The idea of devoting her life to a man had stirred in her only once before, in the early days with Michael; and if it had come to nothing then, was that any reason to disparage the possibilities this time?
Carl might well be “hung up” in his second novel, as he kept saying he was, but Lucy’s presence could help him work it through. Then there’d be another book, and another and still others, with Lucy always faithfully at his side. And she knew there was no fear of Carl’s being intimidated by her money. He’d told her more than once – jokingly, but saying it anyway – that he’d love to let her fortune pay his way through life.
The difference in attitude here, she guessed, was that Michael Davenport’s stern independence arose from his never having known what poverty was. Carl Traynor had always known what it was, so he understood that it held no virtue – and he understood too that having an unearned income would imply no corruption.
There often seemed to be nothing Carl didn’t understand, or couldn’t understand after a moment’s reflection; that may have been part of what made him a compelling writer, and in any case it made him effortlessly kind.
Lucy discovered she could tell him things about herself that she’d never told anyone else – not even Michael; not even Dr. Fine – and that alone was enough to make her feel she had a profound investment in him.
And she would never have to give up painting. Her pictures might get steadily better and more plentiful with the years until she became as thoroughly professional as he was, but there would never be any conflict – there’d be no basis for rivalry or even for comparison. The worlds of their work would be separate, and each might come to form a pleasurable complement to the other.
She could happily attend his publication parties or even go along on his book-promotion tours, if he asked her to, just as he could stand tall and proud and courteously smiling at the openings of her gallery exhibitions – lively, civilized gatherings where the presence of people like the Thomas Nelsons and the Paul Maitlands could always be taken for granted.
By the time they were both in their fifties, if not before, they might well command the admiration and envy of everyone they knew – and they might even be the kind of people that any number of strangers would give anything to meet.
But almost from the beginning there were harsh little troubles between them – quarrels that could sometimes seem bad enough to spoil everything.
Once in their early weeks together, at an old steak-and-potatoes restaurant that Carl said was his favorite place in the Village, she asked him about the girl who’d been his “company” at the time his book came out.
“Well,” he said, “that’s a story that doesn’t reflect very favorably on me. I’ll tell you the whole damn thing sometime, but suppose we let it ride for a while, okay?” And he stuffed his mouth with bread as if that might put a stop to any further questions.
She was willing enough to let it ride, if that was what he wanted, but instead he began to tell her the whole damn thing only a night or two later, in bed and within minutes after their lovemaking, which struck her as curiously inappropriate. And it took a long time to tell.
The girl was very young, he said, fresh out of college and filled with dreamy ideas about what she always called “the arts.” And she was an extremely pretty girl, too: Carl Traynor had thought she was wonderful, and when she first moved in with him he remembered thinking If I can just help her grow up a little, she’ll be perfect. But before long she turned out to be the only girl he’d ever known who drank more than he did.
“She’d fall down in bars,” he said, “and she’d fall out of chairs at parties. She’d be smashed out of her mind every night, and that meant I always had to be the responsible one: every morning I’d have to get her out of bed and into her clothes and out on the street for a cab – it always had to be a cab because she said the subway was ‘terrifying’ – and off to whatever dumb little editorial job it was she had uptown.
“So when the screenwriting deal came through I sort of dumped her – told her I wanted to go to California alone – and that night she tried to open the arteries in both of her wrists with a razor blade. Well, Jesus, talk about scared. I wrapped her up as well as I could and then I carried her all the way up to St. Vincent’s. Can you imagine that? Carrying her? There was some young Spanish doctor on duty in the emergency room that night, and he told me she hadn’t touched an artery; all she’d done was slice into a couple of veins, and he said he could stop the bleeding with tight bandages. She knew more than I did, though – she knew that any attempted suicide in New York can get you an automatic six weeks in Bellevue – so as soon as the bandaging was done she was up and off that table quicker than a cat. She got out through an alley and went running down Seventh Avenue so fast not even the cops could have caught her. And when I finally got her cornered in the vestibule of her old apartment house, where she’d lived before moving to my place, all she said to me was ‘Go away. Go away.’ ”
He sighed heavily. “So that was it. I think I did sort of love her – probably always will, in a way – but I don’t even know where she is now, and I’m not in any hurry to find out.”
There was a considerable silence before Lucy said “That isn’t a very good story, Carl.”
“Well, Jesus, I know it isn’t a – how do you mean?”
“There’s a little too much pleasure on the narrator’s part,” she said. “It’s a self-aggrandizing story. It’s a sexual braggart’s story. I’ve never cared much for stories like that. Why, for example, was it necessary to stress your having carried her to the hospital?”
“Well, because the traffic runs downtown on Seventh Avenue, that’s why. A cab would’ve taken much too long, and for all I knew she was bleeding to death.”
“Ah, yes. Bleeding to death for love of you. Listen, Carl: don’t ever write that story, okay? At least not the way you’ve told it. Because if you ever do it’ll only damage your reputation.”
“Well, I’ll be God damned,” he said. “Here we are in my bed at one o’clock in the morning, and you’re warning me about ‘damage’ to my ‘reputation.’ You’ve got some nerve, Lucy, you know that? Besides, I told you it was a story that didn’t—”
“—reflect very favorably on you. I know. That’s one of your favorite expressions, isn’t it? It’s a way of whetting people’s interest, right? Put ’em off, make ’em wait; then, when it’s least expected, let ’em have it.”
“Are we having a fight now?” he inquired. “Is that the deal? Am I supposed to launch some counterattack so we can be up and shouting at each other all night? Because if that’s what you have in mind, sweetheart, you’re outa luck. All I want to do is sleep.” And he turned away from her, but he wasn’t quite finished. After a moment, in a carefully controlled voice, he said “In the future, dear, I think it might be helpful if you could refrain from advising me on what not to write or how not to write it or any other horseshit along that line. Okay?”
“Okay.” And she put her arm around his ribs to let him know she was sorry.
In the morning she was even sorrier, because she could see then that much of her anger had come from jealousy of the drunken girl, so she delivered a demure, well-worded apology that he didn’t even let her finish because he was laughing and hugging her and telling her to forget it.
And it was always easy to put those clashes behind them, because so many weeks could pass in near-perfect harmony; still, there was never any telling when the next one might erupt.
“Have you kept in touch with Mr. Kelly at all?” she asked him one day.
“Mr. who?”
“You know; George Kelly, from the class.”
“Oh, the elevator guy. No, I haven’t. How do you mean, ‘kept in touch?’ ”
“Well, I was hoping you might have, is all. He was very helpful to me, and he always struck me as a remarkably intelligent man.”
“Yeah, well, sure, ‘remarkably intelligent.’ Look, baby, the world is crawling with
these diamond-in-the-rough types, these salt-of-the-earth characters, and they’re all remarkably intelligent. My God, I knew half-literate guys in the Army who could scare the shit out of you with their intelligence. So if you’re running a writing course you’re glad enough to have one or two of those people in the group – you may even let ’em do most of the work for you, the way I did with Kelly – but when school’s out, it’s out. They know it as well as you do, and it’d be crazy to expect anything else.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Well, for Christ’s sake, Lucy, what the hell do you want to do? You want to get on the subway and ride for an hour out into Queens so we can have a nice little evening with George Kelly? There’d be Mrs. Kelly serving up the coffee and cake and talking a mile a minute, wearing seven different kinds of costume jewelry for the occasion, and there’d be four or five little Kellys standing around the carpet and staring at you, all working on their bubble gum in unison. Is that what you want?”
“It’s curious,” Lucy said, “that for a man with a twelfth-grade education you should have such a highly developed sense of social snobbery.”
“Yeah, yeah, I knew you’d say that. Know something, Lucy? It’s getting so I can predict everything you’re going to say before you’ve said it. If I ever write a story about you, the dialogue’ll be a cinch. It’ll be child’s play. I’ll just sit back and let the typewriter do that part of it all by itself.”
And she walked out of his place that time, after a parting statement about how “hateful” he was.
But she came back three hours later, bringing four well-chosen Impressionist reproductions for his walls, and he was so glad to see her that he seemed almost in tears as he clasped and held her in a long, staggering embrace.
“My God,” he said later, after she’d carefully taped the pictures into place. “It’s amazing what a difference they make. I don’t know how I managed to live here all this time with nothing but bare walls.”
“Well, these are only temporary,” she explained, “because I have a plan. I’m full of plans where you’re concerned, did you know that? The plan is, as soon as I have enough paintings of my own that I like, and enough that Mr. Santos likes too, I’m going to bring them down and hang them here, and then they’ll be yours.”
And Carl Traynor said that would be the nicest thing he could imagine. He said it would be an honor far beyond anything he could ever hope to deserve.
They were sitting on the edge of the bed now, holding hands as bashfully as children, and he told her he had never meant to be such a “pill” about George Kelly. He said he’d be perfectly willing to call George Kelly tonight, or this weekend, or whenever she liked.
“Well, that’s awfully nice, Carl,” she said, “but it’s something we can easily put off until you feel more comfortable with it. Wouldn’t that be better?”
“Okay. Good. Only there’s one more thing, Lucy.”
“What?”
“Please don’t ever take off like that again. I mean, God knows I can’t stop you from walking out of here – even walking out for good, if that’s what you decide you want to do – but next time try to give me a little warning first, okay? Just enough so I can do everything in my power to make you stay.”
“Oh, well,” she said, “I don’t think that’s the kind of thing we’ll ever have to worry about, do you?”
And the only way to spend the rest of that oddly exhilarating afternoon was to take off their clothes and get under the covers and be extravagantly in love.
He had never used his kitchen for anything but making instant coffee and for chilling beer and milk, but it wasn’t long before she had it fully equipped with copper-bottomed pots and pans all hung in a row, with ample supplies of dishes and silverware, and even with a spice shelf. (“A spice shelf?” he asked her, and she said “Well, certainly, a spice shelf. Why not a spice shelf?”)
She often cooked dinner for them that winter and he was always touchingly grateful, but she came to understand that he preferred restaurants because he “had” to get out of the place at night after working there all day.
His anxiety about his book seemed only to increase with the approach of spring. Sometimes it made him drink too much, which left him unable to work at all, but Lucy had at least a beginner’s knowledge of troubles like that. She helped him establish the right amount of alcohol each day – beer all afternoon, as required, but no more than three bourbons before dinner, and nothing afterwards; still, she couldn’t help him with the book itself. He wouldn’t let her read the manuscript because “most of it’s lousy, and anyway you could never read my handwriting – not to mention all the damn little marginal inserts I can hardly read myself.”
Once he typed up a twenty-page section for her and went into the kitchen to hide while she read it. And when she called him out and told him it was “beautiful,” his haggard face took on a look of tentative peace. He asked her a few questions to confirm that the parts he had hoped she would like were the very parts she’d liked best; then, after a minute or two, he began to look anxious again. She could almost see him thinking Well, okay, she’s being nice, but what does she know?.
She knew by now it would be a novel about a woman, told from the woman’s point of view – and that in itself was one of the big problems, he said, because he’d never tried a woman’s point of view before and didn’t know if he could sustain it in a convincing way.
“Well, it’s certainly convincing in this part,” she said.
“Yeah, well, okay; but twenty pages aren’t exactly the same as three hundred.”
She knew, too, from hints he’d dropped as well as from small indications in the excerpt itself, that the character, whose name was Miriam, would be substantially based on his former wife. And she found nothing displeasing in that: he was much too good a writer to let the portrayal be distorted either by malice or nostalgia; besides, everybody knew it was a writer’s privilege to find his material where he could.
“And even if I do get the point of view under control,” he said, “there’s still an awful lot to worry about. I’m afraid there may not be enough happening to this girl. I’m afraid there may not be enough story in this thing to make a novel.”
“I can think of many fine novels that don’t have much ‘story’ in them,” Lucy said, “and so can you.”
And he told her once again that she always knew how to say just the right thing.
One night they came back late to his place, hours after having broken the three-bourbon rule. They’d had plenty to drink – easily enough to make them fuddled and unsteady and ready for sleep – but the pleasant thing about this particular night was that they both seemed to have “held” it well: they were in a keyed-up, conversational mood, as if talk tonight might be brighter and more interesting than talk at any other time. They even made new drinks for themselves before settling down companionably in facing chairs.
There was one troubling aspect of the woman’s-viewpoint problem, Carl said, that Lucy might be able to help him with. And he asked if she could tell him how it felt to be pregnant.
“Well, I’ve only been through it once, of course,” she said, “and that was long ago, but I remember it as an essentially peaceful time. You get physically slowed down and you worry about being ungainly, or at least I did, but your nerves are quiet and you have a nice sense of being in good health: good appetite; good sleep.”
“Good,” he said. “All that’s good.” Then his face changed just enough to show that his next question would have nothing to do with research. “Have you ever had a hysterical pregnancy?”
“A what?”
“Well, you know. There are some girls so eager to get married they can fake pregnancy. They don’t just say they’re pregnant; they develop all the symptoms of it in a very persuasive way. I knew a girl like that, three or four years ago, kind of a nice, cute little girl from Virginia. She’d bloat up every month and her tits would swell until it looked exactly like the real thing; then
, wham, she’d have her period and it’d be all over.”
“Carl, I think you’re getting into another one,” Lucy said.
“Another what?”
“Another bragging little anecdote to prove what a devil with the girls you’ve always been.”
“No, wait,” he said, “that’s not fair. Whaddya mean, ‘devil’? If you’d known how scared I was every month you wouldn’t’ve seen anything ‘devilish’ about it. I’d be wringing my hands like some meek, timid little wretch. Then finally, maybe the seventh or eighth time she got that way, I took her to see this big-shot Park Avenue obstetrician. Cost me a hundred bucks. And you know what happened? That asshole came smiling out of his examining room and he said ‘Good news, Mr. Traynor, and congratulations. Your wife has a healthy young pregnancy going.’ Well, that was a jolt, as you can imagine, but two or three days later she got her period again. One more false alarm.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I did what anybody else in his right mind would’ve done. I packed her up and sent her back to Virginia, where she belonged.”
“Well, all right,” Lucy said. “But tell me something else, Carl. Have you never been the loser where a girl is concerned? Haven’t any girls ever broken up with you, or dropped you, or told you to get lost?”
“Oh, baby, don’t talk nonsense. Sure they have. My God, I’ve had girls walk all over my face. I’ve had girls act as if I were shit on a stick. Christ Almighty, you oughta hear my wife on the subject of me.”
In June or July Carl gave her a stack of a hundred and fifty typewritten pages – a little less than half the book, he said – and asked her to take it home to Tonapac for a couple of days.
“You’re going to find it’s nothing at all like my first book,” he told her. “There isn’t any thunder and lightning in it; there aren’t any stunning confrontations or surprises or anything like that. I don’t think the first book was necessarily more ambitious than this one, it was just ambitious in a more obvious way: it was a big, rich, ‘tough’ novel.