Nobody in that dry, overheated little makeshift room looked more like an artist than the man on the crate next to Michael’s – he wore white overalls daubed and streaked with many colors – but he was quick to explain that he was “only a dabbler; only a well-meaning amateur.” He was a local businessman, a subcontractor in the building trades: it was he who supplied Paul Maitland with the part-time carpentry work that kept him alive.
“And I consider it a privilege,” he said, hunching closer to Michael and lowering his voice so that their host wouldn’t overhear. “I consider it a privilege because this boy’s good. This boy’s the real thing.”
“Well, that’s – that’s fine,” Michael said.
“Had a rough time of it in the war, you know.”
“Oh?” And this was one part of the Paul Maitland story that Michael hadn’t yet heard – probably because Bill Brock, who’d been classified 4-F during the war and was still touchy about it, would not have been inclined to provide the information.
“Oh, God, yes. Too young to’ve seen the whole thing, of course, but he was up to his neck in it from the Bulge right on through to the end. Infantry. Rifleman. Never talks about it, but it shows. You can see it in his work.”
Michael pulled his necktie loose and opened his collar, as if that might give his brains a better chance to sort things out. He didn’t know what to make of any of this.
The man in overalls knelt to pour himself more wine from a gallon jug on the floor; when he came back he took a drink, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and began talking to Michael again in the same tone of confidential reverence. “Hell, New York’s crawling with painters,” he said. “The whole damn country is, for that matter. But you come across a boy like this maybe once in a generation. I’m confident of that. And it may take years; it may not even happen in his lifetime, God forbid” – here he reached down and rapped his knuckles on a slat of his crate – “but some day an awful lot of people are gonna walk into the Museum of Modern Art and it’ll be Paul Maitland all the way. Room after room after room. I’m confident of that.”
Well, okay, swell, Michael wanted to say, but do you think you could sort of shut up about it now? Instead he nodded in slow and respectful silence; then he peered across the kerosene stove at Paul Maitland’s averted face, as if a close-enough scrutiny of it might reveal some gratifying flaw. He considered Maitland’s having gone to Amherst – didn’t everybody know Amherst was an expensive school for society boys and intellectual lightweights? – but no, all those stereotypes were said to have broken down since the war; besides, he might have chosen Amherst because it had a good art department, or because it allowed him more time to paint than he’d have had at other colleges. Still, he must have enjoyed at least a taste of aristocratic languor there, after all that infantry soldiering. He had probably joined in a general taking of pains over just the right cut of tweeds and flannels and just the right kind of light, witty talk, and in a general vying for perfection at knowing how best to spend each careless weekend (“Bill, I’d like you to meet my sister Diana …”). Didn’t all that suggest something just a little ludicrous about this headlong descent into lower bohemia and odd-job carpentry? Well, maybe; maybe not.
There were still a few inches of wine in the glass jug, but Paul Maitland announced in his customary mutter that it was time for a real drink. He reached into some recess of the hanging burlap and brought out a bottle of the cheap blended whiskey called Four Roses – he sure as hell hadn’t learned to drink that stuff at Amherst – and Michael wondered if they might now be permitted to see the side of him that Bill Brock had disparaged: the brooding, heavy-drinking, Great Tragic Artist horseshit.
But there was evidently neither time nor whiskey enough for that to occur tonight. Paul poured a generous round or two of real drinks for everyone, eliciting gasps and grimaces of appreciation, and Michael liked the jolt of it too, despite the taste. There was livelier and more spirited talk around the burlap enclosure for a while – several voices grew happily boisterous – but soon it was almost midnight, and people were getting up and putting on their coats to leave. Paul rose to wish his guests goodnight, but after the third or fourth handshake he crouched, froze, and gave all his attention to a small, smudged plastic radio that had been buzzing and crackling on the floor beside the bed all evening. The radio’s static had cleared now, and it had begun to issue a sweet, fast melody full of clarinets that took everyone back to 1944.
“Glenn Miller,” Paul said, and he squatted nimbly to turn up the volume. Then he switched on a bright overhead light beyond the burlap, took his girl by the hand, and led her out into the chill of the studio for dancing. But the muffled music wasn’t loud enough for his liking out there, so he hurried back inside and brought the radio out with its wall plug ready in his free hand, looking along the baseboard for a socket and finding none. Then from a shadowed section of the floor he picked up the attachment end of an electrical-appliance cord, the kind of flat oblong device with twin holes meant to receive the prongs of an electric iron or an old-fashioned toaster, and he hesitated less than a second over whether or not it would work.
Michael wanted to say, No, wait; I wouldn’t try that – it looked like something any child would know better than to try – but Paul Maitland jammed the radio plug into the other thing with all the aplomb of a man who knows what he’s doing. A big blue-and-white spark went off in his hands but the circuit caught and held: the radio came up strong again, and he went back to the girl just as Glenn Miller’s reeds gave way to the soaring, triumphant blare of his brass section.
Standing in his overcoat, feeling dumb, Michael had to acknowledge that it was a pleasure to watch them dance. Paul’s heavy, high-cut work shoes were remarkably agile in performing their neat little movements on the floor, and the rest of him was all rhythm too: he would send Peggy spinning away as far as their joined hands would allow and then bring her spinning back, making her dirndl skirt whip and float around her pretty young knees. Neither in high school nor in the whole of his time in the Army nor at Harvard – and not for lack of trying – had Michael ever learned to dance like that.
And as long as he was feeling dumb anyway he supposed he might as well turn and inspect a big painting that now hung revealed in the single studio light. It was just as he’d feared: it looked incomprehensible to the point of chaos; it seemed to provide no sense of order, or any sense at all, except perhaps in the silence of the painter’s own mind. It was what Michael had grudgingly learned to call Abstract Expressionism, the kind of picture that had once provoked him into a bad quarrel with Lucy, before they were married, as they stood in the murmurous hush of some Boston art gallery.
“… What do you mean, you don’t ‘get’ it?” she’d said irritably. “There’s nothing to ‘get,’ don’t you see? It isn’t representational.”
“So what is it, then?”
“Just what it looks like: an arrangement of shapes and colors, perhaps a celebration of the act of painting itself. It’s the artist’s personal statement, that’s all.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, but I mean if it’s his personal statement, what’s he saying?”
“Oh, Michael, I don’t believe this; I think you’re teasing me. If he could have said it he wouldn’t’ve had to paint it. Come on; let’s get out of here before we—”
“No. Wait a second. Listen: I still don’t get it. And there’s no point in trying to make me feel dumb about this, baby, because that won’t work.”
“I think you’re trying to make yourself feel dumb,” she said. “I don’t even know how to talk to you when you’re like this.”
“Yeah, well, you’d better try another line pretty soon, sweetheart, or it’s only gonna get worse. Because you know what you are when you pull this snotty little Radcliffe condescension with me? You’re a real pain in the ass. I mean that, Lucy.…”
But now, here in Paul Maitland’s studio, when she came up as his neatly bundled, pleasantly tired wife and put her hand thro
ugh his arm, he was glad enough to let her steer him away to the door. There would be other opportunities. Maybe, if he saw enough of Paul Maitland’s work, he might begin to understand it.
As they followed Bill Brock and Diana in clumping down the cold, dirty stairs to Delancey Street, Bill turned back cheerfully and called, “Hope you folks are ready for a little walk – we sure as hell aren’t gonna find a cab in this neighborhood.” And in the end, with freezing feet and streaming nostrils, they walked all the way home.
“They’re both sort of – rare people, aren’t they?” Lucy said later that night, when she and Michael were alone and getting ready for bed.
“Who?” he said. “Diana and Bill?”
“Oh, God, no, not Bill. He’s just an ordinary loudmouthed, smart-assed – as a matter of fact I’m getting a little tired of Bill, aren’t you? No, I meant Diana and Paul. There’s something exceptional about the two of them, isn’t there? Something sort of – unearthly. Something enchanted.”
And he knew at once what she meant, though he might not have put it that way. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I mean I know what you mean.”
“And I have the funniest feeling about them both,” she said. “Sitting there and watching them tonight I kept thinking, These are the kind of people I’ve wanted to know all my life. Oh, I suppose all I’m really trying to say is that I want them to like me. I do want that so much, and it makes me nervous and sad because I’m afraid they won’t, or that if they do it won’t last.”
She looked forlorn, sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightgown like the very picture of a poor little rich girl, and her voice was perilously close to tears. If she allowed herself to cry over something like this he knew she would be ashamed, and that would only make it worse.
And so, in as low and comforting a voice as he could manage, he told her that he understood her fears. “I mean I don’t necessarily agree with you – why wouldn’t they like you? Why wouldn’t they like both of us? – all I mean is, I know what you mean.”
Chapter Three
The White Horse Tavern, on Hudson Street, became their most agreeable gathering place. They were usually a party of four – Bill and Diana and the Davenports – but there were a surprising number of other, happier evenings when Paul Maitland would bring Peggy uptown to join them around a big, damp brown table for drink and talk and laughter, and even for song. Michael had always liked to sing; he prided himself on having memorized all the lyrics of obscure songs and on usually having the sense to know when to stop, though there were some nights when Lucy had to frown or nudge him into silence.
This was at a time not long before the death of Dylan Thomas made the White Horse famous (“And we never even saw him in there,” Michael would complain for years afterwards. “Isn’t that the damndest thing? Sat around the Horse almost every night and never even saw the man – and how could anybody miss a face like that? Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know he was in America when he died.”)
As a consequence of that death it seemed that everyone in New York wanted to come and drink at the White Horse every night – and so the place lost much of its appeal.
But by the spring of that year the city itself was no longer very appealing for the Davenports. Their daughter was four, and it seemed only reasonable to look for a place in the suburbs – assuming, of course, that they could remain within easy commuting distance.
The town they chose was Larchmont, because it struck Lucy as being more “civilized” than the others they visited, and the house they found to rent there seemed to meet their immediate needs. It was nice: a good place to work, a good place to rest; and it had a good, grassy backyard for Laura to play in.
“Suburbia!” Bill Brock cried as dramatically as a man discovering the shore of a new continent, and he brandished the bottle of bourbon he had brought as a housewarming gift. Close beside him and clasping his arm with both hands, Diana Maitland pressed her laughing face against his coat as if to suggest that this kind of clowning was the very thing she had always loved best about him.
And as they made their slow, mirth-encumbered way up the short path from the Larchmont sidewalk into the Larchmont house, Bill seemed reluctant to break the pattern of his own hilarity. “My God,” he said, “look at this! Look at the two of you! You’re like a couple of young marrieds in the movies – or in Good Housekeeping!”
There was nothing for the Davenports to do but go along with the laughs as best they could, even after drinks were poured and they were settled in a conversational group around the living room, though Michael had begun to hope the teasing would soon be over. But Bill Brock wasn’t quite finished: he extended the index finger of the hand that held his glass, aimed it first at Lucy and then at Michael, who were sitting together on the sofa, and said “Blondie and Dagwood.”
And Diana almost fell out of her chair. It was the first time Michael had ever disliked her. Worse still, the second time came later that same night, long after the talk had turned to other things and the tension had dissolved. Brock, as if in partial apology for his earlier comments, expressed a nonhumorous interest in seeing what the town was like, so the four of them took a long walk through the leaf-shadowed evening streets. And Michael was tentatively pleased because this was indeed the best time for a tour of Larchmont: all its glaring, oppressive tidiness was softened and made gentle in the dark. Its lighted windows, as seen through their dappling of green in house after house, suggested calm and order and well-earned peace. It was very quiet, and the air smelled wonderful.
“… No, I can certainly understand the appeal of it,” Bill Brock was saying. “Nothing’s awry, nothing’s screwed up, nothing’s ever out of whack. That’s certainly what you’d want, I guess, if you’re – married and have a family and all that. Matter of fact there must be millions of people who’d give anything for a chance to live here – an awful lot of the guys I worked with in the union, for example. Still, for some temperaments it just wouldn’t ever be right.” And here he gave his girl a little squeeze. “Can you imagine Paul in a place like this?”
“God,” Diana said quietly, and she gave an audible shudder that reverberated down Michael’s spine. “He’d die. Paul would absolutely, literally die here.”
“… And I mean couldn’t she see what a tactless fucking thing that was to say?” Michael demanded of his wife after their guests had gone. “What the hell does she take us for? And I didn’t like her getting quite such a big fucking laugh out of that silly shit about Blondie and Dagwood, either.”
“I know,” Lucy assured him. “I know. Well, it was a very – awkward evening.”
But he was glad he had been the one to explode. If he’d held it all in that night it might have been Lucy who broke first – and her breaking, rather than in anger, would probably have been in tears.
He had established a working alcove in one corner of the attic of their Larchmont house – it wasn’t much, but it was private – and he would look forward all day to the hours he could spend alone there. He had begun to feel that his book was almost in shape again, almost done, if only he could bring off the long, ambitious, final poem that was meant to justify and carry all the others. He had an adequate working title for it, “Coming Clean,” but certain lines of it stubbornly refused to be brought alive; whole sections of it seemed ready to collapse or evaporate under his hand. On most nights he worked in the attic until he ached with fatigue, but there were other times when he couldn’t get his brains together, when he would sit there stupefied in a paralysis of inattention, smoking cigarettes and despising himself, until he went back downstairs to bed. And even then there was seldom enough sleep to prepare him for the push and hustle of the Larchmont mornings.
From the moment he closed the front door behind him he was caught up and swept along in a heavy stream of commuters walking to the train station. They were men of his own age or ten or twenty years older, with a few in their sixties, and they seemed to take pride in their very conformity: the crisp dark bus
iness suits and conservative ties, the highly polished shoes brought down in almost military cadence on the sidewalk. Only rarely did a commuter walk alone; almost all of them had at least one conversational companion, and most of them moved in clusters. Michael’s tendency was to look neither right nor left for fear of attracting a comradely smile – Who the hell needed these guys? – but he couldn’t enjoy his solitude because it was too reminiscent of bad times in the Army: the sense of having to keep his own counsel among talking, laughing, better-adjusted men. And that discomfort was always at its most acute after they had filed and clumped inside the Larchmont station, because there was nothing to do in there but stand around and wait.
Then once he saw another stranger leaning alone against the wall, squinting down through steel-rimmed glasses at a lighted cigarette as if smoking required his full attention. The man was smaller and younger-looking than Michael, and he wasn’t even dressed right: instead of a suit coat he wore an Army “tanker’s jacket,” the sturdy zippered wind-breaker once coveted by most ground-force troops in Europe because it was given only to the men who rode in tracked and armored assault vehicles.
Michael drifted over to within speaking range and said “You in an armored division?”
“Huh?”
“I said were you in an armored division during the war?”
The young man looked puzzled, blinking several times behind his glasses. “Oh, the jacket,” he said at last. “Naw, I bought this off a guy, is all.”
“Oh, I see.” And Michael knew that if he said, Well, that was a good buy; they’re nice to have, he would feel even more like a fool, so he kept his mouth shut and started to turn away.