The walls of her office were made of perforated white peg-boards with nothing pegged to them, and the plainness of that background made it easy to believe you were looking at the loveliest girl in the world. She was slim and supple, with dark shoulder-length hair and limpid brown eyes and a wide, full-lipped mouth. When she was seated behind her desk you couldn’t tell what she was like from the rib cage down, but she didn’t keep you waiting very long. Twice during the interview she got up and walked to a tall filing cabinet, and then you saw the whole of her: perfect legs and ankles beneath a straight skirt; a trim little ass with just enough curves to make you ache for it. Your first impulse might be to lock the door and have her here, on the floor, but it wouldn’t take much self-control to follow a more sensible plan: get her out of here, take her somewhere else, and have her there. Soon.
Could Sarah Garvey guess what was going on in your mind? If so, she gave no sign of it. All this time she’d been talking of Vassar and Wellesley and Barnard colleges, and she may have mentioned Mt. Holyoke, too; now she’d begun to talk at length, and with some enthusiasm, about Warrington College in Vermont.
“The arty little place, you mean?” he said. “Well, but aren’t all the girls there expected to be precocious at some – you know – at some art form or other?”
“I suppose it may have acquired a reputation like that,” she said, “but it’s a very open, stimulating environment and I think Laura would do well there. She’s an extremely bright and sensitive person, as you know.”
“Well, sure she is, but she can’t do anything. Can’t paint or write or act; can’t play a musical instrument or sing or dance. She hasn’t been raised that way. There were never any leotards in our house, if you see what I mean.”
And that earned him a small, qualified smile from Sarah Garvey’s beautiful eyes and lips.
“What I’m getting at, Miss Garvey,” he said, “is that I think she might be intimidated by all those talented girls. And being intimidated is the last thing I want for her, in college or anywhere else.”
“Well, that’s very understandable,” she said. “Still, you might want to look into Warrington anyway; I have the catalogue here. And the other factor, you see, is that her mother seems to feel it would be the best place for her.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that means her mother and I’ll have to talk it over.”
Their business seemed to be concluded – Sarah Garvey was stacking papers and folders and putting them away in a desk drawer – and Michael wondered if he would be expected to leave before he’d even had a chance to get her out of here. But then she glanced up at him in a way that seemed too shy for such a pretty girl.
“It’s been really nice meeting you, Mr. Davenport,” she said. “I’ve admired your books.”
“Oh? Well, but how did you ever happen to—”
“Laura lent them to me. She’s very proud of you.”
“She is?”
Too many surprises had hit him at once, and when he sorted them out he found that Laura’s being proud of him was the best. He could never have guessed a thing like that.
Steel lockers were being slammed all up and down the corridors now – school was out, and that made it easy for him to ask her out for a drink. She looked briefly shy again, but said she’d love to.
As she led him out into the faculty parking lot he guessed it wouldn’t matter even if Laura did happen to be in the crowd of kids who watched them go: she might think they were only adjourning to some more comfortable place for a further discussion of her college plans.
“How does someone get to be a guidance counselor?” he asked Sarah Garvey when they were on the road.
“Oh, it doesn’t amount to much,” she said. “You take a few sociology courses in college; then there’s some graduate work, and then you look for a job in a place like this.”
“You look too young to’ve been to graduate school.”
“Well, I’m almost twenty-three; that’s a little younger than average, but not much.”
So there were twenty years between them – and Michael felt so good that twenty years seemed a tidy and even an attractive span of time.
She was driving through a part of the Tonapac countryside that he didn’t recognize, which was just as well – he wouldn’t have wanted to pass the old “Donarann” mailbox, or anything like that. Glancing down, he found she had taken off her shoes to work the floor pedals with her slender stockinged feet, and he thought that was one of the prettiest things he had ever seen.
The bar and restaurant she took him to was a place he didn’t recognize, either – a lot of new business must have come into town since his time – and when he said it was nice she gave him a quick look to see if he was kidding. “Well, it’s not much,” she said as they settled beside each other in a half-circular leatherette booth, “but I come here a lot because it’s convenient; my house is sort of right around the corner.”
“Do you live alone?” he inquired. “Or …”
And in the moment it took her to reply he was afraid she’d say “No, I live with a man” – that had lately become stylish among even the youngest and prettiest of girls, and they always seemed to say it as though they were boasting.
“No, I share an apartment with two other girls, but it’s not working out; I’d much rather find a place of my own.” Then she lifted the heavily beaded glass of an extra-dry martini, straight up, and said “Well: Cheers.”
Cheers indeed. It had begun to seem that this might turn into Michael Davenport’s most cheerful, cheering afternoon in years.
It was hard to believe that any girl so young could have such composure. And there couldn’t be much of a life for her here in the shabbier part of Putnam County – working at a job that must be only sporadically interesting, having roommates she didn’t like, taking meals in this ordinary restaurant. The only way to make it all add up was to assume she must escape into New York every weekend, and into the arms of some man who could let her know who she was.
“You get into the city much?” he asked her.
“Hardly ever,” she said. “I can’t really afford it and I never have a very good time there anyway.”
And so he was able to breathe again.
Because he was closer to her here than in the office, and less shy than in the car, he could see clearly now what he’d only been able to guess at before: the texture of her skin was what had made him want to pull off her clothes the moment he’d seen her. It was like the surface of a flawless apricot or nectarine; it glowed; it needed to be taken and eaten. A small edge of white lace could be glimpsed just inside the V-neck of her dress, moving with each breath and quivering when she laughed, and that frivolous, unconscious touch of flirtation made him heavy with lust.
With the second drink they fell easily into using each other’s first names, and she said “I guess I’d better tell you something, Michael; or maybe you’ve figured it out already. There wasn’t any reason for you to come out here today. Everything we discussed in the office could easily have been done on the phone. I wanted to meet you, that’s all.”
And he kissed her mouth for that, wanting to make it as urgent as a boy’s kiss but careful not to let it be the kind of kiss that could get a man thrown out of a family restaurant.
“It must be wonderful,” she said a little later, “to put a poem together that won’t fall apart – can’t fall apart. I’ve tried and tried that – oh, not much anymore; mostly in college – and they’ve always fallen apart before I could even get them finished.”
“Most of mine fall apart, too,” he told her. “That’s why I’ve published so few of them.”
“Oh, but when yours stand,” she said, “they really stand. They’re built to last. They’re like towers. When I got to those final few lines of ‘Coming Clean’ I was all gooseflesh – all over – and I cried, too. I can’t think of a single other contemporary poem that’s ever made me cry.”
He might have wished she’d picked another poem – “
Coming Clean” was everybody’s favorite – but what the hell. This was nice.
When a waitress laid dinner menus on their table they both knew that having dinner was out of the question.
“Can we go to your place?” he asked against the side of her fragrant hair.
“No,” she said. “There’s never any privacy there at this time of day. They’ll be everywhere, blow-drying their hair or making their chocolate-chip cookies or whatever it is they do. But there’s a—” and he would always remember that she drew her head away in order to look into his eyes when she said this – “there’s a motel not far from here.”
Because his imagination had been undressing Sarah Garvey all afternoon there was no real surprise when her clothes came off in the big, locked, dead-silent motel room: he knew how lovely she would be. And from the moment he had her luminous skin in his hands he knew he could abandon the last dim thoughts of Mary Fontana that had haunted him for years with other girls. There would be no failure here tonight.
It was as if neither he nor Sarah Garvey could be complete unless they were joined. Until then they might as well have been dying for each other: there wasn’t enough air for either of them to breathe; there wasn’t any way for their racing blood to settle. Only in coupling were they fully alive and strong, taking their time, bringing each other along and up and over the unendurable crest of what they had made; and when they fell apart at last it was only to wait, not even having to speak, until they could be joined again.
By the time daylight shone blue in the Venetian blinds, it was understood that they would spend as many nights and weekends together as they could manage. That was the only plan they needed for now; falling asleep, they knew there would be plenty of time for figuring out the rest of their lives.
Chapter Three
Bill Brock had left Chain Store Age to take a public-relations job, which he often described as a piece of cake. And he’d given up trying to write novels: he considered himself a playwright now.
“Oh, listen, though,” he said in the White Horse one night, holding up one hand to ward off Michael’s envy. “Listen, Mike: I know you wrote plays for years without ever quite getting them off the ground, but I’ve always felt that was because you’re essentially a poet. Well, now you’re an established poet and everybody knows it. I couldn’t write a poem to save my ass, but you can. You do. You’ve found your line, and I’ve found mine.
“One thing, I know I’ve always been good at dialogue. Even in the shittiest rejection letters I’d get for my stories and novels, there’d always be a line like ‘Mr. Brock handles dialogue very well.’ So I figured, what the hell; fuck it. If my strength lies in dialogue, I’ll write for the stage.”
He had recently completed a three-act play called Negroes. “Well, sure, it’s kind of a stark little title, but that very quality of starkness is what I was after” – and he felt that his gift for dialogue had served him well in exploring the artistic possibilities of American Negro speech.
“For example,” he said, “all through this play the characters keep saying ‘muh-fuh’; ‘muh-fuh’ – and I’ve spelled it just that way. Well, the word is ‘motherfucker,’ obviously, but sometimes if you write what your ear tells you to, you find you’re really getting inside your material. Anyway, I think this play’s solid, Mike, and I think the times are right for it.”
And his first step toward getting it produced had been to mail it, with a brief and friendly covering letter, to Ralph Morin at the Philadelphia Group Theater.
“Jesus,” Michael said, “Why him?”
“Well, why not him?” And Bill was instantly ready for an argument. “Why not him? That’s the more intelligent question, don’t you think, Mike? I mean, shit, we’re all grownups; all the stuff between Diana and me was over years ago; why should there be any bad feeling? And besides” – he took a deep drink of beer – “besides,” he said again, wiping foam from his mouth, “this guy’s a comer. You can read about him in the fucking Sunday Times. He’s built that little Philadelphia project into something that’s got practically a national reputation. When he gets a good commercial play – and I mean a good commercial play – he’ll kiss Philadelphia goodbye, bring it up here and be one of the top directors on Broadway.”
“Okay.”
“Well, so anyway, he wrote me back this really nice, really gracious letter. He said ‘I’ve told Mrs. Henderson that I love your play, and she’ll be reading it over the weekend.’ ”
“Mrs. who?”
“Well, see, she’s the money behind the whole operation down there; she underwrites everything they do, so they can’t make a move without her approval. And I guess she must’ve liked the hell out of Negroes too, because the next thing was that Ralph called me to find out how soon I could get down to his office and talk it over. Well, shit, I dropped everything: I was there the next day.”
“Did you see Diana?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I sure did, and it was all very pleasant, but that came later. Let me give you the first part first, okay?” And he leaned back comfortably in his wooden chair. “Well, for one thing, I found I really liked the guy,” he said. “You can’t help liking him. I mean, you can tell he’s very sensitive and all that, but he doesn’t try to impress you with it: he comes on in a very calm, straightforward, no-bullshit way.
“So he said ‘Let me level with you, Bill.’ He said ‘All the characters in your play are Negroes, and of course that’s fine; that’s what you set out to do.’ He said ‘You’ve captured their oppression and their rage and their terrible sense of helplessness, and it’s a powerful piece of work.’ He said ‘The difficulty for us, though, is that we have another script here on a racial theme, also by a new playwright, only this other one is an interracial love story.’ ”
Bill came heavily forward then, both elbows on the damp table, shaking his head with a rueful little smile. Michael could remember trying to explain to Lucy, long ago, that one of Bill Brock’s more endearing traits was his way of shrugging off or laughing off his failures. “I’m afraid I don’t see that at all,” she’d said. “Why doesn’t he succeed at something, and then be endearing about that?”
“Well, by the time he got that far,” Bill was saying, “I knew I was losing the ball game. Then he told me about the other play. It’s called Blues in the Night – the title struck me as a little corny, but what the hell; you never know. There’s this very young, aristocratic Southern white girl who falls in love with a Negro boy, you see, and her first impulse is to run away with him to some distant place, some foreign country, but the boy won’t budge: he wants to stay home and brazen it out. Then the girl’s father gets wind of it, so the trouble starts, and you begin to get this relentless building to total tragedy at the end. Well, shit, I’ve abbreviated the thing a lot more than he did, Mike, but you can see how material like that could be dynamite on the stage.
“But then he started telling me about the problems they’ve had trying to find the right girl for the role. He said ‘She’s got to be young as hell, but she can’t just be a good actress – she’s got to be brilliant.’ And you can see what he means by that, too: put some girl in there who’s less than great and the whole play might be open to charges of being – you know – of being in questionable taste, and so on. Then he said ‘So even supposing the perfect girl does turn up – what can we do then? We can’t promise her a Broadway opening, and we sure as hell can’t expect her to work for peanuts in Philadelphia, right?’
“So you see what he was telling me, Mike? He was saying that if this other play falls through in the casting, he and Mrs. Henderson might want to go for my play instead – that’s why he’d asked me in for a talk in the first place. And I thought it was very decent of him to lay his cards on the table that way. Very decent.”
“I don’t get it, though,” Michael said. “How come he couldn’t have told you that on the phone, or in a letter?”
“Wanted to meet me, I guess,” Bill said; “and that’s fair
enough; I wanted to meet him, too. So I was just getting ready to leave when he said ‘I hope you don’t have to rush off, Bill; I told Diana you’d be here today, and she said she’d try to drop by.’
“Then – whammo. It happened right on cue. The door flew open and in she came, dragging these three little boys. Diana Maitland. Jesus. First time I’d seen her since nineteen fifty-four.”
And Bill got up from the table to reenact the scene. “She came in like this,” he said, and he pantomimed falling against a wall, staggering, recovering, and lurching forward.
“And I must say,” he said when he was settled in his chair again with the same little smile he used for shrugging off his failures, “I must say, that really brought back a few memories. Because that was the one thing I never liked about her, you see. That awkwardness. I can remember thinking, Well, sure she’s pretty, and sure she’s nice, and sure I love her – or at least I think I do – but why can’t she be graceful, like other girls?”
For a second or two Michael wanted to reach across the table and pour his full stein of beer over Bill Brock’s head. He wanted to see the shock and the blind bewilderment in Brock’s face as his hair and his shirt were soaked; then he would stand up, put a few dollars on the table, and say You’re an asshole, Brock. You’ve always been an asshole. And he would be rid of him forever.
Instead, sitting still and controlling himself, he said “She always looked graceful to me.”
“Yeah, well, you never had to live with her, buddy. You never had to – ah, never mind; the hell with it. Fuck it. Forget it. Anyway,” Bill said, easing back into the Philadelphia part of the story with evident relief, “I gave her a little kiss on the cheek and we sat around making small talk for a few minutes, all very pleasant; then I suggested we go out for a drink, but Diana said the boys were too tired or something, so we all went down and said goodbye out in front of the office building, and that was it. No, but I mean really, I came away with an essentially good feeling. I’m glad I sent the play to Morin, and I’m glad I met him. I feel I’ve made a good contact and a good friend.”