But then a sobering, cautionary line of thought reminded him that he couldn’t afford to explode alone with Lucy, either. To explode with Lucy over a thing like this would only open up the long, subtle, tantalizing argument that went all the way back to their honeymoon at the Copley Plaza.
When, she might ask, would he ever come to his senses? Didn’t he know there had never been a need for Chain Store Age, or for Larchmont, or for this dopey little house in the decadence of Tonapac? Why, then, wouldn’t he let her pick up the phone and call her bankers, or her brokers, or whoever it was who could instantly set them free?
No; no. He would have to control his temper one more time. He would have to be silent tonight and tomorrow and the next day. He would have to sweat it out.
Chapter Six
One day in the village of Tonapac, where he’d come to buy snow tires, Michael saw a familiar figure on the sidewalk ahead of him: a tall young man in a Levi jacket and pants, walking in a way that suggested a cowboy actor in the movies. “Paul Maitland?” he called, and Maitland turned around in surprise.
“Mike!” he said. “I’ll be damned. What’re you doing here?” And there was a heartening vigor in his handshake. “Got time for a drink?” he asked then, and he steered Michael into a dark, grubby little workingman’s bar where he seemed to have been headed in the first place.
Several slouching customers along the bar said “Hi, Paul” and “Hey, Paul,” as Maitland moved toward a table in the back, and Michael was impressed that an artist could be on easy terms with these roughhewn men.
When their whiskey arrived, Paul Maitland held his glass just short of his lips as if to savor this small postponement of pleasure, and his eyes twinkled in reminiscence of old times at the Horse.
“I’ll never forget the night you astonished that crusty old merchant seaman from Yorkshire,” he said, “by singing all the verses of ‘On Ilkley Moor ’Thout Hat’ – and with a perfect accent, too. Damn good performance.”
“Yeah, well, I was stationed in England in the service, you see, and I knew a Yorkshire girl who taught me the words.”
This was fine. Drinking whiskey in the middle of the day with a man believed to be a genius, a man who’d only rarely shown any particular sign of liking him before, and who was now at pains to remind him that he’d once done something memorable in the White Horse Tavern.
“… You remember Peggy,” Paul Maitland was saying. “Well, we’re married now, and her stepfather has a nice place a few miles from here, over in Harmon Falls. We rented a little house on his property and at first it was sort of touch-and-go, but then I began to find fairly steady carpentry work here in Tonapac and a couple of other towns as well, so we’re doing all right.”
“And you have enough time for your painting?”
“Oh, sure; paint every day. Paint like a fool; paint like a madman. Nothing ever stops that. So where are you and Lucy living?”
In telling him, Michael found himself about to say “It’s really kind of a fruit farm,” but held it back. He had begun to learn that explaining certain things could be more trouble than it was worth. Then he said “How’s your – how’s your lovely sister?”
“Oh, Diana’s fine. I think she’ll probably be getting married soon – fellow named Ralph Morin. Seems like a nice-enough guy.”
“Is he the actor?”
“Well, he’s been an actor; now I think he’s more of a director, or trying to be.” And Paul looked thoughtfully into his drink. “I suppose I always hoped she’d wind up marrying old Bill Brock, because they did seem good together, but what the hell. Nobody ever has any influence in matters like that.”
“Right.”
And over the second drink Michael opened what he hoped might be a happy new topic. “Listen, Paul: there’s another painter out here that I think you’d really like – or maybe you know him already. Tom Nelson?”
“Well, I know of him, of course.”
“Good. Anyway, he’s one of the nicest, most unassuming guys in the world, and I think the two of you might really hit it off. Maybe we can all get together sometime.”
“Well, thanks, Mike,” Paul said, “but I don’t think I’d care for that.”
“Oh? Why not? You don’t like his work?”
The fingers of Paul’s right hand were busy with half of his mustache, and he seemed to choose his words very carefully. “I think he’s a good illustrator.”
“Well, but his illustrations are only part of it,” Michael said. “His paintings are the main thing, and they’re—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know; very big with the museums and all that. But what those people’re buying as paintings, you see, as pictures, are really illustrations.”
Michael’s lungs felt shallow, as if he were about to get into an argument beyond his understanding: no terms would be defined and nothing would be clear. “Because they’re – representational, you mean?” he asked.
“No,” Paul Maitland said impatiently. “No, of course not. Matter of fact I wish people’d stop using that asinine word. Wish they’d stop saying ‘abstract-expressionist,’ too. We’re all just trying to make pictures, after all. But if a picture’s any good it’s self-sufficient; it needs no text. Otherwise, all you’re getting is something clever, something ephemeral, something of the moment.”
“So you’re suggesting Nelson’s work won’t last?”
“Oh, that’s not for me to say,” Paul Maitland said, looking comfortable with having made his point. “It’s for others to decide in the course of time.”
“Well,” Michael said, because it seemed necessary to find some amiable conclusion to this tense little talk, “I suppose I see what you mean.” And then he felt weak inside, as though he’d been bullied into betraying a friend.
“Mind you, I have nothing against the man personally,” Paul was saying; “I’m sure he’s very pleasant and all that; it’s just that I can’t imagine how we’d find anything to talk about. We’re at opposite ends of the spectrum, you see.” And after they’d sat drinking in silence for what seemed a long time, he said “You still see much of Bill?”
“Some. In fact he may be coming out this weekend; I think he wants to show off his new girl.”
“Oh, well, good,” Paul said, “and listen, if he does come out, will you give us a call?” But then he struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Or no, wait – that won’t work: Diana and what’s-his-name are coming out this weekend, too. Damn nuisance, isn’t it? How we all have to keep taking sides?”
“Yeah.”
Paul knocked back his whiskey and signaled for another round. Three drinks with no lunch before an afternoon of rough carpentry might be a little reckless; but then, Maitland had always seemed to know what he was doing.
“I’ve always liked old Bill,” he said. “Loud and arrogant and full of himself, I know, and of course all that Marxist bullshit can be tiresome as hell. What little of his stuff I’ve read could easily have passed for a parody of the Party line, if it hadn’t been so dead serious. I remember one story that began something like: ‘Joe Starve threw down his wrench on the assembly line. “Fuck this,” he said.’ Still, he can be jolly and funny and a good companion; I’ve always liked having him around.”
And there was a slight easing in Michael’s conscience. If Maitland could disparage a man and still value him, then maybe his own knuckling-under in the question of Tom Nelson hadn’t been wholly dishonorable.
When they emerged blinking into the bright street to shake hands again, Michael knew it would be all he could do now to get the damn snow tires home before he’d hit the sack and sleep the afternoon away, while Paul Maitland climbed scaffoldings in the sun and fitted heavy boards together and drove sixteenpenny nails, or whatever the hell it was he did for a living.
“… And this is Karen,” Bill Brock said as he courteously helped her out of the car. She was small and slim and dark, and she was very shy at meeting Bill’s friends in the country.
“K
now what this is like?” Bill said, coming to a stop on the grass. “It’s kind of like an F. Scott Fitzgerald place. Little on the shabby side, but that only makes it all the more so. You can almost see him coming to the window up there in his bathrobe, with half a bottle of gin, to find out if it’s morning yet. He’s spent the night finishing another story, so his daughter’ll be able to finish another year at Vassar; now maybe this afternoon, when he’s got his brains back together, he’ll start writing ‘The Crack-up.’
“Well, anyway,” Bill concluded, with an expansive gesture that seemed to take in the whole estate, “it sure beats the hell out of Larchmont.”
And as the four of them sat around the living room (“We sort of like all the nooks and crannies in here,” Michael explained), Bill remained in charge of the talk.
“All this’ll probably be a bore for Karen,” he began, “because she’s heard nothing else for weeks, but there’ve been a couple of big moves in my life. For one thing, I’ve given up on the Left. As a writer, I mean. Took my two proletarian novels and all the stories, put ’em in a cardboard box and tied a string around it and shoved it into the back of my closet, and I can’t tell you what a relief that was. ‘Write what you know’ – Jesus, I’ve been hearing that advice all my life and I always thought it was too simple-minded, or I was too smart for it or something, but it’s the only real advice there is, right? Oh, I might be able to salvage some of the material from the electrical-workers’ book eventually, but the whole concept’ll have to be different. It’ll have to focus on the problem of why a prep-school-and-Atnherst kid would ever want to work as a union organizer in the first place – you see what I’m getting at?”
They all saw what he was getting at, though only Karen seemed enthralled by it. And the second of his two big moves, announced with unaccustomed shyness, was that he had gone into psychotherapy.
It hadn’t been an easy decision, he explained: it had probably required more courage than anything he’d ever done, and the worst part was that it might take years – years! – before the help he was getting now could have any profitable effect in his life. Still, he had come to a point where no other choice was possible. He honestly felt that if he hadn’t taken this step he might have gone out of his mind.
“How exactly does it work, Bill?” Lucy asked him. “I mean do you lie on a couch and sort of – free-associate? Is that it?” And Michael was surprised that she’d been interested enough to inquire.
“No; no couch – this guy doesn’t believe in the couch – and no real free-association technique either, at least not in the Freudian sense. We sit on two chairs in his office, facing each other, and we talk. All very down-to-earth, for the most part. And that’s another thing: I feel I was extremely fortunate in finding this particular man. I can respect his intelligence; I think I’d have liked him as a person if I’d met him socially rather than professionally, though of course that’s speculation. And we even seem to have a lot in common: he’s something of an old Marxist too. Well, look, it’s almost impossible to explain a thing like this to outsiders; it can’t be – you know – can’t be summarized or anything.”
Then, as if aware that he might have held the floor a little too long, he subsided with his drink to let Michael take over. And Michael did have a few things to say: he began by telling them that he’d been working hard as a bastard. “So I think I’ll be able to finish this new play by the end of the year,” he said, “and it’s beginning to feel like it really does have commercial possibilities.…”
Listening to the tone and rhythm of his own voice as it warmed to its subject, as it enlarged on its theme of high hopes and modest expectations, and as it came to a graceful conclusion on a note of wry self-effacement, he realized what he was doing: he was trying to impress the shy, attentive young stranger at Bill Brock’s side. She wasn’t even an especially pretty girl, but she was here, brand new, and Michael had never been able to resist showing off for a new girl.
“Let’s have another drink,” he said, “and then we’ll take a stroll around the rest of the place before the sun goes down.”
Soon they were all drifting past the giant willow tree, which Karen said was “magnificent”; then, following Ann Blake’s original route, they climbed the stone steps beside the flower-bed terraces. “This funny little shed here on top is where I work,” Michael told them. “Doesn’t look like much, but I like the privacy of it.
“… And talk about nooks and crannies,” he continued as they came around the corner of the big dormitory building, “there’s a nook or a cranny along in here somewhere that serves as a refuge for one of America’s most celebrated faggot actors – I mean this old guy’s so queer the cops once threw him out of Westport for showing dirty movies to little boys.”
“Good evening,” Ben Duane said from the shadows of a doorway. He was dressed in a rumpled suit and a clean shirt, adjusting the turquoise clasp of a string necktie as if in readiness to descend the hill for dinner at Ann Blake’s house. There was no way of telling whether he’d heard Michael or not, but the chance of it was enough to prevent either of the Davenports from stopping to introduce their guests.
“Hello, Mr. Duane,” Michael said quickly, and they all moved away faster than they’d come.
“Jesus!” Michael said, smiting his forehead with his hand. “That was the dumbest, the all-around dumbest thing I’ve done since we moved here.”
“Well, I don’t think he heard you,” his wife said, “but it wasn’t one of your better moments.”
And he was still weak with chagrin when they’d completed their circuit of the grounds and come back to the living room, where he sank into a chair to nurse his feelings.
Then Lucy briskly got their supper on the table – early, she explained, because they were all going to a party at the Nelsons’.
“Nelson?” Brock inquired. “Oh, yeah, the hotshot water-color guy. Well, fine, that oughta be nice; a party’s a party.”
When Tom Nelson greeted them at his bright front door he was wearing the field jacket of an airborne infantryman.
“Where’d you get the paratrooper’s jacket?” Michael asked him as soon as the introductions were over.
“Bought it off a guy, is all. Nice, huh? I like it because of the pockets.”
And Michael was nettled: the tanker’s jacket of Larchmont had been “bought off a guy,” too. What the hell was Nelson trying to do – be a different kind of war veteran every time he moved to a new town?
The Nelsons’ big living room was swarming with people, and so was the studio beyond it. There were a few lovely girls among the women, almost as if a movie director had organized the scene, and the men ranged from youth to hearty middle age, some of them with beards. There were three or four Negroes who looked like jazz musicians, and the crisp recorded sounds of Lester Young seemed to lace all the disparate talk and laughter of the room into wave on wave of pleasurable discourse. At first sight, and even on closer inspection, there was nobody there who didn’t seem to be having a good time.
This was Arnold Spencer, a professor of art history at Princeton.
This was Joel Kaplan, a jazz critic for Newsweek and The Nation.
This was Jack Bernstein, a sculptor whose new show had just opened at the Downtown Gallery.
And this was Marjorie Grant, a poet, who said at once that she’d been “dying” to meet Michael because she’d “loved” his book.
“Well, that’s very nice,” he told her. “Thank you.”
“I’m crazy about your lines,” Marjorie Grant said. “One or two of the poems themselves didn’t strike me as wholly successful, but I love your lines.” And she recited one of them, to prove she had memorized it. She was about Michael’s age and pretty in an old-fashioned way: she wore a heavy shawl drawn close around her upper arms and torso, and her blond hair was fixed in a thick, tight braid that circled her head like a crown. If you could get the shawl off her and take the hair apart, she might be great. But a tall, strong-looking
man named Rex hovered close beside her, smiling patiently while she had her little exchange with Michael, and it was clear that Rex was the only man in the world, for the present, who knew what she was like without the shawl and the braid.
“Well,” Michael said, “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your work, but that’s only because I don’t keep up nearly as much as I—”
“Oh, no,” Marjorie Grant answered him. “I’ve only had one book and it’s just a little Wesleyan University Press sort of thing.”
“Well, but Wesleyan’s one of the finest—”
“Yes, I know people say that, but in my case it doesn’t really apply. One reviewer called it ‘kittenish,’ and after I stopped crying I began to see what he meant. I’m working on some much better stuff now, though, so I hope you’ll—”
“Oh, I certainly will,” Michael told her. “And I’ll get the first book, too, whether you like it or not.”
“Marjorie?” Rex inquired. “Want to move on into the studio and look at some of Tom’s new things?”
When they’d gone Michael felt a happy glow from her praise – the line she’d quoted had never seemed especially good before – though he wished he could have found a way to ask which of the poems hadn’t struck her as wholly successful.
And after another drink or two, watching Tom Nelson move courteously among his guests, he decided he didn’t really mind the paratrooper’s jacket. Most of these people must surely know that Nelson hadn’t been an airborne soldier; and what if they didn’t? The war had been over for eleven or twelve years; wasn’t it about time for people to wear whatever they felt like? Wasn’t it essentially dumb and “square” to think otherwise? And maybe, in all innocence, Nelson did like it because of the pockets. What would be the matter with that?