Young Hearts Crying Read Free

you’re sort of making me nervous? And also,” she added, putting her hairbrush down as carefully as if it might break, “also because there’s something important I have to tell you.”
    As they took conversational positions, partly facing each other in two overstuffed Copley Plaza chairs, he thought at first she might be pregnant – that wouldn’t be great news, though it wouldn’t be bad news, either – or maybe that she’d been told she couldn’t have children at all; then his racing mind touched on the frightful possibility that she might have a fatal illness.
    “I’ve wanted you to know about this from the beginning,” she said, “but I was afraid it might – change things, sort of.”
    It seemed to him now that he scarcely knew her, this leggy, pretty girl to whom the word “wife” might never be comfortably applied, and he sat with a chill of dread from his scrotum to his throat as he watched her lips and waited for the worst.
    “So now I’ll have to stop being afraid, that’s all. I’ll just tell you, and I can only hope it won’t make you feel – well, anyway. The thing is, I have something between three and four million dollars. Of my own.”
    “Oh,” he said.
    Remembering it later, even after many years, it would always seem to Michael that they filled their remaining days and nights in that hotel with nothing but talk. Their voices only rarely took on the tension of an argument and never once broke into quarreling, but it was a steady, dead-earnest discussion that kept circling back over the same issues time and again, and there were decidedly two points of view.
    Lucy’s position was that the money had never meant anything to her; why, then, should it mean anything to him beyond an extraordinary opportunity for time and freedom in his work? They could live anywhere in the world. They could travel, if they felt like it, until they found the right setting for a full and productive life. Wasn’t that the kind of thing most writers dreamed of?
    And Michael would admit he was tempted – oh, Jesus, talk about tempted – but this was his position: He was a middle-class boy and he had always assumed he would make something of himself on his own. Could he really be expected to abandon that lifelong habit of thought overnight? Living off her fortune might only bleed away his ambition, and might even rob him of the very energy he needed to work at all; that would be an unthinkable price to pay.
    He hoped she wouldn’t misunderstand him: it was certainly fine to know she
had
all that money, if only because it meant their children would always have the security of trust funds and stuff like that. In the meantime, though, wouldn’t it be better if she kept it all strictly between herself and her bankers, or her brokers, or whoever the hell it was that looked after it?
    She assured him repeatedly that his attitude was “admirable,” but he always turned away that compliment by saying it was nothing of the kind; it was only stubborn. All he wanted was to carry out the plans he had made for them long before the wedding.
    They would go to New York, where he’d take the kind of job that other fledgling writers took, in some advertising agency or publishing house – hell, anybody could do that kind of work with his left hand – and they’d live on his salary like an ordinary young couple, preferably in some plain, decent apartment in the West Village. The only real difference, now that he knew of her millions of dollars, was that they would both have a secret to keep from the other ordinary young people they’d meet along the way.
    “Isn’t this really the most sensible thing,” he asked her, “at least for the time being? Do you see what I’m getting at, Lucy?”
    “Well,” she said, “when you say ‘for the time being’ I guess I– sure I do. Because we’ll always have the money to fall back on.”
    “Okay,” he conceded, “but who said anything about falling back? Have I ever