Young Hearts Crying Read Free Page B

several of his “stories” he began to relax – maybe it wasn’t really necessary to knock yourself out over this shit after all – and soon he made friends with another staff writer, an affable, talkative young mannamed Bill Brock whose disdain for the job seemed even greater than his own. Brock was an Amherst graduate who had spent a couple of years as a labor-union organizer for electrical workers – “the best, most rewarding time of my life” – and was now deep in the writing of what he called a working-class novel.
    “Look, I’ll give you Dreiser and Frank Norris and those guys,” he would explain, “and I’ll even give you the early Steinbeck, but for the most part there hasn’t
been
a proletarian literature in America. We’re scared shitless of facing the truth, that’s what it amounts to.” And then at other moments, as if sensing something faintly absurd in his own passion for social reform, he would laugh it off with a rueful little shake of the head and say he guessed he’d been born twenty years too late.
    When Michael asked him over for dinner one night he said, “Sure; love to. Be okay if I bring my girl?”
    “Well, of course.”
    Then when he saw Michael writing down the Perry Street address he said, “I’ll be damned; we’re practically neighbors. We’re only a couple hundred yards from you, over on the other side of Abingdon Square. Good, then; we’ll look forward to it.”
    And from the moment Bill Brock brought his girl into the Davenports’ apartment – “This is Diana Maitland” – Michael began to be afraid he would find himself secretly, achingly in love with her forever. She was slender and black-haired, with a sad young face that suggested a fine mobility of expression, and she carried herself a little like a fashion model – or rather with the kind of heedless, lanky grace that any training as a fashion model might only have refined and destroyed. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her, and he could only hope that Lucy wasn’t paying attention.
    When the four of them were settled over their first or second drinks, Diana Maitland cast a brief, twinkling look at him.“Michael reminds me of my brother,” she said to Brock. “Don’t you think? Not so much in the face, I mean, but in the general build and manner; sort of the whole personality.”
    Bill Brock frowned and didn’t seem to agree, but he said, “That’s a great compliment anyway, though, Mike: she’s always been crazy about her brother. Very nice guy, too; I think you’d like him. Little moody and morose at times, but essentially a very –” And he held up one hand to ward off any objection from Diana. “Well, now, come on, baby, I’m not being unfair. You
know
he can be tiresome as hell when he goes in for all this brooding, heavy-drinking, Great Tragic Artist horseshit.” And as if confident of having silenced her, he turned back to the Davenports and explained that Paul Maitland was a painter – “Damn good one, too, from what I hear, and I mean at least you gotta give him credit: he works hard as hell at it and doesn’t seem to care if he ever makes a nickel out of it or not. Lives way the hell downtown on Delancey Street or some awful place, in a studio as big as a barn that costs him about thirty bucks a month. Does rough carpentry to pay the rent and buy the booze – are you getting the picture? A real tough customer. Anybody ever came along and offered him a job like
we’ve
got – you know? As a commercial artist or something? – if that ever happened he’d punch ’em right in the mouth. He’d think he was being compromised. He’d say they were trying to make him sell out – and that’s exactly the way he’d put it, too: ‘sell out.’ No, but I’ve always liked the hell out of Paul, and I admire him. I admire any man with the courage to go – you know – the courage to go his own way. Paul and I were at Amherst together, you see; if it hadn’t been for that I’d