Young Hearts Crying (32 page)

She was agreeably quick to remove all traces of her presence every other weekend, when Laura came into town to visit him; but on each of those Sunday nights, after seeing Laura safely aboard the train for Tonapac again, he knew he could ride the subway home and find his windows lighted on Leroy Street: Jane was always there and waiting for him.

Her nominal residence, where she kept most of her belongings, was the home of a “tiresome old aunt” near Gramercy Park. Didn’t the aunt wonder about her new living arrangement? “No, no,” Jane assured him. “She never asks questions. She wouldn’t dare. She’s fearfully bohemian herself. Oh, Michael, aren’t you ever going to take off your clothes?”

She found so many ways of saying he was wonderful that he might have come to believe it, if he hadn’t had to face the diminished self-esteem implicit in each day’s work. Nothing had come right in any of the poems he’d taken up since moving back to New York. At first he thought having Jane might make a difference, but after she’d been with him a month or two he was still struggling with the words.

He couldn’t complain of needing more time alone, because
Jane was away all day during the week; but that in itself was part of the trouble: he missed her when she was gone.

And she did seem to love her job. She called it “a fun job,” no matter how often he told her “run” wasn’t an adjective; she never allowed herself to be late to work in the morning, or to be less than perfectly dressed and groomed, and he was always surprised in the evening to find how fresh and exhilarated she could be after those long secretarial hours. She would walk back into his life with her face smelling of the sharp fall weather, humming a song from a new musical comedy, sometimes bringing a bag of expensive groceries (“Aren’t you getting a little bored with restaurants, Michael? Besides, I love to cook for you; I love to watch you eat the things I’ve made.”)

Even at times when her job wasn’t fun, it was always a romance.

“I cried at work today,” she reported once, lowering her eyes. “I couldn’t help it – but Jake held me in his arms until I felt better, and I thought that was awfully nice of him.”

“Who’s Jake?” And Michael was startled at how quickly she could make him jealous.

“Oh, he’s one of the men; one of the partners. The other one’s Meyer, and he’s nice too, but sometimes he’s gruff. He shouted at me today and he’s never done that before; that was why I cried. I could tell he felt rotten about it later, though, and he apologized very sweetly before he went home.”

“So how big an agency is it? Just those two guys, or what?”

“Oh, no, there’s a staff of four. One of them’s Eddie; he’s twenty-six and we’re really good friends. We have lunch together almost every day, and once we tangoed all the way down Forty-second Street, just to be crazy. Eddie’s going to be a singer –
is
a singer, I mean – and I think he’s terrifically good.”

He decided not to ask any more questions about the office.
He didn’t want to hear that stuff, and none of it would matter anyway as long as she came home eager to please him every night.

Bill Brock’s word “extraordinary” kept recurring to him as he watched Jane move around the apartment, as he walked with her in the evening streets, or sat with her in the old White Horse. She
was
an extraordinary girl. He had come to feel he could never have enough of her flesh, and his missing her in working hours seemed to suggest a gentler attachment, too. He scarcely even noticed her artificial smiles and sighs anymore – they were part of her style – but he often wished there weren’t such an abundance and variety of information in the story of her life.

She had been married at seventeen to a young teacher at the exclusive New Hampshire boarding school she’d attended, but the marriage was so “horrible” her parents had it annulled in less than a year.

“And that was the last time I had to depend on my parents in any way at all,” she said. “I’d never dream of asking them for anything again. They’re so busy hating each other now, and so busy being in love with their new people, that I’ve sort of come to despise them both. And the worst of it is they feel so
guilty
about me: God, that’s infuriating. It’s not so bad in my mother’s case, way out in California, but my father’s a real nuisance because he’s right here in town. And then there’s lovely Brenda – that’s his wife, you see; my stepmother. The curious thing is I was quite fond of Brenda at first: she seemed sort of like an older sister and we were very close for a while, until I began to learn what a manipulative person she is. Brenda would absolutely dominate my life if she had her way.”

But all this family bitterness could vanish in a breath. Jane sometimes used Michael’s telephone to call her father, and she would talk for an hour with an almost flirtatious enthusiasm,
calling him “Daddy” in every sentence and helplessly laughing at his jokes, then asking to speak to Brenda and spending half an hour more in the kind of soft, cryptic, gossipy conversation that most girls reserve for their best friends.

And perhaps because he had a daughter of his own, Michael was mostly pleased with the harmony of those talks: he would even smile to himself as her sweet English voice went on and on at the phone across the room, and it occurred to him more than once that he’d like to meet her father someday. (“I’m so glad,” the man might say; “so glad Jane seems to have found a sense of stability and direction at last.…”)

Her father hadn’t always been a corporate executive, Jane explained after one of the phone calls; journalism was his first love, and during the war he’d been one of the top correspondents for a leading London newspaper. In an earlier version her father had spent the war in hazardous espionage work for the British government, but Michael didn’t call that to her attention because for all he knew it might have been possible for a journalist to serve as a spy.

There were further discrepancies, though, in some of the other things she told him.

It was her “horrible” former husband who had taken her virginity, so clumsily that the thought of it could still make her shudder; but happier memories once brought her back to the year she was sixteen, when she’d given “everything, oh, everything” to a boy she’d met at a lakeside resort in Maine.

The summer before last she had undergone an extremely painful abortion, in New Jersey; she’d been obliged to find the abortionist herself and to pay him out of her own salary, and the consequences of his bungled work had left her weak and ill for months; yet the summer before last was also when she had hitchhiked all over Western Europe with a boy named Peter and
had a marvelous time until Peter’s father insisted he come home and go back to Princeton in the fall.

Michael tried to clear up a few points in some of her stories, but there were so many others that he lapsed into a bewildered silence most of the time. And then it began to seem that she was willfully testing the limits of his credulity, as troubled children sometimes do.

On one side of her exquisite face there was a small patch of scar tissue, suggesting that a boil or a cyst had once been removed from that spot, and Michael told her one afternoon, in bed, that he thought it made her all the prettier.

“Oh, that,” she said. “Well, I hate that scar, and I hate everything it stands for.” Then, after a significant pause, she said “The Gestapo wasn’t very well known for gentleness.”

He took a long breath. “Baby, where do you get the Gestapo? Please don’t give me the Gestapo, sweetheart, because I just sort of happen to know you were six years old when the war ended. Now, suppose we talk about something else, okay?”

“Well, but it’s true,” she insisted. “That was one of their techniques: torture the children in order to make the parents talk. And I wasn’t even six when it happened; I was five. My mother and I were living in Occupied France then because we hadn’t been able to get back to England. And I imagine it must’ve been difficult, having to sort of hide out all the time, but I still have wonderfully clear memories of the Normandy countryside, and the nice family of farmers we knew. And one day these dreadful men came clumping into the house demanding information about my father. Mummy was very brave, actually: she wouldn’t tell them anything until she saw the knife piercing my face – then she broke and told them whatever they needed to know. If she hadn’t I might have been killed, or I might have been mutilated for life.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Well, that’s a terrible story, all right, and the worst part is I don’t believe it. Now, listen, dear. You know I’m crazy about you; you know I’d do anything in the world for you, but I’m not taking any more of this bullshit, do you understand? Christ’s sake, I don’t think you even know what’s true and what isn’t.”

“Well, I certainly don’t see how an attitude like that deserves any comment at all,” she said quietly. She got out of bed and walked away, and from the tense shape of her back he thought she might be ashamed, but then she turned and gave him a calm, appraising look. “You’re very brutal, aren’t you,” she said. “At first I thought you were a sensitive man, but you’re really very brutal and unkind.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, trying for a tone of great weariness.

That was about as bad as things got during the fall, and even then he knew they would pick up. If he allowed her to sulk for a while, and to take a shower and change her clothes, he knew she would find some easy, face-saving way to become a sweet companion again; and by that time he’d be willing to have her back on any terms.

He never tired of showing her off to other men – even to strangers, even in restaurants of her choosing that he couldn’t really afford – and he happily brought her along to a bar uptown to meet Tom Nelson once, when Tom was in the city for the day. He knew Tom’s face would go slack and weak with envy at the sight of her, and it did. That particular afternoon came close to being wrecked, though, when Jane leaned attractively across the table and said “What do you do?”

“Oh, I’m a painter.”

“Modern?” she inquired.

Tom Nelson blinked several times behind his glasses to
suggest it had been a good many years since anybody had asked him a question like that. Then he said “Yeah, I guess so, sure.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose any kind of work can be fun if you like it, but personally I loathe modern art. All modern art leaves me absolutely cold.”

Tom began carefully molding a soaked cocktail napkin around the base of his drink then, and it was time for Michael to fill the silence with whatever quick, inconsequential talk came into his head.

That was another thing about Jane Pringle: she didn’t really know very much. Her stepmother had taught her a lot about clothes, and she’d heard enough talk around the office to develop strong opinions on current Broadway shows – she could always tell you which of them were great and which were trash – but she hadn’t bothered with many other kinds of learning since her time as an inattentive, daydreaming adolescent in boarding school. Her ignorance was so wide that Michael wondered if her lying might have begun as a way of trying to disguise it.

She told him she would have to spend Christmas with her father and stepmother because they’d been looking forward to it for months; then she called him from their place and said she’d decided to stay over for the New Year’s holiday too.

When she finally did get back to Leroy Street she seemed a little distracted. Even after she’d sat down with Michael she kept glancing around the apartment as if unable to believe she had ever really lived here, and once or twice she looked at his face in the same uncertain way.

“Well, I had a glorious time,” she told him. “We went to thirteen different parties.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s quite a – quite a few parties.”

She had a new hairstyle now, too short for his liking, and seemed to have acquired a new set of mannerisms to go with it:
crisp, businesslike, no-nonsense. Someone had given her an amber cigarette holder of the kind designed to trap poisonous tars, and she used it faithfully for the rest of the winter, allowing it to distort her face in a clenching, squinting way that made her look ten years older and not very smart.

In February she said it would be more sensible to have a place of her own, and he agreed with her. He helped her study the “Apartments Available” columns of the
Times
as carefully as if she were his own daughter starting out in the world. They found a suitable place in the West Twenties, overlooking the gardens of the General Theological Seminary, but Jane declined the landlord’s offer to have it painted before she moved in: she wanted to paint it herself, she said, “so it’ll feel more like my own apartment.”

And that meant Michael had to stand with her in paint-and-hardware stores while she hesitated much too long over choosing just the right shade of off-white, just the right kinds of paint rollers and brushes; it meant he had to wear spattered jeans and climb a stepladder and breathe the paint fumes and tire himself out, wondering all the while what the hell he was doing this for.

Once when Jane was high on another stepladder, dressed in a too-scanty pair of shorts and a too-scanty halter, reaching out to touch up the molding of a front window, there came a happy chorus of cheers and whistles from young Episcopalians in the shrubbery across the street. She laughed and waved to them; then she arranged herself into a slightly more provocative position on the ladder, and blew them a kiss.

Later, she told Michael she wanted her bedroom painted black.

“Why?”

“Oh, just because. I’ve always wanted a black bedroom. Doesn’t it seem sort of delightfully sexy?”

When the paint job was finished, black bedroom and all, he decided to leave her alone for a few days; maybe even for a week.

The next time he went to see her she seemed as eager as ever to have him in her bed, but in the aftermath of it she wanted talk in a way he didn’t find congenial. She explained to him, in language she could only recently have learned from some book of pop psychology
(How to Love,
by Derek Fahr?) that she thought their “relationship” might be more “valid” now that it was “structured on a more realistic basis.”