Youngblood hawke, p.22
Youngblood Hawke, page 22
A church clock outside struck the quarter hour. Jeanne tried to be surreptitious about glancing at her watch, but Karl saw. He said hastily, "This will teach you to go to a man's apartment with him. I'm sure you'd have preferred a ravishing to this lecture."
"No, no, Karl, lecture me any time."
He grunted. "But that wasn't my reason for luring you here, I mean neither the ravishing nor the boring. How happy are you at Prince House?"
"Oh, acutely miserable but getting along," Jeanne said, surprised, "like most working girls. Why?"
Fry looked at her for a long moment and she began to feel uncomfortable. "Jeanne, the new mystery editor at Hodge Hathaway is going to rate an assistant. A hundred and ten a week to start with, I'd guess. No shorthand, there'll be a girl for that. The Hathaway family has decided, after a conservative twenty-year look at the situation, that they may be passing up a bet in mysteries. Ross wants me to try to build up the department."
Jeanne now broke a five-week stretch of abstinence by reaching for one of Karl's cigarettes. He swiftly lit it for her, an unexpected gallantry from Karl Fry. Jeanne had given up cigarettes after Hawke had teased and nagged at her for months, saying that he didn't want her to cough herself to death in the middle of the first useful work she'd done in her life. Of course the cough had promptly disappeared, and Hawke had been so triumphant, and so pleased with himself, that he had taken her to dinner at the Waldorf. But she had never stopped craving to smoke, and confronted with a possible business decision she suddenly figured to hell with Youngblood Hawke. The first puff tasted atrocious. "Well, gosh, Karl, this is terribly kind of you. I haven't had any experience with mysteries."
"What does that matter? What's needed here is a little intelligence, the ability to see the good and the bad in a manuscript, and the tact to handle these womanish goofs called authors. Really, Jeanne, as long as you're in it you may as well do something better than styling. That's drudgery for a clerk."
Jeanne said, puffing away—the cigarette was tasting better—"Well, it's awfully tempting, and you're flattering me to little pieces, I must say."
She was certainly tempted. Jeanne's situation was bad at Prince House. The head copy editor was a woman in her forties, rather dull-witted and vinegarish. She hated Jeanne, and had managed to make Jay Prince and most of the editors believe that Jeanne was rebellious and hard to handle; the truth was that Jeanne had been rebellious enough toward her, having a natural inability to suffer fools. If not for Youngblood Hawke Jeanne would have been looking for work elsewhere. But that was it. Youngblood Hawke was at Prince House.
Karl spoke into her meditative silence. "Jeanne, I'll try to get you a hundred twenty-five. I want you as my assistant. I want you to do all the work while I draw a fat salary and try to start writing poetry again."
"Spoken like a man," Jeanne said, laughing. She stood. "I'm grateful as I can be, Karl. Whether it comes through or not, or whether I can take it or not, you've made me feel remarkably good. It's nice to be wanted."
"There's nothing nicer," Fry said with sudden intensity, and with a touching, almost frankly appealing look. "But you must live in a constant aura of that feeling."
"Not at Prince House. I got off on the wrong foot. My own fault, I have a mean streak. I've got to go. Thanks for everything. A wonderful afternoon, cheered me up no end."
He walked with her to the door, put his hand on the knob, and then didn't open it. "I spend a lot of evenings alone. Maybe we could take a few more dinners together. You make me feel very good, Jeanne, you always have. Some people improve life just by existing."
"I'd like to do that, Karl, some time." She took a little step toward the door, so that he was forced in politeness to turn the knob and open it. But still he barred her way.
"Tomorrow night, Jeanne?"
Though she was free she said, "Sorry, Karl, not tomorrow night." They sparred a bit and it ended in a dinner date for the following week. Jeanne did not at all mind the prospect of dining with Karl. But a quick acceptance would have shown him a pleasure in his attentions that she did not feel. She did not want to be courted by Karl Fry. She did not want to be courted by anyone, just now.
Karl walked with her to the elevator. "How's our young mountaineer friend?"
"You mean Youngblood Hawke?" she said, blushing a bit at the hollow note, the forced innocence.
"Yes, I mean Youngblood Hawke," Karl said with a sad little ghost of a grin.
"Well, he's an egomaniac, but at least he's a good writer."
"I hear you're working on the new one as he goes along."
"Yes, he requested that from Waldo Fipps and they assigned me to the job."
"Give Artie my best," Karl said as she stepped into the elevator.
"I will when I see him."
"Huh-huh," Karl grunted, and the door closed. Again she had made a fool of herself, she thought. Karl knew she was going to see Hawke now; it was written on her, and the pretense that she wasn't had betrayed her if her previous conduct hadn't. Good God, was the gossip all over Prince House that she had lost her head over Youngblood Hawke?
5
The doorbell rang at eight. Hawke was always prompt. She went to the door, swallowing nervously, and opened it. She was wearing a dark blue silk dress, and her hair, her nails, her face were done. Sometimes after a work session he offered to take her out. She was expected to clap on her hat and come along at once.
The red paper portfolio was under his arm; so he had new material to read to her. "Hi. How's it going?" he said, coming in without ceremony.
"Fine. The typist sent back the last four chapters yesterday. I'm pretty well caught up on it."
Without asking him, she served coffee. That was the rule: coffee when he came, and coffee straight through the work session. Then maybe a drink; but Hawke was reluctant to drink in her apartment. Jeanne would have had good grounds for believing that he found her repulsive, except that she knew otherwise. He acted exactly as though she were a married woman, and he was going to be honorable when alone with her, if it killed him.
When they settled down for his reading of the new pages—she curled on the couch, he in the armchair, minus jacket, tie and shoes—she lit a cigarette with pathetic defiance. "What's this?" he growled.
"Let's face it, I'm no good," she said. "I tried but I have no character."
"You have all kinds of character."
"All right, I have. I'd rather smoke and cough and die young. I love to smoke. I've searched my soul and that's how it stands. What's it to you?"
"It's nothing to me," Hawke said, "except that it's going to take me a while to break in another girl when they cart you off in a bag."
"You just won't have all those nagging queries to slow you up, when they cart me off in a bag."
"I can hardly wait." He opened the folder.
Some evenings are fated to go wrong. The new scenes he read to her were bad. Usually she could shrug off a patch of faulty work, knowing that his own instinct would cause him to change it in time; and then she could cheerfully do what he really wanted of her, and tell him that the book was going well. But now and then his very speed of composition took him far along a false path. She had to say what she thought, much as she dreaded to. He did not like criticism. "How is it?" he said, closing the folder.
She nodded. "All right."
"Why? What's the matter?" When Jeanne liked his work Hawke knew it, and he also knew when she didn't. He was the angrier with her because he didn't like the scenes himself. He had just written them. He had come back to his hole on Twenty-eighth Street in a turmoil, after the lunch with Mrs. Winter and the strange visit to Georges Feydal; he had hurled himself at his desk and scribbled off a great task. Even his handwriting looked different on this big batch of pages—hasty, spread-out, slanted. He had the usual symptoms of working too hard and too fast—racing pulse, shaky arms and legs. He had tried to sleep, instead of eating dinner, but had only tossed, so he was hungry too.
When Jeanne said nothing, but just looked at him and smoked, he said gently, "Look, I'm not satisfied either. What bothers you?"
She made her criticisms.
He said grouchily, "I'll look at it again after I've had some sleep. I dashed it off this afternoon. If you're right I'll be obliged to you. Let's get on to your queries."
"Maybe we'd better postpone them."
He looked at his watch. "Why? Are you tired?"
"Not in the least, but they usually irritate you, and I've annoyed you enough for one night."
"Don't be foolish. I may act irritated but you know I'm grateful, or I wouldn't pay attention to you."
But when they were halfway through the queries he jumped out of the armchair, and strode at her in his stocking feet, throwing his arms in the air. "Please, that's too much. This is a novel, Jeanie. That means it's an invention. A piece of fiction. It's a lie, you see. It never happened. I'm making it up. It's not naval history. It's a yarn."
"I know that," she said, looking up at him uncowed. On a point of fact it was impossible to bully her. "All I'm saying is that a jeep carrier couldn't have steamed from Eniwetok to Iwo Jima in that length of time. I've checked the distances and the maximum speed of those ships. It couldn't happen."
"I want it to happen, so it does. That's known as a fictional liberty. Shakespeare foreshortened whole decades in his plays, turned history inside out—times, places, events—when he wanted to, and somehow the sloppy lazy bastard got away with it and people even pay to see his plays to this day."
"He wasn't writing in the convention of realism. You are. Anyway, I admire you, as I guess you know, but I'm not sure you can yet use the free hand of Shakespeare."
"That one stays as it is, Jeanne. What's next?"
He returned to the armchair and sank into it. He tried hard to be gracious through the remaining queries, but Jeanne found herself skipping the troublesome ones. She did not know what was causing the strain. They had had acrid exchanges before, but the tension tonight was new. When he said, after the last query, that he would like a Scotch and soda, she leaped to the buffet comer that served as a bar, and mixed two strong drinks quickly. He gloomily gulped the drink, said he would take another, and lit a cigar. Jeanne reflected that there would be no going out tonight, the silk dress and all the rest had been to no purpose; she could have received him in a housecoat. But she never knew.
He said, "You've made me feel odd tonight."
"Odd?"
"The correct word is guilty, I guess."
"But why, for heaven's sake?" She was coughing badly. "Excuse me, time for the opium. Sorry your effort to reform me failed." She took a spoonful from the brown bottle. "Maybe what I really want is the opium, and smoking is just a devious way to get at it."
Hawke said, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees and looking earnestly at her, "I'm suddenly aware that I'm imposing on you. Jeanne, do you think you'd enjoy working with me in a fancy suite in The Park Tower on the twenty-fifth floor, with a gorgeous view of the park, and all the room service we want, drinks and coffee and a seven course supper at midnight if we feel like it, served out of those big portable warming things by a couple of bowing waiters in gold and green uniforms?"
She said with a puzzled smile, "I suppose I could bear it. Why?"
"That's what we're going to be doing from now on for a while. I couldn't have you coming to that pigsty of mine on Twenty-eighth Street, but that's all over with. From now on I can be a bit less of a burden to you, stomping in on you at all hours, ordering you around—"
"You're not a burden," she started to say, but he kept talking.
"If you'll believe me," he said, "Georges Feydal is our benefactor, Georges Feydal in the flesh. I happened to meet him today, and he's letting me have his apartment in The Park Tower for the summer. I'm moving in there lock, stock, and barrel, day after tomorrow, I really am, and that's where we'll have these sessions from now on. Nice?"
"Amazing. It's wonderful," Jeanne said slowly and cautiously. "What will you do after the summer?"
"Who knows? I haven't really thought about it, this all just happened a few hours ago."
"How on earth did you meet Georges Feydal?"
Having no ready lie, for all this was unpremeditated, Hawke said, "Frieda Winter took me up to his place. You remember Mrs. Winter."
"Yes, I remember Mrs. Winter. The lady who liked my hat at the Christmas party. How did she happen to pop up?"
"I sent her a copy of Alms for Oblivion. She was very helpful to me on the research for the Virginia scenes in the new book."
"Oh? Is she from an old Virginia family? I wouldn't have thought that."
"Of course not. Her mother's Swedish and her father's German or the other way around or something. Anyway she's an old friend of Feydal and she sort of manages him. She's booked him out on this summer lecture tour, and it was her idea to ask him for the apartment. He couldn't have been more gracious about it. We arranged it in a few minutes."
"You're not paying anything?"
"Well, he asked me for a first exclusive look at the next play I write, which seemed a pretty tenuous payment to me, but we shook hands on it. So, Jeanie, our headquarters transfer to The Park Tower day after tomorrow."
"Mrs. Winter went to a lot of trouble for you."
"She's an energetic woman. She insisted on seeing the place where I worked, and then she threw a fit when she saw it and marched right out and telephoned Feydal. She thinks my loft isn't a fit human habitation."
"Well, it's very bachelorish, but that was your own choice, I thought. You've done fine work there and you don't owe anybody anything."
"I won't owe anybody anything in The Park Tower."
"It seems to me you'll owe something to Mrs. Winter. You didn't know Georges Feydal. She did. He's doing her a terrific favor, it seems to me."
"Are you saying I shouldn't have accepted it?"
"That's hardly for me to say. But a furnished apartment in The Park Tower is probably worth a thousand dollars a month, don't you think?"
"He said it's impossible to sublease in the summertime."
"Try it. Ask a renting agent what he can get you for the place."
He began to put on his shoes. "You seem a bit annoyed about Mrs. Winter. She's a happily married woman of forty with four children."
"Yes, I know, a toothless bent old hag whose nose rests on her chin, but a great soul and a patron of the arts." Jeanne went to her desk and snatched a copy of Alms for Oblivion from it. "I trust you autographed Mrs. Winter's book?"
"I autographed it, of course."
"Would you sign a copy for me?"
He looked up; he was tying his shoelaces. "What's all this?"
She stood over him, brandishing the book and a pen at him. Her eyes were wide open, glittering in the reddish light of the floor lamp. "I think it would be nice if I had a signed copy. I don't, you know. Not yet."
He took the book and pen, with a grin. He wrote, For Jeanne Green, editor and collaborator, but for whom this first effort of mine would be a great deal worse than it is—or better, I'll never know—with affection and gratitude, Arthur Youngblood Hawke. She stood looking at him, arms tightly folded, one leg out to a side, her weight on a hip. The attitude threw the feminine lines of the slight girl into relief. Having scrawled the inscription he now wished he had made it less facetious. Written out, it was coarse. Nevertheless he gave her the book.
She glanced at the inscription. "Thanks." She turned away and went to her desk. There she sat and coughed and shuffled papers while he put on his tie and coat. He said, "Come out and have a bite with me. I'm famished. That's one reason I'm surly, I daresay. I skipped dinner."
"Where to?" she said. "The Park Tower?"
"Any place."
"I don't think I'm hungry. Thanks, anyhow." Her back was to him. She was lighting another cigarette. The match fumes caught in her throat and she coughed in deep grating spasms. Hawke strode to her, yanked the cigarette out of her fingers, and crushed it in an ashtray. Then he pulled Jeanne from her chair by the hands. She came unwillingly. She said, "The reason I wanted the book is that I don't know whether I'll be seeing you any more, that's all. I think I'm quitting Prince House." Hoarsely, she told him of Karl Fry's offer.
He said, "Well, I suppose I should congratulate you, but this is upsetting. Couldn't you continue with me anyway, evenings?"
"I don't see how."
"It could be something you're doing on the side. I would pay you, of course."
Jeanne passed the back of her hand across her eyes. "Look, I don't like to put you out, but I'm really not feeling too good, the opium or whatever. You'd better go and eat without me. Thanks anyway. I'm going to bed."
"Well, what do we do? Just drop the arrangement here and now? It's absurd, Jeanne."
She said desperately, "Can't we talk about it tomorrow? I don't feel good, truly I don't."
He clumsily embraced her. She uttered a weak "No, no," but he pulled her to the couch and began to make love to her. She was crying. The cool feel of the tears on her cheeks aroused him in a bitter very strong way. She kissed him with shy tentative excitement, with cutting sweetness. Her body in his arms was angelic. He said, "Don't cry. For God's sake, why cry?"
"Do you know what you're doing?" she said.
He released her.
She took a cigarette from the coffee table. "Don't you dare nag me, I'm going to smoke this one." She lit it and smoked and said nothing. He took her hand and held it, playing with her fingers.
If this was not love, he thought, what was it? Frieda was quite right. He ought to marry Jeanne Green. She was everything he wanted. He could hear himself saying, "Jeanie, let's get married." His lips half moved in the words, as he sat there not saying anything.
