Youngblood hawke, p.23
Youngblood Hawke, page 23
He was hanging on to his freedom, that was all, as a young man will. He wanted to play out the adventure with Mrs. Winter; it couldn't last long! He wanted to gamble on commodity futures for a while if he felt like it. This girl would wither his speculating with her cool skepticism. She would veto The Park Tower. She would put up with no adventures of the Frieda Winter variety.
Like every man who finds himself with almost no way out of proposing to a virtuous and lovely girl, Hawke was a bit appalled by the threatening closing-in of the walls of domesticity. But unlike the men who go through with it and—for the most part—live happily ever after, Hawke did have another ready and enticing alternative: Mrs. Winter and The Park Tower. If he could have put his best offer to Jeanne in words it would have gone something like this: "I love you. Be loyal to me, keep your heart intact, let me be a fool for a little while, work with me, I'll come around very soon." But no man can say such words, so he said nothing, but clung to her hand. A very little thing, a slight extra impulse, some lucky thing she said, and he might have asked her to marry him, then and there.
But Jeanne, in her own way, now did something wrong. She said, unable to fight down the fatal remark, and annoyed and troubled by his silence and by the thought of the sexual freedoms she had just allowed him and herself—and possibly feeling that combat was her one chance at this point—"I think Frieda Winter's paying Feydal for the apartment."
He left the couch and walked up and down the room. Then he faced her angrily. "That's an interesting thought, Jeanie. Why do you suppose she would do that?"
She answered up just as sharply, "Well, as I said, she's a patron of the arts. She probably had the whim and she acted on it. God knows the money would mean nothing to her."
"You are mistaken. Money means much more to rich people than it does to you and me. That's one of the reasons they get rich and stay rich. Jeanie, I'm a little tired of my loft, can't you understand that? I think a sojourn in The Park Tower is an experience I ought to have. It's been offered to me, and I'm taking it. I don't believe Mrs. Winter is paying. I'm sorry that you do, because the opinion of me that you imply isn't pleasant."
She said, standing, "My opinion of you is a little too obvious. I'm not going to talk about that. I doubt very much that we could go on working together anyway. I'm glad I've been of use to you so far. You don't need me, you never have. Nothing can stop you from becoming an important novelist, a very successful one, possibly a great one, though I think the word 'great' can only be used after a writer is dead."
He said, in an irrelevant burst, "Does Karl Fry mean anything to you?"
This sudden inquiry stopped even Jeanne Green's facile tongue. She could not imagine what had given Hawke this preposterous impression. Sometimes she had quoted Karl's letters to him, especially jokes about Hawke himself, and she had always spoken kindly of Karl, but that was all. She looked at Hawke in round-eyed wonder, with an inquiring tilt of the head like an animal. "Hm?" It was a mere defensive noise.
And Hawke blundered on, "I mean if we have to discontinue our work because you and Karl, I mean because you like him or something, that's one thing, but I think it's ridiculous for you to leave me and Prince House just to take another job. I can go to Jay Prince and tell him you should have an editorial position, and more money—"
"Christ, did you say money didn't mean anything to you? Is there anything else that does?" she shrilled, in a tone he had never heard from her, a voice with no trace of girlishness in it, the hard scolding voice of an angry woman. "Will you stop talking about money to me? In fact, will you please get out of my apartment, Arthur Hawke?"
They glared at each other, almost toe to toe, the big heavy-shouldered man and the slender girl. And though she was lovely, she was infuriating, he thought; too quick by half, selfish, proud, clever, too clever, trying to pin him down. Marry this moody sharp-clawed pretty nobody? "You're throwing me out," he said.
"You can call it that. I want to go to bed. I told you that long ago. Stay if you want only let's work, then, or something."
He picked up the portfolio and put away his manuscript. In the few seconds this took he gained a trace of calm. "This has all been my fault. It was a bad night."
She managed to say without a break in her voice, by the strongest effort of the will, "Oh, look, nothing's decided. We'll talk tomorrow. Good night."
They confronted each other across three feet of brown-carpeted space as wide as an ocean. He said gruffly, "Don't smoke. It isn't good for you, Jeanne."
"Don't go to The Park Tower. It won't be good for you," she said.
"Good night," he said, and he walked out.
6
The theatre was almost filled with Feydal's admirers for the closing performance, and the show went with a roar from start to finish. Hawke couldn't understand why the play had failed. It was light, but brilliant and amiable, or at least he thought so. So it was easy for him to be pleasant to Feydal when Frieda took him backstage. The Frenchman sat at a mirror framed in light bulbs, smearing cream on his painted fat face, slumped in an enormous coarse brown dressing gown like a monk's robe. There were several other chattering people in the room, including Pierce Carmian. "Hello, there," Feydal said, not turning around, with a tired smile at Hawke's image appearing behind his in the mirror.
Hawke said, "It's a wonderful show, every minute of it, and you were absolutely superb. They're all idiots."
Because he meant it, and spoke with his natural energy, the words struck home to the actor. Feydal turned around and held out his hand, sharp eyes beaming. "I'm so glad. It is an amusing little thing, isn't it? In the theatre you take the good with the bad, and get on with the next job." He wiped red-brown smears from his face on a fresh towel handed him by a Negro valet, uncovering swathes of pale pink jowl. "Maybe you and I will have a success one day soon, eh! What do you say, my young friend, will you write me a play in that inspiring apartment of mine?"
"Well, if I get an idea I'll certainly try."
"The apartment's cleaned and ready for you," Feydal said. "I left strict orders. We'll go there together later."
The party on stage was a crowded and buzzing affair, for the play had had a large cast. Hawke was astonished at the flatness, the shallowness, the crudely smeared paint of the setting. The curtain was up; the rows of seats stretched off into gloom. Frieda was chatting with some actors. He wandered away and stood alone at the footlights, his back to the party, staring out at the empty theatre.
"New worlds to conquer?" Pierce Carmian said, coming up to him with a bottle of champagne in one hand and paper cup in the other. Hawke laughed. The young playwright, streamlined as a shark, in a black suit, white shirt and oyster-colored silk tie, poured wine into both their cups, and put the empty bottle into the well of the footlights. "This, I warn you, is the theatre," he said. "A paper cupful of champagne. The excitement, the elegance, the poetry of champagne, all contained in the tawdry, trivial impermanence of a paper cup. You're better off with the novel form."
"I'm sure of that."
They were like two strange dogs bristling at each other, Hawke thought, yet he wished Carmian no ill, and rather envied his fantastic handsomeness and his exquisite getups. Carmian was groomed like a woman, though there was nothing else effeminate about him, in fact his voice was resonantly deep and his gestures were hearty. Carmian said, after sipping champagne, "If I had to be dispossessed, I'm glad it was by a hardworking writer like yourself. I'm told you write all day and all night. I hope you'll take a little time off to enjoy the place."
"I wasn't aware I was dispossessing you. And that's really an exaggeration, I work by night because it's quiet then, that's all."
"Why, I'm told you wrote this perfectly enormous book in three or four months."
"It took me a year."
"That's still marvellous. Anyway, you're not exactly dispossessing me," Carmian said with a manly sweep of a flaring lighter to the end of his cigarette, "since I was just going to inherit the place by default, if Georges couldn't sublet it. But he's a Frenchman, and how could he resist all that cash? Of course I can't compete when it comes to money. I haven't sold a book to the movies recently."
Though Hawke was dumfounded, he had to say something under Carmian's appraising glance. "I can't afford it any more than you can. If I'd known you were supposed to have it, I'd have let it alone."
"I doubt that Frieda Winter would have allowed you to. She's a managerial soul, especially with promising young men. Once she made up her mind that you were going to have Georges's place, brother, you were going to have it. Of course, Georges thinks the world of her. So does everybody. You're lucky." Carmian smiled at him, raised his eyebrows knowingly, and turned his back and walked off.
There was a space of three or four seconds when Hawke had trouble keeping himself from springing at Carmian, spinning him around, and hitting him. But he had the sense to know how impossible that was. He stood in his tracks.
Frieda was peering around now, her head bent down, and when she saw him she made for him. "There you are. I can't see anything in this light. Georges suddenly realized he barely has time to pick up his bags and make the plane. We have to pile in his limousine this minute. Having fun?"
"Not much."
"I know. There's nobody more boring than actors, except to other actors. Of course Georges is different, he's brilliant. Let's go." She slipped an arm in his and tugged.
There was nothing to do but go along, and he went. In ten minutes they were in Feydal's gorgeous suite, all orderly and put to rights except for a stack of calfskin luggage in the center of the living room, with some folding bags for suits. In ten minutes more a parade of bellboys had carted all that away, and Feydal had given him keys and made him a present of the remaining liquor in the round little rolling bar decorated with red and gold Japanese figures; and they had drunk a toast in twenty-year-old brandy, and Feydal had made one phone call in the closed bedroom, and taken a preoccupied farewell and lumbered out, enormous in a black raincoat; and Hawke and Mrs. Winter were left in the suite together.
It seemed less glamorous to Hawke on this second visit, much smaller and disconcertingly familiar. He realized that the rooms were not large at all—the living room was only a fraction of the size of his loft, and cluttered with beautiful furniture, and there would be no chance for the headlong pacing that had been part of his work habits—and he found he was oppressed by the thought of living with, and using, another man's things. Yet it was a lush place, no doubt of that, and New York lay far below him, a conquered web of lights, the golden city at his feet.
"Frieda," he said rather miserably, "are you paying Feydal for this apartment?"
"What? Of course I'm not. Pay that monster, after all I've done for him? Why do you ask?"
He glumly told her of his conversation with Carmian. Her big gray eyes were fixed on his face. She was leaning, arms folded, against a smoky-tinted wall mirror. She heaved a long sigh. "Are you going to take Pierce Carmian's word against mine?"
"I'm asking, that's all."
"I have not paid Georges Feydal one cent. He told me on the telephone that you could have it, because I built you up as a potential major playwright. He reneged on me when he asked you for the exclusive reading of your next play. He's getting more than he deserves, and I'm a little angry at him. And I'm not pleased to death with you, either, making me swear on a stack of Bibles that a catty little lie of Pierce Carmian's isn't the truth. I'll be running along. Enjoy the apartment, Bloody."
She started to walk out, and of course he caught her arm. That she should be lying was beyond belief. Carmian had sunk a little poison sting in him to ruin his pleasure in the apartment; and he had almost succeeded. "Frieda, hold on. You're dealing with a clod from the mountains. I don't understand people like Carmian. The thing is I'm not dumb, and I promise you I'll catch on fast."
She turned willingly enough, and put a hand up to his face. Frieda was about Jeanne's size, or perhaps an inch taller. "I wonder whether you ever will. However, you'll make out. You can write, and we need writers."
"I've made an ugly mess of this. I don't know how to thank you."
"Don't you?" she said softly, and with a certain sliding movement that he remembered as long as he lived she was in his arms.
A man has only one honeymoon night. There may be women before it and women after it, it may come early in life or late, it may be with a true love or a false one, but one night one woman unlocks the sweet secret of the best delight the physical world holds—a questionable transient delight, some say, but the best—and for good or ill, his life rolls on and shapes itself on the far side of his honeymoon night. It is over. Arthur Hawke had his night with Mrs. Paul Winter, the mother of four children, in The Park Tower, on the wide lilac silk-sheeted bed of Georges Feydal, at the age of twenty-seven. What other events had occurred in that bed he did not know, but it was not his own wedding bed, and it was a decidedly unusual honeymoon bed. No beggar boy in the Arabian Nights, led by mysterious veiled messengers into the golden boudoir of a lovely queen, ever had a more enthralling night of it. And the night passed, the dawn was gray over New York, gray as his love's eyes, and she dressed and left him to sleep on for a while in The Park Tower. It was one of the few nights when he failed to write his regular quota of pages.
7
And he found out the truth about a week later, in an absurd and somewhat dishonorable way. Among the letters in his box was one in a long white business envelope from Frieda Winter's office, addressed to Georges Feydal. The hotel clerk was always forgetting to readdress Feydal's mail, there was no great mischance in that, and Hawke usually struck out the address himself and wrote in the address of the actor's attorney. But Hawke got his hands on the letter, and with a sickness in his stomach he guessed at the contents. He dropped into a chair in the marble-walled hotel lobby and opened it. It was a letter agreement about the apartment between Frieda and Feydal, a single typed page, and clipped to it was a check for eight hundred dollars, the first month's rent.
They had a battle over the letter that night. Frieda flew directly on the offensive and stayed there. She put him in the wrong for opening the letter, and she raged at Feydal for telling Carmian, and at Carmian for telling Hawke; and she raged at him for being a proud, suspicious, childish hillbilly, creating difficulties where there were none.
"But why did you lie to me, Frieda? That's all I'm asking you. Why did you lie?"
"Oh, please, lied! I was protecting your preposterous Southern vanity, I wasn't hiding anything mean, anything wrong, anything I was or am the slightest bit ashamed of."
"I believe that, Frieda. But my point is that—"
"What was my crime, what was the enormous deed I committed that I had to lie about? You sent me that book of yours! I didn't ask for it, you sent it to me, and we met at the lion cage and we had lunch, and before that lunch was over I was gone, my life fell apart like a house of cards, I knew I was hopelessly in love with a mad oversized young scribbler from Kentucky with a head like a Michelangelo, and I knew that that crazy Christmas afternoon I'd tried to forget was no accident but the beginning of my life when I thought it was all over. I loved you. I wanted to be with you. I made it possible. Did you want to make love to me on the floor of your goddamned loft, under your hanging wet socks, between the box of empty tin cans and the floor heater? Hey? Is that how you wanted to make love to me? Or didn't you want to make love to me? Answer me!"
"I wanted to make love to you all right. I want to make love to you right now. You know that, so don't confuse the issue."
"That is the issue, and get your hands off me. We'll talk this out, I will not be called a liar, and if I'm a liar why do you want to have anything to do with me? Let me go."
"Frieda, you should have told me, that's all I say. You should have told me the truth. You shouldn't have treated me like a baby."
"The truth! The truth is that I love you, that's the truth. You'd never be in this apartment if I'd told you I'd paid for it. Not you! I saw how you acted about that lunch check that day, why you sulked for an hour afterward. Southern pride, suh, mountaineer independence, old Dan'l Boone in the log cabin, that's you, Bloody my boy! Only the days of the log cabin are over. It takes money to live decently. You're going to have a ton of it, you fool, you're a brilliant writer—"
"I've got money now. I've torn up your check. I sent a check for eight hundred dollars to Feydal's attorney."
"What! You did what? Oh, Christ, you make me sick. I can afford it. You can't, you can't, that's all."
"Sure I can."
"Oh, yes. What are you going to do, draw another one of those stupid advances from Jay Prince and mortgage a valuable property you haven't written yet, and give it away for two cents on the dollar? If it offends your Southern manhood to stay here, why, move the hell out. We'll postpone our love affair for a couple of years, isn't that sensible? You see I can be sensible. Or I have a better idea. We'll make love in my house. But it'll have to be only once a year, when all the family and the servants are gone, on Christmas afternoon, complete with corn fritters. Okay?"
Her hand shot up, with wriggling spread fingers, and he had to laugh. "Frieda, it's just that much less I'll be betting on onions and lard. That's all."
Frieda also laughed, coarsely and wildly. "Onions and lard! I'd forgotten them, by God. All right, pay for the apartment by all means, Daniel Boone, and be damned to onions and lard. Now come here, you big lunatic."
And so to love-making again, in the dim pleasant luxury of Feydal's suite, twenty-five stories above the busy streets of New York, where the traffic streamed in yellow rivulets of light.
He was appeased. He had asserted his manhood. And now that he was in The Park Tower, he liked it. All the same, he had found out Frieda's amazing ability to lie when it suited her.
CHAPTER SIX
1
PUBLICATION day of Alms for Oblivion was drawing closer. In the offices of Prince House Hawke had seen proofs of the first advertisements, and there was little doubt that Jay Prince was planning what Karl Fry called "the old jazzeroo campaign." The opening gun for Alms for Oblivion was to be a full page in the Sunday book section of the New York Times, with the novelist's name spread across the top in solid black letters two inches high:
