Youngblood hawke, p.48
Youngblood Hawke, page 48
With all this, he reluctantly stretched out a sweating hand and took the pen and the novel pad. The first few lines he wrote wavered across the ruled paper as though he were sick; then his writing firmed. His mother found him at noon—he had left a note for her to call him then—fast asleep in the chair at his desk, his head on his arms, his right hand and his forehead smeared with ink.
6
The drive to Lexington was a lugubrious one, except when they talked about Hawke's work; then Jeanne managed to rouse herself and speak up in her usual free and sharp way. Otherwise she sat in a frigid calm, looking out at the mountains, at the trees dripping and glistening in the warm rain, and smoking cigarette after cigarette. She rebuffed very shortly one or two questions he put about Karl's trip to Washington. He kept glancing at her as he drove, and her remoteness made her all the more provoking and desirable. Jeanne did not look her best in profile; there was something tough, almost thrusting in the firm lines of her nose and jaw, when they were not softened by the delicious curves of her high cheeks, and the mischievous brightness of her eyes. When she was tense, a muscle at the side of her face rhythmically tightened under her skin; and he could see that muscle working now.
But nothing could lessen her charm for him. From the moment when he had brushed tears from her face as she looked at Nancy's baby, he had broken into a new period in his long and complicated relationship with her. Those tears had signalled for him the unreality of her marriage. It was almost as though time had kindly slipped its cogs and brought him together with her as at the very first. He loved Jeanne. He wanted to marry her. He was haunted by the picture of his ridiculous brother-in-law on his knees, thanking God for the hair on his new baby's head. The realization was strong in him that to go on and on copulating with Mrs. Winter in planned sneaked hours, and to intersperse this indulgence with other casual copulations, was a course that had run itself out. The fascination Frieda had always had for him was far from dead, and he knew he would never forget her, any more than a man forgets his first wife. But he desperately wanted a better existence.
So Hawke ignored all the warning signs that Jeanne's mood was, to say the least, not attuned to a declaration from him. He was full of his new yearning for a life of virtue with her, and out it had to come, though he was seeing her off to join her husband in some undisclosed emergency. The plane was late; he saw to her bags and her ticket, then took her into the airport coffee shop where they sat in a booth and had sandwiches. And there he blurted coarsely into Jeanne's abstracted silence, "Jeanne, tell me just one thing. Is it absolutely out of the question?"
She had been staring at a woman in another booth wearing a preposterous gray hat with a stuffed purple bird on it. She turned to him, her eyes seemed to focus on him with difficulty, and then she measured him with a long glance, her head tilted back. "Is what absolutely out of the question? What are you talking about?"
"I want you back, Jeanne. I'm sure you know that now. I want you for life. I want you to be my wife." He had an ear for words, at least, and he knew the unintended rhyme was clumsy and made him sound foolish.
"You want me back? What is all this? When did you ever have me?" Her voice was flat, cold, hostile.
"I think you once loved me. I've done many stupid things, but I won't believe they're irreparable. I'm only asking whether we can start again, whether there's the faintest possibility of it, whether there's anything I can hope for." Jeanne shook her head in exasperation and started to talk, but he overrode her. "I know this is a shock, I know it's a hell of a time for me to come out with it, but there'll never be a good time, and once it's said at least it's said, and we can go on from there. I'm telling you what I want. I want to marry you."
"Arthur, you need sleep. This is just wild talk, so stop it right now, and let's both forget it."
"Look, Jeanne, you can say no to me. But don't ascribe what I'm saying to lack of sleep, and don't take it lightly. I have an enormous amount of work to do, and no matter what you think of me, no matter what mistakes I've made, you know that that work is important. I believe I have a chance to get it done if you're with me. I know I have the powers to get my work done if all goes well. And all going well means having you, nothing else."
Jeanne's look was softening. She smiled a little, and something of her usual affectionate look came into her eyes, veiled with an odd ironic secrecy. This gladdened Hawke, but he might not have been so glad had he known what she was thinking.
She was thinking how absurd he was. Hawke had written wonderful scenes of the folly of men in love. In fact, in Will Horne, he even now had a situation unfolding of his hero trying to win back his boyhood sweetheart after having made a cynical marriage that he regretted; and he was writing the psychology of the woman, as well as of the man, with remarkable accuracy. Yet here he was, talking away like a worse boob than any in his books. She thought of the fatuous tomcat sex life of Balzac, of the indecent and silly involvements of Byron, and her mind jumped to the historic ridiculousness, the Gallic bedroom farce, of Napoleon's amours. Obviously a man might be wise or important or great, but he could not be other than a man in his dealings with women. And when he came fumbling and fawning around a woman who was not in love with him—or in love with him and out of the mood at the moment—nothing could save him from seeming a fool, the more so because in other things he was a person of consequence. So Jeanne thought. She had a streak of unforgiving clarity that bordered on the cruel, and that perhaps had driven herself and Hawke apart as much as his own raw boyish appetite for the forbidden fun offered by Frieda Winter.
But she also thought—all this took only a moment or so to go through her mind, of course, and it lay behind her softening look and the melancholy smile Hawke found so encouraging—that this was a bitter-sweet sort of triumph that had been a long time coming; but that Arthur characteristically could not have chosen a worse time. What he was asking was not unthinkable. She still was in love with him. There were moments in their work together when she came close to worshipping him, so brightly could he blaze with inspiration and energy; and she could not help finding him physically magnetic. She was touched by his appeal. But she could not respond to it. What was all this nonsense? Karl was in trouble, and she was going to him. Karl could be exasperating, really devilish, especially in invalid or drunken spells. Jeanne more than once had had desperate thoughts of divorce, and even daydreams of being recaptured by Hawke in some such development as this strange talk in an airport coffee shop in Kentucky, between squawks of the loudspeaker. All the same, this moment was wrong, Hawke was being a fool, and the thing had to be cut off sharply. A female instinct murmured, far back in her consciousness, that if this wild change was ever meant to come to pass, it would, and nothing could stop it. Meantime she had to act in the common sense of daylight, and in common decency.
She said, "Karl is a wise bird. Sometimes his prescience is irritating, it's so spectacular. Do you know what he said to me this morning on the phone about you?"
"Obviously I don't," Hawke said, disgruntled by her turning the talk to Karl, and by her light tone.
"Well, I'll tell you, word for word. He said, 'How's our hill-born genius doing? Has he been making passes at you, without La Winter to keep him calmed down?' " Jeanne laughed.
"I fail to find that either prescient or funny, and in fact it gets me angry," Hawke said. "It's in bad taste, and it's a little late in the day for Karl to start worrying about you and me being alone together. I hope you told him that I haven't made anything remotely resembling a pass at you."
"Maybe you should have," Jeanne said, lighting a cigarette, feeling mean pleasure in the use of her claws on Hawke.
He looked shocked, shocked as a pastor hearing profanity. "You know that's impossible, Jeanne, you're just talking."
"I don't know anything. For instance I certainly didn't know I was going to get a marriage proposal this afternoon, or I might have screwed myself up into a more romantic mood. You've certainly accomplished nothing here. Maybe if you'd made a pass at me, some real caveman stuff back in my hotel room, I might have succumbed. Women are supposed to eat up such primitive tactics, at least they do in all the frank and boldly realistic novels that go across my desk. Not in yours, I must say. Maybe you don't understand women."
"I understand women. You'd have broken a lamp over my head."
"Most likely. Well then, turn your understanding on me, for God's sake, Arthur. I'm married. I'm not the girl who enjoyed that memorable turkey dinner in the villa at Rainbow's End. I've made a life and I like it. Obviously I love working with you, but any repetition of this kind of talk could put an end to that. Anyway this is all just nervous conversation, it doesn't mean a thing, you'll get back to Mrs. Winter next week and to use Karl's charming phrase, she'll calm you down in short order."
"Fair enough," Hawke said, "not what you're saying, but the fact that you're saying it. You owe me that and a lot more, and no doubt in due course you'll get it all out of your system. But I'm telling you straight out that I want you, Jeanne, and that I need you."
"But for what, Arthur? I'm just another woman. There are millions of them all built more or less alike, and you've already demonstrated that your requirements are, shall we say, flexible? For editing? You've got me for that." The loudspeaker grated out the announcement of Jeanne's plane. She snatched at her purse, her cigarettes, her gloves, and her lighter. "Here I go. Arthur, you'll have to forgive me if I accept Karl's diagnosis rather than your burst of new insight. You're lonely for a woman. Your restlessness will soon be soothed, I feel confident." She got out of the booth.
"You can be a brute, Jeanne."
"I'm not good at lying."
She said in a different tone, pulling on her gloves, as he trudged gloomily beside her to the plane gateway, "Look, you know me. I'm not going to say any of the sweet nice things a cultured young lady is supposed to say when she gets such a decent proposal from such an eminent and desirable man. Thanks, Arthur. It's no good, it's a hell of a mess, but thanks. I have few fears about you. Nancy's baby is divine, the whole trip was worth it just to see that baby yawning behind the glass. I think if you can cut thirty pages out of the first act and fix that long stretch of legal talk in the second act the play might work. As usual I'm amazed at the amount, and the speed, and the quality of the work you've done. I think Feydal will be pleased, and you'll make another pot of money, which you need so badly. You've got my plane ticket, give it to me."
He handed her the bright-colored envelope. "I must be insane," he said. "You're nothing but a cold sharp over-educated shrew. But I take back nothing I've said, I want you, and now you know that."
She put a white-gloved hand to his face, stood on tiptoe, and kissed his mouth. "A couple of years too late, you son of a bitch," she said. "But you don't need me, you don't need anybody. It might help, just in general, if you got rid of Mrs. Winter. Give her back to Mr. Winter. You've had her."
She strode to the plane and went up into it without looking back.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1
WHEN he came back to his house on Seventy-third Street it was late at night. He was worn out from a plane ride through thunderstorms, and in no condition to face what greeted him.
The house appeared to be in exactly the same condition as it had been a month ago, if not worse. It was filled with carpenter's machinery, tumbled piles of cement blocks, heaps of old lathe and plaster, stacks of lumber, tiles, and copper pipes; also huddles of furniture, appliances and fixtures under big paint-stained tarpaulins. Broken walls gaped at him. The pervading smell of paint, sawdust, and new plaster, which he had learned to hate in the interminable months of reconstruction, hung heavier in the air than ever. The dust of the day's plaster-smashing had not settled. It danced in the light of the naked bulbs that Hawke switched on in room after room, rushing through the place in growing rage; it filled his nostrils and made him sneeze; it whirled merrily after him in coiling thin clouds, and his feet made prints in it on the floor. And this was the finished job he had been promised! The formal Colonial home he had planned, in all its austere American elegance, the perfect retreat for an American author in the very heart of the turmoil and the buzz of modern New York; complete to liquor in the bar, coffee on the stove, and a blonde in the bed!
Coming to the attic room where he lived, he found on his cot a manila folder containing a sheaf of bills, and clipped to these a cheery note on one of the pink memorandum sheets the contractor used. The note said in effect that these bills had to be paid before work could proceed. Hawke glanced through the invoices. They added up to at least fifteen thousand dollars.
He telephoned the contractor at his home in Queens; he dialled several times and let the ringing go on for minutes, but there was no answer. He was too furious to sleep. In the pile of mail on his desk in the library there was a grim dry letter from the Bureau of Internal Revenue summoning him to an examination of his income tax returns for the past two years, the returns he had prepared without an accountant's help. In his excited state this document was a bad shock.
Hawke had plunged almost overnight, it must be remembered, from living on fifteen or twenty dollars a week—from walking miles to save a subway fare in order to be able to buy a frankfurter—into a new existence where money poured at him in tens of thousands of dollars every month. He had undoubtedly done some idiotic things—he was beginning to see that the house was a great idiocy—but he had done careful things, too. He had invested money in cautious increments with Hoag, who several times now had demonstrated that his enterprises were shrewdly conceived and very profitable. He had bought common stocks after much study of the market; and Paul Winter, reviewing his holdings at one point, had remarked with some surprise that his selection showed knowledge and good sense. He had long since discontinued speculating in commodity futures. His net worth, counting the money dumped into the house, was perhaps close to two hundred thousand dollars, an amazing result in a few years for a penniless Seabee. But little of it was free cash. He knew he could not take a severe tax assessment easily. He feared becoming so involved in money troubles that he could no longer write; he feared this much more than returning to long walks to save subway fares.
The fact was that his sudden prosperity had from the first seemed a dream; he had never exactly believed in it though his senses assured him he was waking; and now, sitting in his expensive unfinished ruin of a house, staring at the shocking summons from the tax gatherers, he experienced the physical quake, the fear of falling, that often seizes a man just before he wakes out of a dream. After a brief wrestle with himself, desperate for somebody knowledgeable to talk to, he telephoned Frieda.
Mrs. Winter was at his house in half an hour, magnificent in an orange sari and a necklace of diamonds, radiant and pretty, the powerhouse Frieda, at peak voltage. He had just caught her, she said, five minutes after she had gotten home from a dinner party. She reproached him, not very severely, with failing to write or telephone her often enough from Hovey. She made no mention of Jeanne, and when Hawke said he had finished the play she clapped her hands, her eyes shone, and she said that all was forgiven.
She put on her glasses and went through the house with him, room by room, asking brief questions, her manner turning businesslike. Mainly she examined the floors, the ceilings, the new molded woodwork, the freshly painted surfaces. "Well, he's doing a superb job," she said at last. "It's going to be one of the most beautiful little places on the east side. A gem. He knows his business."
When Hawke spoke of the cost she made an impatient gesture with one hand. "Oh, look, you'll get no sympathy from me. This is what you wanted to do. You're not a lawyer, you're a crazy writer. Finish it, forget the price, have fun."
"How much more money will it need, Frieda? And how much more time?"
She looked at him with her head bent far down, her gray eyes very wide. "Do you want to be cheered up, dear heart, or do you want the truth?"
"The truth."
"Well, depending on what's already been paid for, you'd better figure another twenty or thirty thousand dollars. And four months."
Hawke uttered an animal howl and began throwing things—boxes, tiles, boards—at the broken walls of the living room. It took Frieda a while to quiet him down. She telephoned The Park Tower, and booked a room for him. "You can't sleep here tonight, you'll go out of your mind," she said. "What a rube you are, to be sure! Don't you know what contractors are?"
"This is a city of liars, of thieves, of bloodsuckers!" Hawke roared.
"New York is just America distilled, my love. You have to watch your money or you'll lose it, here or in dear old Hovey. Come along quietly, and stop making noises like a stabbed elephant. It'll be a beautiful house."
The room at The Park Tower was not quite as high up as Feydal's suite, but it was on the same side and had the old view—the black park webbed with roadway lights, hemmed in four-square by tall black buildings checkered with light; the streams of headlights on the streets, hardly diminished at half-past two; the velvety Hudson River beyond the buildings of the west side, and above the rosy glow of downtown, some dim stars and a bronzed half moon. They could see the Paramount clock, which so often had promised Hawke at ten past five that his New York woman was about to telephone him, and which had equally often warned Frieda at seven to go home to her family for dinner.
