The Young Lions (16 page)

He and Noah took rambling walks together along the river, and on the University campus. Roger had found Noah a good job through some friends as a playground director at a settlement house down on the East Side. Noah was making thirty-six dollars a week, more money than he ever had made before, and as they trudged along the quiet pavements late at night, side by side, with the cliffs of Jersey rearing up across the river, and the lights of the boats winking below them, Noah listened, thirsty and delighted, like an eavesdropper on an unsuspected world, as Roger said, "Then there was this defrocked priest near Antibes who drank a quart of Scotch every afternoon, sitting in the cafe on the hill, translating Baudelaire…" or "The trouble with American women is they all want to be captain of the team or they won't play. It comes from putting an inflated value on chastity. If an American woman pretends to be faithful to you, she thinks she has earned the right to chain you to the kitchen stove. It's better in Europe. Everyone knows everyone else is unchaste, and there is a more normal system of values. Infidelity is a kind of gold standard between the sexes. There is a fixed rate of exchange and you know what things cost you when you go shopping. Personally, I like a submissive woman. All the girls I know say I have a feudal attitude towards women, and maybe they're right. But I'd rather they submitted to me than have me submit to them. One or the other is bound to happen, and I'm in no rush, I'll find a proper type eventually…"

Walking beside him, it seemed to Noah that life could not improve on his condition now… being young, at home on the streets of New York, with a pleasant job and thirty-six dollars a week, a book-crowded room nearly overlooking the river, and a friend like Roger, urbane, thoughtful, full of strange information. The only thing lacking was a girl, and Roger had decided to fix even that. That was why they had planned the party.

Roger had had a good time all one evening casting about among his old address books for likely candidates for Noah. And now, tonight, they were coming, six of them, besides the girl that Roger was bringing himself. There were going to be some other men, of course, but Roger had slyly selected funny-looking ones or slow-witted ones among his friends, so that the competition would not be too severe. As Noah looked around the warm, lamp-lit room, with cut flowers in vases and a print by Braque on the wall, and the bottles and the glasses shining like a vision from a better world on the desk, he knew, with delicious, fearful certainty, that tonight he would finally find a girl.

Noah smiled as he heard the key in the door because now he would not have to face the ordeal of greeting the first guests by himself. Roger had his girl with him, and Noah took her coat and hung it up without accident, not tripping over anything or wrenching the girl's arm. He smiled to himself as he heard the girl saying to Roger, "What a nice room. It looks as though there hasn't been a woman in here since 1750."

Noah came back into the room. Roger was in the kitchenette getting some ice and the girl was standing in front of the picture on the wall, with her back to Noah. Roger was singing softly over the ice behind the screen, his nasal voice bumbling along on a song he sang over and over again, whose words went: You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money?

That's all I want to know.

The girl had on a plum-coloured dress with a full skirt that caught the lamplight. She was standing, very serious and at home, with her back to the room, in front of the fireplace. She had pretty, rather heavy legs, and a narrow, graceful waist. Her hair was pulled to the back in a severe, feminine knot, like a pretty schoolteacher in the movies. The sight of her, the sound of ice, his friend's silly, good-humoured song from behind the screen, made the room, the evening, the world, seem wonderfully domestic and dear and melancholy to Noah. Then the girl turned round. Noah had been too busy and excited really to look at her when she first came in and he didn't even remember what her name was. Seeing her now was like looking through a glass that is suddenly brought to focus.

She had a dark, pointed face and grave eyes. Somehow, as he looked at her, Noah felt that he had been hit, physically, by something solid and numbing. He had never felt anything like this before. He felt guilty and feverish and absurd.

Her name, Noah discovered later, was Hope Plowman, and she had come down from a small town in Vermont two years before. She lived in Brooklyn now with an aunt. She had a direct, serious way of talking, and she didn't use perfume and she worked as a secretary to a man who made printing machines in a small factory near Canal Street. Noah felt a little irritated and foolish through the night, as he found out all these things, because it was somehow simple-minded and unworldly to be so riotously overcome by a father ordinary small-town Yankee girl who worked prosaically as a stenographer in a dull office, and who lived in Brooklyn. Like other shy, bookish young men, with their hearts formed in the library, and romance blooming only out of the volumes of poetry stuck in their overcoat pockets, it was impossible to conceive of Isolde taking the Brighton Express, Beatrice at the Automat. No, he thought, as he greeted the new guests and helped with the drinks, no, I am not going to let this happen. Most of all, she was Roger's girl, and even if any girl would desert that handsome, superior man for an awkward, craggy boy like himself, it was inconceivable that he, Noah, could repay the generous acts of friendship even by the hidden duplicity of unspoken desire.

"Miss Plowman," he said, "would you like a drink?"

"No, thank you," she said. "I don't drink."

And he went off into a corner to ponder this and discover whether this was good or bad, hopeful or not.

"Miss Plowman," he said later, "have you known Roger long?"

"Oh, yes. Nearly a year."

Nearly a year! No hope, no hope.

"He's told me a lot about you." The direct, dark gaze, the soft, definite voice.

"What did he say?" How lame, how hungry, how hopeless.

"He likes you very much…"

Treachery, treachery… Friend who snatched the lost waif among the library shelves, who fed and sheltered and loved… Friend now, all thoughtless and laughing, at the centre of the bright group, fingering the piano lightly, singing in the pleasant, intelligent voice, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho…"

"He said," once more the troubling, dangerous voice… "He said, when you finally woke up you would be a wonderful man…"

Ah, worse and worse, the thief armed with his friend's guarantee, the adulterer given the key to the wife's apartment by the trusting husband.

Noah stared blankly and wearily at the girl. Unreasonably, he hated her. At eight that evening he had been a happy man, secure and hopeful, with friend and home and job, with the past clean behind him, the future shining ahead. At nine he was a bleeding fugitive in an endless swamp, with the dogs baying at him, and a roster of crimes dark against his name on the books of the county. And she was the cause of it, sitting there, demure, falsely candid, pretending she had done nothing, knew nothing, sensed nothing. A little, unpretentious, rock-farm hill girl, who probably sat on her boss's knee in the office of the printing machinery factory near Canal Street, to take dictation.

"… and the walls came tumbling down…" Roger's voice and the strong chords of the old piano against the wall filled the room.

Noah stared wildly away from the girl. There were six other girls in the room, young, with fair complexions and glowing hair, with soft bodies and sweet, attentive voices… They had been brought here for him to choose from and they had smiled at him, full of kindness and invitation. And now, for all of him, they might as well have been six tailor's dummies in a closed store, six numbers on a page, six door-knobs. It could only happen to him, he thought. It was the pattern of his life, grotesque, savagely humorous, essentially tragic.

No, he thought, I will put this away from me. If it shatters me, if I collapse from it, if I never touch a woman as long as I live. But he could not bear to be in the same room with her. He went over to the cupboard in which his clothes hung side by side with Roger's, and got his hat. He would go out and walk around until the party had broken up, the merrymakers dispersed, the piano silent, the girl safe with her aunt beyond the bridge in Brooklyn. His hat was next to Roger's on the shelf and he looked with guilt and tenderness at the rakishly creased old brown felt. Luckily, most of the guests were grouped around the piano and he got to the door unobserved; he would make up some excuse for Roger later. But the girl saw him. She was sitting talking to one of the other girls, facing the door, and an expression of quiet inquiry came into her face as she looked at Noah, standing at the door, taking one last, despairing look at her. She stood up and walked over to him. The rustle of her dress was like artillery in his ears.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"We… we…" he stuttered, hating himself for the ineptness of his tongue. "We need some more soda, and I'm going out to get it."

"I'll go with you," she said.

"No!" he wanted to shout. "Stay where you are! Don't move!" But he remained silent and watched her get her coat and a plain, rather unbecoming hat, that made tidal waves of pity and tenderness for her youth and her poverty sweep him convulsively. She went to Roger, sitting at the piano, and leaned over, holding his shoulder, to whisper into his ear. Now, Noah thought, blackly, now it will all be known, now it is over, and he nearly plunged out into the night. But Roger turned and smiled at him, waving with one hand, while still playing the bass with the other. The girl came across the room with her unpretentious walk.

"I told Roger," she said.

Told Roger? Told him what? Told him to beware of strangers? Told him to pity no one, told him to be generous never, to cut down love in his heart like weed in a garden?

"You'd better take your coat," the girl said. "It was raining when we came."

Stiffly, silently, Noah went over and got his coat. The girl waited at the door and they closed it behind them in the dark hall. The singing and the laughter within sounded far away and forbidden to them as they walked slowly, close together, down the steps to the wet street outside.

"Which way is it?" she asked, as they stood irresolutely with the front door of the house closed behind them.

"Which way is what?" Noah asked, dazedly.

"The soda. The place where you can buy the soda?"

"Oh…" Noah looked distractedly up and down the gleaming pavements. "Oh. That. I don't know. Anyway," he said, "we don't need soda."

"I thought you said…"

"It was an excuse. I was getting tired of the party. Very tired. Parties bore me." Even as he spoke, he listened to his voice and was elated at the real timbre of sophistication and weariness with frivolous social affairs that he heard there. That was the way to handle this matter, he decided. With urbanity. Be cool, polite, slightly amused with this little girl…

"I thought that was a very nice party," the girl said seriously.

"Was it?" Noah asked offhandedly. "I hadn't noticed." That was it, he told himself, gloomily pleased, that was the attack. Remote, slightly vague, like an English baron after an evening's drinking, frigidly polite. It would serve a double purpose. It would keep him from betraying his friend, even by so much as a word. And also, and he felt a delicious thrill of guilty promise at the thought, it would impress this simple little Brooklyn secretary with his rare and superior qualities.

"Sorry," he said, "if I got you down here in the rain under false pretences."

The girl looked around her. "It's not raining," she said, practically.

"Ah." Noah regarded the weather for the first time. "Ah, so it is." There was something baffling about the grammar here, but the tone still was right, he felt.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

He shrugged. It was the first time he had ever shrugged in his whole life. "Don't know," he said. "Take a stroll." Even his vocabulary suddenly took on a Galsworthian cast. "Often do. In the middle of the night. Very peaceful, walking along through the deserted streets."

"It's only eleven o'clock now," the girl said.

"So it is," he said. He would have to be careful not to say that again. "If you want to go back to the party…"

The girl hesitated. A horn blew out on the misty river and the sound, low and trembling, went to the core of Noah's bones.

"No," she said, "I'll take a walk with you."

They walked side by side, without touching, down to the tree-bordered avenues that ran high above the river. The Hudson, smelling of spring and its burden of salt that had swept up from the sea on the afternoon's tide, slipped darkly past the misty shores. Far north was the string of soaring lights that was the bridge to Jersey, and across the river the Palisades loomed like a castle. There were no other strollers. Occasionally a car rushed by, its tyres whining on the roadway, making the night and the river and themselves, moving slowly along the budding branches of the glistening trees, extraordinary and mysterious. They walked in silence alongside the flowing river, their footsteps lonely and brave. Three minutes, Noah thought, looking at his shoes, four minutes, five minutes, without talking. He began to grow desperate. There was a sinful intimacy about their silence, an almost tangible longing and tenderness about the echoing sound of their footsteps and the quiet intake of their breath, and the elaborate precautions not to touch each other with shoulder or elbow or hand as they went downhill along the uneven pavement. Silence became the enemy, the betrayer. Another moment of it, he felt, and the quiet girl walking slyly and knowingly beside him would understand everything, as though he had mounted the balustrade that divided street from river and there made an hour-long speech on the subject of love.