“Know something?” Lucy asked, drifting up to his side an hour or so later. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many intelligent-looking people in one place in my whole life.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Well,” she amended, “with the exception of those two over there near the wall. They’re awful – I can’t imagine where the Nelsons ever dug them up, or why, but I’m glad Bill Brock is stuck with them now: they deserve each other.” One was a sturdy young man whose dark hair kept falling almost into his eyes as he talked; the other was a plain girl in a cheap dress that looked uncomfortable and moist at the armpits. Both their faces were so earnest and humorless, so charged with the effort of making their conversational points clear at all cost, that they didn’t seem to belong in this gathering. “Their name’s Damon,” Lucy said. “He’s a linotype operator in Pleasantville and says he’s writing ‘a work of social history’; she writes what she calls potboilers to help support their family. They’re some kind of communists, I think, and I mean I guess they’re nice enough, but they’re awful.” And she turned away from the sight of them. “You want to go into the studio?”
“Not just yet,” Michael told her. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
“… in a cardboard box,” Bill Brock’s loud voice was explaining to the Damons, while Karen clung to his arm as if for protection, “with a string around it. And that represents six and a half years’ work. So you see I can agree with everything you say, Al, and with everything you’re likely to say – but in political terms only. That kind of material simply doesn’t lend itself to the novel form. Probably never has, probably never will.”
“Ah,” said Al Damon, raking his hair back from his brow with nervous fingers. “Well, I’m not going to charge you with ‘selling out,’ my friend, but I’ll suggest that you’re chasing after false gods. I’ll suggest that you’re still hooked on the ‘lost generation’ crowd of thirty years ago, and the trouble is we no longer have anything in common with those people. We’re the second lost generation.”
And because Michael Davenport thought he had never heard anything quite as foolish as a full-grown man saying “We’re the second lost generation,” he moved over close beside Bill in order to meet the Damons.
“… and I understand you run a linotype machine, right, Al?” he inquired. “In Pleasantville?”
“Well, that’s what I do for a living, yes,” Al Damon said.
“Makes sense,” Michael assured him. “Learn the trade, get the union wages and the fringe benefits; probably makes a lot better sense than what Bill and I do.”
And Bill Brock agreed that it probably did.
“And you look to be in pretty good shape, too, Al,” Michael said. “What do you do for exercise?”
“Well, I ride a bike to work,” Damon said, “and I lift a few weights.”
“Good; those are both good things to do.”
Mrs. Damon, whose name was Shirley, was beginning to look a little anxious.
“Tell you what, Al,” Michael said. “Let’s try something, just for laughs.” And he pointed to the upper part of his own abdomen. “Hit me as hard as you can. Right here.”
“You kidding?”
“No, I mean it. Hard as you can.” And Michael tightened and locked the muscles of his midsection, a trick that even amateur fighters are taught to do.
Damon’s foolish, uncomprehending smile gave way to an angry narrowing of the eyes as he gathered and set himself for the punch, and he drove his right fist powerfully into the appointed place.
It didn’t quite take Michael’s breath away and it sent him only two steps back, but it hurt more than he’d thought it would. He hadn’t played this game since college. “Pretty good one, Al,” he said. “Now it’s my turn. You ready?” And he placed his feet properly.
Michael’s fist traveled only a short distance but it was fast, it connected in just the right way, and Al Damon lay unconscious on the rug.
Shirley Damon fell beside him with a scream, and Lucy, appearing from nowhere, rushed up to grasp and shake Michael’s arm as if she’d just caught him killing a man with a pistol. “Why did you do that?” she demanded.
There was a light but general shriek of women around the room now, and a muttering of “Drunk … drunk” among the men. At first Michael thought they must mean Damon was drunk for having fallen down; then, as Lucy continued to shake and berate him, he knew the charge of drunkenness was meant for himself.
The high, wavering voice of Marjorie Grant could be heard across the room saying “Oh, I can’t bear violence; I can’t bear violence in any form.”
“Look, it’s a game,” Michael was explaining to Lucy and to anyone else who would listen. “It’s called trading punches. It’s perfectly fair; he hit me first. Jesus, I never meant to—”
Tom Nelson was smiling in the entrance of his studio, blinking through his glasses and saying “What’s the deal?”
Al Damon regained his senses after a few seconds; he rolled to one side, hugged his belly, and drew up his knees.
“Give him air,” someone commanded, but he had air enough to get unsteadily to his feet, with his wife’s help, at what would have been about the count of seven. Shirley Damon lingered just long enough to give Michael a look of withering hatred; then she carefully steered her husband toward the front door, while someone else brought their coats, but they didn’t quite make it before Al Damon had to stop, crouch, and vomit on the floor.
“… And if he’d vomited while he was still unconscious it could have gone into his lungs and killed him,” Lucy said. “Then what? Then how could you have laughed it off?” She had taken the wheel, as she always did when she wanted to prove that Michael was too drunk to drive, and it always made him feel humiliated – even emasculated – to ride on the passenger’s side.
“Ah, you’re making too much of it,” he said. “I traded punches with the guy, that’s all; there wasn’t any tragedy or any slaughtering of innocents. And most of the people were able to laugh it off. Tom Nelson certainly was – he said he wants me to teach him how to do it. And Pat said it was okay, too. She gave me a little kiss at the door and said I mustn’t worry about it. You heard her say that.”
“Personally,” said Bill Brock, riding in the back seat with his arm around Karen, “I was delighted to see it happen. The guy’s an asshole. His wife’s an asshole, too.”
“Oh, exactly,” Karen said in a sleepy voice. “Neither of them have any – you know – any charm or anything at all.”
“Well, she’s a drab little thing,” Lucy said on Sunday evening, after Bill and Karen had gone back to the city, “but she’s pleasant. And she’s certainly a lot more appropriate for Bill than Diana Maitland ever was.”
“Sure is,” Michael said, and he was heartened because this was the first civil thing his wife had said to him since the Friday night of the Nelsons’ party. With luck, they would now be on good terms again.
But they would never know what became of Karen, because a very few weeks later Bill showed up with another girl. This one’s name was Jennifer, and she was blond, broad-shouldered and given to blushing smiles.
They were only passing through, Bill said. They were on their way up to Pittsfield to visit Jennifer’s parents, who wanted to look him over.
“Bill and I’ve only been seeing each other for about three weeks, you see,” the girl told them, “and I made the awful mistake of letting my parents know. What actually happened was, I happened to be taking a shower one morning when the phone rang, so I asked Bill to answer it and it was my mother. And the point is she and my father’ve both been worried about me since I moved to New York – oh, I know this sounds ridiculous because I’m almost twenty-three, but they’re very old-fashioned. They’re from another time.”
“Hell, I’m not worried,” Bill said, jingling his car keys. “I’ll charm their socks off.”
And he may well have done so, though it turned out th
at they’d never know what became of Jennifer, either, or of Joan or Victoria or any of the other girls he would bring for their inspection over the next few years; they could only assume that Bill, as he’d once explained to them, was all right in short-term relationships.
One Friday afternoon, a month after the Al Damon incident, there was nothing for the Davenports to do but sit reading magazines in different parts of their living room. Neither of them mentioned it, but they were eaten with anxiety that there might be another party at the Nelsons’ tonight and that they might have been dropped from the invitation list.
And then, that same day, Paul Maitland called up to say that Diana was out for the weekend again, with her boyfriend, and that she’d love to see them both. Could they come over to Harmon Falls at about five?
During the short ride Michael steeled himself for this new meeting with Diana. Maybe she had become a silly girl, now that she’d spent all this time with her actor-boy, actor-twerp, actor-asshole – girls did change – but then, maybe not. And from the moment he saw her standing in the driveway with her brother and his wife and her tall young man, smiling in welcome as the car pulled up, he knew she hadn’t changed at all. She might as well have been the only person there: graceful and awkward at the same time, a girl so unique and complete that you’d have to be a fool to want any other girl in the world.
There were kissings and handshakes – Ralph Morin seemed determined to prove he could crush all of Michael’s knuckles if he felt like it – and then the party moved into a big fieldstone house that had been built for Walter Folsom, the retired engineer who was Peggy’s stepfather. In the main room of it, where Mr. Folsom and his wife rose to greet the young people, there was a great window overlooking a leafy ravine that fell away to a bright, rapid stream a hundred yards below. “All my life,” Mr. Folsom told his guests, “I’ve wanted a house equipped with a spigot in the wall that pours whiskey; so now you see I have my wish at last.”
Ralph Morin, sinking into one of the sofas that bordered the big window, was explaining to Mrs. Folsom that he always felt “this really great sense of peace out here.” And he flung one arm along the sofa back to illustrate his point. “If I ever lived in a house like this I’d spend all my time right here, beside this window, reading. I’d read all the books I’ve always meant to read, and then some more.”
“Yes,” his hostess said, looking as if she wished she had someone else to talk to. “Well, it’s a pleasant spot for reading.”
If you didn’t know Ralph Morin had been trained as an actor, Michael decided, you could guess it from his movements and gestures: the way he held his head to its best advantage in the available light, the falsely casual draping of his arm along the sofa, even the poised clasp of his other hand around his drink and the careful placement of his shapely, well-buffed shoes on the floor. He did everything as if he were having his picture taken.
Walter Folsom had taken up painting in his retirement, as had his wife, and they were both plainly delighted with young Peggy’s choice of a husband. For the rest of the afternoon, whenever Paul wasn’t listening, they seemed eager to let the Davenports know how highly they thought of his work, and once Mr. Folsom spoke the same line as the subcontractor on Delancey Street, long ago: “This boy’s the real thing.” Paul Maitland seemed unable to go anywhere without attracting admirers.
But Michael spent most of that time contriving ways to find Diana alone, in some corner or part of the room away from the mainstream of talkers. He didn’t know what he wanted to say to her; he just wanted to have her at close range, all to himself, so that he could make interesting replies to whatever she might feel like saying to him.
And it happened only once, when they were all leaving the Folsoms’ house to go over to the Maitlands’ for supper: Diana fell into step with him and said “That was an awfully nice book of poems, Michael.”
“Yeah? You mean you read it? And liked it?”
“Well, of course I read it and liked it. Why else would I’ve told you?” Then, after a perilous moment, she said “I especially liked the last one, the long one, ‘Coming Clean.’ That’s a lovely thing.”
“Well,” he said, “thank you” – but he was too shy to speak her name.
Paul and Peggy lived in a small, rude clapboard cottage that had been here for years before Walter Folsom bought the property, and there were signs of honest young poverty all around the front room. A mud-caked pair of Paul’s work shoes stood near the front door, beside his carpenter’s toolbox; there were several cardboard cartons of unpacked books, and not far away was an ironing board where it was easy to picture Peggy pressing her husband’s denim clothes. As the party sat huddled over bowls of the beef stew she had served, they might as well have been inside the burlap hangings of the old Delancey Street place.
“Oh, this is wonderful, Peg,” Diana said of the stew.
And Mrs. Folsom, whose handsome face seemed incapable of hiding her feelings, looked pleased that her daughter’s cooking had been praised. Then she said “Paul? A little later, can we have a look at what you’ve been doing in the other room?”
“Oh, I’d rather not show anything now, Helen, if you don’t mind,” Paul told her. “I’ve just been roughing-out a few things; it’s all very tentative work. I don’t think I’ll have anything to show until after we’re back from the Cape. But thanks anyway.”
Michael would always remember that “tentative” was the word a Harvard Crimson reviewer had used to dismiss Lucy’s performance in his first play; now he wondered if he would have been able to tell the difference between Paul’s “tentative” paintings and his finished ones, and he was glad to be spared the task of trying.
A little later he heard Lucy saying “Well, but why, Paul?” and saw Paul Maitland shake his chewing head at her in kindly but firm refusal, as if to explain that any question of “why” was irrelevant. And he knew at once that she hadn’t asked to see the paintings; this was something else.
“Okay, but I don’t get it,” she persisted. “The Nelsons are wonderful people and they’re good friends of ours; I know you’d like them. Just because you and Tom may not see eye to eye professionally, does that really suggest you couldn’t enjoy them in a social way?”
Then Ralph Morin leaned over to squeeze Lucy’s forearm and said “I wouldn’t press him on it, dear; there are times when an artist has to use his own judgment.”
And Michael wanted to strangle him for calling Lucy “dear,” as well as for his fatuous little remark.
“… Oh, but the Cape’s lovely in the off season,” Peggy Maitland was saying. “The landscape’s all bleak and windswept, and there are these wonderfully subtle colors. And there’s this carnival that spends the winters near where we stayed last year. They’re delightful people. They’re gypsies, and they’re very friendly but very proud.…”
Michael had never heard her talk at such length: all she usually did was answer questions in monosyllables or cast silent, adoring glances at her husband. Now she was coming to the point of her anecdote:
“… So I asked one of the men what his act was – his act in the carnival? – and he said ‘I’m a sword swallower.’ I said ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ And he said ‘Think I’d tell you?’ ”
“Oh, that’s marvelous,” Ralph Morin exclaimed, laughing. “That’s the very heart and spirit of the entertainer.”
On their way back to Tonapac that night, Lucy said “What did you think of what’s-his-name? Morin?”
“Didn’t much go for him,” Michael said. “Pretentious, self-conscious, boring – I think he’s probably a fool.”
“Well, you’d say that anyway.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? Because you’ve always had such a terrible crush on Diana. It was all over your face today. Nothing’s changed.”
And because he didn’t feel up to denying it – didn’t especially want to deny it anyway – they rode in silence the rest of the way home.
Except for Har
old Smith and several other clerks whose fares were paid by the railroad that employed them, there were very few daily train commuters from Tonapac to New York: the ride took an hour and fifty minutes. When Michael was obliged to take his twice-monthly trips to the city he would always exchange brief neighborly greetings with Harold on the station platform; then, aboard the train, he would read the paper alone while Harold joined the other railroad men across the aisle, in two facing seats, for a card game that lasted all the way to town. But one morning, looking pleasantly shy, Harold came over and sat beside Michael instead.
“My wife and I were saying just last night,” he began, “that we’re really glad to have you folks living in the guest house. I mean Ann Blake’s very nice, but we were afraid she might rent it out to a couple of queers or something. Makes it a lot nicer to have a regular family in there, is all I meant. And our Anita really thinks the world of your little girl.”
Michael told him quickly that Laura was very fond of Anita, too – and he added that this was especially nice because Laura was an only child.
“Well, good,” Harold Smith said. “So they’ll always have each other for playmates, right? And our other girls are only nine and ten, so they can really all be playmates together. Our boy is six. He’s – handicapped.” Then after a while he said “So what do you do with your free time, Mike? You like to bowl? You play cards?”
“Well, mostly what I do is work, Harold. I’m trying to finish a play, you see, and I’ve got some poems going, too.”
“Yeah, well, I know about that; Ann told us that. And you’ve fixed up the old pump shed to work in, right? No, but I mean how about when you feel like taking a break?”
“Well, my wife and I do a lot of reading,” Michael said, “or sometimes we visit friends of ours over in Harmon Falls, or up in Kingsley” – and only too late, after hearing himself say “friends of ours” and “up in Kingsley,” did he realize how rude he had been.
Harold Smith bent well forward in the train seat to scratch one ankle above the top of its very short sock, his suit coat gaping open to prove that he really did wear five or six ballpoint pens clipped into his shirt pocket, and Michael was afraid that when he settled back he might open his newspaper and spend the rest of the long ride in injured silence.