Liars in Love

  It was a bad one, all right. It went on until after we’d waked the neighbors, and it was never resolved, as none of our worst fights ever were. Our lives, by that time, seemed to be all torn nerves and open wounds; I think we might have broken up that summer, and maybe for good, if we hadn’t learned that Eileen was pregnant.

  Dan Rosenthal rose happily from his drawing board to shake hands on hearing there was a baby on the way. But after that brief ceremony, when we’d both sat down again, he peered at me reflectively. “How can you be a father,” he asked, “when you still look like a son?”

  One weekend soon after that, on one of the first chilly days of fall, I was out gathering scrap lumber in a vacant lot near the river. Our apartment house was very old and badly kept, but we had a fireplace that “worked.” I chose only boards that could be split and broken down to fireplace size, and when I had enough to last a few days I pitched them over the high wire fence that surrounded the lot. From a distance that fence might have looked difficult to scale, but there were enough sagging places in it to make easy footholds. I went up and over it, and had just dropped to the street when I saw Dan Rosenthal walking toward me.

  “Well,” he said. “You looked pretty good there, coming over the fence. You looked very nimble.”

  That was a pleasure. I remember being pleased too that he’d found me wearing an old Army field jacket and blue jeans. He was dressed in a suit and tie and a light, new-looking topcoat.

  As we walked back to the house with the load of wood—Dan carried part of it, holding it carefully away from his coat—he explained that he’d come over to the city today to visit a Cooper Union friend; then he’d found he had a few hours on his hands, so he’d just been walking around the Village. He hoped I didn’t mind his dropping by.

  “Hell, no,” I told him. “This is great, Dan. Come on up; I’d like you to meet my wife.”

  Except that we lived there, Eileen and I weren’t really Village people at all. Bohemians made us nervous. The very word hip held vaguely frightening overtones for us, as did the idea of smoking pot—or “tea,” as I think it was usually called then—and what few parties we went to were most often composed of other young office workers as square as ourselves.

  Even so, when I brought Dan Rosenthal into the house and upstairs that afternoon, I found I was doing my best to slouch and mumble and squint for him. And Eileen couldn’t have been more helpful if she’d tried: we discovered her reclining on the big studio couch, wearing her black turtleneck sweater and black slacks. I had always loved that outfit because it was vastly becoming, with her long red hair, and also because it seemed to loosen all her joints. She had worn it to the acting class sometimes, and she nearly always wore it on evenings when we’d sit quietly for hours in the San Remo or some other locally famous bar, trying to conquer our uneasiness among young men who slouched and mumbled and squinted with their pale, long-haired girls, whole crowds of them erupting now and then into roars of laughter over matters we were fairly sure we would never understand.

  If you’re young enough, there can be exhilaration in pretending to be something you’re not. And if I’d been nimble in vaulting the fence, if I’d been a little hip on the stairs, it was time to be rugged now. Crouching, and with a good deal more force than necessary, I smashed and split those boards over the ringing iron knob of an andiron hauled from the fireplace; then, when they’d been reduced to manageable sticks, I broke each stick in half, or into thirds, one after another, against one straining knee. Some of the lumber had held rows of rusty nails, and Dan said, “Watch those nails,” but I told him without words that I could look out for myself. Hadn’t I done stuff like this all my life? Hadn’t I been a rifleman in the Army? Did he think I’d always been some indoor kind of business-office guy in a white shirt? Hell, there wasn’t much you couldn’t learn in knocking around the world; how else did he think I had won this stunning girl, from whom he seemed almost wholly unable to take his eyes?

  Soon I had a nice fire going. Dan removed his suit coat and loosened his tie; the three of us sat around in attitudes of comfort, drinking beer, and my posturing entered a quiet, “interesting” new phase. Well, no, I told him, aiming a sad smile into the flames, I’d decided to shelve the novel I’d been working on since last spring. It didn’t feel right. “And if a thing doesn’t feel right,” I explained, “you’re better off leaving it alone.” I always tried to use short, cryptic phrases in discussing the craft.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I imagine it’s the same in painting, in a different way.”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Besides, I’ve got a few old stories I want to fix up and send around. You have to fix them up, you know. You have to keep taking ’em apart and putting ’em together. They don’t write themselves.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I held forth at some length, then, on how hard it was to get any real writing done when you were stuck in a full-time job. We’d been trying to save a little money so we could live in Europe, I explained, but now, with the baby coming, there wasn’t much chance of that.

  “You want to live in Europe?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s a thing we’ve always talked about. Paris, mostly.”

  “Why?”

  Like some of his other questions, this one was disquieting. There weren’t any real reasons. Part of it was the legend of Hemingway, and that of Joyce; the other part was that I wanted to put three thousand miles of sea between my mother and myself. “Oh, well,” I said, “it’s mostly just that the cost of living’s much lower there; we could probably get by on a lot less, and I’d have more time to work.”

  “You speak any French?”

  “No; still, I suppose we could learn. Ah, hell, it’s just—you know—the whole thing’s probably just a daydream.” From the very sound of my voice I could tell I was faltering, so I stopped talking as soon as I could.

  “Dan?” Eileen inquired, and her face in the firelight was a masterpiece of innocent flirtation. Nobody ever had to tell her when she’d made a conquest. “Is it true that only one applicant out of ten is accepted at Cooper Union?”

  “Well, you hear different figures,” he said bashfully, not quite meeting her eyes, “but it’s something like that.”

  “That’s wonderful. I mean that’s really impressive. It must have made you very proud to go there.”

  She had thoroughly destroyed my act, if not the whole of my weekend; even so, their talk gave me the beginnings of what seemed a pretty good idea.

  There was a lot more talk, and more beer; then she said, “Will you stay and have supper with us, Dan?”

  “Oh, that’s a very nice thought,” he said, “but maybe it’d better wait for another time; I should’ve been home long ago. Mind if I use your phone?”

  He called his mother and talked agreeably for a few minutes; later, after he’d left with many thanks and apologies and promises to come again soon, Eileen said the phone call had sounded like a husband talking to his wife.

  “Yeah, well, that’s the thing, you see,” I told her. “Ever since his father died he’s been acting sort of as if his mother were his wife. And he’s got a younger brother, seven or eight years younger, and now he acts as if the brother were their son.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s sort of sad, isn’t it. Does he have a girl?”

  “I don’t think so. If so, he never mentions her.”

  “I really like him a lot, though,” she said as she began to clatter pots and pans in the kitchen area of the room, getting dinner started. “I like him better than anyone I’ve met in a long time. He’s very—kind.”

  It was such a carefully chosen word that I wondered why she’d chosen it, and I was quick to assume it was because that particular word could not, very readily, be applied to me.

  But the hell with it. I could hardly wait to get into the alcove formed by a folding screen in the corner, where my worktable was. The partly typed, partly scribbled abortion of m
y novel lay there, as did the several stories I planned to take apart and put together, to fix up and send around. My new idea, though, had nothing to do with writing at all.

  I had always had a knack for drawing simple cartoons, and that night I filled many sheets of typing paper with caricatures of people who worked on the eleventh floor at Remington Rand. They were people Dan and I had to be patient with and nice to every day, and I was almost certain, as I chuckled over a few of the better ones, that the pictures would appeal to him.

  It took me several more nights to weed out the crude ones, and to clean up the better ones; then one morning, as casually as possible, I dropped the finished stack of them on his drawing board.

  “What’s this?” he said. “Oh, I get it: Arch Davenport. And poor old Gus Hoffman. And who’s this? Jack Sheridan, right? Oh, and I guess this is Mrs. Jorgensen in the typing pool.…”

  When he’d inspected them all he said, “Well, these are clever, Bill.” But I’d heard him use “clever” in a disparaging sense too many times to take it as a compliment.

  “Ah, they’re nothing much,” I assured him. “I just thought they might—you know—give you a laugh.”

  The truth was that I’d hoped they might do a great deal more. I had worked out a scheme in which these drawings were only the opening move, and now his lukewarm response seemed to prohibit telling him the rest of it. But my reticence didn’t last long. Before the day was over—even before lunch, I think—I’d spelled out the whole damned thing for him.

  There were hundreds of Americans now enrolled in art schools in Paris on the GI Bill, I explained. Many of them were serious artists, of course, but many others weren’t artists at all: they met few if any academic requirements; they were openly exploiting the GI Bill to subsidize their lives in Paris. And the art schools didn’t care, because they were happy to have steady money coming in from the United States government. I had read about this in Time magazine, and the article had singled out one art school, by name, as being “perhaps the most casual of all in its handling of the matter.”

  I had now decided to apply for admission to that school as a way of getting on with my writing, I told Dan Rosenthal, but I would need a letter of recommendation. So here was the thing: Would he write the letter?

  He looked puzzled and faintly displeased. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Me write the letter? They’re supposed to’ve heard of me?”

  “No. But you can be damn sure they’ve heard of Cooper Union.”

  It didn’t go over very well—I’d have had to be blind not to see that—but he agreed. He wrote the letter quickly, using one of his drawing pencils, and passed it over to me for typing.

  He had told the school authorities that I was a friend whose ability at line drawing showed promise, and that he wished to support my application; he had saved his Cooper Union credentials for the second and final paragraph.

  “Well, this is fine, Dan,” I said. “Thanks a lot. Really. There’s just one thing: when you say I’m a ‘friend,’ don’t you think that might tend to weaken the whole—”

  “Ah, shit,” he said without looking up, and I may have been wrong but I thought his neck was a darker pink than usual. “Shit, Bill. Come on. I said you were a friend. I didn’t say we were brothers under the skin.”

  * * *

  If he disliked me then, and I think he probably did, it wasn’t a thing he allowed to show. After that first embarrassing day it began to appear that everything was all right between us again.

  And now that he’d met my wife there was a new litany in the ritual of our acquaintance. Every night, or at least on nights when we left the building together and walked to the street corner where we’d have to separate for our different kinds of public transit, he would give me a shy little wave and say, “Well. Regards at home.”

  He said it on so many nights that after awhile he seemed to feel a need for variation: with a mock scowl he would say, “How about some regards?” or “Let’s have some regards there, huh?” But those weren’t very satisfactory alternatives, so he went back to the original line. I would always thank him and wave back and call, “Same here,” or “You too, Dan,” and that small exchange came to seem a fitting conclusion to the day.

  I never heard from the “casual” Paris art school—they didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my application—so I was left to assume that the Time story must have brought them an avalanche of letters from other no-talent applicants all over America, misfits and losers and unhappy husbands for whom “Paris” had come to mean the last bright hope.

  Dan came home with me for dinner several times during the next few months, and Eileen soon discovered he could make her laugh. That was nice, but I could almost never make her laugh myself—hadn’t, it seemed, since the very early days of our time together—and so I was jealous. Then late one night after he’d gone and our place had grown uncomfortably quiet with only the two of us there, she pointed out that we had never really given a party. And she said she wanted to do it right away, before she got “too big,” so we went through with it—both of us, I think, in terror of doing everything wrong.

  Dan brought along one of his Cooper Union friends, an impeccably courteous young man named Jerry, who in turn brought a lovely, dead-silent girl. The party was all right—at least it was noisy and rapidly revolving—so Eileen and I were able to tell each other afterwards that it had been fine. A week or two later, in the office, Dan said, “Know something? Jerry and his girl are getting married. And you want to know something else? It was your party that did the trick. I’m not kidding. Jerry told me they both thought the two of you were so—I don’t know; who knows?—so romantic, I guess, that they figured what the hell; let’s do it. And they’re doing it. Jerry’s taken a job I don’t think he ever would’ve considered otherwise, working for some commercial-art school way the hell up in the northern part of British Columbia. I don’t know what the hell he’ll be doing up there—teaching Eskimos how to hold a T-square, I guess—but there’s no turning back now. It’s done. The die is fucking cast.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said. “Tell him congratulations for me.”

  “Yeah, I will; I will.” Then he turned his chair away from his drawing board—he didn’t often do that—and sat looking grave and thoughtful, examining the wet end of his cigar. “Well, hell, I’d like to get married too,” he said. “I mean I’m not really immune to it or anything, but there are a few obstacles. Number one, I haven’t met the right girl. Number two, I’ve got too many other responsibilities. Number three—or wait, come to think of it, who the hell needs number three?”

  Soon after the year turned into 1950, and a few weeks before the baby was due, the National Association of Women Artists agreed at last to hire my mother at a starting salary of eighty a week. “Oh, Jesus, what a relief,” Eileen said, and I couldn’t have agreed more. Except for the smiling boredom entailed in having her over for dinner once, “to celebrate,” it seemed now that we could stop thinking about her almost indefinitely.

  Then our daughter was born. Dan Rosenthal paid a surprise visit to Eileen in the hospital afterwards, bringing flowers, and that made her blush. I walked him out into the corridor for a window-view of the baby, whom he solemnly pronounced a beauty; then we went back and sat at Eileen’s bedside for half an hour or so.

  “Oh, Dan,’” she said when he got up to leave, “it was so nice of you to come.”

  “My pleasure,” he told her. “Entirely my pleasure. I’m very big on maternity wards.”

  The famous Long Island housing development called Levittown had recently been opened for business, and some of the younger married men around the eleventh floor began discussing at length—each of them explaining to the others, as if to convince himself—the many things that made it a good deal.

  Then Dan told me he too had decided to buy into Levittown, and I might have said, But you’re not even married, if I hadn’t checked myself in time. He and his mother and brother had gone out th
ere last weekend.

  What had won him over to Levittown was that the basement of the house they inspected was remarkably big and bright. “It might as well’ve been designed as a studio,” he said. “I walked around that basement and all I could think was Wow. I’m gonna paint my ass off down here. And I can even make prints, set up a lithograph stone, whatever the hell I want. You know all this stuff about the perils of suburbia? How your life’s supposed to fall apart when you move out of the city? I don’t believe any of that. If your life’s ready to fall apart, it’ll fall apart anywhere.”

  Another time he said, “You know anything about Harvard?”

  “Harvard? No.”

  “Well, I think Phil’s got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know?—the outside view. And that’s sort of like the Empire State Building, right? You see it from a distance, maybe at sunset, and it’s this majestic, beautiful thing. Then you get inside, you walk around a couple of the lower floors, and it turns out to be one of the sleaziest office buildings in New York: there’s nothing in there but small-time insurance agencies and costume-jewelry wholesalers. There isn’t any reason for the tallest building in the world. So you ride all the way up to the top and your eardrums hurt and you’re out there at the parapet looking out, looking down, and even that’s a disappointment because you’ve seen it all in photographs so many times. Or take Radio City Music Hall, if you’re a kid of about thirteen—same thing. I took Phil there once when I was home from the service, and we both knew it was a mistake. Oh, it’s pretty nice to see seventy-eight good-looking girls come out and start kicking their legs up in unison—even if they’re half a mile away, even if you happen to know they’re all married to airline pilots and living in Rego Park—but I mean all you ever personally find in Radio City Music Hall is a lot of wrinkled old chewing gum stuck up underneath the arms of your fucking chair. Right? So I don’t know; I think Phil and I’d better go up to Harvard for a couple of days and kind of snoop around.”