Young Hearts Crying Read Online Free PDF Page B

does she take us for? And I didn’t like her getting quite such a big fucking laugh out of that silly shit about Blondie and Dagwood, either.”
    “I know,” Lucy assured him. “I know. Well, it was a very – awkward evening.”
    But he was glad he had been the one to explode. If he’d held it all in that night it might have been Lucy who broke first – andher breaking, rather than in anger, would probably have been in tears.
    He had established a working alcove in one corner of the attic of their Larchmont house – it wasn’t much, but it was private – and he would look forward all day to the hours he could spend alone there. He had begun to feel that his book was almost in shape again, almost done, if only he could bring off the long, ambitious, final poem that was meant to justify and carry all the others. He had an adequate working title for it, “Coming Clean,” but certain lines of it stubbornly refused to be brought alive; whole sections of it seemed ready to collapse or evaporate under his hand. On most nights he worked in the attic until he ached with fatigue, but there were other times when he couldn’t get his brains together, when he would sit there stupefied in a paralysis of inattention, smoking cigarettes and despising himself, until he went back downstairs to bed. And even then there was seldom enough sleep to prepare him for the push and hustle of the Larchmont mornings.
    From the moment he closed the front door behind him he was caught up and swept along in a heavy stream of commuters walking to the train station. They were men of his own age or ten or twenty years older, with a few in their sixties, and they seemed to take pride in their very conformity: the crisp dark business suits and conservative ties, the highly polished shoes brought down in almost military cadence on the sidewalk. Only rarely did a commuter walk alone; almost all of them had at least one conversational companion, and most of them moved in clusters. Michael’s tendency was to look neither right nor left for fear of attracting a comradely smile – Who the hell needed these guys? – but he couldn’t enjoy his solitude because it was too reminiscent of bad times in the Army: the sense of having tokeep his own counsel among talking, laughing, better-adjusted men. And that discomfort was always at its most acute after they had filed and clumped inside the Larchmont station, because there was nothing to do in there but stand around and wait.
    Then once he saw another stranger leaning alone against the wall, squinting down through steel-rimmed glasses at a lighted cigarette as if smoking required his full attention. The man was smaller and younger-looking than Michael, and he wasn’t even dressed right: instead of a suit coat he wore an Army “tanker’s jacket,” the sturdy zippered wind-breaker once coveted by most ground-force troops in Europe because it was given only to the men who rode in tracked and armored assault vehicles.
    Michael drifted over to within speaking range and said “You in an armored division?”
    “Huh?”
    “I said were you in an armored division during the war?”
    The young man looked puzzled, blinking several times behind his glasses. “Oh, the jacket,” he said at last. “Naw, I bought this off a guy, is all.”
    “Oh, I see.” And Michael knew that if he said, Well, that was a good buy; they’re nice to have, he would feel even more like a fool, so he kept his mouth shut and started to turn away.
    But the stranger apparently didn’t want to be left alone. “Naw, I wasn’t in the war,” he said in the same quick, automatically apologetic way that Bill Brock always said it. “Wasn’t even in the service until forty-five, and then I never got overseas. Never even got out of Blanchard Field, Texas.”
    “Oh, yeah?” And this opened up further conversational possibilities. “Well, I spent a little time at Blanchard in forty-three,” Michael said, “and I sure as hell