Liars in Love by Richard Yates

Author:Richard Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

Regards at Home

“WELL, I KNOW it seems funny,” the young man said, getting up from his drawing board, “but I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced. My name’s Dan Rosenthal.” He was tall and heavy, and his face suggested the pain of shyness.

“Bill Grove,” I told him as we shook hands, and then we could both pretend to settle down. We had just been hired at Remington Rand and assigned to share a glassed-in cubicle in the bright, murmurous maze of the eleventh floor; this was in the spring of 1949, in New York.

Dan Rosenthal’s job was to design and illustrate the company’s “external house organ,” a slick and unreadable monthly magazine called Systems; mine was to write and edit the copy for it. He seemed able to talk and listen while executing even the subtlest parts of his work, and I soon fell to neglecting mine for hours and days at a time, so there began an almost steady flow of conversation over the small space between his immaculate drawing board and the ever-more dismaying clutter of my desk.

I was twenty-three that year; Dan was a year or so older, and there was a gruff, rumbling gentleness in his voice that seemed to promise he would always be good company. He lived with his parents and his younger brother in Brooklyn, “just around the corner from Coney Island, if that gives you a picture,” and he was a recent graduate of the art school at Cooper Union—a school that charges no tuition but is famous for being highly selective. I’d heard that only one out of ten applicants is accepted there; when I asked him if that was true he said he didn’t know.

“So where’d you go to school, Bill?” he asked, and that was always an awkward question.

I had come out of the Army with the wealth of the GI Bill of Rights at my disposal, but hadn’t taken advantage of it—and I will never wholly understand why. It was partly fear: I’d done poorly in high school, the Army had assessed my IQ at 109, and I didn’t want the risk of further failure. And it was partly arrogance: I planned to become a professional writer as soon as possible, and that made four years of college seem a wasteful delay. There was a third factor too—one that took too much explaining for comfort, but could in a greatly simplified form be easier to tell than all the fear-and-arrogance stuff—and this had become the reply I gave most often on being asked why I hadn’t gone to college. “Well,” I would say, “I had my mother to take care of.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Dan Rosenthal said, looking concerned. “I mean, it’s too bad you had to miss out on college.” He seemed to be thinking it over for a while, trailing a delicate paintbrush back and forth under the clean scent of banana oil that always hung in his side of the cubicle. Then he said, “Still,

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