Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates

Author:Richard Yates
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307772657
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-27T10:00:00+00:00

Carl Traynor’s first novel didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but Lucy paid close attention to its several excellent reviews, and she bought it at once. The first thing she did was remove its ugly dust jacket – a cheap illustration on the front and a photograph on the back that might have been the picture of an unhappy college boy – then she settled down to read.

She was pleased with the “dignity” of the sentences and the clarity of the scenes, and along in the third or fourth chapter she could dimly begin to see what he’d meant about Madame Bovary. Parts of it were very funny, for a man who could never get a laugh at the New School, but there was a pervasive tone of sadness all through the story and a well-earned sense of impending tragedy toward the end.

It kept her sitting up in bed all night and it made her cry a little, turning away from the page to hide her loose mouth in her free hand; then, after trying and failing to sleep for most of the morning, she found his name in the Manhattan phone book and called him up.

“Lucy Davenport,” he said. “Well. Good to hear from you.”

And in a shy voice, fumbling for the words, she tried to tell him how she felt about his book.

“Well, thanks, Lucy, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m very glad you liked it.”

“Oh, ‘liked’ isn’t the right word, Carl; I loved it. I can’t remember when a novel has moved me so deeply. And I’d love to discuss it with you, but a phone call isn’t really – do you think we could meet somewhere in town for a drink? Soon?”

“Well, actually, I’ve got company here now,” he said, “and I’ll probably be – you know – tied up for some time; so maybe I’d better take a rain check on the drink, okay?”

And for hours after they’d hung up she was still bothered by the clumsiness of his message. Wasn’t “I’ve got company here now” a funny way of telling her he had a girl? And she hadn’t heard anybody say “take a rain check” for years, so that was funny, too – especially from a man with a writer’s abhorrence of clichés.

But she couldn’t deny that her own part of the talk had been all wrong – too open, too direct, too aggressive. If she’d had any sleep last night she would almost certainly have found a subtler approach.

And the worst thing, however she might dwell on the bungled little phone call, the worst thing now was that she was terribly, terribly disappointed. All night, and especially toward morning, she had repeatedly let her mind float away from Carl Traynor’s powerful story into romantic little reveries of the man himself. Her having misjudged and belittled him all those weeks seemed only to lend piquancy to their long afternoon together in that Sixth Avenue bar. She deeply regretted having said no to him that

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