Young Hearts Crying Read Online Free

never have met this creature here.”
    The phrase “this creature” echoed in Michael’s head throughout their dinner and for a long time afterwards. Diana Maitland might be only a girl at the table, courteously praising Lucy’scooking; she might be only a girl in the conversational hour or two that followed, and still a girl when Bill Brock helped her on with her coat in the vestibule and they said goodnight and their footsteps rang and faded across Abingdon Square toward Brock’s place, “their” place – but once they were home, with the door locked behind them and their clothes on the floor; once she lay thrashing and moaning in Brock’s arms, in Brock’s bed, she would be a creature.
    There were other visits back and forth across Abingdon Square in the fall of that year. Each time Michael would steel himself to take the risk of glancing quickly from Diana to Lucy, hoping Lucy might turn out to be the more attractive of the two, and he was always disappointed. Diana kept winning the contest time and again – oh, Christ, what a girl – until, after a while, he decided to quit making those wretchedly secret comparisons. It was a dumb, dumb thing to do. It might well be something other married men did now and then, for little other purpose than to torture themselves, but you didn’t have to be very smart to know how dumb it was. Besides, when he and Lucy were alone and he could look at her from different angles and in any kind of light, it was always easy to believe she was pretty enough to last him a lifetime.
    One ice-cold December night, at Diana’s urging, the four of them rode downtown in a cab to visit her brother.
    Paul Maitland turned out to look nothing at all like Michael: he did have the same general kind of mustache, which he touched and stroked with shapely fingers in the momentary shyness of meeting strangers, but even that provided no real similarity because it was far more luxuriant – a fearless young iconoclast’s mustache as opposed to that of an office worker. He was lean and limber, in a masculine version of his sister’s style,dressed in a Levi jacket and pants with a merchant seaman’s sweater worn under the jacket, and he spoke very courteously in a light, almost whispering voice that made you bend a little toward him for fear of missing something.
    As he led his guests across his studio, a big, plain loft once used for small-factory facilities, they found they couldn’t see any of his paintings because everything lay in shadows cast by the glare of a streetlamp beyond the windowpanes. But in one far corner a great many yards of heavy burlap had been hung from ropes to form a kind of tent, and it was within this small enclosure that Paul Maitland made his winter home. He lifted a flap to usher them inside, and they discovered other people sitting around with red wine in the warmth of a kerosene stove.
    Most of the names were lost in the perfunctory introductions, but by now Michael was less concerned with names than with clothes. Seated on an upended orange crate with a warm glass of wine in his hand, he was unable to think of anything but that he and Bill Brock must look hopelessly out of place here in their business suits, their button-down shirts and silk ties, a couple of smiling intruders from Madison Avenue. And he knew Lucy must be uncomfortable, too, though he didn’t want to look at her face and find out.
    Diana was plainly welcome in this gathering – there had been cries of “Diana!” and “Baby!” when she’d first come crouching in under the burlap – and now she sat prettily on the floor near her brother’s feet, talking in an animated way with a partially bald young man whose clothes suggested he was a painter, too. If she ever got tired of Brock – and wouldn’t any first-rate girl get tired of Brock soon enough? – she wouldn’t have long to wonder where to look next.
    There was another girl called Peggy who looked no more than nineteen or twenty, with a