Young Hearts Crying Read Online Free Page A

sweet grave face, a peasantblouse and a dirndl skirt, and she seemed determined to prove she belonged to Paul. She sat as close as possible to him on the low studio couch that was apparently their bed; she never took her eyes off him, and it was clear that she would like to have her hands on him, too. He seemed scarcely aware of her as he leaned forward and lifted his chin to exchange a few laconic remarks over the top of the stove with a man on the orange crate next to Michael’s, but then when he sat back again he gave her a lazy smile, and after a while he put his arm around her.
    Nobody in that dry, overheated little makeshift room looked more like an artist than the man on the crate next to Michael’s – he wore white overalls daubed and streaked with many colors – but he was quick to explain that he was “only a dabbler; only a well-meaning amateur.” He was a local businessman, a subcontractor in the building trades: it was he who supplied Paul Maitland with the part-time carpentry work that kept him alive.
    “And I consider it a privilege,” he said, hunching closer to Michael and lowering his voice so that their host wouldn’t overhear. “I consider it a privilege because this boy’s good. This boy’s the real thing.”
    “Well, that’s – that’s fine,” Michael said.
    “Had a rough time of it in the war, you know.”
    “Oh?” And this was one part of the Paul Maitland story that Michael hadn’t yet heard – probably because Bill Brock, who’d been classified 4-F during the war and was still touchy about it, would not have been inclined to provide the information.
    “Oh, God, yes. Too young to’ve seen the whole thing, of course, but he was up to his neck in it from the Bulge right on through to the end. Infantry. Rifleman. Never talks about it, but it shows. You can see it in his work.”
    Michael pulled his necktie loose and opened his collar, as ifthat might give his brains a better chance to sort things out. He didn’t know what to make of any of this.
    The man in overalls knelt to pour himself more wine from a gallon jug on the floor; when he came back he took a drink, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and began talking to Michael again in the same tone of confidential reverence. “Hell, New York’s crawling with painters,” he said. “The whole damn country is, for that matter. But you come across a boy like this maybe once in a generation. I’m confident of that. And it may take years; it may not even happen in his lifetime, God forbid” – here he reached down and rapped his knuckles on a slat of his crate – “but some day an awful lot of people are gonna walk into the Museum of Modern Art and it’ll be Paul Maitland all the way. Room after room after room. I’m confident of that.”
    Well, okay, swell, Michael wanted to say, but do you think you could sort of shut up about it now? Instead he nodded in slow and respectful silence; then he peered across the kerosene stove at Paul Maitland’s averted face, as if a close-enough scrutiny of it might reveal some gratifying flaw. He considered Maitland’s having gone to Amherst – didn’t everybody know Amherst was an expensive school for society boys and intellectual lightweights? – but no, all those stereotypes were said to have broken down since the war; besides, he might have chosen Amherst because it had a good art department, or because it allowed him more time to paint than he’d have had at other colleges. Still, he must have enjoyed at least a taste of aristocratic languor there, after all that infantry soldiering. He had probably joined in a general taking of pains over just the right cut of tweeds and flannels and just the right kind of light, witty talk, and in a general vying for perfection at knowing how best to spend each careless weekend (“Bill, I’d like you to meet my sister Diana …”). Didn’t all that suggest something just a littleludicrous about this headlong descent into lower bohemia and