The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page B

with wooden insistence over his eyes. He didn't talk because he felt himself stuttering when he tried. He stared around him, his mouth curled in what he thought was lordly scorn for the world around him. Louise was at the table, he suddenly noticed, with her husband. And Wade, he noticed, sitting next to Louise, holding her hand. Michael's head began to clear and ache at the same time. He ordered a hamburger and a bottle of beer.
    This is disgraceful, he thought heavily, disgraceful. Ex-girls, ex-beaux, ex-nothing. Was it Tuesday afternoon he was to meet Louise, or Wednesday? And what afternoon was Wade to meet Laura? A nest of snakes hibernating for the winter, Arney had said. He was a silly, broken man, Arney, but he wasn't wrong there. There was no honour to this life, no form… Martinis, beer, brandy, Scotch, have another, and everything disappeared in a blur of alcohol – decency, fidelity, courage, decision. Parrish had to be the one to jump across the room. Automatically. Danger, therefore jump. Michael had been right there, next to the window, and he had hardly moved, a small indecisive shuffling – no more. There he'd stood, too fat, too much liquor, too many attachments, a wife who was practically a stranger, darting in from Hollywood for a week at a time, full of that talk, doing God knows what with how many other men on those balmy, orange-scented, California evenings, while he frittered away the years of his youth, drifting with the easy tide of the theatre, making a little money, being content, never making the bold move… He was thirty years old and this was 1938. Unless he wanted to be driven to the same window as Arney, he had better take hold.
    He got up and mumbled, "Excuse me," and started through the crowded restaurant towards the men's room. Take hold, he said to himself, take hold. Divorce Laura, live a rigorous, ascetic life, live as he had when he was twenty, just ten years ago, when things were clear and honourable, and when you faced a new year, you weren't sick with yourself for the one just passed.
    He went down the steps to the men's room. It would start right here. He'd soak his head with ice-cold water for ten minutes. The pale sweat would be washed off, the flush would die from his cheeks, his hair would be cool and in order on his head, he would look out across the new year with clearer eyes… He opened the door to the men's room, and went to the washbowls and looked at himself with loathing in the mirror, at the slack face, the conniving eyes, the weak, indecisive mouth. He remembered how he had looked at twenty. Tough, thin, alive, uncompromising… That face was still there, he felt, buried beneath the unpleasant face reflected in the mirror. He would quarry his old face out from the unsightly outcroppings of the years between.
    He ducked his head and splashed the icy water on his eyelids and cheeks. He dried himself, his skin tingling pleasantly. Refreshed, he walked soberly up the steps to rejoin the others at the big table in the centre of the noisy room.

CHAPTER THREE
    ON the western edge of America, in the sea-coast town of Santa Monica, among the flat, sprawling streets and the shredding palms, the old year was coming to an end in soft, grey fog, rolling in off the oily water, rolling in over the scalloped surf breaking on the wet beaches, rolling in over the hot-dog stands, closed for the winter, and the homes of the movie stars, and the muffled coast road that led to Mexico and Oregon.
     
    The electric sign of the Sea View Hotel, from which at no time, even on the clearest days, could any body of water be observed, added its baleful, minor tone to the thin, sifting fog outside Noah's window. The light filtered into the darkened room and touched the damp plaster walls and the lithograph of Yosemite Falls above the bed. Splinters of red fell on Noah's father's sleeping face on the pillow, on the large, fierce nose, the curving, distended nostrils, the ridged, deep eye-sockets,