Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates Read Free Book Online

pictures
on?
Shelf-paper.”
    “What-paper?”
    “You know. Like what people cover shelves with, for storing canned goods and stuff like that. Said he started using it years ago because it’s cheap, then he decided he ‘likes the way it takes the paint.’ And he does it all on his fucking kitchen floor. Says he keeps a big flat square of galvanized tin there, to make the right kind of surface; then he lays a soaking-wet piece of shelf-paper on it, gets down on his haunches and goes to work.”
    Lucy had been doing her best to prepare their dinner ever since Michael came home, but she’d been too frequently distracted. The pork chops were dried out and she’d forgotten to chill the applesauce; the green beans were limp and the potatoes weren’t baked through. But Michael noticed none of it, or didn’t care. He ate with one elbow on the table and his hand spanning his brow, and with a third or fourth glass of whiskey in readiness beside his plate.
    “So I asked him,” he said around his chewing, “I asked himhow long it takes him to make a picture. He said ‘Oh, maybe twenty minutes if I’m lucky; usually more like a couple hours, sometimes a day or so. Then about twice a month I go through ’em and throw a lot of ’em out – maybe a quarter or a third – and whatever’s left are the ones I bring into town. The Modern always wants first pick, and sometimes the Whitney wants a look at ‘em, too; then I take the rest of ’em up to my dealer – you know, to my gallery.’ ”
    “What’s his gallery?” she asked, and when he repeated the name she said “My God” again, because it was a place made well-known by the art pages of
The New York Times.
    “And he told me – and he wasn’t bragging; Christ’s sake, nothing this little bastard ever says is bragging – he told me they give him a one-man show there at least once a year. Last year they gave him two.”
    “Well, it’s all a little – hard to take in, isn’t it?” Lucy said.
    Michael shoved his plate aside – he hadn’t even opened his baked potato – and picked up his whiskey as if it were the main course. “It’s incredible,” he said. “Twenty-seven years old. And I mean, Jesus, when you think of – Jesus, honey.” And he shook his head in wonderment. “I mean, talk about making difficult things look
easy.”
Then, after a while, he said “Oh, and he said he’d like us to come over for dinner some night soon. Said he’d check with his wife and give us a call.”
    “Really?” Lucy looked as pleased as a child on her birthday. “Did he really?”
    “Well, yeah, but you know how those things are. It may slip his mind. I mean it’s nothing to count on, or anything.”
    “Couldn’t we call them?” she asked.
    And he was silently exasperated. For a girl raised in the upper reaches of the upper class, she could be surprisingly dense about good manners. But then, perhaps good manners had never beenespecially characteristic of millionaires in the first place; how could ordinary people ever know about that?
    “Well, no, baby,” he said, “I don’t think that’d be too good an idea. I’ll probably run into him again on the train, though; we’ll work something out.” Then he said “No, but listen, let me give you the postscript to all this. When I finally got to the office my brains were kind of reeling. I knew I couldn’t face the job, so I went in to waste a little time with Brock, and I told him about Tom Nelson. When he’d heard it all he said ‘Well; that’s interesting. I wonder who
his
father is.’ ”
    “Oh, that’s just
like
him, isn’t it?” Lucy said. “Bill Brock is always going on and on about how he hates cynicism in any form, but he’s really about the most cynical person I’ve ever known.”
    “Wait, though; it gets worse. I said ‘Well, Bill, for one thing his father’s a pharmacist in Cincinnati, and for another I don’t see what the hell difference it makes.’
    “And he said ‘Oh.