Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates Read Free Book Online Page A

Well, okay, then, I wonder whose cock he’s sucking.’ ”
    Lucy was seized by a spasm of revulsion so acute that it forced her up from the table. The syllable “Ugh!” came from her distorted lips and she stood hugging herself with both arms as if chilled to the bone. “Oh, that’s vile,” she said, shuddering. “That’s the vilest thing I’ve ever heard.”
    “Yeah, well, you know Brock. And anyway he’s been in a lousy mood for weeks. I think he’s having a few troubles with Diana.”
    “Well, I’m not surprised,” she said as she began to clear the plates away. “I don’t know why Diana didn’t dump him long ago. I’ve never understood how she could’ve taken
up
with him.”
    *
    One Saturday morning Bill Brock called up, in unaccustomed shyness, to ask if he could come out to Larchmont alone that afternoon.
    “Are you sure he said ‘alone’?” Lucy inquired.
    “Well, he kind of slurred it, or elided over it, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. And he certainly didn’t say ‘we.’ ”
    “Well, then, it’s over,” she said. “Good. Only, now we’re in for it: he’ll want us to sit around for hours while he pours out his broken heart.”
    But it wasn’t that way – not, at least, in the first part of Brock’s visit.
    “I mean, I’m all right in short-term relationships,” he explained to them, hunching forward on the sofa in readiness for a serious discussion of himself. “I know I am, because I always have been in the past. What I can’t seem to do is sustain a hell of a lot of interest over the – you know – over the long haul. I get
tired
of a girl, is what it amounts to. I get bored and then I get restless; simple as that. Frankly, I’ve never understood the concept of marriage. I mean, if it works for you people, fine – but then, that’s your business, right?”
    For the past several months, he reported, Diana had been “making marriage noises. Oh, just a hint here and a hint there at first – those were easy enough to handle – but then it started getting worse. Finally I had to tell her, I said ‘Look, honey: let’s face a few facts, okay?’ So she agreed to move out of my place – she got an apartment with another girl – and we started seeing each other on a different basis, maybe twice a week at the most. That’s the way things were when we came out here that last time. And she enrolled in an acting class – you know how they have these little ‘Method’ classes all over town now, mostly run by broken-down actors trying to put a few dollars together? Well, that sounded like a nice idea; I thought it might be goodfor her. But son of a bitch, it wasn’t more than a couple of weeks before she started going out with a guy she’d met in the class – some actor-boy, actor-twerp, actor-asshole; rich father out in Kansas City who pays him to stay away from home. Then three nights ago – and I swear to you, this was the worst night of my life – I took her out to dinner and she told me in this very cool, distant way – she told me she’d moved in with this guy. She ‘loves’ him, and all that shit.
    “Well, Jesus, I went home feeling crippled, feeling like I’d been run over by a truck. I threw myself down on the bed” – here he lay back in the sofa and flung one forearm over his eyes to suggest a total abandonment to grief – “and I cried like a child. I couldn’t stop. I cried for hours, and I kept saying, ‘I’ve lost her. I’ve lost her.’ ”
    “Well,” Lucy said, “it doesn’t sound so much as though you’d lost her, Bill; it sounds more as though you’d thrown her away.”
    “Well, of
course
,” he said, his arm still covering his eyes. “Of
course.
And isn’t that the worst kind of loss? When you don’t even realize the value of something until you’ve thrown it away?”
    Bill Brock spent the night in their spare room – “I knew it,” Lucy said later; “I knew he’d end up sleeping here” – and he