The Young Lions

CHAPTER SIX

NOAH was nervous. This was the first party he had ever given, and he tried to remember what parties looked like in the movies and parties he had read about in books and magazines. Twice he went into the kitchenette to inspect the three dozen ice cubes he and Roger had bought at the drug-store. He looked at his watch again and again, hoping that Roger would get back from Brooklyn with his girl before the guests started to come, because Noah was sure that he would do some awful, gauche thing, just at the moment it was necessary to be relaxed and dignified.

He and Roger Ca

After his father's death, Noah had drifted back across the country. He had always wanted to see New York. There was nothing to moor him in any other place on the face of the earth, and he had been able to find a job in the city two days after he landed there. Then he had met Roger in the Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

It was hard to believe now that there had been a time when he didn't know Roger, a time when he had wandered the city streets for days without saying a word to anyone, a time when no man was his friend, no woman had looked at him, no street was home, no hour more attractive than any other hour.

He had been standing dreamily in front of the library shelves, staring at the dull-coloured rows of books. He had reached up for a volume, he remembered it even now, a book by Yeats, and he had jostled the man next to him, and said "Excuse me." They had started to talk and had gone out into the rainy streets together, and had continued talking. Roger had invited him into a bar on Sixth Avenue and they had had two beers and had agreed before they parted to have di

Noah had never had any real friends. His shifting, erratic boyhood, spent a few months at a time among abrupt and uninterested strangers, had made it impossible to form any but the most superficial co

Noah could not understand why, but Roger had seemed to like him. Perhaps, Noah thought, the truth was that Roger had pitied him, alone in the city, in his shabby suit, gawky, uncertain, fiercely shy. At any rate, after they had seen each other two or three times, for drinks in the horrible bars that Roger seemed to like, or for di

"Not much," Noah had said, honestly. It was a dreary cell in a lodging-house on 28th Street, with damp walls and bugs and the toilet pipes roaring above his head.

"I've got a big room," Roger had said. "Two couches. If you don't mind my playing the piano every once in a while in the middle of the night."

Gratefully, still astonished that there was anyone in this crowded, busy city who could find profit, of any kind whatsoever, in his friendship, Noah had moved into the large, rundown room near the river. Roger was almost like the phantom friend lonely children invent for themselves in the long, unpeopled stretches of the night. He was easy, gentle, accomplished. He made no demands on anyone and he seemed to take pleasure, in his rambling, unostentatious way, in putting the younger man through a rough kind of education. He talked in a random, probing way about books, music, painting, politics, women. He had been to France and Italy, and the great names of ancient cities and charmful towns sounded intimate and accessible in his slow, rather harsh New England accent. He had dry sardonic theories about the British Empire and the workings of democracy in the United States, and about modern poetry, and the ballet and the movies and the war. He didn't seem to have any ambition of his own. He worked, sporadically and not very hard, for an advertising firm. He didn't pay much attention to money, and he wandered from girl to girl with slightly bored, good-humoured lust. All in all, with his careless, somehow elegant clothes, and his crooked, reserved smile, he was that rare product of modern America, his own man.

He and Noah took rambling walks together along the river, and on the University campus. Roger had found Noah a good job through some friends as a playground director at a settlement house down on the East Side. Noah was making thirty-six dollars a week, more money than he ever had made before, and as they trudged along the quiet pavements late at night, side by side, with the cliffs of Jersey rearing up across the river, and the lights of the boats winking below them, Noah listened, thirsty and delighted, like an eavesdropper on an unsuspected world, as Roger said, "Then there was this defrocked priest near Antibes who drank a quart of Scotch every afternoon, sitting in the cafe on the hill, translating Baudelaire…" or "The trouble with American women is they all want to be captain of the team or they won't play. It comes from putting an inflated value on chastity. If an American woman pretends to be faithful to you, she thinks she has earned the right to chain you to the kitchen stove. It's better in Europe. Everyone knows everyone else is unchaste, and there is a more normal system of values. Infidelity is a kind of gold standard between the sexes. There is a fixed rate of exchange and you know what things cost you when you go shopping. Personally, I like a submissive woman. All the girls I know say I have a feudal attitude towards women, and maybe they're right. But I'd rather they submitted to me than have me submit to them. One or the other is bound to happen, and I'm in no rush, I'll find a proper type eventually…"

Walking beside him, it seemed to Noah that life could not improve on his condition now… being young, at home on the streets of New York, with a pleasant job and thirty-six dollars a week, a book-crowded room nearly overlooking the river, and a friend like Roger, urbane, thoughtful, full of strange information. The only thing lacking was a girl, and Roger had decided to fix even that. That was why they had pla

Roger had had a good time all one evening casting about among his old address books for likely candidates for Noah. And now, tonight, they were coming, six of them, besides the girl that Roger was bringing himself. There were going to be some other men, of course, but Roger had slyly selected fu

Noah smiled as he heard the key in the door because now he would not have to face the ordeal of greeting the first guests by himself. Roger had his girl with him, and Noah took her coat and hung it up without accident, not tripping over anything or wrenching the girl's arm. He smiled to himself as he heard the girl saying to Roger, "What a nice room. It looks as though there hasn't been a woman in here since 1750."