The Young Lions

"I'll ask," Laura said, laughing, and went off arm in arm with the fortune-teller. Michael watched her as she walked through the room, in her straight-backed, delicately sensual way, and caught two other men watching her, too. One was Donald Wade, a tall, pleasant-looking man, and the other was a man called Talbot, and they were both what Laura described as "ex-beaux" of hers. They seemed constantly to be invited to the same parties as the Whitacres. The term ex-beau was one which Michael sometimes puzzled over uneasily. What it really meant, he was sure, was that Laura had had affairs with them, and wanted Michael to believe that she no longer had anything to do with them. He was suddenly a

"When are you going back?" Michael asked.

Parrish looked around him, his blunt, open face taking on a ludicrous expression of guile. "Hard to say, Pal," he whispered. "Not wise to say. The State Department, you know… Has its Fascist spies everywhere. As it is, I've forfeited my American citizenship, technically, by enlisting under the colours of a foreign power. Keep it to yourself, Pal, but I'd say a month, month and a half…"

"Are you going back alone?"

"Don't think so, Pal. Taking a nice little group of lads back with me." Parrish smiled benevolently. "The International Brigade is a wide-open, growing concern." Parrish glanced at Michael reflectively and Michael felt that the Irishman was measuring him, questioning in his own mind what Michael was doing there, in his fancy suit in this fancy apartment, why Michael wasn't at a machine-gun this night instead of a bar.

"You looking at me?" Michael asked.

"No, Pal." Parrish wiped his cheek.

"Do you take my money?" Michael asked harshly.

"I'll take money," Parrish gri

Michael got out his wallet. He had just been paid, and he still had some money left over from his bonus. He put it all in Parish's hand. It amounted to seventy-five dollars.

"See you later," Michael said. "I'm going to circulate."

"Sure, Pal." Parrish nodded coolly at him. "Thanks for the dough."

"Stuff it, Pal," Michael said.

"Sure, Pal." Parrish turned back to his drink, his wide, square shoulders a blue-serge bulwark in the froth of bare shoulders and satin lapels around him.

Michael walked slowly across the room towards a group in the corner. Long before he got there, he could see Louise looking at him, smiling tentatively at him. Louise was what Laura probably would call an "old girl" of his, except that, really, they had never stopped. Louise was married by now, too, but somehow, from time to time, for shorter or longer periods, she and Michael continued as lovers. There was a moral judgment to be made there some day, Michael felt. But Louise was one of the prettiest girls in New York, small, dark and clever-looking, and she was warm and undemanding. In a way she was dearer to him than his wife. Sometimes, lying next to each other on winter afternoons in a borrowed apartment, Louise would sigh, staring up at the ceiling, and say, "Isn't this wonderful? I suppose some day we ought to give it up." But neither she nor Michael took it seriously.

She was standing now next to Donald Wade. For a second, Michael got an unpleasant vision of the complexity of life, but it vanished as he kissed her and said, "Happy New Year."

He shook hands gravely with Wade, wondering, as always, why men thought they had to be so cordial to their wives' ex-lovers.

"Hello," Louise said. "Haven't seen you in a long time. You look very nice in your pretty suit. Where's Mrs Whitacre?"

"Having her fortune told," Michael said. "The past isn't bad enough. She's got to have the future to worry about, too. Where's your husband?"

"I don't know." Louise waved vaguely and smiled at him in the serious private ma

Wade bowed a little and moved off. Louise looked after him.

"Didn't he used to go with Laura?" she asked.

"Don't be a cat," Michael said.

"Just wanted to know."

"The room," Michael said, "is loaded with guys who used to go with Laura." He surveyed the guests with sudden dissatisfaction. Wade, Talbot, and now another one had come in, a lanky actor by the name of Moran who had been in one of Laura's pictures. Their names had been linked in a gossip column in Hollywood and Laura had called New York early one morning to reassure Michael that it had been an official studio party, etc. etc…

"The room," Louise said, looking at him obliquely, "is full of girls who used to go around with you. Or maybe 'used to' isn't exactly what I mean."

"Parties these days," Michael said, "are getting too crowded. I'm not coming to them any more. Isn't there some place you and I can go and sit and hold hands quietly?"

"We can try," Louise said, and took his arm and led him down the hallway through the groups of guests, towards the rear of the apartment. Louise opened a door and looked in. The room was dark and she motioned Michael to follow. They tiptoed in, closed the door carefully behind them and sank on to a small couch. After the bright lights in the other rooms, Michael couldn't see anything here for a moment. He closed his eyes luxuriously, feeling Louise snuggle close to him, lean over and softly kiss his cheek.

"Now," she said, "isn't that better?"

The rest of the evening was confused in Michael's mind. Later on he didn't remember whether he had made a date with Louise for Tuesday afternoon or not, or whether Laura had told him that the fortune-teller had predicted they were going to be divorced or not. But he remembered seeing Arney appear at the other end of the room, smiling a little, whisky dribbling down from his mouth on his chin. Arney, with his head slightly to one side, as though his neck was stiff, came walking, quite steadily, through the room, ignoring the other guests who were standing there, and came up next to Michael. He stood there, wavering for a moment, in front of the tall french window, then threw open the window and started to step out. His coat caught on a lamp. He stopped to disentangle it, and started out again. Michael watched him and knew that he should rush over and grab him. He felt himself starting to move sluggishly, his arms and legs dream-like and light, although he knew that if he didn't move faster the playwright would be through the window and falling eleven storeys before he could reach him.

Michael heard the quick scuff of shoes behind him. A man leaped past him and took the playwright in his arms. The two figures teetered dangerously on the edge, with the reflection of the night lights of New York a heavy red neon glow on the clouds outside. The window was slammed shut by someone else and they were safe. Then Michael saw that it was Parrish, who had been half-way across the room at the bar, who had come past him to save the playwright.

Laura was in Michael's arms, hiding her eyes, weeping. He was a

They sat down in a shrill, orange room with paintings of Indians for some reason all over the walls, and inexperienced waiters, hastily pressed into emergency service, stumbling erratically among the loud, still-celebrating diners. Michael felt drunk, his eyelids drooping 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.