Part One sees the marriage of Michael Davenport and Lucy Blaine. Michael is a young, charismatic upper middle-class man graduating from Harvard on the GI Bill after having been an aerial gunner in World War II. He aspires to be a poet and playwright. Lucy, a lovely amateur actress, attended Radcliffe College and after the wedding reveals to Michael that her family is rich.
The union, the growing tensions and distance between them, and, finally, the dissolution are told in Part One—mostly from Michael's perspective.
Michael walked away from her across the living room, keeping his back straight, and didn't speak until he had turned and settled himself in an armchair that left at least fifteen feet of floor between them.
"It's grown increasingly clear lately," he said then, not quite looking at her, "that you’ve come to think of me as a fool."
"Is there a key?"
"Huh?"
"I said is there a key for the door?"
"Oh, sure," he said. "Got it in my pocket."
Then at last he switched off the razor and put it away. He locked the door with what seemed some difficulty—he had to try the knob several times to make sure the job was done—and came to sit close beside her, slipping one arm around her ribs. "I was careful to reserve this room before the kids came up," he said, "because I knew I'd want privacy, but I didn't know I'd have somebody so nice to share it with. Oh, and I got us some beer, too." He reached under the cot and pulled out a six-pack of Rheingold Extra Dry. "Probably isn't very cold anymore, but what the hell. Beer’s beer, right?"
Right. Beer was beer; bed was bed; sex was sex; and everybody knew there were no social classes in America.
"... I'm beginning to see what writers mean about second-novel panic."
"You don't seem panicky to me," she said. "Everything about you now suggests a man who knows exactly what he's doing."
He knew what he was doing, all right. In less than twenty minutes he had her out of the bar and up in the dim seclusion of his apartment, a block or two away.
"Oh, baby," he murmured as he helped her out of her clothes. "Oh, my lovely. Oh, my lovely girl."
The only trouble at first was that one small, cold-sober part of her mind floated free of the rest of her; it was able to observe how solemn a man could be at times like this, how earnest in his hairy nakedness, and how predictable. You had only to offer up your breasts and there he was his hungering mouth on one and then the other of them, drawing the nipples out hard; you had only to open your legs and there was his hand at work on you, tirelessly burrowing. Then you got his mouth again, and then you got the whole of him, boyishly proud of his first penetration, lunging and thrusting and ready to love you forever, if only to prove that he could.
But she liked it—oh, she liked it all, and that traitorous little part of her mind winked out into nothingness long before it was over. Then, as soon as her breathing and her voice came back to normal, she told Carl Traynor he was "marvelous."
"You always know how to say just the right thing," he said. "I wish I could do that."
"Well, but you can; you do."
"Sometimes, maybe; other times not. I can think of one or two girls who might want to give you an argument on that point, Lucy."
"And I imagine you'll be pleased to be rid of Chain Saw Age."
"Store."
"How's that?"
"It's called Chain Store Age," Michael said. "It's a publication for all kinds of retail stores that operate in—you know—in chains. Get it?" Then, slowly shaking his head in dismay, he said "I'll be God damned. All these years, as long as Brock and I've been telling you what we did, you thought we were talking about fucking chain saws."
"Well, I’ve got it straight now," Paul said, "but yes; I did have the impression you were both concerned with—publicizing chain saws, and that kind of thing."
"Yeah, well, in your case I suppose it was a reasonable mistake. Because you never do listen very carefully, do you, Paul? You never have paid a hell of a lot of attention to anybody in the world but yourself, have you?"
"Wanna shake on it, then?" he asked.
"Well, of course," Paul said, and they were both drunk enough to make an excessively solemn business out of shaking hands.
"Well," she said. "That's really very—really very nice, isn't it?"
It was nice, all right. He had to read it three more times, walking around in the living room, before he could believe it.
Then Sarah came to stand in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel.
"So I guess it's all settled then, about Boston," she said. "Right?"
Right; all settled.
But this was the girl whose very skin had once been made "all gooseflesh, all over," and who'd been made to cry, too, by the concluding lines of that poem; now she looked as calm and plain as any other housewife considering the practical aspects of moving to a new place, and he didn't know what to make of the transformation.
"It wasn't really very long ago," he began, in an almost theatrically quiet voice, "that you told me you thought we were made for each other."
"Yes, I remember saying that," she said. "And the moment I'd said it I knew you'd be reminding me of it, sooner or later."
This time the silence was deep enough to drown in.
- Part Three also has a great sequence about
Michael's young wife having a boy. Michael imagines the difficult years ahead; it's a funny sequence, but more than I
want to type out here.
- Yates deals a lot with gender in his novels.
- Young Hearts Crying was published in 1984. Cold Spring Harbor, Yates final novel, was published two years later. Yates died in 1992.
