Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “I’ll have to take you somewhere tomorrow,” Lucky said. “For the clothes. Hmmm. Where?”

  “Not tomorrow,” Grant said. “I’ve got a business lunch with my producer. Anyway, what I want to know is what are we doing tonight?”

  “Whatever you want,” she said simply. “Have you got a date?” she asked Leslie.

  Leslie shook her head from the deep chair. “This is one of my boyfriend’s nights with his wife,” she said ruefully.

  “Then why don’t I take the both of you out somewhere to dinner?” Grant said. “Like Twenty-One or Voisin?”

  “No, I don’t want to cramp your style, you two,” Leslie said. “You go out by yourselves.”

  “It won’t cramp my style,” Grant said. “I’d love to have you.”

  But the dark little girl continued to shake her head. “I’ll make myself something and read a book. I got lots to read.” Only when Lucky who, apparently, had waited till she was sure Grant meant it and wasn’t just being polite, asked her did Leslie change her mind and decide to go. And so that was the way it started. Many of the nights when Leslie had no date with her own boyfriend, who was a smalltime theater critic on a Trenton daily but lived in Manhattan, she would dine out with them but almost always she came home alone earlier because she had to be at the office by nine. Amiably and happily for her friend she moved herself out of one of the twin beds in the tiny bedroom and out onto the studio couch in the livingroom, as Lucky had done for her on nights when her boyfriend came. She wasn’t doing it for space she said since Ron and Lucky invariably slept all night together in one of the single beds, but for decency. She asked only that they let her get to sleep before they started their action so she would not have to listen and lie awake and be lonely. Usually she was home and asleep before they got there. The only drawback was she had to come in in the morning to get her clothes and if Lucky didn’t want her goddamn Greek god to be viewed in all his glory “and I mean all” she said, then she better damn well wake up enough to cover him up. If this arrangement was satisfactory, she would request only that once in a while when her own boyfriend came they would let her have the bedroom and sleep at the New Weston. She was not very happy with this boyfriend he came around so seldom, and was going to have to quit him and get a new one: there was really no future or happiness in these married men who remained devoted to their wives while screwing you.

  As a matter of fact, they slept at the New Weston quite a lot, because they liked ordering breakfast and having it in bed together.

  As it turned out, they did not go to either Twenty-One or Voisin that first evening, they went to the Colony—where both girls knew as many or more people in the celebrity-pocked crowd of diners than Grant did. They had been roommates all four years in college at Cornell it turned up in the talk, to which Leslie had come from her hometown of Toledo and Lucky from Syracuse, and had lived together in New York the last four of the seven years Lucky had been there. Leslie worked for a very big Hollywood-New York publicity agency as an executive, and in fact personally handled most of their star accounts. Lucky wasn’t working at the moment. She had some money of her own, she told Grant, with an arch glance, and she didn’t have to.

  But it wasn’t always to restaurants of the caliber—and expense—of the Colony that they went, as the days passed (at least for Grant) in a labiapink haze of happiness. The girls knew a lot of excellent fairly cheap little French, Russian, Italian or whatever restaurants—such as Le Berry in the West 50s where a lot of show kids hung out and the French sailors off the liners came for the food—and after the first couple of days they started saving him money rigorously, especially Leslie. But what they saved for him on restaurants they more than made up for by what they made him spend on clothes, or at least Lucky did. Men’s clothes, not ladies’ clothes.

  She had mentioned it that first afternoon with Leslie in the apartment, but it was really at Hervey Miller the critic’s house that it started, as in a way their affair itself had—and as, in another way, something else started there too, something somber and dark and unhappy.

  On the day he had first run into Buddy Landsbaum at Hervey’s, Hervey had invited him to a cocktail party ten days hence. Back then Grant had mumbled “Sure, sure,” but secretly—in the miserable “Miseries” state he was in—he had had no intention of going. Ten days later, with the smell of Lucky in his nose and moustache, permeating him all over in fact like some delicious female cloud, he wouldn’t have missed Hervey’s cocktail party and the chance to show Lucky off to his theater friends for anything. As they climbed the steps of the narrow brownstone with Lucky hanging tight on his arm and leaning a breast on him out there where nobody could see it, it seemed simply absolutely unbelievable that only ten days ago he had not known her, had been lonely and miserable, had been looking for some girl, any girl. Hervey was glad to see them of course although he didn’t know Lucky, but when he saw Grant’s face he beamed suddenly and looked genuinely, really happy for him. Buddy, he told them shaking hands, had departed for the West Coast two days before.

  Lucky had been nervous about coming. “I don’t know any of these legit theater people,” she said when Grant told her they were going. “They’re not my crowd. Except Buddy. And I didn’t even know him when he was theater, only in his films. I’m going to be on close display, aren’t I?”—“I know,” Grant grinned lovingly. But if she was nervous or shy, it certainly didn’t show in the way she acted, or in what she said. It was, once again, so typical of her Grant thought.

  They were sitting at one end of the long narrow livingroom. Grant was sitting in a deep easy chair with Lucky perched on the arm just to be near him, and was holding forth to Hervey and a couple of others, a novelist and a movie critic, about the general shittiness of current American theater. He was feeling pretty smug and selfsatisfled, with his play done and this exquisite girl hanging onto him and onto his every word, and he was being really witty. Then in the lull that followed a laugh over one of his funnies, Lucky turned to Hervey and said in a matter-of-fact voice: “I’m in love with him.” She didn’t try to say it either quietly or loudly. It rang through the room and through that literary gathering. It had in it the quality that when she loved, it mattered, it was rare, and it counted.

  “Well,” Hervey said delightedly in his gravelly drawl, “well. Are you. That isn’t too really difficult to see, my dear.” He probably hadn’t had that much openness in his house in months, and he grinned at Grant. “In my own way, I’m in love with him too, I guess.”

  Grant was embarrassed but it was a very happy embarrassment. He simply sat and grinned. Curiously, everybody in that end of the room was grinning happily too.

  “Well,” Hervey said. “You feel pretty good, hunh, keed?” Grant took Lucky’s hand, aware the other end of the room was watching now, too. “I sure as hell do.”

  “Look at him,” Lucky said in her best cultivated university voice. “Would you believe that under that ugly lumpy Middlewestern suit exists the body of a Greek god?”

  Hervey was even more delighted. Letting his eye run swiftly over the room to check for audience, he said, “I know. I went swimming with Ron once at the YMHA pool to get rid of our hangovers.” He winked at Lucky. “And perhaps the brain of a genius?”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Lucky smiled. Hervey had been totally charmed. “Where shall I take him, Hervey?”

  ‘Take him? For what?”

  “For clothes.”

  Hervey beamed. “Ahhh! Well, how about Paul Stuart? I go there myself. Sometimes. For things.”

  “Perfect,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of Paul Stuart myself?” And Hervey was recharmed.

  “Hey! Hey! Wait a minute! I’m not all that bad!” Grant put in. “You Ivy-Leaguers!”

  “Well, Ron,” Hervey pontificated, “one’s girl can sometimes bring up things one’s friends don’t feel free to . . .”

  “I’m conspired against!” Grant grinned.

  “You have nothi
ng to say about it,” Lucky said. “We’ll go tomorrow.” She put her fingers lovingly on the back of his neck just above his collar. “Look at that tie.”

  Hervey was captivated. Just about the whole of his cocktail party was listening now, and he decided this might be the high spot of his evening.

  Grant saw it coming and played the straight man for him. “What’s wrong with my tie?”

  Hervey paused like the theater pro he was. “Well,” he drawled, “I can’t do anything about the suit, Lucia. Ron’s not my size. But I can certainly do something about the tie!

  “Come with me,” he said, and led Grant through the laughing party and up the stairs.

  “That’s certainly some girl you’ve got yourself there,” he said as he rummaged through his tie rack.

  “Isn’t she?”

  “Where did you find her? I’ve never even seen her before.”

  “Never you mind!” He smiled. “Actually, Buddy introduced me to her. The other day. She’s an old uh pal of his.” He didn’t actually stumble over the word pal, but he felt he hadn’t inflected it properly. He added, “A friend.”

  “Here we are. A nice brown-maroon and dark-blue stripe. That really is a terrible tie, yours. She’s absolutely right. I mean that she really is quite some girl, Ron.”

  “I know,” Grant said knotting it. “I’m going to keep this tie. A remembrance,” he said grinning into the mirror. Behind him Hervey was studying him kindly, shrewdly, thoughtfully, thumb and forefinger to his chin. “And I think you should,” he said. “I’ve known you a long time, haven’t I, Ron? Not as long as your Mrs. Abernathy out there in Indianapolis, but almost as long.” Then abruptly he turned away. “All the world loves a lover.”

  When they marched, chests out, back down and through the party, there was applause and more laughter, and it was then that Lucky, smiling and laughing with pride so much herself that she appeared to be actually blushing, said to Hervey the thing that echoed hollowly through Grant’s inner corridors and was to cast a faint but noticeably somber pall over the next happy weeks with her.

  “I think I’ve decided I’m going to marry him,” she announced to Hervey and the others around them.

  “I can assure you that you could do much, much worse, dear Lucia,” Hervey grinned at her. He clearly had been completely won by her.

  Grant said nothing, her statement made him almost blush with pride himself, but faint warning bells rang in his ears dimly through the labiapink haze in which he moved. It was one thing for Hervey to hint vaguely upstairs about Carol Abernathy, and quite another for Lucky who knew nothing at all about any of it, to say what she had just said. His old instinct to protect, so ingrained by now that it amounted to a signal reaction almost, had trapped him into that ‘foster-mother’ routine so that now his relationship with Lucky wasn’t on his part an honest one, and it wasn’t fair to her. And as the days together passed as he fell more and more under her spell and more and more in love with her, this initial dishonesty lent a poignancy to their affair for him that at times became almost unbearable. It also, curiously, gave him a vital tough hard-to-catch male quality that enhanced their affair for Lucky as well as for himself. Maybe if he’d been easier to catch, she wouldn’t have wanted him so much?

  The problem was, of course, that he was going to have to leave her. Sometime or other. This made the statues and bare trees and open-air opera in the Park where they walked on good days, the Zoo and the seals and the Cafeteria, all much more lovers’-poignant, bittersweet and moving than if they knew they were going to stay together and had set up housekeeping somewhere. The same held true for the joints they frequented. Like P.J. Clarke’s, where they’d gone that first afternoon, and now held a vested interest in. Grant knew that certain people (many good friends of his had this trait) actually required this sweet-sad, happy-tragic quality in a love affair for it to be interesting and fulfilling. And he found himself enjoying it too sometimes, as Lucky did obviously, sometimes. But at other times it was much too painful to be pleasant. And Grant had no wife to go back to, unless you wanted to count Carol Abernathy and Grant didn’t.

  That evening after Hervey’s party which had established an even newer closeness between them, they had dinner at Billy Reed’s Little Club on East 55th, a former hangout of Lucky’s with some other boyfriend where she knew everyone and proudly showed Grant off, then he took her to a late party of literary and theater folk on Central Park West in the Seventies. The cab ride through the cold Park framed with glittering buildings and signs, the (for them) lovers’-guide of the Mutual of New York thermometer, deepened the new closeness between them even more, and Grant caught the cab driver grinning at them in the mirror. All the world did indeed love a lover, it seemed, and this was a New York Grant had never known. In the apartment of the party high up on the West Side the downtown buildings were even more beautiful, and they stood at the window looking at it and sneaking a little handholding. Out there in the dark Park, Puerto Rican and Harlem kids might be right now beating some adult to death with bicycle chains, and Grant couldn’t have cared less. Everyone to his own kind of fun. At home, half drunk and with a curiously communicated sorrow (curiously because neither of them mentioned it or gave any sign of it) they made love in one style or another with a strange hunger all night and into the dawn and the morning until Leslie got up at 7:30 and knocked to get in and get her clothes and then they had coffee with her.

  Once she had got started with it, Lucky did not give up on the marriage thing she had started at Hervey Miller the critic’s house. Yet she was never pushy with it, and Grant never felt cramped. Mostly it came in the form of jokes. Like: “You know, you have to marry me, Ron,” she said one time. “I’m twenty-seven already, and you’re about my last chance. And anyway, you’re the last of the unmarried writers except for the fags, and I couldn’t marry anybody but a writer. Also, I’m in love with you.” There was about her in this the same peculiar openness, frankness that he had noted in her in other things. There was also about her in this an odd and terrible sadness, as if she couldn’t believe that it was not all too good to be true. And that sadness hurt Grant almost more than he could afford. She wasn’t angry or demanding. She seemed totally helpless, totally at his mercy, and furthermore unashamed, uncaring about showing it.

  He had told her about his plans to go to Kingston to learn diving (She had grinned, and said, “You don’t need to learn diving, darling!”) and it turned out that she knew Kingston very well, had lots of friends there, had stayed there often. Her South American boyfriend had used to stash her there for weeks at a time while he returned to his South American country to help make a revolution. “Oh, take me with you! I won’t be any trouble!” she cried excitedly. “I’ll introduce you to everybody! I know wonderful places! I know Kingston like—” They were to have been married in two months when he went back the last time and got shot. “I can’t take you with me,” Grant said, almost automatically. Then he went on to explain how he had conceived this as a project to be done totally alone, how it had to be done alone, and studied, because he thought it might bring back a reality to his writing he was afraid it was beginning to lose, that it would give him new material—new thinking material—for his work. He did not explain how it had also been halfway conceived as a means of getting totally away from Carol Abernathy for a while, or how Carol Abernathy had frustrated this by inviting herself along.

  “Oh, you really must take me along!” Lucky said sadly and with the eagerness of a little girl. “I know it so well! I’d love to go back! I know the greatest hotel, the owner’s a wonderful man, if it’s me with you he’ll give us a discount! I know so many places and things there!”

  “I can’t,” Grant said. “I simply can’t. I’d like to.” Again she did not press. But she brought it up from time to time hopefully. And when she conceived her idea to marry him at Hervey’s party, she tacked that on to it: they could be married in Kingston, at the hotel, her friend Réné Halder the hotel owner would
officiate, he would love it. Grant could only smile and shake his head, and feel terrible.

  She did take him to Paul Stuart. It was not the day after Hervey’s party, but almost a week after. After a lazy morning in bed, after making love lazily twice with the bright winter sun streaming in coldly through the light curtains in the warm little room, while she squatted in the bathtub washing herself out for the second time and Grant stood leaning in the doorway watching her fondly. Lucky announced that today was going to be Paul Stuart day. So he might as well prepare himself, she grinned, and shook her ass like a wet dog and straightened up for a towel. Ron Grant playwright was going to buy clothes. They would have lunch at some nice midtown restaurant and he could prepare himself with two or three but no more martinis and so would she, and then they would go to Paul Stuart’s. No fucking around. Docilely Grant, grinning sheepishly, allowed himself to be led, and for it received what he could only call, after thirty-six years of being alive, the most delicious afternoon of his life.

  Lucky chose everything. She wanted nothing for herself. Indeed, there was almost nothing for ladies in the shop except a few scarves. The light of the love on her face for him was so visibly apparent that the clerks in the store fell in with the game at once, delightedly, and looked at Grant with envy. Even the customers who came in were delighted, and hung around to watch. When they took Grant into the little fitting room, Lucky went too. To fit Grant with a readymade suit whose coat was big enough for his shoulders required that all the pants be altered and cut down. Lucky instructed them in this. And when the clerk was out of the little room, she was all over Grant laughing, kissing him and feeling him up in his shorts so that he had to be extremely cautious so the clerk would not see the more than half hard-on he was sporting. Laughing still more, she refused to leave him alone. The delighted clerk handed Grant a handkerchief for the lipstick on his face the second time he came back. “Compliments of the house, Madam,” he said to Lucky. It was a scene from a Clark Gable-Carole Lombard movie of a happier time if there ever was one in life, and everybody was participating.