by James Jones
In the end they went out with two suits, a charcoal and a subdued brown stripe, a newly styled but still classic tuxedo, sundry kneelength black socks to replace Grant’s Argyles, narrow Ivy League ties, buttondown shirts, handkerchiefs. Everything but underwear, in fact. Lucky extracted a promise that the altered suit pants would be delivered next day, and they took a taxi to the New Weston, an elevator to the suite, and fell laughing and loving on the bed—that big soft ugly bed that didn’t seem so ugly to Grant any more.
The truth was he couldn’t really believe that she was for real. If she was, why not take her to Kingston? Why not marry her in the hotel? Go straight out to Indianapolis, straighten up affairs, come back here and pick her up. Better yet, why go to Indianapolis? He didn’t have to. Take her from here and get on a plane and go straight to Kingston without even stopping in Ganado Bay. The truth was he was scared. First he was scared of the scene—or scenes—he would have to have with Carol Abernathy. Second he was just scared in general. It would mean changing, reorienting his whole life and his plans for his life. Yet he had always intended someday to marry. It was just that it was always off there in the future somewhere, vague and formless, not sitting here in his lap with its teeth in his throat. And yet—what the hell? What could Carol Abernathy do to him really? Point to the church?
It was a peculiar situation. Just because he was not married. Luck. Because in one way he was as free as a bird. He wasn’t married, he didn’t have to divorce anybody, or pay alimony, or dispose of any mutually held property. On the other hand there were fourteen years of a way of life, a manner of living (increasingly insupportable, it was true) behind him that it was difficult to uproot and wrench out of him. He was worried about money, for another thing. He had been spending much more this trip to New York than he had meant or intended to, more than he could really afford. And the way he was living with no investments or capital laid by, if each new play wasn’t a solid hit—he was broke.
And what if this girl he was falling in love with was too good to be true? What if, like all the other girls he had fallen in love or nearly fallen in love with, Lucky turned out to have a set of complexes or a gross egomania she couldn’t control? Or a megalomania like Carol Abernathy?
That evening after the Paul Stuart shopping trip they didn’t go out. They had drinks sent up, had dinner sent up, had coffee sent up, watched the Late Show and the Late Late Show, and made love over and over in that same peculiar hungry way they had the night of Hervey Miller’s cocktail party. Grant’s more or less definite date of departure was only three days off now, and they talked about this.—“You talk about your search for reality in diving,” Lucky said once. “Reality is me. Marrying me, taking our chances with living. Having kids maybe. Who might be morons. Mongoloids. Or geniuses. That’s reality.” Grant didn’t answer.— “Maybe,” he said after a while. “I know I love you.” She was sitting nude on the bed with those supple legs clasped up against her chest, her cheek resting on her knees, looking at him. “But I don’t believe in love,” Grant said.—“Neither do I. I don’t believe in love either,” Lucky said. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” She did not move.
“I only know I have to be myself, alone for a while,” he lied, or half-lied. “I have to think a lot of things out.” She still did not move, and her great blue eyes looked and looked at him solemnly. “Oh, I love you so,” she said in a small voice like a little girl’s. “I don’t know what’ll happen to me when you leave me.” Two tears ran silently down her face. She continued to look at him. Then suddenly she threw back her head, sniffled, wiped her eyes and laughed a choked-up, lovely laugh.—“I’ll be back in six weeks,” Grant said painfully. Lucky had unclasped her knees and was sitting crosslegged.—“Ahh. But it won’t be the same,” she said. “Don’t you see?” For answer, Grant took her ankles and gently pulled her to him until her legs fell over the bed edge. Then he knelt and kissed his way up both of them and buried his face in that delicious place where he sometimes would like, in such painful moods as this, or so he often told himself, to return completely. Above him, he heard her sigh.
He made no decisions. He postponed his departure date yet another week, rented a car and took her up to Frank Aldane’s in Connecticut for a weekend.
4
IT WOULD BE A nice weekend, he told her. Secretly, he wanted to know what Frank and Marie thought of her. At the same time he knew beforehand, even to the phraseology his friends would use, exactly what they would say, and that it would be extremely cautionary. But he needed other opinions, any opinions. At the same time he was more crazily in love with her than ever, could hardly stand the thought of going away from her, and wanted nothing more than that his life continue day by day forever as it was going now. “I hate country weekends,” Lucky said. “I hate the country.” But she knew she was being put up for inspection, and prepared herself accordingly without complaints.
Grant had already arranged one inspection for her. The day before Paul Stuart’s had decided him to stay on another week he had arranged for her to meet his producers, agent and director for cocktails. From which meeting she had emerged with more than flying colors, with flying everything.
They met at Rattazzi’s on 48th Street, a hangout of his producers because it was right across the street from their midtown offices, which were a little far uptown for Broadway producers but which for that very reason gave them a certain air they felt. Lucky had never been to Rattazzi’s, though she often went to Michael’s Pub a few doors away. Because he had a final conference with them that afternoon, he told her to meet them there at 5:30.
Paul Gibson and Arthur Kline, Inc., had produced all three of Grant’s other plays and had been with him as a gang, a rather bawdy gang, from the start. Big Arthur Kline, massive, sorrowful, all the world’s enduring and overpowering ills and sorrows stamped on his great kindly moonface like road directions on a map, was a perfect matching partner for the smaller, hardeyed nervous bundle of bones and flesh which went by the name of Paul Gibson. It was hard to believe looking at the two of them that big Arthur was the tough hard mean-dealing businessman, and Gibson the sensitive, tasteful artist of the combination who could weep over some of Grant’s scenes. They had plenty of other successes in the string, mostly in musicals, but perhaps for that very reason, plus the fact that Grant was their most successful legitimate theater writer, he was a special favorite.
The director, a slightly older man named Don Celt, was the newest member of the group, having directed only one of Grant’s plays before, the second, and had been suggested by Grant’s agent Durrell Wood after they all read the first act sent in from Indianapolis. It was Gibson and Kline who had first suggested that Grant hire Wood, after the huge success of The Song of Israphael, the first play about the sailor and the whore. Wood was an old friend of theirs, and a perpetual enemy, and though they had chosen him now fought against them for Grant with a dedicated fury.
All in all they were a congenial, hairy, bawdy talking bunch, and Grant had been working hard with them on the script of the play all these weeks, in addition to his late nights and long mornings with Lucky. Usually they met for lunch to discuss and worked after, or met after lunch and worked through the afternoon till closing. Mostly the work consisted of trying to get Grant to change words or scenes for reasons of censorship or ‘business’ (for business read ‘in good taste’), and also sometimes—this was rare—because of esthetic or purely technical disagreements. If they were meeting for lunch, he would leave Lucky at 12:30 at the apartment, and then meet her for drinks somewhere as soon as he left them. It was the only time he was away from her. But now all that work was over, at least until such time as they began rehearsals, and he was only staying on now because of her.
He had told them all about her of course. In his happiness and relief he couldn’t have resisted. And in fact Gibson and Kline had noticed the change before he told them, because all their secretaries began arriving on time and the office ran smoothly. Old friends now over
the years they knew what to expect from Grant, and one unavoidable penalty of a Grant stay in New York was turmoil, inefficiency and late arrivals for work among the secretarial force. At least until Grant settled onto one girl. Arthur Kline always accused Grant of suffering from satyriasis.
So it was pretty much an established pattern when Grant told them about Lucky. They expected it. Arthur, his big moonface longsuffering of human beings as the moon’s face itself, rolled his eyes over at his partner and made a slowmotion shrug. Both men had met Mrs. Carol Abernathy (taking the train out to Indianapolis expressly for that purpose), both had felt the lash of her tongue (and in the earlier days the power of her personality), both had kept their mouths totally shut about what they thought of Grant’s relationship to her. They had also been introduced to quite a number of Grant’s New York girls. They were totally unprepared for the entrancing vision of loveliness that came floating up to them in Rattazzi’s, downed two hefty martinis, kidded them, spoke seriously and sympathetically to them about their boy Grant, and floated away again with a hammerstruck Grant tightly in arm.
Of the four of them only Don Celt the director had ever even heard of her before. “Oh, sure,” he said, in the office’s bar-gameroom, when told they were meeting her for drinks. “I knew her out on the Coast, three or four years ago. Well, didn’t really know her, met her a couple of times. Crazy chick. She’s the one tried to run down Buddy Landsbaum with his own car one night. Damn near did. Would of killed him.” Some look in Grant’s eye seemed to warn him, and he seemed to sort of turn and run the ball along the sideline while at the same time trying not to step one of his feet out of bounds. “Uh, one of those crazy nights. Everybody drunk as hell. I don’t know what the trouble— Yeah, I’d like to meet her,” he said. “Again.”
None of them knew what it was that she did to them. Least of all did Grant. It was as though she used some sort of ESP device, some sort of personal telepathy, which shut off and dazzled their eyes to everything but herself. For instance nobody knew what happened to her coat, or whether she even had one, or what color her dress was. She came in, took over, dominated them, left them staring vaguely at each other, and took Grant away with her.
“That’s some girl you got there, Ron,” big Arthur said with his sorrowful smile when Grant finally saw them again. “She’s a real beauty. Makes me wish I was thirty years younger.”
“If you were thirty years younger, you’d be twelve,” Grant said.
“Well, then twenty,” Arthur said.
“She’s got class. Some kind of class,” Paul Gibson said with a puzzled look, “that you don’t see on a lot of girls in this town.”
“Style,” said the fastidious Durrell Wood, “is what you mean. Style.”
Don Celt, still trying to move the ball forward along the sidelines without stepping out of bounds, frowned weightily. “She doesn’t look at all like I remember her. She looks mellower now. That’s it. Mellower.”
Grant grinned at him viciously. “That’s because she’s met me.”
Anyway, they all thought Grant had done himself proud this time, and at the same time some curious delicate instinct made them refrain from kidding him about a new girl as they might be expected to do, as indeed they had done lots of other times in the past. It was about the most perfect reaction Grant could have asked for.
Lucia (he had taken to calling her Lucia a lot now, like Hervey Miller, as though Lucky was too crass and too New Yorkese a nickname now for the way he felt about her) Lucia had told him about the dress, her dress, right away after, as they walked away from Rattazzi’s through the mucky sidewalks and slushy streets down 48th toward Park. “You were wonderful!” he said.
She laughed, with a sort of wild flashing glare. “Well, not really,” she said modestly. “But I did have a serious decision to make. Knowing the way all those fink bastards—”
“Hey, wait a minute! They’re not fink bastards!”
“(Of course not,)” she said parenthetically, “(don’t you think I know that?)—Knowing the way all those fink bastards who step out in town while their wives stay out in Westchester County think about New York single girls, I decided I’d better dress for them. The trouble was, I only have two prim dresses. And one of them is sleeveless: Bare Armpits! But the other one is a little old and’s a little faded under the arms. Well, I decided to wear the one with sleeves and keep my arms down. And after I saw that gang, I knew I was right.”
Grant had listened, at first delighted by the story, and then horrified at the direction in which it was leading her. “Oh, no! There wasn’t anything like that in it,” he growled. “They’re not like that! They know all about you, how I feel about you, I’ve been bragging you up to them for weeks.”
“Even so it’s a hell of a thing to make a girl do and put her through.”
“But that wasn’t it, that wasn’t it! I swear it wasn’t!”
“Anyway, I did it for you.”
“No! Please! Anyway, you were so magnificent I don’t think any of them even saw your dress.”
“What does that matter? It helped me get my con started. All of them sitting there in a row, waiting to inspect me. I bet I’ve fucked fifty men like them. Before I learned better. And every one of them’s scared to death.”
Grant found there was very little to say to this.
“At least you’re not scared, Ron.”
“No,” he said, hoping it was true. “I’m not scared.”
“Their wives, their kids, their homes in the country. Inspecting me!”
“No, no! It wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t an inspection. They’re my friends! I work with them! I wanted you to meet them.”
They had reached Park, and the wind came down it, biting in their faces. And now it was Lucky’s turn not to say anything. Grant had never seen her in such a state. When she did speak her voice had an almost lowing quality, deep, reverberant, about it. “Oh, Ron. I love you so. You and your secret little inspections. Take me home. Take me home quick. Take me home quick and make love to me. Make love to me my way.”
Grant thought later that he must have seemed almost to leap up off the ground. He moved that fast. But as usual whenever anyone really wanted one, there were no taxis immediately available. He came back to her and she took his arm. There was no anger in her now. Actually there had been no anger in her all along, it was something else. She hugged onto him and let him shelter her with his body from the wind. Finally, on the other side of Park, they found an empty cab coming down the ramp under the clock tower. In the cab they started necking hungrily, Grant not caring how much lipstick he got on him, with all the sweet hotness that belongs to youth and that before meeting her Grant had not felt for a long time, and Lucky grabbed his excited crotch through his trousers with one hand. But when they broke apart, she made him take her handkerchief for his face.
“Won’t Leslie be home?” he asked, wiping.
“No, she’s got a cocktail date with a new boyfriend. What she hopes will be a new boyfriend!”
Grant didn’t answer, and the cab moved along past the snowcovered street islands. It had come into his mind while kissing her to tell her about Don Celt, his strange sidelines-running look when her name was mentioned, and his story about her trying to run Buddy Landsbaum down with his own car. Don had looked so peculiar. Could Celt have been one of her nameless 400 men too, like Buddy? Grant ground his teeth with a strange peculiar hatefilled anguish he had never felt before. He decided it was better not to say anything, not just now. And why had it come into his mind just when he was kissing her?
“You’re such a stupid bastard really,” she suddenly said lovingly. “You’re so lucky to have—” She stopped.
“To have what?”
“To have me in love with you!” she said defiantly. “That’s what!”
“I know it,” Grant said humbly. Could she have divined his thought about Celt and Buddy? It was weird.
And he did know he was lucky. Nevertheless this
did not save him from taking a fearful tongue-lashing from Leslie when she finally got home from her cocktail date. They were sitting together, already dressed again and having a drink together and warm and safe again, when she stamped in on her tiny feet in her tiny quickstepping walk, and launched into him without preamble.
“Of all the goddamn lousy chickenshit things to do! Of all the— That is the most goddamn fucking insulting thing I have ever heard of. How dare you? Do you know who you are messing around with here? You are not playing around with some parttime call girl chorus girl from the Copa! You are having a love affair with Lucia Videndi, Ron Grant! Making her come out and display herself and be inspected by your goddamned producers, to see whether they think you ought to go out with her or not! I don’t care whether you’re a big important playwright or not!”
There was much more in this vein before Lucky finally got her hushed up and stopped, with Grant trying to protest his innocence all the time. Then she went over and flung herself down in the one big chair and began to cry into a tiny handkerchief about the size of a postage stamp. “Goddam fucking men: Not one pair of balls down the whole of Madison Avenue. All of you. Men make me sick. Why oh why we even got to need you and have to have you—I just wish there was some other way for a girl to be happy.”
“What happened with your date?” Lucky said.
“Nothing,” Leslie said and shrugged. “Oh, you know. The same old crap. The same usual warmhearted bullshit routine. I understand him.” She looked up at Lucky. “He’s married too you know of course. I don’t see why if they are all so goddam unhappily married so much all of them all the time, why did they ever get married in the first place.” She wiped her eyes and nose—and became totally despondent. “I don’t know,” she said sullenly. “It isn’t worth it.”