by James Jones
“That hick! Well that’s what I was afraid of.”
Forbes Morgan. Old Forbes. He really did have a big thing. Lucky looked at him sorrowfully. She was exhausted. She felt sad for both of them, herself and Forbes. He was a nice boy but she had always told him she wasn’t in love with him— or, well, if she hadn’t told him, she had certainly given him enough signs along the way so that he ought to have understood that she wasn’t. Looking up at him, she turned off her ears again. Forbes Morgan of the prolific Morgans. There were so many of the prolific Morgans now that being a Morgan hardly meant anything. Nevertheless Forbes stood to inherit a nice-sized little fortune when his old grandfather died just the same. She had even visited them up there in Connecticut with him one time, and last year, for quite a long time, Forbes—broke, without a nickel, with hardly a change of his Harvard type clothes—had stayed here in the apartment with her and Leslie, sleeping on the daybed couch. She had taken care of him, fed him, kept up his spirits, fucked him, and finally had even gotten him a job because at just about that same time, when Forbes had moved in with them, she had met Peter Raven and spent a crazy funny wild drunken weekend with him at the Plaza and then had started going out with him too at the same time. Peter Raven, who was married, and was another of those sons of old rich but now broke New England-Harvard families (Les nouveaux pauvres, she called them all). He was a top CBS Television executive, and while she was going out with him, after much concentrated arguing, she had finally talked him into hiring Forbes in a good executive job. At one point Peter wanted to leave his wife and marry her, but she had gently without hurting his feelings talked him out of that. Neither man knew she was going out with and fucking the other. This was one of her own private little games, little jokes, that nobody knew except Leslie and maybe Annie Carler.
“So how’s the job?” she said, turning her ears back on again. It had been a big step up for Forbes, and the doing of it had been good for Peter’s soul. She hadn’t hurt anyone.
Forbes, who (aware that though she was looking at him she wasn’t listening) had turned his conversation slowly around to Leslie, now brought his gaze back to Lucky. “Oh, all right, you know. It’s fun work. And Peter’s very good to me. We’ve become great pals.
“Listen, like I said a minute ago, if there is anything at all I can do to ‘ease your burden’ as they say, will you tell me?”
“As a matter of fact, to be honest, there is something you can do for me right now,” Lucky said. “You can go home and leave me alone. Maybe you guessed: I don’t feel much like talking to anybody tonight.”
Forbes’s face expressed deep hurt. But he swallowed it down manfully. “All right, sweetie. I’ll go right now. May I call you tomorrow? Just to see how things go?”
“I don’t know,” Lucky said despairfully. Forbes really did have a big one. Much bigger than Peter Raven’s. Painfully, she wished Grant were here right now, instead of him. “I really don’t know. You must sense that I don’t really want to look at you right now.” She felt if he didn’t get out of here soon, she was going to start to cry again, and she didn’t want to.
Forbes got his coat.
There was silence for quite a while after he left. But the growing pressure to cry began to subside as soon as Forbes was outside the door and was replaced by a deep sense of doom and gloom that was not entirely without its pleasant aspect. Doomed to gloom. They sat on in silence.
“Do you want to talk?” Leslie said finally.
“No I don’t,” Lucky said plaintively. “I really don’t.”
“Okay. Then we won’t,” Leslie said stoutly. “But let me ask just one question,” she added eagerly. “Did he say anything about coming back to New York?”
“Yes. He’s said that several times. He says he’s coming back to me as soon as this diving junket is over.”
“That’s a strange thing, his feeling about this diving business, and how he has to do it alone,” Leslie said.
“Yeah.”
Leslie made a Jewish gesture, not quite a shrug.
“What am I going to do?” Lucky asked her.
Again Leslie made the gesture. She pouted out her lips. “I can’t tell you.”
“He’s very strait-laced and very stern in certain ways, you know,” she said.
“Well, naturally! He certainly is. Which is exactly what you want. Honey, I knew your father! Remember?”
“You know what the bastard had the nerve to ask me? It was yesterday at lunch, at Chanticleer, when he was already getting everything all ready to go, mind you. He said if we did get married, would I sign a waiver on his property and his income. One of those individual property statements, where he keeps what’s his and I keep what’s mine!”
“So what did you say?”
“I said certainly not. I wasn’t marrying him as an investment, I was marrying him because I wanted to live with him the rest of my life.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He thought about it.”
“Well, at least he’s thinking about marriage seriously, if he’s thinking about his money.”
“How do I know what that foster-mother of his will say that he lives with out there in Minneapolis?”
“Indianapolis, dear.”
“Indianapolis,” Lucky repeated vaguely. The silence reigned again.
“And fuck his money,” Lucky suddenly said plaintively. “He hasn’t got all that much money. My mother’s got a hell of a lot more than he has.”
“Which, I must add,” Leslie said, “doesn’t do you one damn bit of good.”
“That’s true,” Lucky said gloomily.
Again the silence fell over them, each of them wrapped up in whatever special thoughts she carried.
“Do you remember how we used to talk, kid about him?” Lucky said finally. “Ron Grant, the last of the unmarried writers? How we tried to arrange plots for me to meet him?”
“We didn’t really try.”
“No, but we spent a lot of time laughing and joking about it. Ron Grant, the last gasp, the last chance, the last one left, for me to marry a real writer.”
“I never thought you’d ever really meet him. Let alone really fall in love with him.”
“I can’t believe it won’t happen,” Lucky said, more to herself than to Leslie. “It has to happen. Why, it’s like Fate. I have to believe it will happen.—If it doesn’t happen,” she said in a hollow whisper, looking over at Leslie with hollow blue-shadowed eyes, “I don’t know what will become of me. I can’t marry any of these people. I can’t go back and marry some dumbhead from Syracuse.”
“It’s that kindly fatherly quality about him that sunk us all,” Leslie said, “taking all us girls out to dinner with you like he did, being so nice to us all. Remember the Sunday he told the story of the play? He really likes girls.”
Lucky didn’t hear this. She had lapsed into silence, turning off her ears again, and begun thinking about that time, the time when they used to kid about Ron as the last of the unmarried writers. It was about a year ago, just shortly before Forbes with no place to stay had moved in with them. Grant was in town then, working with his producers or something. He had even taken a hotel apartment somewhere, and was trying to write there. The grapevine had it that he couldn’t be doing much serious work what with all the heavy drinking and late hours he was keeping, and apparently it was true because after six weeks he packed up and went back to Minneapolis or wherever it was. And it was during that time that he started having an affair with an old friend of hers, Hope York, a New Jersey very Jewish girl singer and dancer who had never quite made it big on Broadway. She hadn’t seen or heard from Hopie in over two years when one day she called and asked if she could come over. When she arrived, it was to speak only about her love affair with Ron Grant the playwright. She was madly in love with him and wanted to marry him. But he wasn’t having any, and Hopie was afraid she’d botched it with her kookiness. She was really quite kooky, and kept coming up with weird wayout
plots to pressure Grant or blackmail him into marrying her. She wanted Lucky’s help. She did not, however many times Lucky and Leslie invited her to, bring Grant over to the apartment. She would not even say where he was staying, though neither of them ever asked her. But it was clearly a closely guarded secret. Hopie wasn’t about to set her competition up in business. So they never met him. When he went back home to the Middlewest, Hopie was distraught and beside herself for two months. It was then that Lucky laughingly suggested that they all get together with all the rest of the girls they knew who qualified, and form a Writer Fuckers Club.
She sighed. Leslie, who knew well her habit of literally turning off her ears when she was thinking, had lapsed into silence too. And suddenly she thought of Forbes Morgan’s thing again. It certainly was a big one. Maybe the biggest she had encountered. Except perhaps for Jacques the Haitian. But it wasn’t like Grant’s. Nobody’s was like Grant’s. Even though it was only normal sized. She guessed that was love. It was so pretty.
“Remember the Writer Fuckers Club?” Lucky said, and then suddenly she started to cry. She didn’t cry like most people, with sobs and shaking shoulders and a screwed-up face, she simply sat motionless with her eyes wide open, breathing evenly but shallowly through a slightly open mouth, and tears ran down her face to splash on her lax hands in her lap, taking a large part of her eye makeup with them. She didn’t know why she cried like that. She just always had. Maybe it was because she hated to cry so much that it hurt her more to do it. She felt totally helpless, unable to do a thing. She always had needed somebody to help her and take care of her. She always would.
When it stopped, she got up. Leslie had gone to get her a hand towel for the mascara, and fussed around her like some helpless mother hen. Lucky shook her head vigorously, splashing tears out to both sides with the swinging champagne hair. She had always hated being beautiful. People never liked you for you yourself alone, for what you were, but only for your beauty. It was one of the worst kinds of loneliness. That was why she was such an easy pushover for men so often. Oh, Daddy!
“I’m going to bed,” she said to Leslie,
“It’s only seven-thirty, honey.”
“I don’t give a damn. If anybody calls for me, I don’t want to talk. I’m just going to stay in bed.”
“For six whole weeks? Not again,” Leslie said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Where’s that book of Ron’s plays and short stories he gave us?”
Leslie got it for her. “Can I fix you something to eat?”
“I couldn’t eat anything.”
“I wish there was something I could do,” Leslie said.
Abruptly Lucky put her arms around her, and they stood together that way, hugging each other. “Aint nobody can do nothin for nobody,” she said.
“Anyway, you know I’m here, sweetie,” Leslie said.
“Aren’t you going out?”
Leslie looked guilty. “I sort of had a date, but it wasn’t sure, and anyway I don’t feel like going out.”
Lucky didn’t answer. Later from the bedroom she heard Leslie’s new boyfriend ring, come in, low voices for a little while, and then go out. She wriggled herself violently further down into pillow and covers so that nothing except her face and the hands which held the book were outside, uncovered. She did not want the cold air of the world to touch her, not one smidgen more of her than was absolutely necessary. Her two hands were a concession she had to make if she wanted to read Ron’s book.
Ron. Ron. Ron. Names were so funny. They didn’t mean a damn thing, until you met the people attached to them, and then they all seemed to fit and be exactly right. Ron Grant whom she had never met was one name, and Ron Grant whom she knew was a totally different name.
He wrote well. Even in his prose short stories. Which were strange introspective pieces almost without dialogue, as if he were deliberately trying to avoid the dialogue of plays. He didn’t spend much time on delicate stylistic niceties but sort of bullassed right through. But his sensitivity about the physical world and his perceptions about people were so incredibly sensitized that they were almost feminine, and they made you stop sometimes with a feeling of ‘Gee! I’ve felt that!’
She had never seen the first play, The Song of Israphael, which was such a colossal hit. She had not even been living in New York then, and was still in school. But whenever she did come into the city she avoided it simply because it was such a huge hit. If it was such a big hit, how could it be any good? Now she found that it was good. Very good. Grant’s understanding of the whore amounted almost to empathy and astounded her, how could he know that much about women, though when she thought about it, knowing him now, she did not see why it should. She read right through it without even a second’s pause, thinking this writer was the kind of man one would like to know, until she remembered she did know him, and in fact had made violent love with him. When she finished it she put the book down and covered herself with the covers completely, head and all. After a while she put her head out and called to Leslie, in a plaintive, child’s voice.
“Do you think he might call me from out there?”
“Do you want to talk to him if he does?”
“Of course.” She paused. “What time does the train get in?”
“Around noon,” Leslie called.
She wriggled back down into the covers until only her face from eyebrows to mouth was outside.
“But I wouldn’t get my hopes—”
“I’m not,” Lucky said. She turned on her side and shut her eyes and began going back over the past weeks in her mind in luxurious, complete detail, recalling every happy second pleasurably, just as if everything were all right, and he was here, in the other bed there, beside her, sound asleep.
When she woke it was with a definite sense of loss. They had slept together so closely for so long that her body, especially her skin, began missing him, missing his skin, even before her mind was awake enough to appreciate it. There was that way he had of sleeping completely under the covers with his head resting on her flank and one heavy arm lying across her belly as if holding her down. She loved that feeling of being held down like that, by a man, by a real man. Authority.
When she opened her eyes finally, it was mid-morning and the cold heatless winter sun pouring in through the thin curtains carried a sense of autumnal stillness in the air outdoors and of a winter loneliness so deep that it froze to the bone. The same light had seemed happy and gay as long as Ron was still here. Staying under the covers except for her face, she reached out one hand, feeling for the telephone until she found it, and began calling people. She would not even get out of the bed for coffee. Athena Frank, her lawyer friend; Annie Carler at home; Leslie at her office. As she talked she pulled lightly at her crotch hair with one hand, opening repeatedly the outer lips of her vagina ever so slightly. As she was so fond of saying at parties or wherever else she thought it might shock, her trouble was that at the age of eight she masturbated and liked it. At ten-thirty Forbes Morgan called her from his office, and she told him she was staying in bed and wanted to be left alone. He must already have been crying on Peter Raven’s shoulder, because a few minutes later he called.
“You’re really a cute little dirty rat fink, aren’t you?” his voice came over the wire in that amused wry drawl he affected. “Forbes has been in here crying on my shoulder all morning because he’s in love with you. It turns out he’s been having an affair with you for almost a year.”
“It was never an affair. We were merely sleeping together.” But she didn’t feel like playing sexy boy-girl games today.
“Sure. All during the time I was going out with you. I’ve lived in this town long enough that you’d think I’d smarten up. And not only that, you had the audacity to ask me for a job for him. And me, I gave it to him!”
“He needed the job. Are you going to fire him?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t fire him if I wanted. He’s been promoted. Only the Big Man himself ca
n fire him now.”
“It was good for you to give him the job,” Lucky said.
“Sure. It sure was. And the whole thing was very good for you, too. Doubly good, I might say, no?”
Lucky knew she was supposed to laugh here, but she didn’t feel up to it. “At least I didn’t tell your wife the story,” she said tartly.
“No. That’s true. I do owe you that,” the amused voice drawled. “Only it might have been good for her. If you had.”
“Listen, Peter, I don’t feel much like talking,” she said. The whole thing bored her, made her sick, even frightened her. She was tired of this life, and all these smart hip chic people who ran the nation’s thinking for the advertisers. She simply couldn’t go on like this. Not now.
“So he’s got you over a barrel, the playwright,” Peter gloated. “I hope he’s as hard on you as you were on everybody else.”
“You don’t really mean that, Peter, do you?”
“No. I don’t really. I hope Lucky has luck. Now go back to sleep. I’ll call you maybe tomorrow.”
She didn’t even bother with saying ‘bye’ as she hung up. Underneath everything else, under the electric skin contact she felt for Grant, under the deep passion of their actual lovemaking, below and under the deep desperation she felt about her life with him gone, was still something else. It was hard to even find words for it. Sometimes she wasn’t even sure it was there. It was so deep down. Mainly it was a feeling, a superstitious feeling that she would be punished. Punished for what? Hell, take your pick. Anything. You could say punished for her ‘past’. Whatever. A superstition that she would be punished by not being allowed to have Ron Grant, now that she had found him. She had heard the old soldier’s cynical saying that ‘Whores make the best wives’. And probably they did. Anything to get out of the profession. And she knew she would make Grant a good wife. But that superstitious feeling of getting punished was still there; anyway, sometimes it was there. That goddamned fucking Catholic upbringing that she had tried and striven so hard to rid herself of; superstition was still there.