Go to the Widow-Maker (13 page)

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.”

“Ron’s leaving Thursday,” Lucky said lightly. “That’s four days from now.”

“Oh, you poor darling!” Leslie cried, her eyes losing their dullness.

Lucky threw her head back, tossing her champagne hair, and laughed gaily though it clearly cost her quite an effort. She looked like she might cry but she didn’t. “Four days is four days. Can be a long time.”

Grant was hurting more at the moment than he was willing to invest. “Listen, you two deadheads,” he growled at them, more viciously energetic than he meant, and both turned to stare. He softened his tone. “What’s going on here, anyway? What kind of a morgue is this? Is this any way to spend my last four days in town? Come on, let’s all go out and do something.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Lucky said.

Leslie’s eyes fired up again with indignant outrage when she looked at Grant. “You really ought to take her with you! She knows everybody in Kingston!”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve explained it all before. I just simply can’t.”

He remained adamant about that. However, the afternoon at Paul Stuart had made him decide to stay over another week, and coupled to the meeting with his producers, and then the weekend at the Aldanes’, all three were enough to make him change his plans about New York.

He had intended, after his diving junket to Jamaica, to go straight back home to Indianapolis and start in work on another play (though he had no idea yet what subject it would be about), and try to get as deep into it as he could before he was needed for rehearsals on this one, on
I’ll Never Leave Her.
(My God, he thought with despair, did you ever really call it that? Yes; you did!) Now though, he was coming straight back from Jamaica to Manhattan, to Lucky. Maybe he would take a small apartment, a cheap one, somewhere and try to get started on the new play here.

He told all this to Lucky, rather proudly, on Monday on their way back to the city from the Aldanes’. It was once again four days to departure time.

“All right,” Lucky said calmly, without any great enthusiasm, ”we’ll see. It’s all right. We’ll just have to wait and see. How do I know what will happen in the next six weeks to change you? How do you know what will happen to change me?”

He was at the wheel. “You don’t mean like—you would fall in love with somebody else? Do you?” Having to watch the road carefully, he did not look at her.

“I don’t know,” she said, with a sort of tired patience. “How do I know?”

“Well, if it is, it is,” Grant said, vaguely but also stiffly, and braked slightly before swinging out into the second lane to pass a slower car.

“That’s what I said,” Lucky said calmly.

“Nobody’s going to bulldoze me into anything,” he said.

“Nobody’s trying to,” Lucky said airily, and went on looking out the window. She had, at the Aldanes’, once again been her own unbelievably winning, too-good-to-be-true self.

It had been a lovely ride up there in the Hertz car, along the curving parkways, the fields all snowy but the road clear and good, not much traffic. Frank had a nice old colonial house under big trees on the side of a hill, a guesthouse, five acres of parklike woods they could walk through in the snow. They did not, however, do much walking. But they did do a lot of drinking. Lucky didn’t like the country outdoors, and Grant discovered he was not equipped with the proper shoes and clothes for snow-walking. On the other hand, they both were properly dressed and equipped for whatever drinking might be done, and Frank Aldane was a big drinker.

Frank Aldane was a big drinker, but he took very good care of his health while doing it—as he did with everything. This was largely because he was a consummate hypochondriac. Six months ago he had stopped smoking because of the cancer scare. For two months he had been unable to write at all, but after that he had come out of it into the clear, clean-lunged and cured, and now buttonholed everybody that he could get to listen about how they must stop smoking. His intensity when making these speeches made his genuine concern for everybody that much more sweet, endearing. He wouldn’t even smoke a pipe, now, he said.