Go to the Widow-Maker (17 page)

“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 can 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.

If she didn’t hate praying and the idea of praying so much, she’d by God pray.

His phone call came in just a few minutes before one. He had, he said, taken a cab straight home from the station and called her. When she heard that raspy, deep, husky, fatigued voice over the phone the pit of her stomach dropped completely out from under her.

“
Get on a plane and come,” he was saying. “We’ll stay here in Indianapolis two or three days. Then we’ll make the trip to Florida together. I’ll send you home from Miami.”

“I don’t know how to get a plane ticket!” Lucky wailed. “I never know how to do anything like that!”

“Well— Get Leslie to help you. I hate telephone conversations, damn it. I hate them. Nobody ever understands anybody. I wish you were here right now.”

“I haven’t got any money,” Lucky was able to say finally, though it hurt her to.

There was a pause.

“Well, I’ll send you a couple hundred bucks. That ought to be enough, hadn’t it? I’ll wire it. I’ll send it Western Union. To your address. All right?”

“Yes,” Lucky said. “Yes, darling. Anything.” Her whole intestinal and pelvic area was melting into a frothy cream of butter. Her legs had gone too weak to stand up. She spread them apart and let herself come open. If only she could have him here right now.

“If only I could have you here right now,” Grant’s voice said. “Well, then, all right? Okay?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Okay. Goodby.”

“Goodby, Ron.”

But neither one of them hung up. She could hear a sort of agonized breathing from the other end. Neither spoke.

“Goodby again,” Grant said finally, and the phone clicked dead in her ear. Tears brimming in her eyes she put it back in its cradle.

She lay still for a few minutes thinking about him. Then she threw back the covers, and everything began to run too fast, like a movie film played at a speed faster than normal. At five-thirty in the afternoon she was at Idlewild boarding a plane. Somewhere in the confusion she had got stuck in her head that it was to Minneapolis, Indiana, that she was going. But fortunately Leslie, whom she had called and who had come home from the office to help her, had bought the right ticket and steered her to the right boarding passage. Because Forbes Morgan now had an old car, they pressed him into driving them out. The two of them waved her on board.

In such ways did people begin to change their lives, or try to. Change them upside down and all around until they didn’t even look like the same lives. On the plane, she prepared herself for three hours of doing nothing but think.

Even while he was so sweetly and kindly driving her to the airport with Leslie, Lucky had had nothing but contempt for Forbes Morgan. What kind of a man was it that would drive a girl he had been fucking and was in love with out to the airport to go and meet another lover? How could any real girl love a man like that? That was the trouble with all these people, they were all so kind and good and liberal and up-to-date and modern, they could no longer function as simple males. Victims of their own ‘liberal’ propaganda. Treat girls as equals. But it wasn’t only that. Underneath that was a still deeper, even scarier level: the work they all did in this hugely organized business of controlling the minds of the people for the sellers of products, whether in the advertising end or in the actual communication—TV, radio, publishing—had shriveled their souls, if not their testicles as well, until each man became somehow less of himself than when he started, in some strange way nobody could define. This didn’t seem to happen to the lawyers and accountants and bookkeepers and simple office workers.

The diminishment seemed to take two forms. There were those who came to believe ardently in the stuff, largely junk, which they sold. And there were those who became totally cynical about it all. These were the ones who drove sports cars in rallys, flew their own planes, or became amateur bullfighters, or skied or mountainclimbed. All, both types, became ardent girl-chasers, even the impotent ones.

Perhaps the intensive, vicious competition had something to do with it, too. Even a man as highly placed as Peter Raven was afraid, knew he could be fired tomorrow if he fucked up on one single big account. And their manhood suffered. Like poor old Forbes.

Lucky remembered, by contrast with Forbes, the time Raoul had left her stashed in Kingston to go back into South America to mess around with his revolution he could not leave alone. It was like dope to him. After six weeks of it she had been bored, and had taken up with a handsome young Jamaican guy. Although he was really far too light to be called a black Negro (almost all the upper class Jamaicans were mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons or less), and although his body hair though kinky was reddish in color, Jacques still qualified sufficiently for her to be able to think of him as her ‘Negro lover’. Anyway, esthetically, their bodies were beautiful together in the mirror; he was dark enough for that. In any case, whether Raoul had been told about it or had come back on his own and guessed what was going on, he packed her up and had her out of there back to New York so fast it made your head swim. She and Leslie had giggled about it for a long time.

What would Forbes have done? She was reasonably certain that Grant would never have driven her out to any airport to go off to another lover. Or would he? He seemed to keep sending her back all the time, sending her back to the apartment from the train, and now sending her back to New York from Miami. But he had called her to come out. She was pretty sure, if they really did make the drive to Miami, she could talk him into taking her on to Kingston with him.

And that myth about Negroes having bigger things than white men, if her Jamaican boyfriend Jacques was any example, was not a myth at all. By contrast, Raoul’s had been very ordinary. They had giggled about that, too.

A hysterical laughter began to bubble up inside of her, rising out of her inability to cope with or accept appreciation of the awful suspense elements of this her life story—it was like spending a Saturday afternoon with
The Perils of Pauline.
When a man across the aisle tried to strike up an acquaintance, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, trying to keep from breaking out into uproarious crazy laughter.

Then, suddenly, there rose up in her again the awful doom-gloom sense that she would be punished by not being allowed to have Grant. She could not open her eyes because of the man across the aisle, so she sat with it in the dark behind her eyelids, trying to make it go away.

He met her at the scary modern steel-and-glass numbered entrance portal as she came in off the field of the big new modern airport, and in the confusion of noise, flashing bright lights, shrieking conversations and reverberating footfalls in the hollow corridor there began for her a peculiar dreamlike sequence of unreality that did not leave her until she boarded the New York jet in Miami ten days later. In the confusion she was convinced for the better part of an hour, until Grant finally unconvinced her, that she was for some reason in a town called Minneapolis.