Go to the Widow-Maker (12 page)

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.

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.

I
T 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.