Go to the Widow-Maker (7 page)

They didn’t really know each other well. Buddy was always off in Hollywood or South America or Florida, Grant was always home in Indianapolis with his unknown (but suspected) ‘mistress’. Buddy it turned out was having his troubles too. His second wife was costing him so much to divorce that he might not even be able to marry again—even should he ever want to. In addition, her dress shop in Miami Beach had failed and he was having to absorb that. The young star he had made, and whom Grant had met tonight, was already beginning to dally her next producer-director, for her next film. When the whiskey was gone, they went to bed. What was the point of Grant going back alone to the New Weston? It was in the morning, after they’d started off with orange juice and vodka, that Buddy thought of Lucky. Lucky Videndi.

“I don’t know if I ought to introduce you to her, though,” Buddy said after he’d promised to call her and had already picked up the phone. He put the phone back in its cradle. “You’re one of those rough-tough brutal he-man types, and she’s a very sophisticated, sensitive girl.”

Grant grinned. He knew that a lot of people thought of him in that way, but he knew enough real ‘he-man’ types to know that this opinion of him was comparative, very comparative. “Cut the shit,” he said, “I’m no more of a brutal he-man type than you or anybody is.”

“Well, you’re not the type I—or Lucky either—would think of as a very hip, Ivy-League New Yorker.”

“Aw, come on. Then what’d you suggest her for? Okay, then don’t call her. And go to hell.”

Buddy had a peculiar but very common look on his face. It was the look of a man who has screwed a girl and is vain of it and wants everyone to know, but at the same time is committed by his code of honor not to say so or tell. His eyebrows registered smugness, a little embarrassment and some chagrin, all at the same time.

“I don’t know how to explain it to you, Ron. But she’s a very special type of girl. She’s not like most of the kids you and I run into in town. Hell, I could have put her into a couple of my films, groomed her a little, and made her a star but she said to hell with that. She thinks all actors and actresses are exhibitionist and stupid insensitive egos.”

“She’s right,” Grant put in.

“So she works for us a little every now and then, in bit parts or doubling or as script girl, whenever she needs money. She’s got her Master’s in Political Philosophy. Her old man was the biggest bootlegger in upper New York State in the ’20s and made a fortune. So she’s . . .”

He stopped. His face wore another look, one of genuine puzzlement now, one which he had unintentionally talked himself into.

“She just had a rich young South American she was going to marry shot out from under her, so to speak, down there. You know the South Americans. That was a year ago. She’s been working on a play since then. I don’t know if it’s good. She won’t talk about it. She’s been very low since her boyfriend got knocked off, says she’s looking for a new relationship. I . . .” Buddy stopped again, and scratched his rumpled head, a different, deeper kind of puzzled chagrin on his face now. “Well, I called her up and tried to get back in with her,” he said, “but she doesn’t want any part of me anymore. Says she’s had me, up to here. That way. We’re still friends, she still works for us sometimes, but that’s it.”

He looked at Grant with vulnerable eyes, his face puffy and his belly out from all the late nights and boozing. “This is all in the strictest confidence, Ron. But I had to tell you.”

“Okay okay,” Grant said. He suddenly felt sorry for old Buddy, who had not done a play in ten years now. “So call her or don’t call her.”

“And she’s very beautiful,” Buddy added. He drank off another half a glass of orange juice and vodka and then went back to the telephone. After he had talked to her awhile, he put Grant on. The voice, coming through the instrument, sounded husky with a shy edge of wit and laughter just under the surface. She also sounded rather embarrassed, as if she were trying hard not to think of this call and introduction as a form of male procurement. After looking at Buddy, and receiving an affirmative nod, Grant gently and as charmingly as he could made a date with her that night. He was to pick her up at her place, it was over the liquor store and the only tenement on Park Avenue, she said.

“I just did you the biggest favor I could ever do you,” Buddy said sadly as he hung up, and then carried him off to Faye Emerson’s house around the corner where he pushed drinks on him all afternoon, then took him to a cocktail party way downtown with Buddy’s own date, all of it as if now that he’d introduced him he was trying to get him drunk enough and make him late enough so that Grant would miss the date.

When he did arrive, he was forty-five minutes late and more than a little drunk, thanks to Buddy. But he had been emotionally turned on at the cocktail party by a goodlooking girl who wanted to make him (wasn’t it always that way? either drought or flood), and he could feel his not inconsiderable charm working in him like a smoothly purring well-tuned engine. (Ah, if he could only turn it on and off at will!) After climbing four flights of narrow stairs in the tiny building, he knocked and was admitted to a delegation of four girls, three of whom seated on the couch were obviously there to look him over. The prettiest of the four, who had opened the door, put her hand out and smiling nervously said, “Hello, I’m Lucky. You’re kind of late. For a first date.” He apologized, “I very nearly didn’t make it at all, by God!” he added. “I think Buddy was deliberately trying to get me drunk and make me late. So you’d be mad at me.”

“I guess he’s not above it,” she said, her smile still nervous.

Buddy had told him she was beautiful. But that had not prepared him for the kind of breathtaking beauty he found himself facing. All he could think was, It’s unfair, it’s unfair! It very nearly choked off and killed his smoothly purring charm. Her shoulderlength champagne-colored hair was combed straight back above the smoothly rounded forehead in a sort of lion’s-mane effect. She had high slightly prominent cheekbones that slanted her eyes the least tiniest bit. But beneath the short straight nostril-flaring nose, her mouth was her most attractive feature. It was wide enough that it seemed to go all the way across her face although it didn’t, and the full sweet upper lip was so unusually short that it appeared unable to cover a perfect set of prominent upper teeth except by an act of conscious will on the part of its owner. Below the long full lower lip was a tiny cute jaw and chin that further accentuated the mouth. When she smiled with it, even nervously like now, it not only lit up the entire little apartment but appeared to radiate right on through the walls into the apartments around. It was typical of Lucky, Grant learned later, that she should consider her Italian nose her best feature and be embarrassed about that exquisite mouth. But apart from her face, her figure was enough to drive men mad.

Grant never was able to describe the why of her body’s beauty in words, even to himself. It had something to do with the unusual width and squareness of the shoulders, and the long line which tapered down from them to the waist, to flare immediately into a pair of gorgeous, unusually highassed hips; and perhaps because above this width of shoulder rode the slender neck and high small head of a princess. Actually, she needed the wide shoulders to support the big full globes of her breasts thrusting out in the tight black dinner dress. Her calves were perfect, and ended in strong delicate aristocrat’s ankles and the powerful feet of a pro dancer, which it turned out later, she had been. In the tight dress there was suggested just a hint of an equally powerful mons veneris. In her heels she was just a hair shorter than Grant, and she stood very straight, carrying her torso high off her hips, the slender neck extended to carry the small head, in the manner of a Jamaican woman carrying a market basket on her head. She moved the same way. And icing all this cake together, another indescribable quality, a reserved sexuality oozed from her like her very own invisible honey. She was obviously the doted-upon darling of the three girls on the couch, to whom she now began to introduce Grant.

Grant was totally bowled over, but he managed to acknowledge the introductions. He had been out with several coldly professional beauties over the years, but this girl was far and away the most beautiful woman he had ever met, and this included a few very famous female movies stars. It would take him several days to separate the names of the three girls on the couch. But he had always been bad at names anyway.

Leslie Green was Lucky’s roommate in the apartment. A small, pert girl with a good figure in crotch-tight green slacks, raven hair piled up high on her head to make her look taller, and a long haunted Jewish face perhaps a tenth as beautiful as her pal’s, she was obviously the self-appointed general manager of Lucky’s emotional life and the Leader of the Delegation to Study Grant. Her snapping black eyes stated unequivocally that she was not about to let Lucky not be appreciated. Grant felt that her eyes softened a little after she looked him over.

Mrs. Athena Frank was a blocky blonde girl with a square face somewhat marred by acne and a rather gracelessly lush, sensual figure. The introductions turned up the fact that she was a lawyer and Grant wondered uneasily if she were the official legal member of the team, the committee. Her open and belligerent hostility showed already, anyway, which way she would vote on the subject of Ron Grant, playwright.

Mrs. Annie Carler was a slender, fairly tall Jewish girl of about Grant’s own age, with short tousled black hair and lushly dissipated circles under her eyes, much given to unconscious posturings of her long pretty neck and slender back into modern-dance, Martha Graham poses. With a sly puckish grin, she seemed to be enjoying the situation very much and appeared to be the most noncommittal of the three.

All three of them were clearly madly in love with Lucky, her wit and her beauty; and if there were any hidden jealousies in all this anywhere, Grant could not yet smell them out. If she had a big reputation going in Manhattan, and apparently she did, these three were going to promulgate it. And like any real queen, Lucky treated her subjects with dignity, and with a deep respect for their good taste in serving her. There was some small talk—in which Grant did not feel he came off particularly brilliantly—then she got her coat and they whisked out the door and down the four flights of narrow badly lit stairs out onto the nocturnal glories of Park in a winter snowfall. Rich people in dinner clothes and furs were getting into Cadillac limousines and taxis all around them.

“Well, do you think I passed inspection?”

Lucky gave him a sly crooked grin that made her blue eyes glint. “I think so.” She looked at him squarely. “You’re pretty famous.”

He waited but she didn’t say more. In the cab, glancing at her sideways, as she nestled that nosey, toothy, short-upper-lipped profile down into the collar of her coat, Grant realized with a start that he had never before in his life been so proud to be seen in public with a woman. And, especially after these past two years of hibernation and work in Indianapolis, with his mistress and his new play, it made his heart jump. In the past he had often looked with envy at the escorts of unknown, real beauties—of which there were few enough in this world, known or unknown—the kind which made heads turn and tables buzz. Now he was escorting one himself. Settling back, he told himself this might turn out to be one of the great nights of his life.

It didn’t. Though it started out well enough. He took her to the Petite Ange, haven of the sick comics after they graduated from Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard, for dinner and the show. After a few drinks she loosened up and lost her nervousness and began to display that really penetrating wit, humor, and incredibly sexy charm Buddy Landsbaum had told him about. She was apparently an incorrigible flirt. But then, she was also so beautiful, so sexually attractive that for her simply to look at a man was enough. Grant had never sat in a nightclub so proudly, so selfcontent. Heads turned toward her, tables buzzed. The only trouble was that as she loosened up after a few drinks, Grant after a few drinks became quite drunk. All the drinks his old pal Buddy had pushed on him all day long, which drinks and other chicanery he had survived to keep his date, now began to catch up with him. The dinner and all that good food in his belly saved him for a while, but after the show they came back out to the lounge-bar to listen to the colored fag piano player and drink and talk. Lucky was a little drunk herself by this time—but nothing like Grant.

Grant made his pitch for her there in the lounge-bar. With sly drunken shrewdness he had decided not to do it during the dinner and show inside. Too many distracting elements around. But you could talk while the fag piano player was playing; he was background. And he played a lot of love mood music, when he wasn’t doing his funny numbers. So Grant had waited.

He had of course been making love to her as politely and charmingly as he could all during the dinner and show inside. Now for the clincher! The essence of his pitch was that he wanted her to come back to his suite in the New Weston with him, or, if her roommate didn’t mind, since he had noticed a sofa bed in the livingroom as well as twin beds in the tiny bedroom, he would be quite willing to go back to her apartment with her. Either way, he said, he intended to make violent love to her that night.

Maybe he didn’t lay it on right. He had expected, especially after all his old pal Buddy had told him about her, that the result would be a foregone conclusion. He was astonished and shaken when she told him no.

“But my God! Why not?” he cried. “What’s wrong with me?” He then discovered he had nearly drowned out the piano player, who, being an old acquaintance from bachelor nights when the lonely Grant used to come in here and drink alone, looked over at him and winked.

Lucky had a hurt, embarrassed, but sturdy look on her face. “How do I know what’s wrong with you? I don’t even know you yet.” She shook her pretty head and said flatly, “I never lay men the first date I have with them.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Grant protested. During dinner she had been open and quite frank about all the men she had had in her life, though without naming any of them Grant noticed. She had claimed 400, though Grant suspected her of exaggerating to shock him, and now the thought of going back alone to that miserable suite in the New Weston after being titillated and heated up so by this exquisite female was enough to nearly unman him. Had he been more sober, he might have hidden it better. “That’s . . . That’s the same kind of rigid moral rule you hate the middle-class bourgeoisie for,” he protested, lamely. What he wanted to say but hadn’t the courage was If all 400 of them, why not me too?