Go to the Widow-Maker (78 page)

“Go to hell,” Grant said in a pillow-muffled voice. His orgasm was an explosion. Explosion was the only word for it. Like bombbursts he had seen at sea that you could feel coming toward you, then they hit you, and if you turned around, if you had the time, you could see them going away, disappearing over the water.

“Now get off of me, you mean no-good son of a bitch,” Lucky said. It was not exactly the thing to say if she wanted a reconciliation, but apparently she really didn’t want one.— “Just call me Rhett Butler.” Grant said and rolled away.—“I really do hate your guts, you know,” Lucky said. “I really do.” Grant slept peacefully.

The next afternoon at siesta time she announced that she wanted an orgasm herself. “I’m going to play with myself,” she said. “I don’t give a damn what you do. You can watch, or go away, or do whatever the hell you like.”

“Then I’ll play with myself too,” Grant said.

“I don’t give a damn what you do,” Lucky said fingering herself. Then she began to breathe through her teeth.

But none of this ‘renewed sex play’ made them come any closer together. One would have thought it would. But It, the thing, was still there. The kernel, the nut, the rock, the hard core. Of whatever it was. Between them. They were actually not in love. Grant did not know what it was with Lucky— anymore—but for himself he was too angry to love anything. And he was not getting any nearer to New York and the rehearsals of his play. Actually, they would not begin for another month at least. But he still wasn’t getting any nearer them. And he was not getting any nearer to writing on another, newer play.

The showdown fight with René and Lisa came three days after. Grant had been expecting it for five.

It was a curious scene. There were just the four of them, it was late and the bar was empty, even the faithful Ben and Irma had ambled (in the case of Ben) and flittered (in the case of Irma) away to bed. It was Lisa who started it. She had had quite a few drinks. And suddenly all the flashing anger that had been in her eyes so many times when she looked at Grant escaped the cage—herself—in which she had so obviously tried so hard to contain it.

“You’re a no-good son of a bitch!” she said suddenly and unequivocally to Grant, leaning across the table on her elbow and pointing with her other arm. “No man has the right to do what you did to Lucky. To any woman.”

“Go and fuck yourself,” Grant said bluffly. He had had quite a few drinks himself. “It’s none of your fucking business.”

“’Ere now. ’Ere now,” René said. He had had quite a few drinks too.

“Tell ’im!” Lucky said. She was drunk. “Tell ’im, Lisa! Tell ’im what it’s like to be a goddamned woman!”

“I’ll tell ’im!” Lisa said. “I’m
making
it my business!” she said to Grant. Suddenly, all in one gesture, she raised her elbows and flapped her arms hiking her brightly colored blouse up her back so she could lean across the table even further and at the same time stuck out her lower lip and blew a loose strand of her long black hair back out of her eyes. “Do you know who you’re messing around with when you mess around with this girl? This girl is a lady. You don’t take a lady to meet your ex-mistress without telling her about it beforehand! You don’t! And let her think it’s your goddamned mother!”

“Foster-mother,” Grant said. “Now shut the fuck up.”

“I’ll not shut up!” Lisa cried. “I’m defending this girl. Nobody else will.”

“She’s no goddam plaster saint,” Grant grunted.

“That’s neither here nor there, you bastard,” Lisa said. “You men. You goddam men. You goddam
fucking
men!” Even loaded, it was clear it cost her a considerable effort to get that word out. “You all want
us
to be so goddam pure! You
demand
that all of
us
be pure! And you! All you want then is some skinny hipbone-sticking hotassed twenty-year-old torso to rub yourselves against. But let that torso get a little old, put on a little fat around the hipbones, have three or four kids and break down those tight vaginal walls! and you don’t mellow with it. Oh, no! You’re right back out looking for another hipbone torso! Men, shit,” Lisa cried, and sat back triumphantly.

Somewhat loaded though he was, Grant did not fail to notice this sudden switch in emphasis. Whether she realized it or not, she had moved on from Lucky’s complaints to what were so obviously her own. Remembering René’s said “Ahhh, cherie!” in the jeep when Lucky had told him he was different from other men, Grant thought that for the sake of his friend René he ought not to make any comment at this point, and so he kept his mouth shut.

René, however, was there to fill the breech. He too clearly had caught the switch in emphasis. “Eez all verry well for you holler,” he said hotly. “You an’ Lucky. Ronnie ’ave zee problems you don’ ’ave. You don’
want
ave, eezair! Mais ’ee ’ave ze problems of zee responsability and of zee loyalty. Zee women, zay never compren zat.” He had drawn himself up in his chair to his full height of five-three, and his hard tight round little belly was pressed against the table edge. “Because zee women are toujours zay animal. W’at you want her?” he cried with Gallic passion. “’Ee marry ’er! ’Ee take over, take on, ’er responsability! W’at you want of ’eem? But w’en ’ee try be hon-or-able avec zee ozzer woman, ’oo ’ee owe somet’ing, hein, you say he dirty bum. Merde! Tu me fais chier! You make me shit!”

“He should have told her!” Lisa cried. “He married her under false pretenses!”

“Wot you care, false pre-tenses? Zee marri-age eez zee marri-age,” René shouted back.

“You don’t take a young girl’s heart and play with it!” Lisa cried.

“You don’t take zee man’s cock an’ play weez heem eezair!” René hollered. “Malheureusement!”

“I don’t care!” Lisa shouted at him. “If I was her, and he did to me what he did to her, I would feel like a whore!”

“You are whore!” René shouted furiously. “All women are zee whore! Because zay are zee women! Eez zee nature! An’ w’y not?”

The word
whore
struck a serious chord in Grant, but he couldn’t place it in the right connection, or connect it. He filed it away to think about. Then he gave himself up pleasantly to listening to the big fight being conducted on his (and from the other side, on Lucky’s) behalf. It was sort of like a sort of verbal mixed doubles tennis match with the males on one side and the females on the other. Lucky, sitting across the table from him, at the side of Lisa, listened with a fixed bright-eyed drunken attention, turning her head from one shouting friend to the other as if listening with interest and curiosity to the life story of two strangers.

It didn’t go on very much longer. Three or four more shouted exchanges between the ex-Frenchman and his wife, and then René stood up. “Eez enough! We finish nossing. Eez zee time to zee bed.”

“You’re damn right you finish nothing,” Grant put in, gathering himself to get up. “And in any case it’s none of your goddamned business anyway, either one of you.” He never did make it to his feet, and in what followed relapsed back into his chair in a slack-muscled disbelief and astonishment.

“You! You!” Lisa howled suddenly, and jumping up held out her arm, index finger extended like the parent in the melodrama when the daughter comes home with a baby. “You! You no-good son of a bitch! You bastard! You get out of my hotel! You do not spend another night under my roof! Get out! I mean it! Get out of my hotel!”

Grant was too flabbergasted even to react. “Are you kidding?” he said.

“’Ere now! ’Ere now!” René said, putting out his hand.

“You just get him out of here!” Lisa yelled. She had dropped her arm, now she raised it again, stiff as a board right out to the index fingertip. “Out! Get out! Out! Get out!”

And it was just here, precisely as if she were waking up from a nap, that Lucky got into the act. Blinking, she turned on Lisa slowly, at first echoing Grant: “Are you kidding? Listen, do you know who you’re talking to? You’re talking to the best playwright in America of his generation. You’re talking to the best playwright America has had since O’Neill probably! Who are you telling to get out?”

“You can stay,” Lisa said. “I want you to stay. You stay with us.”

“Are you nuts?” Lucky said disbelievingly. “He’s my husband! I’m his wife! You’re crazy!”

“He’s hurt you terribly,” Lisa said. “And he had no right.” Then she began to shout again. “And I don’t give a good goddam how good a goddam playwright he is! Out! Get out!”

“Please, please, ’ere, ’ere,” René was pleading.

“He can—” Lisa was shouting.

“Come on,” Lucky said grimly. Grant was still sitting dumbly in his chair, and she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. “We’re getting out of this. I don’t have to take that kind of shit from anybody.” Forcefully she propelled him toward the stairway still holding him by the arm. “We’re leaving.”

“Oh, come on,” Grant protested feebly. “Are you goofy? It’ll all be over by in the morning. Let’s go to bed.” All he could think about at the moment was sweet sweet sleep.

“I will not!” Lucky said. “Nobody talks to me like that.” And in the suite she dragged a suitcase out of the closet and threw it on the bed and began dumping clothes in it. Grant lay down on the other bed.— “Cut it out, Lucky,” he said tiredly. “Nobody means it. Tomorrow it’ll all be a joke to laugh over.”— “I certainly will not,” she said, and went on packing. “Nobody talks to my husband like that. Whether I love him or not.” And she did not desist until there was a tap on the door and René sneaked in quietly, all apologies.

“You know, she is, ’ow they use to say, a lettel zigzag, hein?” he said. “It mean nossing.”

“Are you apologizing?” Lucky said, still packing.

“I am,” René said with great Gallic dignity. “I am apologize for Lisa, and for me, and for zee Grand ’Otel Crount, and for zee en-tire staff of zee Grand ’Otel Crount I beg you. Please to not to leave.”

“All right,” Lucky said as evenly as she had been talking just before. “I’ll stay.” She began unpacking.

“I see you in zee morning,” René said mournfully. “If all zee ’ead are not too large to get s’rough zee door.”

“You leave me alone now,” Lucky said after René left. “I mean it. You stay away from me. I mean it seriously. It’s not that I’m mad at you. I’m not mad at you. But I’m not in love with you. It’s something else. I mean it. I don’t want you and you just leave me alone.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Grant said.

And on that note they went to bed on the extreme opposite sides of the pushed-together double beds.

S
O EVERYTHING WAS
just the same. And appeared that it would go right on being just the same. If Grant had expected some sort of reconciliation to be effected by Lucky’s sudden and fierce upholding of the family unit “Grant,” he was mistaken. As a matter of fact, Grant wasn’t even thinking that. He was thinking something entirely different, and the next day when he had sobered up and they had come down to be greeted by a smiling Lisa who did not even bother to apologize, he went on thinking about it. It was something that had come up midway in the argument between René and Lisa over how well or badly Grant had treated Lucky. It had to do with the word ‘whore’.

Lisa had said something about that if Grant had treated her like he had Lucky, she would feel like a whore. René had countered with Gallic passion saying that she in fact was, that all women were, that this was nature, and what of it? A succinct and reasonable Gallic attitude. But Lisa’s use of that word had struck some particular thought chord in Grant, as if it were something that he ought to recognize and remember but could not quite. He had stuck it away, though, and held onto it, and the next day—next morning—when he was sober, while Ben and Irma and Lucky cavorted in the pool with Jim Grointon and some other guests, had tried with it again.

Last night when Lisa made her comment about “feeling like a whore” Lucky had simply sat, in her bright-eyed drunkenness, and had not reacted. But at least several of their biggest and most desperate fights had had something to do with the word ‘whore’. He remembered that it was that word—‘whore’— uttered by Lucky, and only by Lucky—that had been the key to the scene the night of the nude swimming party at Sir John Brace’s villa, when Lucky had run weeping and crying: “
I’m not a whore! I’m not a whore!
” into the big stand-up closet and hidden herself. He remembered that it was that same word ‘whore’ another time which had caused a terrible fight one night late in bed when, drunk, he had been jealous over her ex-“Jamaican-lover,” Jacques. He had said it was like being married to a whore, to have all her ex-lovers running around. She had been furious. More, she had frozen—absolutely frozen. He remembered she had said in a strained, frozen voice: “
But I never took money
,” except from Raoul, she had added, who was rich and whom she intended to marry. It was all so ridiculous. And he remembered too the worst fight: the night she socked him in the nose with her purse and walked out of the hotel. He had been seriously wrong that time. But had the word ‘whore’ come up then too? No? He couldn’t remember. Anyway the reference was there, when he told about waking up stuck in up to his shoulders between the beds, and wondering what he had married. And he remembered now, too, that that was the first time he had noted, and been struck by, the total lack of proportion in her reaction, response. And now of course, since telling her about Carol, it was she who was constantly making the reference: “whore”; “hooker”; “New York lay”; “party girl”; “easy lay.” Guilt-complex? Self-hatred? Was it something about his having been Carol’s lover when he met her that made her feel he had thought of her as a whore? But it didn’t make sense. And he hadn’t. Christ, he’d loved her. It didn’t make sense. And it was about to wreck their marriage before it even got started, even got off the ground.

Grant knew himself well enough, had studied himself well enough over the years, though he had never gone in for ‘Analysis’, to know that he himself had a sort of “rejection syndrome” built into his psyche that could be triggered by the slightest and often most inoffensive thing. Knowing it, he had gradually trained himself to control it but once in a while, usually when he was drunk and therefore less in control, some real or imagined “rejection” could turn him into a snarling, near-murderous animal. That was what had happened to him that night he had turned on Lucky over Jacques Edgar. (He had remembered how smug and self-congratulatory he had felt about fucking—about having fucked—Cathie Finer when he met Sam Finer; and he could reasonably assume Jacques Edgar felt equally as smug.) And at such times—if drunk— he was powerless to do anything about himself. Did Lucky have some uncontrollable thing like that about whores or being thought of as a ‘whore’? But nobody,
but no-
body, even possibly, ever thought of her as a whore.