Go to the Widow-Maker (11 page)

Looking at it, Grant felt distinctly peculiar.

“It belonged to my South American boyfriend,” Lucky said as if reading his mind. “He was smaller than you, especially in the shoulders, but you can get into it.” Then she went to the door.

“Oh ho!” Leslie said as she came in in her brusque shortstepping little walk. Then she stopped. “My God, this place smells like the Bronx zoo!”

“Go to hell,” Lucky said. Then she turned slowly, that sun-bright, wall-penetrating (and now beatific) smile Grant had noticed before shining on her face, stretching herself.

“I take it,” Leslie said, “that you two have been making it together with each other while I have been spending the day in the office breaking my brains.” She threw off her coat and slumped in the one big chair. “Well, it’s only what I might have expected after the way she talked last night. You be good to her, you hear?”

“I intend to be,” Grant said. “Hello, Leslie.”

“He’s built like a Greek god,” Lucky reported. “A regular Greek god!”

“Yes?” said Leslie.

“You’d never know it to look at him dressed. We’ve got to see about getting him some decent clothes.”

“I am not currently up on men’s shops,” Leslie said.

“Instead of those hick Indiana suits with the padded shoulders that he wears.”

“Listen, now wait a minute,” Grant said. “I bought that suit at Broadstreet’s on Fifth Avenue.” He had finished his eggs and was enjoying himself more than he could remember in a very long time. Maybe ever.

“Then they saw you coming,” Lucky said.

“I think I am forced to agree,” Leslie said.

“Absolutely,” said Lucky.

“You think so, hunh?” he said.

Grant grinned at her. Even though Leslie had come in Grant had hated seeing her put on the robe, cover up. Her body without clothes was even more incredibly beautiful than it was with clothes on it. The heavy beautiful slightly drooping breasts, that long lean line from armpit to the widely swelling hips, the high rounded bottom, the width of shoulder, not an ounce of age anywhere but not scrawny model-thin, not a bit of fat except perhaps the little delicious belly which wasn’t fat so much as the way she was constructed and which she called her “baby fat”, above the triangular bush on the protuberant Venus mound. And it was the most flexible female body Grant had ever come in contact with. She could actually put both feet behind her head at the same time if she wanted to. Grant sighed in the shoulder-tight dressing robe. Who
was
this South American guy, anyway? Even now this late in the day and after so many times, he wasn’t sated and didn’t want to quit.

“I’ll have to take you somewhere tomorrow,” Lucky said. “For the clothes. Hmmm. Where?”

“Not tomorrow,” Grant said. “I’ve got a business lunch with my producer. Anyway, what I want to know is what are we doing tonight?”

“Whatever you want,” she said simply. “Have you got a date?” she asked Leslie.

Leslie shook her head from the deep chair. “This is one of my boyfriend’s nights with his wife,” she said ruefully.

“Then why don’t I take the both of you out somewhere to dinner?” Grant said. “Like Twenty-One or Voisin?”

“No, I don’t want to cramp your style, you two,” Leslie said. “You go out by yourselves.”

“It won’t cramp my style,” Grant said. “I’d love to have you.”

But the dark little girl continued to shake her head. “I’ll make myself something and read a book. I got lots to read.” Only when Lucky who, apparently, had waited till she was sure Grant meant it and wasn’t just being polite, asked her did Leslie change her mind and decide to go. And so that was the way it started. Many of the nights when Leslie had no date with her own boyfriend, who was a smalltime theater critic on a Trenton daily but lived in Manhattan, she would dine out with them but almost always she came home alone earlier because she had to be at the office by nine. Amiably and happily for her friend she moved herself out of one of the twin beds in the tiny bedroom and out onto the studio couch in the livingroom, as Lucky had done for her on nights when her boyfriend came. She wasn’t doing it for space she said since Ron and Lucky invariably slept all night together in one of the single beds, but for decency. She asked only that they let her get to sleep before they started their action so she would not have to listen and lie awake and be lonely. Usually she was home and asleep before they got there. The only drawback was she had to come in in the morning to get her clothes and if Lucky didn’t want her goddamn Greek god to be viewed in all his glory “and I mean all” she said, then she better damn well wake up enough to cover him up. If this arrangement was satisfactory, she would request only that once in a while when her own boyfriend came they would let her have the bedroom and sleep at the New Weston. She was not very happy with this boyfriend he came around so seldom, and was going to have to quit him and get a new one: there was really no future or happiness in these married men who remained devoted to their wives while screwing you.

As a matter of fact, they slept at the New Weston quite a lot, because they liked ordering breakfast and having it in bed together.

As it turned out, they did not go to either Twenty-One or Voisin that first evening, they went to the Colony—where both girls knew as many or more people in the celebrity-pocked crowd of diners than Grant did. They had been roommates all four years in college at Cornell it turned up in the talk, to which Leslie had come from her hometown of Toledo and Lucky from Syracuse, and had lived together in New York the last four of the seven years Lucky had been there. Leslie worked for a very big Hollywood-New York publicity agency as an executive, and in fact personally handled most of their star accounts. Lucky wasn’t working at the moment. She had some money of her own, she told Grant, with an arch glance, and she didn’t have to.

But it wasn’t always to restaurants of the caliber—and expense—of the Colony that they went, as the days passed (at least for Grant) in a labiapink haze of happiness. The girls knew a lot of excellent fairly cheap little French, Russian, Italian or whatever restaurants—such as Le Berry in the West 50s where a lot of show kids hung out and the French sailors off the liners came for the food—and after the first couple of days they started saving him money rigorously, especially Leslie. But what they saved for him on restaurants they more than made up for by what they made him spend on clothes, or at least Lucky did. Men’s clothes, not ladies’ clothes.

She had mentioned it that first afternoon with Leslie in the apartment, but it was really at Hervey Miller the critic’s house that it started, as in a way their affair itself had—and as, in another way, something else started there too, something somber and dark and unhappy.

On the day he had first run into Buddy Landsbaum at Hervey’s, Hervey had invited him to a cocktail party ten days hence. Back then Grant had mumbled “Sure, sure,” but secretly—in the miserable “Miseries” state he was in—he had had no intention of going. Ten days later, with the smell of Lucky in his nose and moustache, permeating him all over in fact like some delicious female cloud, he wouldn’t have missed Hervey’s cocktail party and the chance to show Lucky off to his theater friends for anything. As they climbed the steps of the narrow brownstone with Lucky hanging tight on his arm and leaning a breast on him out there where nobody could see it, it seemed simply absolutely unbelievable that only ten days ago he had not known her, had been lonely and miserable, had been looking for some girl, any girl. Hervey was glad to see them of course although he didn’t know Lucky, but when he saw Grant’s face he beamed suddenly and looked genuinely, really happy for him. Buddy, he told them shaking hands, had departed for the West Coast two days before.

Lucky had been nervous about coming. “I don’t know any of these legit theater people,” she said when Grant told her they were going. “They’re not my crowd. Except Buddy. And I didn’t even know him when he was theater, only in his films. I’m going to be on close display, aren’t I?”—“I know,” Grant grinned lovingly. But if she was nervous or shy, it certainly didn’t show in the way she acted, or in what she said. It was, once again, so typical of her Grant thought.

They were sitting at one end of the long narrow livingroom. Grant was sitting in a deep easy chair with Lucky perched on the arm just to be near him, and was holding forth to Hervey and a couple of others, a novelist and a movie critic, about the general shittiness of current American theater. He was feeling pretty smug and selfsatisfled, with his play done and this exquisite girl hanging onto him and onto his every word, and he was being really witty. Then in the lull that followed a laugh over one of his funnies, Lucky turned to Hervey and said in a matter-of-fact voice: “I’m in love with him.” She didn’t try to say it either quietly or loudly. It rang through the room and through that literary gathering. It had in it the quality that when she loved, it mattered, it was rare, and it counted.

“Well,” Hervey said delightedly in his gravelly drawl, “well. Are you. That isn’t too really difficult to see, my dear.” He probably hadn’t had that much openness in his house in months, and he grinned at Grant. “In my own way, I’m in love with him too, I guess.”

Grant was embarrassed but it was a very happy embarrassment. He simply sat and grinned. Curiously, everybody in that end of the room was grinning happily too.

“Well,” Hervey said. “You feel pretty good, hunh, keed?” Grant took Lucky’s hand, aware the other end of the room was watching now, too. “I sure as hell do.”

“Look at him,” Lucky said in her best cultivated university voice. “Would you believe that under that ugly lumpy Middlewestern suit exists the body of a Greek god?”

Hervey was even more delighted. Letting his eye run swiftly over the room to check for audience, he said, “I know. I went swimming with Ron once at the YMHA pool to get rid of our hangovers.” He winked at Lucky. “And perhaps the brain of a genius?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Lucky smiled. Hervey had been totally charmed. “Where shall I take him, Hervey?”

‘Take him? For what?”

“For clothes.”

Hervey beamed. “Ahhh! Well, how about Paul Stuart? I go there myself. Sometimes. For things.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of Paul Stuart myself?” And Hervey was recharmed.

“Hey! Hey! Wait a minute! I’m not all that bad!” Grant put in. “You Ivy-Leaguers!”

“Well, Ron,” Hervey pontificated, “one’s girl can sometimes bring up things one’s friends don’t feel free to . . .”

“I’m conspired against!” Grant grinned.

“You have nothing to say about it,” Lucky said. “We’ll go tomorrow.” She put her fingers lovingly on the back of his neck just above his collar. “Look at that tie.”

Hervey was captivated. Just about the whole of his cocktail party was listening now, and he decided this might be the high spot of his evening.

Grant saw it coming and played the straight man for him. “What’s wrong with my tie?”

Hervey paused like the theater pro he was. “Well,” he drawled, “I can’t do anything about the suit, Lucia. Ron’s not my size. But I can certainly do something about the tie!

“Come with me,” he said, and led Grant through the laughing party and up the stairs.

“That’s certainly some girl you’ve got yourself there,” he said as he rummaged through his tie rack.

“Isn’t she?”

“Where did you find her? I’ve never even seen her before.”

“Never you mind!” He smiled. “Actually, Buddy introduced me to her. The other day. She’s an old uh pal of his.” He didn’t actually stumble over the word pal, but he felt he hadn’t inflected it properly. He added, “A friend.”

“Here we are. A nice brown-maroon and dark-blue stripe. That really is a terrible tie, yours. She’s absolutely right. I mean that she really is
quite
some girl, Ron.”

“I know,” Grant said knotting it. “I’m going to
keep
this tie. A remembrance,” he said grinning into the mirror. Behind him Hervey was studying him kindly, shrewdly, thoughtfully, thumb and forefinger to his chin. “And I think you should,” he said. “I’ve known you a long time, haven’t I, Ron? Not as long as your Mrs. Abernathy out there in Indianapolis, but almost as long.” Then abruptly he turned away. “All the world loves a lover.”

When they marched, chests out, back down and through the party, there was applause and more laughter, and it was then that Lucky, smiling and laughing with pride so much herself that she appeared to be actually blushing, said to Hervey the thing that echoed hollowly through Grant’s inner corridors and was to cast a faint but noticeably somber pall over the next happy weeks with her.

“I think I’ve decided I’m going to marry him,” she announced to Hervey and the others around them.

“I can assure you that you could do much, much worse, dear Lucia,” Hervey grinned at her. He clearly had been completely won by her.

Grant said nothing, her statement made him almost blush with pride himself, but faint warning bells rang in his ears dimly through the labiapink haze in which he moved. It was one thing for Hervey to hint vaguely upstairs about Carol Abernathy, and quite another for Lucky who knew nothing at all about any of it, to say what she had just said. His old instinct to protect, so ingrained by now that it amounted to a signal reaction almost, had trapped him into that ‘foster-mother’ routine so that now his relationship with Lucky wasn’t on his part an honest one, and it wasn’t fair to her. And as the days together passed as he fell more and more under her spell and more and more in love with her, this initial dishonesty lent a poignancy to their affair for him that at times became almost unbearable. It also, curiously, gave him a vital tough hard-to-catch male quality that enhanced their affair for Lucky as well as for himself. Maybe if he’d been easier to catch, she wouldn’t have wanted him so much?

The problem was, of course, that he was going to have to leave her. Sometime or other. This made the statues and bare trees and open-air opera in the Park where they walked on good days, the Zoo and the seals and the Cafeteria, all much more lovers’-poignant, bittersweet and moving than if they knew they were going to stay together and had set up housekeeping somewhere. The same held true for the joints they frequented. Like P.J. Clarke’s, where they’d gone that first afternoon, and now held a vested interest in. Grant knew that certain people (many good friends of his had this trait) actually required this sweet-sad, happy-tragic quality in a love affair for it to be interesting and fulfilling. And he found himself enjoying it too sometimes, as Lucky did obviously, sometimes. But at other times it was much too painful to be pleasant. And Grant had no wife to go back to, unless you wanted to count Carol Abernathy and Grant didn’t.