Go to the Widow-Maker (16 page)

She didn’t really know how she got home, or care, but she knew she had stopped crying right away. She hated crying, and she hated having people, especially strangers, see her cry. She was in a daze, that was the truth, a goddamned fucking daze. She had used up so much emotion in the past weeks, especially in the past few days, that she was as empty, and as ugly inside, as an old cold cream jar. An empty daze, and she didn’t really come out of it until she climbed the ugly dirty stairs and keyed the apartment door open and saw Leslie there, Leslie and Forbes Morgan.

Tall, chubby, well-got-up Forbes Morgan. He jumped up off the daybed couch, cutting off in mid-sentence his conversation with Leslie. Forbes Morgan, her stud. Her friendly old stud. Her friendly old
ex
-stud. He had a very big thing.

“Oh, hello, Forbes,” Lucky said lightly. “What brings you over here, uninvited?”

He came toward her his chubby face wryly rueful, and looked at her his eyes warmly searching her face for signs of—signs of trouble, she guessed.

“I have my little grapevine,” Forbes said tenderly. “I keep tabs on you, even when I don’t see you. He’s gone?”

Lucky smiled at him. “He’s gone.”

“He’s an oaf,” Forbes said.

“I guess he’s an oaf,” Lucky said. She took off her coat, hung it in the bedroom closet, and came back and relaxed herself into the big chair which Leslie had tacitly vacated for her. “But he’s also a
man.”

“He sure is that,” Leslie said. “Whew!”

“And a very talented one,” Lucky said. She was feeling bitchy, and ugly. She turned off her ears, and remembered the day, it was the Sunday after the Sunday they met, when he had spent almost the whole day from noon to nearly six o’clock in the evening telling her and Leslie and a couple of the other girls the complex story of his new play. He had talked five solid hours, and had cried real tears at least four times. And had consumed more than half a bottle of whiskey doing it. She had tried writing a play. And spent a year doing it. He was going to have a drinking problem someday if he didn’t watch out. She turned her ears back on. “What?”

“I said we can’t all be geniuses,” Forbes said lightly.

“And I said I guess it’s just as well!” Leslie said. She was trying to smile, and to get Lucky to laugh, and was not succeeding very well at either.

“I was down near 5th and 48th the other day, down near Gibson and Kline, and I saw him blowing his nose in the street,” Forbes said.

“He says blowing your nose in a handkerchief blows the stuff, and the germs with it, back up into your sinuses,” Leslie said.

“Even so. But surely you don’t like it?” Forbes said to Lucky.

“No, I don’t like it much,” Lucky said. Suddenly she laughed out loud. She was remembering her consternation the first time he had ever done that with her with him. It was that first day, when he came over and they walked down to P. J. Clarke’s. It had certainly startled her, and embarrassed her.

Forbes had taken a stance in the middle of the room. “I guess you know I’m in love with you,” he said dolefully.

“I didn’t know,” Lucky said. “I never thought about it.”

“Well, I am,” he said.

“Then I’m sorry for you.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Lucky.”

“I’m not making fun of you, Forbes. I can hardly think at all.”

“That son of a bitch. That son of a bitch.” Forbes pursed his lips. “Then you’re really in love with him.”

“I guess I am,” Lucky said simply. “I can’t seem to help myself.”

“That hick! Well that’s what I was afraid of.”

Forbes Morgan. Old Forbes. He really did have a big thing. Lucky looked at him sorrowfully. She was exhausted. She felt sad for both of them, herself
and
Forbes. He was a nice boy but she had always told him she wasn’t in love with him— or, well, if she hadn’t told him, she had certainly given him enough signs along the way so that he ought to have understood that she wasn’t. Looking up at him, she turned off her ears again. Forbes Morgan of the prolific Morgans. There were so many of the prolific Morgans now that being a Morgan hardly meant anything. Nevertheless Forbes stood to inherit a nice-sized little fortune when his old grandfather died just the same. She had even visited them up there in Connecticut with him one time, and last year, for quite a long time, Forbes—broke, without a nickel, with hardly a change of his Harvard type clothes—had stayed here in the apartment with her and Leslie, sleeping on the daybed couch. She had taken care of him, fed him, kept up his spirits, fucked him, and finally had even gotten him a job because at just about that same time, when Forbes had moved in with them, she had met Peter Raven and spent a crazy funny wild drunken weekend with him at the Plaza and then had started going out with him too at the same time. Peter Raven, who was married, and was another of those sons of old rich but now broke New England-Harvard families
(Les nouveaux pauvres,
she called them all). He was a top CBS Television executive, and while she was going out with him, after much concentrated arguing, she had finally talked him into hiring Forbes in a good executive job. At one point Peter wanted to leave his wife and marry her, but she had gently without hurting his feelings talked him out of that. Neither man knew she was going out with and fucking the other. This was one of her own private little games, little jokes, that nobody knew except Leslie and maybe Annie Carler.

“So how’s the job?” she said, turning her ears back on again. It had been a big step up for Forbes, and the doing of it had been good for Peter’s soul. She hadn’t hurt anyone.

Forbes, who (aware that though she was looking at him she wasn’t listening) had turned his conversation slowly around to Leslie, now brought his gaze back to Lucky. “Oh, all right, you know. It’s fun work. And Peter’s very good to me. We’ve become great pals.

“Listen, like I said a minute ago, if there is anything at all I can do to ‘ease your burden’ as they say, will you tell me?”

“As a matter of fact, to be honest, there is something you can do for me right now,” Lucky said. “You can go home and leave me alone. Maybe you guessed: I don’t feel much like talking to anybody tonight.”

Forbes’s face expressed deep hurt. But he swallowed it down manfully. “All right, sweetie. I’ll go right now. May I call you tomorrow? Just to see how things go?”

“I don’t know,” Lucky said despairfully. Forbes really did have a big one. Much bigger than Peter Raven’s. Painfully, she wished Grant were here right now, instead of him. “I really don’t know. You must sense that I don’t really want to look at you right now.” She felt if he didn’t get out of here soon, she was going to start to cry again, and she didn’t want to.

Forbes got his coat.

There was silence for quite a while after he left. But the growing pressure to cry began to subside as soon as Forbes was outside the door and was replaced by a deep sense of doom and gloom that was not entirely without its pleasant aspect. Doomed to gloom. They sat on in silence.

“Do you want to talk?” Leslie said finally.

“No I don’t,” Lucky said plaintively. “I really don’t.”

“Okay. Then we won’t,” Leslie said stoutly. “But let me ask just one question,” she added eagerly. “Did he say anything about coming back to New York?”

“Yes. He’s said that several times. He says he’s coming back to me as soon as this diving junket is over.”

“That’s a strange thing, his feeling about this diving business, and how he has to do it alone,” Leslie said.

“Yeah.”

Leslie made a Jewish gesture, not quite a shrug.

“What am I going to do?” Lucky asked her.

Again Leslie made the gesture. She pouted out her lips. “I can’t tell you.”

“He’s very strait-laced and very stern in
certain
ways, you know,” she said.

“Well, naturally! He certainly is. Which is exactly what you want. Honey, I knew your father! Remember?”

“You know what the bastard had the nerve to ask me? It was yesterday at lunch, at Chanticleer, when he was already getting everything all ready to go, mind you. He said if we did get married, would I sign a waiver on his property and his income. One of those individual property statements, where he keeps what’s his and I keep what’s mine!”

“So what did you say?”

“I said certainly not. I wasn’t marrying him as an investment, I was marrying him because I wanted to live with him the rest of my life.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He thought about it.”

“Well, at least he’s thinking about marriage seriously, if he’s thinking about his money.”

“How do I know what that foster-mother of his will say that he lives with out there in Minneapolis?”

“Indianapolis, dear.”

“Indianapolis,” Lucky repeated vaguely. The silence reigned again.

“And fuck his money,” Lucky suddenly said plaintively. “He hasn’t got all that much money. My mother’s got a hell of a lot more than he has.”

“Which, I must add,” Leslie said, “doesn’t do you one damn bit of good.”

“That’s true,” Lucky said gloomily.

Again the silence fell over them, each of them wrapped up in whatever special thoughts she carried.

“Do you remember how we used to talk, kid about him?” Lucky said finally. “Ron Grant, the last of the unmarried writers? How we tried to arrange plots for me to meet him?”

“We didn’t really try.”

“No, but we spent a lot of time laughing and joking about it. Ron Grant, the last gasp, the last chance, the last one left, for me to marry a real writer.”

“I never thought you’d ever really meet him. Let alone really fall in love with him.”

“I can’t believe it won’t happen,” Lucky said, more to herself than to Leslie. “It has to happen. Why, it’s like Fate. I have to believe it will happen.—If it doesn’t happen,” she said in a hollow whisper, looking over at Leslie with hollow blue-shadowed eyes, “I don’t know what will become of me. I can’t marry any of these people. I can’t go back and marry some dumbhead from Syracuse.”

“It’s that kindly fatherly quality about him that sunk us all,” Leslie said, “taking all us girls out to dinner with you like he did, being so nice to us all. Remember the Sunday he told the story of the play? He really
likes
girls.”

Lucky didn’t hear this. She had lapsed into silence, turning off her ears again, and begun thinking about that time, the time when they used to kid about Ron as the last of the unmarried writers. It was about a year ago, just shortly before Forbes with no place to stay had moved in with them. Grant was in town then, working with his producers or something. He had even taken a hotel apartment somewhere, and was trying to write there. The grapevine had it that he couldn’t be doing much serious work what with all the heavy drinking and late hours he was keeping, and apparently it was true because after six weeks he packed up and went back to Minneapolis or wherever it was. And it was during that time that he started having an affair with an old friend of hers, Hope York, a New Jersey very Jewish girl singer and dancer who had never quite made it big on Broadway. She hadn’t seen or heard from Hopie in over two years when one day she called and asked if she could come over. When she arrived, it was to speak only about her love affair with Ron Grant the playwright. She was madly in love with him and wanted to marry him. But he wasn’t having any, and Hopie was afraid she’d botched it with her kookiness. She was really quite kooky, and kept coming up with weird wayout plots to pressure Grant or blackmail him into marrying her. She wanted Lucky’s help. She did not, however many times Lucky and Leslie invited her to, bring Grant over to the apartment. She would not even say where he was staying, though neither of them ever asked her. But it was clearly a closely guarded secret. Hopie wasn’t about to set her competition up in business. So they never met him. When he went back home to the Middlewest, Hopie was distraught and beside herself for two months. It was then that Lucky laughingly suggested that they all get together with all the rest of the girls they knew who qualified, and form a Writer Fuckers Club.

She sighed. Leslie, who knew well her habit of literally turning off her ears when she was thinking, had lapsed into silence too. And suddenly she thought of Forbes Morgan’s thing again. It certainly was a big one. Maybe the biggest she had encountered. Except perhaps for Jacques the Haitian. But it wasn’t like Grant’s. Nobody’s was like Grant’s. Even though it was only normal sized. She guessed that was love. It was so
pretty.

“Remember the Writer Fuckers Club?” Lucky said, and then suddenly she started to cry. She didn’t cry like most people, with sobs and shaking shoulders and a screwed-up face, she simply sat motionless with her eyes wide open, breathing evenly but shallowly through a slightly open mouth, and tears ran down her face to splash on her lax hands in her lap, taking a large part of her eye makeup with them. She didn’t know why she cried like that. She just always had. Maybe it was because she hated to cry so much that it hurt her more to do it. She felt totally helpless, unable to do a thing. She always had needed somebody to help her and take care of her. She always would.

When it stopped, she got up. Leslie had gone to get her a hand towel for the mascara, and fussed around her like some helpless mother hen. Lucky shook her head vigorously, splashing tears out to both sides with the swinging champagne hair. She had always hated being beautiful. People never liked you for you yourself alone, for what you were, but only for your beauty. It was one of the worst kinds of loneliness. That was why she was such an easy pushover for men so often. Oh, Daddy!

“I’m going to bed,” she said to Leslie,

“It’s only seven-thirty, honey.”

“I don’t give a damn. If anybody calls for me, I don’t want to talk. I’m just going to stay in bed.”

“For six whole weeks? Not again,” Leslie said.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Where’s that book of Ron’s plays and short stories he gave us?”

Leslie got it for her. “Can I fix you something to eat?”

“I couldn’t eat anything.”

“I wish there was something I could do,” Leslie said.

Abruptly Lucky put her arms around her, and they stood together that way, hugging each other. “Aint nobody can do nothin for nobody,” she said.