Go to the Widow-Maker (8 page)

Lucky still looked embarrassed, and stubborn. “Well, maybe. But I don’t care. I don’t have to. And I won’t.” Then her eyes softened a little. “Anyway, you’re getting pretty drunk.”

“That’s our goddam friend Buddy!” Grant cried waving his arm, and several people turned to look at him. He had been sweating all night in this smoky, overheated place, but now he began to sweat more in his excitement. “And because I’m shy!”

In an effort to calm him Roddy Croft the piano player had begun to play the famous, very popular theme from the film of Grant’s first play.

Lucky was blushing. “People are looking at us.”

“Hell with them!” Grant said. “Sons of bitches! What do they know about loneliness?”

“What do
you
know about it?” Lucky said sharply.

“I think you’re nothing but a—” Grant started, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish it, so he came at it from behind. “I hate cockteasers,” he muttered.

“And I think you’re a boor!” Lucky said. “No girl would lay a man with such a rude, crude approach as yours!”

They were joined by the club’s PR man, another old drinking companion from bachelor nights, who offered to buy a drink. He knew Lucky too, it turned out, from many dates she had had in the joint over the years. Grant thought to appeal to him, but wisely thought better of it. Instead, he began to brood. The PR man bought several drinks.

And that was the way it ended. His first date with Lucky Videndi. Nothing he could say would shake her. When they left at nearly four in the morning, Saul Weiner the PR man went with them, and Grant made his grand climax of the evening. The light snow had stopped and as they walked up Park toward Lucky’s place Grant began to kick over the wickerwire wastepaper baskets along Park Avenue in furious, frustrated, outraged protest.

“That’s against the law,” Lucky told him nervously. “It really is. They’re very serious about it You’re liable to get picked up for it.”

“Yeah? I hope I do! I hope by God I do!” he said and kicked over another.

At her door she shook hands with him. “Not only are you not a gentleman,” she said in a sort of awed whisper, “I really think you’re crazy! You’re a savage goof-off from the goddamned Middlewest!”

“You think so, huh?” Grant said. For one clear moment, one clear agonized moment that would forever stay burned in his head, he stared at her. Out from behind and beyond his large alcoholoic haze, piercing into and through her smaller alcoholic haze, he tried to put into his eyes all that he really felt about her, and about himself, and shit, and about everything. He thought he saw that her eyes understood. But she was very angry. Then the cold dark New Weston suite closed its cloud back down over him and he turned away. Four hundred men! And she wouldn’t even let him feel her titty! With the quiet, cynical Saul Weiner he walked to Reuben’s, where he ate tartar steak he did not want and talked about things that bored him. When he staggered into his hairy furry old New Weston suite at six
A.M.,
he found a telegram from his ‘mistress’ who was at the moment in Miami Beach, which coldly demanded to know why her phone calls could never find him in and why he had not called or answered her wires. It was the third such in two days.

It also said that her husband would be joining her in a few days. Grant wadded it up and threw it on the floor. But he knew that once he sobered up the incredible, horrible, sick-making panic-guilt she was somehow able to instill in him would return.

Carol Abernathy. And Hunt Abernathy, her husband. Grant could not say now, at this late date, which one of them he had really liked the best over the years.

Carol Abernathy. Wife of Hunt Abernathy. Head and primemover of the Hunt Hills, Indianapolis, Little Theatre. And also one of the Indianapolis’s most highly successful real estate agents.

When he was undressed and nude, and had with drunken care hung his clothes up neatly, Grant got the wool blanket off the bed and rolled up in it on the floor of the suite’s livingroom. This made him feel some better. The hard floor felt good. The double bed in the bedroom had a soft mattress and on top of that one of those European-type featherbed comforters. The whole damn thing suffocated him, and he had taken to sleeping in the same spot on the livingroom floor with the blanket whenever he was here alone. Also, that way, he did not have to think so much about the other half of the double bed being empty. He was lonely and panicky for so famous a man. Drunk in his blanket, he did some reviewing.

Up to the age of thirty-six, which was now, Ron Grant had never had what he considered a true love affair. As a result, he had come to believe no such thing existed—except in the movies of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; and in that insane, complex, all-pervasive spiderweb laid down over the entire American nation: the great American love song industry. Anything else was just kidding yourself. He had been considerably aided in this belief by his mistress, who for reasons of her own never tired of stating it:
There is no such thing as love.

Grant had for a long time strongly suspected that her reasons were entirely personal: if she could convince him there was no love anywhere else either, she could bind him that much more closely to her, because what would be the point of leaving her? She never let up on it. And he had to admit that up to now the theory had been just about 100 percent accurate. Long and seriously deep were the philosophical discussions they had had about it.

However, he had been brainwashed like the rest of his generation by the great American love song industry, and he couldn’t stop looking, stop hunting. His ‘mistress’ considered this (and sometimes he agreed) a sin of ignorance. But he could no more stop hunting love than he could stop wanting to get laid well, which she considered a sin of indulgence. He had done a deal of hunting and wanting over their fourteen years. He had done a deal of hunting before that, for that matter. A great, great deal. All he wanted was to have just once in his life one love affair that was like those accursed Clark Gable-Carole Lombard films of his youth, that was all. He didn’t even care if it lasted. After it, he would accept all torment—all the consequences, all the penalties, all the misery.

There were, in all, three love affairs he had had in his life. Innumerable liaisons; but only three love affairs, and not one of them a true one. The first two didn’t even count really, since he had never fucked either of the girls. One was a girl in school, high school, when he was still too green to believe girls liked doing it; she turned out a lesbian. The second was a big, lushly built, redhead Irish-American girl in Hawaii when he was in the Navy during the war, whom he never got any closer to than the grinding of his forearm on the outside of her dress against her enticingly protuberant mons veneris; she now had four kids. Neither counted. And then the third: his long, By God fourteen years long, affair with Carol Abernathy.

He supposed he had to count that one, since it had lasted so long. But it had certainly never been a true one, a Clark Gable-Carole Lombard one. As for the liaisons, both before and during Carol Abernathy, some had been good and some had been not so good. But none could be called love affairs. A love affair, Grant had decided some time back, presupposed a need, an allpowerful, insuperable need—and not just an insuperable, but a
happily
insuperable one—for whatever weak, insecure reasons—of each party for the other which superseded everything else in life. And if that happily surrendered-to need wasn’t there, it couldn’t be a love affair, only a liaison. And yet that need must be— . . . But that was as far as he could take it at the age of thirty-six.

Carol Abernathy. Hunt Abernathy. When he had come home from the Navy and the war to finish school and write plays, he had thought the Abernathys both very glamorous. The Hunts (from whom the Hunt Hills suburb got its name, as had Hunt Abernathy himself) and the Abernathys had been in Indiana since the days of Mad Anthony Wayne. They had settled Hunt Hills. Carol and Hunt had been 1920s kids, flaming, him with a raccoon coat and Stutz Bearcat, her with the cloche hats and titless dresses. When Grant (who had read about them in the
Star
all his life) met them at the age of 22, Carol was 39, Hunt 41. Now when Grant was 36, she was 53. Easy to swallow, this fact was hard to digest. It was a further irony that her name happened to be Carol.

Born into a poor Tennessee hills family who had moved north, she had met Hunt in high school. Later—so Grant got the story from her (he had never talked of it with Hunt!)— with him at college in Bloomington and her working as a waitress downtown, he had knocked her up, paid for her abortion after which she nearly died of infection, and then, when more or less honorably freed, had come back around and, because of some peculiar tortured sense of chivalric masochism of his own perhaps, had married her.

She had been tolerated but never accepted by his family and his country club, where she became known as The Madcap Carol because of doing crazy stunts. He had never been true to her. Having boundless energy, she had contented herself with the social life, fashion and gay parties, but never felt she quite made it. She had had three or four affairs around the country club, one with a rich young happily married doctor, the rest always with younger men who were poorer than she and whom she helped to get started in some business. Then she discovered literature and the theater, began trying to write plays, and organized the Hunt Hills Little Theatre.

Hunt became the best golfer in Indianapolis if not in Indiana, general manager of the biggest brick making and lumber yard establishment in the area, loved cars, fucked many waitresses and other lowclass girls, and settled into being a serious heavy drinker.

When Grant entered the picture—though they went out together in public and gave gay parties at home—(she said) they hadn’t slept together for years and Hunt had once seriously threatened to commit her.

It was such a banal story that it wouldn’t even make a novel or a play. Grant’s entrance into it had not made it any less banal. He knew of at least twenty childless couples scattered over the Petit Middlewest who had ‘adopted’ a broke young artist or writer, who became a member of the family while he was also fucking the mistress of the establishment at the same time. About the only un-totally-predictable thing, which perhaps saved the story from total banality, was that Ron Grant through fate, luck, talent or all three, had become a worldfamous playwright. That, and the fact that Carol Abernathy, as she watched the years of Grant’s and her ages mount together, began more and more to study oriental philosophies.

It was four years after their affair started that Carol Abernathy began to frequent occult book stores. Their physical love affair (never very fulfilling sexually because after a very short time she would only do it one way, in one position) had rapidly waned as she occupied herself more and more with the spiritual side of things.

It was true that Grant had started having other women soon after their affair started (to be exact, one week after she started refusing to have him in more than one way, one position) but even so he could not believe he was
totally
responsible for what was happening to her. Carol, though, obviously felt that he was, that it was ‘his fault’.

Through her occult studies she deduced that she had been appointed a sort of occult Master of Midwestern Artists, doomed by some unknown Karma to the great sacrifice of aiding Creators while herself never being allowed the opportunity to create because of helping them. Under this concept her dictatorial tendencies emerged swiftly, since her sacrifice gave her the moral right to know what was best for more self-indugent people. She made it plain to Grant that she now slept with him only so that he would not waste precious time from his Art chasing pussy. She even went so far as to tell him that a frustrated sex life was good for him, and all artists, all great men, because it allowed him—and them— to sublimate sex energy in work. And Grant at one point in his life with her believed, or tried to believe, it. After all there was a lot of truth in the idea. Look at Gandhi. And yet another part of him, the rest of him, which understood people surely but wordlessly, as would some languageless super-animal, knew it all to be a web of selfish, self-laminating, ego-perpetuating lies on her part. All she really wanted was to keep him like any woman wanted to keep any man, keep him and dominate him, be boss, make him pay. He knew all this and yet he didn’t leave her.

Rolled in his blanket on the hard floor of the suite’s livingroom, Grant groaned in his half-sleep.

Carol Abernathy. Their first four months, most of which time they were separated anyway because Grant was still in the Naval Hospital at Great Lakes Station and still totally flat broke, was the nearest they came to a love affair. Using her husband’s money, she used to meet him in Chicago and stay with him. Only some time later did he actually move in with them in Indianapolis, begin writing original one-acters for her Little Theatre, and allow himself to be supported by Hunt. This was after that disastrous year going to school in New York, after which his GI Bill ran out on him because he had only had his senior year left to do. She had visited him there too on Hunt’s money, from time to time. But after that, having moved in with them in Indianapolis, instead of a love affair (even a bad one) it became like some crazy kind of unhappy marriage, with Grant not even having the public distinction of being anyone’s husband.

Carol Abernathy paid him small sums of Hunt Abernathy’s money for the one-acters. This with his tiny Navy pension gave him a little beer and pool money whenever he went out with the boys. But he was seldom allowed to by Carol, who could always threaten to throw him out, and sometimes did. For the rest—bed, board, books, cigarettes—Hunt Abernathy paid. Grant could never understand why. Except that he knew why. Hunt put up with her for the very same reason he himself did: accumulated guilt. In any case it was not a particularly manly way to live for Grant, and his status could conceivably be termed gigolo or rich lady’s darling.

Later on, of course, after his first big three-acter became such a colossal hit on Broadway, it was a lot harder for her to hold him down. He had to go to New York quite a lot. Carol Abernathy never went with him, though out of politeness he asked her once or twice. She always refused. Neither did Hunt go, who couldn’t because of his job, and who didn’t give a good goddam about New York anyway. And each time Grant went to Europe, he went alone.