by James Jones
“He’s got something serious botherin him, girls. I don’t know what it is, because he don’t talk. Maybe it’s an idea for a new play. Anyway . . .”
Grant looked at him, suddenly remembering for the first time that the big man was married. Bonham drunk was very little different from Bonham sober. The only thing Grant could notice was that perhaps those blackly burning eyes burned a bit more blackly.
Bonham moved. “Well, since Ron ain’t goin, why don’t you come on and go along with us two, Susie?”
“Okeh,” Susie grinned. “Why not?” She gave Grant her hand as they all got up. “It ratheh a shame, but we see each otheh. Maybe you be in a betteh mood Some Time.” Then to the others she lapsed into the Jamaican patois, a—to Grant —totally unintelligible, mumbled jumble of broad, flat vowel sounds, and whatever it was she said made the others both laugh out loud.
“What did she say?”
“She said it was very bad luck for her because you looked like a helluva good piece of loving for tonight,” Bonham said; and Grant almost changed his mind about going. But he didn’t; couldn’t.
He watched them away, creaking off in the beatup old station-wagon. Sounds of bright, rich laughter carried back to him from it in the night. He motioned for a taxi. The taxi deposited him, at his request, at the foot of the villa drive.
It was about a quarter of a mile up to the great-house, uphill through the lush rich growths of special and rare tropical trees and plants which Evelyn and Paul de Blystein made a specialty of collecting. Grant walked it slowly under the hot burnished tropical sky, smelling the fleeting—fleeting because overabundant—flower and plant odors, thinking mostly about the dive he had made. The closer he came to the door, the more his elation turned into depression. Only one night light was burning. In his guestroom he stripped himself naked, made himself a stiff drink at the little bar in one corner and climbed into bed with it.
Almost as soon as he turned off the light, his door opened softly and his mistress, his ‘mistress’, came in: a flowing white shadow in the dark. Hello, Lady Macbeth he suddenly felt like saying, but refrained. In the image it was always black: black-draped, black-mantilla-ed, black-shrouded face, black-flowing, sleeved arm pointing: black of church, black of religion, black of guilt. Of course, if it were black now, he wouldn’t see it. Or would he?
“You son of a bitch,” she whispered.
Grant closed his eyes. “I made my first dive today.”
“Do you know what you did to me? — To us?”
“I said I made my first dive today. In the sea.”
“Evelyn was furious.”
“I’ll laugh her out of it.”
She had sat down on the side of the bed and now smelled him. “And drunk, too!”
“Not drunk. Just high. Did I tell you, I made my first dive today.”
“Until two-thirty in the morning? Hah!” The tone was ugly.
“We went out late. To a reef off the airport. When we got back, we went somewhere to have some drinks. And something to eat. And to talk diving. I forgot the time.”
“Until two-thirty in the morning!” Tone uglier.
“I wanted to talk diving.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” the ugly voice said. “But something is. Anyway I don’t like it. And I don’t have to put up with it and I’m not going to. It must be some little pig of a whore, some cunt you picked up in New York. Is that it?”
For a moment Grant thought about telling her. But he stayed silent.
“It must be that. That’s what it always is,” the voice said. There was no give in it, no give at all. “Because that’s what you always do. Every time you go. Some hot-assed little whore who wants to take you for everything you got. Everything I helped you to earn.”
Grant didn’t answer. Beside him the pressure of her ass on the bed went away. There was a rustle of clothing. The voice when it came was strident, harsh, loudly grating, though still in a whisper.
“Good will is worked out as qualifying the life of a group of Masters—(masters of their own destiny)—under the care of a Master of the Wisdom—(‘Gnostic’). The WILL-TO-GOOD is developed and understood in the groups of those of still greater attainment and is concerned with Purpose. GOOD WILL has vision! Will-to-Good. Then you have Illumination.”
Grant still didn’t answer. “You know all that as well as I do,” she said harshly. “I’ve taught you all I know.” Her mules hit the floor. Then, naked, she climbed into the double bed under the sheet and lay beside him as stiff as a board. She was lying there stiff as a varnished bowstring waiting for him to screw her.
Grant didn’t know if he could. In silence he finished his drink. Finally both pity and a terribly painful sense of how embarrassing it would be for her if he didn’t, plus a vague moral obligation which he knew was ridiculous, plus the fact that she was a female, all came to his aid. God forgive me, he thought to his new girl in New York, you forgive me. Gracelessly, flat on his back, he groped at her crotch a little to aid him. Her arms above her head, she did not move. He rolled over onto her, stuck it in her, and pumped away until he came. As always, she neither raised her legs nor moved.
As he was falling into sleep, he heard again the rustle of clothing as she put back on her nightgown and her robe, then the soft closing of the door.
Awakened by it, he lay wide awake a long time staring at the ceiling and thinking about New York.
2
HE HAD ARRIVED there halfway between Christmas and New Year’s, and the holiday drinking season was on and going full blast in every Third Avenue bar and East Side cocktail lounge. It had snowed all the way through Ohio and Pennsylvania on the train and it was still snowing in Manhattan when his train from his hometown Indianapolis pulled into Grand Central. At six in the evening it was already dark, Christmas lights glistered everywhere, and people hurried into Grand Central on their way home, or picked their way along the streets through the slush desperately looking for cabs. All of Grant’s most horrible sentimentalities for Manhattan as well as his most rabidly hate-filled memories of it, this particular day called up in him. From the station he had taken a cab straight to his reservation at the New Weston at 49th and Madison. They would be pulling the New Weston down soon.
It was strange how later in Jamaica in February, so short a time after that day in December, all of his previous memories of New York—even these going back the full thirteen years he had known it—were now somehow tied up with the new girl he had met, with Lucky. Everything that had ever happened to him in that city had been reconstructed emotionally in his head to include the image of—a laughing 27-year-old siren from upper New York State named Lucky Videndi.
At thirty-six he should be embarrassed even to use such a phrase. But that was the way he thought of her. Lucia Angelina Elena Videndi. Even the memories of those very early, barren, broke days in New York and his life there right after the war, now seemed to include her brightening image, making everything seem less dark and awful, less bad than it actually had been. And he had never even seen her until a few weeks ago.
He did not meet her, actually, until January 10th—although he met some others. But those others . . .
In the nine years since his first big success Grant had been around a fair amount for a famous man. Especially whenever he came on to New York. In the faster sets of girls (he found out later from Lucky, who knew them all) he was known at the secret luncheon sessions as a very good lay and a better diver, but a man who did not want encumbering entanglements and might therefore be half fag. He was also the last of the unmarried writers.
But his real trouble (Grant knew) was that the terrible bonecracking loneliness, the “Miseries”, that he suffered whenever he was without a girl, and which drove him like a whipped horse, was strengthened rather than lessened whenever he dropped into sleep sated but not satisfied beside one of them, sniffing at the delicious pissy female odors permeating his moustache. They didn’t give a real damn about him a
ny more than he gave a damn about them. That was his real trouble. That, and his sense of responsibility to his mistress. He didn’t want to hurt her. However ridiculous that might seem.
But with Lucky all of that changed.
“You know what?” he said one afternoon in Florida, his head on her chest and his lips nuzzling at the pool of sweat that had formed between her magnificent rose-tipped breasts. He was already half asleep and he had a sense of revelation. “We’re Hansel and Gretel, you and me. And the world is the woods.”
“I’ve always thought of us as Clark Gable and Carole Lombard,” Lucky said softly, and took hold of his ears with her hands.
“Maybe. To other people. And maybe they were scared too. ‘Let go my ears! I know my business,’” he quoted. “Anyway I guess it’s not just the world that’s the woods. It’s the fucking Universe,” he said, and rubbed his lips deliciously in the delicious sweat on her chest.
“Don’t think,” she said. “Drink.” He had glanced up and seen her smiling.
It could have been her philosophy. In fact it was. When Rocky Graziano’s ghosted book had come out way back with its horrible title designed for the consumption trade—for the ‘assholes’, as the Madison Avenue boys liked to say—Lucky Videndi had taken it and twisted it to her own: to read: “Somebody up there hates me.” It made the rounds from P. J. Clarke’s to El Morocco, but she really meant it. She was determined to extract every fleeting joy, beauty, pleasure from her life that she could get before God or whatever Monster it was Up There snatched it away from her. She had also twisted for her own benefit Spinoza’s “Because I love God does not mean God must love me in return” to fit more the modern age: “Because God hates me does not mean I must love God in return.” She also said: “The reason there is so much divorce in America today is because sex is not dirty enough in the home.”
Grant found it all not only sane but encouraging. Especially after his Middlewestern mistress’s crazy occultism and yakking about moral responsibility. Because what Lucky said was really the way he felt about the world, if he was honest. Fuck responsibility. Write literature? Responsibility to whom? The inhuman race? Grant’s youthful naïveté about the importance of literature had long since disappeared, buried and suffocated to death by the new age’s avalanche of mass media propagandas and the people it created. The bureaucracy of Madison Avenue.
But when he used it back on her, Lucky surprised him again. “People like you have to write literature,” she said in a sturdy way. Grant mocked her. “Yeah? For who? The race?” Sturdily, she wouldn’t back down. “For me,” she said staring him straight in the eye. After a while she added, “Anyway, you can’t help it anyway.”
He had met her the way he met all of his New York girls. Some friend who liked them and wanted to do you a favor, usually a friend who had laid them in the past, arranged for a polite and proper introduction and then you were on your own. In the case of Lucky, Grant had gone out of loneliness over to Hervey Miller the critic’s house in the East 60s. This was pretty drastic for a playwright even though Miller liked his work and had always given him good reviews, but the Miseries had tied him up in knots. He had spent the long New Year’s weekend in Connecticut with his friend Frank Aldane the novelist and his family, where he had laid an aging lady novelist who lived around there. No score. A good sweat but no score. Neither of them really cared. Then, back in the city, he had finally made it with the second of the two new secretaries his producer’s office had acquired since Grant’s last trip East. Again no score. All very friendly but no real score. He hadn’t called her again. And so here he was at Hervey Miller’s house all alone at five o’clock for a drink. And then Buddy Landsbaum had wandered in.
Buddy was a slightly older competitor in the theater, and at the moment was collaborating with Hervey Miller on a film. What was more important for Grant, he was giving a party that very night in his hotel suite, a farewell party for the cast and crew of his last film. It was just the kind of party for a lonely writer, Buddy said when he heard about Grant’s predicament from Hervey. But as it turned out, it wasn’t. The five or six young chicks were there, as Buddy’d promised, but they were all interested in Buddy. They were all movie actresses and Buddy had just made one girl a star and gotten her a Life cover. The young star herself, who was present, worked hard and carefully to protect her interests. Slowly the five or six chicks wandered off and left—without Grant. They all knew his name of course but he had never done any film, and they wanted film. Then the young star’s husband came and collected her from Buddy. So after the last drunken technician left, Buddy and Grant sat down in the debris with the remnants of the whiskey and got lonely drunk together.
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.”
