by James Jones
“I guess he’s not above it,” she said, her smile still nervous.
Buddy had told him she was beautiful. But that had not prepared him for the kind of breathtaking beauty he found himself facing. All he could think was, It’s unfair, it’s unfair! It very nearly choked off and killed his smoothly purring charm. Her shoulderlength champagne-colored hair was combed straight back above the smoothly rounded forehead in a sort of lion’s-mane effect. She had high slightly prominent cheekbones that slanted her eyes the least tiniest bit. But beneath the short straight nostril-flaring nose, her mouth was her most attractive feature. It was wide enough that it seemed to go all the way across her face although it didn’t, and the full sweet upper lip was so unusually short that it appeared unable to cover a perfect set of prominent upper teeth except by an act of conscious will on the part of its owner. Below the long full lower lip was a tiny cute jaw and chin that further accentuated the mouth. When she smiled with it, even nervously like now, it not only lit up the entire little apartment but appeared to radiate right on through the walls into the apartments around. It was typical of Lucky, Grant learned later, that she should consider her Italian nose her best feature and be embarrassed about that exquisite mouth. But apart from her face, her figure was enough to drive men mad.
Grant never was able to describe the why of her body’s beauty in words, even to himself. It had something to do with the unusual width and squareness of the shoulders, and the long line which tapered down from them to the waist, to flare immediately into a pair of gorgeous, unusually highassed hips; and perhaps because above this width of shoulder rode the slender neck and high small head of a princess. Actually, she needed the wide shoulders to support the big full globes of her breasts thrusting out in the tight black dinner dress. Her calves were perfect, and ended in strong delicate aristocrat’s ankles and the powerful feet of a pro dancer, which it turned out later, she had been. In the tight dress there was suggested just a hint of an equally powerful mons veneris. In her heels she was just a hair shorter than Grant, and she stood very straight, carrying her torso high off her hips, the slender neck extended to carry the small head, in the manner of a Jamaican woman carrying a market basket on her head. She moved the same way. And icing all this cake together, another indescribable quality, a reserved sexuality oozed from her like her very own invisible honey. She was obviously the doted-upon darling of the three girls on the couch, to whom she now began to introduce Grant.
Grant was totally bowled over, but he managed to acknowledge the introductions. He had been out with several coldly professional beauties over the years, but this girl was far and away the most beautiful woman he had ever met, and this included a few very famous female movies stars. It would take him several days to separate the names of the three girls on the couch. But he had always been bad at names anyway.
Leslie Green was Lucky’s roommate in the apartment. A small, pert girl with a good figure in crotch-tight green slacks, raven hair piled up high on her head to make her look taller, and a long haunted Jewish face perhaps a tenth as beautiful as her pal’s, she was obviously the self-appointed general manager of Lucky’s emotional life and the Leader of the Delegation to Study Grant. Her snapping black eyes stated unequivocally that she was not about to let Lucky not be appreciated. Grant felt that her eyes softened a little after she looked him over.
Mrs. Athena Frank was a blocky blonde girl with a square face somewhat marred by acne and a rather gracelessly lush, sensual figure. The introductions turned up the fact that she was a lawyer and Grant wondered uneasily if she were the official legal member of the team, the committee. Her open and belligerent hostility showed already, anyway, which way she would vote on the subject of Ron Grant, playwright.
Mrs. Annie Carler was a slender, fairly tall Jewish girl of about Grant’s own age, with short tousled black hair and lushly dissipated circles under her eyes, much given to unconscious posturings of her long pretty neck and slender back into modern-dance, Martha Graham poses. With a sly puckish grin, she seemed to be enjoying the situation very much and appeared to be the most noncommittal of the three.
All three of them were clearly madly in love with Lucky, her wit and her beauty; and if there were any hidden jealousies in all this anywhere, Grant could not yet smell them out. If she had a big reputation going in Manhattan, and apparently she did, these three were going to promulgate it. And like any real queen, Lucky treated her subjects with dignity, and with a deep respect for their good taste in serving her. There was some small talk—in which Grant did not feel he came off particularly brilliantly—then she got her coat and they whisked out the door and down the four flights of narrow badly lit stairs out onto the nocturnal glories of Park in a winter snowfall. Rich people in dinner clothes and furs were getting into Cadillac limousines and taxis all around them.
“Well, do you think I passed inspection?”
Lucky gave him a sly crooked grin that made her blue eyes glint. “I think so.” She looked at him squarely. “You’re pretty famous.”
He waited but she didn’t say more. In the cab, glancing at her sideways, as she nestled that nosey, toothy, short-upper-lipped profile down into the collar of her coat, Grant realized with a start that he had never before in his life been so proud to be seen in public with a woman. And, especially after these past two years of hibernation and work in Indianapolis, with his mistress and his new play, it made his heart jump. In the past he had often looked with envy at the escorts of unknown, real beauties—of which there were few enough in this world, known or unknown—the kind which made heads turn and tables buzz. Now he was escorting one himself. Settling back, he told himself this might turn out to be one of the great nights of his life.
It didn’t. Though it started out well enough. He took her to the Petite Ange, haven of the sick comics after they graduated from Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard, for dinner and the show. After a few drinks she loosened up and lost her nervousness and began to display that really penetrating wit, humor, and incredibly sexy charm Buddy Landsbaum had told him about. She was apparently an incorrigible flirt. But then, she was also so beautiful, so sexually attractive that for her simply to look at a man was enough. Grant had never sat in a nightclub so proudly, so selfcontent. Heads turned toward her, tables buzzed. The only trouble was that as she loosened up after a few drinks, Grant after a few drinks became quite drunk. All the drinks his old pal Buddy had pushed on him all day long, which drinks and other chicanery he had survived to keep his date, now began to catch up with him. The dinner and all that good food in his belly saved him for a while, but after the show they came back out to the lounge-bar to listen to the colored fag piano player and drink and talk. Lucky was a little drunk herself by this time—but nothing like Grant.
Grant made his pitch for her there in the lounge-bar. With sly drunken shrewdness he had decided not to do it during the dinner and show inside. Too many distracting elements around. But you could talk while the fag piano player was playing; he was background. And he played a lot of love mood music, when he wasn’t doing his funny numbers. So Grant had waited.
He had of course been making love to her as politely and charmingly as he could all during the dinner and show inside. Now for the clincher! The essence of his pitch was that he wanted her to come back to his suite in the New Weston with him, or, if her roommate didn’t mind, since he had noticed a sofa bed in the livingroom as well as twin beds in the tiny bedroom, he would be quite willing to go back to her apartment with her. Either way, he said, he intended to make violent love to her that night.
Maybe he didn’t lay it on right. He had expected, especially after all his old pal Buddy had told him about her, that the result would be a foregone conclusion. He was astonished and shaken when she told him no.
“But my God! Why not?” he cried. “What’s wrong with me?” He then discovered he had nearly drowned out the piano player, who, being an old acquaintance from bachelor nights when the lonely Grant used to come in here
and drink alone, looked over at him and winked.
Lucky had a hurt, embarrassed, but sturdy look on her face. “How do I know what’s wrong with you? I don’t even know you yet.” She shook her pretty head and said flatly, “I never lay men the first date I have with them.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” Grant protested. During dinner she had been open and quite frank about all the men she had had in her life, though without naming any of them Grant noticed. She had claimed 400, though Grant suspected her of exaggerating to shock him, and now the thought of going back alone to that miserable suite in the New Weston after being titillated and heated up so by this exquisite female was enough to nearly unman him. Had he been more sober, he might have hidden it better. “That’s . . . That’s the same kind of rigid moral rule you hate the middle-class bourgeoisie for,” he protested, lamely. What he wanted to say but hadn’t the courage was If all 400 of them, why not me too?
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.
