Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “The same as any mother, I mean, any other mother. What the hell? That aint got anything to do with it.” Frank and Marie had always been content to follow his lead on the subject of his foster-mother, whatever gossip they may or may not have heard.

  “Well,” Frank said holding his glass up to the light and admiring it. Suddenly it fell from his hand and smashed on the floor. “Shit!” he said and turned to get another. “Well, as I was about to say, I enjoy, I might even say I empathize, with your affair, you and Lucky. But then, as you well know, that is my goût. However, I am a married man, and you are not.”

  Grant bent to brush splashes of bourbon from his pantsleg and almost fell down in the glass shards. He straightened up smiling. “I tell you what. Let’s sleep on the floor again and pretend we’re boy scouts again. I got to do something. I’m going fucking nuts. You remember that crazy night?”

  Frank Aldane grinned. Marie had found them in the morning, snugly tucked under a big polar bear skin of hers on the livingroom floor, fully dressed, peacefully asleep. “Not tonight,” Aldane said judiciously. “The bear rug is being cleaned. Anyway, did you forget you’ve got Lucky upstairs?”

  “My God!” Grant said, aghast. “I forgot! I actually forgot!”

  ‘Take your glass with you,” Aldane said.

  Grant did. When he crept in beside her, she immediately snuggled up to him even though she was sound asleep, and he saw that she too was sleeping nude. He shook her shoulder gently.

  “Do you think I’m maybe oversexed?” he whispered anxiously.

  “Well if you are, so am I,” Lucky murmured sleepily, “so it’s all right.”

  “You don’t care if my first name is Decameron?”

  “I wouldn’t care if your first name was Firestonetire,” she murmured.

  Grant felt an enormous relief flood over him, because of both points. “I’m glad these springs don’t squeak,” was all he said as he turned her tenderly on her back. But as he entered her, “Hansel and Gretel again,” was what he was thinking.

  “You drink too much,” Lucky whispered sleepily and kissed his ear as she elevated her hips and legs to receive him. O the beautiful pissy musk of the opening female!

  It was probably true he did drink too much. But it didn’t seem to hurt him any. Yet. There was no getting around it, he was in love, and he was going to have to do something about it.

  Sunday they all spent most of the day cursing Saturday night. In spite of that Frank Aldane did get set up and pursue his little indoctrination course which he had promised Grant, and he pursued it right to its promised end which was the revelation of his new panacea for America in a superorganized world. The ‘indoctrination’ had mostly to do with a young lawyer who had been at last night’s party.

  “You met him. Do you remember him? Lester Horton? Did you get a chance to talk to him?”

  “Dark and slight? Looked Jewish. No, not much. What’s so important about him?”

  “That young man graduated Harvard Law School with the next to highest grades ever taken. He now lives in Washington, where he is involved with the government. Not only that, he is a very close friend of the President.”

  “So?”

  Frank’s momentous pause was positively pregnant. “How would you someday like to be invited to spend a year, say, in Rio as the United States’s Artist in Residence in Brazil?” Triumph shone on his face.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Grant said cautiously. “I never thought about it You mean, it actually could happen?”

  Frank nodded vigorously. “It could. That’s Les’s own project one of the things he’s working on for the President.”

  “Well, I guess I’d like it” Grant said still cautiously. “I’m not so sure it would be good for me. Or my work.” He looked over at Lucky.

  “I love Rio,” she smiled.

  “You been there, too?” Grant said sourly. She nodded, smiling at him happily.

  “Under this administration,” Frank said sententiously, “for the first time in American history it is happening that the artist and the intellectual actually can be active in Government.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Grant said. “But I worry about an artist being committed to anything, any Administration, any nation even. You know how I believe that any artist who is really engagé to anything, any politique, any philosophy even, becomes passé and just about worthless as soon as the conditions which created his particular politique or philosophy change. Shit, look at all them Thirties writers!”

  “Look,” Frank said. “You’re one of the few men of real integrity I know. Your first play was a huge success. All that fame, success, money never touched you. You, like me, know what the almost insurmountable problems are going to be to try and save any sense of the individual skeptic and free thinker in any future society which we are already building now; today.”

  “Aw, I’m too cynical,” Grant said embarrassedly. “Nobody’d want to talk to me.” He looked over at Lucky. “Anyway, I’d rather get laid.”

  “Well it’s what we have to do. It’s our responsibility,” Aldane said seriously. “These men want our ideas, for the first time in history, whether they use them or not. It certainly can’t hurt. We must try to help.”

  “Can’t you see that by its very nature it can’t work? The weight, the sheer mass, of any society is always unoriginal, unimaginative, conservative. The very things you and I, the artists, want to change about people to make them better are the very things people don’t want changed. It can’t be any other way. You and I are therefore compelled to address ourselves to unborn future generations.”

  “But now at least we can advise,” Frank said.

  “Aw, come on. Advise what? And be listened to? Naw.”

  “Well anyway I gave ol’ Les Horton your address,” Frank said. “You’ll be hearing from him.”

  “I aint going to have any address for quite a while,” Grant said.

  “You’re still determined to go through with this kooky diving business?” Frank said almost pedagogically.

  “I sure am.”

  “What if you got killed?”

  “It’s not that dangerous.”

  “People do get killed doing it.”

  “I know, but not very many.”

  “You remember all what I’ve told you. Honor, you said! Honorably, we have to try. Think about it.”

  “Okay, I will,” Grant said, glad to get off the subject. His depression of Friday night was returning, as it always did when he let himself think about the world and its future. He held up his left arm with his wrist watch on it. “Look! We made it! It’s after five! What do you say we have a drink?”

  But in the car going back to the city the next day Lucky brought the subject up again herself.

  “If what Frank says is true, you know you really do have to try. It’s everyone’s responsibility, to his society, to his race. Besides, I’d love to spend a year in Rio.”

  “We aint married yet,” Grant heard himself say. “And you lay off of me with your Cornell socio-political socialist ideas. I’m an artist, a playwright. I want to know what makes the wellsprings of human character tick. Let the others save the world.”

  It was, he noted, as both of them had also privately noted only a little short while before, right here in this same Hertz car on this same highway, once again four days to departure time.

  During those four days the closeness between them and the sense of poignancy in their love affair got stronger and stronger, like a musical note that is increased and increased in intensity until the glass is ready to tinkle and break, the ears to begin to scream. It was almost too much emotion to stand. Always before in Grant’s New York affairs there had come a breaking point when it was over, finished, when he would know he was going to leave and go home. It coincided with the point at which he found that that particular girl’s character flaws, neuroses, idiosyncracies, or whatever, were in unequal balance to, too glaring for, a love from him. But this time ther
e didn’t seem to be any of that. He had started out (this time, too; as always) wanting not to hurt Carol Abernathy; and he had wound up at the end wanting not to hurt Lucky Videndi. Was this the basic choice of love: choice of who not to hurt?

  Up to now they had existed in a sort of midtown lovers’ vacuum which had nothing to do with either of their lives. Now their lives were starting to come back into it all and take over, as the days passed and he did not postpone again. She would go back to doing whatever she had done before, being whatever it was she had been, and he would also. You could smell it. There was that feeling in the air.

  Was it true, Grant wondered, the old saw, the old superstitious myth that said when a man found Something Good and True he must give some token, make some gesture of spiritual Commitment or he would lose it, lose it forever? Certainly that feeling was strongly in him. But then he had always been superstitious anyway.

  He was still receiving phone calls from his ‘foster-mother’ in Miami. She had not gone on to Ganado Bay after all. Most of these he refused to accept when he was at the hotel, which was seldom now, usually only to change shirts. But on the day when Lucky came to help him pack to catch the evening train that night, perhaps because he was so nervous and upset to be leaving anyway, the phone rang and inadvertently he picked it up. Such a loud and insulting volley of hysterical screaming and cursing came out of the instrument at him, that he was sure Lucky in the bedroom of the suite packing his ties must be able to hear it. He made his voice guarded and low, and answered in grunts and monosyllables.—Yes, he was leaving today.—“And she’s up there right now helping you pack, isn’t she?” the voice said incredibly. “No,” he mumbled. The voice went on. But underneath all his distress and the sub-moronic guilts he could not seem to shake, another emotion was rising in him: he was just getting a bellyful of this; a hard, mean quality; and suddenly he just hung up the phone, hung up on her, cut her off. He had never done that in his life before.

  Lucky was standing in the bedroom doorway. “Who was it?” she said lightly. But some deep intuitive knowledge shone powerfully on her face that she had understood it all.

  “Oh, just some guy,” Grant said. “Come on, let’s get this over with and get the fuck out of here.”

  She didn’t say a word and went back into the bedroom. It was as if, by not retorting, she were deliberately putting herself into the hands of Fate, whatever the odds, sealing her bet for win or lose. When the phone began to ring again just a few minutes later, Grant refused to answer it and became enraged.

  “Goddam them! Goddam them! They all know I’m leaving! What the fuck are they all calling now for! I don’t want to talk on the fucking telephone! I want to be with you!

  “God!” he growled, with such a violent intensity that it surprised himself, “I hate packing! I hate it! I never could stand it! Come on, let’s get out of this! How much time have we got?”

  “About four hours,” Lucky said in a strangely calm voice.

  “Let’s go over to your place, then.” He put into his eyes that he wanted to make love to her one more time. Leslie wouldn’t be there, was at work at her office.

  “I’d rather not,” Lucky said in a voice that was curiously decisive. “Let’s go somewhere and have a drink or two instead.”

  She went with him to the train. He had checked his bags through early and then walked with her over to Rattazzi’s, which had become a lovers’ hangout for them since he first took her there and where they were known, and where they had four large martinis each, sitting at their own private little table in the back. So they were both a little drunk when they came back two hours later for Grant to board.

  “I’ll come with you,” Lucky said in a still voice, “if you want me to.”

  “To where? Indianapolis!” It was an idea that had never occurred to him. His jerking mind could not get used to it. Also, there was noise and confusion all around them, and people pushing.

  “Sure. Why not?” she said. “I’ll make the drive to Florida with you and fly back from there.”

  Grant couldn’t get used to the idea. He had never done things like that. But he had always wanted to. “Wait a minute,” he said and climbed into the train to put his briefcase on his berth. He came back and hopped off onto the platform. “You haven’t got any clothes with you. Anyway, where would I put you?”

  “Haven’t you got a house out there? You were telling me all about it the other day.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “We could have a wonderful five days on the drive down.”

  From down the line the All Aboard! call went.

  “I’ve never thought about it” Grant said. “I don’t—I can’t—” He kissed her and climbed up onto the step, and there they stood, she on the platform with this strangely, incredibly forlorn look on her white face like some little lost girl, he on the step, looking at each other, waiting for the door to shut the train to move.

  “I can’t take you to Jamaica,” Grant growled. It had become almost a signal reaction.

  “Send me back on a plane from Miami.”

  “Your clothes—”

  “You can buy me a couple of little dresses.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Please.”

  “All right then, come on!”

  Lucky took two very hesitant steps forward. “But are you sure? I don’t want to come if—I won’t push you.”

  “Well, I—I just haven’t thought about—”

  The door slid shut in front of his face. He stood looking out at her, an anguish bursting in him like a small bomb. The train began to move. She waved once, then dropped her hands to her sides and like that same little girl lost from her parents, she began to cry, then she disappeared from view, cut off by the angle of the glass. Grant felt numb.

  That night he didn’t eat but instead got drunk in the club car all by himself. When he finally climbed into the berth, drunk, it felt strangely empty.

  5

  SHE DIDN’T REALLY know how she got back to the apartment but she assumed she took a taxi since she certainly wouldn’t have ridden the subway. She had only ridden the subway five times in her life, five times in seven years in New York, and that was when she was doing that bit part for Buddy Landsbaum and Don Celt who were shooting it in Brooklyn. She had ridden the subway to Brooklyn five times at four o’clock in the morning to do that job.

  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.”