Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  First he had stashed them in some cheap little mote] way out in nowhere on one of the freeways. The spending money that he gave her for them was barely enough for hamburger-shack lunches, not even enough to get them into town unless they rode the bus. Then he had rented himself a big limousine and chauffeur and disappeared. That, the big car, was necessary for business he had explained. And after that they saw him only at night. All the dinners, of course, were invitational. Whether at someone’s home or out. Buddy had many many friends out there. And, of course, so were all the after-dinner parties that he took them to, invitational. Don Celt was always with them of course, trying in a rather lukewarm and lackadaisical way to make Leslie, who on her side wasn’t having any. Both girls knew it was Lucky that Don Celt really had the hots for, and talked about it between themselves and laughed.

  Then one night Buddy took them all to Clinton Upton’s house, after a very heavy-drinking dinner. Clint Upton had been as big a playwright in his generation as Ron Grant was in his. In later years he had done few plays, always flops, but had done an enormous amount of movie work, largely as a trouble-shooter on scripts that were in big trouble, for which he was paid fantastic sums. He had an enormous, incredibly expensive house, a fantastic collection of records for one of the world’s most fantastic hi-fi sets, an invaluable collection of Klees and Kandinskys and the like, had decorated everything in original Restoration antiques. And he showed the two girls, especially Lucky, all of it. Right down to the tiniest item. And it soon became clear that Buddy, in the nicest politest way possible of course, was offering Lucky to Clint Upton—who, for his part, was taking. It turned out later that Buddy and Don Celt were in trouble with their Canadian script. They wanted Upton to work on it.

  She couldn’t believe it at first. Not her. Maybe Hopie York, or other girls like that that she knew. But not her. So she laughed, and joked, and flirted, on and on, getting more embarrassed, making it look worse. When she finally did believe it was when she left. And she did not leave quietly. Of course she was very drunk by that time. They all were. She threw her drink at Upton, who ducked, so that the glass smashed on the big stone fireplace behind him, and then ran outside to the car. Fortunately the chauffeur was loafing somewhere in the servant’s quarters, as she had been pretty sure he would be. But by the time she got the unfamiliar controls of the car working, the men had run out after her. They had tried to stop her, Buddy and Don stepping out in front of the car in the light of the headlights. She had rammed the car right at them in the long expensive flowering-bush-bordered driveway and Celt, not quite as close as Buddy, had been able to step back. But Buddy had only saved himself by putting both hands on the headlight and fender and vaulting himself off head-first into the flowering bushes. God, he had looked funny, the last part of him to disappear into the bushes being his two worn shoe-soles glaring whitely at them all in the light from the headlights. She wouldn’t have cared at the time if she had killed him. Later of course she was glad he wasn’t. But her pride was hurt. And nobody got the chance to hurt her pride twice.

  She had driven the big car back to the motel and parked it. They had arrived soon after, as she had known they would, in Upton’s big car, though Upton was not with them. Buddy, Don, the chauffeur, and with them Leslie who could not keep from bursting out into laughter every so often. Buddy’s white dinner jacket was all covered with loamy soil, and he kept mopping with a no-longer-clean white handkerchief at the blood oozing from several deep scratches on his face.

  She never knew whether what she did then was simply for Leslie’s benefit or not. She didn’t think it was. But in another, more hollow way, she hoped that it was.

  In any case when Buddy had begun—somewhat sheepishly —to remonstrate with her, she had simply stared at him contemptuously and turned to Don. “How would you like to take me out tonight?” she had asked.—“Where?” Don had said, in a low voice.—“Where do you think? There’s nothing open this late. To your place,” she had answered. After a moment, Buddy made a half-strangled sound of protest. “Well—” Don said, and glanced at Buddy.—“Well, what is it?” she said. “Come on! Yes or no?”—“Well, it’s yes,” Don had said, in that low voice. Without a word she had walked around and gotten into his car, which he had left there earlier when they had started for Clint Upton’s. It had taken Don quite a bit longer to get in, and she had stared at Buddy from the window. Buddy did not say anything. He was taking it quite well, except that under everything else on his face—chagrin, shame, unmanliness even —there was a distinct look of painful, anguished pleasure, perverse enjoyment of what she was doing to him. They were all enjoying it. She was enjoying it herself. Only Leslie really looked shocked.—“Bye!” she had called sweetly as Don turned the car. “See you!”

  Men! she had thought contemptuously, then, looking at Don behind the wheel, as Men! she thought contemptuously now again, cracking her lids just enough to peek up at Grant’s face lit by the dashlight.

  He had not really been a bad lay. Once nature had time to get him over the initial awkwardness. She had helped time by being calm and amenable, sitting down in a chair and making herself at home. The only cruel thing she did was to refuse a drink when he offered it. But he had had that coming, and he seemed to sense that as he coughed and fidgeted around. When he finally sidled over and sat down by her and kissed her, she kissed him back. But in the morning she was up and gone before Celt, who had to be up quite early to get to the studio, had even begun to start waking up. Men!

  Men, she remembered having thought oh so many times really, God how I detest them all. A pair of tits and a cunt, and that was all they wanted. The only really honorable man with real honor she had ever met was her Daddy really.

  But it was after that incident that she first really began to worry about herself. She couldn’t really be a whore, could she? God, what if it turned out she was? Back at the motel she had found Leslie waiting with, “God! You really made him pay, honey!” in a half-scared awed admiring voice. Buddy it turned out had cried a couple of times between drinks, and then tried to climb into the sack with Leslie, unsuccessfully of course. Lucky listened. Trying to save his pride and get even. Still freezing cold emotionally, she had called up Clint Upton on an impulse.

  “Sure, you can both come on out for a few days if you want,” he had said in his amused, still-Jewish, still very-Bronx accent. “What? You haven’t got . . . ? God, those boys sure treat you right, don’t they? Okay, I’ll send the car for you.” He had regaled them with stories of stars and gossip of people in high places, they swam in his pool, he played them his records, his Mexican maid cooked them excellent dinners for three days. “What do you want me to do about their job?” he asked her finally, smiling. “Do you want me to take it or not? I’ll leave it up to you.”—“I refuse to even answer such a thing,” she had said coldly.—“No, come on. It’s your right. You say the word, I’ll turn it down. Or take it, if you say so.”—“I absolutely refuse to make such a decision!” she answered coldly, and would not budge. In the end, she learned later, he had taken the job; but the Canadian picture was a flop anyway. On the fourth day he said, “I think it’s about time Leslie got back to New York, don’t you?” In all that time he had not touched, or tried to touch, either of them. “Leslie?” she had said.—“Oh, and you too, if you want to go. I had thought maybe you’d like to stay on a while longer. But you have a ticket to New York any time you want it. After all, somebody has to uphold the reputation of the brethren of this trade.” Sweet man.

  She had stayed. What the hell? And Clint Upton turned out to be really an endearing man. Though quite a lot older. As she was to say over and over in the years after and had been saying for at least two years before, the only way to really get to know somebody was to fuck them. He had once been married to a very famous star, and he told her in his amused voice how he used to eat bananas and prunes and sectioned oranges and grapefruit out of his wife’s pussy. He used to take about half his meals there in fact, he said.
Then one day he got carried away and chased her (Lucky) around the swimmingpool with a Gillette razor wanting to shave hers. “Come on! You’ll like it! I know you will! Just try it once!” Fortunately he was older and hadn’t much wind and finally ran himself down. The next day she had invoked his offer of a plane ticket back home to New York—on the grounds that because after all she had to get back to her real life someday didn’t she, so that they would part friends, and which was a good part of the truth anyway, more than the thing about him wanting to shave her pussy. The thing had just run itself out. Because if it hadn’t, she would have let him shave it. Clint of course had learned a lot about her too and one day only a couple of years later she was to see herself turn up as a character in a play of his, vastly distorted of course. It was a flop, too. Men!

  Men!, and Lucky peeked up at Grant again from under her slivered lids. Well, there’s three of the Four Hundred Men you will never know about, My Husband. How about that? Except that that wasn’t really true, either, was it? He already knew about Buddy.

  She did not really know why she was so angry at him and as she paused to wonder why, the anger itself sieved away. Partly because the black night and the black nighttime Negroes scared her. And then besides, that kind of life was nowhere, out there, on the Coast. That wasn’t the way she wanted to live. And besides twenty-seven going on twenty-eight is not twenty-three going on twenty-four, either. The changed mood made her remember her so-oft-repeated promise to herself and, silently, to him. To Ron. She would make him a good wife. She would. Sliding down a little, she reached out one hand and let it rest on his hard thigh. His broad ugly tough-looking face was strong and almost good-looking in the dim dashlight.

  Suddenly she choked back tears. Oh, Daddy, Daddy! Why did you have to go and die so suddenly like that and leave your Little Girl?

  Grant continued to herd the car. She continued, to pretend to sleep.

  She was depressed again. Like in New York, though not as bad. The superstitious feeling that she would be punished came back over her. Doom-gloom. The fucking Catholics. She understood it all. All that, plus the Electra complex bit. Understanding did not make it cease, or go away. Pride: Anger: Silence: Guilt: They always took the same course with her predictably, and now she was in the Guilt phase. She loved ‘Authority’, but at the same time hated it. She knew she had a too strong penchant for contempt for men. (If she didn’t like cocks so well, she might have been lesbian. Except she could never put her face down there, like men did. Ugh!) But fear of Grant offset that somewhat: her man-contempt: she never knew what he was going to do or say. His honesty about himself was almost too much. He would say anything about himself, confess anything about himself, totally shamelessly. He didn’t seem to have any repressions like other people. Just the opposite, he seemed to have a compulsion to tell everybody everything about himself, and this embarrassed her. Psychologically, he was not hygienic, not—sanitary and she hated that. Damn him! she thought, and then realized she had come clear around the circle back to Anger. Pride and Anger. When she realized this, her depression doubled.

  The thing about Grant was, he was real. She had never felt real, herself. So, whatever she said or did didn’t really count She wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, and so it didn’t mean anything. Take her feeling about telling him about the $10,000 wedding present her mother was going to give them. The only way she could describe it was that a sort of ‘evil spirit’ of ‘Charm’, a naughty devil of charm, had possessed her. It was a mistake. She was being charming, and he was being charming, and they were kidding and laughing about their marriage (which neither one of them believed in, then), and it had just popped out. And when she said it she knew it wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter because it would never come back to her, never come home to roost, because she wasn’t real, and none of this was real, and so it didn’t count. And anyway when she said it it was true because she said it. She still didn’t know about what his reaction to the real truth had been when she told him. He hadn’t reacted. But, what had he thought?

  And furthermore, how could she go about explaining to him that it wasn’t really a ‘lie’ at all? She couldn’t. It would simply sound like an excuse.

  Okay. But that wasn’t what was really disturbing her. Go further. All right. The thing that really disturbed her was that on that first night of nude swimming in Sir John’s brightly lit pool, way down deep inside of her she had secretly wished that Ron had said, had ordered her, ‘Take off your suit,” had demanded that she expose herself naked to all of them. That was what had scared her, and looking into it even deeper—as she had done then sitting there in the deck chair just as Terry September came walking back from the Little Girls Room in her bikini—she had found way down there in some very deep bottom of her mind one of those sexual fantasy pictures that one cannot tell to anyone, not even to an analyst, a played-out-in-full imaginative sexual fantasy of her screwing another man in front of Ron, of making him stand there and watch her screw another man in front of him and maybe, say, play with himself while he watches. That was what had terrified her, and the weeping fit came from the terror and from the idea that she could even in her imagination imagine such a thing. Hide in a closet!

  She still felt, even now, that she had lost considerable face with him, had shown a big lack of courage. But she had also felt, very strongly, with a powerful feeling of impending danger, that if she had taken off her suit that night they two would have lost something between them that they could never have gotten back. But how could Ron be expected to understand that? Especially since it was exactly that that she was making him pay for the next day, when she did take off her suit and show herself nude at the picnic?

  God, those people! And especially his ‘old buddy’ Doug Ismaileh! They were not the kind of people that they—she and Ron—ought to be hanging around with. God, was everybody in the world sick? She huddled down further into her coat, as if that would save her, and well, it would all sort itself out, she had to believe that, now that they were away from them, were on their way to GaBay and going to Kingston. René and Lisa would be glad to see her. René and Lisa and their funny Grand Hotel Crount. She had stayed with them so many times and so long during her long affair with Raoul. Lightly, lovingly, scared and panicky, she dug her fingernails gently into the hard meat of Grant’s thigh as he drove on.

  Thinking of Raoul so soon after thinking of her mother’s ‘$10,000 Wedding Present’ made her couple the two and suddenly remember the time Raoul had given her $10,000 in cash that time. She hadn’t thought of that in ages. Another example of how she was not really real.

  Usually Raoul gave her jewelry, most of which she subsequently sold or pawned, after his death. God, they were all so rich those South Americans, what with their great estates and peon peasants and no taxes at all, hardly even any law. An ordinary American couldn’t believe it. This time he had simply given her this money at the airport when she had ridden out with him to see him off. She had come home with a purse so jammed with bills she couldn’t completely close it. The very sight of it had panicked her. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she’d cried.—“I don’t care,” he’d said. “It’s a present. Buy yourself something with it.” When counted it had turned out to be $10,000. And it had lasted like a week. She had given hundred-dollar bills to all her friends. She had loaned hundreds and hundreds of dollars to people she knew damn well would never pay her back. She threw big parties. Once she had scattered twenty-dollars bills all around the apartment to her girlfriends like it was ticker-tape confetti. It just wasn’t real, and she couldn’t make it seem real. She herself wasn’t real holding it. Then it was gone. But she was still proud of herself for it. Of course, she didn’t know he was going to get himself killed down there.

  She must have dozed because the sound of the car’s motor getting lower and lower until it was idling seemed a dream, and then the car itself rolling gently to a stop, and then it brought her back with a start. Grant leaned over her and said gent
ly, “Well, sweetie, we’re here.” Sitting up, she saw a decrepit-looking kind of Charlie Addams house with high steep mansard roofs of corrugated tin.

  Although it was after midnight, the little house was ablaze with lights. Rock and roll music poured from its windows. When Ron called, an enormous figure appeared in the screendoor literally filling it, and stood there silhouetted against the light like some huge terrible gorilla from the forests of Africa, bellowing.

  “That’s Al Bonham,” she heard Grant say from behind her with almost boyish hero-worship. “The best damn aqualung diver in the Caribbean.”

  “Haw! You son of a bitch! I thought you’d gone to China or someplace!” Bonham was roaring.

  Once inside, the two men began beating each other on the back. A third man, naked to the waist and heavily muscled with that thin layer of protective lard just under the skin that she had seen professional football players have, came over from the table and gave Grant a punch on the arm that sounded like a butcher hitting a side of meat with a flathead hammer. She watched Grant wince, suddenly feeling a little sick in her stomach. But he came back with a punch to the belly swift and hard enough to make the other man whoof. “And this is Mo Orloffski,” he said with an apologetic grin, “sailor, diver, and owner of the biggest sporting goods store on the South Jersey Shore.” Orloffski roared with laughter. “Used to be, honey. But I’m sellin it. You want to buy one?” Two women, one of them a light-skinned Jamaican colored girl, sat by the trumpeting record-player holding cans of beer. One of them, the Jamaican girl, was knitting. Everything, every flat surface in the room except the floor was crowded with empty beercans and beer bottles. Around the edges of the floor and crowding the corners of the room were duffel bags packed with gear, rubber-hosed aqualung regulators and sets of tanks. On the table, crowding the beercans outward to the corners, was an aqualung regulator all opened up with its innards showing that the two men must have just been working on. On the floor beside the table was a haphazard pile of marine charts upon which several stuffed-out cigarette butts had fallen. Lucky felt a horribly strong distaste rising in her.