Free Go to the Widow-Maker by James Jones

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