Free Go to the Widow-Maker by James Jones Page A

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