Donald Westlake - Sacred Monster

“But, I don’t know,” I tell O’Connor, shaking my head at the memory, “sometimes you can’t win for losing.”

Into the booklined airy living room of the Malibu house came Jack and Lorraine, arguing, she coldly furious, he bewildered but beginning to get sore. “Darling,” he said, as they entered the room, “we won .”

“But despicably, darling,” Lorraine said through clenched teeth. “I’ve never seen such utter and total male-chauvinist piggery in my entire life.”

“Would you rather we had lost? ” Jack demanded. “Would you have liked that no-doubt brain-damaged infant to have been a part of our lives from now on? Would you have liked it to live with us?”

“We have to live with ourselves, darling,” Lorraine said, cold and furious, her face dead-white except for two high splotches of color.

Buddy entered the room from deeper in the house before Jack could think of the proper response. Grinning from ear to ear, Buddy spread his arms wide and marched across the room toward Jack as to a conquering hero. “Congratulations, Dad!” he cried. “It was on the radio.”

“Thanks, Buddy,” Jack said, beginning to smile, turning with relief to this evidence of approval:

Buddy wrapped his arms around Jack and gave him a bear hug, grinning over Jack’s shoulder at Lorraine, saying, “What do you think of our boy, Lorraine?”

Lorraine didn’t answer. Buddy’s grin became knowing, while Jack’s shoulder blades tightened as he became aware of the lengthening silence. At last, he disengaged himself from Buddy and turned to see Lorraine studying them both, her expression enigmatic, thoughtful, calculating. “Darling?” Jack said, unable to keep the anxiety out of his voice. “What are you thinking, darling?”

“I’m thinking, darling, ” Lorraine said slowly but emphatically, “that you two probably do deserve each other, but I don’t deserve either of you.”

Thunderstruck, Jack cried, “Darling! You aren’t leaving me!”

“Oh, but I am, darling,” Lorraine said, with the calm confidence of someone whose mind is made up at last. “But before I go, there’s just one thing—”

Jack ducked and leaped over the nearest sofa. He stood behind it, alert, ready for anything. Lorraine ignored this odd behavior, ignored everything except her own exit line: “Just one thing I want to tell you,” she said. “Buddy Pal, your oldest friend in all the world, several times in the course of our marriage tried to rape me. Fortunately, I minored in judo.”

Having delivered her exit line, she turned about, square-shouldered, and made her exit. Jack, staring at her back, coming out from behind the sofa, shrillness in his voice, cried, “You’re just trying to make trouble!”

Lorraine kept going. A door closed, not forcefully. Jack turned his wide-eyed stare on Buddy, who shrugged and grinned, completely at his ease. “That bag of bones?” Buddy said. “Not my type, Dad, you know me.”

Jack continued to stare at him, not responding, not changing in any way. Buddy crossed to him, the same crooked confident grin on his face, and gave Jack a light but meaningful tap on the arm, saying, “You do know me, Dad, remember? From the very first girl. Remember?”

Jack was slow to answer, his breathing strained, muscles jumping in his cheeks, but at last he sagged, and his face lost its tension, and he said, “I remember, Buddy.”

Buddy nodded, secure, and tapped Jack’s arm again. Then he turned away, crossing toward the liquor cabinet, saying, “You won a big case today, Dad. Want a little drink to celebrate?”

“Yes,” Jack said. He hadn’t yet moved.

Buddy opened the liquor cabinet and held up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “On the rocks, or straight up?”

At last, Jack moved. He crossed the room, saying, “Don’t wrap it, I’ll drink it here.” Taking the bottle from Buddy’s hand, he removed the top, threw it away behind himself, put the bottle to his mouth, leaned his head back, and chugalugged.

“That was when I started hitting the bottle pretty heavy.”

O’Connor looks at me, as though not sure whether to believe what I’m saying. “You mean,” he asks, “you weren’t a drinker before your second marriage broke up?”

“I was a social drinker,” I tell him, and shrug. “Like anybody else.” (Hey, I just shrugged there and didn’t fall over! I’m getting better, health is returning, I can feel it. Once again, I survive the Temple of Doom.) “But after Lorraine left,” I continue, “I wasn’t a social drinker, I was a drinker . And it was beginning to affect my work.”

The antiques-store set was wide but shallow with an old glass-paned door leading to a minimal sidewalk set at the right end, and smaller, darker wooden door leading out of the left end to nowhere but the rest of the soundstage. The effect in the film would be of a deep narrow dark shop, crammed with all sorts of curios.

Facing this set broadside were the usual crew and equipment. The director, a florid stocky bald man in a bush jacket, sat on a tall canvas-backed stool beside the camera. “Quiet,” he said, quietly.

“Quiet!” called an AD.

“Quiet!” called a further-off AD.

“Rolling,” murmured the director.

“Rolling!” called the first AD.

“Rolling!” screamed the further-off AD.

Nothing happened.

The director looked sardonic and long-suffering. Shifting position on his stool, he raised his voice a bit and called, “We’re rolling, Jack. That’s your cue.”

Still nothing happened.

The director looked as sardonic, but even more long-suffering. Speaking generally, to ADs, grips, best boys, gaffers, script girls, whoever might know anything of use, he said, “Jack? Is he back there?”

No one spoke. A general awful embarrassment rose from the assembled company like shimmering heat waves. The director, masterfully combining deference with irritation in his voice, called, “Jack? We are rolling now, Jack.”

The front door of the antiques shop burst open, slamming back against the set wall. Jack reeled in, off balance, the door having weighed less than it looked so that he’d given it a little too much push when he’d opened it, and then he’d tried to overcompensate in the other direction, and now all he was trying to do was stay on his feet.

His waving arms sent a candelabra flying toward the camera, bouncing on the floor at the director’s feet. Next, a stuffed owl was knocked the other way off a crowded shelf, taking a kerosene lantern along with a crash and a clatter.

The sudden noise startled Jack just as he was getting his equilibrium back, and he staggered sideways into a row of porcelain beer steins, sending them into and through a display of old doll furniture. Lunging away from all that, Jack became entangled with an old wooden rocking chair, fought manfully to free himself from the thing, and only succeeded by reducing the rocking chair to kindling, some of which swept nearby shelves clean of apothecary bottles, tea sets, samovars, and stereopticons.

Each move Jack made caused a separate and distinct crash, smash, thunk, tinkle, thud, bang, crumple, snap, jingle, gong, crack, and/or pit-a-pat, and every noise made Jack try again to correct his course by making another move. Thus, by an irregular series of tattoos, detonations, and dying falls, he crossed the set from right to left. Never quite toppling over, never quite getting his balance, never quite managing to just stand still, Jack swept like the angel of death across the antiques shop set, leaving hurricane news footage in his wake.