Donald Westlake - Sacred Monster

Jack weaved slightly, not leaning against anything. He looked at the shiny thing in his hands and recognized it, but didn’t quite yet dope out its meaning or implications. With a piteous look at Dori, begging for enlightenment, he said, “This is for me?”

The microphone on the lectern picked up the question, of course. The audience, which had quieted enough to hear what Jack might say, naturally thought it was meant to be a joke, and responded with good-natured laughter and more applause. Jack looked out toward the great hall, saw it full of people, and began to catch on. He looked back at Dori. He had it together now, and his trouper’s spirit took over.

The famous Jack Pine smile flashed. The famous Jack Pine voice spoke: “Well, thank you, Dori.”

At which point, Dori was supposed to leave, backing smiling away from the lectern to give the recipient of the award his opportunity to thank everybody on God’s green earth for having made this moment possible. Preparatory to this rearward departure, Dori did smile her farewell smile, but then something went wrong. Jack reached out his right hand — the left hand still clutching Oscar about the head, as though he were a bottle of Jack Daniel’s — dipped the hand into the open top of Dori’s dress, and grasped her right, or downstage, breast.

Dori gasped. The whole audience gasped, but Dori gasped on television. Dori started to pull away, to make her scheduled departure anyway, but then she realized — as her expression told the half of the world’s population watching — that she’d better not.

With his left hand clutching Oscar and his right hand clutching Dori’s breast, Jack turned toward an audience suddenly grown deathly still. “And thank all of you,” he said. “I mean it, honest to God I do.”

Dori stood frozen, a terrified smile on her face. She had no choice but to remain there throughout Jack’s acceptance speech, and in her panic she had clearly come to the conclusion that the best thing to do was look as happy and bubbly as possible, just as though nothing had gone terribly wrong, just as though her breast was not now in the tight and unrelenting grip of a madman.

Jack went on, addressing the audience, saying, “I really thank you all for this, uh, Tony, Emmy, what the hell is it?” He held up the statuette, studied it closely. “Oscar,” he decided. Lowering the statuette again, but still holding on to Dori, he looked out at the oil painting of an audience and said, “I thank you. And I want to thank everybody who made this moment possible. I want to thank every ass I ever had to kiss. I want to thank every prick who ever turned me down for a rotten picture so I was forced to do the good ones. I want to thank Marty Friedman, my director, that traffic cop, for staying the hell away from me and letting me get the job done. And I want to thank my co-star, Sandra Shaw, for doing such a tight-ass, piss-poor, lamebrain job of it that I had to look good in comparison. You notice she didn’t get a nomination. But mostly, I want to thank all those little people out there, all those little people out there, those little people, all those goddamn little people. There’s more of them around all the time, you know? I think they live in the plumbing.”

Finished, befuddled again, his mind full of lurking, crawling, slithering little people, Jack turned and walked offstage, leaving a stunned silence behind, but taking Dori Lunsford along by the breast.

“Six weeks later, I married that bitch.”

Michael O’Connor is at last surprised by something. “Dori Lunsford?” he says. “I didn’t know you were ever married to Dori Lunsford.”

A flaw in his impeccable research, eh? I smile at him in triumph — we keep our secrets, yes we do, when we want, large and small — and I say, “It didn’t last.”

“I guess it didn’t.”

I lean forward slightly, feeling extremely healthy, a sound body in a sound mind — no, that’s the other way around, isn’t it? Doesn’t matter — and I rest my elbows on my spread knees, and I gaze into the middle distance of time. “How different that was,” I say, “from my first wedding, even though they both took place in the same church.”

“Same church?” O’Connor echoes. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Very photogenic church,” I explain. “Great for the press. You fellas. Well, you know that. And this time, of course, we didn’t have to hire a crowd. We both had our fans, our agents, household staffs, attorneys, accountants, standins, hangers-on, the whole crowd. The media was out in force, a lot more so than when Marcia and I tied the knot. We all had to work our asses off to suppress those pictures, let me tell you.”

“Pictures?” O’Connor looks bewildered, poor fella; I’m surprised he doesn’t already know this part, being in the journalism racket and all. He says, “Suppress pictures? What pictures?”

“Of the wedding,” I tell him.

Which doesn’t seem to help him much. Shaking his head as though there’s a bee in his ear, he says, “Suppress pictures of the wedding. Your old wedding with Marcia, you mean? So people wouldn’t know it was the same church?”

“Oh, who cares about that?” I ask him. “One of the very few good qualities of the press is that it has no memory. No, it was the pictures of the wedding with Dori we had to suppress. And a hell of a job it was, too.”

“I don’t understand,” he confesses. “If the whole thing was meant to be a publicity stunt, why suppress the pictures?”

“Because things went a little bit wrong,” I explain.

“What things?”

“Well, we were both of us drinking pretty heavy then,” I tell him. “It was the only way we could put up with each other, or anything else, or get through the day. So, we handled the ceremony okay, but on the way back down the aisle — or is it back up the aisle? — anyway, on our way back from the altar, Dori’s drunk said something that irritated my drunk just a little.”

The lovely white chapel in Santa Monica had been freshly painted for the occasion, and parts of the gleaming green grass had been resodded. Hundreds and hundreds of wedding guests and media people milled about in front of the chapel, held back from the gray cement walk leading from front steps to street by police sawhorses and stern-looking, blue uniformed, white helmeted policemen. A red carpet had been unrolled from the church door down the steps and across the gray cement walk and the sidewalk to the waiting limo. Organ music and the sound of an expensive imported choir rang out from within as the ushers opened the twin front doors.

Jack and Dori came out, he in tux, she in a different white gown from the one she’d worn to the Academy Awards, this one showing a bit less cleavage. Jack and Dori were yelling and screaming at each other, both red-faced, both waving their arms around. Jack shoved Dori when they reached the top step, but instead of falling, Dori swung around and smashed him across the head with her bouquet. He then took a swing at her, but she ducked and kicked him in the shin.

Ushers and friends, paralyzed with shock in the first few seconds, at last hurried forward to break up the newly-weds, both of whom now swung and missed, Jack’s overhand right taking out a flower girl, while Dori’s left uppercut sent an usher flying off the steps and into the crowd below. Jack finally connected with a straight left to Dori’s forehead, driving her back into an off-balance wedding guest, who in his turn fell backward into two photographers, who shoved him unceremoniously out of the way. The wedding guest, not taking kindly to this opening of a second front at his rear, turned around and popped a photographer. So then the second photographer popped the wedding guest. So then another wedding guest popped the second photographer.