The Merry Month of May by James Jones

Then he went up on his toes, stretching himself to his full height in the dark narrow-cut suit, and spread his arms above his head. Momentarily he looked like some kind of witch’s demon. There was in it such force, such a power of long-sat-upon, painfully contained energy and exuberance, that I half expected to see sparks crackle in streams from his spatulate fingers.
    “Jesus!” he said again, and threw himself down in an overstuffed armchair like a sack of old arms and legs. “I’ve been waiting for a shot like that for over a year. Ever since those Italians hit the market with their product.”
    He wriggled in the chair. “I’ve been waiting longer! Five years at least. To make that kind of a Western. But nobody in America had the guts to go against the taboos and try it.” He gathered himself and got to his feet.
    “Come on. Let’s go upstairs. Up to my office. We need to cool out, you and me. Over a bottle of Scotch. I feel like I’ve just gone fifteen rounds.”
    He led us out. On the dimly lit exterior stairs of the building he turned back, grinning with his hatchet-face in the faint light, and said, “You have to play poker with them. It’s almost a ritual. That’s just the way it is in this business.”
    He climbed on, and his voice continued, coming back over his shoulder in the pale, just barely sufficient light of the minuterie . “If you ever let them know that you want it, they’ll kill you. If they even get any idea at all that you’re in fact aching to do it, they’ll shit all over you all down the line. They’ll stick a knife as big as Jim Bowie’s up your ass and make you dance the hoe-down.”
    The keys jingled in his jacket pocket as he withdrew them. He reached inside and snapped on the overhead light and led us in. By the time I was inside and had shut the door, he was already sitting tilted back in the big black leather swivel chair behind his antique wooden desk. “You just can’t level with them,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not sure I want to go down to Spain to work that long really. I’m not sure I want to be away from Louisa that long.”
    The desk and the Louis Treize table set at right angles to it were covered with manuscript and stacks of research materials. Beside the chair stood his IBM electric on a rollered typing table. Beside that stood a tiered paper, carbon and notebook holder on rollers. I sat down on one of the two middle-height Louis Treize armchairs across from the desk.
    “I’m not at all sure I want to be away from Louisa that long,” Harry said. He got up and moved toward the bar for whisky, Perrier, glasses and ice. I looked around. Again.
    “Anyway, it’s already been done now, in Italy,” he said from behind the bar. “It’s not the same as if I would be doing it for the first time.” I didn’t answer.
    Harry’s studio was such a massive projection of Harry’s personality that it was almost a caricature, or something made up by a screenwriter of one of Harry’s own American he-man love-story films. On one wall hung a Watney-Mann “Red Barrel” dartboard in its Watney-Mann cabinet identical to the one in any London pub; and on the floor under it stretched the authentic Watney-Mann rubber mat with its eight-foot and nine-foot marks. On another hung Harry’s collection of Western arms and cartridges, Bowie knives, Indian lances, bows and tomahawks. In a corner leaned six or seven modern shotguns, and three modern fiberglass bows, unstrung.
    Harry had taken over three maids’ rooms on the top floor of the building up under the roof, back when he leased the apartment, and by knocking out portions of the walls between had made them into one studio. So he had more than four walls under his slanting ceiling; he had about seven. It had its own complete kitchenette, and its own ample bathroom. Half of one of the small rooms had been covered with a sort of raised dais a foot-and-a-half high covered in some kind of a heavy blue felt material, and