Go to the Widow-Maker (18 page)

He took her right away upstairs to the handsome modern bar for a drink, where they sat looking at each other as they downed it. Grant was wearing levis, cowboy boots and a leather jacket. Then he drove her out to his home through the city. It was a much bigger town than Lucky, who had never been west of Harrisburg, Pa., except once to fly to California, had anticipated.

They spent three wonderful lovers’ days there, in his house, never going out, cooking together, watching television, playing ping-pong or pool in the gameroom, reading, making love. He had completely done over the old house and it had a huge stone fireplace, books everywhere on all the walls, glass cases of guns and fishing and camping gear. It very definitely bore the impress of his personality, and it constricted Lucky somewhat to see that he had very definitely built himself a very definite life out here away from New York.

Only once did he take her out. This was the third night when he took her to dinner at a fairly ritzy countryclub, which seemed pretty much like her hometown one in Syracuse and in fact seemed to be pretty much furnished with the same people—all of whom looked at her with surprise (and with admiration, she noted). Grant, as he introduced her and showed her around, seemed to be wearing a sort of subdued belligerence, as if he were doing something he did not particularly like to do but that he had promised himself he would do.

Then the drive began. It took them a full six days. Down through Indiana and across the Ohio at Henderson, Kentucky, where the snow slowly began to disappear and they began to be in the South. The close, fetid air of commingled lechery and hatred which became apparent to her as soon as they crossed the river affected her so strongly that it took her breath away and made her sick at her stomach, and the further South they got the stronger and more fetid it became. The cold and at the same time obscenely lecherous eyes of the tall paunchy men who looked at her lewdly made her skin creep. She
knew
they hated all women. But when she mentioned this to Grant, he merely laughed. And when they stopped off at a few places to eat with people Grant knew, everyone was very nice. The women that she met seemed to her peculiarly two-faced in some mincing way, as though they all knew something about the men that they were not telling, something they did not need to tell because as long as they knew it and didn’t tell it, it aided them.

It was the most Lucky had ever seen of the actual earth of the great nation she belonged to, and it all made her want to get back to New York as fast as possible and stay there and never leave.

As they drove, they talked and talked and talked. By the time they reached the Florida state line near Tallahassee they knew just about everything about each other. Grant told her about his ‘career’ in the Navy during the war, and how he had gotten himself transferred from a nice safe clerical job at Pearl Harbor to duty on board an aircraft carrier which he was subsequently blown off of into the Pacific Ocean.

“My God, why did you do all that?”

He snarled. “I didn’t know any fucking better. I wouldn’t do it now. I was trying to escape from ‘petty bureaucracy’. What I found was the same bureaucracy plus danger.”

For her part Lucky told him about her horrible convent childhood, and how her father saved her from it. “He was really a great man. Even when I was only five he told me to listen to what they said, but believe what I wanted.”

“Well, wasn’t he a Catholic himself?”

“Nominally, yes. But he believed they were in business like everybody else. Like every ideology.” At which Grant roared.

Finally, after some hesitation and much prompting by Grant about the fact that she must have had
some
boyfriend before she met him, she told him about her stud Forbes Morgan, how she had gotten him a job, about how Forbes had driven her to the airport and how she felt about it. “I never was really in love with him. I never was
really
in love with anybody but you, that’s the truth. Not even Raoul.”

Grant listened politely, without anger, but there was such a strained look on his face that she decided not to tell him everything about Peter Raven, only that he was an admirer, another guy who was trying to make her.

Then it was suddenly late at night with the glow of Miami on the Eastern sky as Grant herded the big Chrysler convertible across the ghostly, haunted Everglades toward it.

They had had five further nights together in various hotels and motels along the road. They spent the last night in a middleclass motel across the Boulevard from the canal, and by noon the next day she was on the New York plane. She did not protest further. His face was set in a peculiarly stubborn way and she knew it would be useless. “I have some things to take care of before we can think of getting married, among them this diving business and the problem of courage.” As she fastened her seatbelt and looked out the port she could see the tiny figure still standing way off there on the ramp and knew that if he didn’t hurry up he would miss his own flight to Jamaica. She was aware that people around her were looking at her, after the wild kiss of their farewell, and she set herself not to cry.

At Idlewild Leslie met her with a taxi and she went straight home to bed, and stayed there.

Only once in the next days did she get up, and that was when her uncle Frank Videndi, a big horseplayer, came to town. Somehow he knew she was in trouble and took her to the Copa with a couple of his cronies. After Sammy Davis Jr. finished his performance he asked her what was the matter. So she told him.

T
HE
A
BERNATHYS HAD
met him at the Ganado Bay Airport. There was no reason to assume they would not meet him, since he had wired them his arrival time, but when Grant saw them standing there together in the hot sun on the ramp he was disappointed. The muggy tropical Jamaican heat flowed into the big jet like a salty molasses as soon as the door was unsealed. Even the air itself smelled different, like holidays. But he needed more time. With a sinking feeling he felt that he
was
in fact sinking—sinking back into a rhythm, a part of his life that no longer suited or fit. After Lucky, after New York this time, everything was different. He could still taste on his moustache all the secret places of that lovely body. He could still remember how her plane had got off the ground and had so achingly disappeared northward in the blue Florida sky.

They even looked different. For one thing they looked years older. And for another, they looked to him now, suddenly, like exactly what they were: Hicks. Two hicks. And Grant realized suddenly that this was a thought he had been avoiding thinking for quite a long time. Why? Because he had thought it was too cruel a thought to admit, was that why? There had been a time, back when he first got out of the Navy and came home and first met them, that he had thought they were the two most worldly and sophisticated people he could ever meet. But they hadn’t gone on. He had gone on and had been going on, for quite a long time now, he just had not found up to now an idea, a place to go on to.

He had had to force himself to get out of the seat to descend the steps into the heat and when they waved at him —Hunt with his perpetually friendly way, she with that false smile he had gotten to know so well—he wanted to turn around and climb right back into the jet. Through passport checking, through customs, through the little glass of rum punch the pretty colored girl from the Chamber of Commerce offered him, he felt as though he were leaning backward: moving forward while straining to go rearward; and then he was with them. He had had nothing at all to say.

And it had gone on like that for days.

It did not really matter that he had had nothing to say. Carol had immediately taken over and begun to run things. There was this diver in town she had found for him, his name was Al Bonham, and when they got his wire she had arranged for him to have his first diving lesson in a pool tomorrow. She would go with him, and learn it too. And she did. Fortunately, though she was a good swimmer, better than Grant actually, she proved to be totally unable to cope with anything having to do with a mask or an aqualung. She could not breathe through a lung mouthpiece underwater without choking, she could not let water into her mask and clear it underwater without choking. It was as if some terrible claustrophobic fear struck her that she could not control the moment she put her face underwater in a mask and she would stand up in the pool gasping and coughing, she who was always talking about ‘mind control’, and after the first day she quit, leaving him alone and relieved with the big diver, Bonham. These were about the only times he was alone and away from her.

But before all this happened they had had their first conversation alone together.

She could not, naturally, say anything while Hunt was around. This was another part of all their lives together that Grant had somehow come to accept, and now no longer wanted to accept. But Hunt was playing golf today at the local club with Paul de Blystein and some other ‘businessmen’ he had found around. He already had his clubs in the car with him. Grant had known a confrontation scene would be forthcoming, but he had hoped for more time. Apparently he was not to have it. Hunt had dropped them at the front portal (that was the only thing to call it; it was much too big to be called a door) of Evelyn de Blystein’s huge magnificent villa and had driven off. Neither, of course, could she talk in front of Evelyn. But after the necessary fifteen minutes and two drinks of amenities and hellos; after giving his bag to the Jamaican maid to unpack in his room, he and Carol had walked down the hill through the unbelievably beautiful grounds to Evelyn’s private beach and beachhouse across the Jamaican ‘highway’ for a swim.

She did not say anything going down the hill, and she did not take his hand as she might once have done under these same circumstances. Grant was grateful for that, but he felt it was all very painful.

“So,” she said finally after they had crossed the road and were wading through the deep sand in the hot sun toward the beachhouse, “was she a good fuck?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he had said.

Carol snarled. “The fuck you don’t!” It was like the face of some animal. “She was probably right there in that goddamned hellish New Weston hotel room with you all those times I was calling you, or trying to call you. I’m positive she was!”

Grant did not answer and plodded on. He had changed to what in the old days in the Navy at Pearl Harbor they had called a ‘gook’ shirt and a pair of shorts and carried his bikini in his hand. In the pocket of the shirt he had put an undeveloped roll of color film with a few shots he had taken of Lucky on the trip down. He owned an Exacta single lens reflex.

Actually, he had taken the precaution of removing the film from the camera and carrying it with him because he knew Carol Abernathy was not above blatantly and openly going through his things sometimes when he was not around and then daring him to do anything about it.

“What’s that?” she asked suddenly. “In your pocket.”

“Roll of film,” he had said.

And suddenly, so fast and unexpectedly that he hadn’t even had time to move, Carol had snatched the roll from the pocket, ripping the pocket slightly, and thrown it out across the beach into the sea.

“Well you won’t have that!” she said viciously. “That much is gone!” She faced him defiantly, her head thrown back, as though expecting him to hit her or slap her, which in fact he had actually been thinking of doing.

Grant shrugged and made a face.

“I know they were pictures of her, it was pictures of her, wasn’t it?” Carol demanded.

“Now you’ll never know, will you?” Grant had said. He felt cruel. First red anger, than white fury boiled up inside his head and he struggled to contain it. If she was following some planned campaign to go—get back—to what had been before, and he wouldn’t put it past her, to have planned it all, she was certainly going about everything exactly wrong. They were almost to the lovely little coral-stone beachhouse. “I’m thinking of bringing her down and taking her to Kingston with me,” he said with deliberate malice. He had no intention of doing that. But he didn’t intend to take Carol either.

Carol stopped. “You won’t! You’ll not! You will over my dead body!” She was almost screaming and her fists were clenched against her thighs. “I didn’t spend the best years of my life bringing you up and teaching you and making a man out of you for you to go off to Kingston with a little hot-assed floozy! I’ve got a big investment in you! I made you!”

Grant had stopped, too. The tropical sun broiled down on both of them. They had both been so nice to him really, had really helped him so much—Hunt perhaps because he was forced to by Carol, at least at first; Carol because she believed in him and had been in love with him. He owed them a lot. But he didn’t owe them that. The truth was that while he had gone on working and learning and growing, all on his own because they couldn’t follow him, Carol had either given up or simply been unable to follow, and had moved on further and further into her lazy, easy-to-pretend-to-study mysticism. He had charge of his craft now. And the talent, such as it was, and it wasn’t at all too bad, was his. She worked by rote, chartclass ideas, usually ideas he had come up with, utilized, passed on to her, then abandoned for something newer while she clung on and on to them. And sold them like a philosophy to her little theater gang.

“You’ll get your share,” he said thinly. “But you didn’t make me.” Stubbornly, like a man in a driving rainstorm, he had turned and plodded on for the beachhouse.

It was that question of ‘courage’, what he had said to Lucky that last day in Miami, though he was sure he had worded it so obscurely that she didn’t understand and thought it applied to the diving. At least, he hoped so. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to marry her. Sometimes he thought he did, and sometimes he didn’t. He didn’t know, that was the truth. He was still afraid she was too good to be true. But that was beside the point of courage. He had to do something about this, and he had to do it soon. But he wanted to do it graciously, if he could. That was why he had made that point of taking her out to the Indianapolis country club where he and the Abernathys belonged. If they hadn’t heard about it in a letter by now, they would soon. Honor had made him do that, anything else would have been sneaking and anyway people knew he had her there anyway. What the hell?