Go to the Widow-Maker (37 page)

When he told Doug that Carol Abernathy was his mistress and had been since they’d met him, Doug only grunted. When he added that her recent nervousness and neurotic actions and fits were almost certainly due at least in part to the fact that he wanted to break off with her—in fact,
had
broken off with her, Doug grunted again. Of course, Grant qualified, her dictatorialness and paranoid formulations had been increasing discernibly the past few years, even in the time Doug had known her. Here Doug nodded. But of course, Grant added, trying hard to be honest, that could be due—or partly due— to the fact that for a long time she had felt Grant slipping slowly away from her, as she got older. Hell, he didn’t care whether she was crazy or not. He wasn’t going to try to commit her or anything. All he wanted was to get out of it. Whether he married Lucky or not, he knew now he had had it with Carol and was through with her. Lucky did want to marry him. The only trouble with her, at least as far as he could tell up to now, was that she was just too good to be true. Every quality he would want a woman he’d marry to have, she had. All of them! But when he tried to describe Lucky’s qualities (other than her sensuality and beauty), he failed miserably and lamentably.

He was astonished to hear himself pouring his guts out like this, about all this. This made the third time he had told somebody about Carol. In as many weeks. Or was it . . . No. No, no. It was the
second
time. He had told Cathie Finer, and now Doug. But up to then he had never told anybody about it, had not even let on to anyone. Not even to one of his best friends. Although he had to admit he had had very few of these.

Doug said very little. In fact, in the end, he seemed much more interested—with an intense unwarrantable concentration —in how Hunt Abernathy felt about Grant’s longterm affair with his wife.

“Christ, I don’t know! How the hell would I know? We never talked about it,” Grant said. “But we’ve become pretty close friends, over the years,” he said, “you know?”

But it was not strictly true, that first, he remembered suddenly. They had talked about it. Once. Sitting in a car, they had been, just like now. Hunt’s car. Only that car hadn’t been moving. It had been parked out in front of the Abernathys’ house in Hunt Hills. They had either just been someplace and returned, or else were going someplace and Hunt had not yet started the motor. Or else they had gone out to the car for privacy, Grant couldn’t remember. It had been very early on in the relationship, when Grant was still living with them, long before he ever had any success. Hunt’s face had a set stiff look, and his eyes if cold were very deep as he stared straight ahead out through the windshield. He sat quite a long time in the still, quiet, parked car before speaking.—“I guess you wonder why I’m doing all this,” he said finally, referring to what he was doing, and had done, for Grant. Grant hadn’t answered, largely because he didn’t know what to say.— “You must be wondering why I tolerate this ‘situation’, and what’s going on.” This time he didn’t even wait for any answer. “Well, it’s because I’m trying to help Carol. I don’t give a damn about you. Or what happens to you. And you just remember that Carol is my wife. And remember that I’m her husband.”—“Of course,” Grant had said, delicately. He was terribly embarrassed. Hunt had sat on without saying more for a full minute, staring straight ahead out through the windshield.—“Just don’t forget that,” he said finally, and opened the door to get out and go inside, or was it that he had then started the motor? Grant for the life of him couldn’t remember. His puzzlement at the time had been total. Anyway, they
had
talked about it. If you could call that talking about it. But he wasn’t about to tell Doug Ismaileh any of that.

“I wonder why he stayed with her?” Doug said from beside him. “Why didn’t he just throw her out?”

“Who knows,” Grant said. “Habit?” He was beginning to sweat a little, and felt flushed and uncomfortable. He wished he hadn’t brought the subject up. “I’ll tell you why!” he said suddenly and violently. “Because she had him by the balls, that’s why! Like she had me. But she won’t have me that way anymore.”

“Maybe he liked it,” Doug said. “Being cuckolded.”

“That’s kind of faggy, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. Lots of guys are like that. I’ve known quite a few.” Doug grinned, but his eyes had a peculiar hungry look. “Do you think she might have been fucking him too at the same time all those years?”

Grant was startled. “Well, no. I never thought so. I mean, I assumed she wasn’t.” He wasn’t going to tell Doug that in his heart he had never been sure she wasn’t.

“You’re pretty sure then she wasn’t fucking anybody else all that time.”

“Well, no. I’m not,” Grant said. “Since you bring it up. Now that I think about it. But I just don’t give a shit, whether she was or not. That’s the truth. If she was, that just makes me that much more of a sucker, that’s all.”

Doug didn’t answer for a moment. “She probly wasn’t.”

There was something odd in his tone. From the wheel Grant gave him a sharp glance for a split second, then put his eyes back on the road. Doug was looking straight ahead out through the windshield, slumped down in his corner, his arms folded across his chest. “Well, if she wasn’t,” Grant said, “I guess that puts me in even a worse position.”

“In any love affair he who quits first wins,” Doug said. “Ismaileh’s Law.”

Grant was suddenly angry without knowing why. What the fuck did he think he was doing? Was he trying to imply he knew something he wasn’t telling? It sounded like some kind of police interrogation. “I believe you, but I’d hate to live like that,” he said. It was half a lie. There was a part of him that was both pleased and proud that it was him who was quitting, was him who was not feeling the pain. He was the superior. It was the old “Get the Upper-Hand” theory of personality development. But underneath that was the further knowledge that he probably couldn’t have done it at all without the existence of Lucky. Where
was
the truth! God! “Funny, my new girl told me that same thing, in New York,” he lied viciously. “Those exact same words.”

“I thought I made it up,” Doug said. It was his turn to be startled.

Grant relented. “Maybe you did. You could have both made it up separately. I never heard it anywhere else before.”

They were just pulling into the ugly little town of Falmouth, and Grant felt a vast wave of relief wash over him. Exaggeratedly, he leaned forward and craned his neck this way and that, pretending to look with interest at the surroundings, to cut off the conversation.

“What a hellhole,” he murmured.

“Yeah. Wouldn’t like to be a field nigger and have to live here.” Doug answered.

Where
was
the truth? the
true
truth? The true truth was that Decameron L. Grant, goy Anglo-Saxon white Protestant from the Middlewest (whose people both came over on the
Mayflower
and met the boat, as his grandfather who was a quarter Cherokee was fond of saying), wanted everybody in the world to love him. Or if not love, at least like him, and think he was an honorable fellow. Even Doug Ismaileh, whom he couldn’t care less about. And everybody else. It could get to be pretty difficult when it was a Red Chinese on one side and a GM Executive on the other. Or two male humans after the same cunt. Phoo-ee. He continued to pretend to look.

After Falmouth there was five miles of marshy salt flats not unlike parts of Florida in the Keys, and they both remained silent through all of this too, Grant still biting his tongue for having talked as much as he had. Then, as though having tried it on for size and finding that it fitted, they continued to ride in silence the next twelve miles all the way to the outskirts of Montego Bay. Only when the luxury seaside hotels began to appear on the beach on their right, did Doug perk up and begin to give instructions.

“There’s a shortcut over the shoulder of the hill called the Queen’s Road. Saves goin all the way around the airport on the beach road. It’s at the—There it is! Just up ahead.”

Grant braked and swung left onto the curvy road that led past the jet airport on the right, curved up over the flank of the high hill inland, then dropped straight down into the hot dusty insufficiently shaded town. On the descent they passed the entrance to the Racquet Club, a steep side road leading straight uphill on the left, and Doug pointed it out.

“We’ll have to go up there. They’re a good bunch of guys. Big drinkers and partyers, and they know where all the action is and what’s going on.”

They drove straight through the sudden heat to the hotel-restaurant of Doug’s relatives. This was located on Union Street, one of the main east-west streets running from the harbor straight back into the hills. There, it became Something Drive (Doug said) and curved around amongst many trees to give entrance to some of the better white or near-white homes of the town. The Khanturian (that was the family name) Hotel, a four-story modern-style brick building, was set in the midst of a bunch of Charles Addams houses made of wood with high mansard roofs of corrugated tin, and had a bar and diningroom on the ground floor and three floors of rooms above. The bar, dim and cozily lit, was more than twice the size of the diningroom, Grant noted, and was practically deserted. The diningroom was totally deserted. It was in this bar that they had almost immediately met Sir John Brace.

Doug of course had first to say hello to his relatives. There was much whooping and crotchgrabbing and backslapping and goosing involved, since they had not seen each other for over two years. Although of the family (father, mother and five unmarried sons) only two of the sons were present, working the bar and diningroom respectively, the noise was enough to startle the Negro hired help and bring them running to look, and to wake the few scattered drinkers out of their various reveries, as the brothers Khanturian hauled their guests to the bar to buy for Doug and his friend “Whoever you are!” It was at the bar that John Brace was standing, all alone.

Sir John, as he pretended not to much like being called, but it turned out did not really mind being called at all, was on his third New York-sized martini before going off to lunch. Tall, horsefaced, with enormous buck teeth, a receding chin and a whinny of a laugh, he was such a caricature of the upperclass Englishman that it would be impossible for him ever to be employed as an actor in anything but a vicious satire. But then Sir John wasn’t an actor. He was in real estate, he explained to them after offering to buy a drink, and (but only when asked pointblank) was the heritor of an hereditary baronetcy of a family that was in publishing. Later they found out—from his friends of course, and he had many, all of whom hated him for his money, his good nature and particularly for his title—that the publishing family was engaged in was the publishing of British tax forms, hence the title; and that the real estate he was in was the real estate of an exile, a firm bought for him and kept running by the family to keep him out of England, and at which in fact he did nothing, or almost nothing, which did not matter—said his friends—since his allowance was ample, which was also fortunate, because he was stupid. Ron and Doug, naturally, both liked him immediately. He spoke in a peculiar high voice with a perfect King’s English accent, but interlarded this with oddly out-of-place words of Madison Avenue hip slang pronounced with a strong American accent. This was because he made quite a few trips to New York every year “during the season” he explained cheerfully, when Ron asked him about it. “Is a bit odd, isn’t it?” He had seen all of Ron’s plays and both of Doug’s, and had loved them all, indiscriminately. “Love to be able to write something. Like that. You know. Cahn’t even write m’ own name what?” He was about their own age and had been a Grenadiers officer in Italy during the infantry war. “Could write about that, eh? No bloody red blouses there.”

It was Sir John who like a bloodhound led them straight to the models: “I say! I say, if you two cats are really on the loose for a day or two, I know just the thing.
Buick
or
GM
or one of those American cars is doing a big ‘romantic tropics’ ad layout here just now.
And they are some chicks!
Their head-qua’ters are out at the Half Moon Hotel. What say we all three head out there for lunch, what?”

They went in his car. After sauntering in (he was wearing those obscenely loose-legged shorts the British affect in the tropics, a Madras shirt, and a short-brimmed Madison Avenue-style porkpie straw) and blandly demanding an introduction from the manager, he invited the entire crew to lunch— photographers, wardrobe supervisor and all—on his tab. “No, no. I was going to do all this on my own anyway,” he giggled nervously when Ron and Doug offered to split it. He guffawed. “Wait’ll the local spies report
this
back home to the family!” After further imperious inquiry of the manager (“And I am quite sure he is one of them!”), he returned to whisper, “I also now understand they’ll be wo’king at the Racquet Club this afternoon. We could follow them up there, have a swim, cause general hell; and take them out tonight. What?” He gazed fondly at the girls and said in his American accent, “
Aint they
something?
”

They were indeed. Tall, slender, longlegged, with tight, taut bellies, bellies so flat they were practically concave, all of them had the hips of women and obviously were well practiced in using them, and they didn’t care who knew it. All in their teens or early twenties, they had the world by the ass with two fingers as if it were their own personal bowling ball and until they gave up the gay life and became proper wives and mothers, nothing interested them except parties, money, titles, travel and celebrities. That they would ever later pay for the sins of their youth seemed highly doubtful. They were all far too beautiful to ever pay for anything, and what was more, they all knew it. If none of them was especially bright, it was clear that none of them would ever have to be. It was enough to make a reflective man resentful, but neither Ron, Doug nor Sir John were worrying about any of this.

“Christ, you really have got it bad, haven’t you?” Doug whispered late in the night when Ron refused to pair off with any of them. Grant could only nod miserably and dumbly.