Go to the Widow-Maker (39 page)

It was just dark, and the big jet winged in whistling insanely over the bay with its landing lights on, screeched rubber as it touched down, roared as it immediately began braking, ran on to the end of the runway as if it might go right on off it into the excavation they were making to lengthen it, then rolled like a fat awkward bird back to its disgorging station. The bureaucratic necessity of mid-Twentieth Century, the same old deathly impersonality of handling large groups of people which they both professed to hate, separated them from her just as surely as the electrified barbed-wire fences of a concentration camp, but they could stand out on the Visitor’s Balcony and, leaning on the railing in the sultry sea-smelling air, watch for her as the jet spewed forth its full load of dressed-for-winter vacationers and business-trippers who trooped amiably down the mobile stairway and across the tarmac after the pretty airline hostess.

Grant saw her almost before she was out of the dark cave of the hatchway, the champagne hair, the small head, the wide long-waisted shoulders, the flair of female’s hips above the long sleek legs, and began to holler and wave like a mad bull. The sight of her filled his chest cavity with such additional pressure that he wouldn’t have been surprised later to find he had afflicted himself with an air embolism. He kept trying to point her out to Doug in the trooping crowd. She did not see them at first but when she did she waved only once. Smiling with embarrassment, she came toward them in that walk of hers and passed in below them to the customs desks. When Doug finally saw her, and was sure that it was she he saw, all he could say, in a voice of protest, was, “Jesus S Christ!”

“You’re so damned loud,” were the first words she said. “I’d forgotten how loud you are.” She was smiling and, for some unstated reason (Grant knew the reason but couldn’t state it either), she was blushing. The totally defenseless love on her face was, at least for Grant, a joy to behold. And his mood of this morning, when he wondered why he hadn’t taken on one of the models, seemed to him now to have been totally insane.

“Now don’t worry about a thing,” he told her as soon as the passport stamping, customs declarations, baggage inspection and the rest—all the small but continuous payments-out of pieces of spirit to the organizational forces which made such marvelous transportation possible—were paid and finished and they were rolling back to town. “We’re having a ball. We’ve got everything laid on for a big fun party tonight.” Lucky, sitting between them, as he turned his head from the road to look at her eagerly, looked a little disappointed. But then she put her hand on his arm, quietly and unobtrusively, on his biceps that was manipulating the wheel. “It’ll be a ball,” Grant reassured her. “You’ll have more fun than you’ve ever had in your life. On this trip. I promise you.”

Doug had obviously fallen madly in love with her from his very first sight of her, not carnally but like a fellow knight of the Round Table with another’s lady, and he now interrupted to take over and tell her about everything. This included his relatives the Khanturians, father, mother, and five unmarried sons, and their hotel, Sir John Brace and the models, and the wacky party last night at which Sir John had so uproariously tripped himself up. Lucky kept her hand on Grant’s arm as she listened, and the light touch of it there made Grant swell up with happiness, pride, and the peculiar super-manliness she in some way always could make him feel, although he noted nervously that she was not roaring with laughter the way she should be.

As if by some unspoken understanding they had not kissed at the airport, had in fact refrained from even touching each other seriously, and they did not kiss until they were alone together in Grant’s bedroom of the hotel suite and Doug had tactfully gone off somewhere—for a swim, he said. Then, finally, Grant took her in his arms, in the privacy both instinctively knew would be required for such a kiss. It was a kiss of such thirst and depth and questing tongues that Grant imagined he felt his soul being sucked down from within his brainpan and out through his mouth into this girl by the force of it, and happily he let it go. At the airport, during all the time since, and again right now, he was surprised by the sense he had of some invisible and fatal Rubicon-crossing in his life in the bringing of Lucky down. Just last year he had had an affair, with some local wealthy girl back in Indianapolis this time, an affair of some emotional violence, but all during the months it lasted there had never been any question of fatality, he had known all along it would end as it did end, that he would wind up back in his old life with the Abernathys. The Indianapolis girl had been such an unmitigated bitch, really, was why. But not this one, not this one. Not this one, to whom he was going to enslave himself and all he had, his work, everything he stood for, and hoped to stand for. Nothing mattered. Nothing but that. And he didn’t care.

Of course, he could not tell her all this, or even any of it. So as he shoved his nose between her ear and hair he said again what he had said several times before.

“Hansel and Gretel,” Grant said huskily. “Hansel and Gretel to the road again. Hello, Gretel.”

“Don’t ever let them destroy us,” Lucky whispered against his throat. “Promise me you won’t ever let them.”

“I promise,” he said. “That I’ll promise. They never will.” He pushed his nose in further. “But maybe we’re just being paranoic. They say all the world loves a lover.”

“That’s not true and you know it,” she said against his neck. “There’s nothing the world hates more than a lover.”

“I guess so,” Grant mumbled gently. “Because ‘Duty’ must come before everything, including love. Especially love.”

“If they ever suspected what we have,” Lucky said, “they’d have to dedicate themselves to destroying it.”

“We won’t let them,” Grant said. “We’ll hide it. And pretend we’re just like any other ordinary couple full of hate.”

They made love twice before Doug Ismaileh came rattling around and routed them out for John Brace’s dinner, and both times Grant went down on her to bring her to orgasm.

L
UCKY DIDN’T WANT
to go. And she said as much to Grant as they were getting back into their clothes. She would much rather have gone off somewhere for a quiet dinner alone with him where they could be together and talk and look at each other, without a big gang of people around watching them.

“Aw, come on, honey. We’ll have fun. Doug’s an old friend. An old, old friend. Even Sir John’s practically an old friend by now. We’ll have plenty of time together. I want to see what this town’s like.” There was no combating his nervous ebullience.

“All right,” she said. “You know I like to go out. I always have.” But she looked at him strangely.

And in truth he was in a strange mood. The magnificence of their love-making, which he had been without for so long, instead of relaxing and releasing him had heightened his excitement into hilarity. All the drinks he had had today didn’t decrease it. The sense of having crossed some vague but dangerously final Rubicon had increased his adrenal output enormously. And the awareness of all the lies he had told both sides in this business made him more aware than ever that somewhere somehow, soon, some kind of a showdown with somebody was coming. He felt a lot like he used to feel during the war on the carrier just before a big fight.

“They got a couple pretty good nightclubs going here too, I hear,” he said. From outside in the suite’s livingroom Doug Ismaileh pounded on the door again impatiently. “My God, what are you two doin in there?” he roared in a voice of raucous laughter. “God, not again!” Beside Grant, Lucky blushed. Grant kissed her. “We’re coming! We’re coming, goddam it!” He opened the door.

Sir John Brace’s second big evening started off auspiciously enough in spite of all. First they all had drinks up at the Racquet Club, sitting out on the cool terrace overlooking the harbor. A tourist cruise ship was in and gaily all lit up from stem to stem it added to the festivity. The town would be inundated with chubby tourists wearing peculiar-shaped native straw hats and floppy Hawaiian style shirts. “Fawtunately,” Sir John drawled, “they don’t know the really good or right places to go.”

With a sensitivity he was capable of displaying at almost all times when he wasn’t absolutely dead drunk, he had thoughtfully rearranged the party for tonight. There were no extra girls. In deference to Lucky, who was there as the real girlfriend of one of them, there were only four models present and each of them had a bona fide date. Sir John and Doug had two, the manager of the hotel (“the Spy from Home”) was there for the third, and (and apparently this was Doug’s doing) the eldest Khanturian brother, the ex-Infantry sergeant with the bad feet, who was really way in over his head and playing out of his league with this group, was dating the fourth. The fourth model’s nose, because of this, was quite a bit out of joint. So it was not as if there were not troubles looming on the night horizon. In addition, Lucky was almost painfully shy.

Still, the drinks at the Racquet Club and the dinner at still another romantic seaside hotel went off nicely enough, especially since Sir John took care to take them to a hotel a long way out of town where no boat tourists appeared. It was only when all the drinking finally took effect—martinis at the Racquet Club; red wine at dinner; whiskey at the nightclub afterwards—and they arrived at that stage of “Being Totally Honest” in which drunks feel required to tell each other the Truth about each other, that the various predictables began to happen.

This was at the nightclub, which was only a short distance from the hotel where they had eaten. The fourth model (who last night had been swimming nude and squealing with Doug and Sir John) slapped the face of the eldest Khanturian brother for trying to feel her up under the table and called him a “fat, greasy pig.” The eldest Khanturian brother called her a “lousy New York whore”, and Doug, incensed at this treatment of his cousin, called her a “cunt”, whereupon she fled weeping to a taxi. The eldest Khanturian brother did not bother to follow her and stayed on. Doug told Sir John the story of his cousin’s frozen feet in the Hürtgen campaign; but Sir John, instead of being sympathetic, began to demand in a belligerent voice where the hell the “bloody fucking Americans” were in 1940 when the British really needed them and were fighting their bloody battles for them all alone. This led to several disagreements about the American Revolution, of which Sir John maintained that “If Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne have been Backed up by the Secretary for America Lord George Germain as he should have been, there never would have been any United States of America and damn their squirrel rifles.” Nobody could refute this because nobody knew who Lord George Germain the Secretary for America was or had ever heard of him.

In the meantime Grant had got into a malicious-wit battle with the sharpwitted American comic who had recognized him and introduced him from the stand with a spot on the table. Grant, who resented this and who could be quite funny when he was drunk enough or flattered enough to let himself go, got the best of the exchange but was hampered by the fact that the comic had a loudspeaker microphone. But by then Lucky had fled outside to the car. Fortunately there were not many people in the place, but the few boat tourists who had found it almost certainly disqualified Grant from the contest for his use of four-letter words.

When he finally noticed she was gone, Grant hurried outside after Lucky in a panic, and after a while the others came traipsing out after them. But before they did that he and Lucky had their own truth-telling session in the dark car in the irregular-shaped parking lot bordered by lush lovely bougainvillaea, under a gorgeous royal palm.

“What’s happened to you?” Lucky demanded in a kind of furious half-wail, when he stuck his head in through the open car window. She had been crying. She was not sober, either.

Grant withdrew his head, almost as if he expected to be hit “Who, me? What’s happened to me?” Drunkenly he moved his head back and forth and then flapped his arms up and down in a gigantic shrug of miserable inexpressiveness.

“You’re not the same man I knew in New York. You’re not the same man I left in Miami.”

Grant didn’t know what to say. “I’m not?”

“I think Doug is bad for you,” Lucky said. “Whenever you’re around him, something in you changes, and you become a different person. Meaner and malicious and more cruel. It’s as if—”

“Aw, that son of a bitching comic,” Grant growled. “He had no right to pull shit like that. They think they can get by with anything.”

“That’s not what I mean.—”

“I should have punched his fucking head in,” Grant said, “that’s what I should have done.”

“There, you see? That’s what I mean.—”

“They’re all phonies. Their whole profession is phony. Show business is phony.
Everything
is phony. Everything in the whole world is phony. Everything and
everybody
is phony. Nobody says what he means. Except me. Except me and thee, as the Quaker said, and I wonder about thee.” He was suddenly raging, but he had to stop for breath.

“Maybe they are,” Lucky said. “But it’s not your job to go around correctioning everybody. Didn’t it ever occur to you how you were embarrassing me?”

“What the hell?” Grant said. “What the hell?”

“What were you doing, showing off for Doug?” she said. “So he would admire you? That’s what it looked like to me. Every time you get around him you change personalities. It’s as if— It’s as though he deliberately set out to change you into somebody else, handle you.”

Suddenly amiable, Grant nodded his head up and down lugubriously. “That’s the truth. He’d like to. He’d sure as hell like to. But he’s not about to. He’s not about to handle me. Not ever. I got him taped.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Lucky said.

“Well, you aint no goddam plaster saint either.”

She stared at him. “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. In New York you were gentle and tender, and kind. And understanding.”

“Not all the time,” Grant said, low.

“What is it that’s eating you up?”