Go to the Widow-Maker (40 page)

Grant was first astounded, then outraged. “What is it that’s eating me up? You want to know what’s eating me up? I’ll tell you what’s eating me up. I’m going to die. Someday. That’s what’s eating me up. I’m going to die. Me. And nobody in the whole fucking world is going to give a good goddam. That’s what’s eating me up. Not even you. I could marry you tomorrow and drop dead the day after and within a year you’d be married to somebody else and just as happy. Because you can’t stand to be without a lover for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. Any more than me. That’s the truth. That’s the truth about everything. About everybody. And all this love shit and caring and integrity is so much horseshit. Only, people won’t admit it. They pretend it isn’t so so they can go on living with their terror. They make up stories. When they write them down, they call it History. You want to know what’s eating me up? That’s what’s eating me up. And . all . I . want . is . just . once, just once to make them admit it for maybe fifteen minutes. One theater full of people for one half of one third act.”

In the middle of this impassioned declamation Lucky had begun to sob quietly and when he stopped she said, “Oh, you’re terrible. How do I know if I would ever fall in love with somebody else? I know I love you now. How do I know if I know if I would ever marry anybody else? I certainly wouldn’t marry anybody else like you! And I’m not so goddamned sure I want to marry you, right now.”

“Okay,” Grant said, suddenly amiable again, like a man who has just been relieved of a serious case of constipation, “then let’s just go to Kingston and have ourselves a good time and worry about everything else later.” He heaved a great sigh, in which there was a certain amount of self-satisfaction for some reason or other, and leaned his head back and looked up in the sky.

“Come here,” he said after a moment, in a totally new, tense voice. “Come on, get out here! Look at this. Come on, look!” She did and was standing beside him her shoulder just touching his, the small fine head just coming up to the tiptop of his ear, when he spoke again. Above them in the night sky from horizon to horizon literally billions of stars glittered and blinked at them. “Isn’t that the most chilling, freezing, horrendous thing you ever saw? Do you think any of them ever give a fuck whether me and you ever lived or died?”

“I don’t know,” Lucky said in a subdued tone. “I suppose not. I’ll tell you one thing. I certainly don’t give a good goddam for them.”

It was just then, when he was kissing her seriously, that the rest of the group came meandering out of the nightclub looking for them.

Of course they all went to Sir John’s seaside villa from there. And, of course, inevitably, unavoidably, it got around to the nude swimming party in the underwater-lit pool. Indeed, “the Spy from Home” who at his hotel today had heard all about the party of last night, was panting like an aroused bull for them to get on with the show. Of course it did not start all at once, cold turkey, and everybody decorously got into trunks or bikini in the two dressing rooms for the first act, but finally the moment came when one of the models complained about the restrictiveness of all bathing suits even bikinis and shucking out of her two bandannas tossed them from the water up onto the pool edge. This was the signal. And this was when Lucky rebelled.

She wasn’t wearing a bikini, in the first place, but one of those Olympic-style black one-piece suits of thin double-layer nylon. Her figure was a little bit too lush to look good in a bikini, she said. In this suit she had swum by herself four or five slow lazy laps which showed she had done quite a bit of swimming, and then had climbed out onto the pool edge and sat, cheek resting on the knee of one leg which she had drawn up and clasped against her and looking apprehensively (and not at all happily) as though she knew beforehand exactly what was going to happen. Grant had swum around near her porpoising and spouting, enjoying the now strangely amateurish feel of swimming without mask or flippers, and occasionally kissing her other foot that still dangled in the water. But when the first model threw up the first bikini, she pulled her foot out and got up and walked up to the shallow end nearest the house and sat down in one of the beach chairs in the dark out of the light. Grant followed her.

“Hey! What’s the matter?”

In the slung-canvas chair she had curled herself up into the smallest ball possible, like a foetus.

“Maybe I don’t know what all your tastes are,” she said in a small low voice, “maybe we haven’t known each other that long after all, but I don’t go in for orgies.”

“Hey! Hey! Wait a minute.”

“When I told you I’d slept with four hundred men, it was a good round figure give or take a few, and probably accurate. But I never slept with them in tandem, or in groups. No orgies.”

“Oh, come on,” Grant protested. “This is no orgy. Everybody’s got his own date. Except Khanturian, and he’s s. o. l. But I don’t care if you don’t take—”

“Do you
want
me to take my suit off and let those men see me naked?”

“Well, no,” Grant said promptly. “Of course not.” This was not strictly the truth, he realized immediately; but it was only half a lie. There was a kind of breathless anticipation to have her do just that but the thought of her doing it, at the same time, caused an acutely painful cramp in his innards. Even more painfully, he thought of all her “Four Hundred Men”. She could be a little more circumspect about talking about it. He’d like to beat the shit out of all of them.

“But you knew all along this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think about it,” Grant said, lamely, although this was the exact truth.

“But you heard Doug tell me in the car that that was what you all did last night,” Lucky insisted.

“I just didn’t think about it,” he insisted back. But in spite of that he knew enough to know, and was honest enough with himself to admit, that he
should
have thought about it. If only to consider whether his preference was in having her participate, or in having her not. There was some kind of self-subterfuging there, all right. “Look, what the hell?” he said.

Lucky’s eyes flashed at him dangerously. “Listen. And believe me! If you want me to, I will. Just say the word! And if I
do,
you’ll be the most jealous little gentleman that ever lived. I can promise you that!”

“Certainly not,” Grant said calmly. It was a false calm, and his ears were ringing. “Absolutely not. Of course not. Look, we don’t
have
to do anything. We can just sit right here. Or if you want I’ll take you—”

But it was just then that Doug’s girl, Terry September, walked by still in her bikini on her way back from the Little Girls Room and interrupted him.

“Hey! Aren’t you two joining the fun?”

“Thank you, no,” Lucky said coldly.

“Aw, come off it,” Terry said irritably. “I knew you in New York, Sweetie. You’ve been around plenty. Why don’t you just relax and loosen up a little bit.” Then smiling, she sat down on the edge of the beach chair and put her arm around the other girl friendlily. As if she were being physically burned by her touch, Lucky leaped up from the chair and ran weeping into the house.

“I’m not a whore! I’m not a whore!”

Grant heard her say that much. Nobody else noticed a thing, it was all done so quietly. Except of course Terry.

“Hey! What did
I
say?” she complained.

“Nothing. It’s okay,” Grant said. “Forget it. I’ll go and get her. She’s tired from the trip.” And he hurried off.

He found her in one of the bedrooms. She had run into the walk-in clothes closet and shut the door and was huddled on the floor in a corner, back among some hanging coats. She was weeping like a busted child, newly orphaned. “Honey, honey! Come on, come on. Don’t cry like that, don’t cry.” The words didn’t matter, as long as he said them as softly as he could. She acted like a wounded animal. Finally he got her to stand up and got her out of the closet into the bedroom, where they sat down on the bed and he held her and finally she stopped crying.

“You’re a son of a bitch,” she said finally, wiping her red eyes and still snuffling. Grant got her some tissues from beside the bed. “You’ve got no right to treat me like that. I’ve never done anything to you to give you the right to treat me like that. Like I was one of those girls.”

“Certainly not,” Grant said. “Of course not. But they’re not whores, Lucky. They’re just young girls living it up while they can. Like everybody.”

“I know that,” Lucky said. She was pulling herself together. “No, that’s not true. They’re sick. I was never sick. Not like that.”

Grant stared at her, listening. It was as close as she had ever come to talking, about herself. But she didn’t go on. He himself was feeling that—in his own eyes at least—he had lost considerable face, displayed considerable lack of courage by backing down out there on the nude bathing business. Almost automatically, he had been positively cowardly in front of her challenge. But he had sensed also very strongly, with a powerful, alert, slow-breathing sense of impending danger, that if he had not, if he had let her go ahead and go through with it, had with her joined the naked swimmers, they would have destroyed something between them that could never be got back. But would she realize that? know what he had done? And was he
right?
Silently, he continued to pat her on the back as she dried her face and stopped her sniffling. And it was just then that the eldest Khanturian brother wandered in upon them.

For some reason known only to himself he had put back on his gartered socks and his shoes, so that he looked rather strange since the only other thing he was wearing was his baggy wet swimming trunks. He peered at them as if he didn’t know them for a moment or two and then groaned somewhat drunkenly. “Jeez, my poor old feet are killin me,” he announced mournfully. “I wish I just had somebody to rub them for me for a minute.” It was ridiculous. Of course he had no girl, she had left weeping, and she almost certainly would not have done it for him even had she been there. It was clear he was pretty tired of watching the other men playing with their girls in the pool.

“Would you rub my feet?” he asked Lucky.

“Here, sit down,” Grant said with a grin at her. “Sure. I will.” And when Khanturian flopped back on the bed he knelt and taking off his shoes with a wink at Lucky rubbed the bony feet in the silk socks for a minute. Khanturian sighed blissfully. “I hope I aint disturbin you guys any,” he said.

“No,” Grant said. “No, no. Why don’t you take yourself a nap?” He felt very sorry for him; for everybody. Getting Lucky’s arm, he led her out.

“He really is a fat greasy pig,” Lucky whispered distastefully when they were outside the bedroom in the big beamed living-room. “She was right.”—“Well,” Grant said. He had to admit he was pretty greasy.

“And I’m an Italian,” Lucky said.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you home to the hotel. I’ll just tell Doug and Sir John we’re leaving.”

On the long dark drive back to town she held onto his arm with both hands, close up against him, her head pressed against his shoulder as he drove. She felt like a scared little girl holding onto her daddy. At the airport, as they went up over the hill, only a very few lights were still burning.

“I guess I’ve got a thing about old vets,” Grant said finally, after a long silence that had extended from the moment they got into the car in Sir John’s long curving driveway outside the villa in the dark. They had sat a long moment, listening to and looking at the laughter and the lights inside. “Old sailors
and
old soldiers. I know what they went through. And I know what it’s like to be a nobody. To be manipulated, statistics moved around like chess pieces on the board to gain some overall strategic goal.

“And when it’s all over the Players line you up and thank you in bulk, statistics to the end. Nobody important ever knows your face or name. You’re just there, a pyramid of faces to be stood on. And the oldest Khanturian is like that in peace the same as in war. A nobody. He’s even a nobody with that gang of ours tonight.”

“The oldest Khanturian and all the other Khanturians,” Lucky said. They had all three of them amongst themselves, after Doug started it, taken to referring to the five Khanturian brothers by their numerical position of birth: the eldest Khanturian, the second oldest Khanturian, etc. “I didn’t like to see you rubbing his feet.”

“Well, I didn’t want you to do it. And somebody ought to be willing to rub his feet. All old vets deserve more than that, but
I
don’t know how to give it to them.”

“Sure. They deserve the right to go down to the American Legion and become reactionaries.”

“I know, I know,” Grant said, moving slightly to take a curve, “I know it’s sentimental. But I can’t help it. It scares me. I don’t like to see it.”

“See what?”

“See the helplessness of the enormous bulk of humanity, supporting on its pyramid of faces the ambitious, the intelligent, and the talented (who all love it, naturally—in bulk) and who, simply because we all believe with a deep animal instinct in the pecking order, will go down in ‘History’. They deserve better.”

“Rousseau’s Fallacy! You mean you still believe in ‘the noble savage’?”

“Not at all, not at all. I know they’re bastards, animals. But so are the ambitious, intelligent and talented. It’s their
helplessness
that scares me. They have nothing to say about what happens to them. And it’s going to get worse. It’s the Age of the Future, I’m afraid, and it’ll be just as much in peacetime as in wartime.”

“But it’s always been like that.”

“But not the same. If Augustus Caesar could get away with being more cruel than Harry Truman or General Eisenhower would be allowed to by the people, he still did not have their modern means of imposing and making stick with the people a loving picture of himself.”

“I like beautiful people,” Lucky murmured into his sleeve.

“Unfortunately, there just aint very many of them in the world.”

“You’re one,” Lucky said.

“Me? Sure. I’m famous. And if you get to be famous like me it’s almost as good as being a politician. You don’t have that problem. Of being a nobody anymore. The people whose lawns you used to mow and battles you used to fight invite you to dinner to show you off to the people whose lawns you didn’t use to mow. They elect you to the Club. Hell, I even played poker with a general once, after I got to be famous.”