Go to the Widow-Maker (45 page)

What was it Ron and Bonham could have been conspiring about? And what was all this coy tickly business about renting a cheap room? She knew better than that. Something cold suddenly ran all over her.

Could it be that Ron wasn’t straight with her after all? That he was holding something back from her all this time after all, like so many of the others, like
all
the others?

A secret wife hidden away someplace? An alimony wife and alimony kids he couldn’t afford to give up to marry again? A lover or mistress he hadn’t told about, and didn’t
want
to give up? Was it this foster-mother who ran his life and wouldn’t let him?

Jesus, a lone woman was so vulnerable.

It was like an old bad dream coming back. How many possible situations were there? In her time she had been just about through the entire lot. He didn’t
act
like the kind of man who was dominated by his mother, his foster-mother. She had known one like that, too. Did this mother, this foster-mother hold that much power over him?

Could it be, even, one of the other possibilities?

One third sleeping, Lucky looked bleakly back over the whole long, long list of them in her life, suddenly half-smothered in real fright and jerked back awake. It stretched all the way back to the age of twenty-two when she had first come on to New York and the handsome society gynecologist—who wouldn’t even help her out with her first abortion after causing its necessity. Not one of them but who had lied to her about something.

Even Raoul, who had
told
her he had a wife down there, and who was
trying
to get a divorce, had not told her the real dangerousness of his revolution activities. He had told her how they sat him naked on cakes of ice for hours, and how they had wired his teeth with electricity, but he had laughed about all that. And even under her questioning he would never admit that it could go so far that anybody would actually kill him. God! And all of them.
All
the others.

No. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. Not after the way he had been to her, the way they had been to each other all that time in New York. That had to be real. There couldn’t be any lie behind, underneath that. She had to believe in him. She just had to.

So she did.

She just would.

Seeking warmth, she cuddled up and curled herself against him in the bed. In his sleep Grant moved away, and again she followed, curling up like a baby kitten blindly curling up against any warmth. Warmth. Warmth.

She felt loose, at loose ends and out of place here with these people like Bonham. She had nothing really, no past experience of it, to judge by. She had always disliked sports. And ‘sportsmen’. And kept as far away from them as possible. There was something funny, sick about them, as if they did all these things because they didn’t like women.

That Orloffski, for instance. Orloffski had made her think of somebody. In her senior year at Cornell she had gone with, been the girlfriend of, the Captain of the Football Team. For campus fame. For campus glory. And in that year, after losing her virginity—losing it? giving it away gladly!—the year before to a hometown non-college boy, she had had an affair with her football captain. Afterward he had gone on to play pro ball, and she had dropped him. For a year or two after that he had used to call her up in New York whenever his team was in town. He apparently couldn’t get her out of his mind, some kind of a challenge, although he was married by that time. But she had never gone out with him again, because he was a man who preferred the company of men to being with a woman. Being with a woman to him was essentially only something to talk about later with the fellows. You could even sense that in him, when he was with you. Like Orloffski. A Cornell graduate, he was still very much like Orloffski. He had been built exactly like Orloffski, in fact—except that he wasn’t hairless. He had, in fact, been very hairy. Her fingers remembered that. But that other, odd quality was there.

What was it? It was not so much pro-male as it was anti-female. Or rather, it
was
pro-male. Super pro-male. Super-duper pro-male. But it wasn’t homosexual. Or not usually homosexual. Just the reverse, the type usually hated homosexuality with a fearful passion. But it was male. Male-to-male. Males together against the world. Shoulder-to-shoulder. Soldier-to-soldier. Male, male, male. Every-thing male. Everywhere male. Maybe it was only anti-female insofar as femininity encroached upon maleness. It fairly oozed out of Orloffski. It had oozed out of Tad. Tad Falker. God, she hadn’t thought of that name in so long. And Bonham had it too for that matter, as far as she could tell. The trouble with that was . . .

Thick on the edge of sleep, an image kicked its way up into her head, squalling loudly. She tried to refine it and make it sayable, as she pressed her face against Grant’s armpit.

It was like the Circle of Politique, she had learned so well during all the dreary, boring years of Political Science at Cornell. You could only go so far Right without becoming Left; and you could only go so far Left without becoming Right. The rabid extreme Right became Leftist; the rabid extreme Left became Rightist. The Clock Face of Politics. If 12 o’clock was extreme Right and 6 o’clock extreme Left, you could not pass above or below 9 or 3 without moving toward becoming your own opposite, what you hated, your enemy. And this pro-male, Masculinity thing was like that. The Circle of the Sexes. When you become more Masculine than Masculine, you could only become, move toward Feminine. You simply couldn’t go on becoming more and more Masculine than before. When you became more Masculine than normal, than 9 o’clock, you automatically came closer and closer to the Feminine. There just wasn’t anywhere else to go. Whether you liked it or not. So they
were
all fags together, in a totally non-fag non-sexual physical way. With this clarified in her mind, when she thought of Orloffski it stuck out all over him. His physical vanity, his preoccupation with his own beauty (beauty?!), his posing, his preening, his instinctive dislike of women. But my God, did Ron have that problem too? And if he did, what could she do about it? Delicately, she slipped out the tip of her tongue, touched it lightly to the tips of the long hairs of his armpit, tucked it back in, and slept. Grant had borrowed an alarm clock from Bonham, and when he woke her at seventy-thirty it was as if she had been used to getting up that early all her adult life.

It was a beautiful day. With the flat, glinting, silent sea stretching hotly away and away like a table, the hot, beating tropic sun in the small breeze, the little boat’s icechest full of beer and scotch, the multiple picnic lunch the hotel had prepared, it couldn’t have been a more beautiful day. The wives of Bonham’s three new clients were all hip, chic New Yorker types Lucky could talk to and be at ease with, and with the six of them plus herself and Ron, the two Orloffskis, Bonham and Ali, the little boat was crowded with gaiety and laughter.

But by ten-thirty in the morning she had seen something that was to ruin the day for her, and began to ruin skindiving for her forever. Swimming around on the surface in the mask, snorkel and flippers Bonham had provided her and watching the lung-packing spearfishermen down below, she saw Ron—her Ron; her lover—spear a nice-sized fish, and then nearly have it taken from him by a shark before he could get it back to the boat. She could hardly believe her eyes. The fish looked like some kind of a snapper, though she couldn’t be sure, and no sooner had Ron speared it than this shark appeared from nowhere and made a grab for it with all his rows and rows of teeth. It wasn’t a very big shark, not as long as Ron himself, and it was black and swam with an ugly awkward undulating motion not at all like the fabled lethal torpedo, but still it was enough for her. Putting her head up to yell once, she started swimming toward the boat with her head down so she could watch Grant and the shark. Bonham, who was lying on the surface in a lung not far away looking after his charges, swam over to her, but did not offer to help Grant. With Bonham between her and the shark, she felt safe enough to stop and watch. What she saw astonished her even more, and then made her furious.

Ron was playing with the shark! Looking for all the world like a guilty sheep-killing dog, the shark would dart up and make a grab for the fish, and Ron, holding the speargun at arm’s length, would give it a little jerk. At the other end of the double length of line and spear, when the dead fish moved, the shark would veer off and flee, only to come back again a moment later. Once when he circled up and in between Ron and the fish, Ron, hauling in on his gun and line, turned back and swam directly at him—whereupon the shark turned and fled ignominiously in panic, only to reappear again in a few seconds. Then, as Ron swam on up and closer to them near the boat, the shark, apparently seeing reinforcements, turned away and swam off and disappeared.

When Grant boated the fish (“Mangrove snapper,” Bonham said) in the dinghy, unscrewing his spearhead, he was laughing in a bright-eyed, almost drunken way (though he hadn’t had a drink) that she had never seen him laugh before. And her fury turned into a kind of superstitious awe and fear. They were both crazy, he and Bonham.

“I was a little nervous,” Ron laughed. “Especially when he circled up to me that time.”

“You sure didn’t show it the way you handled him,” Bonham grinned, obviously proud of him. “Was real professional.”

“Do you think we can still find him?” He was reloading his gun.

“I seriously doubt it. If we do, we’ll never catch him now. He’s too spooked. But we can give it a try. Come on.”

From beside the boat’s ladder, where she kept one hand reassuringly, Lucky watched them until they faded out beyond the circle of visibility. When they came back, they were empty-handed. They hadn’t found him.

She did not spend much time thinking about it. She ate the delicious picnic lunch, had some drinks, sunbathed on the cabin roof, swam a little more, joked with the New Yorkers who were enjoying their vacation. By three o’clock they had used up all the air bottles Bonham had brought with them anyway, and so decided to go back in. But whenever she did remember it, accidentally, then and later, a heart palpitation of fear would run over her, to be followed by a fury of shock and outrage.

When she talked about it to him, on the boat’s long run back in to port, he only looked irritated. “He was more scared of me than I was of him. Hell, even I could see that.”— “But you
liked
it!”—“Yes. Yes, I did like it. That part. I can’t help it.”—“But a big one could come along at any moment.”—“I suppose one could. But it doesn’t happen very often. Obviously.” She did not tell him what she was also thinking, which was that a man who may go down in history as one of the greatest (if not
the
greatest) playwrights of his generation had no right to go taking chances with his life like that.

That night they all got drunk together at Bonham’s hangout The Neptune Bar with Grant and the New Yorkers picking up the tab, and Grant insisted on singing
Summertime
over the bar’s entertainment speaker system, embarrassing her intensely. She did not know what it was, but around Bonham, as around Doug, he seemed to become an entirely different personality.

The next day it was the same thing all over again, only this time without any sharks. Lucky, however, could not forget that one.

But that evening Doug Ismaileh came back from Montego Bay. Lucky had not thought she would ever be that glad to see him again. But she was.

G
RANT TOO WAS GLAD
to see Doug back again. It was true that he really wanted to make more dives with Bonham before going off to dive alone in Kingston, but he didn’t want to have to go on diving with Bonham forever. And while his little ruse with Lucky about the cheap room (mainly to avoid running into the de Blysteins or the Abernathys at one of the hotels) had worked well enough, he was bright enough to know in spite of his violent state, that it could not go on like that forever.

He really was, in a violent state. He seemed to have lost all power to act or think ahead. Something about that mantilla-ed she-witch who had been taking over small pieces of his soul bit by bit for so many years, or so he believed, had taken all moral force, all will out of him. It was ridiculous that he should be so concerned over his moral responsibility to her, when she so obviously didn’t give a damn about any moral responsibility she might owe to him. But there it was. He could no more go over there alone and beard her in her villa-den than he could take off and fly by flapping his arms. So he simply marked time, some mindless will-less chicken, waiting for Doug to come back. Any gratification he might have got out of his first shark encounter was more than ruined by this knowledge.

It was strange, Bonham seemed to have divined—and fallen in with—his “cheap room” ruse almost as if he had been briefed on it beforehand. But he had never told Bonham about Carol Abernathy. Had Bonham, then, guessed it? Doug could not have told him, because Doug had not seen Bonham since Grant himself had told Doug the story. Certainly Cathie Finer would not have told him. Yet Bonham had gone right along, conspiratorially conspiring, helping more than he had been asked to, just as if he knew exactly what was going on and what needed to be done about it. Grant was grateful to him, but at the same time it oddly irritated him.

When Doug pulled into the front yard in his own rented car that evening, they were all sitting out in the back yard around the barbecue where Bonham was making ribs again, his contribution to Grant and the three New Yorker fellas (as he said) for the dough they laid out on the party at The Neptune last night. It must have cost him a buck-seventy-five, five bucks if you counted the beer. Of course they all knew he didn’t have much money. Grant and one of the New Yorkers had brought whiskey. Grant was grateful for the New Yorkers. Lucky liked them, and they helped to keep her occupied. Slyly, he had noted that the three New York males had taken a great shine to Bonham, with the same almost boyish hero-worship he and Doug sometimes showed for the big, tough diver. For no good reason, Grant made a mental note and filed it away in the grabbag part of his mind where he kept his future material.