Go to the Widow-Maker (46 page)

There was more of the Haw!-ing and hooting and back-pounding and armpunching from Bonham and Orloffski, under which Doug who was almost as big as they stood up at least as well as Grant. Lucky’s face showed her disdain for this physical-pounding kind of greeting, Grant noted. Then Lucky, who was sitting on an old hewn-log bench with the three New Yorker women, leaped up and ran over and gave Doug her own kind of greeting, which was to throw her arms around him and give him a big kiss as if he were her long-lost brother. Grant felt an irrational but nonetheless powerful twinge of jealousy move slowly all through him and then run on out of the ends of his fingers and toes. By the time he grasped Doug’s hand in his own all vestiges of the twinge had departed.

Later on in the evening, in the night rather, as they all sat around with cigarette butts glowing like echoes of the glowing, dying fire in the barbecue, when they had drunk sufficiently, Doug joined Grant in some close-harmony singing of old cowboy songs like
The Streets of Laredo,
commoner folk ballads like
Down in the Valley,
and songs they had marched to in the war like
I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
and
For Me and My Gal.
To Grant’s surprise this time instead of being angry Lucky joined in. She knew all the songs. And she had a clear, perfectly pitched, not very strong soprano which was somehow very moving because of some oddly defenseless little-girl quality in it. But before any of this pleasant, illusory immortality got started Grant had already discussed with Doug and decided, what he was going to do tomorrow about Carol Abernathy.

He approached Doug while Doug was talking to Lucky. Lucky had left the three New Yorker women and gone off with Doug to sit on an old beatup wrought-iron loveseat, and as he came up to them he overheard Doug wryly and ruefully talking to her about Terry September. When he stopped in front of them they both looked up and smiled.

“What the fuck’s going on here?” he growled with a lot of mock anger. But underneath that, he was childishly jealous.

Doug looked up at him, shrewdly. “I was just telling your Old Lady here that I think I’m fallin for Old Aunt Terry September. I’m ’onna look her up when I go up to New York.”

“If it’s private I’ll leave, if you want,” Grant offered, but suddenly felt melancholy.

“Horse shit!” Doug said.

“Are you kidding?” Lucky said.

“What I really came over for was to ask you what you think I ought to do about old Mom. Our ‘Mom’.” He twisted the word. “Would you be willing to go over there with me tomorrow while I tell her I’m going off to Kingston with my sweetheart here?”

“Why, sure,” Doug said after a moment. “Sure I would. I reckon. I guess my heart can stand the strain. And two targets is always better than one. If your side’s the side gettin shot at.
One
may survive.”

“What is it about this weird woman?” Lucky said. “Are both of you so terrified-scared of her?”

Doug grinned. “No, we ain’t scared of her.”

“Well, what is it then?” Lucky said. “What’s the hold she’s got over both of you? What’s her power?”

“There’s no denyin she’s got somethin,” Doug said. “I wisht I knew what it was.” He grinned cheerfully, with his large, mug’s face. He was playing up heavy the lousy English tonight, whatever it was his mood was. “I guess it’s because she believes—
believed,
in you when everybody else didn’t and thought you were fucking nuts to ever want to be a playwright.” He shrugged.

“What do you say?” Lucky turned to Grant.

“You know about me,” he said. “They practically supported me. Did support me. I feel like I’m adopted by them.”

Doug grinned. “Unfortunately, she’s got this thing about her boys. This fixation. She believes that every female in the world is out to marry them for their money—after she helped make them successful.”

“Well, maybe they are,” Lucky said. “So nu? What’s wrong with that? Men shouldn’t get married?”

The
So nu
brought back to Grant suddenly New York, Leslie, the little apartment, all the days he had spent there so happily, with a painful, pleasant rush.

“It certainly is strange,” Lucky said. ‘Two grown men running around like a couple of dogs with their tails between their legs, whenever they have to think of going to talk to this weird woman.” She sniffed.

Doug grinned at her and shrugged, and Grant broke in on her. “You’ll go with me then?”

“Sure.” Doug looked up at him with all the innocence on his face of a totally naive man who has never told even half a lie in his life. “I’ll help you tackle old ‘Mom’.” He too twisted the word.

So it was decided. They would go tomorrow. “Come hell or high water,” Doug grinned. And Lucky was apparently none the wiser, was completely taken in, accepted totally their untrue evaluation. She would wait for them at Bonham’s. But first they made the next day’s morning dive with Bonham. It was the last day for the three New York couples, they were leaving on the evening plane, and meeting and diving with Grant and Doug had been the big “Extra” of their whole vacation and they wanted them to come. Also, Doug wanted to go out with Bonham one more time, because after Grant and Lucky left for Kingston he was heading back for Coral Gables and then on to New York. For business. But also to see Terry. “What the hell? If you two can be that fucking lucky, why the fuck can’t I?” He grinned at them.

The dive that last day, as so often happens on last days of anything, was singularly unexciting. A few fish were taken, they explored around down on the deep reef, the three New Yorkers picked themselves some choice specimens of elkhorn and staghorn corals that Bonham had promised to dry and clean and send on to them, but nothing very unusual or exciting happened and Grant for the first time found himself bored with a dive. He would never be bored with the first part, the dressing out, the anticipation of—what? danger? miracle? something? the splashing back entry, the first singing breaths from the regulator in the sudden stillness, the first look down through the slanting sun rays as the bubbles cleared. But once on the bottom he found there was little to do that he hadn’t done to death, there were no big fish today, and so he occupied himself with knocking down with his heavy diving knife Bonham had sold him the long wavy rows of fire coral which grew profusely on the reef and could give a diver a seriously painful sting. And when he finally surfaced and poked his head out into the bright, hot, penetrating Caribbean sunshine he could not help wondering for a moment what the hell he was doing here? Then he ducked back under and with a now smooth expertise unstrapped and shucked the bottles off over his head while still breathing from the regulator, took one last look down into the mysterious realm which was no longer so mysterious when you were down there, and handed the rig up to Ali.

He would have been surprised, as he climbed the little sea ladder to where the New Yorkers had already congregated sadly after their last dive, to know that Lucky and Doug while he was futzing around unhappily down below had had a long, very serious conversation about him. He would probably not have been so surprised to learn that Lucky had in doing it, as she had with the Aldanes, and most of the rest of his friends, acquired another ardent partisan in Doug.

Lucky was a little surprised by it herself. She did not believe in having heart-to-heart talks about people with their intimates. It always made for bloodshed, and it was indelicately unprivate. So she was surprised to be doing it. Looking back later, she was able to understand that it was Doug who broached the whole thing, and to place exactly the point of conversation where he had done so.

The two of them, not diving, had snorkeled around on top for a while close to the boat, like the New Yorkers’ wives. Having seen what she had seen down below Lucky had no desire at all any more even to swim in the sea, and had to force herself to it. With Doug or Bonham or someone like that with her she was willing to snorkel around a little bit as long as she stayed close to the boat, but Doug wanted to follow the divers so she climbed back on board and stretched out on the blinding white cabin roof to sun. Sometime later with her eyes shut against the sun she felt someone come forward and sit down beside her on the edge of the towel she had spread on the hot cabin roof. It was Doug.

“Got tired of following after them,” he said in a somewhat dejected voice.

Lucky moved over to make more room for him. She always felt ticklish and uncomfortable about her boyfriend’s friends possibly touching her. “I wouldn’t do it for anything.”

“I just wish I could do it,” Doug said morosely.

“Oh, I don’t mean diving,” she said. “I mean just snorkeling along after them. Away from the boat”

Doug laughed. “You’re a girl.”

“Well, I hope so! Built like I am. I’d sure make a funny boy.”

Doug laughed again, moreso, this time throwing back his head. “You sure as hell would.” For several moments he plucked at the towel edge irresolutely. “But I didn’t come up forward to bother you with chitchat. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about, and tell you.”

Lucky turned her head to look at him in the bright sun but didn’t answer, squinting her eyes behind the dark glasses against the light. Doug’s mug’s face stared back at her with great seriousness from the towel’s edge. But when he began to talk, he looked away and down. “See, I’ve known Ron quite a while now. Almost four years. I think I’ve formed a pretty accurate impression of him by now.” There was none of his deliberately lousy English now. “I think he needs a woman. His own woman. A wife. He’s not like me; I’m the kind of guy, I’m fairly certain, who’ll never find that; and I’ve accepted it.” He looked sad, but Lucky for some reason could not believe in it. “I’m uh I’m trying to say I think you ought to marry him.”

“What do you think I’m down here trying to do?” Lucky said, a little too thinly she thought.

But Doug nodded. “He’s really quite a guy, Ron is. He takes to this diving stuff like a duck to water. As they say. He’s as brave as a lion. I guess he’s probably the best man I’ve ever met. Physically, mentally, and uh and morally: spiritually. The best.”

“Well, don’t expect me to disagree with you,” she said. “I’m in love with him.” Big compliments to anyone always made her slightly uneasy and embarrassed.

“So it’s a shame. If he had only been bigger,” Doug concluded, “he could have been a great athlete.”

Lucky could hardly believe she’d heard right. “A great athlete! My God! Who in hell wants to be a great athlete?” Tad Falker. My God; Tad Falker.

“Just about every American—every
man
—who ever lived,” Doug said.

“More than being a great writer?”

“Well, of course, there’s that. But of course it’s possible to be both.”

“Like who?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Like Byron, maybe. Even Hemingway maybe, in a small way.”

“Well, I think the two are basically incompatible. Intrinsically,” Lucky said flatly.

“Maybe you’re right. Of course that could be called a typical woman’s viewpoint.” It was a sort of a polite sop, with a backhanded slap tacked on. He plucked at the towel edge again for a little while. “Anyway, I know that knowing him the few short years I have has completely and totally changed my whole life.”

Something about the way he said that, that last, sounded stilted and false and irritated Lucky. “What about this weird woman? This Mrs Abernathy?” she said thinly. “I thought it was her who changed your life.”

Doug plucked at the towel. “Well, she’s helped me some of course.” He paused. “But she’s not really very intelligent, you know. And Ron says she’s gotten worse and worse over the years. I’ve seen it myself, a little. She uh she sort of makes me think of all those old cunts. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Stanton, old Mary Walker, Lucy Stone.”

“All the old lesbians.”

“Well if
you
want to put it that way yes I guess. She certainly hasn’t got much sex in her, I don’t think. And she doesn’t much like men.”

“And yet all you fellows buzz around her like flies around some goddamned honeypot.”

“No, and that’s what I wanted to tell you,” Doug said. “Don’t think that about Ron. Because it won’t be true. He’s his own man, believe me.”

“I hope so. I hope I wouldn’t fall in love with anybody who wasn’t,” Lucky said.

Doug was staring at her, and suddenly he gave a twisted lopsided grin. “You’re quite a gal.

“Look. The old gal—Carol—‘Mom’—is hipped on all this mystical and metaphysical stuff. That’s been going on for eight years. She stumbled onto some book called
Hermes
Trismegatus
in some New York occult bookshop and that started her off. And now she’s developed this theory, which is not original, that any artist or creative genius diminishes his vital energy, his force, his genius whenever he marries and takes on a wife and family.”

“It’s not hard to see why she chose to believe that,” Lucky said.

“Sure. She even goes so far as to say that every time you get laid, have an orgasm, and use your sexuality, don’t sublimate entirely, you’re diminishing your creative power. And maybe there’s some truth in it. I don’t know. How do I know? Hell, Gandhi believed it. But Ron’s not like that. And neither am I.”

“My God!” Lucky said. “I should hope not.”

Doug grinned a crooked grin. “Just the reverse, we’re probably the two most oversexed guys anybody’ll ever meet. Anyway, Ron’s at the stage of his career and life right now where he needs to get away from her, break her influence. He’s
broken
her influence; but he’s very loyal. The only thing that can break his loyalty to Carol and Hunt is a greater loyalty. And only love can give him that.”

“Well, that’s exactly what I’d like to give him.”

Doug nodded crisply. “Right. And between us, you and me, we can probably make him the greatest playwright America’s ever seen.”

Lucky was first astonished, then shocked. “Yes? What would
you
do?” she said faintly.

“Oh, be there when he needed me.”

She felt this to be incredibly presumptuous. For several moments she didn’t answer. The white-hot sun beat down on both of them pulsatingly. She felt completely at sea, caught and pulled by currents and countercurrents she couldn’t understand.