Go to the Widow-Maker (59 page)

Grant explained how he had already met Jim Grointon. Five minutes later the stocky sandy-haired Irish-cop-looking diver pulled in in his battered old jeep.

“Bes’ diver een Kingstone,” René grinned after the other two had shaken hands. “But you got to watch heem, Ronnie. Rarely does ’ee teach a man how to dive without ’ee teach ze man’s wife something too! Eet’s a shande. ’Ee ees ze biggest Don Huan between ’ere and ze Windward Road. Eef not een ze ’ole Kingstone.”

“He’s flatterin me,” Jim Grointon grinned with his pale strange lashes, and slapped René on the back with the familiarity of a comrade. “I’m not quite that good. So! I’m glad you finally got down. When do you want to go out?”

“Anytime.”

“Then we’ll go right now. This afternoon.”

“Fine. Come on over and I’ll introduce you to my uh—”

“Hees wife,” René said.

For just a second Grointon gave Grant a look from behind his pale lashes. “Sure. Glad to meet her.”

“She wasn’t with me when I went to Grand Bank,” Grant felt called upon to explain. “She came down after. And she’s not my wife, she’s my girl.”

“She weel be,” René grinned. “Do not to worry. She weel be. When zos t’ree get ze ’eads together.” And he bobbed his head toward the table.

“Will she be going out with us?”

“I don’t know. We’ll ask her. She doesn’t dive but maybe she’ll want to go along.”

She did. “I’m not letting this guy out of my sight for the next two weeks or whatever it takes if I can possibly help it,” she grinned. And thus began their daily, day-by-day exodus and return out to the reefs. There were quite a number of them within a radius of four miles from the hotel. The nearest of these, Gun Cay and Lime Cay, which were about a mile away and a mile from each other, they visited first and then slowly branched out day by day among the others: Rackhams Cay, Maiden Cay, Drunkenmans Cay, West Middle Rock, West Middle Shoal, East Middle Ground, Turtle Head Shoal, South Cay, South East Cay. Only a few were actually visible from the surface, so that if you did not know where they were you would not have found them. They averaged in depth from two or three fathoms shading off down to ten or twelve. They were not very interesting diving really, but in spite of that they managed to keep themselves in enough fish for eating. A couple of days the musical comedy writer and her husband went out with them. One day the famous fag conductor and his wife went out, but they did not go again. This was just as well. Grant did not like the conductor, and the conductor equally disliked him. Jim Grointon had a small air compressor at his anchorage with which he could refill Grant’s tanks and he was willing as he was with any other client to do all the dirty work, but Grant did not like this. He was a do-it-yourself-and-learn man. So he spent a good deal of time over at the anchorage with Jim, cleaning and filling and repairing, and even helping with the chores of the boat.

The weather held fine. Each day they went out shortly before noon, taking sandwiches and beer, baking in the heavy sun on the near-windless sparkling sea until with the tans they already had Lucky and Grant were soon almost black, darker than the freckled Grointon. The catamaran was perfect for this kind of sailing. With its twin steel hulls, airtight and sealed, its big retractable waterglass-box, powered by two enormous outboard motors, it was comfortable and about impossible to scuttle, turn over or sink. On a framework of pipes a tarpaulin was stretched overhead to make shade, running between the two masts fore and aft, because not even Lucky with her ivory, easy-tanning Italian skin could stand all that sun all day long. The two men were in the water most of the time, and Grant discovered he got sunburned only on the back of his neck and his shoulders which floated free, and on the backs of his knees even though they remained a foot or so under. He was using the aqualung less and less, though they always carried a couple, and was free-diving more and more. Jim Grointon never used one, since a man who could free-dive a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty feet had no trouble free-diving ten or twelve fathoms. Lucky had taken to him in a way she had never taken to Big Al Bonham so that there were no currents of antagonism on the boat, and the long days out on the water were great fun and marvelous even though she still refused to try to dive. She soon discovered that Jim despite his surname was Irish after all, and that however much the “Don Juan” he was and however brave and tough he was underwater, he was still easily shocked and considerably embarrassed by her New York female’s outspokenness. A number of native fishermen worked the cays and shoals during the good weather, poling in shallow water or rowing in deep water their little homemade boats. Invariably they worked totally naked, standing tall and lean in their skiffs, and almost invariably there dangled from their groins the longest and largest penises Grant anyway had ever seen. Only when the catamaran came close enough for them to see there was a woman aboard would they duck down and come up wearing a garment looking like a cross between a priest’s cassock and a woman’s pullover cotton dress, smiling in terrible embarrassment. So Lucky took to carrying a pair of highpowered binoculars borrowed from René. With these she was able to study their unbelievably large penises from afar without embarrassing them, and this became (she claimed) her “pastime” and her “hobby” while the two men were out in the water, diving, and when they would return to the boat after a dive she would hold up her hands grinning and measuring what she had seen, or thought she had seen, this time: ten inches, a foot, a foot and a half; with some such comment as: “Oh, those beautiful big long chocolate things! Yum!” at which Jim Grointon would retire to the stern with a strained grin to start the motors, his freckled ears red under his tan. Invariably when they returned to the hotel where Jim left the boat now every night, René would chortle and holler, “Et alors! What you ’ave seen how big today?” Grant knew that at least two-thirds of her little routine was done to shock Grointon (and any other prudes who might be around the hotel), while almost all of the other third was simply pure iconoclasm, and he would catch Jim looking at her with confused and embarrassed wonderment, and perhaps admiration, whenever he thought no one was watching. And so the marvelous, laughter-making, fun days passed. The only day that they did not go out was the Wednesday, the day that they were married.

But in spite of the fun and laughter, the further laughter and drinking and repartee in the bar and on the big porch at night, in all of which Grant joined lustily enough, the only times Grant felt himself to be fully functioning and not numb were those times when he was actually in the water diving. Only then could he completely forget his problem, his marriage problem about which he was doing nothing. Even out in the catamaran, out on the sparkling, always-heaving, never-quiet, sunburnt splendor of the sea, when he would climb back in and strip off his gear, sometimes the lung but more usually now only snorkel, mask, flippers and gun, it was as if some switch would click off, some curtain would fall, in his mind and he would again be facing his problem that he knew he had to solve but which he could not begin the solving of. Should he? Shouldn’t he? He preferred to stay in the water. And as a result his diving, which he hated to leave even for a moment now, progressed enormously and by the day of his wedding he was free-diving fifty feet quite easily. But all the rest of this twosome vacation was all truly only half alive, benumbed.

Then too, as if the rest were not enough, his jealousy had come back, and come back with an incredible vengeance, an unbelievable force. He had had it for her all that time in New York, and strongly. But he hadn’t had it since she came down to meet him in Montego Bay. Now he had it again. This had happened on the third day when Lucky introduced him to her old, two-year-old, two-and-a-
half
-year old (time, distance in time, became very important now) Jamaican lover.

He knew the story well enough. She had not been averse to telling it to him. Actually, she had told it to him on that long ride, that long lovely ride down to Florida. How on one trip, one particularly long trip back into his South American country where he insisted on playing his idiot’s game of politics, Raoul had left her stashed a particularly long time at the Grand Hotel Crount. How this guy Jacques, who used to hang around the Crount and dine there like so many of the hipper young people of Kingston, had made a big play for her, and how she figured what the hell, Raoul had it coming to him, she’d give it a go. They had had a two-weeks affair, going around everywhere together, and then Raoul had come back and had hustled her out of there and back to New York so fast she didn’t know what hit her. Yes, he knew the story well enough. He had even laughed about it on the way down to Florida (though it hurt him too), largely because he liked to think of that goddamned Raoul getting one put over on him, but when he had to shake hands with Jacques Edgar, who was a handsome pleasant welloff importer son of a welloff importer father, and feel the heavy warm clean friendly pressure of Edgar’s hand in his own, he didn’t know if he could do it, or stand it. All sorts of sick, painful pictures and imaginations ran through his mind, of them together, of her lying back and opening her legs to him, of her kissing him as he entered her. What he wanted to do was hit him in the belly as hard as he could. Instead, he smiled and said hello and pretended he was civilized.

He should have known he would have to meet him down here, in Kingston, at the hotel, sometime or other. But that thought, that possibility, had never entered his head apparently. He would have expected a black man, not that that mattered, coalblack as Paule Gordon was coalblack. Lucky’s delighted iconoclasm about her Negro lover had made him sound at least that black. Instead the truth was, with Grant’s dark seaburnt tan, the pleasant civilized Edgar, who worked in an office all day, was at least as light as Grant was. And he was obviously a very nice fellow.

The whole thing was silly, really. Especially was it silly when he thought of all the women he had slept with himself, before meeting Lucky. But it didn’t matter. It was so painful that he could hardly keep from flinching and yelling out loud. This was the first of Lucky’s ex-boyfriends he had ever met face-to-face, and whole new chasms of gloom and doubt opened up under his already benumbed near-nonfunctioning state. Was he marrying himself to some kind of a damned little hustler? Was he letting himself be caught by some kind of goddamned twobit whore of a nymphomaniac? But he
loved
her. And of course the old clincher: if she liked sex that well with him, with Grant, why wouldn’t she like it just as well with somebody else, with anybody?

Hansel and Gretel, my ass.

And as if all of this were not enough to unnerve and unman him in his state of total indecision, a new torment had to be added as if by some cynically laughing fate. The day after they arrived a pretty big Time-man, a Contributing Editor, had flown in with his wife from New York for a three-week vacation at the Crount. He had even been given one of René’s more exclusive suites fronting on the water. (“I make ze mistake, Ronnie, I’m ze schnuk,” René groaned later. “Even I am not ze totalement parfait.”) He turned out to be a man Grant had met a couple of times in New York. He had the same sly, half-queasy, overly boyish face so many of his breed had, and he began almost immediately to live up to his looks. When he learned that Grant and Lucky were very likely to be in the process of getting married, he immediately began to insert himself (and his physically attractive, sexless, mentally arrested wife) in with them and their group of friends. Grant stayed away from him most of the time, or managed always to be with somebody when he came around, but finally the Contributing Editor trapped him alone at the dim cool bar on the hot afternoon of the fourth day.

“Hello, Grant,” he said with his too easy smile, which crinkled and overly warmed his eyes. “Buy you a drink?”

“Thanks. I’ve got one.”

The Contributing Editor, whose name was Bradford Heath, leaned his arm on the bar in a sort of intimate way. “So you’re really gonna hitch it up tomorrow, are you, eh? She’s a real beauty. Ron Grant, the last of the bachelor writers. That’s news.”

“I don’t know,” Grant said evasively. “They’re split into two parties about that. One party says yes, tomorrow. The other says no, not tomorrow.”

Heath hitched himself a little closer, boyish cheek resting on his knuckles. “Well, if not tomorrow, within the next couple of weeks.”

“I’m not so sure,” Grant said.

“Well, anyway, you two are gettin’ hitched? Eventually?” Heath smiled.

“Maybe not.”

“I wouldn’t tell Lucky that,” Heath smiled. “That won’t be so nice for her. She’s crazy in love with you.”

“Well, I’m crazy in love with her.”

Heath bobbed his head up on his knuckles, appreciation of the admission. “Anyway, if you do get hitched I’m gonna have to send a release home about it, probably a squib for the
People
page. I hope you won’t mind.”

“Don’t see how I can,” Grant said. “Like you said, it’s news. Though I seriously doubt if very many people care that much about what’s happening to me.”

“Oh, people always want to read about celebrities,” Heath said, almost bitterly.

“I can never quite think of myself as that much of a celebrity,” Grant said.

“Oh, you are,” Heath smiled. “You are.” There was almost a nasty edge to his smile now.

“Tell me,” Grant said without any expression on his face. “What year did you graduate from Harvard, Heath?” He was beginning to get fed up with him.

“Me? Oh, 1950. Why?”

Deliberately Grant did not answer him, and continued to look at him expressionlessly.

Heath’s reaction was to hitch himself a little closer, and put back into his smile that overwarmth. “What really interests me, and the reason I’m bothering you,” he smiled, “is I’d like to know what your uh foster-mother thinks: about you marryin’ a uh showgirl.” The way he said ‘showgirl’ was not especially nice either.

Grant could feel his face stiffen a little, but on the other hand he did not feel like he ought to cut and run either. Any reaction but a calm happy one, that would also keep him talking, would look bad, the way Bradford Heath had so sharply and so shrewdly set it up. “Mrs Abernathy? She’s got nothing to say about it. It’s me that’s getting married. But if you’re really interested, she thinks it’s probably a very good thing for me.”