Go to the Widow-Maker (62 page)

Grointon reddened, and grinned. Ron laughed and told Doug about her anatomical study of chocolate penises. When the two were introduced, Lucky watched them shake hands somberly, taking each other in, studying each other. Men always did that. Like two strange dogs in the street. It both irritated her and made her want to laugh.

There was something very physically attractive about Jim Grointon that Lucky couldn’t quite put her finger on. And in spite of all his prudery there was a cold, bitchy quality, an egocentric indifference about him that back in the old days with Raoul—or, back anytime before Ron Grant—would have made her want to take him and deliberately coldbloodedly fuck him once or twice, make real love to him a couple of times, then cast him aside like a tattered used old flour sack just to see how he would react. It was pretty clear he was the one who was used to doing the casting aside. And she was completely confident he had never laid a woman as goodlooking and beautiful as herself, or who was as accomplished in bed as she was. How would that affect his cold bitchiness? In the old days she might have done it. Once driving in Jersey on a summer Sunday with some musician friends, professional classical musicians—violinists, harpists, cellists, who all made a good living for themselves in New York playing all the concerts and classical record dates, and with whom she had run around for a year or so—she had been standing in front of a rag-tag motordrome a cocky, dirty, arrogant young fellow wearing sideburns and Levis, black jacket and boots, clearly a lowclass cat of some totally uneducated kind, who obviously thought he was a ladies’ man, and maybe was even hung well (certainly he was muscular enough), and she had had somewhat the same feeling about him as she had about Jim Grointon. He had obviously never screwed any kind of a lady before, and she had wanted to coldbloodedly take him on as a one-or-two-night-stand stud and then gently but firmly throw him away. She had told her musician friends her fantasy. Her friends had urged her to do it, saying they would all go back to the motordrome and, while pretending to watch the motorcycle performance, really watch her. But she had not done it that time, either. Sticking to her theory that fantasy indulged is not only fantasy lost but might also be actively dangerous, she had declined. But Jim Grointon made her feel somewhat that same way, and so she didn’t really like Jim that much better than Bonham after all. Except that she did.

“Are you married, Jim?” she asked him pleasantly later on that same day, when they were finally all out together on the boat.

She was sitting back in the stern on the starboard side near the motors, which Grointon steered with his bare foot on their coupling bar while standing in his characteristic position leaning on the tarpaulin’s pipe frame to look ahead. Ron was almost across from her, talking to Bonham on Ron’s left and to Doug on Bonham’s left. When Jim had learned that Bonham was coming with them, he had immediately suggested that they go someplace other than their usual stamping ground, and Lucky thought she knew why. Ron had complained to her mildly that these near reefs they had been going to were not really very good diving since the reefs were too small for big fish and the banks were almost pure sand. She did not know why Grointon had kept taking them there unless it was pure laziness or the desire to save money on fuel. In any case, almost certainly because of Bonham, Jim had suggested that today they go down the coast to Morant Bay where he knew some better reefs. His excuse for not taking them before was that it was a much longer trip and anyway Ron hadn’t been ready to free-dive that deep yet, which was between fifty and sixty feet. Now he could—though they would take along a couple of lungs anyway just in case.

It was on this first leg, the long trip down, that she asked her question about his being married.

“Yes,” he said, without taking his eyes off the horizon. Quite a large number of large ships traced their way among these reefs and shoals into and out of Kingston harbor. Then he looked down at her with his blue cop’s eyes behind their pale lashes. “Yes, I am. To a local Jamaican girl. Got two kids by her. But we’re separated.” He looked back out at sea.

“Is that because as René says you’re such a ‘Don Huan’ around the Grand Hotel Crount?” she smiled.

Again Grointon looked down at her, and then grinned. “No. No, it isn’t. It’s because I just simply can’t stand to live with her anymore. She’s stupid, and ignorant, and she won’t learn— won’t try to better herself. She’s a hick. I like it at the hotel, like to spend time there, but I could never take her there. She wouldn’t fit in.” He looked back up again out over the sea. “And on top of that she’s almost totally neurotic. A nut.”

“But you must have known all that when you married her, hunh?” Lucky said.

Grointon made an embarrassed grin. Without looking down he said, “She was young. I thought I could teach her.”

Lucky made a provocative, provoking laugh. “When are you going to learn you can’t teach women anything?” she teased.

Again Jim looked down at her, penetratingly, with those strange eyes lined with blond fur. “I guess that’s right,” he said noncommittally, and looked back out to sea.

Across the way Ron, who apparently could listen to her conversation while engaging in another one with Bonham, suddenly looked back at her, slightly over his shoulder because of the way he was sitting, and jerked his chin at her pugnaciously, and flashed for one second at her such a deep stare of ferocious fury that it almost seriously scared her. Grointon was looking out at sea. Bonham and Doug were talking. So for answer she arched her back, threw back her shoulders and grinning, shook, wiggled her breasts at him, all in a second’s time, so fast none of the others saw. But it did not make him smile as she had hoped it would. God, she loved him so much more than all the rest of these weird, screwed-up types put together.

Apparently she was not alone in this. For after they had been anchored for about twenty minutes somewhere off Morant Bay (she couldn’t see any
bay
anywhere, only straight shoreline), Big Al Bonham came swimming back to the catamaran with several fish and climbed into the boat grinning and singing Ron’s praises to the point where it almost became embarrassing.

Before that Doug had come back even earlier. They were swimming in water too deep for him to even get anywhere near the bottom. And he and Lucky had sat for almost ten minutes in silence. At first he had seemed as if he wanted to talk, but she had discouraged him. He said, “I hope you don’t mind my sayin what I said, but I do really think Ron ought to go back up to GaBay.” She said, “Of course not. And we’ll go. If Ron decides that that’s what he ought to do,” and then went rather pointedly back to the book she was reading. So Doug was there too when Bonham came lumbering in over the side bragging about Ron.

“That’s really some guy, your new husband,” he said shaking his head. “I never would’ve believed it. The son of a bitch is free-divin deeper than I can go already.”

“Aw, come on,” Doug said.

“I crap you not. He’s doin fifty-five and sixty feet out there today. Sixty feet is about all I can do on my best days. I never saw anybody pick it up so fast. He’s a goddam genius or something.”

“Then it ought to make him feel good,” Lucky said.

“That’s the funny thing,” Bonham said quizzically. “It doesn’t. He goes right on worrying and stewing and being gloomy. What is it with him, anyway? I can’t understand. Now he’s worrying because he can’t keep his diaphragm from heaving for air on the way back up. Says Grointon doesn’t do it.”

“Then he’s probably going too deep,” Lucky said, “for his experience.” She was suddenly nervous and felt a panic start to flutter in her stomach. “Doug, hand me a beer, will you?”

“No, he’s not,” Bonham said. “That’s not what I meant. That happens to just about everybody. What I meant was, I just can’t figure him out. Every time he gets ready to do something, he’s nervous, and moody, and high-strung, and scared. Then when he—”

“I think it’s just because he doesn’t happen to be an aggressive type,” Lucky said. She drank the beer down fast.

“Haw!” Doug called from where he was getting himself a beer. “The fuck he’s not!”

“Well, anyway,” Bonham said, “I think he deserves everything he’s got, and everything he can get. I never met anybody who ever deserved their success as much as him. He’s what I’d almost call the perfect human man—mentally, physically, everyway. Well, anyway,” he said, and then slapped his big hand down hard on his thigh with happy satisfaction. “You know,” he said, “I’ve got a theory. Would you like to hear my theory?”

“Sure. Why not?” Doug said.

“About Ron?” Lucky said, more cautiously. She didn’t want to have to hear any Bonham theories about Ron.

“No, not about him. Though he comes into it too. All of you do. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania after the war,” he said directly to Lucky. “You didn’t know that, did you?” With his stormcloud eyes he was looking at her with that enigmatic, mocking look again that he turned on her so often. He didn’t wait for an answer.

“My theory is about what I call the Chosen Ones or the New Aristocracy. The Chosen Ones simply means celebrity-hood. If you’re worried, both of you qualify. So does Ron. Lucky qualifies because she’s married to Ron. In our own time this celebrity-hood jazz has become worldwide due to technological advances begun in World War II and expanded enormously since then. Lumped together these advances are called Mass Communications. Whatever the process, a Chosen One, once arrived, once ‘chosen’, becomes different from other people, actually lives by different laws almost. They are protected by everybody, they get better service, are treated with deference, are given better deals on everything, live off the fat of the land. All for the publicity. They become protected symbols of what everybody would like to be.

“Now the other phenomenon that has grown out of the technological advances begun in World War II is Mass Cheap Travel. In this age of ‘You-must-work-forty-hours-a-week-government-required’, the carrot under the nose of a ‘Citizen’ or a ‘Comrade’ is that for two weeks every year (or a month, if you’re an executive) he can live like a Chosen One lives all the time. Not really of course, but enough to make the pretense digestible. If he saves his money the other 48 or 50 weeks of the year, he can go just about anywhere in the world, be catered to, be treated as if he really were a Chosen One. This is known as the Tourist Industry. All the exotic places, the faraway romantic names, he can now visit and pretend (for a while) he is one of the New Aristocracy he has helped to choose, and preserve. The whole world is opening up due to Mass Cheap Travel egged on by Mass Communications—in the East as well as in the West. It’s an entirely new field, the Tourist Trade, a real ‘Frontier’ (probably the only one left), being ‘Pioneered’ by people who want to live like the Chosen Ones live all the time. And the Chosen Ones, the real Chosen Ones, are the kings of and key to it all.

“Take the Grand Hotel Crount, for example. It’s a Chosen Ones’ hotel. Hell, if you’re not a Chosen One it’s hard as hell to even get in there. But where the Chosen Ones go, the unchosen ones want to go. Did you know that when Kingston became popular with the Chosen Ones because of the Crount, the tourist business and the hotel business boomed all over the area?

“No, it’s all comin on fast. All over. Everywhere. And for the U.S., at least for the next twenty years, it’s going to be the Caribbean. It’s all being prepared for. Soon the big advertising will start.

“And that’s where guys like me and Jim come in. We cater to the tourists—with our ‘special skills’—mainly the unchosen ones, but preferably the Chosen Ones. Because that’s where the loot is. Look at René. What can an unchosen one do with his lousy little two-week vacation? You think he can really learn skindiving in two weeks? Of course you don’t tell him that. But the Chosen Ones have
time, and
the money. Jim’s got himself a booming business in Kingston, not only at the Crount but all over the town. Yet he makes most of his real money at the Crount.

“And that’s what I hope to do in GaBay, once I get my schooner out and to going.” He slapped his leg again, hungrily. “I want to live with, and like, the Chosen Ones.”

He had seemed to get carried away as he talked, and both of them had listened, fascinated by the businessman inside Bonham the adventurer.

“But,” Doug said now, “you haven’t got any Grand Hotel Crount in GaBay.”

“Sure we have. We’ve got
one,”
Bonham said. “The West Moon Over Hotel. They get lots of celebrities there, and it’s still comin up. Some of the Kennedy family stayed there last year.” Again he slapped his leg, a sound like a hungry pistol shot. “But don’t you see, with my schooner I’m not committed to any one town or one hotel. I can make the entire Caribbean my ‘work area’.”

“And what’s gonna happen to your lovely primitive seas and pristine unfished reefs after several thousand other guys like you do the same thing?” Doug grinned. “You’re contributing to the desecration and destruction of the very thing you love.”

Bonham grinned back. “I don’t care. I’ll be dead when that happens. Meanwhile
I
can escape ‘
Civilization’
.” Then suddenly he sat back and relaxed. “But you people, you’re already members of the New Aristocracy, you’re already Chosen Ones. All you got to do is sit back and enjoy the gravy. Enjoy our,
my
, services.”

Lucky had been wondering all this time what this big spiel was all about, and she suspected that it was directed directly at her. “Yes,” she said with asperity. “Yes, all
we
have to do is maintain that high level of success. Did you ever try it? If Ron Grant has one big flop, he won’t have enough money left to be one of your Chosen Ones. And I imagine that’s true of Doug, too.”

“Haw!” Doug said. “It sure as shit is. But he’s right about most of those film people, though. Liz Taylor. Burton. John Wayne. Kirk Douglas. Mr Zanuck.”

“Well, maybe it’s not true all the way of Doug and Ron,” Bonham said. “But I think Ron really is one of the Chosen Ones, and of all the people I’ve ever met he is the one who deserves it the most.” Then he grinned. “But for my purposes it’s true enough, anyway. Besides this guy Sam Finer, Ron is the only one of the Chosen Ones, or nearest to being one, that I’ve ever had as a client.” He grinned again, winningly. “If he likes me, maybe he’ll tell other Chosen Ones among his friends.”