Go to the Widow-Maker (77 page)

“We’ll keep up appearances,” she said from across the snowy tablecloth while dawdling with half a grapefruit. “That’s very important to me. I don’t like acting out scenes of my private life in front of other people, or having them know all about what my private life is like. There’s no reason to let all those goddamned people down there know what’s going on between us. Is that all right with you? And you can fuck me whenever you want to. Since you’re paying the bills. That’s only fair. When you want to, you tell me.”

“Okay,” Grant said dryly. “But you don’t mind if I don’t do it now, do you? Since I’m all already dressed and all?”

His irony did not apparently reach her, and she stared back at him across the table wide-eyed and somber. “I don’t know how to explain it to you, or even if you’re interested enough to want to know. But when I found out you lied to me like that—and about a thing that—something just happened to me.”

“I didn’t
have
to tell you,” Grant interjected quietly.

“I know. Probably you shouldn’t have. I might have gotten along all right if you hadn’t. Anyway, now it’s something I can’t help. I don’t have any control over it. I thought it was all pure, pure and straight. But if you can lie to me like that about that you can lie to me about anything anytime. You’ll always be able to lie to me, anytime it suits your needs. I don’t think I love you anymore. I’m going to ask Ben and Irma to lunch with us, if that’s all right with you.”

“All right” Grant said. “But I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to say. I think this is a very adolescent way of looking at it all. You’re not taking into account any of the pressures that were working on me, nor any of the past I had been through before I even met you. And not only that, for some time after I met you, because there was no way of my knowing then even after I fell in love with you that I was ever going to love you enough to marry you. Also, there’s no reason to suppose that you, who love to flirt over and brag about all your four hundred love affairs—”

“Four hundred men,” Lucky interjected. “Not four hundred love affairs.”

“Excuse me,” Grant said politely. “Four hundred men. No reason to suppose that, with that you would think this thing of mine so horrible. You
should
be more sophisticated than that. There’s something about your reaction to what I told you that just doesn’t have any handle I can grasp or get hold of. Hell, I thought you’d laugh about it. It just doesn’t make sense, and I can’t understand it.” He stopped. “Them’s my comments,” he said.

Lucky was sitting quietly, as if waiting politely for him to finish. “I can’t help the way I am,” she said, now that he had. “And I’m not a bum. My family had more money, and lived richer and higher and with more culture, than yours ever did even before your old, Old-American grandfather lost all his money in the Crash. Don’t you ever forget that. Is it all right about Ben and Irma for lunch?”

“It is,” Grant said, getting up. “Is one o’clock all right? And now I’m going to go for a long walk along the beach.”

“I’ll see you down on the terrace by the pool then,” Lucky said with complete calm. “Please do try and get back by one.”

Ben the analyst spoke to him as he made his way out through the hotel, and even offered to go along as if he too knew there was something wrong (had he been talking to René?), but Grant put him off. The sea was as flat as a pancake and the sun was heavy and hot, but with a mid-, mid-late-morning freshness that was exceedingly pleasant to the body’s senses. If not the mind’s. Ha. The water made tiny rushing, then receding noises, then interspersed these with tinier, very small sucking kissing sounds, forming a three-beat definite, predictable rhythm in the sun-quiet. He walked barefoot along the more packed, still moist sand the tide had leveled and compacted, walking eastward toward the airport and the mainland rather than westward toward Port Royal. Eastward, there was absolutely nothing for miles and miles. This was serious. This wasn’t any of their quick hot violent fights and quarrels they’d had before. Finally he sat a while in the shade of a single royal palm with his back against the rough trunk, looking out to sea. To the south and eastward it ran on forever, calm as a pasture under the sun. In the slightly cooler shade the skin under his eyes and on his cheekbones felt hot and pink as if he’d been eating Mexican tamales. After a while he got up and started back. He had come to no decision. What decision was there to come to? If any decision had come at all, it was that he would wait it out a while. If he had learned anything at all from his fourteen years with Carol Abernathy, and sundry other temporaries, it was that no matter how bitter the fight or how long, it was only when one or the other of the parties started stepping out, having affairs and actual sex contact outside, that it was all really finished. That was what broke the contact. And the contract. He had force-trained his mind that he would never again be the first to do that. When he got back to the hotel and made his way to the pool, he found them all sitting there laughing and drinking Campari-soda, and Jim Grointon he noted was with them, sitting at the pool edge with his knees pulled up and smiling his slow smile. They shook hands warmly, but Grant was not at all glad to see him there at the moment.

It was inevitable that a serious confrontation should take place between Grant and the famous, newly arrived male movie star. The famous Playwright and the famous Star could not just put up at the same chic little resort hotel and ignore each other. On the other hand, neither could one of them just go up and say hello to the other, and have it appear that he instead of the other was soliciting acquaintance. Protocol was involved. It had to be arranged. Grant, over lunch with his little band of partisans, which now only included Ben the analyst and his wife Irma, Lucky, Jim Grointon, and Lisa (René was off working), decided that for him cocktail time would be the best, preferably twenty minutes before dinner time, so that they two protagonists would not have to confront each other too long. Word of this, via Lisa, whose invitation it would be, was sent off to the Star, who obligingly sent back word via Lisa that he and his wife would be glad to accept the host’s (René’s) invitation to meet the Playwright and his wife at that time, but could they possibly make it twenty minutes earlier as the Star and his wife unfortunately had another cocktail date just before dinner. To this Grant equally obligingly sent back word, via Lisa, that that would be just fine. And so it was arranged. And so it was that at exactly 8:10
P.M.
the Playwright and four friends and the Star and four friends met at the stand-up bar three-fourths of which had been reserved and somewhat blocked off unobtrusively by tables and provided by Lisa with canapés, and (while René took pictures) were introduced, smiled at each other, shook hands in a friendly way, complimented each other upon each’s various works, kidded each other a little to show that while famous they were still regular fellows, talked cautiously a little about Art, Artistry and future prospects, drank two cautious drinks apiece, and then went severally their several ways to eat and drink privately in relief. If the Star had another cocktail date, he forgot it. On the terrace-diningroom both remembered to smile and nod at the other in thanks for an encounter which had meant exactly nothing.

The Star, who had beautiful and marvelously corded abdominal muscles, largely because he carried a bongo board with him and did one hundred to one hundred and fifty sit-ups on it every day, had been, Grant learned the next day from Jim Grointon, going out with Jim diving just about every day since he had been here. He had done some diving on the West Coast apparently, both with lung and without, and could do about forty or forty-five feet free-diving, but he was not anywhere near the diver Grant was—Jim said. “He just aint got the real passion for it like you have,” Jim grinned, “and what he does he does about two-thirds of for show.” An irritating egotism made Grant, though vastly irritated by the egotism, vastly pleased by this. Especially since he knew the Star was at least four years his junior. But it was hard for anything to please Grant for more than a few seconds just now. It was unbelievable how much misery he, one, could go through in just a few minutes, while sitting and talking, or eating, or having a drink, while—in short—pretending to be normal. But he was not going to give in.

“I’d ask you to come along with us in the afternoons,” Jim said. “But I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to come if he knew you were coming. And especially after he saw you dive. And I’d uh just hate to lose the business. And he’s gonna be here three more weeks. I could take you out mornings though.” He was charging the Star more than twice as much as he had charged Grant “That’s the racket,” he shrugged with a grin.

“It’s all right,” Grant said. “I don’t really feel much like diving now anyway. This trip.” And he didn’t. He didn’t feel like doing anything, much. And not even the thought of diving carried any savor. Irritation. Anger. Fury. Depression. Misery. Gloom. These he had, especially the anger. But not pleasure. But he was not going to give in. And he was not going to let it show. He was not going to let his lack of pleasure show. He made trips with Ben and Irma and Lucky to Blue Mountain Inn, to Stony Hill to Strawberry Hill, to the Pine Grove Hotel. They borrowed a car from René and drove up the hot dry valley to Spanishtown and beyond it to Bog Walk, the land here so dry and deserty compared to the lush vegetation of the windward side which got the rain. Another time they took a car and drove clear across the central mountains to the Fern Gully and Ocho Rios and stayed the night in Ocho Rios, coming back the next day. They took lunch here, had dinner there. They drove in to the Sheraton Hotel in town where Grant and Ben could dive off the three-meter board. Usually the four of them dined at the hotel, and went afterwards to the tiny clandestine little (and strictly illegal) “Casino” gambling joint where René had got them cards. Lucky, it turned out, was an excellent crapshooter. Ben was a good chemin de fer player.

Ben Spicehandler (which name being an Americanization of his Jewish grandfather’s original Polish name) and his wife had been in Jamaica at the Crount for over a month, and planned to stay at least another month. So they would certainly be there at least as long as Lucky and Grant chose to stay, and this was probably a good thing Grant thought. They made the perfect and always ready, buffer for the Grants at this particular stage of the game. Ben made so much money as an analyst in New York that he only needed to work nine months a year, so the other three months of each year he and Irma took off and traveled. “After all,” as he himself lugubriously said with his broadfaced, narroweyed grin that made a washboard of his forehead, “we aint none of us gittin any younger.” This year, having heard so much about it for the past two years in New York, they had decided on the Crount and Jamaica, and as Grant had already thought, it was probably a good thing for the Grants. Ben and Irma were always ready to go anywhere and do anything that any one of the four of them thought up. A compulsive humanist who had once studied to be a rabbi, Ben was a tall hulking fellow of Grant’s age, thirty-five, an excellent swimmer and fair springboard diver, who could never think about anything seriously except helping people. That he made so much money at it was due to another, economically thoughtful side of his nature, which came from his paternal grandmother, he said. And, at the moment, he had made it his vacation project to help the Grants.

“Look,” he said to Grant, on the first occasion of his offer of help, and as he was to say again many times later. “Look, buddy. I know you guys’re havin some kind o’ trouble.” (He came originally from Indiana.) “It don’t take much to see that.” He bent down from his greater height and narrowed his eyes slyly and grinned and bobbed his head seriously several times. “Now any time you want, anything I can do to help you and Lucky or both of you, you just tell me. Me and Irma like both of you a lot, see? Anything you want to talk about, you just tell me.”

Grant had thanked him and said there wasn’t anything wrong.

“Okay. Okay. Well now you just remember see?” Ben said, and narrowed his eyes and grinned and thrust forward his head.

“What the fuck?” Grant said irritably. “Do you carry a portable analyst’s couch with you wherever you go? I can’t afford your prices anyway.”

“Never min’,” the analyst grinned. “If you need us, you just tell us. Me an’ Irma’ll be there.”

And they were. Ready to do whatever and whenever anything Grant or Lucky thought up to do. They even came up with a wealth of ideas of their own, in order to keep the Grants occupied. And the tiny Irma, dark and almost Oriental-looking with her black bangs, huge bun of hair on the top of her head, and her crazy witch’s cackle of a laugh coming out of her bunched-up mobile face, was at least as loyal to this vacation project as was Ben. They would cancel or postpone any dates or plans of their own, make enemies even, at a moment’s notice, whenever the Grants had anything or anyplace they wanted to do or go.

It was after six full days of this kind of perpetual preoccupation that Lucky loosened up a little, or so Grant thought at the time. But it turned out that she hadn’t. They had gone up to the suite for siesta after a long and fairly heavy-drinking lunch, preparatory to going off to play tennis with Ben and Irma in town. Grant had been seven days now without getting laid and he was getting a bit horny. He had even taken to looking covetously at Lisa’s beautiful unattatched Haitian friend Paule Gordon (known everywhere locally around the hotel as the “Black Swan”), and maybe that had something to do with it, maybe Lucky had seen him eyeing her. She was lying on the bed and called to him.

“What?” he said.

“I said you may make love to me, if you like.”

“Ha,” Grant said. “Thanks a lot. Thanks but I’ve never got heated up over that kind of an invitation.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, shut up and come on and fuck me,” Lucky said.

“I don’t know if I can,” Grant said honestly.

“Here,” she said. “Try.”

He found that he could.

“You may be my husband, and I may not love you, but I still like to fuck,” Lucky said. “Ah. Ah. That’s it. Ah.”