Go to the Widow-Maker (84 page)

There were supremely rememberable moments. A sunset one particular evening with weatherheads and squalls of falling rain far to the southwest of them moving north and west and backlit by the reddening sun. The sound of the dawn breeze in the fronds of the tall coco palms on North-East Cay as they rolled out at daybreak in the bright dawn light to wash in salt water and eat and row out to the little ship. The first true coral ‘heads’ Grant and Doug had ever seen, rising before their masks from the bottom anywhere from thirty to sixty feet high and looking like nothing so much as the mushroom clouds of atomic bombs solidified in stone. A huge four-foot kingfish, silvery and torpedo-like, which Grant had found calmly tail-beating his way about for no good reason among the deeper reefs and speared, and from which Jim—in a dirty black greasy old skillet—made them the best kingfish steaks any of them had ever eaten. There was the particular evening, when after a hard day’s spearfishing they had rowed ashore from the anchored little ship and set about the evening chores in the late-afternoon light: Grant and Jim cleaning the fish: Doug and the captain kicking up dried brushwood and driftwood for the fire: Lucky sitting on the sand furiously brushing and combing out her wet hair from the day’s swimming. It was that particular evening that they all stopped what they were doing almost simultaneously and looked around at each other with a sudden acute awareness of the passing moment and of how pleasurable it was, and also of how inevitably, inexorably passing it also was, and then with ironic snorts of self-derisive antisentiment to hide all that and one wild whoop from Doug, returned without speaking to what they had been doing. Moments like this engendered the feeling they had for each other, or perhaps it was the feeling they had for each other that engendered the moments.

It was on the seven-hour sail back to Kingston that Jim came forward with his near-ecstatic eulogy of Grant. They were all sitting around in the cockpit around the captain at the wheel, drinking beer. Jim had gotten up and come around from the portside to where Grant was standing leaning against the starboard rail watching the bellying sails, a thing Grant never tired of. Once again, as he had done before that time in the Kingston airport, he clasped the slightly taller Grant around his now sweatshirt-covered shoulders, Roman-style.

“I just want to say, and I want you all to hear me say, that I have never had a diving client who was as good, or who was as much fun to dive with, or who learned as fast and as much—as this one! I think I can also say without embarrassing anybody that I have never had a diving client that I liked as much, or felt as much friendship for, or that I’ve formed as lasting a friendship with. I know, I
know
we all haven’t seen the last of each other. In the meantime this trip is over, you all will be going off with Bonham in a few days, and anyway if we do go out together again now it won’t be the same, not after this. I just want to say that this is the best trip I’ve ever made, bar none, and that includes that other trip I made to the Morants with that other diving couple I told you about. And as far as I’m concerned I want to say that this guy right here, this guy, is responsible for more than at least fifty percent of the fun and success this trip has been. I’ll never forget it, and I want him to know I’ll never forget him!”

It was a rather long speech to keep your arm clasped around another’s shoulders all the time, and it made Grant uncomfortable, and a little embarrassed, having to stand still under the embrace. He had an innate dislike of having most people touch him intimately. At the same time he was deeply moved because he had come to feel the same kind of friendship for Jim. Then Jim gave him a mighty clap across the shoulders, for all the world like one Roman soldier saying hello or goodby to another Roman soldier, and said, “And that’s my speech! If this guy ever needs or wants anything that I can do or give or get for him, all he’s got to do is ask!”

He crossed back over to his portside seat and sat, resoundingly, grinning and his face deeply flushed. Perhaps he was a little high on the three or four beers he had had since they had gotten under way. In any case it was a positive enough endorsement.

“Well, thanks,” Grant said shyly and feeling kind of silly. “And I want you to know the same thing goes for me, and that I feel the same way about you.” And it was true. Because in addition to the depth of his feeling of friendship toward Jim, as with Bonham he had an enormous, profound, near-boyish hero-worship for the things Jim could do in or on or above the sea, diving, sailing, flying, even the camping, all the romantic, and
real,
things that the bourgeois, small town, and now pseudo-intellectual, types like himself could not do and only dreamed about and sometimes, if they became pseudo-intellectual, wrote about. A really sweet smile passed over his face and goosebumps arose on his bare thighs, his arms and back, and when he realized suddenly that he might quite quickly be caught with tears in his eyes, he sat down quickly and preoccupied himself with getting another beer from the icechest.

It was a rather deep and touching final act curtain to Kingston, Grant thought, or at least it would have been had not Doug Ismaileh a little while later chosen to stir his own particular oar into the general stew.

This happened maybe half an hour after Jim had made his eulogy. Lucky had gone below to use the head. Jim had gone forward to trim sail for the captain. So they two were alone with the captain. Grant had gone forward to sit on the coachroof and lean his arm on the main boom. Doug came up and squatted beside him.

“That was a hell of a speech old Jim made you there, wasn’t it? I guess I was a little jealous,” he said with a sly Greek-Persian grin on his broad, sly-eyed Greek-Persian face. “Ask anything and he’ll do it for you. It’s a good thing you don’t have to ask him to take care of your wife for you, aint it?”

Grant was startled. He hadn’t thought Jim’s crush on Lucky had been
that
apparent. On the other hand he was certain Doug had tumbled to exactly what the actual situation was between them, himself and Lucky, though Doug had never once said a word about it, or asked a question. So what kind of a remark was that, then? He did not answer for a moment, and when he did, he grinned. “Yeah, it is, aint it? But I don’t think that’s likely to happen for some very good long time in the future.” He added, “Poor guy, he does seem to be pretty stuck on her, don’t he?”

Doug did not answer this. Whether this was the reaction he had expected from Grant, or whether he had hoped for some totally opposite reaction, Grant could not tell. After a few minutes Doug got up and went aft and occupied himself with getting a beer from the icechest. Grant thought Grant had won that exchange. But the theme was to be repeated with variation, like some piece of 19th Century music, almost as soon as they got back to Kingston. This time it was Lisa.

Lisa had not changed much—externally—since the night of her big blowup at Grant, either in her ideas or her application of them. She still obviously felt, like some clucking motherhen, that her Lucky had been treated badly and that Grant was responsible, but now she kept it to herself. She did not keep it to herself so much that Lucky did not know it, though, and what the two girls—two women—talked about alone together he had no idea of. Lisa had never once said a word about her drunken blowup, treating it exactly as though it had never happened (René had apparently talked to her), and everybody else had treated it the same way, choosing to let well enough alone. Whether she had changed internally was another thing, but her own worries and her troubles that she had brought out and displayed so openly that night now remained clearly in the open and visible to anybody who had been concerned that night. René spent an awful lot of afternoons in town, doing work for the hotel, when Grant was absolutely sure there was no work for the hotel that needed to be done, though be did not mention this to Lucky.

In any case it was Lisa who variated on the theme of Lucky and Jim Grointon. And she did it—so much more subtly than Doug—almost entirely by indirection. She did it by talking about Jim’s other “skindiving couple” that he had taken to the Morant Cays.

She of course would not have done it had not just the three of them been alone, but the three of them were alone. Jim had gone on off with the captain to berth and batten down the little ship after the finish of the trip. René was in town. Doug had gone off to town too, to the Myrtle Beach Hotel where some guest staying at the Crount had told him a girl that he knew had checked in while he was away. So, after all the hellos and kisses and hugs and how-was-its had been given and accepted, the three of them
were
alone in the bar, the dim, cool, remembered bar with the remembered sea glinting susurrously outside beyond the white-hot beach.

Lisa’s story differed from Jim’s own only in one major stated point, and one unstated point. The wife of the “skin-diving couple” Lisa maintained, was by far the better diver of the two and was Jim’s main pupil of the couple, while Jim had stated plainly to them that it was the husband who was the better diver. No, Lisa said; the wife was an excellent skindiver, the husband a good bit less so. Lisa believed that Jim had told this lie deliberately for protective coloration because of the unstated point. And, the unstated point Lisa said, because naturally Don Juan-Gentlemen Jim would never say so (though he might and did, imply it), was that Jim was screwing the wife all that time. Both before the trip and after it, and apparently even during it. Here Lisa looked at Lucky with a sly look, and both women laughed, a sort of private but strangely obscene and raucous, special, women’s laugh. The story was, Lisa went on, that he took her off “booby” egg hunting, that this was how he accomplished it on the trip.

Grant very carefully forced himself not to look at Lucky, who (he nevertheless felt) was looking closely and hard at him. Didn’t he trust her? Sure he did. Well then?

In any case, Lisa wound her story up, the husband and wife had gone off happily back to New York or wherever the hell it was they lived, and nobody was the wiser.

Grant found himself growing flamingly. dangerously furious. This story had all of the worst element of cuckoldry, which was that the husband had been duped, had been so stupid or insensitive that his wife could horn him and he still went right on happily loving her. That was the worst nightmare of all. “But how do you know what kind of big fights they had when they got home?” he finally said. “And anyway how do you
know
he was screwing her?” he demanded, feeling somewhat in over his depth in this now. “Did you actually
see
them screwing? Did anybody?”

No, Lisa said, but she would be willing to bet her bottom ten-shilling note that he had. In any case, he got the credit for it everywhere around, which was just about as good. Again she looked at Lucky, and again she and Lucky laughed.

“Sure, and good for him,” Grant said brutally, “except that then he
didn’t
get the fucking.”

“Sometimes,” Lucky said in a veiled voice, with that same veiled look Grant had learned to recognize now but still could not interpret, “sometimes I think Ron loves Jim better than he loves me.”

“Now what the hell kind of a remark is that?” Grant demanded, furiously.

“It’s not a remark,” Lucky smiled at him. “It’s a statement.”

Grant knew only that he had been 100 percent right up in GaBay, when he had suggested that to come down here to Lisa was the worst thing Lucky could do under the present circumstances. That night he availed himself of his “fucking privileges” again.

Jim had been present for dinner that night at the hotel (on Grant’s check of course) and so had Doug, but Al Bonham had not shown up. Bonham had apparently flown back to further prepare for the
Naiad’s
maiden trip. René and Lisa ate with them too. But in spite of that they were neither one very loaded when they finally went off to bed.

“I’m pretty hard up after that trip and not getting laid at all for a week,” Grant said, “I’d like to invoke my ‘privileges.’”

“Okay. Fine,” Lucky said. “I’m pretty hot myself.”

“Ooo,” she said after they had been at it for a while. “I do like it. I really like it.” In one way this made Grant feel good and in another it did not.

“I would like to point out to you,” he said afterwards, resting his forehead lightly on hers while he remained inside her, “that I love you very much.”

“Sure,” Lucky said, quickly and shortly, “me too. Now get off of me, will you?”

Grant, who had always been a counter-puncher, whose very nature it was to be a counter-puncher, said as he rolled away, “Maybe we could figure out some system of payment.”

“What?”

“I mean, like so much for an ordinary lay, so much for a blow job, so much if I blow you. Then you could have your own cash, your own allowance.” He had had about all of this that he wanted to take.

Lucky was eyeing him coolly with cold eyes. “That’s not a bad idea,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Oh, come off it!” Grant suddenly found himself leveling, something he had carefully promised himself he would not do. “Look, how long is this going to go on? I told you the truth. Because I thought I owed it to you. And because I thought it would help you. Help you understand something. Now how long is this going to go on?”

“You didn’t tell me the truth very damn quickly, though, did you?” Lucky said. “Oh, I’d like to forget it,” she said, in that kind of child’s wail he had often heard her speak in in earlier, happier days. “I’d like to. I want to. I really do. But I can’t. Maybe there’s something wrong with me?”

Without answering this Grant got out of bed. There was a bottle and soda on the table across the room. “Maybe we better have a nightcap drink,” he said. Pride. Oh, damn pride,
fuck
pride! Lucky accepted the remark, and the drink, in cold silence.

It all came to a head the next night. This was the eve of Doug’s departure on the noon flight the next day, and somehow or other it all caught up with Grant that evening. He would never be sure just how much of it Doug was responsible for. But in the end that didn’t really matter. In the end everybody had to account for what he did and said himself. Jim Grointon had had dinner with them again, of course, and then stayed on to drink with them because it was Doug’s last night and he wanted to make a good goodby for him and because he really, as he said, hated to see old Doug go. They had all been out together on the catamaran that afternoon. In the end they four outstayed everybody so that finally there were only the four of them around a table and Sam the bartender left in the bar.