Go to the Widow-Maker (9 page)

But why did he always come
back?

When the big money began to come in, Carol Abernathy found for him (in her other capacity as real estate agent) an expensive home right across the street from their own in Hunt Hills. What was more, she got him to buy it. Grant was aware that—in addition to being for his security, welfare, quiet and peace of mind, as she told him—it also tied up a big chunk of his sudden new income. And yet he went ahead and did it. But of course at the time he had wanted to do it.

Further, Carol Abernathy got him to invest an even greater sum (over $75,000 to be precise, and most of it non-deductible) in the building of a brand-new theater and grounds for the Hunt Hills Little Theatre. By now, due largely to Grant’s first big success, the Hunt Hills Little Theatre had quite a little group of would-be artists, novelists, playwrights, designers and actors grown up around it. The new theater, grounds and living quarters caused an exciting little Arts Renaissance in Indianapolis. But Grant also knew that besides being for Art and the good of Art and that he owed it to Art because he’d been lucky, as Carol Abernathy told him (and as he himself believed, for that matter), the new Hunt Hills Little Theatre tied up even more of his new money. And yet he went ahead and did that too. But he had wanted to do that, too. He allowed her to go on saying in public that he owed it to her, for helping him.

Why?

That was nine years ago. And so far his share of all spiritual profits had been, simply and solely, guilts—newer and bigger and profounder guilts: guilt as unfaithful lover, guilt as ungrateful son, guilt as commercially successful artist, guilt as a man who kept on repeatedly cuckolding his friend. My God, talk about Oedipus!

As Carol Abernathy in one of her better moments once chuckled and said huskily as they lay in bed, “Christ! You’re the only man I ever heard of who got to live out his Oedipus complex!” Grant had laughed, at the time.

They began seriously the foster-mother routine for the first time when
Life
Magazine sent one of its hot-shot young feature writers out to Indianapolis to do an article on the hick playwright from some Indiana Little Theater group who had come up with the biggest hit since
A Streetcar Named Desire,
and on the “strange Middlewestern housewife” who “dominated the Group like a dictator” and “ran the Group’s affairs like a general”. How they ever managed to fool the smart young
Life
Yale man Grant didn’t know, but he suspected it was because not even a Yale man could believe a grown man who was fucking some woman would allow himself to be so bossed, so tonguelashed, and so ordered around by her. But that was exactly his reason, once he allowed himself to be convinced by Carol that they seriously had to play mother and son or be found out, which—after all—would really hurt nobody but Hunt.

Naturally, the
Life
article made him look like a raving fag to the world. And from then on he was trapped in the role. A ‘mother’-dominated neurotic. His intention had been to protect Carol and Hunt—especially Hunt, who had come to be the biggest of his guilts. It was peculiar that there seemed to be no other choice. Either he shut up and let himself be a fag mother’s boy to the world, or he told the truth and showed up his friend Hunt Abernathy as a cuckold—and, one made so by himself.

Grant never did know what Hunt thought about the whole thing. Whenever they two were together alone, they reacted and talked as though the
Life
article was right and they three were a family with Carol the mother, Hunt the father, and Grant the son—which, in one strange way, they really were. Only once did Hunt even obliquely mention anything about the whole business and that was one time several years after Grant’s success when, after a terrible lovers’ fight with Carol, Grant had gone out and got drunk and Hunt—not too sober himself—had come to find him and bring him home. They two, both males—or both trying to be males—had over the years formed an oddly deep, enduring friendship from opposite sides of this peculiar woman who seemed determined (whether consciously or not) that neither should ever be a man again. Driving along the darkened streets of downtown Indianapolis, lit only by the neon of bars at this late hour, Hunt Abernathy had said, “Listen, I don’t know what this fight’s all about. But I want you to know that, much as I’ve come to like you, even love you, Ron, if it ever comes to a head-on collision, a head-on break between you and Carol, I’ll have to side with Carol.”—“Sure,” Grant had said in a pained, subdued voice, “of course.”—“Because I think she’s right,” Hunt Abernathy said. “I believe in her.”

How had she managed it? It was incredible. For years she had governed her every act by a double-edged policy of declaring herself
arbiter morum
over the lives of her husband and lover in order to ‘help’ them, and also in order at the same time to retain power over them both. For years she had labored—whether deliberately or not—to instill sufficient guilt in them to bind both to her forever. She had succeeded, apparently.

And yet of course it hadn’t all been bad. Maybe that was the trouble. Despite everything else, human loyalties had grown—caused simply by the guilts, perhaps. Grant could recall the time the three of them had gone out together and celebrated his first sale of a Grant one-acter outside the Hunt Hills Little Theatre; some little summer theater in upstate New York had wanted to do it. When the first big hit came, he had taken the two of them on a month’s vacation in Havana. What a time they had had. Hunt had caught a marlin.

On the floor of the room in the New Weston Hotel the rolled-up figure groaned again. If he could only just once find one Carole Lombard. For one week. He would throw it all up, throw away everything, success, money, talent even, for one week.

Why then did he always come running back to Carol Abernathy? Fear, that was why. Fear of being alone. Fear that every girl in his life from now on would only be a liaison; and that kind of bonecold loneness he could not face. Terrorized and haunted and made cowardly by such thoughts, he preferred to run back to a little love which if it did not keep you really warm, at least did not let you quite freeze. Grant, half waking, remembered the crumpled-up telegram.

The reason Carol Abernathy was in Miami Beach visiting friends and on her way to Jamaica was because during the two years he had worked on his new play Grant had decided he wanted to learn skindiving.

Reading M. Cousteau’s book had started him off. He bought himself a little aqualung at his sports dealer’s, dove down thirty-five or forty feet into two murky Indiana lakes, saw nothing, and came back home with a serious external ear infection which it took six weeks to cure.

Indiana just wasn’t the place for it. He bought more books on diving. And from diving he branched out into marine biology, underwater archeology, oceanography, marine geology. Sitting in his relatively safe vantage point of Indianapolis Indiana watching via newspapers he did not trust the three colossal bureaucracies of the world wrassling each other for moral superiority and threatening each other with ‘retaliatory destruction’, he studied the last frontier open to the individual, non-team man. He was writing a play about a languishing fourteen-year-old love affair which his agent, producers and director told him was almost certain to be a smash hit, and into which he was trying to put some sense of serious meaning of what it was like to live in his own terrified, terrorized time, and what that time itself was like when Presidents and Leaders and parliamentary bodies, and the vast anonymous bureaus and groups of bureaus their governments had created, could not influence—and could not even be held responsible for—what was happening to the world.

He promised himself that when he finished it, hit or not, he would take some time off and really learn this new world where it ought to be learned, in the tropics. At least it would be an antidote to world politics for six months or so. It would also be an antidote to Carol Abernathy. He told Hunt and Carol about it over dinner one evening in his house, in Indianapolis. This made it an occasion, because usually he dined with them.

Carol liked the idea. She liked it so much she immediately invited herself and took over the planning, suggesting Ganado Bay in Jamaica because they could stay with the Countess Evelyn de Blystein, who was the former Evelyn Glotz of Indianapolis before with her father’s huge coal fortune she married the Count Paul, and whom they all had known for years and whom Carol and Hunt had twice visited in her Jamaican winter home. She would write her a letter tomorrow. The play would be finished in a matter of weeks, and they could leave before the real cold weather started.

Grant listened to all of this and said nothing.

Their plans, then—his and those of the Abernathys, after Carol finished with them—were that she would spend some days with friends in Miami and, leaving her Mercedes there, would then go on to Ganado Bay where she would stay with Evelyn de Blystein and where Grant after seeing his producers in New York would meet her, and where Hunt would join them for the six weeks of his annual vacation. Then, at their leisure (whatever the hell that meant, Grant thought sourly, because it was her phrase), they two would continue on to Kingston where he would take diving lessons from a European professional named Georges Villalonga he had read about and thus begin his diving career.

The thought of the diving excited Grant, but the thought of Carol Abernathy being there did not. Why then could he not tell her this? explain to her that he wanted, preferred to go alone? He couldn’t.

His ladylove left first, driving her own little Mercedes to Florida, and leaving from her own house almost directly across the street from the house she had found for Grant to buy. (It required only a moment for him to slip across the street late at night, after Hunt was asleep; as long as he was always back in his own house some time before daylight. And Grant had always enjoyed being up at dawn.) With some part of all this in his mind he stood in her yard with Hunt as she left, waving. As she pulled away, she gave him a secret tender loving look, which lit up her dark brown eyes, and which also Grant noticed accentuated the petulant jowls on her jawline that she had been steadily acquiring over the past six or eight years because she felt he did not love her and because she was aging. Then he went back across the street and spent five days going over the typescript of his new play one last time with a pencil, adding a word here, cutting one there, relishing reading over one more time his own finished work, which of course most of the time until now he had believed in despair would never be finished. There was always this sad feeling that once a play was done, and seen by the public, it was no longer his and he had lost it. Then he packed a bag and, after a last drunken evening with Hunt, left for the train possessed of a violent desire to get the hell out of Indianapolis and back to New York and quickly get laid, anxious to start living yet once again—which meant getting laid.

Again the figure on the floor of the New Weston suite’s livingroom groaned. Laid? Laid?

He was awakened by the desk clerk at eight-thirty with the information that there was a person-to-person call for him from Miami. He refused it, telling the clerk to say he was out, took a shower and shaved, and then, after hacking hard to get the cigarettes-and-whiskey huskiness out of his voice, picked up the receiver and called Lucky Videndi.

S
OME TIME LATER
Lucky told him that that very huskiness in his voice was what had sunk her, that the only reason she had allowed him to continue to talk at all without hanging up on him immediately was because the husk in his phone voice was so sexy and exciting that it startled and intrigued her into listening. “That was my bad luck,” she grinned, running one hand lightly across his belly and then down into his crotch, kissing him in the center of his chest. “My good luck!” Grant countered, and trapped her hand where it was with his own so she couldn’t remove it, or stop what it was doing. “And it turns out it was only cigarettes and whiskey!” she smiled.

Normally she didn’t do things like that, grab him like that so often, and so Grant liked it. Usually she sort of waited, to be stimulated and then played upon, as though this was some woman’s passive prerogative she could avail herself of if she wished to. Grant sometimes felt she saw herself as some sort of flesh and blood harp with somewhere deep inside secret strings that twanged, and that he himself was the harpist—a harpist—who literally twanged these strings. Like any instrument she had to be warmed up; then, warmed, she could be played upon, and Grant was dedicating himself to this art form. He had never had sex like this in his life, ever.

It hadn’t been much of a phone conversation really, that time, not actually. Grant had apologized for his conduct the night before. Lucky had told him he ought to, but had not verbally accepted it. Grant had then suggested awkwardly (How did one ever disguise these things? they were always so blatantly obvious) that he might come over and look at her play for her. “At least I could tell you whether there’s any hope at all or not for it,” he added, because he wanted her to think he was serious about it.

“Thanks!” Lucky said sharply, then softened her voice. “But don’t you have anything more interesting than that to do today?” Soft or not, there was a dangerous edge there, he thought.

“No, nothing. I got a date for cocktails dinner and the theater for tonight is all.”

This was the
first
of the two new secretaries in his producer’s office, the one he had not yet made because she first had stood him off and then departed on a January vacation. This date had been made before she left, and now Grant sincerely regretted it.

“I’m sorry about that,” he hemmed, “but it’s a date I—”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” the lovely low voice said airily. There was a pause. “Okay, come on over. I’m not really doing anything.”

Like the other remark, just before, this too could have been an ego ploy with an extra meaning, a little dig. But he was soon to learn that Lucky, incredibly, never said things like that. She always said simply and directly exactly what she meant, and so far from playing upon other people’s sensibilities with double-entendre she leaned the other way, almost too far, by ignoring sensibilities almost completely.