Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  If she didn’t hate praying and the idea of praying so much, she’d by God pray.

  His phone call came in just a few minutes before one. He had, he said, taken a cab straight home from the station and called her. When she heard that raspy, deep, husky, fatigued voice over the phone the pit of her stomach dropped completely out from under her.

  “Get on a plane and come,” he was saying. “We’ll stay here in Indianapolis two or three days. Then we’ll make the trip to Florida together. I’ll send you home from Miami.”

  “I don’t know how to get a plane ticket!” Lucky wailed. “I never know how to do anything like that!”

  “Well— Get Leslie to help you. I hate telephone conversations, damn it. I hate them. Nobody ever understands anybody. I wish you were here right now.”

  “I haven’t got any money,” Lucky was able to say finally, though it hurt her to.

  There was a pause.

  “Well, I’ll send you a couple hundred bucks. That ought to be enough, hadn’t it? I’ll wire it. I’ll send it Western Union. To your address. All right?”

  “Yes,” Lucky said. “Yes, darling. Anything.” Her whole intestinal and pelvic area was melting into a frothy cream of butter. Her legs had gone too weak to stand up. She spread them apart and let herself come open. If only she could have him here right now.

  “If only I could have you here right now,” Grant’s voice said. “Well, then, all right? Okay?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Okay. Goodby.”

  “Goodby, Ron.”

  But neither one of them hung up. She could hear a sort of agonized breathing from the other end. Neither spoke.

  “Goodby again,” Grant said finally, and the phone clicked dead in her ear. Tears brimming in her eyes she put it back in its cradle.

  She lay still for a few minutes thinking about him. Then she threw back the covers, and everything began to run too fast, like a movie film played at a speed faster than normal. At five-thirty in the afternoon she was at Idlewild boarding a plane. Somewhere in the confusion she had got stuck in her head that it was to Minneapolis, Indiana, that she was going. But fortunately Leslie, whom she had called and who had come home from the office to help her, had bought the right ticket and steered her to the right boarding passage. Because Forbes Morgan now had an old car, they pressed him into driving them out. The two of them waved her on board.

  In such ways did people begin to change their lives, or try to. Change them upside down and all around until they didn’t even look like the same lives. On the plane, she prepared herself for three hours of doing nothing but think.

  Even while he was so sweetly and kindly driving her to the airport with Leslie, Lucky had had nothing but contempt for Forbes Morgan. What kind of a man was it that would drive a girl he had been fucking and was in love with out to the airport to go and meet another lover? How could any real girl love a man like that? That was the trouble with all these people, they were all so kind and good and liberal and up-to-date and modern, they could no longer function as simple males. Victims of their own ‘liberal’ propaganda. Treat girls as equals. But it wasn’t only that. Underneath that was a still deeper, even scarier level: the work they all did in this hugely organized business of controlling the minds of the people for the sellers of products, whether in the advertising end or in the actual communication—TV, radio, publishing—had shriveled their souls, if not their testicles as well, until each man became somehow less of himself than when he started, in some strange way nobody could define. This didn’t seem to happen to the lawyers and accountants and bookkeepers and simple office workers.

  The diminishment seemed to take two forms. There were those who came to believe ardently in the stuff, largely junk, which they sold. And there were those who became totally cynical about it all. These were the ones who drove sports cars in rallys, flew their own planes, or became amateur bullfighters, or skied or mountainclimbed. All, both types, became ardent girl-chasers, even the impotent ones.

  Perhaps the intensive, vicious competition had something to do with it, too. Even a man as highly placed as Peter Raven was afraid, knew he could be fired tomorrow if he fucked up on one single big account. And their manhood suffered. Like poor old Forbes.

  Lucky remembered, by contrast with Forbes, the time Raoul had left her stashed in Kingston to go back into South America to mess around with his revolution he could not leave alone. It was like dope to him. After six weeks of it she had been bored, and had taken up with a handsome young Jamaican guy. Although he was really far too light to be called a black Negro (almost all the upper class Jamaicans were mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons or less), and although his body hair though kinky was reddish in color, Jacques still qualified sufficiently for her to be able to think of him as her ‘Negro lover’. Anyway, esthetically, their bodies were beautiful together in the mirror; he was dark enough for that. In any case, whether Raoul had been told about it or had come back on his own and guessed what was going on, he packed her up and had her out of there back to New York so fast it made your head swim. She and Leslie had giggled about it for a long time.

  What would Forbes have done? She was reasonably certain that Grant would never have driven her out to any airport to go off to another lover. Or would he? He seemed to keep sending her back all the time, sending her back to the apartment from the train, and now sending her back to New York from Miami. But he had called her to come out. She was pretty sure, if they really did make the drive to Miami, she could talk him into taking her on to Kingston with him.

  And that myth about Negroes having bigger things than white men, if her Jamaican boyfriend Jacques was any example, was not a myth at all. By contrast, Raoul’s had been very ordinary. They had giggled about that, too.

  A hysterical laughter began to bubble up inside of her, rising out of her inability to cope with or accept appreciation of the awful suspense elements of this her life story—it was like spending a Saturday afternoon with The Perils of Pauline. When a man across the aisle tried to strike up an acquaintance, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, trying to keep from breaking out into uproarious crazy laughter.

  Then, suddenly, there rose up in her again the awful doom-gloom sense that she would be punished by not being allowed to have Grant. She could not open her eyes because of the man across the aisle, so she sat with it in the dark behind her eyelids, trying to make it go away.

  He met her at the scary modern steel-and-glass numbered entrance portal as she came in off the field of the big new modern airport, and in the confusion of noise, flashing bright lights, shrieking conversations and reverberating footfalls in the hollow corridor there began for her a peculiar dreamlike sequence of unreality that did not leave her until she boarded the New York jet in Miami ten days later. In the confusion she was convinced for the better part of an hour, until Grant finally unconvinced her, that she was for some reason in a town called Minneapolis.

  He took her right away upstairs to the handsome modern bar for a drink, where they sat looking at each other as they downed it. Grant was wearing levis, cowboy boots and a leather jacket. Then he drove her out to his home through the city. It was a much bigger town than Lucky, who had never been west of Harrisburg, Pa., except once to fly to California, had anticipated.

  They spent three wonderful lovers’ days there, in his house, never going out, cooking together, watching television, playing ping-pong or pool in the gameroom, reading, making love. He had completely done over the old house and it had a huge stone fireplace, books everywhere on all the walls, glass cases of guns and fishing and camping gear. It very definitely bore the impress of his personality, and it constricted Lucky somewhat to see that he had very definitely built himself a very definite life out here away from New York.

  Only once did he take her out. This was the third night when he took her to dinner at a fairly ritzy countryclub, which seemed pretty much like her hometown one in Syracuse and in fact seemed to be pretty much furnished wit
h the same people—all of whom looked at her with surprise (and with admiration, she noted). Grant, as he introduced her and showed her around, seemed to be wearing a sort of subdued belligerence, as if he were doing something he did not particularly like to do but that he had promised himself he would do.

  Then the drive began. It took them a full six days. Down through Indiana and across the Ohio at Henderson, Kentucky, where the snow slowly began to disappear and they began to be in the South. The close, fetid air of commingled lechery and hatred which became apparent to her as soon as they crossed the river affected her so strongly that it took her breath away and made her sick at her stomach, and the further South they got the stronger and more fetid it became. The cold and at the same time obscenely lecherous eyes of the tall paunchy men who looked at her lewdly made her skin creep. She knew they hated all women. But when she mentioned this to Grant, he merely laughed. And when they stopped off at a few places to eat with people Grant knew, everyone was very nice. The women that she met seemed to her peculiarly two-faced in some mincing way, as though they all knew something about the men that they were not telling, something they did not need to tell because as long as they knew it and didn’t tell it, it aided them.

  It was the most Lucky had ever seen of the actual earth of the great nation she belonged to, and it all made her want to get back to New York as fast as possible and stay there and never leave.

  As they drove, they talked and talked and talked. By the time they reached the Florida state line near Tallahassee they knew just about everything about each other. Grant told her about his ‘career’ in the Navy during the war, and how he had gotten himself transferred from a nice safe clerical job at Pearl Harbor to duty on board an aircraft carrier which he was subsequently blown off of into the Pacific Ocean.

  “My God, why did you do all that?”

  He snarled. “I didn’t know any fucking better. I wouldn’t do it now. I was trying to escape from ‘petty bureaucracy’. What I found was the same bureaucracy plus danger.”

  For her part Lucky told him about her horrible convent childhood, and how her father saved her from it. “He was really a great man. Even when I was only five he told me to listen to what they said, but believe what I wanted.”

  “Well, wasn’t he a Catholic himself?”

  “Nominally, yes. But he believed they were in business like everybody else. Like every ideology.” At which Grant roared.

  Finally, after some hesitation and much prompting by Grant about the fact that she must have had some boyfriend before she met him, she told him about her stud Forbes Morgan, how she had gotten him a job, about how Forbes had driven her to the airport and how she felt about it. “I never was really in love with him. I never was really in love with anybody but you, that’s the truth. Not even Raoul.”

  Grant listened politely, without anger, but there was such a strained look on his face that she decided not to tell him everything about Peter Raven, only that he was an admirer, another guy who was trying to make her.

  Then it was suddenly late at night with the glow of Miami on the Eastern sky as Grant herded the big Chrysler convertible across the ghostly, haunted Everglades toward it.

  They had had five further nights together in various hotels and motels along the road. They spent the last night in a middleclass motel across the Boulevard from the canal, and by noon the next day she was on the New York plane. She did not protest further. His face was set in a peculiarly stubborn way and she knew it would be useless. “I have some things to take care of before we can think of getting married, among them this diving business and the problem of courage.” As she fastened her seatbelt and looked out the port she could see the tiny figure still standing way off there on the ramp and knew that if he didn’t hurry up he would miss his own flight to Jamaica. She was aware that people around her were looking at her, after the wild kiss of their farewell, and she set herself not to cry.

  At Idlewild Leslie met her with a taxi and she went straight home to bed, and stayed there.

  Only once in the next days did she get up, and that was when her uncle Frank Videndi, a big horseplayer, came to town. Somehow he knew she was in trouble and took her to the Copa with a couple of his cronies. After Sammy Davis Jr. finished his performance he asked her what was the matter. So she told him.

  6

  THE ABERNATHYS HAD met him at the Ganado Bay Airport. There was no reason to assume they would not meet him, since he had wired them his arrival time, but when Grant saw them standing there together in the hot sun on the ramp he was disappointed. The muggy tropical Jamaican heat flowed into the big jet like a salty molasses as soon as the door was unsealed. Even the air itself smelled different, like holidays. But he needed more time. With a sinking feeling he felt that he was in fact sinking—sinking back into a rhythm, a part of his life that no longer suited or fit. After Lucky, after New York this time, everything was different. He could still taste on his moustache all the secret places of that lovely body. He could still remember how her plane had got off the ground and had so achingly disappeared northward in the blue Florida sky.

  They even looked different. For one thing they looked years older. And for another, they looked to him now, suddenly, like exactly what they were: Hicks. Two hicks. And Grant realized suddenly that this was a thought he had been avoiding thinking for quite a long time. Why? Because he had thought it was too cruel a thought to admit, was that why? There had been a time, back when he first got out of the Navy and came home and first met them, that he had thought they were the two most worldly and sophisticated people he could ever meet. But they hadn’t gone on. He had gone on and had been going on, for quite a long time now, he just had not found up to now an idea, a place to go on to.

  He had had to force himself to get out of the seat to descend the steps into the heat and when they waved at him —Hunt with his perpetually friendly way, she with that false smile he had gotten to know so well—he wanted to turn around and climb right back into the jet. Through passport checking, through customs, through the little glass of rum punch the pretty colored girl from the Chamber of Commerce offered him, he felt as though he were leaning backward: moving forward while straining to go rearward; and then he was with them. He had had nothing at all to say.

  And it had gone on like that for days.

  It did not really matter that he had had nothing to say. Carol had immediately taken over and begun to run things. There was this diver in town she had found for him, his name was Al Bonham, and when they got his wire she had arranged for him to have his first diving lesson in a pool tomorrow. She would go with him, and learn it too. And she did. Fortunately, though she was a good swimmer, better than Grant actually, she proved to be totally unable to cope with anything having to do with a mask or an aqualung. She could not breathe through a lung mouthpiece underwater without choking, she could not let water into her mask and clear it underwater without choking. It was as if some terrible claustrophobic fear struck her that she could not control the moment she put her face underwater in a mask and she would stand up in the pool gasping and coughing, she who was always talking about ‘mind control’, and after the first day she quit, leaving him alone and relieved with the big diver, Bonham. These were about the only times he was alone and away from her.

  But before all this happened they had had their first conversation alone together.

  She could not, naturally, say anything while Hunt was around. This was another part of all their lives together that Grant had somehow come to accept, and now no longer wanted to accept. But Hunt was playing golf today at the local club with Paul de Blystein and some other ‘businessmen’ he had found around. He already had his clubs in the car with him. Grant had known a confrontation scene would be forthcoming, but he had hoped for more time. Apparently he was not to have it. Hunt had dropped them at the front portal (that was the only thing to call it; it was much too big to be called a door) of Evelyn de Blystein’s huge magnificent villa and had driven off. Neit
her, of course, could she talk in front of Evelyn. But after the necessary fifteen minutes and two drinks of amenities and hellos; after giving his bag to the Jamaican maid to unpack in his room, he and Carol had walked down the hill through the unbelievably beautiful grounds to Evelyn’s private beach and beachhouse across the Jamaican ‘highway’ for a swim.

  She did not say anything going down the hill, and she did not take his hand as she might once have done under these same circumstances. Grant was grateful for that, but he felt it was all very painful.

  “So,” she said finally after they had crossed the road and were wading through the deep sand in the hot sun toward the beachhouse, “was she a good fuck?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he had said.

  Carol snarled. “The fuck you don’t!” It was like the face of some animal. “She was probably right there in that goddamned hellish New Weston hotel room with you all those times I was calling you, or trying to call you. I’m positive she was!”

  Grant did not answer and plodded on. He had changed to what in the old days in the Navy at Pearl Harbor they had called a ‘gook’ shirt and a pair of shorts and carried his bikini in his hand. In the pocket of the shirt he had put an undeveloped roll of color film with a few shots he had taken of Lucky on the trip down. He owned an Exacta single lens reflex.

  Actually, he had taken the precaution of removing the film from the camera and carrying it with him because he knew Carol Abernathy was not above blatantly and openly going through his things sometimes when he was not around and then daring him to do anything about it.

  “What’s that?” she asked suddenly. “In your pocket.”

  “Roll of film,” he had said.

  And suddenly, so fast and unexpectedly that he hadn’t even had time to move, Carol had snatched the roll from the pocket, ripping the pocket slightly, and thrown it out across the beach into the sea.

  “Well you won’t have that!” she said viciously. “That much is gone!” She faced him defiantly, her head thrown back, as though expecting him to hit her or slap her, which in fact he had actually been thinking of doing.