by James Jones
Grant deliberately did not answer her. He had known, everybody had known, for at least four years, that Doug had Greek-Armenian relatives who ran a restaurant and small hotel in Montego Bay. They had come down there from Florida and opened it up immediately after the war. Doug was forever talking about them, and meant to do a play about them.
“So,” Carol went on cheerfully, “I thought it might be a good idea if the two of you went over there for a week or so. It’ll save ‘trouble’ here at Evelyn’s. And you can pick up some cunts and have yourselves a good bender. It might serve to take Ron’s mind off all his little New York pussycats.”
“It’s okay with me,” Doug said and looked at Grant.
“I think it’s a fine idea,” Grant said with a chilled voice. “I’m ready to go right now, today. The sooner the better.” He got up.
“Then maybe you’ll feel more like yourself,” Carol smiled at him. “You might even feel like getting down to work again.”
This had been one of her techniques of ‘personality control’ for years: the instillation of guilt about not working, not ‘creating’: more, the idea that none of ‘her boys’ had strength of character enough to get their work, their writing done, without her around to crack the whip over them. Grant did not intend to let her get by with that this time.
“I doubt that,” he said coldly. “I haven’t done as much of this skindiving yet as I want to.” He looked over at Doug. “I was thinkin I might take along an aqualung from Bonham, and do a little diving over there.”
“Good idea,” Doug said.
“It’s only seventy-five miles,” Carol said. “You can do it in an afternoon.”
“I’d rather go right now,” Grant said. “This morning.” And with that he put his napkin on the table and went to his room to pack a bag. As he climbed the big staircase he could hear Carol and Doug still talking, swiftly, then Doug followed him.
They rented a car in town. While Doug was doing that, Grant picked up a set of tanks and a regulator from Bonham’s shop. “It’s okay. I’ll put it all on the tab,” Bonham grinned. “There’s a guy over there named Wilson who’s got a compressor and can refill ’em for you if you need it.” An hour and a half after Grant had deposited his napkin on the table they were on their way out of town along the north coast road.
16
THE MOMENT HE WOKE in the hotel bed, with a terrible hangover, he knew he was going to call her and reached out blindly for the phone even before he opened his eyes or took his face out of the pillow. The phone in his hand, he opened his eyes and stared at the untouched, unperfumed, unlipsticked pillow beside his own. He had had it all up to here. It was what, now? three weeks! And he had had a bellyful of everything, of just about everything.
In one way he felt it was a weakness. To call her. He had wanted to do this diving thing all on his own, alone, and concentrate wholly on that. But he was too weak to do even that. Couldn’t even be without a broad for three weeks or a month without sinking into a suicidal depression. But he didn’t give a damn. He placed the call (there would be a delay of thirty to forty-five mintues the oversweet voice said) and rolled over on his back staring at the ceiling and contemplating his weaknesses.
The false and professionally happy voice of the operator, demanded of her by her company’s personnel training course, made him as lonely and nauseated him almost as much as the catalog of his weaknesses. He ought to be used to them. He was not. He ran once more fruitlessly over all his problems: Carol Abernathy and responsibility: when did it stop; that goddamned white elephant of a house in Indianapolis that he no longer wanted and that was costing him a fortune; his financial problems (it was embarrassing to have made as much money as he had and not have one nickel invested; and he was already worried about Bonham’s forthcoming bill); his other, essentially a drinking, problem with Doug Ismaileh (and other artists of that particularly drinking type).
How to get out of Indiana? How to get money so he could afford to live somewhere else? How to get out of skindiving, now he had gotten into it? How to get into Lucky? That weakness? Well, he wasn’t going to marry her. He’d take her to Kingston, for a while, and see what happened. How to get rid of Doug, whom he liked and didn’t want to hurt—at least at certain times? Right now Doug was firmly and unequivocally shacked up with a gorgeous model in the next bedroom across the connecting bath, in which the rush of water had wakened him three times during the night—or rather, the morning—as she came in to douche. Grant looked at the snowy rounded untouched pillow beside him and longed for Lucky. He must really be in love. He had had his choice of three of them!
He had talked to Doug about Carol Abernathy on the drive over. Grant had never been to Montego Bay. Doug knew MoBay but had never been to Ganado Bay, and so neither knew the road. Grant had driven. And probably because of that, almost certainly because of that—because he was driving— he suddenly found himself talking and talking and talking about Carol Abernathy, about art and life, about his past, about Lucky. As can so often happen, he became hypnotized with the car and the road, the movement of the land backward, the movement of the windshield forward, and talked and talked.
The ride itself was beautiful. Almost all the way the road ran alongside the sea, glinting and sparkling cleanly in the bright tropic sunshine. Almost everywhere inland thick fields of green cane slanted slowly to the forested, jungled mountains sometimes several miles away, sometimes only a few hundred yards from the road. Only the village and towns were ugly. Dusty, jerrybuilt and dilapidated except for one or two rich planters’ townhouses with their gardens walled in so you couldn’t see them, they appeared at regular intervals like misshapen pearls knotted into a string. Peeling ad signs and busted neon tubing along the main streets. Like the beat-up cars nobody knew how to drive or take care of. Parts of a blunted salient of the civilization the tourist vacationers came here to flee but which itself must inevitably come too, brought by them or those who catered to them. All the tourist hotels along the sea were beautiful, they noted, and modern, and there were many of them. Between Ocho Rios and St. Ann’s Bay they stopped at the Roaring River Falls for a beer at the falling-down garbagy beercan-strewn concession in the chill fern-laced clearing beside the giant’s rock staircase over which the water never ceased its noisy pouring, and ate sandwiches Evelyn had insisted on packing for them because the concession was notoriously foul and germy. Then Runaway Bay, Discovery Bay, Rio Bueno, Falmouth. Over all always there was a smell of an unusually pungent woodsmoke, the fuel the black peasants used for everything, from cooking to heating wash water.
When he told Doug that Carol Abernathy was his mistress and had been since they’d met him, Doug only grunted. When he added that her recent nervousness and neurotic actions and fits were almost certainly due at least in part to the fact that he wanted to break off with her—in fact, had broken off with her, Doug grunted again. Of course, Grant qualified, her dictatorialness and paranoid formulations had been increasing discernibly the past few years, even in the time Doug had known her. Here Doug nodded. But of course, Grant added, trying hard to be honest, that could be due—or partly due— to the fact that for a long time she had felt Grant slipping slowly away from her, as she got older. Hell, he didn’t care whether she was crazy or not. He wasn’t going to try to commit her or anything. All he wanted was to get out of it. Whether he married Lucky or not, he knew now he had had it with Carol and was through with her. Lucky did want to marry him. The only trouble with her, at least as far as he could tell up to now, was that she was just too good to be true. Every quality he would want a woman he’d marry to have, she had. All of them! But when he tried to describe Lucky’s qualities (other than her sensuality and beauty), he failed miserably and lamentably.
He was astonished to hear himself pouring his guts out like this, about all this. This made the third time he had told somebody about Carol. In as many weeks. Or was it . . . No. No, no. It was the second time. He had told Cathie Finer, and now Doug. But up to then
he had never told anybody about it, had not even let on to anyone. Not even to one of his best friends. Although he had to admit he had had very few of these.
Doug said very little. In fact, in the end, he seemed much more interested—with an intense unwarrantable concentration —in how Hunt Abernathy felt about Grant’s longterm affair with his wife.
“Christ, I don’t know! How the hell would I know? We never talked about it,” Grant said. “But we’ve become pretty close friends, over the years,” he said, “you know?”
But it was not strictly true, that first, he remembered suddenly. They had talked about it. Once. Sitting in a car, they had been, just like now. Hunt’s car. Only that car hadn’t been moving. It had been parked out in front of the Abernathys’ house in Hunt Hills. They had either just been someplace and returned, or else were going someplace and Hunt had not yet started the motor. Or else they had gone out to the car for privacy, Grant couldn’t remember. It had been very early on in the relationship, when Grant was still living with them, long before he ever had any success. Hunt’s face had a set stiff look, and his eyes if cold were very deep as he stared straight ahead out through the windshield. He sat quite a long time in the still, quiet, parked car before speaking.—“I guess you wonder why I’m doing all this,” he said finally, referring to what he was doing, and had done, for Grant. Grant hadn’t answered, largely because he didn’t know what to say.— “You must be wondering why I tolerate this ‘situation’, and what’s going on.” This time he didn’t even wait for any answer. “Well, it’s because I’m trying to help Carol. I don’t give a damn about you. Or what happens to you. And you just remember that Carol is my wife. And remember that I’m her husband.”—“Of course,” Grant had said, delicately. He was terribly embarrassed. Hunt had sat on without saying more for a full minute, staring straight ahead out through the windshield.—“Just don’t forget that,” he said finally, and opened the door to get out and go inside, or was it that he had then started the motor? Grant for the life of him couldn’t remember. His puzzlement at the time had been total. Anyway, they had talked about it. If you could call that talking about it. But he wasn’t about to tell Doug Ismaileh any of that.
“I wonder why he stayed with her?” Doug said from beside him. “Why didn’t he just throw her out?”
“Who knows,” Grant said. “Habit?” He was beginning to sweat a little, and felt flushed and uncomfortable. He wished he hadn’t brought the subject up. “I’ll tell you why!” he said suddenly and violently. “Because she had him by the balls, that’s why! Like she had me. But she won’t have me that way anymore.”
“Maybe he liked it,” Doug said. “Being cuckolded.”
“That’s kind of faggy, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily. Lots of guys are like that. I’ve known quite a few.” Doug grinned, but his eyes had a peculiar hungry look. “Do you think she might have been fucking him too at the same time all those years?”
Grant was startled. “Well, no. I never thought so. I mean, I assumed she wasn’t.” He wasn’t going to tell Doug that in his heart he had never been sure she wasn’t.
“You’re pretty sure then she wasn’t fucking anybody else all that time.”
“Well, no. I’m not,” Grant said. “Since you bring it up. Now that I think about it. But I just don’t give a shit, whether she was or not. That’s the truth. If she was, that just makes me that much more of a sucker, that’s all.”
Doug didn’t answer for a moment. “She probly wasn’t.”
There was something odd in his tone. From the wheel Grant gave him a sharp glance for a split second, then put his eyes back on the road. Doug was looking straight ahead out through the windshield, slumped down in his corner, his arms folded across his chest. “Well, if she wasn’t,” Grant said, “I guess that puts me in even a worse position.”
“In any love affair he who quits first wins,” Doug said. “Ismaileh’s Law.”
Grant was suddenly angry without knowing why. What the fuck did he think he was doing? Was he trying to imply he knew something he wasn’t telling? It sounded like some kind of police interrogation. “I believe you, but I’d hate to live like that,” he said. It was half a lie. There was a part of him that was both pleased and proud that it was him who was quitting, was him who was not feeling the pain. He was the superior. It was the old “Get the Upper-Hand” theory of personality development. But underneath that was the further knowledge that he probably couldn’t have done it at all without the existence of Lucky. Where was the truth! God! “Funny, my new girl told me that same thing, in New York,” he lied viciously. “Those exact same words.”
“I thought I made it up,” Doug said. It was his turn to be startled.
Grant relented. “Maybe you did. You could have both made it up separately. I never heard it anywhere else before.”
They were just pulling into the ugly little town of Falmouth, and Grant felt a vast wave of relief wash over him. Exaggeratedly, he leaned forward and craned his neck this way and that, pretending to look with interest at the surroundings, to cut off the conversation.
“What a hellhole,” he murmured.
“Yeah. Wouldn’t like to be a field nigger and have to live here.” Doug answered.
Where was the truth? the true truth? The true truth was that Decameron L. Grant, goy Anglo-Saxon white Protestant from the Middlewest (whose people both came over on the Mayflower and met the boat, as his grandfather who was a quarter Cherokee was fond of saying), wanted everybody in the world to love him. Or if not love, at least like him, and think he was an honorable fellow. Even Doug Ismaileh, whom he couldn’t care less about. And everybody else. It could get to be pretty difficult when it was a Red Chinese on one side and a GM Executive on the other. Or two male humans after the same cunt. Phoo-ee. He continued to pretend to look.
After Falmouth there was five miles of marshy salt flats not unlike parts of Florida in the Keys, and they both remained silent through all of this too, Grant still biting his tongue for having talked as much as he had. Then, as though having tried it on for size and finding that it fitted, they continued to ride in silence the next twelve miles all the way to the outskirts of Montego Bay. Only when the luxury seaside hotels began to appear on the beach on their right, did Doug perk up and begin to give instructions.
“There’s a shortcut over the shoulder of the hill called the Queen’s Road. Saves goin all the way around the airport on the beach road. It’s at the—There it is! Just up ahead.”
Grant braked and swung left onto the curvy road that led past the jet airport on the right, curved up over the flank of the high hill inland, then dropped straight down into the hot dusty insufficiently shaded town. On the descent they passed the entrance to the Racquet Club, a steep side road leading straight uphill on the left, and Doug pointed it out.
“We’ll have to go up there. They’re a good bunch of guys. Big drinkers and partyers, and they know where all the action is and what’s going on.”
They drove straight through the sudden heat to the hotel-restaurant of Doug’s relatives. This was located on Union Street, one of the main east-west streets running from the harbor straight back into the hills. There, it became Something Drive (Doug said) and curved around amongst many trees to give entrance to some of the better white or near-white homes of the town. The Khanturian (that was the family name) Hotel, a four-story modern-style brick building, was set in the midst of a bunch of Charles Addams houses made of wood with high mansard roofs of corrugated tin, and had a bar and diningroom on the ground floor and three floors of rooms above. The bar, dim and cozily lit, was more than twice the size of the diningroom, Grant noted, and was practically deserted. The diningroom was totally deserted. It was in this bar that they had almost immediately met Sir John Brace.
Doug of course had first to say hello to his relatives. There was much whooping and crotchgrabbing and backslapping and goosing involved, since they had not seen each other for over two years. Although o
f the family (father, mother and five unmarried sons) only two of the sons were present, working the bar and diningroom respectively, the noise was enough to startle the Negro hired help and bring them running to look, and to wake the few scattered drinkers out of their various reveries, as the brothers Khanturian hauled their guests to the bar to buy for Doug and his friend “Whoever you are!” It was at the bar that John Brace was standing, all alone.
Sir John, as he pretended not to much like being called, but it turned out did not really mind being called at all, was on his third New York-sized martini before going off to lunch. Tall, horsefaced, with enormous buck teeth, a receding chin and a whinny of a laugh, he was such a caricature of the upperclass Englishman that it would be impossible for him ever to be employed as an actor in anything but a vicious satire. But then Sir John wasn’t an actor. He was in real estate, he explained to them after offering to buy a drink, and (but only when asked pointblank) was the heritor of an hereditary baronetcy of a family that was in publishing. Later they found out—from his friends of course, and he had many, all of whom hated him for his money, his good nature and particularly for his title—that the publishing family was engaged in was the publishing of British tax forms, hence the title; and that the real estate he was in was the real estate of an exile, a firm bought for him and kept running by the family to keep him out of England, and at which in fact he did nothing, or almost nothing, which did not matter—said his friends—since his allowance was ample, which was also fortunate, because he was stupid. Ron and Doug, naturally, both liked him immediately. He spoke in a peculiar high voice with a perfect King’s English accent, but interlarded this with oddly out-of-place words of Madison Avenue hip slang pronounced with a strong American accent. This was because he made quite a few trips to New York every year “during the season” he explained cheerfully, when Ron asked him about it. “Is a bit odd, isn’t it?” He had seen all of Ron’s plays and both of Doug’s, and had loved them all, indiscriminately. “Love to be able to write something. Like that. You know. Cahn’t even write m’ own name what?” He was about their own age and had been a Grenadiers officer in Italy during the infantry war. “Could write about that, eh? No bloody red blouses there.”
