by James Jones
It was Sir John who like a bloodhound led them straight to the models: “I say! I say, if you two cats are really on the loose for a day or two, I know just the thing. Buick or GM or one of those American cars is doing a big ‘romantic tropics’ ad layout here just now. And they are some chicks! Their head-qua’ters are out at the Half Moon Hotel. What say we all three head out there for lunch, what?”
They went in his car. After sauntering in (he was wearing those obscenely loose-legged shorts the British affect in the tropics, a Madras shirt, and a short-brimmed Madison Avenue-style porkpie straw) and blandly demanding an introduction from the manager, he invited the entire crew to lunch— photographers, wardrobe supervisor and all—on his tab. “No, no. I was going to do all this on my own anyway,” he giggled nervously when Ron and Doug offered to split it. He guffawed. “Wait’ll the local spies report this back home to the family!” After further imperious inquiry of the manager (“And I am quite sure he is one of them!”), he returned to whisper, “I also now understand they’ll be wo’king at the Racquet Club this afternoon. We could follow them up there, have a swim, cause general hell; and take them out tonight. What?” He gazed fondly at the girls and said in his American accent, “Aint they something?”
They were indeed. Tall, slender, longlegged, with tight, taut bellies, bellies so flat they were practically concave, all of them had the hips of women and obviously were well practiced in using them, and they didn’t care who knew it. All in their teens or early twenties, they had the world by the ass with two fingers as if it were their own personal bowling ball and until they gave up the gay life and became proper wives and mothers, nothing interested them except parties, money, titles, travel and celebrities. That they would ever later pay for the sins of their youth seemed highly doubtful. They were all far too beautiful to ever pay for anything, and what was more, they all knew it. If none of them was especially bright, it was clear that none of them would ever have to be. It was enough to make a reflective man resentful, but neither Ron, Doug nor Sir John were worrying about any of this.
“Christ, you really have got it bad, haven’t you?” Doug whispered late in the night when Ron refused to pair off with any of them. Grant could only nod miserably and dumbly.
In the end, after the lesbian wardrobe supervisor had quickly disappeared with the one that was her special friend, and after a long lingering dinner by candlelight out under the tropical moon in a restaurant on the shore, Sir John took the remaining five and the two playwrights off to his place. This was a recently built, rambling villa beside the sea constructed around a central pool brilliantly lit by underwater lights. With everyone still drunk from the bottles and bottles of red wine Sir John had been pushing at dinner, it was only a short easy step from the scanty, already supremely revealing bikinis of the girls to out-and-out nude swimming. Even Grant participated in this. But when it came to the next stage, the groping and porpoise-diving down under the shrilling girls, he retired to the pool edge, put back on his bikini, and found himself a bottle of scotch to nurse his misery. It seemed to be the history of his life. Everybody else once again was having fun and once again, for whatever the variety of reasons over the years, Ron Grant was unable to take part, was on the outside looking in again.
The underwater lights illuminated everything superbly. After five minutes at the pool edge, he knew all five of their young bodies about as intimately as if he’d been married to them all for five years. Their insolently carefree beauty made his back teeth ache. Nipples, navels, haired and vastly protruding Venus mounds, the delicious sag of breast from corner of opened armpit, all ran disembodied around in his head like a strip of experimental movie film, and the hurt they brought him came from the certain knowledge that never ever in his life could he ever possess one tiny smidgen of all this teeth-aching beauty. He could hump them till he was crosseyed, and it would do no good. He would remain as far outside of them, and they outside of him, as ever. Hell, they couldn’t even possess it themselves. Age, withering death, yes, but not possession. He ached to have all of them, all at the same time. Sir John surfaced near him, grinning cheerily with his huge teeth. “By Jove! We don’t get fucking windfalls like this down here very often. Once or twice a year.” He disappeared again beneath the waves the cavorting bodies kept generating, and one of the girls shrieked quite happily. When they were all toweling off, modestly but quite certain of their nude loveliness, rosy skinned from the chill water, Grant told Doug and John he was going back to the hotel.
“All right then, by God,” Doug said with drunken staunchness. “I’ll go, too, Ron. Come on, honey. Let’s get our clothes on.”
“What’s the matter?” one of the girls, whom Doug had singled out, or perhaps who had singled him out, said. She had wrapped one of the terrycloth robes Sir John had thoughtfully provided over her delicious body. “Are you two guys queer or something?”
“Now, cut it out,” Doug said patiently, and drunkenly. “This poor slob’s in love. Really in love. You may not believe it. I can’t let him go back to the hotel on his lonesome all by himself like that. I’m his old buddy. You and me’ll go with him and keep him company in his misery.”
“But I like it here!” the model protested.
“I don’t want anybody to go with me,” Ron said irritably.
“We got a great suite at the hotel, too,” Doug went right on nevertheless. “Anything you want. And a great view of the bay.” This last was an outright lie. The Khanturian Hotel had no view at all, of anything.
Sir John suggested they all have a drink first, out on the terrace, and discuss it. This was done. “Why don’t you sleep here, Ron?” he suggested when Doug refused to budge from his position. “I’ve plenty of bedrooms. Have one to yourself.”
“Christ, are you crazy? It’s bad enough at the hotel. Just let me go,” he said to Doug, “and go on with your party.” All he wanted was to be alone with his drunk ache. Doug shook his head. “Christ, I think you guys really are fags,” the model said; “well, it might be interesting.” And in the end it had been the three of them, himself, Doug, and the model, who drove back to town. Sitting in the car while Doug drove with the girl between them, Grant had felt very virtuous about himself, and quite self-admiring. When the tall, lovely model suggested matter-of-factly that he could come on in the bed with her and Doug as far as she was concerned, he had merely smiled.
(When they finally saw John Brace the next day the toothy Englishman roared with laughter at himself. He had gotten so drunk after they left he hadn’t been able to screw any of the four that remained and they had all gone innocently to sleep together on the big livingroom floor in front of the fire.)
In the hotel bed, Grant shook his aching head in the horrible morning sun. He still felt supremely virtuous this morning, but sober, was a little more amused at himself for it. He looked again at the untouched, unperfumed, unlipsticked pillow beside him. Then, on the bed table the phone rang. Grant looked at his watch. Instead of the thirty to forty-five minutes he’d anticipated, the call had been one solid hour coming through.
Overseas calls from Jamaica were notoriously buzzy, but through all of that he could hear a faint squawk and then a thin wail. Immediately he had a throbbing, full-taut, blood-filled hard-on. “What are you doing?” he asked the mouthpiece huskily. “What are you doing on that great island of Manhattan?”
“What am I doing?” the lovely, sad, curiously little-girl voice came back faintly. “I’m getting dead drunk. That’s what I’m doing. And I’ve been dead drunk for the whole three goddam weeks.”
“Ahh,” Grant said. It was all he could think of to say. Under the covers he fingered himself with his other hand. “Do you know what I’ve got in my hand?” he said suddenly, spur of the moment. He was suddenly completely happy, in a warm nest of feathered perfection.
“Yes. And I have, too,” Lucky whispered. But then her voice raised to a wail again. “But I’m mad at you. I hate you. All my friends say you’re a worthless pr
ick and I should completely forget you.”
“Fuck your friends,” Grant said.
Just the same, she meant it. She went on to tell him how miserable she had been, nothing but drinking and drinking from morning to night, and lying in bed all the time crying, and not one word from him. He wasn’t worth it. Nobody was worth it. Grant listened contentedly and happily. It seemed he was a lousy prick after all. How could he be contented and happy over making this girl so miserable? But he was. She had a girlfriend whose boyfriend owned a private airline, and they were flying down to Palm Beach in his private plane, and she was going with them. After that she was going to go and get herself a cabin somewhere in Key West and live by herself.
“How would you like to fly down to Montego Bay instead?” Grant said contentedly.
“Montego Bay! I thought you said you were going to Ganado Bay. To see your goddamned foster-mother. And then to Kingston.”
“I am. I have. But a buddy of mine named Doug Ismaileh came down from Coral Gables for a visit, and he and I decided to drive to Montego for a few days. He wrote Dawn’s Left Hand.”
“I know who he is,” Lucky said. “I didn’t like his play. He hates women.”
Grant was startled nearly out of his complacency. Another of those perceptions. “Well, for a guy who hates women, he sure fucks a lot of them.—(“It figures,” Lucky put in.)— “There’s a bunch of fashion models down here on a job and we were out with them last night and a crazy Englishman we met.”
There was silence at the other end. Something about her, something, could make him feel so manly. “But don’t worry. I didn’t take any of them on. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I wanted you. And that’s why I called. I couldn’t have gotten it up. Will you come?”
He could hear the silence on the other end change from fearful, suspicious silence to hopeful silence.
“Will you come?” he said again.
Her voice, when she spoke, had changed back to that plaintive wail. “Well, I don’t have any money again. I spent it all on booze in fact—to try and forget you.”
“Then how were you going to go to Key West? Look, I’ll call my lawyer. You’ll have it in time to make the one o’clock plane. You’ll be here tonight.”
The wail. “Well, you know I’m no good at doing things like that. You know I’m not.”
“Call Leslie. Will you come?” There was silence in the earphone. “And we’ll go on to Kingston.”
“All right,” she said with a soft sigh.
“And do you know what I’ve still got in my hand, here?” Grant said softly.
There was a pause in which he could hear her breathing. “Then go ahead and do with it what you know you want to do with it,” she said. There was another pause. “Play with it. And think about me all the time.” A third pause. “And I will, too,” she said breathlessly. There was an incredible impossible, honey-rich sensuality in her voice.
“I love you,” Grant said.
“Oh, yes,” Lucky said. “Goodby.” The phone went dead.
After he hung up the instrument Grant masturbated, following her instructions exactly and consciously. After his orgasm as he lay sleepily in the bed he felt totally replete, if only she were here to touch. Finally he got up and showered. Then he put the call in for his lawyer. By the time he was dressed the call came through and he told him what to do about the money. Then he went to wake Doug and the girl.
As he did so, he stopped frozen with his hand already on the doorknob of the door into the connecting bath. After his recent, self-induced orgasm a whole new attitude had come tinkling and tickling into his mind, and now it crystallized itself in a conscious question. Why had he not done it? Why had he not taken one of the models last night? He could have. Very easily. And just not have told Lucky. If he had, he probably would not have called her to come down.
He could almost kick himself. A simple, friendly fuck, with no commitments on either side and no desire for any. Nobody hurt, and nobody would be the wiser. Why hadn’t he? Payment? Atonement? Some fuzzy superstitious spiritual disbursement, which he felt that if made, paid, would aid him in some unclear metaphysical way? Some private expiation for his guilt in treating Carol Abernathy as he was, and had been, treating her all these years? Or was it just that he enjoyed being frustrated, that it excited him to deliberately frustrate himself? And that he took dubious pleasure, painful pleasure from his own deliberate frustration?
There was certainly that in him.
There was also the question of monogamy. He was aware that over large areas of the world the Christian-oriented institution of monogamy was laughed at, and that large portions of those areas were among the Christian countries themselves. But none of this helped him because he had been raised, brought up, indoctrinated and oriented in the belief that the only sexual perfection lay in the one man—one woman monogamous love affair (never mind marriage). And he couldn’t shake it. And his fourteen-year experience with Carol Abernathy, and all the infidelities he had been forced into by her coldness and perhaps by his own inordinate desires, as well as all the busted and unhappy love affairs and marriages he had observed around him over the years, had confirmed this. It had caused to grow in him a flat decision that—should he ever be so lucky as to find another love—he would be completely faithful to the covenant. The minute one party started stepping out something irreparable was lost which could never be got back. And the loneliness of the practicer of friendly fucking was at least as great as the loneliness of the long-distance runner. He didn’t make the rules. But then neither did all those other people he had observed, who were also so constructed that they too, whether they willed or not, must live by them.
What he really wanted, he thought suddenly, the thought rising unbidden, coming up from some deep and completely disconnected area, an area totally separated from the logical progression of his previous conscious thought, what he really wanted was to enslave himself to some woman, become her creature, her groveling possession, contemptible, and contemptuously treated by her . . .
And that was why, his conscious mind said, taking the thought over, that was why all these years he had had to be so careful in picking himself a wife. He must not pick himself a bad master. In his pants he felt his penis stretch itself toward hardening. It was, he was convinced, a typically American reaction. Convulsively, he tightened his grip painfully on the doorknob, which he had forgotten he was holding. But of course he would have to be the boss in the family, too.
When he opened the door on the other side of the bathroom, what he saw made him stop irresolutely. Doug and the model (she really was beautiful) lay curled up together cheek to cheek with their free arms around each other, cuddled in sleep, as if they really knew each other well and actually needed each other. Hunh, they were probably as scared, sick at heart, and lonely as him or anybody. And instinctively some sensibility made him sure they would both be embarrassed to be caught and wakened in such a position. Stepping back outside, he shut the door and then pounded on it.
“Come on! Rout it out!” he bawled. “Come on, you guys! I got news! We gotta meet a plane tonight!”
The two of them met her on the evening plane. The model (whose name was Terry September) of course had to cut out and get back to her job of work, as she called it, before noon; but they would be seeing her tonight. They had lunch with John Brace who told them his story, guffawed at himself and promised that he would not get that drunk again tonight; he had already arranged everything for an even bigger party tonight. Ron had wanted to rent a small boat, maybe from Wilson, and make a dive on some local reef with the lung he had lugged along, but in the end he didn’t. In the end he wound up sitting in the Khanturian Hotel bar with Doug and the rest of the Khanturian brothers who had gathered like some species of great clannish birds and immediately clustered around Doug, everybody drinking far more than he should as they all admitted, and talking about the old family, the old country, the old war. The eldest Khanturian brother had been a Sergeant of
Infantry and had frozen his feet in the Hürtgen Forest and they still bothered him. Doug once again savagely bemoaned the loss of all of their fearless, violent youths. To Grant it seemed that the moment the diving and its impetus was removed—down here—everything went to hell, and everybody was drunk alla time. He had noticed it with Bonham, too. When they piled into the car to go to the airport, and were waved away by the cheering Khanturians, they were both pretty drunk; and although they were not anywhere near dead drunk, not anywhere near, it was still something Ron had not wanted to be.
It was just dark, and the big jet winged in whistling insanely over the bay with its landing lights on, screeched rubber as it touched down, roared as it immediately began braking, ran on to the end of the runway as if it might go right on off it into the excavation they were making to lengthen it, then rolled like a fat awkward bird back to its disgorging station. The bureaucratic necessity of mid-Twentieth Century, the same old deathly impersonality of handling large groups of people which they both professed to hate, separated them from her just as surely as the electrified barbed-wire fences of a concentration camp, but they could stand out on the Visitor’s Balcony and, leaning on the railing in the sultry sea-smelling air, watch for her as the jet spewed forth its full load of dressed-for-winter vacationers and business-trippers who trooped amiably down the mobile stairway and across the tarmac after the pretty airline hostess.
Grant saw her almost before she was out of the dark cave of the hatchway, the champagne hair, the small head, the wide long-waisted shoulders, the flair of female’s hips above the long sleek legs, and began to holler and wave like a mad bull. The sight of her filled his chest cavity with such additional pressure that he wouldn’t have been surprised later to find he had afflicted himself with an air embolism. He kept trying to point her out to Doug in the trooping crowd. She did not see them at first but when she did she waved only once. Smiling with embarrassment, she came toward them in that walk of hers and passed in below them to the customs desks. When Doug finally saw her, and was sure that it was she he saw, all he could say, in a voice of protest, was, “Jesus S Christ!”
