by James Jones
That goddamned Grant! With all that polite kindly shit of his about some kind of a claustrophobia! Who the fuck did he think he was? And who did he think he was being kind to? Fuck him and his kindness. If you don’t like a goddamned sport, what’s the point of forcing yourself to do it?
Doug looked at his watch and saw he had been driving almost an hour. Looking out he saw they were almost to Dunn’s River. And just then, whether it was because he had been thinking irritably of his friend Grant, or whether because his eyes in looking out fell on the rigidly still form of Carol Abernathy—or whether, even, in the end, from some other and unnameable source he would never isolate—the soft, big thought like the tone of a bell vibrating on in the air after the strike, the thought came into his mind that he wanted to fuck this woman in the car here, that for a long time he would have liked to fuck her.
He couldn’t really believe it was him who was thinking it. He had had no preparation for such a thought. Never in all the years had he ever thought of Carol in that way, or if he had, it had certainly never reached his consciousness. She was like a second-string mother to him. Why now? Why suddenly now?
Could it be because of Grant? But that didn’t make sense. She wasn’t Grant’s any more. He had thrown her over, tossed her out. Was Doug Ismaileh the kind of guy to go around picking up on Grant’s leftovers?
Maybe it was just because she had never been available before? That he had known instinctively she was committed to somebody and so never allowed the thought to reach his conscious mind?
Later on, when he had time to think about it and try to analyze it, he became convinced that it was Carol herself lying there so rigidly and wide awake who somehow put the thought in his mind. In some one of her occult, mystical tricks of thought concentration she concentrated so hard she made him think the thought she had picked out for him to think. In the light of what she did about it all and of what happened after, he couldn’t see how it could be any other way.
None of this, however, was in his mind at the moment. He drove on through Dunn’s River. He continued on, slowly. The desire, hot and liquid, was there in him, existing, powerful, to be dealt with. It would be a “delightful escapade,” as they liked to say in some quarters, a “delightful escapade.” But how to go about it? He decided the best thing to do was wait until Montego Bay. But no sooner had he decided this than the whole thing was taken out of his hands by Carol.
Somewhere beyond Dunn’s River the road moved inland and lost sight of the sea. Just here on their right, on the seaside, was a broad flat spit about a mile wide covered by a wood of big pinetrees and choked with undergrowth below. It was here that Carol suddenly sat up in her carrobe-blanket and cried out, “Stop! Stop! I want to go in there!”
Doug had seen the side road himself. He hadn’t been driving particularly fast. It was easy to back up to it. The sandy side road dipped down off the roadgrade and slid in under the pines amongst the undergrowth and disappeared. Once inside and further out toward the sea where the pinetrees thickened the underbrush thinned out. He followed it maybe half a mile until it came to and mounted a little knoll where a group of pines growing closely enough together to make a canopy formed a sort of grove with no underbrush at all. From it you could look out under and see the sea blue and glinting. Without the undergrowth a soft sea breeze blew across it.
“Stop here!” Carol commanded.
He did. She got out with her carrobe and walked out onto the little knoll. It was covered with pine needles and it looked as if nobody had been here for at least fifty years. Doug got out and followed her.
By the time he got to her she had spread the carrobe out on the pine needles and stretched her arms out sideways and was breathing deeply of the pine- and sea-scented air. When he stopped beside her, she turned to him, backed off three paces and said, “I want you to make love to me love to me I want you to make love to me.”
“Okay,” Doug said. He grinned.
“Here,” Carol said. “Now.” Without another word she lay down on the robe, closed her eyes, and pulled her skirt up to her waist exposing the fact that she had no panties on. Nor did she open her eyes when Doug took his time.
Doug was embarrassed. He had no erection nor the immediate prospect of one. It was such short notice. And it also had the emotional climate about it like some sort of Command Performance almost. He stepped out of his pants (which necessitated taking off his shoes too, because of the narrow legs) and took off the sweater he was wearing in the car, but he kept his Hawaiian shirt and his shorts on as he lay down beside her. That lack of an erection bothered him. Well that would be coming along. When he kissed her on the mouth she returned it, but when he tried to put his tongue in her mouth she tightened her lips together. Well, hell, he thought, okay, and put one hand down to tickle her crotch.
“Don’t do that!” she said sharply, without opening her eyes.
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t play with it!”
Christ! she sure puts up the handicap; like a regular obstacle course, Doug thought grimly. Poor old Grant! Hell, poor Hunt! But he took his hand away, and tucked it up inside the sweater above her skirt against her belly. He felt of her breasts through their brassiere. But he was all right now, he was coming along, and he slipped out of his shorts.
But when he went to mount her he found he had another problem. She was lying there with her legs together and her arms straight down at her sides like so much dead weight. He had to pull her legs apart with his hands before he could get his knees between them. She did not aid him. Not even one of the fingers on her limp relaxed hands so much as twitched.
But finally, once he was in her, simple male sexual brutality came to his aid. With his two hands under her two knees he pushed her legs apart and up toward her chest where they ought to be, where she should have put them herself. What the hell? After that, it was better. He looked off at the sea for a while through the trees and across the brown floor of pine needles. Christ the scenery was like something out of Hemingway. But he wasn’t Robert Jordan. And this certainly wasn’t any Maria. Then he felt it coming up, rushing up through his chest, up along his spine and across his shoulders and down his arms. When that hit you, it didn’t make any difference any more who they were, they were all the same. That was the God’s truth. And balls to you, Grant!
Afterward he went to the car and got some tissues for her. He lay down beside her for a while, but she did not touch him. So he did not touch her. Screw it! In a while she got up and walked off and stood looking off through the trees at the sea. Then she came back and completely blank-faced got in the car. “We’d better be getting on,” she called.
Back out on the road it was just exactly as if nothing had happened. They drove clean on through St. Ann’s Bay, then Priory, then Laughlands, without one word being spoken.
Doug was just as glad. He didn’t have anything to say to her really. He was in a strange state of high teeth-clenching euphoria, so strong that he gripped the wheel tight with both hands to keep from laughing out loud. I’ve had your broad, Grant! I’ve had your broad! was what he was feeling, though his mind did not present it to him in exactly those words. It didn’t present it in words at all, but that was what it was. I’ve had your broad, Grant! And what a lousy lay. He was just as happy not to talk. And it was Carol who finally spoke first.
“Was it good?” she asked faintly.
“Of course it was good!” he said. “It was marvelous!”
“No, it wasn’t. I know it wasn’t. I’m just an old-dry-bag.” She said it as one word. “That’s what we used to say in school.”
“Come on now,” Doug said. “That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. I have always felt that sex just was not very important. I know some people don’t believe that.”
“Oh, come on, now. Sex is important only when you don’t have it,” Doug said profoundly. “When you have it it’s the most unimportant thing in the world.”
“I did like it
when you pushed my legs up like that,” Carol said.
Doug glanced at her. “Didn’t anybody ever show you that?”
Carol’s eyes narrowed suddenly as she looked back at him, as if she was savoring the import of her words. “No. Nobody. Never.”
Doug found this impossible to believe, especially of Grant, but he certainly wasn’t going to pursue it. He grinned. “Well, hell. All you need is a little experience and practice, honey.”
But if that was all she really needed, and Doug didn’t believe that, it became quickly clear that it was not going to be him who was going to give it to her. During the rest of the trip she did not ask him for any more, did not even mention the subject. And Doug did not offer to give her some. The hell with it. They registered at one of the better beach hotels, in separate rooms, instead of going to the Khanturian Hotel and his relatives, and she sat in the sun on the sand all day for six days and then suddenly said she was ready to go home. Or, back to Evelyn’s, rather.
In fact, Doug saw very little of her during the six days. The first evening he introduced her to Sir John and they all had dinner together. But she could not stand Sir John. And Sir John automatically disliked her intensely. After that they had dinner alone together every night, in the hotel dining room, and after dinner when she went to her room Doug would go out with Sir John scouring the town for ass. Unfortunately, after the great magazine modeling bonanza, the town was as bare as a bone of unattached females. Except for the shag joint whores.
He did spend some time with her during the days, on the beach. But he spent more time in the cool, dim bar of the Khanturian Hotel with the five Khanturian brothers and usually Sir John, drinking. Carol didn’t seem to need anything from him at all really.
She did read the play. But, as he had suspected she might, she came up with no criticism that was helpful. She talked a little wildly, and pointlessly, about changing this and that in it. But she did not even note the basic and valid criticism that Paul Gibson had pointed out about the too great heroism.
As far as he was concerned the trip was about as much a total loss as anything could be, and in Coral Gables the fucking play was still waiting.
“Who is this strange woman you’ve got travelin with you?” Sir John asked him once when they were drinking and hunting unsuccessfully for pussy. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s bereaved. She just lost a boyfriend to another gal,” Doug said.
“Who?”
“The guy? Nobody you’d know,” Doug said.
Sir John sniffed with his long English nose. “I should think she’d be too old really to have any kind of a ‘boyfriend’.”
Doug had laughed. “Come on, John. You know damn well women aren’t like men. Women never get too old to have an erection.”
Sir John nodded gravely. “Quite true. I must say. They do have it on us there, don’t they?”
On the trip back to Ganado he slowed up as they passed the side-road entrance into the pine-grown spit, and Carol leaned across him to look at it. She then gave him a strange conspiratorial look that left him wondering if, in the end, he had had her, or the other way round, she had had him. She said nothing.
He didn’t care. When he got back to GaBay he was going to pack up and get out the very next day. And he wasn’t going back to Coral Gables either. Except to get some clothes. The truth was he was sick of all this shit, he was sick of Jamaica, sick of Florida, sick of this ‘country living’, and all the rest of that shit. And fuck fishing. He was going back to New York. And if he couldn’t get this play going there, he was going to throw it away. Throw it away and take that fucking film job his agent had been bugging him to take. God damn plays anyway; he preferred films. At least there you had somebody else, a director or producer or another writer, to throw your ideas at. It wasn’t so fucking lonely.
That was not however the way it worked out, because the day after they got back, while Doug was preparing to pack up his one bag, an accredited visitor presented himself at the villa. This was the local Jamaican Time-correspondent flown up specially from Kingston, a black man but with the same sneaky mean face most of the white Time-men had. He was here, he said, to find out what Mrs Abernathy thought about the marriage of her number-one protégé Ron Grant to a New York showgirl. Ron and Lucky had been married two days before at the Grand Hotel Crount in Kingston. He was prepared to stay around several days and talk to her, and his face wore a look as if he had been briefed on at least several things he was not telling. He was curious to know, he said, why she and her husband had not been invited to the wedding, particularly since they were in Jamaica themselves at the time. Had there been trouble between them and Ron Grant over the marriage perhaps? He’d be glad to talk to her about it, and makes notes on anything she wished to get off her chest about it.
After he left Carol was almost beside herself with fury, and Hunt’s face was set and hard and white. Doug who had been introduced to the Time-man was along with Evelyn called into the war council that proceeded.
It was almost unbelievable to see Carol’s immediate baldfaced assumption, her taking up of her old foster-mother role again. Doug watched with amusement and admiration. And occasionally with envy. It was next to impossible to believe that she had ever fucked Grant, to look at her. Or that she had ever fucked Doug. Maybe she had never fucked Doug? he wondered.
“They want to cause trouble between us—Hunt and me— and Ron,” she said. “Well, I’m not going to let them. We didn’t raise that boy for fourteen years, I didn’t teach him all I knew, support him, make him into America’s number-one playwright, for these people to try and make a family scandal out of the fact that he got married. What the hell? Sons always get married. Finally.”
“Maybe he ought to come back here for a week or two with uh with his wife?” Doug said quietly.
“He’s simply got to come back here with her,” Carol said in a cold bright voice. “That’s the only way out. For a week or two. To show no hard feelings. I’m going to call him down there in Kingston. But I’m not even sure he’ll speak to me. That’s where you come in, Doug. Is your bag packed?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is, Mom.” He had already made up his mind to go even before she went on. He wouldn’t miss this for anything. Evelyn he noted was smoking from her long holder, and had on her face that deep, gimlet-pointed look of deeply hidden cynical amusement she very often wore. She obviously felt the same.
“Well, you’re not flying to Miami,” Carol said. “You’re flying to Kingston. You’ve got to explain it to him. How much we need him. He’ll always talk with you. And you’re an old pal from The Group, so it won’t look funny for you to go down there like it would if Hunt went.”
“That’s all true enough. Okay. I’ll go,” Doug grinned, making it sound as if he had just decided. And what the hell? He’d like to see how they were doing now down there, now that they were hitched. And to watch the rest of the developments, back here, ought to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
“Otherwise,” Carol said, “they can ruin, destroy all my work, all my plans, everything I’ve worked for all these years for my Hunt Hills Little Theatre, by making me a laughingstock. Well, Ron was my first protégé. He helped me found that group.”
“He sure did,” Doug said, staunchly. He looked over at Hunt. But Hunt wasn’t seeing any humor in it. His face was perfectly serious, perfectly righteous, perfectly middleclass. Christ, didn’t he know he was a cuckold? how much he had been cuckolded? was being cuckolded? Or did he perhaps know? And if so, what kind of oddball did that make Hunt? Doug wanted desperately to laugh. “Of course, I may not be able to get right on the plane today,” he said, instead.
“You won’t mind if they stay here a week or two, will you, Evelyn?” Carol was saying. “To help me out?”
“Nothing I’d like better, darling,” Evelyn de Blystein grinned with her gravelly voice, and took a puff on her cigarette.
“Ron will be glad to help out with the food and li
quor bills and such-like.”
“Never give it a thought, my dear,” said Evelyn.
At the door as he prepared to go out to Hunt and the waiting car with his suitcase Carol said to him alone: “Tell him I really need him. It’ll only be for a little while.”
Doug nodded, patted her on the shoulder, and kissed her on the cheek.
23
RON GRANT HAD BEEN in Kingston Jamaica nine days, nine very very hectic days, when his old fishin’-and-playwritin’-buddy Doug Ismaileh hove half-drunkenly into view on the porch of the Grand Hotel Crount. And for four of those days he had been married to Lucky Grant.
Lucky Grant.
God. Or, to Lucia Videndi Grant, if you wanted to be more formal. Or, if you wanted to go all the way with the formality, to Lucia Angelina Elena Videndi Grant. That was the name on the License. He didn’t believe it would ever happen to him. And Lucky, when it came right down to the last final and hysterical sticking-point moment, clearly hadn’t believed it would ever happen to her. Lucky Grant. Lucky Grant. It didn’t even sound right or natural, let alone make any sense, and he couldn’t get used to it, and she couldn’t get used to it, and they both of them loved it and both didn’t love it. He jumped up to run and greet Doug when he saw him, leaving his 10 A.M. in the morning Bloody Mary on the table with Lucky’s and the others.
It seemed to him now when he looked back over the nine days that he had been drunk every single moment of that time. But that couldn’t be strictly true because he had been out diving every day but one, and with no less a personage than Mr Jim Grointon whom he had met on the plane to Grand Bank Island with Al Bonham. He had also slept a lot.
