Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  He knew the story well enough. She had not been averse to telling it to him. Actually, she had told it to him on that long ride, that long lovely ride down to Florida. How on one trip, one particularly long trip back into his South American country where he insisted on playing his idiot’s game of politics, Raoul had left her stashed a particularly long time at the Grand Hotel Crount. How this guy Jacques, who used to hang around the Crount and dine there like so many of the hipper young people of Kingston, had made a big play for her, and how she figured what the hell, Raoul had it coming to him, she’d give it a go. They had had a two-weeks affair, going around everywhere together, and then Raoul had come back and had hustled her out of there and back to New York so fast she didn’t know what hit her. Yes, he knew the story well enough. He had even laughed about it on the way down to Florida (though it hurt him too), largely because he liked to think of that goddamned Raoul getting one put over on him, but when he had to shake hands with Jacques Edgar, who was a handsome pleasant welloff importer son of a welloff importer father, and feel the heavy warm clean friendly pressure of Edgar’s hand in his own, he didn’t know if he could do it, or stand it. All sorts of sick, painful pictures and imaginations ran through his mind, of them together, of her lying back and opening her legs to him, of her kissing him as he entered her. What he wanted to do was hit him in the belly as hard as he could. Instead, he smiled and said hello and pretended he was civilized.

  He should have known he would have to meet him down here, in Kingston, at the hotel, sometime or other. But that thought, that possibility, had never entered his head apparently. He would have expected a black man, not that that mattered, coalblack as Paule Gordon was coalblack. Lucky’s delighted iconoclasm about her Negro lover had made him sound at least that black. Instead the truth was, with Grant’s dark seaburnt tan, the pleasant civilized Edgar, who worked in an office all day, was at least as light as Grant was. And he was obviously a very nice fellow.

  The whole thing was silly, really. Especially was it silly when he thought of all the women he had slept with himself, before meeting Lucky. But it didn’t matter. It was so painful that he could hardly keep from flinching and yelling out loud. This was the first of Lucky’s ex-boyfriends he had ever met face-to-face, and whole new chasms of gloom and doubt opened up under his already benumbed near-nonfunctioning state. Was he marrying himself to some kind of a damned little hustler? Was he letting himself be caught by some kind of goddamned twobit whore of a nymphomaniac? But he loved her. And of course the old clincher: if she liked sex that well with him, with Grant, why wouldn’t she like it just as well with somebody else, with anybody?

  Hansel and Gretel, my ass.

  And as if all of this were not enough to unnerve and unman him in his state of total indecision, a new torment had to be added as if by some cynically laughing fate. The day after they arrived a pretty big Time-man, a Contributing Editor, had flown in with his wife from New York for a three-week vacation at the Crount. He had even been given one of René’s more exclusive suites fronting on the water. (“I make ze mistake, Ronnie, I’m ze schnuk,” René groaned later. “Even I am not ze totalement parfait.”) He turned out to be a man Grant had met a couple of times in New York. He had the same sly, half-queasy, overly boyish face so many of his breed had, and he began almost immediately to live up to his looks. When he learned that Grant and Lucky were very likely to be in the process of getting married, he immediately began to insert himself (and his physically attractive, sexless, mentally arrested wife) in with them and their group of friends. Grant stayed away from him most of the time, or managed always to be with somebody when he came around, but finally the Contributing Editor trapped him alone at the dim cool bar on the hot afternoon of the fourth day.

  “Hello, Grant,” he said with his too easy smile, which crinkled and overly warmed his eyes. “Buy you a drink?”

  “Thanks. I’ve got one.”

  The Contributing Editor, whose name was Bradford Heath, leaned his arm on the bar in a sort of intimate way. “So you’re really gonna hitch it up tomorrow, are you, eh? She’s a real beauty. Ron Grant, the last of the bachelor writers. That’s news.”

  “I don’t know,” Grant said evasively. “They’re split into two parties about that. One party says yes, tomorrow. The other says no, not tomorrow.”

  Heath hitched himself a little closer, boyish cheek resting on his knuckles. “Well, if not tomorrow, within the next couple of weeks.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Grant said.

  “Well, anyway, you two are gettin’ hitched? Eventually?” Heath smiled.

  “Maybe not.”

  “I wouldn’t tell Lucky that,” Heath smiled. “That won’t be so nice for her. She’s crazy in love with you.”

  “Well, I’m crazy in love with her.”

  Heath bobbed his head up on his knuckles, appreciation of the admission. “Anyway, if you do get hitched I’m gonna have to send a release home about it, probably a squib for the People page. I hope you won’t mind.”

  “Don’t see how I can,” Grant said. “Like you said, it’s news. Though I seriously doubt if very many people care that much about what’s happening to me.”

  “Oh, people always want to read about celebrities,” Heath said, almost bitterly.

  “I can never quite think of myself as that much of a celebrity,” Grant said.

  “Oh, you are,” Heath smiled. “You are.” There was almost a nasty edge to his smile now.

  “Tell me,” Grant said without any expression on his face. “What year did you graduate from Harvard, Heath?” He was beginning to get fed up with him.

  “Me? Oh, 1950. Why?”

  Deliberately Grant did not answer him, and continued to look at him expressionlessly.

  Heath’s reaction was to hitch himself a little closer, and put back into his smile that overwarmth. “What really interests me, and the reason I’m bothering you,” he smiled, “is I’d like to know what your uh foster-mother thinks: about you marryin’ a uh showgirl.” The way he said ‘showgirl’ was not especially nice either.

  Grant could feel his face stiffen a little, but on the other hand he did not feel like he ought to cut and run either. Any reaction but a calm happy one, that would also keep him talking, would look bad, the way Bradford Heath had so sharply and so shrewdly set it up. “Mrs Abernathy? She’s got nothing to say about it. It’s me that’s getting married. But if you’re really interested, she thinks it’s probably a very good thing for me.”

  “She gave you her permission then?”

  “Permission?” Grant said sharply.

  Heath bobbed his head on his knuckles. “I mean well let’s say her blessings.”

  “Oh, sure. But I don’t need anybody’s permission. Except, of course, yours.”

  Bradford Heath bobbed his head and grinned. Suddenly he raised his head from his knuckles long enough to look all around cautiously over-cautiously. “You know there were a lot of us at Time-Life,” he smiled confidentially, “who never really swallowed that foster-mother story that young kid wrote when he came out to Indianapolis. But he was one of our sharpest young reporters, so we all accepted it. And printed it. But a lot of us still didn’t believe it, privately. Incidentally, how does your ‘intended’ feel about all that?”

  Grant could hardly believe he had heard right. “My ‘intended’ feels exactly like I tell her to feel,” he said coldly.

  Nobody but a fool, an utter complete fool, would have approached him like that. He was being invited to admit to this queasy sneaky tall Ivy League fucker that he had had an affair with Carol Abernathy, after having gone out of his way for fourteen years to conceal it.

  “Then you’re a lucky young fellow,” Bradford Heath said, and smiled.

  “I make my luck,” Grant said.

  “Do you, now?”

  Grant nodded solemnly. Then after a moment he said, with a perfectly straight face, “Well, of course you’re quite right. And it’s quite true. She couldn
’t possibly be my foster-mother because I was already twenty-one when I met her and Hunt. You can’t adopt somebody once they’re of age.”

  There was a little silence in which Bradford Heath’s eyes studied Grant above Bradford Heath’s knuckles. Then he remembered to smile. He was backing down, Grant could sense, or at least backing off. Perhaps he thought he had gone too far. “Uh, yes of course that’s all quite true,” the Contributing Editor said in a serious resonant tone.

  Grant thought it was a good time to get out “Well, see you around. Got to go and find out what my uh showgirl future wife is up to.”

  “Didn’t she use to be Buddy Landsbaum’s girlfriend, some time back?” Bradford Heath asked after him.

  “Yes,” Grant said over his shoulder without stopping. “As a matter of fact it was Buddy who introduced us.”

  Even the greasy seaslime of a coral reef was bracing and clean alongside of this, Grant thought as he went to find Lucky, and all he could think about—underneath all his other problems to which this problem was now being added—was to get back out to them as quickly as he could in Jim’s boat. But they did not go out on the next day, on the Wednesday, because in the end that was the day they were really, finally, and irrevocably married after all.

  Actually they could have gone out on the Wednesday too if it had not been for Lucky. The wedding ceremony was set for 5:30 in the afternoon, after the heat of the day, in the big hotel bar (the Crount had no “Lobby” or “Reception” and the master received his clients in the bar). So there was no reason that they could not have packed their usual sandwiches and beer and gone out to the reefs except for one and the one was Lucky.

  From the moment she got out of bed on the Wednesday she seemed a totally different girl than any of her myriad personalities Grant had seen. She giggled, she flirted (but then she always flirted), she laughed at everything like a flitterbrain, she acted extravagantly at the pool pouring champagne down the bosom of her swimsuit, she acted like an idiot schoolgirl about to go out on her first date and too unsure of herself to know whether she liked it or not. In short, from the moment she got up, had her shower, dressed and went down to the veranda for breakfast she was totally hysterical and as the day wore on she got more hysterical than totally. And Lisa Halder was her accomplice.

  For Grant, to lie or sit on the bed in the morning after having made love and watch that long, deliciously curved, rich, warm, heavy-breasted, round-hipped, lean-legged body come out of the shower to dry itself and then finally begin to dress itself, was one of the greatest pleasures of his day, every day. It was quite clear to him on this particular day that neither had Lucky any more than he ever thought that it, It, wedding someone, Marriage, would ever happen to her specifically. Perhaps she had sometimes thought that at some indefinite time in some indefinite future she would someday marry some indefinite man, but not specifically and not here and not now and not him. When he suggested later after watching her that they go out with Jim in the boat anyway like on any other day, thinking this might calm her, she said she did not want to go, but that she would go if he said so because he was going to be her Lord and Master to Obey and she better be getting used to it. Then she giggled. Grant said no. Thinking twice, he decided he would not like to have her out in any boat in this condition, especially with him off in the water diving.

  So they did not go. They played at the pool with their new friends they had made, the musical comedy writer and her husband, and a wealthy young psychoanalyst and his wife who was a designer of children’s clothes. But finally, after nearly everybody had gotten three-quarters drunk at lunch and her idiotic and giggling shenanigans with Lisa got worse and worse, he took her off to their suite and made her a speech, a lecture, a serious down-to-earth let’s-face-our-facts talking-to. He probably sounded pompous as hell he thought listening to his voice but he meant every word of it. The upshot of it was that getting married was a serious business and not a joke and you didn’t do it as if you were playing games, and that was the way he was taking it: seriously, and that was the way she had better take it too. He was marrying her for good and always and for keeps and that was the way she better think of it. He was astonished to hear the grandfatherly responsible tone of his voice, amazed at the responsibility in him. “If there’s anything I’ve learned by watching people, married people, at all,” he said, and he was thinking mainly of Hunt and Carol Abernathy at that moment, “it’s that the minute one of them ever ever steps out on the other one, the whole fucking thing is blown to hell, over, and the pieces just never fit back. That’s the way I’m marrying you, and that’s the way you better be marrying me, the way you are marrying me, whether you know it or not, and you better remember that.” She sat on the edge of the bed like a little girl with her two hands in her lap and listened to him quietly without smiling and two big tears rolled from her eyes down her face. “I know it,” she said, “and I am.”

  But at the ceremony itself the shenanigans started up again. She and Lisa. And Lisa was at least sixty percent the instigator. Lisa who had been married twenty-three years. Well, maybe every woman resented it a certain amount, and maybe not a one of them ever entirely got over it entirely. So they giggled and made fun. He had to admit it was ludicrous-enough-looking: the tall solemn black civil servant who was to perform it for them wore as his badge of office a long black frock coat and a very wide-brimmed black hat which he never took off, so that he looked like he had just stepped out of a Western film where he had been portraying Sam Grant, and appeared to be at least as likely to shoot them down as to wed them. Of their four witnesses, who all had to be locals, three were black: Lisa, her friend Paule, and Sam the bartender; and the fourth, René, as he himself said later, probably could not count as white either since he was a fat French Jew who could hardly speak English. They all laughed like hell over that later. An auspicious beginning, Grant said, later. But then, at the moment, when the two women started their infernal indecent hysterical giggling again as they all sat facing the black civil servant, he bent such a ferocious frown on them and hushed them so viciously that they both said later he scared them three-fourths to death. He at least scared them to silence. Long enough anyway for the ceremony to get over.

  But afterwards, during the required celebration, she and Lisa started up again, giggling hysterically together and, together with Paule who also had some resentment against males apparently, the three of them had great sport at his expense about how they had concocted the snare and trapped him in it. And even that did not quite end it. Because that evening, when it was all over, and they were hitched, “’Itched tighter zan two Jamaican mules” as René had guffawed, and everybody had celebrated and all drunk a great deal, but not eaten, because it was not even yet dinnertime, they two went off together to their suite and a-little-more-than-half drunkenly went to bed. And after making love for the second time that day, Lucky, lying in his arms with her eyes shut while he leaned looking down at her on his elbow, said in a low but quite clear voice, “Someday I’m going to cuckold you.”

  It did not sound so much like a simple statement as like some oracular prophecy that had come out of her and for which she was not responsible. He understood that she resented somewhat having given up her “freedom” to him, but he did not know what to say in response to that remark. The silence seemed to go on and on and Lucky seemed to show no signs that she was going to break it. “Then I’ll just cuckold you, too,” he said huskily.

  “No, no. No, you must never do that,” she said, her eyes still closed. “It would hurt me too much.”

  Grant didn’t answer. Suddenly he thought of the day she had done the nude dance in the water at Montego Bay. Inside himself he seemed to get more and more and more breathless. “Well, then if you ever do cuckold me, you’ll have to let me watch it,” he said, even more huskily.

  For response, Lucky opened her eyes and smiled up at him. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t say a single word. She simply lay with her eyes open smiling up at him.
After a moment Grant got up and reached for his underpants. “Come on, let’s go down and eat dinner,” he said gruffly.

  He was suddenly dangerously angry. She should at least have said something. About how she knew it wasn’t true. On the stairs going down, after they had dressed, he leaned forward and tapped her roughly on the shoulder and said roughly, “Just remember that fantasy isn’t reality.” Again she looked up at him, over her shoulder, and smiled in silence. What he wanted to do was hit her. Then she reached back up the stairs and took his hand in one of the most loving gestures Grant had ever seen. He shrugged her hands away. You should never say things like that to anybody. Especially when they were things you didn’t mean at all. If he could have seen Jacques Edgar in front of him, or Forbes Morgan, or even Buddy Landsbaum, he would have punched any one of them, or all of them, in the face.

  And who should he see standing in front of them, as they rounded the turn of the stairs and debouched down into the narrow foyer? Bradford Heath! Standing by the potted papaya! Fortunately, because of the turn of the stairs, Heath had not seen his brusque gesture.

  “My congratulations, Grant!” the Contributing Editor said with his alert queasy smile. “And to Madame all my best wishes!” He shook hands with both of them. “I watched all from the periphery. Oh, uh, can I see you for a moment, Grant?” he added as they made to pass on.

  “No, you can’t,” Grant said roughly and shouldered past, but Heath put a restraining hand on his arm. Lucky had by now already gone on ahead.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I sent in my little story,” Heath said, as Grant jerked his arm loose.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you do, Heath,” Grant said roughly. “You just do whatever the fucking hell you like.”