by James Jones
“She actually said torch?” Grant asked.
“Yes,” Lucky said.
“Jesus!” Grant said. “I’m a torch.”
“Wait. You haven’t heard it all yet.” Carol had gone on to say that he was a strange wild boy when she first met him, probably half crazy from the war, but she had tried her best, and had kept him going until he became a success, for which he had thanked her little. Lucky should note that last. Then, wiping her eyes and lifting her face from her cupped hands with a strange sly little smile, she said that she thought Lucky ought to know that she, Carol, had always suspected he was a queer. A homosexual. She had never told anybody this before, but she thought Lucky ought to know. And now that she had told it, she said, she might as well go on and say that she thought he and Al Bonham were having an affair. A regular affair.— “I always thought that perhaps he and Hunt, my husband, were having an affair,” Carol said. “I know they used to go off together and get terribly drunk. And I know that Ron used to go off and stay for days and days. I know for a fact that he used to go to whorehouses in Indianapolis and over in Terre Haute. And sometimes Hunt went with him. What they actually did there I have no idea.” She had gone on, elaborating on this theme for quite a while, and then apologized for having told Lucky all this but she thought she ought to know, and then she left.
“Jesus!” Grant said.
Lucky had been so stunned she had simply listened and hardly said anything in reply.
Grant was stunned too. “Jesus!” he said again, hopelessly. “What the hell could you have said?” He stopped and thought. “I guess a couple of years ago that would have made me so furious I’d have flipped my lid. Well, what do you think we ought to do? Do you think we should leave?”
“I don’t know,” Lucky said. “I do know I’m not too terribly happy around here.”
“And I’ve about had it with this salvage diving routine. I’ve done it, I know what it’s like, and I’m ready to move on. I don’t really give a damn about the money from it anyway. Orloffski can finish it up with him.”
“By the way,” Lucky said, “none of that stuff is true, is it?”
Grant stared at her. “Well, yes. I mean, no. I mean, some of it’s true. I mean, I used to go to whorehouses a lot in Indianapolis and Terre Haute. Yes. And why not? I wasn’t getting laid good at—I wasn’t getting laid good anywhere else. But I never went with Hunt. I thought of asking him a couple of times. But he was always so sealed-off and distant. And I didn’t feel that, you know, in my place, I ought to.
“And as far as my having an affair with Bonham, that part’s absolutely true. You ought to know that. Can’t you tell from the way I treat you?”
Lucky began to grin, then threw back her champagne-colored head of hair and laughed. Grant went over and put his arms around her. “Maybe we should leave.”
“On the other hand,” Lucky said, “maybe she’s straightened herself out for a while, blown off enough of her internal steam that her pressure is relieved and she won’t bother us for a while. They say they do that. Boy, you sure picked yourself some foster-mother! But maybe she’ll let us be now. For a while.”
“Maybe,” Grant said dubiously.
But they were disabused of this illusion about an hour later.
Grant happened to be in the shower at the time. Suddenly over the rush of the water he heard voices from the vicinity of the kitchen, and then the word “cocksucker” repeated over and over several times in Carol Abernathy’s hysterical shout. When he shut off the shower, and the water noise ceased to act like the filter screen that it was, it all came in clear. Too clear. “I don’t give a damn! You’ll not lock me out! I have as much right here as you have! More! Don’t you ever try to lock me out! What did you ever do for him? Fuck him, that’s all! He only married you because you were a good easy lay! The best cocksucker in New York! That’s what he told me, yes! The best cocksucker in New York! The best . . .”
Calmness spread over Grant in a slow quiet flow. Curiously, enough he felt exactly the same way he had felt that time when he watched the big jewfish dragging Grointon off towards its cave and knew that he was going down there, the same way he felt each time on the bottom during the salvage diving. Methodically and carefully he wrapped one of the big lush towels around his waist and tucked it in and, still wet, went out toward the kitchen. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. If he was dead five minutes from now, it wouldn’t matter. Carol Abernathy was standing just inside the splintered remnants of the screendoor, bent forward tautly from the waist, her eyes hysterical, her mouth shouting as if it were a separate creature. Lucky was standing in the center of the room eight feet away, small and brave, and saying in a quietly nervous voice between Carol’s shouts, “Carol. Carol. This is my house. This is my house. You can’t come in here and do this. You can’t come in here and do this.” She obviously had not backed off, and Carol obviously had not come any closer. And by the sink Mary-Martha the maid was standing utterly terrified.
Grant moved in like a slow-moving but inexorable avalanche, using his chest and belly like a snowplow blade. Carol did not allow him to come near enough to touch her and backed off still shouting. If she had had a gun or knife in her hand it would not have mattered and he would not have cared. Slowly but swiftly he bellied her toward the door. Unfortunately the shattered screendoor was still locked and after fumbling with it once he did not bother and stiffarmed it with the heel of his palm as if stiffarming a tackler. It popped open, its latch broken (what the hell it was already smashed anyhow), and Carol backed out past it, still shouting. Grant followed her, his face feeling like a plaster-of-paris mask. “Out! Out! Get out!” was all he said. He continued to follow her down the walk like some pacific but nonetheless inexorable Nemesis until she turned and fled. Then he came back to the hysterical kitchen and broken screendoor.
Lucky was white. Reconstructing it all it appeared that Carol had come up the walk, whether to reclaim her suitcases from Grant or for some other reason, and at just that moment Mary-Martha had—as she was wont to do—reached over and pulled shut and locked the screendoor which because it was warped had a habit of standing open slightly. Carol had interpreted this to be the result of an order from Lucky who was sitting in the little dinette, a deliberate hint, snub or insult to herself to show her she wasn’t wanted. She had then kicked in the door, smashing the thin lathing that held it together, and come in through it actually lacerating one arm.
“I don’t know,” Lucky said half-hysterically, “I don’t know. I never saw anything like that.” She stood breathing in a shaky way for a moment and smiling a shaky smile. “I have to pee,” she said.
Grant followed her out of the kitchen into the little corridor, down which she disappeared. At that moment, for no especial reasons, he decided that he had to tell her the truth about himself and Carol. And now he thought about it. It was not at all unpleasant. He was sure she would understand. And what if she didn’t? He didn’t care. That great calmness of non-caring came over him again. By the time he heard the water flushing and she reappeared at the other end of the corridor he had prepared himself.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Lucky,” he said, making his voice grave so she would catch the great import of what he had to say. “I was Carol Abernathy’s lover when I met you.”
There was a pause as she continued to walk toward him along the corridor. “You weren’t,” she said finally. “Really? Not really!”
“Yeh,” Grant said. “Really. That explains a lot of the things that have been happening around here.”
“It sure does,” Lucky said. She suddenly let out a high-pitched peal of nervous laughter that rather than running its course and tapering off seemed to be cut off in the middle deliberately so that it left a shocking echo of itself in the air. Then she stepped into the kitchen. “Mary-Martha, go up to the great house and get us two bottles of gin, will you please? We’ve run out down here.” Grant realized he never would have thought of that.
“Yem,” Mary-Martha said, and left, but it was clear that she didn’t want to.
Lucky stood in the little baywindow of the dinette looking after her until she disappeared. “How long?” she said finally, without moving.
“Ever since I first met them,” Grant said. “Fourteen years ago. But for the past ten years—”
“And you lived with them!” Lucky said cutting him off.
“I sure did.”
“And Hunt paid for you! Everything! He supported you!”
“He sure did.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why,” Grant said truthfully.
“Because she dominates him,” Lucky said, still standing there, still looking out. “Like she dominates you.”
“Maybe. But not any more,” Grant said. “If she ever did. I—”
“She did,” Lucky said, still looking out. “And did you fuck her again down here? After you sent me back to New York from Miami?”
“No,” Grant said, then bit his tongue. “Well, yes. Once. No, twice. I’m trying not to lie. But the only reason I did was because I felt so sorry for her. I couldn’t hurt her that much to turn her down. She came to me asking. Can you understand that?”
“Sure,” Lucky said. “Sure. I can understand everything. That’s my job. That’s what you pay me for. Isn’t it? You actually put your thing in me again after sticking it in that dirty old hole!”
“Oh, Lucky, come on,” he said desperately.
“And you had the temerity, the gall to accuse me about my old boyfriend from three years ago, who wasn’t even a love affair!” she said. “And so all our love affair, everything that happened to us in New York, was all a lie,” she said. That was when she turned to him and Grant saw he had totally miscalculated. Her eyes were two bright, bright buttons, glinty, impossibly concentrated to two tiny points like some addict’s. They did not at all match the horribly wide, stiff smile of her mouth below them. Grant suddenly remembered that time in Kingston when she had slapped him across the face with her purse, and how he had promised himself to try to analyze her unexpected reaction, and hadn’t. “I was a whore. I really was a hooker, a New York lay, a two-week party-girl whore. And you were the businessman from out of town in for a fling who wanted to get his ashes hauled. Only it all turned out different, and I married you. Only because you just didn’t happen to be married. Only you didn’t even have guts enough to tell me—”
“Lucky! Don’t say that! You know that isn’t true!” Grant said.
“Only you didn’t even have guts enough to tell me how much you loved the little wife. Back home. You didn’t even have that much courage.”
“Lucky, please.”
Unaware of what she was doing, still with those bright bright, stary, almost pointed eyes and the horrible smile below them, she put her right hand under her left breast and hefted it, hoisted it, as if weighing something. “Men. Goddamned miserable asshole-licking men. Self-pitying sons of bitches. Ass-lickers. I might have known. I should have known. Nobody’s ever really free, without some kind of a Stud or a free lay around somewhere. But I’m just stupid. Some stupid whore. So! Another Buddy Landsbaum I get.”
Grant felt something click in him and the strange calmness he had felt in the shower stall swept over him even stronger. After all, what could happen? They could shoot each other, at the very worst. Otherwise she could divorce him and take half his loot in alimony, if she wanted. Fine. Good. What the fuck did it matter. “Well, what do you want to do?” he said.
Lucky Grant didn’t answer that and went on absently hoisting her left breast, and her face became normal. “It’s not such a bad deal at that, I suppose,” she said. “All I have to do is fuck you every now and then, whenever you want to get laid, and maybe blow you once in a while. And I’ll have my charge at Saks and my charge at Bonwit’s. I love Mancini shoes. They’re hard to find in New York, did you know that? There’re only two places that I know of. I guess it’s not such a bad deal really. I’ll be just like everybody else. Did you really say that?” she asked. “What she said you said about me?”
“Lucky!” Grant said, stung. Then he pulled himself back down. “Of course not. You’re not.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m fair. But you couldn’t really call me the best cocksucker in New York. That was what surprised me.”
Grant wanted to scream at her from pain. Instead he pulled himself back down, and made himself listen for that click into the calmness that didn’t care. “Well, let’s stop, hunh? It’s the second act curtain. What do you want to do?”
“I certainly don’t want to stay around here any longer,” Lucky said. “That’s for sure.” She seemed as far away from him as he felt from her. It was horrible. But he didn’t care, did he?
“We’ll leave for New York as soon as I can get tickets.”
She turned to look at him then, her eyes wide and hardly seeing but not that horrible brilliance anymore, and took her hand away from her breast. “New York? New York? I don’t want to go back to New York. Not now. All my friends would know right away. All they’d have to do would be to look at us. I’m proud.”
An ironical defense seemed the only thing left to avoid this kind of pain, he thought. “Okay. Well, where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. I have to think. This is all a bit of a shock, you know. I have to think. I don’t know where I want to go. I don’t want to stay here, I know that.” She gave him a glacial smile that was light-years away. “It’s really not such a bad deal at that, you know. It’s just that it’s not a love affair. But businesswise it’s okay.” The horribly glacial smile disappeared. “But how could you have brought me here? Really! How could you have?”
“It was easy,” Grant said. “You think it over and you let me know where you want to go, will you? We’ll go there.”
“Are you going to take me back to your ‘house’ in Indianapolis?” Lucky said.
“No,” Grant said. “I guess that’s out.”
“Yes, I think that ought to be out,” Lucky said. “I want to go back to Kingston,” she said. “That’s where I want to go. I want to go back to René and Lisa. For a while anyway, at least.”
“Okay. I’ll go to town and get the plane tickets. But I would like to suggest,” he added, leaning heavy on the irony, “that Lisa of all people is about the worst choice you can pick at the present moment. She hates men about as much as you do at this moment. She can’t be very good for you right now.”
“Yes,” Lucky said and gave him that light-years smile again, a smile totally different in kind from that first horrible one. “Yes, she hates men. All but René. You really are a cheap gutless nogood prick, you know that? How could you have brought me here back to her? That horrible old bag. How could you have been her lover?”
“I’ll go and get the tickets,” Grant said in a stony voice. “For as soon as we can get out.”
She didn’t answer. He went and dressed. He was exhausted, he discovered, when he got out of the house, the Cottage. When he put his hands and feet on the steering wheel and pedals of one of Evelyn’s cars they were all four shaking. No hour and a half of bottom-time with a crowbar had ever exhausted him half as much. He forced the car to move anyway, by sheer force of willpower. It had happened. His estrangement with Lucky over Carol had happened. And it had happened just exactly like he had dreamed it so many times in his horrible wide-awake daytime daydream nightmares. Just exactly.
In town, after seeing to the plane tickets (they would be flying out once again on the midnight flight), he went to the Ganado Beach Hotel and called René in Kingston. The Ganado Beach had a dim quiet bar with fishnets on the ceiling and those green glass balls for floats. It was soothing, and he needed soothing. He ordered a double martini. When things are so bad that nothing else bad can happen to you, it’s sometimes almost pleasant, almost peaceful. The end of the line. But of course he’d find room for them René had said.— “You want ze same sui
te? We ’ave now ze John Gieigud suite, ze Sharlie Addams suite, and now we ’ave ze Ron Grant Honeymoon Suite. I move somebody. Wa ze matter, my Ronnie? Eez somesing bad happen you?”—“No, nothing’s happened,” Grant said, “why?”— “You soun’ fonny,” René said—“No. I’ve caught a small cold is all,” Grant said. —“I ’ave everysing ready for you. I meet you at ze airport. Kees ze Lucky pour me.”— “Sure,” Grant said. Ha ha. Hansel and Gretel and the Babes in the Woods. After he finished his drink he went around to Bonham’s.
The big diver was sitting in his swivel chair with his feet up on his desk, and Orloffski was loafing lazily in a chair on the other side of it. “There’s nothing like some weather to give a guy a rest,” Bonham grinned, and took his feet down.
There semed to be no way to tell him except just come out with it. “We’re leaving, Al. Lucky and me. We’re going back to Kingston for a few days.”
“Kingston’s got the same weather,” Bonham said. “You won’t be able to dive there either.”
“I know. But that’s not why we’re going. Lucky wants to see René and Lisa again before we head out for New York. So it looks like the salvage operation’s over for me.”
“There’s still five cannon to get out,” Bonham said. “We ought to be able to dive in five six days.”
“Not me. I got to be getting back to New York. See about my new play. Starting rehearsals.” It was strange when you felt like this how hard it was just to talk. It was all dull, nothing mattered.
“What’s the matter with you, pal? You look like you lost your best friend,” Orloffski said bluffly.
“I don’t have any best friends,” Grant said, making it crisp. “I thought you knew that.” He was back to not liking Orloffski again, now that the first flush of the Pole’s successful voyage had worn off. He was still convinced Orloffski had stolen his Exacta camera. “You can help Al finish the salvage job,” he added, as an afterthought.
