by James Jones
“Are you kiddin?” Orloffski bellowed. “Multiple dives at 120 feet with 47 minutes decompression time? I aint about to. I aint no chance-taker. And I aint no workin diver. I’m a simple spearfisherman.”
Grant looked at him with amusement “Was it all that dangerous, Orloffski?”
“You knew how dangerous it was,” Bonham put in quickly from behind the desk. “It’s all right. I’ll do it myself. It’ll take longer that’s all. Or maybe you and me’ll do it when you come back down for the Naiad’s first trip. But what about your share of the seven that we’ve got?”
“I don’t care,” Grant said. “Put it in on the schooner. Send me a statement, but put the money all on the schooner.” He got up. He found he was having trouble sitting still, now. “But there was something else I—” he mumbled, embarrassed. He discovered he hadn’t known what he had meant to say. Or cared. He thought a moment. “Oh, yeah. What about—What about the possibility of silver and gold; you know, other stuff, artifacts, that might have been on that ship?”
“No chance,” Bonham said. He shrugged. “It would take equipment like Ed Link had on the Sea Diver to find anything under that sand. Now that it’s located somebody like Ed Link might do it someday, but we couldn’t. Anyway it might even be too deep for Link.” He got up from behind the desk and followed Grant outside. “Listen, I just got word that the Naiad may be finished soon. In a couple of weeks maybe. That means that once I get hold of Sam Finer we may be pullin out on our cruise in less than a month. If that’s true, it would be silly for you to go back to America and then come right back. Why don’t you just stay? You could just about live on the extra plane fares.”
“I can’t,” Grant said. “I’ve got to be getting back to New York for my play. And Lucky wants to go back to Kingston before we leave. Anyway, you’ve got my New York address. Send me a wire. Anyway uh Lucky might not be going with us on the cruise.”
“Is something the matter?” Bonham said.
“No. Why?”
“You seem so strange,” Bonham said. “I thought maybe something bad might have happened up at the villa.”
“No,” Grant said. “Nothing.” He found he could hardly think, actually, and he wanted to get done and be gone. “Look, send me that wire. I figure we’ll stay in Kingston a week or so. Okay?”
“Okay,” Bonham said. They shook hands, rather sadly, Grant thought. But then he found he couldn’t really think about much of anything. He couldn’t think consecutively. His mind just jumped around. All he seemed really able to think about was just that Lucky was mad at him, more than mad at him— totally and glacially separated from him. Light-years. Wherever he turned he came up against that like against that same brick wall. On the other side of which was all the sunshine. And there was nothing to do.
Back at the villa he went to see Evelyn. “Lucky and I are leaving.”
“I rather thought you might be.” Evelyn came out onto the veranda with him.
“I wanted to tell you myself. And thank you for everything you’ve done for us. We’re taking the midnight plane to Kingston.”
“Carol is shut up in her room,” Evelyn said. “She would like to know if there’s anything she can do to rectify what she’s done. And she asked me to help any way I can.”
“There’s nothing to be done. We couldn’t possibly stay here now. I wouldn’t want Lucky to. And she certainly doesn’t want to.”
“I suppose not,” Evelyn said. “Carol said some pretty insulting things.”
“Insulting! Did you hear it?”
“How could I help it?” Evelyn smiled. “Still . . .”
Grant looked at her, their hostess, this tall statuesque woman with her cynical face, whom he had known off and on for years now. Just two nights ago, when he had walked out into the grounds well after midnight, he had seen her and the girl Les Wright sitting side by side with their heads together on a set of old stone steps that led nowhere on the hillside. As he watched Les Wright had begun to comb Evelyn’s long gray hair on her thrownback head in the moonlight. He had tiptoed away so they didn’t see him.
“Your screendoor is all busted up down there,” he said.
“That’s of little importance,” Evelyn de Blystein said. “It’s been awf’ly hard on Carol having you here with your new bride.”
“It was her idea,” Grant said. “It wasn’t me who asked for it”
“It’s pretty easy to see that she’s madly in love with you,” Evelyn said.
Grant did not know how much to say, how far to go. “She told you that!”
“No, but . . .”
“I don’t think she’s capable of loving anybody. Or any thing. Except maybe herself, a little bit.”
“She thinks she loves you,” Evelyn said.
“Foster-mothers often fall in love with their sons,” Grant said. “Especially if they haven’t had any children of their own.”
“Yes,” Evelyn said. “Have you seen Hunt?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“Don’t you think you ought to say goodbye to him?”
“I suppose so,” Grant said. “Where is he?”
“Paul and he went down to the gardener’s greenhouse to look at some new plants. They’re both trying to pretend nothing has happened, the asses.”
“They would be,” Grant said. “Well, thanks. I’ll go down and see him.”
Hunt Abernathy saw him coming from inside as he approached the greenhouse, and came out to meet him rather than let him come in. Quietly he took Grant by the arm and led him away, off across the lawn. His gray eyes were anxious, enhancing the deep crowsfeet wrinkles around them. “What are you going to do?”
“Go back to Kingston, Hunt. We leave on the midnight plane.”
“Oh, maybe it won’t be necessary to do anything as drastic as that,” Hunt said. “Perhaps if—”
“No, Hunt Lucky doesn’t want to stay here after that. And I can’t very well ask her to.” Grant didn’t want to say anything about his and her own troubles now.
“I suppose you can’t,” Hunt said thoughtfully.
“We’ve done what we came to do anyway,” Grant said, “which was hush up any rumors that ass Heath might have wanted to start.” Suddenly he put his hand warmly on Hunt Abernathy’s shoulder. “You know, this probly means the end of the house in Indianapolis for us, too, you know that don’t you.”
Hunt stopped. “Really?”
“I can’t expect Lucky to go back there and live now, across the street from you and Carol, in a house that Carol practically decorated.”
Hunt had already stopped, and now he turned and focused on Grant his tough gray eyes, cool and all screwed up behind their heavy crowsfeet. In the last four years he had had three drunken driving accidents. “Then this is really goodby, then, almost, isn’t it?”
“I guess it is,” Grant said. He took his hand off the other’s shoulder. It was strange that he should feel so terrible about leaving him, after cuckolding him and screwing his wife all those years, but he did. “We’ll go on to New York from Kingston. I don’t know when I’ll ever get back out there to Indiana. Probably I’ll turn the house over to somebody and let them sell its contents and all. I’m going to be in a terrible way for money now. Thanks to Carol.”
“She only got you to buy that place to protect you,” Hunt said. “She only wanted to help you.”
“I’m not sure of that,” Grant said.
“Well, I’m her husband,” Hunt Abernathy said.
“And I’m Lucky’s husband,” Grant said.
Hunt nodded and looked at the ground thoughtfully. Funny, Grant thought it was really where the screwing was that mattered in the end. It was where you were getting laid, and who was laying whom. People Who Fuck Together Stay Together.
“Well, I can drive you to the airport, anyway,” Hunt said after a moment. “How soon do you want to go?”
“Any time,” Grant said. “Right now. It’s almost eight now. We can have dinner out there at the
airport, and then wait in the bar.”
“All right,” Hunt said. “I’ll meet you out front. Are you packed?”
“Should be by now. Where’s Doug?”
“I don’t know,” Hunt Abernathy said gloomily. “I haven’t seen him since—I haven’t seen him since this morning.”
Doug it turned out was at the Cottage with Lucky, when Grant got back to it. Grant was glad that he was. He had handled all this other, the farewells etc., the plane tickets, Hunt, and René, but now when it came to talking to his own wife again after that scene they had had, he found he couldn’t think of one single thing to say. And more, he found that he didn’t want to. His fury and anger with her increased in direct ratio to his swiftly approaching nearness to her, and by the time he stood before the two of them he was almost trembling with it, and not sad, guilty or miserable at all anymore.
She and Doug were sitting in two deep chairs talking calmly out on the green-and-brown-tile floor of the room the pool entered, and which seemed, and felt, like a patio though actually in fact it was not. “Well, it’s all set,” he said. “We have reservations on the midnight plane. The goodbys are all said. We can leave here any time we like. Are the bags packed?” And screw you, he thought.
“Yes, all set,” Lucky said politely, almost even sweetly, even. “I did them while you were in town.” But her eyes were as distant as they could get. She was as far away as the moon. A hell of a lot farther. Hansel and Gretel Light-Years, that happy Navaho Indian couple.
“We can leave right now, then,” Lucky said. She got up, and Doug got up with her.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Grant said crisply. “Hunt wants to drive us to the airport.”
“Hunt?” Lucky said, looking at him with surprise.—Hard to believe, eh? he wanted to say, but didn’t.
“Yes. Hunt. Carol’s husband,” he said instead. “He said he hated to say goodby to me, and he would like to drive us.” It was only a little poetic license. If Hunt hadn’t actually said that, he had certainly meant it, felt it. “He’s already waiting for us out front.”
“I suppose it was self-contained, all in the cards, that something like this had to happen,” Doug said, “but I’m sorry that it did.” Nobody said anything. Looking at him, Grant could not really believe him, somehow. But what did that matter? “I don’t think I’ll come out to the airport with you this trip. But I might drop down to Kingston for a day or two, before I take the straight flight there back to Miami, when I leave. If you want me, that is.”
“We’d be very glad to see you, Doug,” Lucky said politely before Grant could answer. “You’ve been very nice to both of us and have been a great help to us actually.”
“Come on, I’ll help with the bags,” Doug said.
Hunt was waiting for them out on the great loop of driveway as they came out around through the side gate of the villa. In the car Lucky sat between them in the front seat with the bags in the back seat and in the trunk. They were waved away by Doug, Les Wright and Evelyn standing on the steps. But the Count Paul for whatever private reasons of his own had preferred to stay in his tropical greenhouse even though by now it was almost full dark. After he got them started down the winding hill, Hunt turned his grave eyes onto Lucky briefly for a moment and said, “I want to apologize for what Carol did, and said, Lucky. But,” he said, “she’s been having a pretty hard time lately.”
“I guess she has,” Lucky said simply.
“Well, enough of that,” Hunt Abernathy said. That was about all that was said. Grant, sitting with his arm out the open window up to his shoulder to give Lucky more room in the middle, didn’t feel like talking either. It was strange to be sealed off back into his old Single Viewpoint of Life again, after getting so used to their Double, Composite Viewpoint as he had. Absently his mind turned back to one of those nights when they had been still diving on the wreck, and late at night after everybody else had all gone to bed he and Lucky had swum nude again in the pool. They had swum nude other nights, but this night they had made love there, in the water. Proud and confident now of his ability to hold his breath, he had swum down along the bottom from the other end and come up under her in the deep end and buried his face in her crotch. When she made it to the side of the pool, he came up and trapped her against the side of the pool between his arms. Then he had put it in her and holding her with her back against the side of the pool with one arm on either side fucked her invisibly down there in the water while the cool ripples laved her breasts and his shoulders. He had thought then about the incredible suppleness of her body and how she could actually put both feet behind her head and had done it for him once, in the bed. No woman could get physically closer to a man.
At the airport Hunt did not get out. “I won’t get out,” he said. He had pulled up alongside the long brightly lighted open-sided building with the airline companies’ desks strung out all along its back wall. He shook hands with each of them through the open window, Grant lastly. Tears had come into his eyes and were running quietly down his cheeks. Grant saw the look of shock and surprise come into Lucky’s eyes. But when she saw his look at her, she filmed her eyes over for him coldly. They stood like that and watched Hunt Abernathy drive away.
28
THE TEARS IN HUNT abernathy’s eyes glinted, splintered and shivered his eyesight as he pulled the car away from Grant and his new bride, but he waited until he had turned the corner around the parking lot buildings into the exit avenue before slowing down and wiping them out with his thumb because he did not want the two of them to see him do it. But as he did this a sudden breath spurted from his nose in an uncontrollable snort of weeping and new tears spurted into his eyes. He was forced to pull the car off onto the shoulder and stop.
After a moment or two it stopped but this time when he wiped his eyes out he did not go on but simply sat in the car with the motor running, rubbing the center hollow of his palm around and around on the gear-shift knob. He was reasonably certain that Grant meant every word of it about this being the end of the house in Indianapolis, the end of his tenancy in Indiana. On the other hand, he was sure Carol could not have avoided or altered her outspoken little blowup at the Cottage. Patience, suppression had never been Carol’s strong point; her power came from flamboyance, total openness, lack of inhibition; whereas his, Hunt’s, greatest weakness had always been his tendency to almost total inhibition. As she was so fond of telling him. Slowly, with the clutch pedal depressed, he ran the gear lever up through the four forward gear changes and then back down again through all four, 4 to 3 to 2 to 1, while the car remained motionless, its motor still running.
It had been him, Hunt, who had taught Grant to drive. As he had taught Carol. Day after day, year after year even, he had sat beside him (“Riding shotgun!” they had called it) with the then-much-younger Grant at the wheel, drilling and drilling him in every tiniest little thing, on every little or large trip they took. (Such as never taking a curve too fast, so fast that you had to cross over the center line to flatten your arc.) Until finally Grant had become at least as expert a road driver as himself, and perhaps even better. The miles they had put in. And that had been thirteen and fourteen years ago. Slowly Hunt put the car in low and pulled it back out onto the roadway. You didn’t just throw away fourteen years of experiences and memories like that without also uprooting and throwing with it some part of yourself.
The by-now-familiar Jamaican countryside slid past him and his headlights, and Hunt hardly saw it. He was filled up with a totally complete and terrible sadness over the way the world just moved on so inexplicably, and just kept moving on. When this sadness hit him was when he needed a drink bad. There was a flask in the dashboard and he reached for it, gulping down a swallow of raw straight scotch. If asked, he couldn’t have put it into words. He had never had many words. Technical words yes, as an engineering graduate for his work, but not literary words. Like Grant. It was this same attribute of sadness that had first attracted him to Grant. Not so Carol. Sh
e was always sanguine; always had to be optimistic. Not Hunt. The Abernathys were an old, old family of means and position, and decadent because of it. Carol was fresh blood to the likes of the Hunts and the Abernathys.
Grant came of an old, old family too, and maybe that was it. Anyway when he first came out to their house with all those other wounded vets who hung around Hunt and Carol to drink (after all, that was about all they could do for them, wasn’t it? feed them booze?), he had been different. He brooded about it. Those others they all only wanted to forget it as fast as they could. That had been back before the war was even quite finally over.
Hunt didn’t remember quite when he first began to suspect Grant was sleeping with his wife. It was sometime around the time she started taking her car to go up and see him in Chicago, probably. Ron was still in Great Lakes Station in the hospital then, and could only get one weekend pass a month. Letters came in from him for Carol quite often, but then she was always getting letters from lots of the other kids, too. Hunt of course would never allow himself to look at any of them. And she was always taking her car and going off on trips, to visit a sister, or go see one of her brothers stationed somewhere in the Army. How could he know? Then somebody said they had seen her in Chicago. But he still didn’t know. She had used to go to Chigaco shopping every now and then. And he could hardly suspect her of it. She had never been what anybody could call oversexed. Though, of course, he knew she was interested in literature and the theater like Grant. But he didn’t really know. And if he did anything about it, and it was so, other people would know.
Then Grant had come home to Indianapolis to stay with them after his discharge. He stayed a month or six weeks, Hunt thought, and during that time he wrote three one-act plays. Then he went off for New York for his final year of school. He had brought enormous energy into the house. And he was more uninhibited than Carol even. Hunt had never seen anyone with so much energy. And he was funny. He had them both laughing out loud a good deal of the time. His parents were dead and the rest of his family scattered, the only relation he had in Indianapolis now was a first cousin and his wife, and they were now poor after the ’29 Crash as were all of the others. It was rather like having a son in the house. Of course there were looks and little gestures that passed between them. Some of the time. Once in a while. Hunt could not fail to notice those. But if they were sleeping together they kept it very private and were very discreet about it. There was no gossip. All that would come much later. And he didn’t really know. And then of course Grant left for New York. Maybe the truth was that he didn’t really want to know.
