Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  He had stayed with them in Indianapolis, he remembered, just a little over two months. Two months and two weeks, to be exact, before he knew he was going to have to leave. He had waked up suddenly in the night knowing that he had to get out, had to leave. There was a powerful feeling in him that his manhood was being affected by living in Hunt Abernathy’s house while having an affair with Hunt Abernathy’s wife; but he did not tell this to Carol when he told her he had to leave. He said it was to finish school. He had enough separation pay left to keep him going in New York until he could register and start collecting from the government under the Public Law 16 for disabled veterans. Grant, in the plane, suddenly remembered that it had been Hunt who had driven him to the station that time also.

  There had been enough precedent for him to stay, actually. And Hunt himself had actually asked him to stay, or at least had indicated in that tightly inhibited way of his that he would like for him to stay on. Grant knew there were two other childless couples in town—or in that part of town, that set, in which the Abernathys moved—who had young men living with them who wanted to be artists or writers and who were pretty obviously the lovers of the mistresses of the homes they stayed in. So that part of it was all right. But Grant still felt he had to leave.

  He had lasted three months in New York before he had had to send up the call for help, and it was the worst period of his life. Worse than the war even. And he knew also when he did send out his call for help that he was licked, that if ever the opportunity to live with the Abernathys cropped up again, he would take it and be glad of the chance.

  After registering at the University and getting himself into the Public Law 16 program with the Veterans Administration, he had taken a tiny room in a sixth-floor walkup cold-water flat on West 63rd just off Columbus Circle. This belonged to a Swedish immigrant woman who could hardly speak any English, a widow, who sat up all night sewing piecework to make her own ends meet before going off to her regular job in the morning. The poor, miserable, totally hopeless conditions of this poor woman’s life seemed to reflect in and color his own in the mean, cold, hatefilled, muddy streets of the city. And it was here Carol Abernathy found him, without a doctor and sick in bed with the flu compounded by a return of the malaria he had contracted in the Pacific, two weeks after a healthy Grant had sent off his letter appeal.

  He supposed he was in love with her, at the time. It was as if after giving up Billie Wrights, with whom he had been so completely and sexually compatible, he had, all totally unwittingly at the time, put all of his eggs in the one basket of Carol Abernathy. With whom, he rediscovered very quickly, he was not sexually compatible at all. And never mind the age discrepancy. She had nursed him, got him back on his feet and back to school, had with the fifteen hundred dollars Hunt had given her plus a little of her own found a nice little two-room apartment further uptown, and stayed with him there for three months until he had a shortlived (weekend) affair with a young unmarried woman from the floor above, whereupon she had taken her group of occult books she had been buying up down on Fourth Avenue and returned to Hunt in Indianapolis, causing Grant to have to give up the apartment for a tiny room again.

  And it wasn’t only all of that. There were other things bugging him. He was not at all sure for quite a long while whether he might not be losing his mind. At the University, where when they saw his work they had immediately shot him up to their most advanced workshop in writing and play-writing, he found nobody could help him with his playwriting, teach him anything about playwriting that he did not already know; and all that he did know was still not enough. More, none of the professors or students he talked to seemed real. None of the women he slept with seemed real. It was as if, terrified, he was afraid he might push his finger or his hand clean through one of them. He made the Dean’s List both semesters, and was graduated with honors at the end of the year, and he couldn’t have cared less. About the only good thing to come out of the whole year was his meeting Gibson & Kline. He had been more than glad to return to the safety of the Abernathy menage after that, though by now there was really no question at all of his being in love with Carol Abernathy.

  God!

  The lights in the plane went up, and Grant left off thinking of all that stuff. He had not thought so honestly or deeply of that horrible year in New York for a very long time, or of the fact that it was at that time, while she was living with him in New York, that Carol Abernathy first began to get messages by opening at random a book called Hermes Trismegatus which was some 19th Century occult lady’s journal. Had he caused her to go nutty? That was one of those things he hated even to think about and tried to avoid. But now he had to face up to it that he might have. Well, if he had, he had. Even though, if he had, he didn’t care. It all still seemed so unreal. He had not been able to stomach New York since then, despite all the success, until he had met Lucky. Beside him, he noted, she seemed to be asleep. They were coming into Montego Bay where just about a month ago he had met her down here with Doug. Since they were going to be on the ground only ten minutes, he did not touch her or try to wake her, but he was not absolutely sure she was asleep.

  He managed to doze a little bit himself on the longer flight to Kingston. Then René was meeting them with the Crount’s fringed, pink and white striped jeep, and driving them back along the flat, scrubby, sea-smelly spit in the deep-night dark. Lucky’s eyes did not appear to be at all sleep-swollen, like his own felt, Grant noticed.

  “Hokay,” René said from the wheel. “W’at eez all zees trouble now, hein? Tell me.”

  Grant was sitting in the back with the bags. He decided not to say anything at all. Lucky apparently decided the same thing. The silence ran on.

  “Wat ’ave ’appen up zere in GaBay weez zees Meesus Abernathy to make you change all zee trip an’ all zee plan?” René persisted. “Some’sing ’appen. II faut tell Papa René, babies.”

  “This son of a bitch took me up there to be friends with— to live with—his mistress,” Lucky said in an icily bitter voice. “That’s what happened. Without even telling me one word. When everybody else around the place knew all about it, and were laughing at me behind my back. That’s what happened.”

  “Ah, ho!” René exclaimed, and chuckled. “Ronnie eez zee foxy grandpaw, hein? Just like all zee men.”

  “Just like all the men,” Lucky said flatly. “Exactly. Just like all the men. Except for you, René.”

  “Ahhh, cherie,” René said with a deep Gallic sadness. He drove with both hands high on the skinny jeep wheel, hunched forward at the shoulders, and now between the hunched shoulders he shook his crinkly Jewish head with a great sorrowfulness, making it look as though he were repeatedly peering at first one hand then the other. But he did not elaborate. “Een any case, you two mus’ not let go of to t’row away w’at you ’ave foun’ just when it is beginning starting.”

  “That’s just it,” Lucky said coldly. “It never did start. It never got started. Because it was all a big lie from the very beginning.”

  “Zee life eez not for long,” René said. “An’ most of time ’ee’s hard. Eet is maybe better in zee long run ’ave a marriage who eez zee frien’ instead of who eez zee lovair.”

  “How can you be a friend to somebody who lies to you?” Lucky said. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life before.”

  “Ronnie ’ave zee problems, cherie,” René said softly, “weez zees Time-man give ’eem ’ard time down ’ere. You know zat.”

  Lucky did not answer this.

  “We ’ave know you for long time ’ere, cherie, non? ’Ow long? Plenty years. We ’ave always love you. But you remember zee time Raoul leave you ’ere, go back to Sout’ Amerique, and you start running h’around weez zat other fellow? You ’member ’ow queeck Raoul snap you out h’of ’ere back to New York?”

  Lucky’s voice got sullen, very sullen, and from behind her Grant could see the sullenness in the stiffness of her neck and head. “That’s not the same. Not at all the same. I w
asn’t married. And Raoul was going off leaving me all the time. I haven’t left Ron since I very first met him—except when he kept sending me away. Because he didn’t know what to do with his goddamned mistress!”

  Grant leaned forward, stung, with a contorted face. He spoke to René, but what he said was for Lucky to hear. “That’s not the truth. That’s not even anywhere near the truth. The truth is I wanted to come on this diving junket alone because I knew if I brought any other extraneous element into it, a girl, it would all blow up. And that’s just what it’s doing: blowing itself right up in my face. I’d been protecting those people for years. I had to. How did I know when I met her and fell— How did I know when I met her what kind of— Or how to—”

  “What kind of New York broad!” Lucky interposed bitterly, “you mean. What kind of easy lay New York hooker!”

  “We not talk more,” René said softly. “Lisa wait at zee ’otel for ’ave a drink wiz us. Lucky, w’en we ’ave your marriage ’ere weez us in zee ’otel, we sink eez best t’ing ever ’appen for you and are verry ’appy. For you and Ronnie both tous les deux. Lisa say ’zees ’eez zee marri-age made in ’eaven.’” His voice was low and sad.

  “Sure,” Lucky said in a stony voice entirely different from her near-shouting voice of a moment or two before, and bobbed her small blonde head sharply, cynically, several times, making the champagne-colored hair swing, and from behind her Grant watched it swing. He was furious with her, and at the same time deeply hurt, more hurt he thought than he had perhaps ever felt about anything, and he watched the blonde hair swing, sadly and unhappily.

  At the hotel Lisa was waiting for them in the bar. The oldest of her three sons was sitting with her, and except for two small parties of three most all of the clients had already gone off to bed. Lisa had had quite a few drinks waiting and her lovely dark eyes were hazy, but not so hazy that she couldn’t tell immediately when she saw them that something was seriously wrong.

  “We don’t talk about heem now,” René warned her. “Is too late. Everybody tired. We ’ave zee one drink.”

  It was a pretty gloomy drink. And neither Grant nor Lucky did much to alleviate its gloom. Lucky tried several times to talk normally to Lisa, but it was not a very good effort, and anyway Lisa was more than a little loaded. Grant caught her eyes glinting angrily several times when she looked at him. Upstairs, the houseboys had put their bags back into their old suite and laid out their things. Somebody had even taken out the center bedside table and pushed the two double beds back together for them the way they had liked them. A nice ironic gesture, Grant thought, under the circumstances.— “I’m going right to sleep,” Lucky said in a very distant, explanatory voice. “I’m terribly beat and worn out”— “You do that,” he said. He had carted a bottle up from the bar by its neck for just such a contingency, and he sat on the bed edge drinking from it in one of the toothbrush glasses, mixing it with the French-style bottled water, and trying to read. In GaBay he had picked up a new travel book on the Caribbean Islands called The Traveller’s Tree by an Englishman named Fermor, a good finely written book but he found it exceedingly hard to concentrate on it. That beautiful body had begun to taunt him already. Well what the hell, he could take it for longer than that. After a while he switched off the light and just lay waiting to sleep, trying to sleep, which was always the worst way. Finally he dropped off.

  The next day they found, as soon as they came down, that even in just the short time they had been gone the social façade of the hotel had changed considerably. The famous musical comedy writer and her husband had gone back to New York. The famous fag conductor and his wife had departed also a few days later. A famous, fairly young, male movie star and his actress wife had arrived from the West Coast for a three weeks’ stay between shootings, and both were the main center of attention in the bar evenings, where both played the hearty, hale-fellow-well-met role to perfection. René was running around trying to find a suitable suite to name after them, since the one they were in was already named the Charlie Addams suite. Bradford Heath the Time-man and his wife had left for New York only two days before. The Grants—as even Lucky apparently now thought of them, despite everything—were glad of this. Only the young analyst and his designer wife were still there from the “old days” of before.

  Perhaps that was all it was, really: that they were, now, “The Grants.” Just the simple inertia of life worked at keeping them married now that they were married, as that same inertia worked at keeping them unmarried as long as they were unmarried. In any case, they had decided to have breakfast out on the big livingroom-porch of the suite that first day rather than have to go down and have to face a lot of new people, and it was while they were doing this that Lucky made the speech she had so obviously been thinking about and preparing.

  “We’ll keep up appearances,” she said from across the snowy tablecloth while dawdling with half a grapefruit. “That’s very important to me. I don’t like acting out scenes of my private life in front of other people, or having them know all about what my private life is like. There’s no reason to let all those goddamned people down there know what’s going on between us. Is that all right with you? And you can fuck me whenever you want to. Since you’re paying the bills. That’s only fair. When you want to, you tell me.”

  “Okay,” Grant said dryly. “But you don’t mind if I don’t do it now, do you? Since I’m all already dressed and all?”

  His irony did not apparently reach her, and she stared back at him across the table wide-eyed and somber. “I don’t know how to explain it to you, or even if you’re interested enough to want to know. But when I found out you lied to me like that—and about a thing that—something just happened to me.”

  “I didn’t have to tell you,” Grant interjected quietly.

  “I know. Probably you shouldn’t have. I might have gotten along all right if you hadn’t. Anyway, now it’s something I can’t help. I don’t have any control over it. I thought it was all pure, pure and straight. But if you can lie to me like that about that you can lie to me about anything anytime. You’ll always be able to lie to me, anytime it suits your needs. I don’t think I love you anymore. I’m going to ask Ben and Irma to lunch with us, if that’s all right with you.”

  “All right” Grant said. “But I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to say. I think this is a very adolescent way of looking at it all. You’re not taking into account any of the pressures that were working on me, nor any of the past I had been through before I even met you. And not only that, for some time after I met you, because there was no way of my knowing then even after I fell in love with you that I was ever going to love you enough to marry you. Also, there’s no reason to suppose that you, who love to flirt over and brag about all your four hundred love affairs—”

  “Four hundred men,” Lucky interjected. “Not four hundred love affairs.”

  “Excuse me,” Grant said politely. “Four hundred men. No reason to suppose that, with that you would think this thing of mine so horrible. You should be more sophisticated than that. There’s something about your reaction to what I told you that just doesn’t have any handle I can grasp or get hold of. Hell, I thought you’d laugh about it. It just doesn’t make sense, and I can’t understand it.” He stopped. “Them’s my comments,” he said.

  Lucky was sitting quietly, as if waiting politely for him to finish. “I can’t help the way I am,” she said, now that he had. “And I’m not a bum. My family had more money, and lived richer and higher and with more culture, than yours ever did even before your old, Old-American grandfather lost all his money in the Crash. Don’t you ever forget that. Is it all right about Ben and Irma for lunch?”

  “It is,” Grant said, getting up. “Is one o’clock all right? And now I’m going to go for a long walk along the beach.”

  “I’ll see you down on the terrace by the pool then,” Lucky said with complete calm. “Please do try and get back by one.”

  Ben the analyst s
poke to him as he made his way out through the hotel, and even offered to go along as if he too knew there was something wrong (had he been talking to René?), but Grant put him off. The sea was as flat as a pancake and the sun was heavy and hot, but with a mid-, mid-late-morning freshness that was exceedingly pleasant to the body’s senses. If not the mind’s. Ha. The water made tiny rushing, then receding noises, then interspersed these with tinier, very small sucking kissing sounds, forming a three-beat definite, predictable rhythm in the sun-quiet. He walked barefoot along the more packed, still moist sand the tide had leveled and compacted, walking eastward toward the airport and the mainland rather than westward toward Port Royal. Eastward, there was absolutely nothing for miles and miles. This was serious. This wasn’t any of their quick hot violent fights and quarrels they’d had before. Finally he sat a while in the shade of a single royal palm with his back against the rough trunk, looking out to sea. To the south and eastward it ran on forever, calm as a pasture under the sun. In the slightly cooler shade the skin under his eyes and on his cheekbones felt hot and pink as if he’d been eating Mexican tamales. After a while he got up and started back. He had come to no decision. What decision was there to come to? If any decision had come at all, it was that he would wait it out a while. If he had learned anything at all from his fourteen years with Carol Abernathy, and sundry other temporaries, it was that no matter how bitter the fight or how long, it was only when one or the other of the parties started stepping out, having affairs and actual sex contact outside, that it was all really finished. That was what broke the contact. And the contract. He had force-trained his mind that he would never again be the first to do that. When he got back to the hotel and made his way to the pool, he found them all sitting there laughing and drinking Campari-soda, and Jim Grointon he noted was with them, sitting at the pool edge with his knees pulled up and smiling his slow smile. They shook hands warmly, but Grant was not at all glad to see him there at the moment.