Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  It was inevitable that a serious confrontation should take place between Grant and the famous, newly arrived male movie star. The famous Playwright and the famous Star could not just put up at the same chic little resort hotel and ignore each other. On the other hand, neither could one of them just go up and say hello to the other, and have it appear that he instead of the other was soliciting acquaintance. Protocol was involved. It had to be arranged. Grant, over lunch with his little band of partisans, which now only included Ben the analyst and his wife Irma, Lucky, Jim Grointon, and Lisa (René was off working), decided that for him cocktail time would be the best, preferably twenty minutes before dinner time, so that they two protagonists would not have to confront each other too long. Word of this, via Lisa, whose invitation it would be, was sent off to the Star, who obligingly sent back word via Lisa that he and his wife would be glad to accept the host’s (René’s) invitation to meet the Playwright and his wife at that time, but could they possibly make it twenty minutes earlier as the Star and his wife unfortunately had another cocktail date just before dinner. To this Grant equally obligingly sent back word, via Lisa, that that would be just fine. And so it was arranged. And so it was that at exactly 8:10 P.M. the Playwright and four friends and the Star and four friends met at the stand-up bar three-fourths of which had been reserved and somewhat blocked off unobtrusively by tables and provided by Lisa with canapés, and (while René took pictures) were introduced, smiled at each other, shook hands in a friendly way, complimented each other upon each’s various works, kidded each other a little to show that while famous they were still regular fellows, talked cautiously a little about Art, Artistry and future prospects, drank two cautious drinks apiece, and then went severally their several ways to eat and drink privately in relief. If the Star had another cocktail date, he forgot it. On the terrace-diningroom both remembered to smile and nod at the other in thanks for an encounter which had meant exactly nothing.

  The Star, who had beautiful and marvelously corded abdominal muscles, largely because he carried a bongo board with him and did one hundred to one hundred and fifty sit-ups on it every day, had been, Grant learned the next day from Jim Grointon, going out with Jim diving just about every day since he had been here. He had done some diving on the West Coast apparently, both with lung and without, and could do about forty or forty-five feet free-diving, but he was not anywhere near the diver Grant was—Jim said. “He just aint got the real passion for it like you have,” Jim grinned, “and what he does he does about two-thirds of for show.” An irritating egotism made Grant, though vastly irritated by the egotism, vastly pleased by this. Especially since he knew the Star was at least four years his junior. But it was hard for anything to please Grant for more than a few seconds just now. It was unbelievable how much misery he, one, could go through in just a few minutes, while sitting and talking, or eating, or having a drink, while—in short—pretending to be normal. But he was not going to give in.

  “I’d ask you to come along with us in the afternoons,” Jim said. “But I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to come if he knew you were coming. And especially after he saw you dive. And I’d uh just hate to lose the business. And he’s gonna be here three more weeks. I could take you out mornings though.” He was charging the Star more than twice as much as he had charged Grant “That’s the racket,” he shrugged with a grin.

  “It’s all right,” Grant said. “I don’t really feel much like diving now anyway. This trip.” And he didn’t. He didn’t feel like doing anything, much. And not even the thought of diving carried any savor. Irritation. Anger. Fury. Depression. Misery. Gloom. These he had, especially the anger. But not pleasure. But he was not going to give in. And he was not going to let it show. He was not going to let his lack of pleasure show. He made trips with Ben and Irma and Lucky to Blue Mountain Inn, to Stony Hill to Strawberry Hill, to the Pine Grove Hotel. They borrowed a car from René and drove up the hot dry valley to Spanishtown and beyond it to Bog Walk, the land here so dry and deserty compared to the lush vegetation of the windward side which got the rain. Another time they took a car and drove clear across the central mountains to the Fern Gully and Ocho Rios and stayed the night in Ocho Rios, coming back the next day. They took lunch here, had dinner there. They drove in to the Sheraton Hotel in town where Grant and Ben could dive off the three-meter board. Usually the four of them dined at the hotel, and went afterwards to the tiny clandestine little (and strictly illegal) “Casino” gambling joint where René had got them cards. Lucky, it turned out, was an excellent crapshooter. Ben was a good chemin de fer player.

  Ben Spicehandler (which name being an Americanization of his Jewish grandfather’s original Polish name) and his wife had been in Jamaica at the Crount for over a month, and planned to stay at least another month. So they would certainly be there at least as long as Lucky and Grant chose to stay, and this was probably a good thing Grant thought. They made the perfect and always ready, buffer for the Grants at this particular stage of the game. Ben made so much money as an analyst in New York that he only needed to work nine months a year, so the other three months of each year he and Irma took off and traveled. “After all,” as he himself lugubriously said with his broadfaced, narroweyed grin that made a washboard of his forehead, “we aint none of us gittin any younger.” This year, having heard so much about it for the past two years in New York, they had decided on the Crount and Jamaica, and as Grant had already thought, it was probably a good thing for the Grants. Ben and Irma were always ready to go anywhere and do anything that any one of the four of them thought up. A compulsive humanist who had once studied to be a rabbi, Ben was a tall hulking fellow of Grant’s age, thirty-five, an excellent swimmer and fair springboard diver, who could never think about anything seriously except helping people. That he made so much money at it was due to another, economically thoughtful side of his nature, which came from his paternal grandmother, he said. And, at the moment, he had made it his vacation project to help the Grants.

  “Look,” he said to Grant, on the first occasion of his offer of help, and as he was to say again many times later. “Look, buddy. I know you guys’re havin some kind o’ trouble.” (He came originally from Indiana.) “It don’t take much to see that.” He bent down from his greater height and narrowed his eyes slyly and grinned and bobbed his head seriously several times. “Now any time you want, anything I can do to help you and Lucky or both of you, you just tell me. Me and Irma like both of you a lot, see? Anything you want to talk about, you just tell me.”

  Grant had thanked him and said there wasn’t anything wrong.

  “Okay. Okay. Well now you just remember see?” Ben said, and narrowed his eyes and grinned and thrust forward his head.

  “What the fuck?” Grant said irritably. “Do you carry a portable analyst’s couch with you wherever you go? I can’t afford your prices anyway.”

  “Never min’,” the analyst grinned. “If you need us, you just tell us. Me an’ Irma’ll be there.”

  And they were. Ready to do whatever and whenever anything Grant or Lucky thought up to do. They even came up with a wealth of ideas of their own, in order to keep the Grants occupied. And the tiny Irma, dark and almost Oriental-looking with her black bangs, huge bun of hair on the top of her head, and her crazy witch’s cackle of a laugh coming out of her bunched-up mobile face, was at least as loyal to this vacation project as was Ben. They would cancel or postpone any dates or plans of their own, make enemies even, at a moment’s notice, whenever the Grants had anything or anyplace they wanted to do or go.

  It was after six full days of this kind of perpetual preoccupation that Lucky loosened up a little, or so Grant thought at the time. But it turned out that she hadn’t. They had gone up to the suite for siesta after a long and fairly heavy-drinking lunch, preparatory to going off to play tennis with Ben and Irma in town. Grant had been seven days now without getting laid and he was getting a bit horny. He had even taken to looking covetously at Lisa’s beautiful unatt
atched Haitian friend Paule Gordon (known everywhere locally around the hotel as the “Black Swan”), and maybe that had something to do with it, maybe Lucky had seen him eyeing her. She was lying on the bed and called to him.

  “What?” he said.

  “I said you may make love to me, if you like.”

  “Ha,” Grant said. “Thanks a lot. Thanks but I’ve never got heated up over that kind of an invitation.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, shut up and come on and fuck me,” Lucky said.

  “I don’t know if I can,” Grant said honestly.

  “Here,” she said. “Try.”

  He found that he could.

  “You may be my husband, and I may not love you, but I still like to fuck,” Lucky said. “Ah. Ah. That’s it. Ah.”

  “Go to hell,” Grant said in a pillow-muffled voice. His orgasm was an explosion. Explosion was the only word for it. Like bombbursts he had seen at sea that you could feel coming toward you, then they hit you, and if you turned around, if you had the time, you could see them going away, disappearing over the water.

  “Now get off of me, you mean no-good son of a bitch,” Lucky said. It was not exactly the thing to say if she wanted a reconciliation, but apparently she really didn’t want one.— “Just call me Rhett Butler.” Grant said and rolled away.—“I really do hate your guts, you know,” Lucky said. “I really do.” Grant slept peacefully.

  The next afternoon at siesta time she announced that she wanted an orgasm herself. “I’m going to play with myself,” she said. “I don’t give a damn what you do. You can watch, or go away, or do whatever the hell you like.”

  “Then I’ll play with myself too,” Grant said.

  “I don’t give a damn what you do,” Lucky said fingering herself. Then she began to breathe through her teeth.

  But none of this ‘renewed sex play’ made them come any closer together. One would have thought it would. But It, the thing, was still there. The kernel, the nut, the rock, the hard core. Of whatever it was. Between them. They were actually not in love. Grant did not know what it was with Lucky— anymore—but for himself he was too angry to love anything. And he was not getting any nearer to New York and the rehearsals of his play. Actually, they would not begin for another month at least. But he still wasn’t getting any nearer them. And he was not getting any nearer to writing on another, newer play.

  The showdown fight with René and Lisa came three days after. Grant had been expecting it for five.

  It was a curious scene. There were just the four of them, it was late and the bar was empty, even the faithful Ben and Irma had ambled (in the case of Ben) and flittered (in the case of Irma) away to bed. It was Lisa who started it. She had had quite a few drinks. And suddenly all the flashing anger that had been in her eyes so many times when she looked at Grant escaped the cage—herself—in which she had so obviously tried so hard to contain it.

  “You’re a no-good son of a bitch!” she said suddenly and unequivocally to Grant, leaning across the table on her elbow and pointing with her other arm. “No man has the right to do what you did to Lucky. To any woman.”

  “Go and fuck yourself,” Grant said bluffly. He had had quite a few drinks himself. “It’s none of your fucking business.”

  “’Ere now. ’Ere now,” René said. He had had quite a few drinks too.

  “Tell ’im!” Lucky said. She was drunk. “Tell ’im, Lisa! Tell ’im what it’s like to be a goddamned woman!”

  “I’ll tell ’im!” Lisa said. “I’m making it my business!” she said to Grant. Suddenly, all in one gesture, she raised her elbows and flapped her arms hiking her brightly colored blouse up her back so she could lean across the table even further and at the same time stuck out her lower lip and blew a loose strand of her long black hair back out of her eyes. “Do you know who you’re messing around with when you mess around with this girl? This girl is a lady. You don’t take a lady to meet your ex-mistress without telling her about it beforehand! You don’t! And let her think it’s your goddamned mother!”

  “Foster-mother,” Grant said. “Now shut the fuck up.”

  “I’ll not shut up!” Lisa cried. “I’m defending this girl. Nobody else will.”

  “She’s no goddam plaster saint,” Grant grunted.

  “That’s neither here nor there, you bastard,” Lisa said. “You men. You goddam men. You goddam fucking men!” Even loaded, it was clear it cost her a considerable effort to get that word out. “You all want us to be so goddam pure! You demand that all of us be pure! And you! All you want then is some skinny hipbone-sticking hotassed twenty-year-old torso to rub yourselves against. But let that torso get a little old, put on a little fat around the hipbones, have three or four kids and break down those tight vaginal walls! and you don’t mellow with it. Oh, no! You’re right back out looking for another hipbone torso! Men, shit,” Lisa cried, and sat back triumphantly.

  Somewhat loaded though he was, Grant did not fail to notice this sudden switch in emphasis. Whether she realized it or not, she had moved on from Lucky’s complaints to what were so obviously her own. Remembering René’s said “Ahhh, cherie!” in the jeep when Lucky had told him he was different from other men, Grant thought that for the sake of his friend René he ought not to make any comment at this point, and so he kept his mouth shut.

  René, however, was there to fill the breech. He too clearly had caught the switch in emphasis. “Eez all verry well for you holler,” he said hotly. “You an’ Lucky. Ronnie ’ave zee problems you don’ ’ave. You don’ want ave, eezair! Mais ’ee ’ave ze problems of zee responsability and of zee loyalty. Zee women, zay never compren zat.” He had drawn himself up in his chair to his full height of five-three, and his hard tight round little belly was pressed against the table edge. “Because zee women are toujours zay animal. W’at you want her?” he cried with Gallic passion. “’Ee marry ’er! ’Ee take over, take on, ’er responsability! W’at you want of ’eem? But w’en ’ee try be hon-or-able avec zee ozzer woman, ’oo ’ee owe somet’ing, hein, you say he dirty bum. Merde! Tu me fais chier! You make me shit!”

  “He should have told her!” Lisa cried. “He married her under false pretenses!”

  “Wot you care, false pre-tenses? Zee marri-age eez zee marri-age,” René shouted back.

  “You don’t take a young girl’s heart and play with it!” Lisa cried.

  “You don’t take zee man’s cock an’ play weez heem eezair!” René hollered. “Malheureusement!”

  “I don’t care!” Lisa shouted at him. “If I was her, and he did to me what he did to her, I would feel like a whore!”

  “You are whore!” René shouted furiously. “All women are zee whore! Because zay are zee women! Eez zee nature! An’ w’y not?”

  The word whore struck a serious chord in Grant, but he couldn’t place it in the right connection, or connect it. He filed it away to think about. Then he gave himself up pleasantly to listening to the big fight being conducted on his (and from the other side, on Lucky’s) behalf. It was sort of like a sort of verbal mixed doubles tennis match with the males on one side and the females on the other. Lucky, sitting across the table from him, at the side of Lisa, listened with a fixed bright-eyed drunken attention, turning her head from one shouting friend to the other as if listening with interest and curiosity to the life story of two strangers.

  It didn’t go on very much longer. Three or four more shouted exchanges between the ex-Frenchman and his wife, and then René stood up. “Eez enough! We finish nossing. Eez zee time to zee bed.”

  “You’re damn right you finish nothing,” Grant put in, gathering himself to get up. “And in any case it’s none of your goddamned business anyway, either one of you.” He never did make it to his feet, and in what followed relapsed back into his chair in a slack-muscled disbelief and astonishment.

  “You! You!” Lisa howled suddenly, and jumping up held out her arm, index finger extended like the parent in the melodrama when the daughter comes home wit
h a baby. “You! You no-good son of a bitch! You bastard! You get out of my hotel! You do not spend another night under my roof! Get out! I mean it! Get out of my hotel!”

  Grant was too flabbergasted even to react. “Are you kidding?” he said.

  “’Ere now! ’Ere now!” René said, putting out his hand.

  “You just get him out of here!” Lisa yelled. She had dropped her arm, now she raised it again, stiff as a board right out to the index fingertip. “Out! Get out! Out! Get out!”

  And it was just here, precisely as if she were waking up from a nap, that Lucky got into the act. Blinking, she turned on Lisa slowly, at first echoing Grant: “Are you kidding? Listen, do you know who you’re talking to? You’re talking to the best playwright in America of his generation. You’re talking to the best playwright America has had since O’Neill probably! Who are you telling to get out?”

  “You can stay,” Lisa said. “I want you to stay. You stay with us.”

  “Are you nuts?” Lucky said disbelievingly. “He’s my husband! I’m his wife! You’re crazy!”

  “He’s hurt you terribly,” Lisa said. “And he had no right.” Then she began to shout again. “And I don’t give a good goddam how good a goddam playwright he is! Out! Get out!”

  “Please, please, ’ere, ’ere,” René was pleading.

  “He can—” Lisa was shouting.

  “Come on,” Lucky said grimly. Grant was still sitting dumbly in his chair, and she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. “We’re getting out of this. I don’t have to take that kind of shit from anybody.” Forcefully she propelled him toward the stairway still holding him by the arm. “We’re leaving.”

  “Oh, come on,” Grant protested feebly. “Are you goofy? It’ll all be over by in the morning. Let’s go to bed.” All he could think about at the moment was sweet sweet sleep.