by James Jones
Grant, who had always been a counter-puncher, whose very nature it was to be a counter-puncher, said as he rolled away, “Maybe we could figure out some system of payment.”
“What?”
“I mean, like so much for an ordinary lay, so much for a blow job, so much if I blow you. Then you could have your own cash, your own allowance.” He had had about all of this that he wanted to take.
Lucky was eyeing him coolly with cold eyes. “That’s not a bad idea,” she said, thoughtfully.
“Oh, come off it!” Grant suddenly found himself leveling, something he had carefully promised himself he would not do. “Look, how long is this going to go on? I told you the truth. Because I thought I owed it to you. And because I thought it would help you. Help you understand something. Now how long is this going to go on?”
“You didn’t tell me the truth very damn quickly, though, did you?” Lucky said. “Oh, I’d like to forget it,” she said, in that kind of child’s wail he had often heard her speak in in earlier, happier days. “I’d like to. I want to. I really do. But I can’t. Maybe there’s something wrong with me?”
Without answering this Grant got out of bed. There was a bottle and soda on the table across the room. “Maybe we better have a nightcap drink,” he said. Pride. Oh, damn pride, fuck pride! Lucky accepted the remark, and the drink, in cold silence.
It all came to a head the next night. This was the eve of Doug’s departure on the noon flight the next day, and somehow or other it all caught up with Grant that evening. He would never be sure just how much of it Doug was responsible for. But in the end that didn’t really matter. In the end everybody had to account for what he did and said himself. Jim Grointon had had dinner with them again, of course, and then stayed on to drink with them because it was Doug’s last night and he wanted to make a good goodby for him and because he really, as he said, hated to see old Doug go. They had all been out together on the catamaran that afternoon. In the end they four outstayed everybody so that finally there were only the four of them around a table and Sam the bartender left in the bar.
Lucky had been unusually scintillating even for her, keeping them all laughing with her wit and offbeat, iconoclastic (and generally sexual) humor and remarks. When she was like that, laughing openly and throwing back her head to shake that champagne-colored hair, almost nothing could be as beautiful and as desirable. Finally she had told again the story that Grant had heard only once before (on their long drive down to Florida), and to which he could only give the Thurberesque title The Night Somebody Peed or Peed Not in the Holy Water. They were shooting one of those saccharine nun’s pictures in the Fifth Avenue cathedral for some bigtime Hollywood producer or other, and they had to shoot in the wee hours of the morning so they could have the cathedral empty. They had this horrible sickly-sweet lady star, one of those like Loretta Young had been for the last generation, playing the nun. Lucky and all the other young bit players had had to stand around in the cold while they shot the star over and over to be sure they had all her profiles right. All of them were sickened by it and stood around making cracks about the church and Madison Avenue, and somebody had a flask to warm them up, and at one point Lucky said she wished she was a boy, and had a thing, she’d pee in the holy water. Some Italian boy who also had had a lousy Catholic background piped up and said he would do it, but he would have to get paid in case he got caught and got fired off the picture. So Lucky had bet him her night’s pay (and they were getting double time because of the hour!) that he wouldn’t do it. He had done it (it was dark right then at the back of the church), and she had had to pay him her double-time night’s wages. But it had been worth it when later they shot (over and over, of course, to get her profiles right) the sweet sweet star blessing herself in that same font of holy water with pee in it. They almost all got fired for giggling. Grant seemed to remember that the first time he had heard the story the Italian boy had chickened out and had not peed in the holy water, and she had not lost but had won a night’s pay of double time. And he remembered nothing about the star blessing herself. But it didn’t matter. Even Sam the bartender at the bar was laughing to himself behind his subterfuge of the glass polishing. And Grant remarked the looks of total admiration—and sort of awed disbelief that anything as outrageous and lovely as she could actually exist—on the faces of Doug and Jim. It was those looks that prompted him to say what he said.
“It’s too bad,” he said with his nose in his glass. “Too bad old Doug has to be leavin tomorrow. Now you’ll only have two of us in love with you.”
It wasn’t just only the looks. It was also everything that had happened to them, so suddenly and so strangely, since he had told her about Carol Abernathty. It was a whole host of things, resentments, including Lisa’s cackling story about Jim and the ‘diving couple,’ and Doug’s comment the day before on the homebound ship. She could be so damned infuriatingly attractive. And of course he was drunk.
“What?” Lucky had flushed crimson. “What? Two lovers?”
“O’ course there’s always old Ben,” Grant said maliciously. “And René.”
Lucky was blushing. “I only told the truth. A true story.”
“Hell’s bells, that’s all right!” Grant said. “I only told the truth too. Well, look at them! They’d both give anything they got to screw you!” He had told the truth.
Slowly Lucky looked at the other two men.
“Isn’t it?” Grant said.
Doug came up with a half-guilty smile and washboarded his forehead at her. “He’s right. At least he’s right as far as I’m concerned.”
Jim Grointon said nothing, and only smiled his slow Irish-cop’s smile.
“’Course, unluckily for us, he got you first, honey,” Doug grinned. Jim Grointon still said nothing, and only smiled, that same slow smile, as if he had the situation well under control.
“What the hell?” Grant growled.
“I guess it’s time to knock it off,” Doug said lightly. “I got to be out of this stinkin joint by about eleven.” He got up.
Lucky got up too. She shook back her pale-blonde hair and laughed. “Well, see you all tomorrow. We’ll all see you off, Doug.”
Then Grant and Jim got up. Grant watched the diver closely, all ready to really swing hard on his smug cop’s smile if he made one wrong move, but Jim seemed to sense this and backed off easily, and confidently. “Good night,” was all he said.
When they were in the suite and she had gotten into her robe, Lucky sat down at the dressing table and began to brush her hair furiously. Grant got out of his clothes and got himself a drink and sat down on the bed and stared back at her in the mirror. Okay, so she was pissed off at him. He still had told the truth. Always tell the truth.
In the mirror Lucky took her eyes off him and focused them on her hair. She had on her face that same strange veiled look he had been seeing there so many times lately and had never been able to plumb or understand. “Would you like for me to have an affair with Jim?” she said.
The words seemed to hang on in the air after themselves, like the ends of the stanzas in Yeats’s Innisfree, going on and on in silence after the words themselves have been said and have faded away. Grant felt almost exactly as he had felt when he watched the shark’s flank going on and on and on past him and then the numbing jerk of his hand. Shock? And live alone in the bee-loud glade. Bing. Bing. Bing. He took a very deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding at all,” Lucky said, her voice as veiled as her face. “I never kid about things like that.”
“You mean you’ve got the hots for him?” Grant said.
“Well, a little. In a way. Let me just say that he’s the first man I’ve met since I met you that I’d like to go to bed with.”
“Well!” Grant said, and took another deep breath. His body started walking back and forth across the room with him. “Well. Let me just say this. You just go ahead and do whatever the fucking hell your l
ittle heart desires, sweetie. And then we’ll just see what transpires.” He thought that sounded threatening enough, but apparently it didn’t.
“Is that all you care for me, then?” Lucky said in a sour voice.
“Look,” he said. “I’m not about to ride herd on my own wife. I’m not about to yank you away from here and take you back to New York, either. You just go ahead and do whatever you want to do. Then I’ll make up my mind about what I want to do. Okay?” He thought that that was plain enough, but later on he was to wonder if he had perhaps been ambiguous and not made himself fully clear. It was true, as Lucky would eventually point out to him, that he had not actually said that he would leave her.
“Okay,” Lucky said. “Good night.”
32
SHE LAY AWAKE a long time, staring up straight above her in the darkness at where the ceiling ought to be, at the blackness that had been the ceiling before the lights had been put out. She could focus her eyes exactly on the height of the invisible ceiling even though she could no longer see it. Funny how you got used to things. Physical things. She wondered, was deeply curious about, what kind of and how big a thing Jim Grointon had. From the bed beside her there was no sound. She almost wished he’d have another of those nightmares.
They had made up before over one of those.
But this time was not the same. This time was really serious. She realized he had put up with a lot of shit from her the past two weeks. She also realized that, in his own way, whatever that was, he really loved her too. The question was, was that love (whatever the hell that love was), was it worth it? That was the damned question.
The thing that destroyed her the most was that he had actually screwed that old cunt after knowing her—twice, he had—after sending her, Lucky, back to New York. How could he have? And if twice, why not more? If once, why not five times? Fifty times? In any case once was enough. That implied that everything that had happened between them in New York had been simply a lark, a joke, a lie, a short—if intense—fling with a New York ‘cutie’. In other words, her. That was all she meant to him: he was like all the other cheap pricks she had known, like Buddy, Clint Upton, Peter Raven, that Englishman, the Hollywood producer: an easy-lay beautiful New York ‘hot number’. And if that was true, he was only weak, like all the rest of them. Or just cheap inside.
She remembered how the marriage had been brought about mainly by Lisa. Lisa and her black swan friend Paule Gordon. They had done it all. Grant had done nothing. He had merely drifted with the current. So had she herself. If Lisa and Paule had not done all the hard and dirty work, there wouldn’t have been any damned marriage. And she couldn’t stand the thought of a weak man. A cheap-inside man.
Jim Grointon might not be very bright But he certainly wasn’t weak. She couldn’t stand being married to a weak man. God! When she suggested to him having an affair with Jim, he hadn’t even hit her!
Maybe she ought to do it to him. God knew he deserved it. He was really weak, a baby-boy who had got himself attached to that powerful Carol and could never leave her. Until somebody—and not herself, but Lisa and Paule Gordon—had forced him, weakly, like some rudderless boat, to marriage.
Christ!
On the other hand, if she did do it to him, she knew that it was all finished. Even if she did it so secretly that he never found out, how could she respect a man who didn’t even know when his wife was cuckolding him? And if he knew, he’d kick her out. She was sure of that.
God, but she was mad at him! Sick of him. It burned all through, her, through all her arteries and veins and nerves like dry ice, searing everything.
Maybe that was the best way, really. She could always go back to the old Park Avenue tenement and Leslie and start waiting again. Waiting again for—how many years?
It would be hard on the pride. Her friends could all laugh at her. Lucky Videndi and her two-months marriage to Ron Grant the playwright. But that would die down eventually. And he would have to pay her something, some kind of money, except that screw him she didn’t want any of his damned money. She would have gotten even with him with Jim Grointon, anyway. Maybe after all that was the best way. How could he have done to her what he’d done?
He shouldn’t have told her. In the first place. He should either have told her in the very beginning, or else not told her at all. She hadn’t asked him. She hadn’t even wanted to know. But above all he should not have carried her along all this time and lied to her, lied to her!—and then try to niggle out by telling her ‘the truth’ after the big climax had happened. That was just cheap. Cheap, chickenshit and cowardly. Why, that was just exactly what that old woman had been pushing him to do! And him! he had played right into her hand and done it, done just exactly what she had planned for him to do! If she herself, Lucky, had not packed up and left for New York right then and there, it was through no fault of Carol Abernathy!
And all that bullshit about how he wanted to protect Carol’s and Hunt’s reputations, how he wanted to save Carol’s literary reputation for her, because he didn’t want to destroy her totally—even though it was false, the reputation. Again a shudder of disgust ran all through her turning her stomach over sickly, only this time it was disgust with herself. To let herself get trapped like this.
But then the thought of going back, back to all that of before, that year and a half that she had spent after Raoul had been killed, the very thought of going back to that life was almost more than she could bear. The old Doom-Gloom feeling came up in her that was always there, lurking around somewhere in the bottom of her. The old superstitious Goddamned Catholic that told her she must be punished. She was being punished now. The superstition had told her all along she would be punished by not being allowed to have Ron Grant, but she did not know then the manner or the method. Now, it was turning out, she would not be allowed to have Ron Grant because the Ron Grant she wanted did not exist. Never had existed. She had made him up. That was the worst of all.
She was not a whore! She was not a whore, and she never had been one, and she didn’t care what any of them said! They were all lucky to have had her, by Christ! And she had never hurt a single one of them! Instead she had helped them all, or almost all.
As far as Jim Grointon went, she was attracted to him physically. She had always liked that kind of stocky wide-shouldered husky man best. Ron was one himself. And Ron had acted as though he wanted her to have an affair with him: telling her right in front of him that he, Grointon, was in love with her! What kind of half-fag stuff was that? She was getting sick and tired of these half-fag outdoor types that loved each other better than they any of them loved their women. They all treated women as if they were some kind of bottle which held their dope or booze and after they emptied the bottle of whatever necessary contents it contained threw it away, or better yet took it back to the grocery store and turned it in for a discount on a new one.
All these goddamn men in love with each other. She had about had a bellyful of it. She had never seen so much of it. Bonham in love with Grant, and Grant in love with Bonham. Grointon in love with Grant, and Grant in love with Grointon. Hunt in love with Grant, and Grant in love with Hunt. Doug Ismaileh in love with Bonham and Grant. There didn’t seem to be anyplace left for a simple ordinary female woman.
There was some quality about her husband that seemed to attract certain types of men to falling in love with him. For starters she didn’t like that; but further, she could tell, sense, smell that all these types in some perverse way ached to fall in love with her too. Have her, to use grandmother’s phrase. Was it only to get that much closer to him, to Ron? Or was it just the reverse. Anyway, they all had it. Even Bonham had it, in the sort of reverse upsidedown way of a high school boy who insults and teases the young girl of his choice in order to attract her attention. And certainly Doug and Jim Grointon had it. Of them all only Hunt could she sense not to have it, and Hunt was . . . God, what was he?
She remembered that she could hardly believe it when she saw Hu
nt crying. It was sickening; enough to make you vomit. Here was a guy who had been screwing his wife, practically in front of him, lo these fourteen years, and when the guy leaves—finally and for good and all—this sick creep starts to weep over his departure. How sick could you get? Pure disgust seasoned with a peppery sauce of strong dislike—even hatred—for most all men made her stomach turn over and caused her to shudder involuntarily. And as far as Ron went that made him little better than a paid professional gigolo.
Did he suspect that Jim had already told her himself that he was in love with her? Was that it? Could he have guessed? He was shrewd. It had happened the second time Jim had taken her booby-egg hunting, over on the far side of the island. She hadn’t even told this to Lisa. Although Lisa apparently suspected it. The ugly birds had all flown off screaming (she hated birds, anyway) and hovered off in the air squawking and protesting from a distance. Jim had squatted by the first nest, and then had suddenly looked up at her with that dirty-Irish-cop squint in his eye. Really dirty. That was kind of intriguing too, in its way. “I guess you know I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said.— “No, I didn’t,” she had answered immediately. “And I certainly never intended that.” Jim had grinned that slow exasperating smile of his. “Well, I have,” he said. “And I am. I want you.”— “I think I prefer not to have heard what you said,” she said. “I should also warn you that Ron while not a professional outdoorsman like yourself was a very good boxer in the Navy.”— “Oh, I’m not really worried about that part,” Jim had smiled. Then he got up. “Come on, we’ll find a couple more nests.” For a moment she thought of asking him what he would do if she told Ron what he’d said. How could he be so sure she wouldn’t?
When she did ask him later on, he only grinned and said, “Oh, wives never do. They don’t want to make trouble. In the family.”
But then how could he, on the trip back to Kingston, and right in front of her, make such a really flattering eulogy of Ron? There were certain types of men who liked to screw another man’s woman just in order to get that much closer to the man. The only other answer was that his eulogy of Ron was the most totally cynical thing she had ever seen, or heard, done. She was not about to let herself be made some cheap pawn in a half-fag love affair between outdoorsmen, but the cost was high: she could feel all over her again the hard, tough, cynical self-preservation sense she had worn, posed in, for so many years in New York, and that she had thought with Ron she would be able to lose, abandon. Now, apparently, she couldn’t. That was high cost indeed.
