Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  So in the end there were only three of them again. Herself and Grant, herself and Ron, and Jim.

  They had been out nearly all day that day on the catamaran, and since there were now only the two of them diving they had gone down to the place near Morant Bay, shark-fishing. Naturally she did not approve of it, but there was nothing at all that she could do about it. Nothing except go along and hope something bad would not happen. The tide was right for it today, Jim had said, since it would be an outgoing tide nearly all the afternoon, so they had gone. They had taken almost no fish, just enough to bleed for shark-bait, and had hunted most of the remainder of the morning and all of the afternoon. Finally they, the two of them—using a Brazilian rig and two extra spearguns—had taken an almost twelve-foot tiger shark that had come nosing around and had boated it. Boated it! They had had to lash it alongside the dinghy behind the boat to get it home! Lucky could not understand them, either of them. Why did they want to do it? In any case, Ron had been drinking beer almost all day, from almost the very moment they had started. When they got home—where the shark caused a big sensation—he was plainly exhausted, if not half-drunk. He said he was going to take a nap for an hour or so until eight-thirty when Jim came. When Jim did come at eight-thirty, looking fresh and hungry, and she made them both their first serious before-dinner drink, talking and laughing loudly and clinking ice and glasses furiously, Grant, Ron, her husband, was still asleep. And he did not wake up.

  Lucky was furious. He knew Jim was coming. And that Jim was coming alone. There wouldn’t be anybody else. With Irma and Ben not back. She decided to let him just damned well fucking sleep. Or was that just her damned mind tricking her? Anyway, the dinner was practically ready. Her sauce had been simmering all day. All she had to do was dump the spaghetti into the already boiling water and cook it seven minutes. After two drinks and he still didn’t wake up she did this, and then she served it and she and Jim ate it all alone. “Ron is terribly exhausted from that shark-fishing today,” was how she explained it. “I think I’ll just let him sleep. He’ll probably wake up after a while. But he’s awfully tired. And I can always heat it up for him.” It was after the dinner (at which Jim ate heartily and kept up a running pleasant conversation), when it had become pretty obvious to everybody that Grant, that Ron, was not going to wake up—it was after the dinner that Jim Grointon propositioned her again. And this time he asked her to leave Grant and marry him.

  She could hardly believe it. With her husband lying asleep (or was he asleep?) right in the next room. Instinctively, after eating, she had gotten up and left the dining area with her final glass of wine in her hand and moved away from him to a chair in the corner clear across the sitting room, so that it was from there that she heard his proposition.

  In spite of the crazy audacity of it, or because of it, Lucky had to admit to herself it excited her a little. He was really a real dirty-Irish-cop ‘devil’, this one.

  “You must be crazy,” she said finally. “You’ve already got a wife.”

  “But I’m in the process of getting a divorce.”

  “But you’ve got two kids by her.”

  “I’ve got two kids by my first wife, too. She can have them.”

  “She’ll want your money.”

  “Her parents can take care of them. And her. They’re nothing but inbred Jamaican peasants anyhow.”

  “I’d take you for every last goddamned nickel that you had,” Lucky said.

  “I know you would,” Jim said, and grinned. “I guess that’s one reason I’m not in love with her and am in love with you.”

  “Can you see me as the wife of a Jamaican skindiver in Kingston Jamaica?”

  “Oh, I haven’t always been a skindiver. And I’ve got a pretty good business head. I’ve got plenty of contacts in New York. I know several places I could start in at ten or fifteen thou a year. I’d even do that for you. To have you.”

  “You really would?”

  “I sure would. I told you. I’m in love with you. I want you.”

  “Do you realize that my husband, my husband, might be lying awake listening to all this in the next room?”

  “I know that. And I’m sorry about that. But it’s the truth I’m telling you. I’d tell him too.”

  “He’d knock your block off,” Lucky said, wondering if he would, wondering if he could.

  “He might. And then he might not. Even then it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “You’re incredible!” she said.

  “I guess I am. I can’t help it Why don’t you shut the door?”

  “I think I’d better,” Lucky said. She did. Ron did not seem to have moved since she had last looked in at him. And only then did she realize she had placed herself in a trap, a compromised position. Jim was grinning at her from the dining table as she sat back down in her distant chair.

  “How many other wives have you told that to since you’ve been taking their husbands out skindiving down here?” she said sharply.

  “Well,” Jim said with his easy, cop’s smile, “none, really. Not that. Not exactly that.”

  “You are incredible,” Lucky said. “Well, the answer is no. And the reason the answer is no is that I’m not in love with you.”

  “Well. All right.” He grinned. “Fair enough. That’s straight. That’s straight enough. But you’d like to sleep with me.”

  Lucky could feel her ears getting hot. She didn’t answer. How dare he lie in there like that, asleep, or not asleep, while this went on out here, allowing this to go on out here. He deserved whatever he got, by God.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Jim grinned.

  “Not especially,” she said. “Not particularly.”

  “But maybe just a little bit? A teensy bit?” Jim grinned. Then he erased his grin. “Well, I want to sleep with you. I want you. Now. Tonight. And I want you as bad as any man ever wanted any woman.”

  “I get all the sex I want at home,” Lucky said. “More, in fact. More than I can handle almost, in fact.”

  Jim Grointon nodded. “I bet you do at that.”

  “You really are incredible,” Lucky said. “I can’t understand you. Here you are, openly and baldly propositioning the wife of a man you profess to like and admire. And in his own house. You’ve done nothing but brag him up for the past two weeks, every chance you got it seems to me, and now here you are trying to fuck his wife. I can’t understand that.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about that,” Jim grinned. “I really am. But I can’t help the way I feel. I do like him. And I think I am his friend. Seriously. Better than most; as friends go. I think I even love Ron—straight, I mean—in the way some men, brave men, can love each other. It’s just bad luck that I’m in love with, and want, his wife.”

  “I can’t understand that,” Lucky said, giving him the most open, coldest stare she could muster up. He really was an evil devil. An evil dirty-cop devil. Why did it excite her so? It always had. “I think that’s just about the dirtiest, lowest, rottenest thing I ever heard of.”

  “I guess it is,” Jim smiled. “I guess I’m just dirty. Hunh? I apologize for that. But I think you want me, too. And I’m right here. I’m available. Just tell me—honestly—that you don’t want me too, and I’ll fold my tent and quietly take off.”

  “Whether I would want you or don’t want you hasn’t got anything to do with it,” she said, a little desperately. “Can’t you see that?”

  “Okay, then. Then tell me. Just tell me.” He was still smiling that smile and his eyebrows were up with a sort of amused confidence, an amused supreme confidence. Her ears must be fiery red by now from the way they felt.

  “Do you realize what you’re suggesting could change my entire life?” Lucky said. “It wouldn’t change yours.”

  “Oh, come on now. Isn’t that just a little bit dramatic? Anyway, wasn’t that what I offered you, that change, at the very start? Come on, what the hell?” he grinned. “You’re always talkin about all those four hundred men you’ve had, a
lways studyin those native fishermen’s big whangs. You’ve been flirting with me for weeks. You think I’d be in there asleep if my broad was out here with ME? Now’s the time to put up or shut up, Mrs Grant.”

  “Are you mad?” Lucky said. “Here?”

  “My car’s right outside,” Jim grinned. “There’s even a blanket in it. He’s not about to wake up, not for a long time.”

  Lucky stared at him and thought about it. That flirting remark, that hurt her pride. But of course that was why he was doing it.

  “Do you realize I could take you and break you up into little pieces and throw you away? Like a busted chandelier?” she said coldly.

  “Maybe,” Jim Grointon grinned. “Maybe I do.” Slowly he poured himself another glass of red wine out of the straw-wrapped Chianti bottle. “And maybe that’s just what I’m lookin for, Mrs Grant,” he grinned at her.

  Lucky stared at him again and thought about it some more. You couldn’t get away from that dirty-Irish-cop, black-leather-jacket-smelly-motorcycle thing about him. She was still attracted to him. And he was certainly honest enough. Considering. Oh, would she lead him a merry chase, a merry chase and farewell. Of course he would never marry her, and never meant to. But even so—And there was that son of a bitch lying in there asleep on his damned ass. Asleep! And who had fucked that dirty old woman after he had known her, had actually stuck his thing in that old bitch, after knowing her, after knowing her intimately. And had lied to her about it. He damn well deserved it. Asleep! Like Jim had said. Suddenly it was all like all those years in New York again. Suddenly it was. If they were sometimes lonely, they were certainly carefree. Responsibility-free. She was tired of responsibility.

  Yet on the other hand she knew it would be all over with Grant, with Ron, if she did go ahead and do it. Wanting to was one thing, doing it another. And what kind of profit was there in that? Certainly no money profit in it, by God! Even if he did marry her, and did go to New York, and all that jazz he had tried to con her with. And yet—Asleep! lying in there asleep! If she did it and didn’t tell, it would all be over anyway. What she had wanted to make of it. What she had wanted it to be. But it—that—that—was already all over with anyway, wasn’t it? It sure was. That dirty old woman. Even if he never found out, and he could be a stupid jerk sometimes even for a playwright, it would still be all over. But it already was. All over. It was just like back in New York. She wished she knew what his thing looked like, she thought in a kind of crazy way, she wished she could see it. She bet it was a pretty one. Like Ron’s.

  Lucky stood up and smoothed her skirt and arranged herself, arranged herself to walk over to the dining table, or to go open the bedroom door. It was, it had to be, one or the other. She walked across halfway to the cocktail table against the wall to get herself a good stiff scotch, and to tell Jim Grointon the decision, her decision, that even she herself didn’t yet know the answer to.

  33

  GRANT AWOKE AT around two-thirty. His luminous Spiro-technique diving watch with its two big brightly luminous dials, which Bonham once had sold him in the what now seemed so long ago, said two-thirty-eight when he looked at it on his naked wrist. A kind of panic had gripped him from the first second he had awakened even before he glanced at the watch, and he had waked up with that total alertness and total instant full possession of all his faculties that he had used to always wake with during the war but had not done for a long time now. Bright chartreuse moonlight flooded into the corner from the windows on two sides, and he could see everything clearly except the four darkened corners. But there couldn’t be anything there? Lucky lay quietly asleep in her own big bed placed right alongside of his own.

  What could have happened? They were supposed to have a spaghetti dinner? Jim was coming? Jim! After a moment’s reassurance, he got up and slipped into his robe and walked around the two double beds to look at Lucky. She was sleeping soundly, deeply, peacefully (repletely, even?), sleeping on her stomach with her head turned away from his bed and toward where he now stood, the champagne-colored hair spread out in the moonlight like a halo. She was breathing softly and evenly, deliciously, through her mouth. Totally relaxed. Like after sex. Everything seemed to be becoming a symbol, a Symbol, crazy Symbols, suddenly. Was everything what it really seemed to be, or was it all his imagination? He rubbed his hand hard over his face several times and then looked at it and saw that it was blue-colored in the chartreuse moonlight. That was scary enough in itself. A blue hand?

  Had he lost her? But why say had? Was he losing her, was what he meant to say.

  Lucky did not wake, and seemed perfectly content to go right on sleeping, perhaps forever. He did not touch her, or try in any way to wake her. Without knowing quite why, he was afraid to. So instead he walked out into the livingroom of the suite. One night light, a stand-up floorlamp, was burning; but it was entirely unnecessary in that moonlight. He could never remember having looked at things and seen them so clearly, so distinctly, as if they were all separate and disparate universes, instead of fairly reasonably connected objects in the same room. He felt, quite suddenly and for no reason, the terrible way he had used to feel as a very little boy when he had been told, informed, that he had done a very bad thing. He went into the kitchen.

  In the kitchen, which had only a very tiny window—and that covered up with those horrible chintz curtains—he was forced to turn the light on. Immediately he saw the sink: two spaghetti plates, two salad plates, two wineglasses, three highball glasses. All had been put to soak for the housemaid in the morning. When he opened the refrigerator, so violently the door banged back against the too-close wall barking his knuckles, he did not even curse. In the refrigerator, seen under its own interior light, was a large earthenware bowl of spaghetti and sauce—and of course all the other normal stuff: beer, Seven-Up, Coke, a dried-up piece of old salami. Each of them, each object and each group, looked as though he had never seen them before. Grant was suddenly and simultaneously ravenously hungry, and sick at his stomach and unable to eat. Forcing himself, he got out the bowl and getting a fork out of the drawer, wolfed down the cold spaghetti and meat sauce until his belly felt full. It did not take a lot of spaghetti to achieve this. Then he put back the bowl, switched off the light, went back into the moonlit sitting room, got a full bottle of whiskey and sat down with it and a bottle of soda. He drank the nearly straight whiskey until he was drunk enough, groggy enough, dopey enough to go back to bed and be sure that he could sleep. It took a while.

  All sorts of terrible thoughts passed through his head, through all of him, as he sat there drinking the therapeutic whiskey. Terror, fear, murder, a sense of foolish idiocy, and a sense of castration all boiled together in him until it was impossible to separate one ingredient from another in the infernal stew. Green, flaming jealousy hurt him worse than it ever had, hurt him close to yelling. But he wasn’t going to yell. And all the old half-formed, only half-examined masochistic fantasies exploded and disappeared totally in the blaze of actual possibility. He would kill her. No, of course he wouldn’t kill her. Finally drunk enough, he went back to bed. For a moment he stood looking down at her again as she slept in the chartreuse moonlight on her own side of the pushed-together double beds, the golden, champagne-colored hair spread all about her on the pillow. She was so beautiful.

  Maybe she hadn’t done it. But then, why hadn’t she waked him?

  In the morning he determinedly determined to say nothing. And, strangely enough, Lucky suddenly displayed for him a love the like of which she had not shown since possibly their very earliest days in New York. Before they were even fully awake she came into his bed of her own volition, something she almost never did, even when they were on the best of terms. And when they had gotten up, and had had coffee, and then made love yet once again, and then dressed to go down and meet Ben and Irma at the pool to hang around till lunch, she had said before descending that she did not want to go out on the catamaran today, this afternoon, she wanted instead to spend the aftern
oon with him, in bed. “And I promise you you won’t regret it,” she whispered. She had clung to him like a frightened child in the bed; on the stairs going down she took his arm, took it close, and said: “It’s taken me a long time to get over it. And don’t think I don’t know how patient you have been. But I am over it now.” Then she added softly, “Don’t forget this afternoon.” Grant accepted, hungrily. How could she possibly be treating him this way, now, if she had just cuckolded him with Grointon the very night before? This was what he had always dreamed, since the beginning of their trouble, that their reconciliation would be like. Then his heart stopped totally still for a long moment when he thought that if she had cuckolded him this might be just exactly the way she might act in her guilt. She would have gotten even with him over Carol Abernathy, and now she would be both guilty and frightened and trying to make it up, make amends. But, my God, wouldn’t that be too damned obvious? Could she possibly be that naive? She couldn’t be.