Go to the Widow-Maker (91 page)

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 afternoon 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.

“Why didn’t you wake me up last night?” he asked calmly, conversationally, at the bottom of the stairs. Ben and Irma were waving at them from the pool. They had called this morning the moment they had got in.

“You were so beat, poor darling,” Lucky said. “I just thought I’d let you sleep. You looked so really beat.”

That much was certainly true enough. He had been beat. He had run out of guts again, run out of courage, run out of nerve. It was the bottle with the tiny hole in the bottom all over again, and he had watched his courage-level sink in it again day by day. It had taken every absolute ounce of nerve he had, plus all the beer, to go shark-shooting yesterday. Go shark-shooting deliberately. Why had he done it? Why did
Jim
do it? Why did Jim
like
to do it? He had hated it. Afterwards of course he had loved it, loved having done it, loved the stir it made when they anchored off the hotel and hauled the big shark ashore. It had looked really monstrous. Eleven feet, ten inches, give or take a couple inches gained or lost in the measuring. You could with all honesty call it a twelve-footer. And it had been so easy to kill. The problem was to catch it, not to run away from it. After it had come in to the blood spoor and started circling and nosing around, they had had to actually
chase
it, to get the Brazilian-rig spear into it! But he knew damn well
all
sharks weren’t like that. They were almost at the pool by now, Ben and Irma were getting up, grinning and waiting to say hello after their absence. Why couldn’t they have stayed around? They’d said they’d wanted to help, hadn’t they? God damn them. He grinned and stuck out his hand and said nothing further to Lucky.

But he watched closely all through lunch. Jim was there of course, and of course ate with them, as usual. The catamaran was still anchored off the hotel beach on the still calm sea, where they had left it yesterday when they’d swum the dead shark in. The shark itself had already been taken away, by Jim. Maybe he’d sold it. For the liver. Jim seemed, as far as he could tell, exactly as he had seemed yesterday. He got up and smiled his smile and shook hands with Lucky as he always did. Grant avoided shaking hands with him, but without making it at all obvious. When they told him they wouldn’t be going out today, Lucky added in her normal voice with a sweet smile at Grant, “We’ve got an engagement this afternoon. That we just have to keep.”

“Yesterday make you a little nervous, hunh?” Jim grinned at Grant.

“I have to admit that it did,” Grant said. “In spite of all the beer I drank. But I guess I’d still go today. Except that we have this appointment we can’t break.” He smiled lovingly at Lucky. He was determined, certainly at least around Jim Grointon, not to show, not to let on, not even in the faintest way indicate, that he had any suspicions about last night. Good God! he thought suddenly. Poor Hunt Abernathy! But then, that had all been different. Watch as he might, he could not throughout the normally long lunch find any symptoms, any look, any indication at all of anything in either Jim or Lucky. Christ, if it was true, what would he do? Beat him up? He thought he probably could. What
could
he do? Beat
her
up? And what good would any of that do? Why did Americans take this thing of being cuckold so much more seriously and as so much more unmanning than Europeans did? Europeans didn’t even care, didn’t even give a damn. Or so people said. Europeans just went out and got
themselves
a girl. Or so people said. Immediately after the lunch the two of them retired.

They did everything. Just about everything two human beings could do together sexually, assuming that one of them was a male and that the other one was a female, they did that afternoon. And they spent the entire afternoon at it. Not even in the early days of their love affair in New York had they ever made love any more passionately, furiously, tenderly, lovingly, rupturingly, than they did this afternoon. And in most of the new things Lucky was the instigator, the aggressor. Grant had always been too shy. It was Grant’s dream of what a love affair—of what
all
love affairs for
all
people everywhere —ought to be like. And yet deep in his mind his suspicions of her, of Lucky, of his wife, were not allayed. Could she do a thing like that to him? Could she? And then be like this?

“Why did you suddenly change so suddenly?” he asked once when they were resting between bouts on the bed. Lucky was lying nude in the bed beside him and fingering his chest. Suddenly he had a mental picture of another man lying here with her, doing all these things with her, that they had been doing. The man in the picture was faceless, but he appeared to be built suspiciously like Jim Grointon. “I mean, yesterday you were still furious at me. What
caused
you to change?”

“I just decided it had gone far enough,” Lucky said lightly. “I just realized that it could really wreck our marriage. And I find I don’t want our marriage wrecked.”

You don’t, hunh? was what Grant thought. But what was it suddenly made you find that out, hunh?

“You’re quite a man, you know,” Lucky said lightly. “Not only in the sack, a good lover. But in other ways. I realize you had serious integrity problems. With all that Carol Abernathy business. I accept that you had to take me up there. I wish you hadn’t had to. I wish you hadn’t lied to me. I wish most of all you hadn’t actually fucked that dirty old woman, after me.”

“I tried to explain about that,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t want to hurt her.”

“So instead you hurt me,” Lucky said lightly. “But it’s all over. I’m willing to forget it. It’s under the bridge. And I find that I do need you, darling. Darling Ron.” She began to tickle him where it counted.

Grant said nothing. The thought of it, of that other, faceless, man, was more than he could bear to think about. Had Hunt Abernathy ever thought like that? But Hunt and Carol hadn’t been making love for years by that time. After a moment he began to tickle Lucky where it counted, too. How, why, when did she
suddenly
discover so suddenly that she needed him? was what he was thinking and asking himself.

He watched again, all through dinner (at which Jim Grointon ate again with them, at Grant’s own express invitation; he would have died rather than not invite him), and he watched all through the drinking and fun and talking in the bar that followed after dinner. He could not find one single look, or glance, not one innuendo, that he could point to, use to prove to himself that she—
that she and Jim
—were lying to him, living a lie out
for
him. Ben and Irma, who ate with them of course, were both visibly relieved and elated over their so sudden making up, becoming again the early lovers they had known. Not one thing could he find.

It had to come out. Later he would wonder just
why
it had to come out. But at the time there was no wondering. His manhood was affected here and he had to find out. After all of it, though, he did not find out.

He waited until they had retired for the night. After Lucky had crawled over into his bed beside him, nude, and lay hugging him (almost desperately, it seemed to Grant), he brought it up again.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t wake me up last night,” he said.

“I told you all that, darling,” Lucky murmured against his shoulder.

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Grant persisted. “It just doesn’t make sense, unless of course you wanted to be alone with Jim Grointon.”

Lucky pulled away from him and half sat up. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“What would I want to be alone with Jim Grointon for?”

“What for? For Christ’s sake, the other night you asked me pointblank, outright, if
I
wanted you to have an affair with him, didn’t you?”

Lucky’s voice was now no longer soft, or loving. “Only because you embarrassed me by saying, right in front of him and in front of me, in front of everybody, that he was in love with me.”

“Well, he was. Is.”

“Yes,” Lucky said. “He is. And I’ll tell you one thing: he asked me to leave you and marry
him.
Are you trying to imply that you think I slept with him last night?”

“No, but you could have. I’m asking you did you.”

“Do you think I could do something like that to you, and right here in your own house?”

“Yes, I think you might have. You’ve been furious with me since I told you about Carol Abernathy. You might have done it to get even. And you could have gone out. Out somewhere with him. I would never have known.” The picture of that faceless man and Lucky together nude, nude and doing things together, would not go out of his head.

“Do you think I could do something like that with him, and then be with you the way I’ve been today?”

“Yes, I think you might. If you found it wasn’t very good, and found you were still in love with me after all, and then were guilty and afraid. Yes, I think that.”

“I think
you’re
crazy,” Lucky said coldly. “I think you
want
me to fuck Jim Grointon. I think you’re some kind of crazy half fag.”

“You already told me he asked you to marry him,” Grant said just as coldly. “What did you say to him?”

“I told him no. That I was in love with my husband.”

“All I’m asking is that you tell me that you didn’t fuck him last night, that’s all.”

“All right. I will
No!
No, I didn’t fuck him last night, or any other time. And furthermore do you think I would ever admit it to you if I did? The answer is no, I didn’t fuck him. Okay?”

“Then how do I know you’re not lying?”

“You don’t. You don’t, do you? You just don’t. All you have is my word for it, and that’s all you’re ever going to get. Ha, ha, you son of a bitch. No, I didn’t do it. Okay?”

“I could ask him,” Grant heard himself say.

“He wouldn’t tell you either,” Lucky said. “If he had.”

“If I thought you had.” Grant began.

“What would you do? And I’ll tell you something else, Mister Smart-Ass, Mister Smart-Ass-Fag,—because I swear I think you are—I’ll tell you something else.” She had gotten out of bed by now, and had put on her robe, and was calmly and coldly tying its thick corded belt around her. “I’ll tell you something else. I’m not going on your goddamned crazy cruise with you. I happen to still be in love with you, and never mind how or why, and I’m not at all sure that you deserve for me to be in love
with.
But I am. But I’m not going on your crazy cruise with you, in a boat that’s uninsurable. I’ll go back to New York and wait for you; or I’ll stay here and wait for you (but I know you wouldn’t want that); or I’ll go to Ganado Bay and wait for you in a hotel; I’ll even go to Miami and wait for you there in a hotel. But I’m not going on your fucking cruise.”

“You’re going on that cruise,” Grant said. “You’re my wife, and you’re going on that cruise with me. Or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else you won’t be my wife anymore. It’s as simple as that. I’ll just be long-gone. And you’ll never see me again. And you won’t collect a fucking nickel off me either. I’ll go to jail first.”

Lucky stood staring at him a long time, her fine Italian nostrils flaring and flattening as she breathed deeply over and over. “All right, I’ll go,” she said finally, in a thin hard voice. “But you better get us the fuck out of here, and fast.”

“You’re
warning
me?” Grant said coldly.

“Yes. Get Bonham off of fucking Cathie Chandler—Cathie Finer—and get him to get his damned boat ready. I want to get out of here and fast. I can’t stand this place and I can’t stand these people. They’re all sick. Except René and Lisa. I am warning you. Get moving. Or maybe
I’ll
leave
you.”