Go to the Widow-Maker (58 page)

“Well, you’re not flying to Miami,” Carol said. “You’re flying to Kingston. You’ve got to explain it to him. How much we need him. He’ll always talk with you. And you’re an old pal from The Group, so it won’t look funny for you to go down there like it would if Hunt went.”

“That’s all true enough. Okay. I’ll go,” Doug grinned, making it sound as if he had just decided. And what the hell? He’d like to see how they were doing now down there, now that they were hitched. And to watch the rest of the developments, back here, ought to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

“Otherwise,” Carol said, “they can ruin, destroy all my work, all my plans, everything I’ve worked for all these years for my Hunt Hills Little Theatre, by making me a laughingstock. Well, Ron was my first protégé. He helped me found that group.”

“He sure did,” Doug said, staunchly. He looked over at Hunt. But Hunt wasn’t seeing any humor in it. His face was perfectly serious, perfectly righteous, perfectly middleclass. Christ, didn’t he know he was a cuckold? how much he had been cuckolded? was being cuckolded? Or did he perhaps know? And if so, what kind of oddball did that make Hunt? Doug wanted desperately to laugh. “Of course, I may not be able to get right on the plane today,” he said, instead.

“You won’t mind if they stay here a week or two, will you, Evelyn?” Carol was saying. “To help me out?”

“Nothing I’d like better, darling,” Evelyn de Blystein grinned with her gravelly voice, and took a puff on her cigarette.

“Ron will be glad to help out with the food and liquor bills and such-like.”

“Never give it a thought, my dear,” said Evelyn.

At the door as he prepared to go out to Hunt and the waiting car with his suitcase Carol said to him alone: “Tell him I really need him. It’ll only be for a little while.”

Doug nodded, patted her on the shoulder, and kissed her on the cheek.

R
ON
G
RANT HAD BEEN
in Kingston Jamaica nine days, nine very very hectic days, when his old fishin’-and-playwritin’-buddy Doug Ismaileh hove half-drunkenly into view on the porch of the Grand Hotel Crount. And for four of those days he had been married to Lucky Grant.

Lucky Grant.

God. Or, to Lucia Videndi Grant, if you wanted to be more formal. Or, if you wanted to go all the way with the formality, to Lucia Angelina Elena Videndi Grant. That was the name on the License. He didn’t believe it would ever happen to him. And Lucky, when it came right down to the last final and hysterical sticking-point moment, clearly hadn’t believed it would ever happen to her. Lucky Grant. Lucky Grant. It didn’t even sound right or natural, let alone make any sense, and he couldn’t get used to it, and she couldn’t get used to it, and they both of them loved it and both didn’t love it. He jumped up to run and greet Doug when he saw him, leaving his 10
A.M.
in the morning Bloody Mary on the table with Lucky’s and the others.

It seemed to him now when he looked back over the nine days that he had been drunk every single moment of that time. But that couldn’t be strictly true because he had been out diving every day but one, and with no less a personage than Mr Jim Grointon whom he had met on the plane to Grand Bank Island with Al Bonham. He had also slept a lot.

The Grand Hotel Crount at the time he and Lucky arrived to stay in it was probably the chicest hotel in the whole of the Caribbean. Grant of course, the Indianapolis hick, had never heard of it but Lucky had stayed there quite a lot with Raoul, her rich South American. The day before they arrived John Gielgud had departed for New York after a two-week stay, and Charlie Addams the cartoonist was due to arrive in a week for an even longer stay. Residing in one of the hotel’s suites at the moment was a famous Broadway musical comedy writer with her husband, and in another a very famous conductor with his wife. Peter Lawford the actor and his wife had wired for reservations in April. Travel writers for just about every publication that hired travel writers had been writing it up for a couple of years as
the
chicest and
the
hippest place to go in the Caribbean. All of this fame, fortune, publicity, income and happiness was due to the shrewd ministrations of one man, Lucky’s old friend and the Crount’s owner and manager, René Halder, and his wife whose name was Lisa and who was herself Jamaican.

Halder, a French Jew who had been one of the top American movie-cameramen overseas during the war, and whose name everybody automatically pronounced “Al
-dare
”, was an ebullient fizzing bubbling little man who had met his wife in New York where she was studying dance and after encountering color discrimination there because of their marriage, had removed with her to Jamaica and bought the Crount from the heirs of an old British Navy seacaptain. And that had been the seacaptain’s name: Crount.

When asked by Grant—as he admitted he usually was asked by almost everybody—why he had not changed the name, he grinned his tubby little smile and shrugged. “W’y shange heem, Ronnie? ’Ees got mahzel. ’Ee ees so ’orrible I tink I like it. And he canfuse ever’-body so much when ’e try to say
Crownt,
instead of
Croont.
So I leave him.”

Old Captain Crount had apparently built his small hotel both to take care of him and support him in his old age, and to at the same time allow him to be close to the sea. Apparently he had been given some kind of grant of government land for services rendered the Navy, and he had chosen to take his land out along the seaward side of the long sand spit known as the Palisadoes which encloses Kingston Harbor and terminates in the old pirate town of Port Royal. Here he built his small place, low and heavy and of stone on the ground floor because of storms, cheap and of wood and corrugated tin on the second floor so it would be easy to replace if blown away, all of it together constituting just enough rooms to let him live out his life and keep him in whiskey. Situated a mile and a quarter east of Port Royal village and three miles west of Kingston’s International Airport on the Palisadoes spit, it perched or rather squatted on the sandy beach staring out south over the sparkling sea with nothing around it except sand, scrub, a few brackish ponds, and the blacktop road. And mosquitoes.

But René and his personality and his ideas made up for all of that that might have looked so unprepossessing. By some dubious and marvelous chicanery which he never explained, René was able to take over the old Captain’s grant, which should normally have reverted to the government which had given it to him, and by buying out—or paying off—the heirs, take over these rights himself. He had added onto the small place, keeping the same outlandish architecture as being too beautifully ugly to change or demolish, building along the seafront and in an L back toward the road enough new rooms and suites to make him capable of taking care of thirty clients, or couples. Getting his money whenever and wherever he could, usually from acquaintances in the swiftly widening circle of friends among his clients, he did all this, planted more palm trees all around, built a small swimming pool in the angle of the L, added three small cottages, and managed to pay the whole thing off in the six years he had had it, especially in the last two years of its new notoriety. Now just about all the young executives and editors along Madison Avenue were clamoring for winter, and even summer, reservations, and most of them getting turned down for simple lack of space. The main lot of these that he did accept René relegated to the long L back toward the road which he had added, and which he called “Purgatory,” saving his suites and rooms along the seafront for his more celebrated clients. This was not so much because he catered to celebrities, he explained to Grant in his strange Jewish-French accent on the first day he met him, as that generally he found celebrities or people who had made their mark on the world more interesting and amusing and more fun for him to be around. And that was all he cared about. This was not to say that an occasional celebrity of unpleasant personality (such as the famous conductor who with his wife was at this moment staying in the hotel, for example) did not find himself relegated to “Purgatory,” as indeed Grant found the conductor was (“I ’ate ze pederasts,” René grinned), but in general the celebrities were better to talk to. And René loved to talk. More than that, he could on occasion even listen.

René had met them at the airport in the hotel’s pink and white striped jeep with the fringed top. He took to Grant immediately. He had read all of his plays and stories and had even seen two of the plays, while on trips to New York. And he had always loved Lucky, from the very first time she had stayed in his place three years ago. He was, clearly, just the man to further, to throw himself into furthering, Lucky’s underhanded and chicanerous plans for marriage. And with his quiet but immensely efficacious wife Lisa on her side too, Grant really had no chance from the start, but then, as he had been telling himself for about two weeks now, he was not so sure he wanted a chance. If he had really wanted a chance, if he had really fought it, not even René and Lisa running in tandem alongside of Lucky could have cornered him.

Lisa, who though quiet could also be a hell of a talker every now and then when she got started, and who apparently loved Lucky as much as René did, occupied herself with arranging and organizing the marriage, which was why it was accomplished in five days. And she as much as told Grant, half-laughing, that she was going to do so. And yet Grant did nothing. He certainly would not have organized it himself, the marriage (and probably Lucky wouldn’t have either), but he did nothing to stop Lisa doing it. He did protest a little, and look shamefaced, as becomes a male, as males are expected to do, but that was all. He guessed half of him didn’t believe she could really accomplish it.

Lisa, who was half Haitian, had a friend, a long-lined, long-necked, small-headed, beautifully curved, coalblack-African beauty of a Haitian girl named Paule Gordon who had left Haiti when the troubles started and now lived with them in the hotel, and she turned all of the legwork duty of arranging the marriage over to Paule since she herself could not be absent from running the hotel now during the height of their season. Every evening just before cocktail hour descended on them, in the dim cool uninhabited bar the three women would hold a progress-report conference huddled at a corner table (while René engaged Grant in conversation and bought him drinks at the bar itself) discussing such interesting items as the fact that yes, they
could
get a civil servant to come to the hotel to perform the ceremony or the fact that yes, the American consul
would
validate the marriage for American law with an official paper from his office. The date for the ceremony was set for Wednesday next, at five o’clock at the hotel. And still Grant did nothing.

It was all half a joke, of course, and all not half a joke. Everybody laughed and kidded about the forthcoming tying of Grant’s knot, including Grant. But at the same time he was in a strange benumbed half-functioning state during those five days. And only a small part of it was due to drinking. He did not know if Lucky sensed this. If she did she did not say so. It was easy enough for all of them, and easy enough for her too. She had damn little to lose when you looked right at it, only Leslie and half a tiny rented apartment, and a life of doing TV and movie jobs she hated. Whereas he would be changing his whole life. His whole life pattern he had set up over a number of years. He didn’t even know if he had enough money
to
do it, thanks to goddamned Carol Abernathy. For example, should he take her back out to Indianapolis to live? Or should he not? (She had said she was willing to go. But wouldn’t it be an awful dirty trick to take her out there to live across the street from Carol Abernathy?) And if he
shouldn’t,
where the hell was he going to take her to live, and where get the money to do it on? Maybe he should tell her the truth, all of it, right now before the marriage. That would be the
honorable
thing to do. But he was sure, in his guilt, that if he did tell her now, she wouldn’t marry him at all. And he needed her. In fact, now, after that time away from her, then getting her back so marvelously, he felt that he literally could not live without her, and at the same time he hated himself for feeling that way because he felt it was unmanly. A man should be able to live without any damned woman. So he vacillated. And the three inexorable women moved on like the three inexorable Fates. Christ, even René, a man, wasn’t on his side.

Christ, if only they could wait till the fall, see how the new play made out, or at least give him time to settle up out there, sell the house maybe, he wanted to tell her that, but he couldn’t tell her that, because she didn’t care, she was willing to go out there, Oh Christ.

And all this time, every day, except the actual day of the marriage itself, he had been diving with Jim Grointon.

Jim Grointon it turned out, Jim Grointon with whom he had flown to Grand Bank and whose six-foot ten-inch ground shark he had envied, was as much a fixture at the Grand Hotel Crount as the Negro doorman René kept standing by the main entrance stairs in a Haitian general’s uniform. He spent about half his spare time there, and drew about a third of his business from René’s clients. His steel and glass catamaran was docked at an anchorage around on the other side of the spit near the garrison wharf not far from Port Royal village, and he could have it around to the Crount on call in less than an hour. And in fact, during good weather, he half the time left it anchored right out in front of the hotel just off the beach. Grant learned all this the very first day when, after he inquired about diving facilities, and while the women were already huddled together in their first marriage consultation, René called up Grointon to come over and meet him.

“Usu-al
l
y,” René said, “Jeem leave zat boat right out een frawnt ’ere,” and swept an arm toward the empty beach beyond the veranda where some paying guests swam in the heavy quiet noonday sun. “W’enhever zay clients want to go div
ing
I call Jeem. ’Ee ees a real ganzer macher. ’Ee make plenty beesness off me.”