Go to the Widow-Maker (68 page)

“Oh, I think you can feel safe in stayin’ that much longer,” Heath smiled. “I can guarantee you we won’t leave for a week.”

Grant grinned. “Fine. Good. See you, then.”

“I don’t think you ought to go out of your way to antagonize Heath like that,” Lucky said after they had walked away. “It only means that he and his pals will lay for you and knock you and your new play when it opens.”

“They would anyway,” Grant said. “Whether I’m nice or not. So I might as well enjoy myself.”

The dinner in the suite was exquisite. After they closed all the Venetian blinds, no one could see in to tell whether they were eating or just sitting and reading. The oldfashioned circular fan on the ceiling turned slowly and silently, and they were served by one of René’s oldest and most trusted waiters. They ate in their robes, and after they had eaten stripped off the robes and fell upon each other in the pushed-together twin beds.

“Let’s do something special,” Lucky said.

“What?”

“Let’s play with ourselves. You play with yourself and I’ll play with myself and I’ll watch you and you watch me. Didn’t you ever do that with some little girl when you were little?”

“No,” Grant said, feeling breathless and densely excited. “But I always wanted to.” It seemed to him there were so many things he had always wanted to do but never done, until he met her, met Lucky. Like walking into a joint knowing you had the best-looking girl in the place on your arm, for example. Like making love and knowing at the same time there was always more love-making there, still waiting for you, and you didn’t have to make excuses or explanations about it. Whenever he looked at her he felt like a miser in his bank vault counting his gold. It was like, after a long drought, long dearth in his life, a landslide goldrush had happened.

They did not see Bonham again the next day before he left. He had come by early in the morning, René said, but had left to catch his plane before they came down. Later on, with a not very decent grin, Jim Grointon told them Bonham had been sleeping on board the schooner while he was here, to save money. When she heard this Lucky looked at Grant with a sad smile he completely understood. But, “Oh, the poor man,” was all she said.

With Bonham gone it was as if an irritant had been removed. It was as if the old group closed ranks over the empty space and came back into their former closeness. Every day they went out with Grointon, with Doug, and with the musical comedy writer and her husband, or with the young analyst and his designer wife. The analyst, though not his wife (who could not swim), had become a fair diver now under Jim’s tutelage and could do twenty or twenty-five feet like Doug.

Those few last long sun-bright, sun-hot afternoons diving in the glassy, tranquil-colored green sea gave Grant such a sense of security and pleasure in and under the water that several different times he almost entirely forgot to be afraid. He loved the going down especially, hyperventilating then rolling over and heading straight down, kicking slow and easy, effortlessly, totally without gravity sucking at him, sure and confident that he had enough air in holding his breath to take him just about as deep as he would want to go, then drifting back up slowly, almost reluctantly, with a struggling fish on the end of his line, toward the dappled moving never-quiet surface to breathe. He had become an expert with the speargun now. But Lucky steadfastly refused to put on a mask and look below. She would swim around the boat without a mask, practicing her sidestroke and her crawl, but she absolutely would not put on a mask and look down and see what was below her. Grant, and just about everybody else, tried to explain that this was absolutely silly. It made no difference.

On the last day, their last day out, something happened which gave to their leavetaking the next morning a marvelous flavor, a marvelous aftertaste. They had already come in, from the last dive, and were all sitting around the bar in their swimsuits having a drink with Jim Grointon, when a sudden squall had come in from the west, leapfrogging the green western hills. Sentiment was high in all of them because it was Last Day, and Jim had anchored the catamaran off the beach and brought the fish in in the dinghy, while the rest of them had swum in. One of his constant chores when parking the boat off the hotel was to keep always one eye out for the first signs of weather and be prepared to rush over to the Crount at any time of day or night to sail it around into the harbor anchorage if some weather came up. Now, in what seemed like only seconds, rain was lashing the porch and the big glass doors along the covered terrace, and in the sudden wind the sea was building up three to four to five-foot waves and sending them smashing against the beach and the catamaran anchored off it. The patent anchor couldn’t possibly hold it in the sand, and in mid-drink, in mid-swallow almost, Jim was off trudging, half-running, down through the sand to swim out, board the little boat and sail it around.

“Do you want me to come along and help you?” Grant called after him.

Jim stopped and turned. He looked both tired and disgusted. Then he shrugged. “No. No, it’s my job. And my boat. I can manage it all right. I’ve done it often enough.” Then he turned back and trudged on. The cold rain was already making him shiver, and he looked so forlorn half-running down the beach that Grant on the porch suddenly stripped off the sweater and dungarees he had put on because he was cold and took off running after him. “Get René’s car and come around and meet us on the other side!” he yelled back at Lucky.

The worst thing about it was the cold, but it could have been dangerous, as Jim pointed out. From the hotel’s beach on down to the harbor entrance at Port Royal the shore was mostly sharp volcanic rock which could have cut them to ribbons had they capsized and been forced to swim ashore in these waves and with that wind behind them. Out further, where Jim immediately ran them and where the four-foot waves were not yet breaking over into five-foot surf, the little catamaran still had to take quite a jostling and knocking about from the waves which it had to take broadside on, and they both had to hold on every moment. At one point Jim (who was really doing all the work anyway) suddenly put on a mask with snorkel attached, pushing it up on his forehead in the heavy rain and pulled a pair of flippers near and advised Grant to do the same. It seemed a bit histrionic to Grant at the time, and proved to be an unnecessary precaution, but later when they were around the bend and in calm water the diver explained: “I know what I did seems silly,” he said with a shy, Irish cop’s smile, “but I just suddenly remembered that I had one of America’s best writers—best playwrights—with me, and realized I had no business letting you come. It would have been very hard to swim in over that rock, even with a mask, and while if anything happened to me it wouldn’t matter, it would certainly have mattered about you. And I would have been responsible.” Grant, embarrassed, could only grin and shrug; it still seemed a bit theatrical to him, but he thought it sweet. And it wasn’t any easy trip. Though the Point Royal spit was less than two miles from the hotel it took them over an hour and a half to make the entire voyage. When they arrived at the anchorage around inside, the entire gang from the hotel led by Lucky was standing under a lean-to shed roof in the rain waving at them happily, and they all had a hot toddy together at the anchorage bar because they were almost as frozen as Jim and Grant. It was then that Jim Grointon clasped Grant with his arm across his back and squeezed his bare shoulder and said: “You’re a hell of a guy, Ron. And you’re one of the very best free-divers I know.
And that’s no bull!”
He said exactly the same thing and clasped him the same way again the next day at the airport, where he had come with René and Lisa to say goodby, though now Grointon was wearing his white linen summer suit, and grinned his white-eyelashed Irish smile. Then he kissed Lucky gently on the cheek. Grant found this thoughtful, and even sweet. Lucky, on the other hand, was not so sure.

Nobody met them at the Ganado Bay airport. Doug had wired ahead that they were coming, but no car from Evelyn’s estate was there to meet them. Looking at her husband’s face to see if this was the sign of some bad omen, and finding nothing there at all, Lucky felt the butterflies start up in her stomach again, the way they had when she had spoken to Carol Abernathy on the phone.
Mothers!
she was thinking
God damn
all mothers!
She had had enough trouble with her own. And now she had his. And a foster-mother yet, at that! And a powerful one. Grant on the other hand, though he showed nothing on his face, was convinced the absence of a car was a deliberate ploy on the part of Carol Abernathy. So was Doug, from the look on his face. And so it proved to be—or so Grant believed. It was so well handled that he never could be sure.

“Well!” Doug said, as they stood in the heat amongst the surly, pushy Negro porters who served to make nervous every liberal who arrived at GaBay. “Aint no point in us rentin a car. There’ll be half a dozen layin around loose at Green Hall. So we might as well rent us a one-shot chauffeur job.”

This they did. The colored chauffeur was quite impressed to be driving somebody to Green Hall. He had driven past it for many years, he said, but only once had he ever carried someone inside. “It ve-ry pret-ty, Mom,” he smiled. And Lucky was impressed too. Ron showed her where the estate began, then showed her the beach house and beach on the sea side of the road as they slowed and then turned in, up the hill, away from the sea, on the long winding drive that finally ended in a great loop at the manorhouse. Green Hall certainly lived up to its name. Grant tried as best he could to point out to his wife the various lush rare tropical trees and plants whose names he remembered being told by the Count Paul who had collected them, as they wound up the blacktop drive. “She must be very rich, the Countess Evelyn,” Lucky said.— “Rich?” Grant said. “She owns just about all the coal in Indiana.”—“But for God sake don’t call her that: Countess,” Doug said from the front seat. “It aint chic.”—“Oh for God’s sake shut up, Doug!” Grant said viciously from beside her. When the butler opened the great wrought iron and glass doors for them, they found the whole gang already all drawn up to meet them.

Evelyn took the ball right away. “I’m terribly sorry! We did want to have someone there to meet you. But Doug neglected to tell us just which flight you were on!” Grant, who had not actually seen the wire, could not tell if this was the truth or not; and Doug, later, said he could not remember. “Come!” she said with all her cynical charm, “let me introduce you, Lucia! Lucky, is it? May I? Charming nickname!”

They were: the Count Paul (simply called Paul). Evelyn herself, Hunt Abernathy, Carol Abernathy, and a girl named Lester Wright who worked for
Sports Illustrated
who was staying with them and had come down to do an article on Paul de Blystein’s amateur seaplane flying. Bloody Marys were served immediately. A cold buffet of mainly ham and chicken was already out, on the terrace.

“Hel
l
o! Hel
lo!”
Carol Abernathy said to her when it came her turn. “But it isn’t really an introduction, is it? Ron has told us so much about you that
I
feel I know you already, Lucky!” The colored Time-guy it turned out had flown back to Kingston, apparently on orders from Heath, just the day before. He had had one last try at Carol before leaving.

Evelyn put them halfway down the hill in “The Cottage.” “After all, you
are
still honeymooning, aren’t you? even though officially you’re not now! And I thought you’d much prefer to be alone!” “The Cottage” turned out to be no cottage at all but a marvelous, very modernistic small house built in such a way that the free-form outdoor swimming pool actually entered into the building in the place of one wall on its ground floor. Formerly it, or at least the ground floor, had been used for the big poker games Evelyn de Blystein loved so much. “Of course now while you’re here we’ll play up in the salon! or on the terrace! Doug of course can have his old room back up in the great house! And if you want to take any of your meals luncheon and dinner down here alone, which I’m sure you will! all you have to do is telephone up to Greg the butler!” There was one telephone in each of the four small rooms. “We almost never use the pool except at around five o’clock,” Evelyn said. “And seldom then.”

“I like her,” Lucky said when they were finally left alone. “I liked her when I first met her, that time in the supermarket, and I still like her.”

“Oh, she’s all right,” Grant said cautiously. He was still trying to feel his way around, get the lay of the land, because, in the overall, he had not wanted to do this—and would not have done it except for that son of a bitch Bradford Heath. Or would he? Anyway he did not feel at all smug, or manly, super-manly, or proud of himself, at having introduced his wife to an old lover.

“She’s mean, probably,” Lucky said, answering him, “but in the end it’s all only for kicks. To get her kicks. And that’s not bad.”

“She loves gossip,” Grant said. “And poker.”

“She’s having an affair with that girl Les Wright from
Sports Illustrated,”
Lucky stated calmly.

Grant was flabbergasted. “She is? Is she!”

Lucky nodded calmly. “Normally I don’t like lesbians. But I like her.”

“But, Christ! She must be sixty-five, anyway.”

“So?” Lucky said.

“Look,” he said. “What did you think of Carol?”

“I didn’t really have a chance to form an opinion.”

“Well, look. If any of these people start bugging you, like especially Carol, you just let me know.” He felt he really had to say that. “I really want to do this diving salvage job with Bonham. But I can scrap it. We don’t really have to stay here more than just a few days.”

“Wouldn’t it look funny if we moved out and still stayed in Ganado Bay?”

“Maybe, but to hell with it. Anyway, I don’t think Bradford Heath would hear of it.”

“He might. If that guy of his left word with somebody in town to call him.”

“Well, screw him.”

“I’ll stay,” she said. “I can handle mothers. I’ve had experience.”