Go to the Widow-Maker (87 page)

The night before Bonham had briefed them on everything except the actual trip itself. Naturally, he and Orloffski had eaten dinner with them, naturally on Ron’s check—although Bonham said (with his usual look at her) that this would be the last time, it was just too damned expensive for Ron, and he and Mo would catch their meals in town somewhere after this. And he and Mo would sleep on board, while they worked on her sails and gear and on getting her ready belowdecks. He had made reservations with René already for Sam Finer and his wife, and they would be arriving in four or five days. The brain surgeon and his girlfriend would be arriving about the same time, but they would sleep on board too, to save money. The surgeon wanted to help with the work anyway. Bonham figured that after seven or eight days’ sailwork, ropework, rigging, and some minimal paintwork and cleaning-up below— they would be ready to go.

The second night, the night after they had visited the ship and watched the ‘launching,’ true to his word Bonham did not appear for dinner. But they came afterward, bringing with them all the necessary charts and maps and a pair of marine dividers and parallel rulers to lay out and brief them on the trip itself, those who were interested. Lucky wasn’t. When they came to the charts of the Nelson Islands themselves, she took one look and retired to the bar for a drink without understanding these any more than she had ever understood any maps, including highway roadmaps. Irma, who wasn’t interested either and who understood maps no better, joined her almost immediately. So the two of them sat at the bar, drinking, and watched the five men, Bonham, Orloffski, Ben, Ron and Jim, huddling excitedly over the great mass of charts and maps on the largest of the bar’s tables. Lucky could see that the other hotel guests scattered around, including the movie star and his wife, were all quite impressed. She herself wasn’t.

“You’re really going?” she asked Irma finally.

“Sure, why the hell not?” Irma said. Then she cackled her weird laugh. “I might even learn to swim. From those fucking boy scouts. Bonham’s promised he’d teach me.”

“Well, I don’t think I am,” Lucky said after a moment.

Irma leaned closer suddenly and glanced at the table of men. “I don’t think you have much choice,” she said softly. “Listen, Lucky. Ben and I’ve been talking. About you and Ron. We don’t really know what the trouble is. Except what you told me about that ex-mistress-‘foster-mother’ of Ron’s. But we’ve decided, and I’ve been delegated by Ben to tell you, that you damn well better go. If you want to save your marriage. Christ, you’ve only been married what? Not even two months yet already.” For Irma it was a long speech. “We think you
want
to save it,” she added. “And we want you
to.”

“I’m not at all sure I want to save it,” Lucky said thinly.

“Well, that’s something else again,” Irma said. She was not cackling now.

Lucky didn’t answer, and instead turned to look at the men. She shouldn’t have said that. It was her instinct not to talk at all about things like that, not to outsiders, even Irma. She studied the men at the table pointedly, and Irma followed suit.

They were really something. Bonham, who could—when he had to—be reasonably polite and civilized, was nevertheless completely out of place here in this chic international bar and set. But Orloffski was a horror. His crude, loud, brutal, totally insensitive voice and manner in that great beefy body made him seem doubly like an ape here in this place. A hairless ape. Unfortunately. And apparently even he sensed it this time. He kept looking around the place at the various men as if measuring them all to see if there was one man here that he could
not
whip. A sort of belligerent selfdefense, which seemed to be felt uncomfortably all over the bar. A week or ten days on a ship with that oaf seemed to Lucky to be beyond the call of duty even for a wife. And Ron seemed to be liking it all so much! So did Jim Grointon, who wasn’t even going along! Neither one of them had hardly spoken a word to her since Bonham and Orloffski arrived yesterday. She ordered another drink.

“Come on,” Irma said. “Let’s us wives get back over there.”

The upshot of all this furious map-reading, discussion and measuring appeared to be that the Nelson Islands, situated in their position halfway between the Pedro Bank and the Rosalind Bank, and too small to be shown on any map except possibly those of the very greatest scale, consisted of four major islands and twelve tiny uninhabited islets strung out along and between them. The two northern ones, named appropriately North Nelson and South Nelson, which were the largest, were only about seven miles long altogether with a half-mile pass between them, and were shaped like a crazy drunken U lying on its side with the pass running through the exact bottom of the U. Because of this there was good anchorage anywhere inside the U. The two southern main islands, called Dog Cay and Green’s Cay, lay sixteen miles to the south and were much smaller with a pass of only a hundred yards between them. One of these, Dog Cay, had been bought up in its entirety by a group of wealthy Bahamians, Englishmen and Americans and was in effect a private club, run English-style, with a full-time British resident manager even yet. They were notoriously hospitable to private yachts putting into their small anchorage during the off season. Three of the tiny islets lay between these and the north islands, with the other nine islets strung out in a roughly straight line south of Dog Cay for another twelve or thirteen miles. Reefs abounded everywhere along the entire group. It was Bonham’s plan to head straight for North Nelson where the capital, named Georgetown naturally, was situated, spend a couple of days spearfishing and exploring there, then head on down the rest of the group, stopping off a day or so at Dog Cay, then sail straight for home— Ganado Bay—from the small islet end of the chain. Lucky couldn’t have cared less.

By the time all the chart-reading, calculation, discussion and measuring was over everybody had put away quite a large quantity of booze, including herself and Irma, who spent more of their time at the bar talking to Sam than at the table, and they all were ready to call it a day and go to bed. In a way Lucky was sorry, in spite of all the nautical shit. Going up to the suite every night now was the hardest thing she had to do in every day. She and Ron hardly spoke to each other again tonight. She herself was thinking about what Irma had said at the bar, and of the message Ben had had Irma relay. It was all getting to be that obvious, then. What must Jim think? She had a small instinct not to show herself nude in front of Ron, to do her undressing in the tiny bathroom where he could not see her, but it was only a tiny instinct and she didn’t bother to indulge it. It would almost certainly only infuriate him and cause another fight and she didn’t feel like fighting.

“Do you intend to go right on going out with Jim in the afternoons then?” she asked finally, after she had gotten unabashed into her shorty nightie. She deliberately veiled her voice, so as not to make the question sound too important. Grant of course always slept nude.

“Certainly,” he said from the table where he was pouring himself a last drink. “Why not?”

“What I said to you about Jim the other night didn’t change the way you treat him much,” she said.

“You think I intended to let Grointon know how he’s managed to fuck up my homelife?” he said. “You ought to know by now I’m far too proud for that. And anyway, it isn’t his problem. Even if he is madly stuck on you. It’s
your
problem. And maybe mine.”

Lucky got into her side of the two big beds and under the sheet without answering this. “I guess that’s correct,” she said finally from the bed. “And anyway, it wasn’t Jim who ‘fucked up your homelife,’ as you so delicately put it.”

If she expected this to be a hard parting shot, there was no visible evidence that it worked. If she expected an answer, she did not get one. True to his word, they went out the next day again, spearfishing from the catamaran. Ben and this time Irma too both went along. Lucky occupied herself once again with her binoculars, studying the naked native fishermen, more to make Ron angry than for any other reason. She did love him a little sometimes—or, at least, once in a while some small tendril of what she had once felt for him touched at her lightly somewhere inside. And that was why she wanted to hurt him.

Bonham (and his sidekick Orloffski) did not show up at the hotel all that day, and they did not appear that night either. They had apparently disappeared into the interior of the schooner and intended to stay there. So they dined alone that night, with Jim Grointon naturally, and with Ben and Irma, who appeared almost visibly disturbed. Not so Jim. He apparently couldn’t have been happier. And he insisted on picking up the check. He spent most of the evening loudly extolling Ron’s increasing prowess as a free-diver and spearfisherman.

It was after two more days and nights like this, days spent out on the catamaran, nights spent eating and drinking with Jim and the Spicehandlers, that Lucky, fuming and boiling inside with the tension and at the same time extreme boredom of it all, made her little proposition. She didn’t want this kind of life, hadn’t ever wanted it, with this kind of people, and she hadn’t expected to have this kind of life when she married Ron Grant. She had thought that eventually they would live in New York, maybe spend a year or two in Europe. She was sick of it and of all of them.

She didn’t know what ‘devil’ in her made her do it. It was the same ‘devil’ Jim had in him. Grant had had it too. Ron. Ron had had it, the ‘devil’, in him when she first had met him. But now that had changed somehow. After the dinner and a couple of drinks at the bar, Ben and Irma had said they felt like going into town to the illegal “casino” for a little roulette and chemin de fer. Ron had said no. He wanted to get to bed early tonight, he was tired from the day’s spearfishing and diving, and he didn’t feel like going out gambling.

It was then that Lucky heard herself, almost as if it were some totally different person, another voice, offering a counter proposition.

“But it’s only twelve-thirty. Everybody else wants to go. Why don’t you just go on to bed, and I’ll go on in and gamble a while with Ben and Irma and Jim. Jim’ll look after me.” The voice she heard was a little giggly, and about half, or less than half, say thirty percent, teasing.

Grant’s, Ron’s, voice was totally calm when he answered. But a tiny tickle of intense warning somewhere in her made her intensely aware that beneath the calm was a lot more of something entirely else.

“No, I think I’d rather have you stay with me,” he said. “And you really do look pretty tired yourself, as a matter of fact.” He smiled at her friendlily, lovingly.

“All right. If you say so,” Lucky said.

“I don’t think I’ll go either,” Jim Grointon smiled. “If we want to get a full day’s diving in tomorrow, I better get some sleep myself.” But he hadn’t said that before.

As she followed Grant, Ron, docilely to the suite she thought that at least she could now be reasonably sure he wasn’t
pushing
her at Jim, anyway.

After they had undressed, he turned to her and spread his arms out slightly from his sides, palms toward her. “I want to make love to you tonight,” he said in a voice that seemed quietly full of despair. “Not just
fuck.
Make
love
to you.”

“All right, Ron. I want to make love to you too,” she said. She moved toward him and toward the bed. “Tonight,” she heard herself add. Tonight I want it, but of course ‘it’ was him. He did not answer, as he lay down beside her. Then he moved over her. Next day the Finers arrived and everything changed again.

The advent of the Finers changed quite a lot of things, but it did not change Lucky’s basic problem. She still didn’t know. She . just . did . not . know. If she loved him at all, a little bit, once in a while, as when he had put his arm around her and given her that grin in his excitement over the schooner, it was still not enough to overcome the deep cold anger in her for him, not enough to melt at all the thick layer of dry ice she felt herself encased in. She could not love him as she had before. She could not forget that he lied to her, and therefore would always be able to lie to her. She was
not
a whore! Distrust. And she had thought it was all pure. She had believed Carol Abernathy was important to his work, he had led her to believe that. Had told her that. The coming of the Finers could not change any of that.

The Finers had hit Kingston Jamaica and the Grand Hotel Crount like one of the Caribbean’s proverbial hurricanes. There was no hotel jeep for Sam Finer. He had wired ahead from New York for a private limousine, even though the Crount was only three miles from the airport. And that was the way the Finers arrived.

Grant, Ron, had briefed her on them long before they arrived, but she still did not expect what she saw when they came up the steps from the limousine, moved in, were introduced, and began making themselves at home. Ron had for instance told her how very much in love they were, and how good a thing it was for them, both of them, but the moment Lucky saw them together when they sat down on the veranda for their first drink while the houseboys carried up their bags, she knew instinctively and intuitively that they were not in love at all. Instead, they obviously hated each other’s guts. There was a sullen, long-suffering look on Cathie Finer’s face that made this plainly evident, at least to Lucky. And how anybody could be in love with Sam Finer anyway was more than she could figure. Grant, Ron, had also told her that she might in fact know, or at least have
met,
Cathie Finer around New York. Lucky found that she did indeed know her, and know her better than just a few casual meetings. Cathie Finer, or Cathie Chandler as her name had been then, was one of the bigger Writer-Fuckers of Manhattan Island. One of the biggest, though she had never been a member of “The Club.” The old Club. All of this brought back all sorts of old memories to Lucky—memories that, in her present situation, with Grant, with Ron, left her feeling terribly low and depressed: to remember that old life she had thought she was through with forever. And she knew intuitively and surely, though she could not have said just how, that at some point or other Cathie Finer—Cathie
Chandler
—had fucked Ron Grant, or Grant, Ron, had fucked her. Now that complicated matters now, didn’t it?