Go to the Widow-Maker (55 page)

At the house, after they had searched hard and thoroughly for the camera and not found it and had had a couple of drinks, as a gesture he offered Doug his car to go home in.

“Well, thanks, Al,” Doug said. “I uh—Okay, I’ll take it.”

“I’d just like to have it by ten-thirty or eleven,” Bonham said. “Because I’m going out. Maybe it would be better if I drove you.”

“Maybe that would be better,” Doug said. “I probably wouldn’t get up that early.”

They did not talk on the way, but when he let Doug out at the big iron gates of the villa he said again how sorry he was about the loss of the camera. “I expect Orloffski’s right and one of them damn porters stole it.”

“I expect so,” Doug said. “Anyway it’s a little thing, really.”

“What’ll you be doing now? With Grant and his girl gone?” Bonham asked.

“I don’t know. Probably mosey on back to Coral Gables and get back to my snook fishin, I guess,” Doug said. He turned toward the villa. As he went up the curving walk Bonham heard him start to whistle. The song was a popular song that had been a big hit, called
The Party’s Over.

Bonham waited till he had gone in before he drove off. The dew was finally beginning to settle the dust, and the air was cool on his flushed, embarrassed, angry face. God, it was good to be alone. God damn all of them.

A
FTER HE SHUT THE
big glass and iron front door behind him, Doug Ismaileh stopped and stood in the villa foyer several moments. He listened to Bonham’s old car chuff and chug away. Its sound faded and silence settled around him. The villa was totally silent, appeared to be totally deserted tonight. Only one night light burned in the foyer. Everything else was dark.

After hesitating several seconds more in the deep silence, Doug snapped on the lights in the grand salon where the bar was—where
a
bar was; there were bars everywhere here—and went in there and made himself a very stiff scotch and soda. Then, holding the glass, he looked at all the empty chairs and loveseats and divans under the bright lights in the great room. The sight increased his depression. Bonham probably thought his reserve tonight was due to the stealing of the camera (and Doug very deliberately had not straightened him out) but the truth was that he had been reticent and distant because he was having a real putdown. Again, something had changed, a period was over, an adventure had ended in his life. When Grant and Lucky became airborne in the Kingston plane, a serious melancholy settled over him. Now there was nothing for it but to head back home and back to work on the new play. No more excuses. If he went to Kingston it wouldn’t be the same; down there they would be a couple, a sealed-shut couple. And his former heated ideas about going to New York for a while, and looking up Terry September, made him grin ruefully now.

God
damn
that fucking Grant! He was shot in the ass with luck. Everything came to him on a plattter. With no more talent, brains or hard work than a thousand other guys, everything he did turned to gold and fame and happiness. Look at how he had found this goddam Lucky, for instance. He hadn’t even found her! She had found him.

Holding the drink up to the light, Doug admired it; selfconsciously admired himself admiring it. The giantkiller, old Hemingway used to call booze. He was sure right. The old man always was. Still, he couldn’t drink it in here under all these bright lights and only himself among all these empty chairs. Turning on his heel he took the big drink out onto the terrace where only small reflected light from the salon penetrated. It felt much better out there.

Pulling up one of the big highbacked wicker chairs, he sat down and cocked his feet up on the terrace balustrade. Below him lights in the town showed where a number of tourist honkytonks and local shag bars for locals were still open. He felt like going down to one of the local joints and getting into some kind of a fight with some ape. Or hit a tourist trap and pick up some tourist for a nice drunken poker-game, or maybe get him dead drunk and fuck his wife. But, no. Anyway, he certainly wouldn’t run into Bonham and Orloffski down there, he thought wryly, now that their two chief sources of drinking money (himself and Grant) were no longer with them. They’d be home. He sure would not like to have to tangle with Bonham. Now that Orloffski, he wouldn’t like to tangle with him either.

Doug was as sure as everybody else that Orloffski had stolen the camera. But in a way it tickled him. It made him want to chuckle instead of making him angry. It was good once in a while to see something that wasn’t quite perfect for fucking Ron Grant!

Of course, why Orloffski would do such a thing when he knew Bonham was trying hard to sell Grant on going into their schooner and diving business, was something else again. As Doug saw it he just had to be some kind of a klepto.

So, let him be a klepto.

No, what had made him distant to them tonight was something entirely else.

His whole life seemed to be going past him fast, and faster, like an express passenger train picking up speed until the windows blurred into one, and all without leaving any residue or marks on him. And to see Grant and Lucky together made him intensely aware of it. What did
he
have? Ha! His first wife out in L.A. with that dumb kid of theirs they’d had; who needed it? His second wife in Detroit, the fat pig, with her dopey teenage son; he never should have signed all the income of the first play over to her, now she had that
and
his house in Detroit; he had sure had bad advice on that one from all his Greek cousins in New York in their try to save taxes; still, he had all the second-play income himself although it wasn’t as big a hit. He had his house in Coral Gables, and his little boat, and a bunch of fishing experiences and opportunities—which, unless there was an audience to see them or somebody to tell them to afterwards, didn’t mean all that much anyway. And he had his third play, which although he was halfway through the second act, he still couldn’t get the first-act curtain for. Which meant it wasn’t even off the ground. That was what he had.

And that fucking Grant! That son of a bitch! How dare he come up with such a great broad as old Lucky? He had no more right to her than anybody. She was as loyal to him as a tigress. She
loved
him. And why? She had met him. A mutual friend had introduced them. A mutual friend had introduced them, and she had been ready to fall in love with
somebody,
so fucking Grant fell into the gravy. Why had he met her? Why hadn’t Doug met her? It could just as easy happen. What was so great about Grant? His Moral Integrity? Ha! Here he lived with this older broad for fourteen years, screwing her in her own house, in her husband’s house, letting her husband support him—until his work started making money. Hell, he wouldn’t even have to pay her alimony now when he left her! What kind of luck was that? But moral integrity! Did Lucky think he had moral integrity?

His next thought caused a kind of astonished stillness in Doug.

What if somebody told Lucky all about Carol, what would she say about moral integrity then?—was the thought.

Why hadn’t he? Why the hell hadn’t he? He could have slipped it to her so easy she probably wouldn’t even have known where it came from. And Grant the fucker deserved it. Why, by God, he hadn’t even
thought
of it! What kind of a brain-thinker did that make Ismaileh? No. No you couldn’t go doing things like that to your best friends. Even if they deserved them.

Sitting in the high-backed wicker chair Doug sensed rather than heard someone come up behind him out onto the terrace. Silently he tensed his body in the chair and grasped the heavy crystal ashtray that had been sitting in his lap and grinned, somehow feeling vastly relieved suddenly. Okay, come on, you!

“Doug?” the soft voice of Carol Abernathy said from behind him. “Is that you, Doug?”

He relaxed and got to his feet “Yes. Hi, Carol! God, did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”

“No, you didn’t wake me. I woke on my own, and then saw the lights on down here and thought it might be you.”

“I’m just havin a nightcap before goin off to bed.” He turned to look out over the town again, his jaws tightening for some unaccountable reason. A few of the lights had gone out.

She came and stood by him, looking out too. She was wearing one of her better looking robes, tied in with a wide Japanese-style sash, and mules with long-haired pompoms on them. Above the sash her heavy breasts, even though they sagged a good bit, didn’t look bad.

“Did you finally get the pair of young lovers off for Kingston?” she said in a mild voice.

“Yeh,” Doug said lightly. “Yeh, I did. And everybody was as happy as clams.”

“Where were you all day today? I thought they were leaving last night.”

“Well, Bonham had this dive to make today. Couple crashed through the bridge in a car. And he wanted Ron to make it with him. So they stayed over a day. So—I stayed with ’em.”

“Yes, I heard about the accident. Some poor married man and his girl. Did they seem happy to you?”

“Yes,” Doug said, not without a certain twinge of particular pleasure. “Yes, they seemed very happy to me.”

Rather sadly Carol pulled a big wicker chair over by his and sat down on it, putting her heels up on the balustrade.

“Do you think he’ll marry her?” she asked.

“Yeah, I pretty much think he will. He was sort of of two minds about it in the beginning, but he’s come around to accepting it as sort of his Fate. And she’ll do just about anything to marry him.”

Carol was silent for a long moment, looking out over the town. “Of course she will,” she finally said, sadly.

There was a cool, sane mildness about her tonight, an acceptant melancholy that answered his own. This was the way Doug remembered her that first night he had met her, when Grant was in New York, after he had driven down from Detroit to Indianapolis.

“Do you think she would go out to Indianapolis to live with him?” Carol said.

“Why?” Then he spoke with a relish he could not avoid but hoped was concealed. “Yes, I think she’d go out to Indianapolis to live with him. I think she’d do anything, absolutely anything she had to do to marry him and be his wife. She’s crazy in love with him.” How did he get into this? But he was enjoying it. He didn’t really believe that all that strongly, himself. But he almost did. “But why do you ask that?”

“Why?” She turned her head to look up at him where he stood against the balustrade, and it was as if her eyes had gone totally blind, become sightless. A tear welled up in each but didn’t drop. “I guess you never realized, nor noticed. But I was his lover. All those years. You never guessed that?”

“No!” he lied. “No, I didn’t. I guess I thought about it once or twice, but it seemed too—” he had meant to say
incongruous
but choked it off. Instead he shrugged and spread his hands and flattered. “I guess it was just too well covered up.”

Carol was looking back out over the town now. “Well, I guess it was a dirty trick on my part, but I got him to buy that house and tie up all that money in it just to keep him away from New York and that kind of girls. Now, he doesn’t have all that much money, to try and move away.”

“What about the new play?”

“Well, of course if the new play is a success it won’t make any difference.”

Doug chuckled. “Yeah, that was kind of a dirty trick. How is the new play?”

“I don’t know. I’m not qualified to judge it. I’m in it,” Carol said thinly. “As to whether it’ll make money or not, I couldn’t say. It ought to.”

“And if it makes money he can move away from Indianapolis with his new bride, is that it?”

“That’s right. I’m assuming she won’t like me, naturally.”

“On the other hand, if it doesn’t, he’ll have to bring his bride out there to live, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Across the street from you?”

Carol glanced up at him then, then looked back out across the town. “Yes.”

Doug bit his lower lip. He had to admire it. But what a broomstick up old Grant’s ass! Screw him, he had it comin to him! Something in Doug’s nature, something feminine, or maybe it’s just something conspiratorial, responded deeply to what Carol Abernathy’s feminine wiles had cooked up. He had played some pretty dirty pool in his time, some of which he was proud of, some not, but this beat him hands down. What an underhanded handicap to pin secretly onto a new marriage! Suddenly angry at all women for a moment, he thought of telling her that Grant had already told him about them. Instead he said: “She’ll have
some
mother-in-law troubles, hunh?”

“I’m just interested in his work. Now. That’s all I have the right to be interested in, now,” Carol said.

“Well, you knew it was going to happen to you someday, didn’t you, I guess?”

Carol’s mild face continued to brood sadly out over the darkened town. “I guess I did,” she said. “But I thought I’d have more sayso in the choice he made.”

Jesus! Doug thought admiringly. He was envious. Pick her own successor; who she wanted him to have. And she would really go that far, too! Had it planned that far! Christ, it’s like some kind of a fucking Greek play. No wonder she’s crazy! The wonder is that Grant aint. Or maybe he was too. What a thing to saddle a young bride with! What a
play
it would make! All naturalborn writers had to be born gossips too. Where else would they get their material? You couldn’t make something like this up!

“Solely because I’m interested in his work,” Carol said.

“That’s all we’re all interested in, aint it?” Doug said harshly. “Well look,” he said, more harshly than he meant now. Because he wanted to be honest. But maybe there was a bit of malicious pleasure in it too maybe, hunh? Probly there was. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think this girl is probly the best for him that he could find. In the whole goddam fucking world! And I mean it! And
she
cares about his work, too. If anybody would be good for him to marry, it’s this girl.”

“You really think so?” Carol murmured.

“I do. I sure do,” Doug said, watching her face. He
was
enjoying it. “And I think you’ve got to realize that. Hell, I’d marry her myself, if she was in love with me instead of him.”