Go to the Widow-Maker (64 page)

“Okay. I’ll take it under advisement. I’ll think about it. But it’s my fuckin money. And if I want to put some of it into Bonham’s fuckin boat I’m fuckin damn well goin to. You fuckin
got it?
”

Lucky had recoiled and was staring at him. She had never seen him like this. He was positively almost ravening, like an animal.

“And while we’re on the subject of complaints, I’ve got a couple of complaints of my fuckin own. I’m the boss of this fuckin household, and I’m layin down a couple of rules. You stop flirting with that goddam fuckin Grointon—or I’ll push your goddam head in and his too. An’ the other one is that I’m not meetin any more of your goddam ex-boyfriends. Period. Jesus! I can’t stand shakin hands with the sons of bitches. I want to go wash my fuckin hands. It makes me sick in my stomach. I’m a very jealous man.”

Lucky felt exactly as if she’d been slapped in the face, it even hurt up there, on her cheek, and her mind went totally blank. It was as if a block of hot, burning ice had formed all around her. She said, “You knew damned well you’d almost certainly
meet
Jacques here, when you came here. And as far as that goes you’ll probably meet a lot of others before your life is done. So you better get used to it,” she said coldly. “What would you have had me do, not even say hello to him?”

Her husband grinned. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” Then he laughed. “I want you to give me a list of every man you fucked. I want it tomorrow. That’s an order.” He giggled. “Then I’ll know who not to shake hands with. Christ, there may be a nuther fuckin dozen of ’em around here for all I know.”

“Sweat it out,” Lucky heard herself say coldly. “You’ll never get it out of
me,
you son of a bitch.”

“Aw, shut up and go to bed. Leave me alone.” And he stretched out on the bed and pulled the sheet up over him. Stiffly, like a person walking amongst unbroken eggs, she went around to her own side of the pushed-together double beds and got in and lay there, a stiff frozen block.

“Shit, it’s like bein married to a goddam whore,” his pillow-muffled, stranger’s voice said, “for Christ’s sake.”

“I never took any money,” she said coldly. Then she heard him move and added, before he could, “except for Raoul, and you know he was going to marry me.”

“Aw, shut up and leave me alone.”

“Gladly,” Lucky said. She had never felt so totally frozen up inside. He had deliberately hurt her in her most sensitive place. Deliberately. Or had it been deliberate? She lay in the bed thinking of what she could do to him. As she went off to sleep, finally, she remembered thinking it was their first real fight. As far as she cared, it could be the last, too.

He woke her at four-thirty. He himself was still asleep, but he was moaning and gritting his teeth. He was rigid. His face was covered with sweat and his hands kept clenching and unclenching at his sides, while his feet jerked and made little fluttery motions every now and then.

“Ron!” she said. “Ron!” and touched his shoulder. He sat bolt-upright in the bed, his eyes wild.

“What is it? What is it?” she said.

“Oh, that damned nightmare again,” he said in a muffled voice after a moment

“About the fish?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you’re crazy,” she whispered. Ron didn’t answer. “But you weren’t scared today. Were you?”

“No. No,” he admitted. “No. I wasn’t scared today.”

“Then what is it you’re brooding about so now?”

“I guess it’s because I’m scared now,” he said. After a moment he lay back down, and then turning toward her put his hand lightly on her shoulder. After a moment, she covered his hand with hers. And after a while they made love and then lay clinging to each other in the darkness.

D
AY THE NEXT MORNING
came grey and damp, and the good weather had broken. The wind had shifted to south-southeast. Looking due south from the now cool porch of the Grand Hotel Crount, clouds—a heavy seldom-broken cloud layer with the slanting falling blue streaks of rain squalls scattered all along its length—stretched all the way to, stretched right on around, the sea’s horizon to the south and east. It darkened the high hills in the west. If the wind should freshen—and it did—Jim Grointon had already decided at eight o’clock to run his catamaran back around inside to the anchorage and not dive today. When the Grants came down for breakfast on the covered terrace at ten-thirty, the wind was already whipping the red and white checkered tablecloths and driving the less adventurous like Bradford Heath back inside, and Grointon and his boat had disappeared.

At eleven it began to rain. Bonham appeared in a borrowed car soon after. He did not appear inclined to put the visit to the schooner off for a prettier, sunnier day so, piling in hastily to avoid the rain, into Bonham’s borrowed car and a hotel car which René loaned to Grant, the large, already slightly damp party pulled away from the hotel. No one of them seemed to have quite enough courage to tell Bonham they did not want to go.

In one way only (because there was no diving) was it a good day to visit Bonham’s new pride and joy. In every other way it was not. But this did not seem to bother Bonham.

The boat—the ship—had been hauled at a small yard not far from the Royal Yacht Club around on the inland side of the harbor. Bonham led them there in the cars, and then they all ran for the shelter of the boathouse—all, that is, except Bonham. He walked, slowly. The musical comedy writer and her husband, and the young analyst and his designer wife, all close friends of the Grants by now, were not sailors and therefore were not used to walking around fully clothed and drenched, even in a moderate rain. They spent the entire visit in the big, musty old shed and only looked out at the schooner, upright in its cradle in the rain, through the big open doors. Only Grant and Bonham seemed impervious to the rain. Grant seemed even to enjoy it, as if climbing the ladder to the slippery deck and getting soaking wet put him in some closer communion with spray-drenched sailors. Doug went with them on board, and tramped all around with them, but both his face and figure had the look of a wet angry cat. He had by now found himself a blonde goodlooking middleaged Frenchwoman, a refugee from Haiti staying at the hotel, whom he had brought along. This lady stayed in the shed with the New Yorkers, not looking happy at all. But Lucky Grant went with the sailors. Wearing sneakers without socks, shorts and a sleeveless jersey, with an old yellow sou’wester hat of Bonham’s pulled down on her head to protect her hair, she climbed around the boat with the others, inspecting the foremast, looking at the enormous mainmast and its rigging, inspecting the interior, and got as wet as they did clearly determined not to be called anything but a good sport.

Grant could read it in her. It was strange but in these few days since they’d gotten married, caused by some occult alchemy of close warm wet sexuality, it was as if the two of them had actually become one personality, the two separate eyes in one head as it were, so that each knew at any given second exactly what the other felt or was thinking. Grant grinned his appreciation at her and she smiled back.

The old ship—for it was a ship, once you got up on its deck and looked at the size of the main boom; it was not a ‘boat’—was not very much to look at, except maybe to the eye of an expert. 68 feet long overall, it was not beamy enough to be really comfortable, and this fact immediately became apparent once they got below and looked at the accommodations. From the cockpit a five-step ladder descended through a sliding hatch into the main saloon and the four of them in it all together crowded it. The big mainmast came right down through the center of it, and the table was built around it, with a drop-leaf on either side. With the leafs up there was no room to pass, or even to get up or down, and the whole thing turned itself into a sort of dinette. On the port side forward of the saloon separated off by a bulkhead, was an open single bunk which could be extended into the central alleyway to make a double, and on the starboard side, extending into the middle so that the central alleyway ran forward a little bit to port, was the “main cabin.” In this, which had its own door, was a three-quarter bed with barely enough room between it and the bulkhead to walk, provided you turned sideways. And while it had its own door—for ‘privacy’—the bulkhead, to provide aeration, only ran two-thirds of the way to the ceiling. Standing in the “main cabin” you could look right down on the portside bunk across the alleyway.

“This is certainly not a boat built for lovers, is it?” Lucky said cheerily, after peering into this compartment. Bonham merely glared at her.

Forward of the sleeping the rest was conventional: galley on the port side, the smaller head on the starboard to take less room from the “main cabin,” and in the forepeak two crew’s bunks and an open toilet. When Bonham said it slept eight he was correct technically, but they had better be a very tiny eight. Everywhere, as on the topside, paint was peeling and the old dark varnish cracked and flaking. Gear and moldy-looking sails were piled in the portside bunk and all around the saloon. A heavy musty odor of old canvas and long-since-dried sweaty socks pervaded everything, and was not lessened by the heaviness in the air caused by the rain outside. Indeed, the very rain itself seemed appropriate, seemed to lend itself to the gloomy smelliness of the entire inspection. All in all, at least to the neophytes, it was not very prepossessing looking.

As if he sensed this in them, Bonham said, “Of course, we’ll fix all this interior stuff up eventually before we
really
start chartering her out. Anyway the insides don’t matter much. She sails like a son of a bitch. I’ve been out on her. I think what we’ll probly do, once we got the money, is rebuild the whole interior by another plan. I’m workin on a plan for it now.”

“Will that be soon?” Lucky said pleasantly. Bonham stared at her with his cold eyes before he grinned. “Not bloody likely,” he said in an English accent, then reverted: “We can’t even pay for the real structural, necessary repairs yet, right now.” It was a war to the finish with them, she could see that, and had been ever since she had been so bold as to tell him what she thought was wrong with him. “That’s a shame,” she said pleasantly.—“Yeah,” Bonham smiled, “aint it? It sure is.” Both of them watched Grant moving around touching things with a rapt, gone expression on his face.

He really had it bad. The bad smell, the cracking varnish, the peeling paint, the moldy gear, none of that had any effect on him at all. He seemed instead even to like it. More, he somehow seemed to feel curiously at home in it. He did not know whether he had gotten it before, up in Ganado Bay before he had even seen the boat, maybe he had. Maybe he had come all prepared to fall, already brainwashed. In any case he had it now. He would give anything in his life except his wife—and the success of his next play—to be the owner of this boat. This ship. And failing that, to be a part-owner, even a tiny-piece-owner, of it. He crawled and scrambled over the whole interior of it again, his third complete tour. And Bonham watched, him happily. Triumphantly.

Bonham took him outside in the still-falling rain, though falling less heavily now, to show him the dryrot area starboard forward, and pulled aside the tarp that had been hung over the hole to keep out the weather. Lucky, peering out through a saloon port, watched them and thought later that it must have been then that Bonham talked to him about the loan. In fact it was not. Bonham talked to him back at the hotel, after they returned when, having showered hurriedly, he went down to the bar ahead while she was making up and dressing. Bonham had, without ever having said he was going to, waited on him all that time down there in the bar, and Bonham was not about to miss his chance now, and both he and Grant knew it. But of course she was not there for that.

“Well,” the big man grinned from the bar, and raised his glass of whiskey and bottled soda. His wet clothes had practically dried on him by now. “So you liked her, hunh?”

“Christ!” Grant said huskily. “She’s a real beauty.” And to him she was, though he knew nothing about boats. “All that inside stuff can be fixed up and redone anytime.”

“Sure,” nodded Bonham. “Though once she’s all cleaned up and you throw a little paint and varnish on her, you’d be surprised how nice and comfortable she’ll be below. Without
chan
ging
any
thing.”

“Yeah,” Grant said. They two were alone at the bar, except for Sam, René’s Jamaican barman and one of the witnesses at the wedding. “Gimme a double scotch with a splash of soda, Sam,” Grant ordered and then turned back to the big diver who was leaning on his forearm on the bar and smiling. It had been a big day for Grant. Since coming down in the morning and finding the bad weather, he had had a sense of vast relief that today he would not have to go out, not have to dive, not have to swallow down all his fears still another time. It was like having a day off from school. And as always, around sea ports and sea resorts, the advent of bad weather had brought with it a sort of gala feeling of vacation and vacation-excitement. Perhaps that influenced his feeling about the schooner also. But he would have loved it anyway. It was the first time he had ever been this close to somebody who could and would own a boat like that. And more, who would put his whole everyday professional life on the line for it. Looking at him he wished he had ever wanted anything in his life as much as Bonham wanted that schooner. The only thing he had ever wanted that badly was to be a great writer, a great playwright. But that was not a concrete object like the schooner. That was something he would never know about, in his own lifetime. But Bonham, with his concrete, wood-and-rope-and-canvas schooner, had a dream to live on that any man could envy.

“’Course,” Bonham smiled, “I can’t do that work now. Shit, I can’t even pay for the repairs, like I said.” He paused and sighed, still smiling. “They stopped work on her yesterday, you know.”

“No!” Grant said. “I didn’t! Why?”

Bonham shrugged. “No money. They want at least a thousand bucks right now, tomorrow, to continue work. I haven’t got it. So, no work. She sits there till I get it. And after a week they’ll start chargin me rent.” He had timed it beautifully, and had read the lines just about perfectly. “I shot off a wire to Orloffski this morning. But I’m worried about him, I got a hunch he won’t come through with anything.”