by James Jones
She had been tolerated but never accepted by his family and his country club, where she became known as The Madcap Carol because of doing crazy stunts. He had never been true to her. Having boundless energy, she had contented herself with the social life, fashion and gay parties, but never felt she quite made it. She had had three or four affairs around the country club, one with a rich young happily married doctor, the rest always with younger men who were poorer than she and whom she helped to get started in some business. Then she discovered literature and the theater, began trying to write plays, and organized the Hunt Hills Little Theatre.
Hunt became the best golfer in Indianapolis if not in Indiana, general manager of the biggest brick making and lumber yard establishment in the area, loved cars, fucked many waitresses and other lowclass girls, and settled into being a serious heavy drinker.
When Grant entered the picture—though they went out together in public and gave gay parties at home—(she said) they hadn’t slept together for years and Hunt had once seriously threatened to commit her.
It was such a banal story that it wouldn’t even make a novel or a play. Grant’s entrance into it had not made it any less banal. He knew of at least twenty childless couples scattered over the Petit Middlewest who had ‘adopted’ a broke young artist or writer, who became a member of the family while he was also fucking the mistress of the establishment at the same time. About the only un-totally-predictable thing, which perhaps saved the story from total banality, was that Ron Grant through fate, luck, talent or all three, had become a worldfamous playwright. That, and the fact that Carol Abernathy, as she watched the years of Grant’s and her ages mount together, began more and more to study oriental philosophies.
It was four years after their affair started that Carol Abernathy began to frequent occult book stores. Their physical love affair (never very fulfilling sexually because after a very short time she would only do it one way, in one position) had rapidly waned as she occupied herself more and more with the spiritual side of things.
It was true that Grant had started having other women soon after their affair started (to be exact, one week after she started refusing to have him in more than one way, one position) but even so he could not believe he was totally responsible for what was happening to her. Carol, though, obviously felt that he was, that it was ‘his fault’.
Through her occult studies she deduced that she had been appointed a sort of occult Master of Midwestern Artists, doomed by some unknown Karma to the great sacrifice of aiding Creators while herself never being allowed the opportunity to create because of helping them. Under this concept her dictatorial tendencies emerged swiftly, since her sacrifice gave her the moral right to know what was best for more self-indugent people. She made it plain to Grant that she now slept with him only so that he would not waste precious time from his Art chasing pussy. She even went so far as to tell him that a frustrated sex life was good for him, and all artists, all great men, because it allowed him—and them— to sublimate sex energy in work. And Grant at one point in his life with her believed, or tried to believe, it. After all there was a lot of truth in the idea. Look at Gandhi. And yet another part of him, the rest of him, which understood people surely but wordlessly, as would some languageless super-animal, knew it all to be a web of selfish, self-laminating, ego-perpetuating lies on her part. All she really wanted was to keep him like any woman wanted to keep any man, keep him and dominate him, be boss, make him pay. He knew all this and yet he didn’t leave her.
Rolled in his blanket on the hard floor of the suite’s livingroom, Grant groaned in his half-sleep.
Carol Abernathy. Their first four months, most of which time they were separated anyway because Grant was still in the Naval Hospital at Great Lakes Station and still totally flat broke, was the nearest they came to a love affair. Using her husband’s money, she used to meet him in Chicago and stay with him. Only some time later did he actually move in with them in Indianapolis, begin writing original one-acters for her Little Theatre, and allow himself to be supported by Hunt. This was after that disastrous year going to school in New York, after which his GI Bill ran out on him because he had only had his senior year left to do. She had visited him there too on Hunt’s money, from time to time. But after that, having moved in with them in Indianapolis, instead of a love affair (even a bad one) it became like some crazy kind of unhappy marriage, with Grant not even having the public distinction of being anyone’s husband.
Carol Abernathy paid him small sums of Hunt Abernathy’s money for the one-acters. This with his tiny Navy pension gave him a little beer and pool money whenever he went out with the boys. But he was seldom allowed to by Carol, who could always threaten to throw him out, and sometimes did. For the rest—bed, board, books, cigarettes—Hunt Abernathy paid. Grant could never understand why. Except that he knew why. Hunt put up with her for the very same reason he himself did: accumulated guilt. In any case it was not a particularly manly way to live for Grant, and his status could conceivably be termed gigolo or rich lady’s darling.
Later on, of course, after his first big three-acter became such a colossal hit on Broadway, it was a lot harder for her to hold him down. He had to go to New York quite a lot. Carol Abernathy never went with him, though out of politeness he asked her once or twice. She always refused. Neither did Hunt go, who couldn’t because of his job, and who didn’t give a good goddam about New York anyway. And each time Grant went to Europe, he went alone.
But why did he always come back?
When the big money began to come in, Carol Abernathy found for him (in her other capacity as real estate agent) an expensive home right across the street from their own in Hunt Hills. What was more, she got him to buy it. Grant was aware that—in addition to being for his security, welfare, quiet and peace of mind, as she told him—it also tied up a big chunk of his sudden new income. And yet he went ahead and did it. But of course at the time he had wanted to do it.
Further, Carol Abernathy got him to invest an even greater sum (over $75,000 to be precise, and most of it non-deductible) in the building of a brand-new theater and grounds for the Hunt Hills Little Theatre. By now, due largely to Grant’s first big success, the Hunt Hills Little Theatre had quite a little group of would-be artists, novelists, playwrights, designers and actors grown up around it. The new theater, grounds and living quarters caused an exciting little Arts Renaissance in Indianapolis. But Grant also knew that besides being for Art and the good of Art and that he owed it to Art because he’d been lucky, as Carol Abernathy told him (and as he himself believed, for that matter), the new Hunt Hills Little Theatre tied up even more of his new money. And yet he went ahead and did that too. But he had wanted to do that, too. He allowed her to go on saying in public that he owed it to her, for helping him.
Why?
That was nine years ago. And so far his share of all spiritual profits had been, simply and solely, guilts—newer and bigger and profounder guilts: guilt as unfaithful lover, guilt as ungrateful son, guilt as commercially successful artist, guilt as a man who kept on repeatedly cuckolding his friend. My God, talk about Oedipus!
As Carol Abernathy in one of her better moments once chuckled and said huskily as they lay in bed, “Christ! You’re the only man I ever heard of who got to live out his Oedipus complex!” Grant had laughed, at the time.
They began seriously the foster-mother routine for the first time when Life Magazine sent one of its hot-shot young feature writers out to Indianapolis to do an article on the hick playwright from some Indiana Little Theater group who had come up with the biggest hit since A Streetcar Named Desire, and on the “strange Middlewestern housewife” who “dominated the Group like a dictator” and “ran the Group’s affairs like a general”. How they ever managed to fool the smart young Life Yale man Grant didn’t know, but he suspected it was because not even a Yale man could believe a grown man who was fucking some woman would allow himself to be so bossed, so tonguelashed, and so ordered arou
nd by her. But that was exactly his reason, once he allowed himself to be convinced by Carol that they seriously had to play mother and son or be found out, which—after all—would really hurt nobody but Hunt.
Naturally, the Life article made him look like a raving fag to the world. And from then on he was trapped in the role. A ‘mother’-dominated neurotic. His intention had been to protect Carol and Hunt—especially Hunt, who had come to be the biggest of his guilts. It was peculiar that there seemed to be no other choice. Either he shut up and let himself be a fag mother’s boy to the world, or he told the truth and showed up his friend Hunt Abernathy as a cuckold—and, one made so by himself.
Grant never did know what Hunt thought about the whole thing. Whenever they two were together alone, they reacted and talked as though the Life article was right and they three were a family with Carol the mother, Hunt the father, and Grant the son—which, in one strange way, they really were. Only once did Hunt even obliquely mention anything about the whole business and that was one time several years after Grant’s success when, after a terrible lovers’ fight with Carol, Grant had gone out and got drunk and Hunt—not too sober himself—had come to find him and bring him home. They two, both males—or both trying to be males—had over the years formed an oddly deep, enduring friendship from opposite sides of this peculiar woman who seemed determined (whether consciously or not) that neither should ever be a man again. Driving along the darkened streets of downtown Indianapolis, lit only by the neon of bars at this late hour, Hunt Abernathy had said, “Listen, I don’t know what this fight’s all about. But I want you to know that, much as I’ve come to like you, even love you, Ron, if it ever comes to a head-on collision, a head-on break between you and Carol, I’ll have to side with Carol.”—“Sure,” Grant had said in a pained, subdued voice, “of course.”—“Because I think she’s right,” Hunt Abernathy said. “I believe in her.”
How had she managed it? It was incredible. For years she had governed her every act by a double-edged policy of declaring herself arbiter morum over the lives of her husband and lover in order to ‘help’ them, and also in order at the same time to retain power over them both. For years she had labored—whether deliberately or not—to instill sufficient guilt in them to bind both to her forever. She had succeeded, apparently.
And yet of course it hadn’t all been bad. Maybe that was the trouble. Despite everything else, human loyalties had grown—caused simply by the guilts, perhaps. Grant could recall the time the three of them had gone out together and celebrated his first sale of a Grant one-acter outside the Hunt Hills Little Theatre; some little summer theater in upstate New York had wanted to do it. When the first big hit came, he had taken the two of them on a month’s vacation in Havana. What a time they had had. Hunt had caught a marlin.
On the floor of the room in the New Weston Hotel the rolled-up figure groaned again. If he could only just once find one Carole Lombard. For one week. He would throw it all up, throw away everything, success, money, talent even, for one week.
Why then did he always come running back to Carol Abernathy? Fear, that was why. Fear of being alone. Fear that every girl in his life from now on would only be a liaison; and that kind of bonecold loneness he could not face. Terrorized and haunted and made cowardly by such thoughts, he preferred to run back to a little love which if it did not keep you really warm, at least did not let you quite freeze. Grant, half waking, remembered the crumpled-up telegram.
The reason Carol Abernathy was in Miami Beach visiting friends and on her way to Jamaica was because during the two years he had worked on his new play Grant had decided he wanted to learn skindiving.
Reading M. Cousteau’s book had started him off. He bought himself a little aqualung at his sports dealer’s, dove down thirty-five or forty feet into two murky Indiana lakes, saw nothing, and came back home with a serious external ear infection which it took six weeks to cure.
Indiana just wasn’t the place for it. He bought more books on diving. And from diving he branched out into marine biology, underwater archeology, oceanography, marine geology. Sitting in his relatively safe vantage point of Indianapolis Indiana watching via newspapers he did not trust the three colossal bureaucracies of the world wrassling each other for moral superiority and threatening each other with ‘retaliatory destruction’, he studied the last frontier open to the individual, non-team man. He was writing a play about a languishing fourteen-year-old love affair which his agent, producers and director told him was almost certain to be a smash hit, and into which he was trying to put some sense of serious meaning of what it was like to live in his own terrified, terrorized time, and what that time itself was like when Presidents and Leaders and parliamentary bodies, and the vast anonymous bureaus and groups of bureaus their governments had created, could not influence—and could not even be held responsible for—what was happening to the world.
He promised himself that when he finished it, hit or not, he would take some time off and really learn this new world where it ought to be learned, in the tropics. At least it would be an antidote to world politics for six months or so. It would also be an antidote to Carol Abernathy. He told Hunt and Carol about it over dinner one evening in his house, in Indianapolis. This made it an occasion, because usually he dined with them.
Carol liked the idea. She liked it so much she immediately invited herself and took over the planning, suggesting Ganado Bay in Jamaica because they could stay with the Countess Evelyn de Blystein, who was the former Evelyn Glotz of Indianapolis before with her father’s huge coal fortune she married the Count Paul, and whom they all had known for years and whom Carol and Hunt had twice visited in her Jamaican winter home. She would write her a letter tomorrow. The play would be finished in a matter of weeks, and they could leave before the real cold weather started.
Grant listened to all of this and said nothing.
Their plans, then—his and those of the Abernathys, after Carol finished with them—were that she would spend some days with friends in Miami and, leaving her Mercedes there, would then go on to Ganado Bay where she would stay with Evelyn de Blystein and where Grant after seeing his producers in New York would meet her, and where Hunt would join them for the six weeks of his annual vacation. Then, at their leisure (whatever the hell that meant, Grant thought sourly, because it was her phrase), they two would continue on to Kingston where he would take diving lessons from a European professional named Georges Villalonga he had read about and thus begin his diving career.
The thought of the diving excited Grant, but the thought of Carol Abernathy being there did not. Why then could he not tell her this? explain to her that he wanted, preferred to go alone? He couldn’t.
His ladylove left first, driving her own little Mercedes to Florida, and leaving from her own house almost directly across the street from the house she had found for Grant to buy. (It required only a moment for him to slip across the street late at night, after Hunt was asleep; as long as he was always back in his own house some time before daylight. And Grant had always enjoyed being up at dawn.) With some part of all this in his mind he stood in her yard with Hunt as she left, waving. As she pulled away, she gave him a secret tender loving look, which lit up her dark brown eyes, and which also Grant noticed accentuated the petulant jowls on her jawline that she had been steadily acquiring over the past six or eight years because she felt he did not love her and because she was aging. Then he went back across the street and spent five days going over the typescript of his new play one last time with a pencil, adding a word here, cutting one there, relishing reading over one more time his own finished work, which of course most of the time until now he had believed in despair would never be finished. There was always this sad feeling that once a play was done, and seen by the public, it was no longer his and he had lost it. Then he packed a bag and, after a last drunken evening with Hunt, left for the train possessed of a violent desire to get the hell out of Indianapolis and back to New York and quickly get laid, anxi
ous to start living yet once again—which meant getting laid.
Again the figure on the floor of the New Weston suite’s livingroom groaned. Laid? Laid?
He was awakened by the desk clerk at eight-thirty with the information that there was a person-to-person call for him from Miami. He refused it, telling the clerk to say he was out, took a shower and shaved, and then, after hacking hard to get the cigarettes-and-whiskey huskiness out of his voice, picked up the receiver and called Lucky Videndi.
3
SOME TIME LATER Lucky told him that that very huskiness in his voice was what had sunk her, that the only reason she had allowed him to continue to talk at all without hanging up on him immediately was because the husk in his phone voice was so sexy and exciting that it startled and intrigued her into listening. “That was my bad luck,” she grinned, running one hand lightly across his belly and then down into his crotch, kissing him in the center of his chest. “My good luck!” Grant countered, and trapped her hand where it was with his own so she couldn’t remove it, or stop what it was doing. “And it turns out it was only cigarettes and whiskey!” she smiled.
Normally she didn’t do things like that, grab him like that so often, and so Grant liked it. Usually she sort of waited, to be stimulated and then played upon, as though this was some woman’s passive prerogative she could avail herself of if she wished to. Grant sometimes felt she saw herself as some sort of flesh and blood harp with somewhere deep inside secret strings that twanged, and that he himself was the harpist—a harpist—who literally twanged these strings. Like any instrument she had to be warmed up; then, warmed, she could be played upon, and Grant was dedicating himself to this art form. He had never had sex like this in his life, ever.