by James Jones
“Well, no,” Grant said promptly. “Of course not.” This was not strictly the truth, he realized immediately; but it was only half a lie. There was a kind of breathless anticipation to have her do just that but the thought of her doing it, at the same time, caused an acutely painful cramp in his innards. Even more painfully, he thought of all her “Four Hundred Men”. She could be a little more circumspect about talking about it. He’d like to beat the shit out of all of them.
“But you knew all along this was going to happen, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t think about it,” Grant said, lamely, although this was the exact truth.
“But you heard Doug tell me in the car that that was what you all did last night,” Lucky insisted.
“I just didn’t think about it,” he insisted back. But in spite of that he knew enough to know, and was honest enough with himself to admit, that he should have thought about it. If only to consider whether his preference was in having her participate, or in having her not. There was some kind of self-subterfuging there, all right. “Look, what the hell?” he said.
Lucky’s eyes flashed at him dangerously. “Listen. And believe me! If you want me to, I will. Just say the word! And if I do, you’ll be the most jealous little gentleman that ever lived. I can promise you that!”
“Certainly not,” Grant said calmly. It was a false calm, and his ears were ringing. “Absolutely not. Of course not. Look, we don’t have to do anything. We can just sit right here. Or if you want I’ll take you—”
But it was just then that Doug’s girl, Terry September, walked by still in her bikini on her way back from the Little Girls Room and interrupted him.
“Hey! Aren’t you two joining the fun?”
“Thank you, no,” Lucky said coldly.
“Aw, come off it,” Terry said irritably. “I knew you in New York, Sweetie. You’ve been around plenty. Why don’t you just relax and loosen up a little bit.” Then smiling, she sat down on the edge of the beach chair and put her arm around the other girl friendlily. As if she were being physically burned by her touch, Lucky leaped up from the chair and ran weeping into the house.
“I’m not a whore! I’m not a whore!”
Grant heard her say that much. Nobody else noticed a thing, it was all done so quietly. Except of course Terry.
“Hey! What did I say?” she complained.
“Nothing. It’s okay,” Grant said. “Forget it. I’ll go and get her. She’s tired from the trip.” And he hurried off.
He found her in one of the bedrooms. She had run into the walk-in clothes closet and shut the door and was huddled on the floor in a corner, back among some hanging coats. She was weeping like a busted child, newly orphaned. “Honey, honey! Come on, come on. Don’t cry like that, don’t cry.” The words didn’t matter, as long as he said them as softly as he could. She acted like a wounded animal. Finally he got her to stand up and got her out of the closet into the bedroom, where they sat down on the bed and he held her and finally she stopped crying.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” she said finally, wiping her red eyes and still snuffling. Grant got her some tissues from beside the bed. “You’ve got no right to treat me like that. I’ve never done anything to you to give you the right to treat me like that. Like I was one of those girls.”
“Certainly not,” Grant said. “Of course not. But they’re not whores, Lucky. They’re just young girls living it up while they can. Like everybody.”
“I know that,” Lucky said. She was pulling herself together. “No, that’s not true. They’re sick. I was never sick. Not like that.”
Grant stared at her, listening. It was as close as she had ever come to talking, about herself. But she didn’t go on. He himself was feeling that—in his own eyes at least—he had lost considerable face, displayed considerable lack of courage by backing down out there on the nude bathing business. Almost automatically, he had been positively cowardly in front of her challenge. But he had sensed also very strongly, with a powerful, alert, slow-breathing sense of impending danger, that if he had not, if he had let her go ahead and go through with it, had with her joined the naked swimmers, they would have destroyed something between them that could never be got back. But would she realize that? know what he had done? And was he right? Silently, he continued to pat her on the back as she dried her face and stopped her sniffling. And it was just then that the eldest Khanturian brother wandered in upon them.
For some reason known only to himself he had put back on his gartered socks and his shoes, so that he looked rather strange since the only other thing he was wearing was his baggy wet swimming trunks. He peered at them as if he didn’t know them for a moment or two and then groaned somewhat drunkenly. “Jeez, my poor old feet are killin me,” he announced mournfully. “I wish I just had somebody to rub them for me for a minute.” It was ridiculous. Of course he had no girl, she had left weeping, and she almost certainly would not have done it for him even had she been there. It was clear he was pretty tired of watching the other men playing with their girls in the pool.
“Would you rub my feet?” he asked Lucky.
“Here, sit down,” Grant said with a grin at her. “Sure. I will.” And when Khanturian flopped back on the bed he knelt and taking off his shoes with a wink at Lucky rubbed the bony feet in the silk socks for a minute. Khanturian sighed blissfully. “I hope I aint disturbin you guys any,” he said.
“No,” Grant said. “No, no. Why don’t you take yourself a nap?” He felt very sorry for him; for everybody. Getting Lucky’s arm, he led her out.
“He really is a fat greasy pig,” Lucky whispered distastefully when they were outside the bedroom in the big beamed living-room. “She was right.”—“Well,” Grant said. He had to admit he was pretty greasy.
“And I’m an Italian,” Lucky said.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you home to the hotel. I’ll just tell Doug and Sir John we’re leaving.”
On the long dark drive back to town she held onto his arm with both hands, close up against him, her head pressed against his shoulder as he drove. She felt like a scared little girl holding onto her daddy. At the airport, as they went up over the hill, only a very few lights were still burning.
“I guess I’ve got a thing about old vets,” Grant said finally, after a long silence that had extended from the moment they got into the car in Sir John’s long curving driveway outside the villa in the dark. They had sat a long moment, listening to and looking at the laughter and the lights inside. “Old sailors and old soldiers. I know what they went through. And I know what it’s like to be a nobody. To be manipulated, statistics moved around like chess pieces on the board to gain some overall strategic goal.
“And when it’s all over the Players line you up and thank you in bulk, statistics to the end. Nobody important ever knows your face or name. You’re just there, a pyramid of faces to be stood on. And the oldest Khanturian is like that in peace the same as in war. A nobody. He’s even a nobody with that gang of ours tonight.”
“The oldest Khanturian and all the other Khanturians,” Lucky said. They had all three of them amongst themselves, after Doug started it, taken to referring to the five Khanturian brothers by their numerical position of birth: the eldest Khanturian, the second oldest Khanturian, etc. “I didn’t like to see you rubbing his feet.”
“Well, I didn’t want you to do it. And somebody ought to be willing to rub his feet. All old vets deserve more than that, but I don’t know how to give it to them.”
“Sure. They deserve the right to go down to the American Legion and become reactionaries.”
“I know, I know,” Grant said, moving slightly to take a curve, “I know it’s sentimental. But I can’t help it. It scares me. I don’t like to see it.”
“See what?”
“See the helplessness of the enormous bulk of humanity, supporting on its pyramid of faces the ambitious, the intelligent, and the talented (who all love it, naturally—in bulk) and who, simply because we al
l believe with a deep animal instinct in the pecking order, will go down in ‘History’. They deserve better.”
“Rousseau’s Fallacy! You mean you still believe in ‘the noble savage’?”
“Not at all, not at all. I know they’re bastards, animals. But so are the ambitious, intelligent and talented. It’s their helplessness that scares me. They have nothing to say about what happens to them. And it’s going to get worse. It’s the Age of the Future, I’m afraid, and it’ll be just as much in peacetime as in wartime.”
“But it’s always been like that.”
“But not the same. If Augustus Caesar could get away with being more cruel than Harry Truman or General Eisenhower would be allowed to by the people, he still did not have their modern means of imposing and making stick with the people a loving picture of himself.”
“I like beautiful people,” Lucky murmured into his sleeve.
“Unfortunately, there just aint very many of them in the world.”
“You’re one,” Lucky said.
“Me? Sure. I’m famous. And if you get to be famous like me it’s almost as good as being a politician. You don’t have that problem. Of being a nobody anymore. The people whose lawns you used to mow and battles you used to fight invite you to dinner to show you off to the people whose lawns you didn’t use to mow. They elect you to the Club. Hell, I even played poker with a general once, after I got to be famous.”
Lucky snorted against his sleeve. She was still the helpless, scared and embarrassed little girl again. “What’s so wrong with all that?”
Such a strange one. “Nothing at all. I’m in favor. I deserve it!”
“You’re not like the oldest Khanturian, anyway. You never were a nobody.”
“Oh yes I was! I remember well.”
“Why do you think he never married?”
Grant felt a prick of start, of caution. He steeled his voice to a tone of analysis. “That’s easy. Did you ever see the mom? She believes in ‘Family’. Meaning, her. She’s not about to ever let one of those boys get out from under her thumb. And if she tells him to, even though he might not want to, the Old Man will cut their money off. They haven’t got a chance.” He waited, but Lucky did not make the obvious comparison.
“I hate my mother,” she whispered against his sleeve, instead. “And she hates me. We understand each other, only I admit it and she smiles with her hard stupid selfish eyes and claims she loves me. How can I prove to anyone she doesn’t? Everything she’s ever done to hurt me, she’d done ‘for my own good’. People believe it. The only thing she really loves is her own ignorant greedy stupidity. But that won’t be provable.”
“She doesn’t sound much like the kind of lady who’ll give us ten thousand dollars as a wedding present,” Grant said, suddenly remembering old Frank Aldane’s nod of drunken approval when told that very thing.
There was a small silence. “That was a lie,” Lucky said against his sleeve. “She’s more likely to give us one or two small pieces of the silver my daddy collected.” Another small silence. “I lied to you and told you that because I thought it might make you more inclined to marry me.”
The car had dropped down past the Racquet Club into the edge of the town. Grant didn’t answer for a moment. Then he laughed. “Well, don’t worry about that.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Lucky said. “But I am worried about us.”
At the hotel, after they were in the suite, she clung to him bodily, even more so than she had done in the car. “We mustn’t let them destroy us. They would, all of them, if we gave them half a chance. I can’t protect myself against ‘Them’. But maybe together we can. I’m a little drunk. I don’t like it here. Please, let’s get out of here. Please!”
‘Them’, Grant understood, was just about everybody, everybody who had ever made a dollar off another person, everybody who had ever put a bayonet in another, everybody who had ever demanded allegiance from another, everybody who had ever sustained life or limb or bank account or ego at the expense of another, just about everybody in other words, beginning with her mother, her playmates, her teachers and schoolmasters, her university professors and carrying on to the US House of Representatives, the United States Senate, the voters, especially the voters, who knew? even the President himself—if he knew about her. But then he didn’t have to know about her, did he? Nor did any of the others. They all knew she existed somewhere. And you could go on and include the Bankers of England, the Communist Presidium, every Army in Europe, all churches, the Arab League, the Israeli Army, the Red Chinese social structure, and every howling tribe in Africa. Plus the NAACP, Black Muslims, Klan, and John Wayne and the Birch Society. Grant understood, because it was a feeling he had had himself most of his life. And more than five years in the US Navy fighting for Democracy had not helped alleviate it.
Paranoia, Mr Analyst? You bet your life. You bet your sweet ass. The Condition of Modern Man. And you show me, Mr Analyst, the humanity you talk about that doesn’t have the need or the necessity to destroy, even down to the tiniest word and never mind the atom bombs.
“We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll go tomorrow. First thing in the morning. I promise you. Come to bed and let me hold you.”
They did not leave the next day, however. And it was strictly Grant’s fault. When they got up in the middle of the morning it was to find that Doug and Terry September had come back to the hotel and were there in the living room of the suite already having their own breakfast. The eldest Khanturian had gotten bored hanging around Sir John’s private paradise without a girl and had asked to be taken back to town and they had driven him. Then instead of going back they had come on here, where they could be by themselves. “A little bit of that shit goes a long way,” Terry said with a raucous laugh. “I’m more like you, Lucky. I’d rather make it with just one guy at a time who I enjoyed.” Doug beamed at her. They were both still half drunk and had slept practically none at all.—“Did you ever see anybody more in love than those two?” Doug asked her.—“Well, not since I got out of high school anyway,” Terry laughed. It was from them that Grant and Lucky learned about the picnic which Sir John planned for today.
“Got this place over on the west end of the island he goes to, y’know,” Doug said with a quite accurate imitation of Sir John’s King’s English. He had always had a great ear. “Place called Negril Bay. Doesn’t own it. Place owned by a little sod of a farmer. Chap raises a few papaya and lives off his coconuts. Pays him a few quid a year to use the beach. Lovely beach. Great marvelous reef right off it. Takes along a special rum punch he makes, and coldcuts, cooks hamburgers on the little brick barbecue. Great fun. Swim all you want. Lie in the sun.”
Terry of course had to put in an appearance on the job, she and the other girls. “But we’re through after twelve o’clock noon. And we finish up tomorrow and leave the day after. I thought it would be a sort of nice you know finale.” There would just be the four couples of them, with Doug, Sir John, Ron and “the Spy from Home”.
Grant immediately wanted to go. Partly he wanted to get a chance to try out on the “great marvelous reef” the rented aqualung he’d brought which had been moldering in the trunk of the car ever since they’d gotten here. And partly, he suddenly discovered in him a great reluctance to do anything that would hurry up his departure and force him to get on with it, go on back to Ganado Bay and have his showdown with Carol Abernathy about going on to Kingston ‘alone.’ He had told her once that he was taking his ‘new girl’ down there with him, but he hadn’t really meant it, then, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t believed it. To avoid trouble, and yelling and screaming, he was going to tell her he was going down to Kingston alone but he knew it would still cause a lot of upset. God; in spite of all she had done to him so callously and selfishly, evilly, over the years (and to just about everybody else, including Hunt), he still acted as guiltily around her as if he were a goddamned weak little philandering husband. A regular unmanly little Rotarian. The image again
: dark, mantilla-ed, and still standing on the church steps pointing, pointing at the great nail-studded, dark evil doors. It was that feeling that he’d started this whole damned diving junket to try and get over.
He told Lucky about wanting to go on the picnic as soon as Terry had left and they were alone together in the bedroom to dress for the day. “I’d like to see this Negril place. I’ve read about it. And I’d like to get one chance to try out this damned aqualung, which is really why I came in the first place.” She agreed to go without much argument, but again she looked at him strangely. “I really don’t like it here,” she said after agreeing. “And I don’t really know why. It’s just a feeling. Of something terrible hanging over us. Something horrible that’s liable to happen to us any moment.”
“Is it that you don’t like Sir John?” Grant said, guiltily.
“No. No, not really. I like him. I like him a lot—”
“A lot? You mean like that? Really a lot?” Grant said jealously.
“Don’t be silly. And I like Doug, too. I like him a lot. And those girls are really okay. Like you said, last night.” She paused, inconclusively. “I just don’t know what it is. But something’s wrong. And I’m scared.”
Grant decided not to answer this, and when they finished dressing and came out into the livingroom of the suite again, they found Doug waiting for them.
“Jesus, if you two aren’t a rosy-looking pair,” he said. “You look like an ad for the Great American Lovesong Industry. Right out of McCalls. Christ, I swear, when I look at you two I think I oughta fall in love again myself. And I thought I was through with that kind of shit-thinking forever.”
He put up his big arm and scratched his curly hair and strode with explosive energy back and forth across the room. “What do you think of that Terry girl? Underneath that façade of hers, she’s really quite a nice girl. And as shitless-scared as the rest of us, I guess.” He looked up at them. “Hunh?”
“I think she’s a great girl,” Grant said.
“Well. Anyway, we’re meeting them all at Doctor’s Cave for a beer at 12:15 and taking off from there.” He grinned at them with explosive delight.