by James Jones
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.”
“You would?”
“I sure would!”
“And then you’d have three,” Carol smiled, “you’d be paying alimony to. Instead of two.”
Doug grunted, then grinned. “Okay. Touché. It’s true you did save him from payin any alimony all those susceptible years. But I mean what I say about this one. And you better take that into account.” God, now why had he said that? So strongly? He didn’t really believe that. Not that strongly. Like any other relationship it would be a toss-up. Who knew?
“And she’s very bright,” he added. “She’s got a brain on her.”
“I always thought he should marry a good-natured stupid woman,” Carol murmured. “Like Joyce.” But it had not really been an answer to Doug, and she was still staring moodily out over the town. “It’s a hard role I’ve got picked out for myself, Doug,” she finally said, broodingly. “Sometimes I wonder if I can hack it.”
Doug pushed himself up and away from the balustrade. “Well, I’m goin to make myself another stiff drink. And go to bed.”
“I’ll come along,” Carol said, and got up. But at the door she stopped. “I’ve got to get away from here, Doug,” she said suddenly. “Will you take me away from here? Somewhere? Anywhere? I can’t take it here anymore. I can’t stand their faces. I don’t want to look at them. Especially Hunt I can’t stand looking at.”
Doug chewed his upper lip. “You mean you want to go now? Tonight?”
“No. I would. But I don’t want to take one of Evelyn’s cars, because I don’t know where I’ll go or for how long.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Let’s go tomorrow. Let’s go to Montego Bay. To your friends. Relatives. Just for a week. A week away. Then I’d be all right. Maybe we’ll go right on. Right on around the island. They say it’s a lovely drive.”
“Okay,” Doug heard himself say. “I’ll pick up a Hertz car tomorrow. But I wouldn’t advise trying to look them up in Kingston.”
“Oh, no. Oh, no,” Carol said. “Nothing like that.”
When he turned back from the bar with his refilled glass, she had gone.
His mouth pursed in a thoughtful whistle that made no noise, Doug took his big belt of scotch with its little splash of soda back out to the terrace. But first he took the precaution of turning out the lights. His room was down at the other end of the long gallery so she wouldn’t know if he came up or not, if the lights were out.
Back in the wicker chair, his feet back on the railing, he thought about Grant’s new play, and about his own. Carol—despite all her present upset and anguish—appeared to be awfully cool about talking about Grant’s play with him. Grant had been reticent too, when he had pumped him about it on the way to Montego Bay and after. So she was in it! As a character. That might explain why both of them were unwilling to talk about it. Or, it might be because neither of them trusted Doug Ismaileh not to steal it. Or a part of it.
Goddamn that Grant, he thought with a kind of admiring irritation. How anybody could have made that third play of his work, and not only work, be a success, was beyond Doug Ismaileh. He had read it in its entirety long before it ever came out and was produced, and he would have bet his last nickel it had to fail. He had not of course told Grant or Carol that. Why make waves? But—five sailors trapp
ed in an engineroom in a destroyer sitting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor the day after Pearl Harbor. That was all it was. One set. One set almost in darkness. And five guys sitting waiting for their air to run out, waiting to die. Five guys who talk about death and about life and about their own lives. Once in a while somebody off-stage raps on a piece of steel plate for purposes of suspense to indicate the divers are still trying to get to them. It should have bombed. And did it? No, siree. No, siree-bob it didn’t. It was almost as big a hit as his first one.
Doug had to admit in all honesty that the good thing, the great thing about it was how all these guys sitting there faced with certain death tried to pretend they were tough, honest and brave, that they were men, and how each man slowly, as he talked, proved conclusively by what he said and told about his past that he was none of these things. Proved it conclusively for the audience, if not for his fellow prisoners who, being in the same boat (literally), were forced to accept his fictions if they wanted their own roles respected. Talk about irony. And so they just all died dumb, learning nothing from the experience.
But that was no reason for it to be such a hit. Rather just the reverse. And yet it was. People flocked to it. The Whites of Their Eyes. It was a good title, but it wasn’t that good. But they went.
Doug knew he would never have tried such a thing himself. Even if he had thought of it, which he hadn’t. But he would never have thought of it. It wasn’t his kind of thing. A kind of deep, miasmic, bottomless hollow opened up in him at the thought of his own new play. He didn’t want to think about it.
He had based the hero on himself, plus a guy he had known in the war in Persia. The situation was a love affair he himself had had a couple of years after he got married. That, and some violent events that had occurred in Persia during the war. Not to him but to the other guy. He had known all along that the biggest danger in the idea was in the possibility of making the hero too heroic. And yet he couldn’t seem to help it. He just couldn’t seem to make the guy do bad things. And anyway besides, he had to be somewhat heroic. He had tried to prepare for and cover this by making the guy tougher and more cruel than he probably normally would have been. But then Paul Gibson who had read it all all along wrote back that he thought the hero was too mean and cold-blooded, that he needed some kindness and compassion in him. But whenever he wrote anything kind or compassionate about him, Paul would write back that that wasn’t compassion, that was sentimentality. What the fuck did they want from him? Aw, fuck it! he thought and finished his glass and got up to go to bed.
Up on his feet, he discovered that he was pretty drunk. Well good. Then maybe he’d be able to sleep. So tomorrow he’d be taking old Carol off to MoBay. Well, a week or so more away from work, what the hell? He almost welcomed it.
He had a copy of the new play with him. He would show it to Carol and have her read it. Maybe she might come up with something. Probably she wouldn’t. Probably she wouldn’t even get what he was driving at. She’d been getting more and more like that the last couple of years. But it was worth a shot.
The last thing he thought as he settled into the bed and let the peaceful buzz of drunkenness engulf him into sleep was that if she stayed as calm and as sane as she seemed tonight it might even be a pleasant, fun trip.
Unfortunately, as he could see immediately as soon as he saw her the next morning, that was not the way it was going to be.
He did not know what was bugging her now. But whatever it was that had made her mild and rational last night, it was no longer with her. She was roundly insulting and unpleasant to just about everyone. Evelyn of course she almost never criticized, or the old Count Paul there. Doug cynically believed that this was because she knew damn well what side her visitor’s card was buttered on. But with everybody else she was horrible. And as always, it was moral issues that she bugged everyone about. At breakfast on the terrace in the bright hot lovely sun she launched into a tirade against some hapless junior member of the Hunt Hills Little Theatre Group whose inept second act had just been delivered to her in the morning mail. The causes of this ineptitude were always moral lapses on the part of the individual who had written the material, as far as she was concerned: laziness, sloth, gluttony, greed, drinking, sex, etc. She had just finished reading it before Doug came down, and she knew. Then it was Doug’s turn. She upbraided him because he was down here in Jamaica loafing in the sun when he should be up at Coral Gables working, even though it was she who had called him down here in the first place and who was taking him off to MoBay for a week today. She castigated him for the late hour at which he had risen today. She herself had been up since six.
As he had learned to do long ago, Doug simply pulled down and snapped shut the fasteners on his earflaps. He answered in monosyllables, affirmative or negative, and then only when addressed directly with a question. Why did he sit around and take it? He knew why. Because, in spite of these kooky crazy moods, she had helped him in the past and might still help him again. He would take help wherever he could get it, and sticks and stones.
Then it was Hunt’s turn, as he came out in his robe for breakfast looking a little bleary-eyed. What in the living hell was he doing down here in Jamaica when he ought to be up home in Indianapolis taking care of his business. Mark her word, those goddamned slippery partners of his were going to slip his business right out from under his feet if he wasn’t careful. It went on and on. Drink, sex, that lousy fucking escapism golf. Wasted lives. As Doug watched, a curious transformation slowly took place in Hunt. Instead of getting angry, he got guiltier and guiltier—with a sort of self-castigating, self-loathing, total culpability on his face. Christ, Doug thought looking at his face, he’s going to come in a minute if she don’t let up.
Purely academically, Doug wondered what would happen if somebody was really cruel to Carol. Really mean. She would probably become their slave. Out on the West Coast after his discharge and before he got married he had worked for the rackets a while running a gambling and callgirl place, a hotel, and had gotten to know some really superior professional pimps. And under their tutelage had done some serious pimping himself. It was amazing what you could get a woman to do if you were just cruel enough to her. They loved it. And the supreme test was to get a girl to love you so much that she was willing to fuck another man if you told her you wanted her to. More, you could make them suck cock, let themselves be buggered, anything. But you had to make them love you first, then be mean to them. Most of the guys had peephole arrangements where they could watch if they wanted, and the girls knew that and accepted it. Only the customer didn’t know. It could be great fun. It all was amazing and Doug looked at Carol Abernathy shrewdly as she went on throwing her weight around, and grinned suddenly to himself.
Actually it was clear that she was about on her last legs as far as nerves went. Probably, Doug supposed, she had been waiting and waiting around for him to come back, hoping that in the end something would change and Grant would not go. When Doug didn’t come back and she heard from other sources that Grant had stayed over a day, she probably had taken that as a sign, one in her favor. And now, of course, it was all over. The birds had flown.
Fortunately, when he returned with the hired car later and loaded their bags in the back, she appeared to have about hollered herself out. She was practically silent. Unhealthily silent.
While she was still upstairs, Hunt had taken him aside to talk about her. In that authoritative, command-giving, I-expect-to-be-obeyed businessman’s voice he had normally and which was so different from the abject way he presented himself to his wife, Hunt asked him to take care of her. “She’s had a pretty rough time these past few weeks, Doug. She really needs to get her mind off all this business and get some rest. I can’t give it to her. But maybe you can.”
“Sure,” Doug said, and patted the diminutive Hunt on the back. “That’s what I’m doin this for, old buddy. I know what she’s been through. Ron was her first boy, and her favorite, as well as her most famous one, too. I
understand.”
Hunt Abernathy nodded. “I myself think he’ll come back. Even if he does marry this girl. Why shouldn’t he?” he said and gave a sad tired smile.
When Carol did appear she went straight to the car and got in in silence. Hunt came to the window to kiss her goodby. After that, she waved and smiled to Evelyn up on the porch. Hunt stepped back. “For God’s sake, let’s get the fuck out of here!” she said under her breath to Doug. Her voice sounded desperate. It was the last word she spoke for about an hour.
Doug was grateful. He had hoped that while he was gone for the car she might run herself down or wear herself out. Now she tucked herself up in the carrobe-blanket she had brought along and turning her head toward the window she slept. Or pretended to. Doug couldn’t be sure. He sensed somehow in some animal way that she was awake and not asleep. But to find out he was not going to ask any questions that might turn into another conversational tirade like this morning. Silence was fine with him.
He had run into Orloffski in town this morning while getting the car, just long enough to have a quick beer. Bonham had already gone out—Orloffski had told him—in the boat, early, by himself. Orloffski was downtown to see about his plane ticket to Baltimore, to go back north and bring down the cutter. It had started Doug off to thinking about Bonham and Grant and himself, all of them, and the diving. Now he resumed it. Waiting for all the rigamarole and paperwork that had to be done to get the car, and thinking about all of that, he had in the office of the Hertz Company about convinced himself that when it came to diving in the aqualung he was nothing but a lousy ratfink coward. He simply could not make himself breathe through those fucking tubes down there on the bottom of that pool. His throat would choke up, his nerves would get all jumpy and tricky, gallons of water would seem to be leaking into his mouth, he would have to claw for the surface, it would always astonish and embarrass him to find that there was hardly any water in his mouth at all. Now in the car he went back to contemplating this. He had made a big fuss and to-do about burbling and spitting but about the only water in his mouth was water he had let in there himself after getting back to the surface. He wasn’t a coward about anything else. And anyway he didn’t have any big grand passion for it like Grant did. He didn’t even care that much about it. So what the hell?