Free Go to the Widow-Maker by James Jones Page B

reviewing.
    Up to the age of thirty-six, which was now, Ron Grant had never had what he considered a true love affair. As a result, he had come to believe no such thing existed—except in the movies of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; and in that insane, complex, all-pervasive spiderweb laid down over the entire American nation: the great American love song industry. Anything else was just kidding yourself. He had been considerably aided in this belief by his mistress, who for reasons of her own never tired of stating it: There is no such thing as love.
    Grant had for a long time strongly suspected that her reasons were entirely personal: if she could convince him there was no love anywhere else either, she could bind him that much more closely to her, because what would be the point of leaving her? She never let up on it. And he had to admit that up to now the theory had been just about 100 percent accurate. Long and seriously deep were the philosophical discussions they had had about it.
    However, he had been brainwashed like the rest of his generation by the great American love song industry, and he couldn’t stop looking, stop hunting. His ‘mistress’ considered this (and sometimes he agreed) a sin of ignorance. But he could no more stop hunting love than he could stop wanting to get laid well, which she considered a sin of indulgence. He had done a deal of hunting and wanting over their fourteen years. He had done a deal of hunting before that, for that matter. A great, great deal. All he wanted was to have just once in his life one love affair that was like those accursed Clark Gable-Carole Lombard films of his youth, that was all. He didn’t even care if it lasted. After it, he would accept all torment—all the consequences, all the penalties, all the misery.
    There were, in all, three love affairs he had had in his life. Innumerable liaisons; but only three love affairs, and not one of them a true one. The first two didn’t even count really, since he had never fucked either of the girls. One was a girl in school, high school, when he was still too green to believe girls liked doing it; she turned out a lesbian. The second was a big, lushly built, redhead Irish-American girl in Hawaii when he was in the Navy during the war, whom he never got any closer to than the grinding of his forearm on the outside of her dress against her enticingly protuberant mons veneris; she now had four kids. Neither counted. And then the third: his long, By God fourteen years long, affair with Carol Abernathy.
    He supposed he had to count that one, since it had lasted so long. But it had certainly never been a true one, a Clark Gable-Carole Lombard one. As for the liaisons, both before and during Carol Abernathy, some had been good and some had been not so good. But none could be called love affairs. A love affair, Grant had decided some time back, presupposed a need, an allpowerful, insuperable need—and not just an insuperable, but a happily insuperable one—for whatever weak, insecure reasons—of each party for the other which superseded everything else in life. And if that happily surrendered-to need wasn’t there, it couldn’t be a love affair, only a liaison. And yet that need must be— . . . But that was as far as he could take it at the age of thirty-six.
    Carol Abernathy. Hunt Abernathy. When he had come home from the Navy and the war to finish school and write plays, he had thought the Abernathys both very glamorous. The Hunts (from whom the Hunt Hills suburb got its name, as had Hunt Abernathy himself) and the Abernathys had been in Indiana since the days of Mad Anthony Wayne. They had settled Hunt Hills. Carol and Hunt had been 1920s kids, flaming, him with a raccoon coat and Stutz Bearcat, her with the cloche hats and titless dresses. When Grant (who had read about them in the Star all his life) met them at the age of 22, Carol was 39, Hunt 41. Now when Grant was 36, she was 53. Easy to swallow, this fact was hard