Islands in the Stream (13 page)

Young Tom brought the platter of yellowtail, yellow and white grunts, and rock hind up into the cockpit. They were scored deep in triangular cuts across their flanks so the white meat showed, and fried crisp and brown, and he started to pass them around the table.

“Eddy said to thank you very much but he’d had a drink,” he said. “And he doesn’t eat lunch. Is this fish all right?”

“It’s excellent,” Thomas Hudson told him.

“Please eat,” he said to Roger.

“All right,” Roger said. “I’ll try.”

“Haven’t you eaten anything, Mr. Davis?” Andrew asked.

“No, Andy. But I’m going to eat now.”

In the night Thomas Hudson
would wake and hear the boys asleep and breathing quietly and in the moonlight he could see them all and see Roger sleeping too. He slept well now and almost without stirring.

Thomas Hudson was happy to have them there and he did not want to think about them ever going away. He had been happy before they came and for a long time he had learned how to live and do his work without ever being more lonely than he could bear; but the boys’ coming had broken up all the protective routine of life he had built and now he was used to its being broken. It had been a pleasant routine of working hard; of hours for doing things; places where things were kept and well-cared for; of meals and drinks to look forward to and new books to read and many old books to reread. It was a routine where the daily paper was an event when it arrived, but where it did not come so regularly that its nonarrival was a disappointment. It had many of the inventions that lonely people use to save themselves and even achieve unloneliness with and he had made the rules and kept the customs and used them consciously and unconsciously. But since the boys were here it had come as a great relief not to have to use them.

It would be bad, though, he thought, when he started all that again. He knew very well how it would be. For a part of a day it would be pleasant to have the house neat and to think alone and read without hearing other people talk and look at things without speaking of them and work properly without interruption and then he knew the loneliness would start. The three boys had moved into a big part of him again that, when they moved out, would be empty and it would be very bad for a while.

His life was built solidly on work and on the living by the Gulf Stream and on the island and it would stand up all right. The aids and the habits and the customs were all to handle the loneliness and by now he knew he had opened a whole new country for the loneliness to move into once the boys were gone. There was nothing to do about that, though. That would all come later and if it was coming there was no good derived from any fearing of it now.

The summer, so far, had been a very lucky and good one. Everything had turned out well that could have turned out badly. He did not mean just spectacular things like Roger and the man on the dock, which could have come out very badly; nor David and the shark; but all sorts of small things had come out well. Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it. This may not be true but he had believed it to be true for a long time and this summer they had experienced happiness for a month now and, already, in the nights, he was lonely for it before it had ever gone away.

He knew almost what there is to know about living alone and he had known what it is to live with someone that you loved and that loved you. He had always loved his children but he had never before realized how much he loved them and how bad it was that he did not live with them. He wished that he had them always and that he was married to Tom’s mother. Then he thought that was as silly as wishing you had the wealth of the world to use as intelligently as you could; to be able to draw like Leonardo or paint as well as Pieter Brueghel; to have an absolute veto power against all wickedness and be able to detect it infallibly and always justly when it starts and stop it with something as simple as pressing a button and while doing all this to be always healthy and to live forever and not decay in mind nor body. That was what he thought tonight would be some good things to have. But you could not have them any more than you could have the children; nor that who you loved could be alive if who you loved was dead or gone out from your life. Out of all the things you could not have there were some that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good. There were many things that made it for him when he had it. But just now, in this month, four people made it something that was as good, in some ways, as what the one person had once been able to make and so far there had been no sorrow. There had been no sorrow at all.

He did not even mind being awake now and remembered how it had been once when he had not been able to sleep and had lain in the night thinking about how he had lost the three boys and the fool he had been. He had thought how he had done things because he could not help them, or thought he could not help them, and had moved from one disastrous error of judgment to another that was worse. Now he accepted that as past and he was through with remorse. He had been a fool and he did not like fools. But that was over now and the boys were here and they loved him and he loved them. He would let it go at that for now.

They would go away at the end of their stay and he would have the loneliness again. But it would be only a stage on the way until they came back. If Roger would stay and work and keep hum company it would be much easier. But he never knew about Roger nor what he would do. He smiled in the night thinking about Roger. Then he pitied him until he thought how disloyal it was and how Roger would hate pity and he stopped it and, hearing them all breathing quietly, he went to sleep.

But he woke again when the moonlight came on his face and he started to think about Roger and the women he had been in trouble with. He and Roger had both behaved stupidly and badly with women. He did not want to think of his own stupidities so he would think of Roger’s.

I won’t pity him, he thought, so it is not disloyal. I have been in enough trouble myself so that it is not disloyal to think about Roger’s trouble. My own is different because I only really loved one woman and then lost her. I know well enough why. But I am through with thinking about that and it would probably be well not to think about Roger either. But tonight, because of the moonlight which, as always, would not let him sleep, he thought about him and his serious and comic troubles.

He thought about the last girl Roger had been in love with in Paris when they had both lived there and how very handsome and how very false he thought she was when Roger had brought her to the studio. For Roger there was nothing false about her. She was another of his illusions and all his great talent for being faithful was at her service until they were both free to marry. Then, in a month, everything that had always been clear about her to everyone who knew her well was suddenly clear to Roger. It must have been a difficult day when it first happened but the process of seeing her clearly had been going on for some time when Roger had come up to the studio. He had looked at the canvases for a while and spoken critically and very intelligently about them. Then he said, “I told that Ayers I wouldn’t marry her.”

“Good,” Thomas Hudson had said. “Was it a surprise?”

“Not too much. There’d been some talk about it. She’s a phony.”

“No,” Thomas Hudson had said. “How?”

“Right through. Any way you slice her.”

“I thought you liked her.”

“No. I tried to like her. But I couldn’t make it except at the start. I was in love with her.”

“What’s in love?”

“You ought to know.”

“Yes,” Thomas Hudson had said. “I ought to know.”

“Didn’t you like her?”

“No. I couldn’t stand her.”

“She was your girl. And you didn’t ask me.”

“I told her. But now I have to make it stick.”

“You better pull out.”

“No,” he said. “Let her pull out.”

“I only thought it might be simpler.”

“This is my town as much as it is hers.”

“I know,” Thomas Hudson had said.

“You fought that one out, too, didn’t you?” Roger had asked.

“Yes. You can’t win on any of them. But you can fight them out. Why don’t you just move your
quartier
?”

“I’m all right where I am,” Roger had said.

“I remember the formula.
Je me trouve très bien ici et je vous prie de me laisser tranquille
.”

“It starts with
je refuse de recevoir ma femme
,”
Roger had said. “And you say it to a
huissier
. But this isn’t a divorce. It’s just breaking up.”

“But isn’t it going to be hard on you seeing her?”

“No. It’s going to cure me. That and hearing her talk.”

“What about her?”

“She can figure that out for herself. She’s figured plenty out in the last four years.”

“Five,” Thomas Hudson had said.

“I don’t think she was doing so much figuring the first year.”

“You’d better clear out,” Thomas Hudson had said. “If you don’t think she was figuring the first year you’d better go a long way away.”

“She writes very powerful letters. Going away would be worse. No. I’m going to stay here and go on the town. I’m going to cure it for keeps.”

After he and this girl split up in Paris, Roger was on the town; really on the town. He joked about it and made fun of himself; but he was very angry inside for having made such a profound fool of himself and he took his talent for being faithful to people, which was the best one he had, next to the ones for painting and writing and his various good human and animal traits, and beat and belabored that talent miserably. He was no good to anyone when he was on the town, especially to himself, and he knew it and hated it and he took pleasure in pulling down the pillars of the temple. It was a very good and strongly built temple and when it is constructed inside yourself it is not so easy to pull down. But he did as good a job as he could.

He had three girls in a row, no one of whom Thomas Hudson could be more than civil to and the only excuse for the last two might have been that they reminded him of the first one. This first one came right after the one he had just broken up with and she was sort of a world low for Roger although she went on to have a very successful career both in and out of bed and got herself a good piece of one of the third or fourth biggest fortunes in America and then married into another. She was named Thanis and Thomas Hudson remembered how Roger could never hear it without wincing and he wouldn’t say it; no one ever heard him say the name. He used to call her Bitchy the Great. She was dark with a lovely skin and she looked like a very young, well-groomed, fastidiously vicious member of the Cenci family. She had the morals of a vacuum cleaner and the soul of a pari-mutuel machine, a good figure, and that lovely vicious face, and she only stayed with Roger long enough to get ready for her first good step upwards in life.

She was the first girl that had ever left him and that impressed Roger so that he had two more that looked almost enough like her to be members of the same family. He left both of them, though, really left them, and Thomas Hudson thought that made him feel better; though not a hell of a lot better.

There are probably politer ways and more endearing ways of leaving a girl than simply, with no unpleasantness and never having been in any row, excusing yourself to go to the men’s room at 21 and never coming back. But, as Roger said, he did settle the check downstairs and he loved to think of his last glimpse of her, sitting alone at the corner table in that décor that suited her so and that she loved so well.

He planned to leave the other one at the Stork, which was the place she really loved, but he was afraid Mr. Billingsley might not like it and he needed to borrow some money from Mr. Billingsley.

“So where did you leave her?” Thomas Hudson had asked him.

“At El Morocco. So I could always remember her sitting there among those zebras. She loved El Morocco too,” he said. “But I think it was the Cub Room that was graven on her heart.”

After that he got mixed up with one of the most deceptive women Thomas Hudson had ever known. She was a complete change from his last three Cenci or Park Avenue Borgia types in looks. She looked really healthy and had tawny hair and long, good legs, a very good figure, and an intelligent, lively face. Though it was not beautiful it was much better-looking than most faces. And she had beautiful eyes. She was intelligent and very kindly and charming when you first knew her and she was a complete rummy. She was not a lush and her alcoholism had not showed yet. But she was just at it all of the time. Usually you can tell someone who is really drinking by their eyes and it always showed in Roger’s immediately. But this girl, Kathleen, had really beautiful tawny eyes that went with her hair and the little pleasant freckles of health and good nature around her nose and her cheeks; and you never saw anything in them of what was going on. She looked like a girl who was sailing regularly or living some sort of very healthy outdoor life and she looked like a girl who was very happy. Instead she was just a girl who was drinking. She was on a very strange voyage to somewhere and for a while she took Roger with her.

But he came up to the studio Thomas Hudson had rented in New York one morning with the back of his left hand covered with cigarette burns. It looked as though someone had been putting butts out by rubbing them against a tabletop; only the tabletop was the back of his hand.

“That’s what she wanted to do last night,” he said. “Have you got any iodine? I didn’t like to take those things into a drugstore.”

“Who’s she?”

“Kathleen. The fresh outdoor type.”