Islands in the Stream Read online

  “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.”

  “You had to participate.”

  “It seemed to amuse her and we’re supposed to amuse them.”

  “You’re burned pretty badly.”

  “Not really. But I’m going to get out of this town for a while.”

  “You’ll be taking yourself along wherever you go.”

  “Yes. But I won’t be taking a lot of other people I know with me.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “Out West for a while.”

  “Geography isn’t any cure for what’s the matter with you.”

  “No. But a healthy life and plenty of work won’t hurt. Not drinking may not cure me. But drinking sure as hell isn’t helping any now.”

  “Well, get the hell out then. Do you want to go to the ranch?”

  “Do you still own it?”

  “Part of it.”

  “Is it all right if I go out there?”

  “Sure,” Thomas Hudson had told him. “But it’s rugged from now on until spring and spring isn’t easy.”

  “I want it to be rugged,” Roger had said. “I’m going to start new again.”

  “How many times is it now you’ve started new?”

  “Too many,” Roger had said. “And you don’t have to rub it in.”

  So now he was going to start new again and how would it turn out this time? How could he think that wasting his talent and writing to order and following a formula that made money could fit him to write well and truly? Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do. Roger had thrown away and abused and spent his talent. But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence so that he could make another start. Any writer of talent should be able to write one good novel if he were honest, Thomas Hudson thought. But all the time that he should be training for it Roger had been misusing his talent and how could you know if his talent still was there? To say nothing of his métier, he thought. How can anyone think that you can neglect and despise, or have contempt for craftsmanship, however feigned the contempt may be, and then expect it to be at the service of your hands and of your brain when the time comes when you must have it. There is no substitute for it, Thomas Hudson thought. There is no substitute for talent either and you don’t have to keep them in a chalice. The one is inside you. It is in your heart and in your head and in every part of you. So is the other, he thought. It is not just a set of tools that you have learned to work with.

  It is luckier to be a painter, h
e thought, because you have more things to work with. We have the advantage of working with our hands and the métier we have mastered is an actual tangible thing. But Roger must start now to use what he has blunted and perverted and cheapened and all of it is in his head. But au fond he has something fine and sound and beautiful. That is a word I would need to be very careful of if I were a writer, he thought. But he has the thing that is the way he is and if he could write the way he fought on the dock it could be cruel but it would be very good. Then if he could think as soundly as he thought after that fight he would be very good.

  The moonlight did not shine on the head of Thomas Hudson’s bed anymore and gradually he stopped thinking about Roger. Thinking about him doesn’t do any good. Either he can do it or he can’t. But it would be wonderful if he could do it. I wish that I could help him. Maybe I can, he thought, and then he was asleep.

  IX

  When the sun woke Thomas Hudson he went down to the beach and swam and then had breakfast before the rest of them were up. Eddy said he did not think they would have much of a breeze and it might even be a calm. He said the gear was all in good shape on the boat and he had a boy out after bait.

  Thomas Hudson asked him if he had tested the lines since the boat had not been out for big fish in quite a while and Eddy said he had tested them and taken off all the line that was rotten. He said they were going to have to get some more thirty-six thread line and plenty more twenty-four thread and Thomas Hudson promised to send for it. In the meantime Eddy had spliced enough good line on to replace the discarded line and both the big reels had all they would hold. He had cleaned and sharpened all of the big hooks and checked all the leaders and swivels.

  “When did you do all this?”

  “I sat up last night splicing,” he said. “Then I worked on that new cast net. Couldn’t sleep with the goddam moon.”

  “Does a full moon bother you for sleeping too?”

  “Gives me hell,” Eddy said.

  “Eddy do you think it’s really bad for you to sleep with it shining on you?”

  “That’s what the old heads say. I don’t know. Always makes me feel bad, anyway.”

  “Do you think we’ll do anything today?”

  “Never know. There’s some awfully big fish out there this time of year. Are you going clean up to the Isaacs?”

  “The boys want to go up there.”

  “We ought to get going right after breakfast. I’m not figuring to cook lunch. I’ve got conch salad and potato salad and beer and I’ll make up sandwiches. We’ve got a ham that came over on the last run-boat and I’ve got some lettuce and we can use mustard and that chutney. Mustard doesn’t hurt kids, does it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We never had it when I was a kid. Say, that chutney’s good, too. You ever eat it in a sandwich?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t know what it was for when you first got it and I tried some of it like a marmalade. It’s damned good. I use it sometimes on grits.”

  “Why don’t we have some curry pretty soon?”

  “I got a leg of lamb coming on the next run-boat. Wait till we eat off it a couple of times—once, I guess, with that young Tom and Andrew eating, and we’ll have a curry.”

  “Fine. What do you want me to do about getting off?”

  “Nothing, Tom. Just get them going. Want me to make you a drink? You aren’t working today. Might as well have one.”

  “I’ll drink a cold bottle of beer with breakfast.”

  “Good thing. Cut that damn phlegm.”

  “Is Joe here yet?”

  “No. He went after the boy that’s gone for bait. I’ll put your breakfast out there.”

  “No, let me take her.”

  “No, go on in and drink a cold bottle of beer and read the paper. I’ve got her all ironed out for you. I’ll bring the breakfast.”

  Breakfast was corned-beef hash, browned, with an egg on top of it, coffee and milk, and a big glass of chilled grapefruit juice. Thomas Hudson skipped the coffee and the grapefruit juice and drank a very cold bottle of Heineken beer with the hash.

  “I’ll keep the juice cold for the kids,” Eddy said. “That’s some beer, isn’t it, for early in the morning?”

  “It would be pretty easy to be a rummy, wouldn’t it, Eddy?”

  “You’d never make a rummy. You like to work too well.”

  “Drinking in the morning feels awfully good though.”

  “You’re damned right it does. Especially something like that beer.”

  “I couldn’t do it and work though.”

  “Well, you’re not working today so what’s the goddam problem? Drink that one up and I’ll get you another.”

  “No. One’s all I want.”

  They got off by nine o’clock and went down the channel with the tide. Thomas Hudson was steering on the topside and he headed her out over the bar and ran straight out toward where he could see the dark line of the Gulf. The water was so calm and so very clear that they could see the bottom clearly in thirty fathoms, see that sea fans bent with the tide current, still see it, but cloudily, at forty fathoms, and then it deepened and was dark and they were out in the dark water of the stream.

  “It looks like a wonderful day, papa,” Tom said. “It looks like a good stream.”

  “It’s a fine stream. Look at the little curl of the whirlpools along the edge.”

  “Isn’t this the same water that we have in on the beach in front of the house?”

  “Sometimes, Tommy. Now the tide is out and it has pushed the Stream out from in front of the mouth of the harbor. See in there along the beach, where there is no opening, it’s made in again.”

  “It looks almost as blue in there as it is out here. What makes the Gulf water so blue?”

  “It’s a different density of water. It’s an altogether different type of water.”

  “The depth makes it darker, though.”

  “Only when you look down into it. Sometimes the plankton in it make it almost purple.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they add red to the blue I think. I know they call the Red Sea red because the plankton make it look really red. They have terrific concentrations of them there.”

  “Did you like the Red Sea, papa?”

  “I loved it. It was awfully hot but you never saw such wonderful reefs and it’s full of fish on the two monsoons. You’d like it, Tom.”

  “I read two books about it in French by Mr. de Montfried. They were very good. He was in the slave trade. Not the white slave trade. The olden days slave trade. He’s a friend of Mr. Davis.”

  “I know,” Thomas Hudson said. “I know him, too.”

  “Mr. Davis told me that Mr. de Montfried came back to Paris one time from the slave trade and when he would take a lady out anywhere he would have the taxi driver put down the top of the taxi and he would steer the taxi driver wherever he wanted to go by the stars. Say Mr. de Montfried was on the Pont de la Concorde and he wanted to go to the Madeleine. He wouldn’t just tell the taxi driver to take him to the Madeleine, or to cross the Place de la Concorde and go up the Rue Royale the way you or I would do it, papa. Mr. de Montfried would steer himself to the Madeleine by the North Star.”

  “I never heard that one about Mr. de Montfried,” Thomas Hudson said. “I heard quite a lot of others.”

  “It’s quite a complicated way to get around in Paris, don’t you think? Mr. Davis wanted to go into the slave trade at one time with Mr. de Montfried but there was some sort of a hitch. I don’t remember what it was. Yes, now I do. Mr. de Montfried had left the slave trade and gone into the opium trade. That was it.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Davis want to go into the opium trade?”

  “No. I remember he said he thought he’d leave the opium trade to Mr. De Quincey and Mr. Cocteau. He said they’d done so well in it that he didn’t think it was right to disturb them. That was one of those remarks that I couldn’t understand. Papa, you explain anyt
hing to me that I ask but it used to slow the conversation up so much to be asking all the time that I would just remember certain things I didn’t understand to ask about sometime and that’s one of those things.”

  “You must have quite a backlog of those things.”

  “I’ve got hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. But I get rid of a lot of them every year by getting to understand them myself. But some I know I’ll have to ask you about. At school this year I may write a list of them for an English composition. I’ve got some awfully good ones for a composition of that sort.”

  “Do you like school, Tom?”

  “It’s just one of those things you have to take. I don’t think anyone likes school, do they, that has ever done anything else?”

  “I don’t know. I hated it.”

  “Didn’t you like art school either?”

  “No. I liked to learn to draw but I didn’t like the school part.”

  “I don’t really mind it,” Tom said. “But after you’ve spent your life with men like Mr. Joyce and Mr. Pascin and you and Mr. Davis, being with boys seems sort of juvenile.”

  “You have fun, though, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes. I have lots of friends and I like any of the sports that aren’t built around throwing or catching balls and I study quite hard. But papa, it isn’t much of a life.”

  “That was the way I always felt about it,” Thomas Hudson said. “You liven it up as much as you can, though.”

  “I do. I liven it up all I can and still stay in it. Sometimes it’s a pretty close thing, though.”

  Thomas Hudson looked astern where the wake ran crisply in the calm sea and the two baits from the outriggers were dragging; dipping and leaping in the curl of the waves the wake raised as it cut the calm. David and Andrew sat in the two fishing chairs holding rods. Thomas Hudson saw their backs. Their faces were astern watching the baits. He looked ahead at some bonito jumping, not working and threshing the water, but coming up out and dropping back into the water singly and in pairs, making hardly any disturbance of the surface as they rose, shining in the sun, and returning, heavy heads down, to enter the water almost without splash.