Island, p.1
Island, page 1
ISLAND
Charles Abbott
To AARON ASHER
whose editing, enthusiasm, and integrity
made this book possible.
Contents
Part One: GETTING THERE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Part Two: THERE
21
22
23
23
25
26
27
Part Three: LEAVING THERE
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
Copyright
About the Publisher
To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are the closest to your pain, your happiness, to write about my sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depths of my discouragement…. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of your strength when these are ended; to write about the painful search for self….
—JOHN CHEEVER
In the heart of each man there is contrived by desperate devices a magical island. We place it in the past or future for safety, for we dare not locate it in the present. We call this memory or a vision to lend it validity, but it is neither, really. It is the outcome of our sadness, and of our disgust with the world that we’ve made.
—E. M. FORSTER
P a r t O n e
GETTING THERE
1
I HAD A WIFE NAMED JULIA AND A GIRLFRIEND NAMED Fran.” He said that to himself once in a while, just to remind himself who he was. Always in the past tense. “Had,” never “have,” because they were both gone, washed away by his drinking. And, he had to admit, he drank a lot. Julia threw him out. He drank more, and Fran left. Her going lay on him. It bore him down. Its weight made his head hang as he walked the street.
So he drank more because, among other things, he had also lost his job, and was picked up on the sidewalk a couple of times and taken to the hospital. And the doctors there said he was killing himself and what was the matter and why didn’t he put himself in the hands of a competent therapist.
Which is how he wound up with Dr. Hennerkop.
M. J. Hennerkop, Ph.D. Not a real M.D. doctor, but he called him doctor, and as he lay on the doctor’s couch he wondered what kind of a name Hennerkop was—Jewish probably—and wondered if the time had come to be frank enough to admit that he was wondering about things like that and own up to the fact that he was prejudiced against Jews.
“What do your initials, M. J., stand for?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just curious. After all, you’re my doctor and I’m pouring all this crap out to you and I don’t even know your first name.”
“My first name is Maxwell.”
Probably a jump-up from Max. And he hadn’t even said what his middle name was. Avoided it. Probably Jacob. Max Jacob Hennerkop. A Jew. He was lying there being analyzed by a Jew.
Jew or not, Hennerkop did something to him. The very fact that Hennerkop was there—just sitting there to listen as he poured out things he had never mentioned to anybody else, not even faced squarely in the privacy of his own mind—did something. He quit drinking and took up crying instead. His health improved. Having no job, he sat in the park a lot and did much of his crying there. Quietly and surreptitiously, on an end bench somewhere with nobody else around. He would be sitting there, and the overwhelming loneliness would hit him, and he would crumple inside, and the inside crumpling would be matched by a crumpling around the mouth and chin, and the tears would run down his cheeks. Those days he always had a handkerchief handy, and he made it his business, while sitting crying in the park, to hold a handkerchief carelessly in his hand as if he were just about to blow his nose, in case anybody sat down near him and took a good look at him.
Self-conscious in extremis. He couldn’t seem to shake that.
Those sessions. Forty dollars a throw and his bank account dwindling. And no job. And no future. And hour after hour of lying there repeating the same old crap until the mixture of boredom and anxiety made him almost want to jump out of his skin. Too many of those hours spent trying to think of something to say.
“I bought a shirt yesterday.”
No answer.
“From B.H. Wragge. They’re the best shirtmakers.”
No answer.
“White, with a very pale blue stripe. The stripes are about a thirty-second of an inch apart.”
Long silence.
“They have French cuffs—for cufflinks.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Why indeed. Why, except to fill the hour he was paying for, fill those silent stretches that grew in tension the longer they lasted, that made the couch he was lying on seem like a raft on the sea. At those times Dr. Hennerkop’s office walls receded rapidly and Hennerkop himself got very small. Pretty soon he would shrink to a pinpoint, and the panicky feeling would grow that Hennerkop might disappear altogether, leaving him alone.
He would talk about his shirts some more to bring Hennerkop back. Or his custom-made shoes. There was a lot to talk about there, because wearing the right things hadn’t come easy. He’d had to learn what to wear—work his way up by observing how the right people dressed, then waiting until he had the money to buy the kind of clothes he felt he should have. And all that time, as he kept his eyes open and learned more, he discovered that there were inner layers, subtler gradations of good taste in clothes than he had ever realized. Finally he got there. He worked his way up from Roger Kent—which was all he could afford at first—to Brooks Brothers. And it was only when he was comfortably ensconced in Brooks Brothers that he discovered that there was a world of really subtle dressers who would no more go into Brooks Brothers than he—now—would go into Roger Kent.
He learned to spot such things. He kept his mouth shut and his eye open; you didn’t make any mistakes, give anything away, if you just watched. Pretty soon he would be having lunch with one of those men who really had it, and he would slip it out casually:
“That’s a nice shirt you’re wearing. Where did you get it?”
“B.H. Wragge.”
The important thing was not to look ignorant. Raggy? Was he kidding? The thing to do was to lift an eyebrow or nod perceptively as if he knew B.H. Raggy all along and was digesting the news that this particular shirt came from B.H. Raggy and was dispassionately comparing it with other tailor-made shirts produced by other equally in and equally obscure shirtmakers.
Back at the office, he would look up B.H. Raggy in the phone book, then just Raggy, then B.H. Raggie, etc., etc. Of course he wouldn’t find him, and then would have to come the real sitting down with himself to assess his relationship with the wearer of the shirt and try to decide whether he had been kidding or not. If so, he would have to be even more careful with that man in the future and remember never to mention shirts to him again. But sooner or later he would spot that kind of shirt somewhere else in the upper levels of the advertising business. And if he got B.H. Raggy again, then he would know that the first man wasn’t lying after all. Meanwhile try and figure out another way of running Raggy down.
At another lunch, with another man: “That a Raggy shirt?”
“No, it came from Sulka.”
“I need to buy some shirts. I usually go to Raggy, but I hear they’ve moved.”
“No, still across from the Harvard Club, far as I know.”
There were a couple of large office buildings along there but nothing like Raggy on the street level. So he would go inside and look at the building directory. And he wouldn’t find Raggy, or Raggie, and he would look under Shirts, and finally he would locate him down among the W’s.
That way, in due course, he learned about Stone and about Wetzel, and about Vernon & Vernon, and he gradually accumulated a wardrobe of really good suits. Things that from a distance looked something like gray flannel but up close were unmistakably something else, light soft worsteds with almost invisible little patterns or stripes in them. Of the lot, Vernon & Vernon were the best. They were the smallest, the most obscure, and the most expensive. All their materials came from England.
He learned about Whyte, the custom shoemaker; he graduated to Whyte from Peale.
The good thing about a Wragge shirt was that it had a way of identifying itself unobtrusively. Not like those blatant initials on the Countess Mara ties, which were for real slobs who had to let you know in the crudest way that they were well up there in the tie department. The thing about the Wragge shirt was that it had two buttons at the throat to make the collar sit a little better. When he was well up there himself, with a fine office and a secretary, and had reached the point where he could afford to work in his shirtsleeves—in fact, where it was almost better to be seen working in your shirtsleeves because it advertised that you no longer had to think abo ut wearing a suit jacket—then he could also work with his tie loosened and his shirt collar unbuttoned. The two buttons would show, and anyone who was far enough up there, sophisticated enough to recognize a Wragge shirt, would see them. Nothing ever said. Just a flicker of the eye back and forth. He knew and you knew. That was enough—members of the fraternity.
Hennerkop himself wore clothes that were pure crap.
He didn’t say this to Hennerkop. Instead, he said, “You must think I’m a pretty disagreeable snob, talking this way about clothes.”
“Not necessarily. If you wish to talk about clothes, you will talk about clothes. Perhaps in that way you will learn something about yourself.”
“All I learn about myself is—”
Hennerkop waited.
“I mean, I talk about clothes. I do that, yes. But—” How explain to a wearer of crap the subtle importance of clothes in helping you move in a world you wanted to move in and didn’t feel comfortable in? That the clothes helped you belong. Belonging was important.
A lot about clothes. An awful lot. After a while he was left wondering if they were quite that important. And yet they were important. Up there they dressed right. And he had to dress right, too, to convince himself that he belonged up there with the rest of them.
“After all, there’s no harm in wearing good clothes.”
Silence.
“The right people wear the right clothes. Can’t you understand? It’s as simple as that.”
“You sound angry.”
“I’m angry that you don’t see it. That I have to keep talking about these clothes. That you don’t seem to recognize the difference between good clothes and the kind of crap that—” Oops.
“That I wear?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Did you think it?”
Of course he thought it. That crappy suit and those green socks.
“It is your thought that is important. Why do you repress it?”
“Well … It’s just that if you dressed a little better you’d look a little better.” With a proper suit, Hennerkop would be able to walk into the Racquet Club without everybody looking at him. Hennerkop didn’t seem to understand that at all.
“Why do you repress that thought?” he repeated.
“Nobody wants to be told he wears crappy clothes.”
“Why not?”
“Well …” Good God, that was obvious.
“I mean, here why not? You talk about clothes, but my thought is that you are not really talking about clothes at all.”
“What am I doing, then?”
“Exactly. What are you doing?”
Trying to get through the hour. Keep some tiny safe distance between Hennerkop and himself. Someday he might be able to say that to him. Right now he couldn’t quite manage it. So at the next session he avoided clothes and talked about drinking, even though he had talked endlessly about it before.
It was a relief to tell Hennerkop something he already knew, dredging up those empty afternoons after five o’clock. When the offices let out and all the girls went whirling into the subway and he might see Fran’s face here or Fran’s hips there. And the day closed in and the lights went on and the bars filled up and everybody seemed paired up and laughing. And he was standing outside it all. And he had to do something, go somewhere, be with somebody, or he was nothing. He would stand it as long as he could, but finally it would get to be too much. He would step into a bar and order a bourbon and water and sip it slowly as he looked around, and the drink trickled through him and began to ease things a little.
The best bars curved at one end. He could sit there, leaning against the wall, looking down the bar, watching the action, not in anybody’s way, gradually feeling a little better. He sipped very slowly. From long practice he knew enough to do that, because the bearable time was beginning to be right now—or just a little ahead of right now—and he wanted to stretch the goodness of right now as far as he could and savor the knowledge that just ahead of right now would be even better. Concentrate on that and obliterate what he knew came after just ahead of right now.
If he took it really slow and easy, wedged into his corner, where he couldn’t be hassled by the other customers or by the bartender, the first drink would last nearly half an hour. Pretty soon, still taking it easy, he would order his second bourbon and water. And he would still be traveling through right now, and right now would be a little better, and beginning to edge into just ahead of right now, which was better yet. The important thing then was not to order his third drink too soon. The temptation was to plunge into just ahead of right now right away. Rush it. That was bad. He had to learn to control that and try to stay suspended in right now as long as he could.
Soon it would be time for the third bourbon and water, or the fourth. By now he would have begun to feel sufficiently better to think about stage two of the evening. The loneliness would still be there, the desperation, but it would be cushioned in the bourbon that took the hard corners off everything. It made the bar seem halfway decent, a place he could comfortably stay in for quite a while as the faces around him became more endurable, the men less threatening, the women softer and less unattractive.
Sometime well into the third or fourth drink—he was beginning to travel dangerously fast out of right now into the keener feeling and excitement of just ahead of right now, and that feeling was really moving in him and he was aware that he mustn’t let it get too headlong but at the same time enjoying the rush of it—sometime along about there he would spot a woman in the bar who was just on the edge of passing over from unattractive to attractive. He would try to hold back on his fourth drink while he studied that possibility.
First he had to make sure she was alone. Women in bars alone fell into two categories: the pros and the drinkers. He had devoted a good deal of thought, based on experience, to which was better, or rather worse, because neither was better. Both were awful. But that awfulness had to be risked because the best part of right now or just ahead of right now was the anticipation of contact with another human being. The drinking, while it was good in itself, was also an instrument, a glove that he put on so that he could endure the touching and intimacy that he was looking for. Contact with another body, almost any body—he was down to that.
And as he came to the end of his fourth drink—or maybe the fifth because, despite all his care, things would have begun to move a little faster than he had planned, and often he would find himself in the later stages of just ahead of right now—he would have reached the delicate part of the evening. He had to be drunk enough to want somebody and still sober enough to function.
And the choice was always: pro or drinker. If he had been moving too fast, he couldn’t always be sure which was which.
Each was awful in her own way. The pros were quick and methodical and cold, often so quick and cold that he extracted no warmth from them at all. Hustler was a good word. They hustled him out of his clothes, hustled him into bed, often hustled another drink into him from the bottle he kept in his closet (more about that bottle later). That last drink was often the toppler. Straight out of the bottle, it would hit him, and he would have to sit up to prevent the whirls that were a prelude to passing out or getting sick. But he couldn’t sit up with a woman pressing her body against his, so more often than not he did pass out, and would wake up later to the discovery that his money and watch, and sometimes other things, were gone.
That wasn’t so bad after a while, because toward the end he had nothing much left worth stealing, and he had learned the precaution of never starting an evening with more than fifty dollars in his pocket. As another precaution he had hidden his checkbook so that he could not be persuaded to begin writing drunken checks; the only way he could get more money was by going to the bank during banking hours and asking for it.
If, instead of going to his place, he had gone to one of those hotels in the West Forties, it was worse. The women who worked those hotels were really tough. They stole your clothes and your shoes, sometimes left you with nothing but your underwear in a dusty, greasy little room.
He woke up in that predicament once. Nothing but a pair of shorts, and he didn’t know where he was or what time of day it was. He went to the window to see if he could discover what street was out there. Uncontrollably shaky. It took an immense effort just to get to the window. The cotton inside his head, the red-hot cotton, made it hard to tell just what he was looking at. He got back into a smelly, lumpy bed and wondered what to do next.
