The man talking with the wino seemed familiar and yet she could not place the man. He had the lean bearded look of one who had gone native; but not really, for he was set apart by his fastidiousness. He wore sandals, yet his feet seemed clean, the toenails glimmering; he wore a sandy beard but it was neatly trimmed and his hair was expensively cut, not at all shaggy; he wore a blue denim short-sleeved shirt, fashionably faded but it had sleeve pockets and epaulets and had come from a designer shop and his white sailor’s trousers fit perfectly.
I know him, Brenda thought, but she couldn’t summon the energy to stir from her spot when the bearded man and the wino walked away into the town. Vaguely and without real interest she wondered idly what those two could possibly have to talk about together.
She found shade on the harborfront. Inertia held her there for hours while she recounted the litany of her misfortunes. Finally hunger stirred her and she slouched back to her miserable little third-class hotel.
The next day, half drunk in the afternoon and wilting in the heat, Brenda noticed vaguely that the wino was no longer in his usual place. In fact, she hadn’t seen the wino at all, not last night and not today.
The headache was painful and she boarded the jitney bus to go up-island a few miles. She got off near the Kapalua headland and trudged down to the public beach. It was cooler here because the northwest end of the island was open to the fresh trade winds; she settled under a palm tree, pulled off her ragged sneakers, and dug her toes into the cool sand. The toes weren’t very clean. She was going too long between baths these days. The bathroom in the hotel was at the end of the corridor and she went there as infrequently as possible because she couldn’t be sure who she might encounter and anyhow the tub was filthy and there was no shower.
Across the channel loomed the craggy mountains of Molokai, infamous island, leper colony, its dark volcanic mass shadowed by perpetual sinister rain clouds, and Brenda lost herself in gruesome speculations about exile, isolation, loneliness and wretched despair, none of which seemed at all foreign to her.
The sun moved and took the shade with it and she moved round to the other side of the palm tree, tucking the fabric of the cheap dress under her when she sat down. The dress was about gone — frayed, faded, the material ready to disintegrate. She only had two others left. Then it would be jeans and the boatneck. It didn’t matter, really. There was no one to dress up for.
It wasn’t that she was altogether ugly; she wasn’t ugly; she wasn’t even plain, really; she had studied photographs of herself over the years and she had gazed in the mirror and tried to understand, but it had eluded her. All right, perhaps she was too bony, her shoulders too big, flat in front, not enough flesh on her — but there were men who liked their women bony; that didn’t explain it. She had the proper features in the proper places and, after all, Modigliani hadn’t found that sort of face abominable to behold, had he?
But ever since puberty there’d been something about her gangly gracelessness that had isolated her. Invitations to go out had been infrequent. At parties no one ever initiated conversations with her. No one, in any case, until Briggs had appeared in her life.
...She noticed the man again: the well-dressed one with the neatly trimmed beard. A droopy brown Hawaiian youth was picking up litter on the beach and depositing it in a burlap sack he dragged along; the bearded man ambled beside the youth, talking to him. The Hawaiian said something; the bearded man nodded with evident disappointment and turned to leave the beach. His path brought him close by Brenda’s palm tree and Brenda sat up abruptly. “Eric?”
The bearded man squinted into the shade, trying to recognize her. Brenda removed her sunglasses. She said, “Eric? Eric Morelius?”
“Brenda?” The man came closer and she contrived a wan smile. “Brenda Briggs? What the devil are you doing here? You look like a beachcomber gone to seed.”
Over a drink at Kimo’s she tried to put on a front. “Well, I thought I’d come out here on a sabbatical and, you know, loaf around the islands, recharge my batteries, take stock.”
She saw that Eric wasn’t buying it. She tried to smile. “And what about you?”
“Well, I live here, you know. Came out to Hawaii nine years ago on vacation and never went back.” Eric had an easy relaxed attitude of confident assurance. “Come off it, duckie, you look like hell. What’s happened to you?”
She contrived a shrug of indifference. “The world fell down around my ankles. Happens to most everybody sometimes, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”
“Just like that? It must have been something terrible. You had more promise than anyone in the department.”
“Well, we were kids then, weren’t we. We were all promising young scholars. But what happens after you’ve broken all the promises?”
“Good Lord. The last I saw of you, you and Briggs were off to revitalize the University of what, New Mexico?”
“Arizona.” She tipped her head back with the glass to her mouth; ice clicked against her teeth. “And after that a state college in Minnesota. And then a dinky jerkwater diploma mill in California. The world,” she said in a quiet voice, “has little further need of second-rate Greek and Roman literature scholars — or for any sort of non-tenured Ph.D.’s in the humanities. I spent last year waiting on tables in Modesto.”
“Duckie,” Eric said, “there’s one thing you haven’t mentioned. Where’s Briggs?”
She hesitated. Then — what did it matter? — she told him: “He left me. Four years ago. Divorced me and married a buxom life-of-the-party girl fifteen years younger than me. She was writing advertising copy for defective radial tires or carcinogenic deodorants or something like that. We had a kid, you know. Cute little guy, we named him Geoff, with a G — you know how Briggs used to love reading Chaucer. In the original. In retrospect, you know, Briggs was a prig and a snob.”
“Where’s the kid, then?”
“I managed to get custody and then six months ago he went to visit his father for the weekend and all three of them, Briggs and the copy-writer and my kid Geoff, well, there was a six-car pileup on the Santa Monica Freeway and I had to pay for the funerals and it wiped me out.”
Eric brought another pair of drinks and there was a properly responsive sympathy in his eyes and it had been so long since she’d talked about it that she covered her face with the table napkin and sobbed. “God help me, Eric. Briggs was the only man who ever gave me a second look.”
He walked her along the Sea Wall. “You’ll get over it, duckie. Takes time.”
“Sure,” she said listlessly. “I know.”
“Sure, it can be tough. Especially when you haven’t got anybody. You don’t have any family left, do you?”
“No. Only child. My parents died young. Why not? The old man was on the assembly line in Dearborn. We’re all on the assembly line in Dearborn. What have we got to aim for? A condominium in some ant-hill and a bag full of golf clubs? Let’s change the subject, all right? What about you, then? You look prosperous enough. Did you drop out or were you pushed too?”
“Dropped out. Saw the light and made it to the end of the tunnel. I’m a free man, duckie.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a scrimshander.”
“A what?”
“A bone-ivory artist. I do scrimshaw engravings. You’ve probably seen my work in the shop windows around town.”