“Roge, you did get over it, though.”
“No,” Roger said. “You never get over it and sooner or later I have to tell it. I’m ashamed of that the way I’m ashamed of the fight on the dock.”
“You had nothing to be ashamed of there.”
“Yes, I did. I told you once. Let’s not go into that.”
“All right.”
“I’m not going to have any more fights. Ever. You never fight and you can fight as well as I can.”
“I can’t fight as well as you. But I just made up my mind I wouldn’t fight.”
“I’m not going to fight and I’m going to be some good and quit writing junk.”
“That’s the best thing I’ve heard you say,” Thomas Hudson said.
“Do you think I could write something that would be worth a damn?”
“You could try. What did you quit painting for?”
“Because I couldn’t kid myself any longer. I can’t kid myself any longer on the writing either.”
“What are you going to do, practically?”
“Go some place and write a good straight novel as well as I can write it.”
“Why don’t you stay here and write? You can stay on here after the boys are gone. It’s too hot to write in your place.”
“I wouldn’t bother you too much?”
“No, Roge. I get lonely, too, you know. You can’t just run away from everything all the time. This sounds like a speech. I’ll cut it out.”
“No. Go on. I need it.”
“If you are going to start to work, start here.”
“You don’t think out West would be better?”
“Any place is good. The thing is not to run from it.”
“No. Any place isn’t good,” Roger objected. “I know that. They’re good and then they go bad.”
“Sure. But this is a good place now. Maybe it won’t always be. But it’s fine now. You’d have company when you quit work and so would I. We wouldn’t interfere with each other and you could really bite on the nail.”
“Do you truly think I could write a novel that would be any good?”
“You never will if you don’t try. You told me a hell of a good novel tonight if you wanted to write it. Just start with the canoe.”
“And end it how?”
“Make it up after the canoe.”
“Hell,” Roger said. “I’m so corrupted that if I put in a canoe it would have a beautiful Indian girl in it that young Jones, who is on his way to warn the settlers that Cecil B. de Mille is coming, would drop into, hanging by one hand to a tangle of vines that covers the river while he holds his trusty flintlock, ‘Old Betsy,’ in the other hand, and the beautiful Indian girl says, ‘Jones, it ees you. Now we can make love as our frail craft moves toward the falls that some day weel be Niagara.’ ”
“No,” said Thomas Hudson. “You could just make the canoe and the cold lake and your kid brother—”
“David Davis. Eleven.”
“And afterwards. And then make up from there to the end.”
“I don’t like the end,” Roger said.
“I don’t think any of us do, really,” Thomas Hudson said. “But there’s always an end.”
“Maybe we better knock off talking,” Roger said. “I’m liable to start thinking about the novel. Tommy, why is it fun to paint well and hell to write well? I never painted well. But it was fun even the way I painted.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas Hudson said. “Maybe in painting the tradition and the line are clearer and there are more people helping you. Even when you break from the straight line of great painting, it is always there to help you.”
“I think another thing is that better people do it,” Roger said. “If I were a good enough guy maybe I could have been a good painter. Maybe I’m just enough of a son of a bitch to be a good writer.”
“That’s the worst oversimplification I’ve ever heard.”
“I always oversimplify,” Roger maintained. “That’s one reason I’m no damn good.”
“Let’s go to bed.”
“I’ll stay up and read a while,” Roger said.