The sun was going down and there were clouds in front of it.
“We’ll get a wire to Wilkinson on their next radio schedule to come over early and for him to call up and save me space on a plane to New York.”
“What do you want me to do while you’re away?”
“Just look after things. I’ll leave you some checks for each month. If there are any blows, get plenty of good help with the boat and the house.”
“I’ll do everything,” Eddy said. “But I don’t give a shit about anything any more.”
“I don’t either,” said Thomas Hudson.
“We’ve got young Tom.”
“For the time being,” Thomas Hudson said and for the first time he looked straight down the long and perfect perspective of the blankness ahead.
“You’ll make it all right,” Eddy said.
“Sure. When didn’t I ever make it?”
“You can stay in Paris a while and then go to the Cuba house and young Tom can keep you company. You can paint good over there and it will be like a change.”
“Sure,” said Thomas Hudson.
“You can travel and that’ll be good. Go on those big boats like I always wanted to go on. Travel on all of them. Let them take you anywhere they go.”
“Sure.”
“Shit,” said Eddy. “What the fuck they kill that Davy for?”
“Let’s leave it alone, Eddy,” Thomas Hudson said. “It’s way past things we know about.”
“Fuck everything,” Eddy said and pushed his hat back on his head.
“We’ll play it out the way we can,” Thomas Hudson told him. But now he knew he did not have much interest in the game.
XV
On the eastward crossing on the Ile de France Thomas Hudson learned that hell was not necessarily as it was described by Dante or any other of the great hell-describers, but could be a comfortable, pleasant, and well-loved ship taking you toward a country that you had always sailed for with anticipation. It had many circles and they were not fixed as in those of the great Florentine egotist. He had gone aboard the ship early, thinking of it, he now knew, as a refuge from the city where he had feared meeting people who would speak to him about what had happened. He thought that on the ship he could come to some terms with his sorrow, not knowing, yet, that there are no terms to be made with sorrow. It can be cured by death and it can be blunted or anesthetized by various things. Time is supposed to cure it, too. But if it is cured by anything less than death, the chances are that it was not true sorrow.
One of the things that blunts it temporarily through blunting everything else is drinking and another thing that can keep the mind away from it is work. Thomas Hudson knew about both these remedies. But he also knew the drinking would destroy the capacity for producing satisfying work and he had built his life on work for so long now that he kept that as the one thing that he must not lose.
But since he knew he could not work now for some time he planned to drink and read and exercise until he was tired enough to sleep. He had slept on the plane. But he had not slept in New York.
Now he was in his stateroom, which had a sitting room connected with it, and the porters had left his bags and the big package of magazines and newspapers he had bought. He had thought they would be the easiest thing to start with. He gave his ticket to the room steward and asked him for a bottle of Perrier water and some ice. When they came, he took out a fifth of good Scotch from one of his bags and opened it and made himself a drink. Then he cut the string around the big bundle of magazines and papers and spread them on the table. The magazines looked fresh and virginal compared with the way they looked when they arrived at the island. He took up The New Yorker. At the island he had always saved it for the evenings and it had been a long time since he had seen a New Yorker of the week of publication or one that had not been folded. He sat in the deep comfortable chair and drank his drink and learned that you cannot read The New Yorker when people that you love have just died. He tried Time and he could read it all right, including “Milestones,” where the two boys were dead complete with their ages; their mother’s age, not quite accurate; her marital status, and the statement that she had divorced him in 1933.