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.”
Eric’s studio, high under the eaves in the vintage whaler’s house that looked more New Englandish than tropical, revealed its owner’s compulsion for orderly neatness.
She had never liked him much. He and Briggs had got along all right, but she’d always found Eric an unpleasant sort. It wasn’t that he was boorish; hardly anything like that. But she thought him pretentious and totally insincere. He’d always had that air of arrogant self-assurance. And the polish was all on the surface; he had the right manners but once you got to know him a little you realized he had no real understanding of courtesy or compassion. Those qualities were meaningless to people like Eric. She’d always thought him self-absorbed and egotistical to the point of solipsism; she’d felt he had cultivated Brigg’s friendship simply because Eric felt Briggs could help him advance in the department.
Eric had been good at toadying up to anyone who could help him learn the arts of politics and ambition. Eric had always been very actorish: he wasn’t real — everything was a role, a part, a performance: everything Eric did was done with his audience in mind. If you couldn’t be any help to him he could, without a second thought, cut you dead.
He wasn’t really handsome. He had a small round head and ordinary features. But he’d always kept himself trim and he’d always been a natty dresser. And the beard sharpened his face, made it longer, added polish to his appearance. Back on the mainland, she remembered, he’d tended to favor three-piece suits.
Eric’s studio was spartan, dominated by a scrubbed-clean workbench under the dormer window’s north light. An array of carving tools filled a wooden rack, each tool seated in its proper niche, and there were four tidy wooden bins containing pieces of white bone of graduated sizes. Antique inkwells and jars were arranged beside a tray of paintbrushes and other slender implements. In three glass display cases, each overhung by a museum light, lay examples of Eric’s art. One piece, especially striking, was a large ivory cribbage board in the shape of a Polynesian outrigger canoe with intricate black-and-white scenes engraved upon its faceted surfaces.
“That’s a sort of frieze,” Eric explained. “If you follow those little scenes around the board, they illustrate the whole mythology of the Polynesian emigration that led to the original settlement of Hawaii a thousand years ago. I’m negotiating to sell it to the museum over in Honolulu.”
“It must be pretty lucrative, this stuff.”
“It can be. Do you know anything about scrimshaw?”
“No,” she said, and she didn’t particularly care to; but Eric had paid for the bottle and was pouring a drink for her, and she was desperate for company — anyone’s, even Eric’s — and so she stayed and pretended interest.
“It’s a genuine American folk art. It was originated in the early 1800s by the Yankee whalers who came out of the Pacific with endless time on their hands on shipboard. They got into the habit of scrimshanding to pass the time. The early stuff was crude, of course, but pretty quickly some of them started doing quite sophisticated workmanship. They used sail needles to carve the fine lines of the engraving and then they’d trace India ink or lampblack into the carvings for contrast. About the only materials they had were whalebone and whales’ teeth, so that’s what they carved at first.
“The art became very popular for a while, about a century ago, and there was a period when scrimshanding became a profession in its own right. That was when they ran short of whalebone and teeth and started illustrating elephant ivory and other white bone materials. Then it all went out of fashion. But it’s been coming back into favor the past few years. We’ve got several scrimshanders here now. The main problem today, of course, is the scarcity of ivory.”