The Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

novel or screenplay. Better to stay where he was, make a decent wage for working (in fact) a two-day week, broaden his experience and contacts through free-lance work, absorb ideas that could be used later on.
    Devon was disappointed, but she continued to support and encourage him, to appreciate his free-lance pieces (for they were the work he was proudest of), to help him develop possible story lines for a novel. Not once did she accuse him of settling into a rut of comfortable survival. Not once did she suggest that his novel represented a dream of freedom and fulfillment that he would never attain.
    Their marriage had begun to break up four years ago, though neither of them knew it at the time. Their son, Justin, had entered second grade at the Allen-Stevenson School, and for the first time, he was away from home from eight until four. Devon took a job at an advertising agency and, to her utter surprise, turned out to be a good copywriter, and then, with practice, a brilliant one. When her boss and two other colleagues left the agency to form a new one, they took her with them. Within a year, she was chief copywriter and a partner in the firm. Her annual salary was $50,000, augmented by a bonus of half again as much.
    She loved everything about her work—long hours, hustling new accounts, traveling, entertaining clients, and the challenge of convincing the public to spend money on her products rather than on the competition’s.
    She built herself a world in which she was happy, while Maynard floated through a world of someone else’s making, doing well enough without really doing anything, and not knowing exactly what he wanted to do. He had no particular lust for fame, and contempt for celebrity; He believed in Andy Warhol’s prediction that by the year 2000 everyone in America would be a celebrity for twenty minutes. His one real passion was for history—perhaps, he realized, because of a subconscious dissatisfaction with the present. In his daydreams he lived during an age of discovery (say, the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century), when people did things for the sake of doing them, went places simply because no one had been there before, and lived out (he recalled the quote from a book about the Spanish Main) “. . . a dream of irresponsibility, lethal larkiness and, above all, mobility . . .”
    His dream was Devon’s nightmare. Finally, they agreed, they faced different futures. She asked for no alimony and accepted a token $500 a month in child support.
    “Fine, Nancy,” Maynard said. “Just fine. Devon called?”
    “Yes, sir. She’s at lunch. I know she’ll be mad that she missed you.”
    “Sure. What did she want?” He knew that Devon would have given Nancy the message; she never bothered him without a reason, and there was rarely anything to say that Nancy could not transmit efficiently. For all Maynard knew, Devon was in her office now, but didn’t want to make idle, awkward conversation with him. He knew that she had come to regard him as a part of her past; if he was not actually forgotten, he was stashed at the back of a closet, and consulted, along with baby pictures and college yearbooks, only when nostalgia crept in.
    “She wondered if you could take Justin for a few days. She has to go to Dallas, and—”
    Maynard cut in. “Sure. Fine. Starting when?”
    “Tomorrow. For a week.”
    “Okay. Tell him to take the bus down here, and . . .” He stopped. “No, forget it. ‘Trends’ has been killed for this week. I’ll pick him up at school.”
    Maynard hung up and opened the folders he had brought from the library. Most of the clippings were “trend” pieces, dating back to the mid-1950s, about various stages in the boating boom in the United States. There were stories about boat shows, new developments in ferro-cement hulls, and inflatable runabouts as a tool for coping with the energy crisis. There were short items about the disappearance or sinking of individual boats. But