The conversation to which Richard had alluded as 'Seabrook Island stuff,' and which Jack remembered as well as his friend, took place in the last week of their final visit to the resort of that name.
The two families had taken joint vacations nearly every year while Phil Sawyer was alive. The summer after his death, Morgan Sloat and Lily Sawyer had tried to keep the tradition going, and booked the four of them into the vast old hotel on Seabrook Island, South Carolina, which had been the site of some of their happiest summers. The experiment had not worked.
The boys were accustomed to being in each other's company. They were also accustomed to places like Seabrook Island. Richard Sloat and Jack Sawyer had scampered through resort hotels and down vast tanned beaches all through their childhood - but now the climate had mysteriously altered. An unexpected seriousness had entered their lives, an awkwardness.
The death of Phil Sawyer had changed the very color of the future. Jack began to feel that final summer at Seabrook that he might not want to sit in the chair behind his father's desk - that he wanted more in his life. More what? He knew - this was one of the few things he did truly know - that this powerful 'moreness' was connected to the Daydreams. When he had begun to see this in himself, he became aware of something else: that his friend Richard was not only incapable of sensing this quality of 'moreness,' but that in fact he quite clearly wanted its opposite. Richard wanted less. Richard did not want anything he could not respect.
Jack and Richard had sloped off by themselves in that slow-breathing time composed at good resorts by the hours between lunch and cocktails. In fact they had not gone far - only up at the side of a pine-tree-covered hill overlooking the rear of the inn. Beneath them sparkled the water of the inn's huge rectangular pool, through which Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer smoothly and efficiently swam length after length. At one of the tables set back from the pool sat Richard's father, wrapped in a bulging, fuzzy terrycloth robe, flip-flops on his white feet, simultaneously eating a club sandwich and wheeling and dealing on the plug-in telephone in his other hand.
'Is this sort of stuff what you want?' he asked Richard, who was seated neatly beside his own sprawl and held - no surprise - a book. The Life of Thomas Edison.
'What I want? When I grow up, you mean?' Richard seemed a little nonplussed by the question: 'It's pretty nice, I guess. I don't know if I want it or not.'
'Do you know what you want, Richard? You always say you want to be a research chemist,' Jack said. 'Why do you say that? What does it mean?'
'It means that I want to be a research chemist.' Richard smiled.
'You know what I mean, don't you? What's the point of being a research chemist? Do you think that would be fun? Do you think you'll cure cancer and save millions of people's lives?'
Richard looked at him very openly, his eyes slightly magnified by the glasses he had begun to wear four months earlier. 'I don't think I'll ever cure cancer, no. But that's not even the point. The point is finding out how things work. The point is that things actually really do work in an orderly way, in spite of how it looks, and you can find out about it.'
'Order.'
'Yeah, so why are you smiling?'
Jack grinned. 'You're going to think I'm crazy. I'd like to find something that makes all this - all these rich guys chasing golfballs and yelling into telephones - that makes all this look sick.'
'It already looks sick,' Richard said, with no intention of being funny.
'Don't you sometimes think there's more to life than order?' He looked over at Richard's innocent, skeptical face. 'Don't you want just a little magic, Richard?'
'You know, sometimes I think you just want chaos,' Richard said, flushing a bit. 'I think you're making fun of me. If you want magic, you completely wreck everything I believe in. In fact you wreck reality.'
'Maybe there isn't just one reality.'
'In Alice in Wonderland, sure!' Richard was losing his temper.
He stomped off through the pines, and Jack realized for the first time that the talk released by his feelings about the Daydreams had infuriated his friend. Jack's longer legs brought him alongside Richard in seconds. 'I wasn't making fun of you,' he said. 'It's just, I was sort of curious about why you always say you want to be a chemist.'
Richard stopped short and looked soberly up at Jack.
'Just stop driving me crazy with that kind of stuff,' Richard said. 'That's just Seabrook Island talk. It's hard enough being one of the six or seven sane people in America without having my best friend flip out totally.'
From then on, Richard Sloat bristled at any signs of fancifulness in Jack, and immediately dismissed it as 'Seabrook Island stuff.'