Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

Meanwhile, as if they’d been watching the children from behind the edges of closed blinds, the old people of our town began to emerge from their hiding places. We saw them late at night, gathered on dark front porches, silently rocking. They seemed to be waiting for something that was about to happen. Sometimes we would catch sight of them moving very slowly across our backyards, taking small steps, their heads bent toward the ground, the rubber tips of their canes and walkers pressing into the grass. The paper reported that one night at two in the morning four “oldsters,” ranging in age from eighty-six to ninety-three, made their way down the beach to the water’s edge, where they were discovered by a policeman. They were staring out at the water. The tide was coming in, and the low waves had already covered their shoes and ankles by the time the officer found them.

Sometimes we had the feeling that at any moment, around any corner, suddenly the summer would reveal its secret, and a peace, like soothing rain, would descend on us.

By the middle of August we felt the exhaustion of adventures that had never taken us far enough. At the same time we were inflamed by a kind of sharp, overripe alertness to possibilities untried. In the languor and stillness of perfect afternoons, we could already feel the last days of summer, coming toward us with their burden of regret. What had we done, really? What had we ever done? There was a sense that it all should have led to something, a sense that a necessary culmination had somehow failed to come about. And always the days passed, like riddles we would never solve.

It was one of those rich late days of August when the air seemed to quiver with light and heat, so that you felt you were looking at things through a faint haze, though the sky was brilliantly clear. Was it the haze of our accumulated desires? For in the last weeks of summer our longings had grown stronger and more demanding, unappeased by our tunnels and roof-dwellings, our gatherings and investigations, which seemed to us now, when we thought back on them, feeble emblems of whatever it was that eluded us. The day was Saturday — the last one of August. It felt like the last Saturday of the year, the last Saturday of all time. As we moved through the morning and afternoon, filled with vague unrest, we were scarcely present, in our backyards and on our front porches, at our picnic tables and at the beach, we were straining in other directions, we were elsewhere.

The change began around dusk. We had come home, most of us, from wherever the day had taken us. We’d finished dinner, we were waiting for the rest of the day to come about — waiting, in the peculiar way of that summer, for something worthy of our desires. The sun had slipped out of sight, though the tops of telephone poles and high trees were still touched by light. The sky was pale blue. Here and there, a lamp went on in a window. It was the time of day when it was really two times of day — above, the still-bright sky; below, the beginnings of night. It was as if the day had paused for a moment, unable to make up its mind. And we, in our various places, were probably not paying close attention, had perhaps fallen into a muse, an inner pause of our own. Someone must have been the first: the hand reaching idly out and rippling through the lamp table, drifting through the lamp. It happened in street after street: the shoulder moving through the bathroom door, the hand floating through the armchair, dropping through the porch rail. Some reported a faint resistance, like the sensation of passing a hand through cool water, or of pushing through cobwebs. Others felt nothing at all. Some claimed to hear, rising from the houses of our town, a communal gasp or sigh. In the wonder of that moment, we understood that our summer had risen to meet us.

Warily, joyfully, we moved through our houses with arms held wide, passing through objects that no longer resisted us. We entered the streets, where people wandered as if under a spell. Children, crazed with laughter, ran back and forth through the trunks of maples. We walked through hedges and white picket fences, stepped through the sides of porches, passed through the walls of houses into other backyards. Through swing sets and birdbaths we strolled along. We made our way over to Main Street, where streetlights glowed in the pale sky, and crowds tense with awe moved through store windows. Someone pointed up: a sparrow, trying to land on the crossbar of a telephone pole, passed through and began beating its wings fiercely before sweeping back up into the sky.

Who can say how long it lasted? We plunged into that dusk as if we’d always known what lay under the skin of the world. We reveled in dissolution. Under the darkening sky we wandered through our town like children after a first snow.

Just before nightfall, when there was still a little light left in the sky, we became aware of a slight thickening. As we stepped through things, we could feel a satiny tickle. Someone cried out: he had banged his knee against the side of a store. Things hardened part by part. Here and there, a hand was caught in wood or stone.

Later, when we tried to understand it all, when we tried to give it a meaning, some said that maybe, at a certain moment, around the beginning of dusk, everyone in our town had been dreaming of something else. The town, deprived of our attention, had begun to tremble and waver, to grow insubstantial. Others, more skeptical, proposed that none of it ever happened, that a great delirium had struck our town, like an outbreak of the flu. Still others argued that we had been given a revelation but hadn’t known what to do with it. Our ignorance had ushered in the reign of hardness.

Whatever may have happened that day, we woke the next morning as if we’d slept for a month. Sunlight streamed into our rooms. We reached out and touched the edges of things. In our kitchens, chairs stood out sharply, as if they’d sprung up from the floor. We felt in our hands the weight of spoons, felt against our fingers the rims of cereal bowls. We pushed against doors, felt on the soles of our feet the thrust of doormats and front steps. Outside, we ran our fingers along bush branches and hedge branches, we squeezed hoses and steering wheels, the rubber grips of lawn mowers. On Main Street we grasped the handles of glass doors, we picked up objects that tugged back, filled shopping bags that pulled against our palms. All day we felt the push of sidewalks, the surge of grass. All day we felt the weight of sunlight settling on our arms. All day we felt, grazing our skin, the blue of the sky, the edges of shade. Sometimes we recalled that other summer, but already it was a story we would tell, in warm living rooms in winter, about the time we wandered through the streets at dusk with our arms held wide, a long time ago, in some other life.

I have thirteen wives. We all live together in a sprawling Queen Anne house with half a dozen gables, two round towers, and a wraparound porch, not far from the center of town. Each of my wives has her own room, as I have mine, but we gather for dinner every evening in the high dining room, at the long table under the old chandelier with its pink glass shades. Later, in the front room, we play rummy or pinochle in small groups, or sit talking in faded armchairs and couches. My wives get along very well with one another, though their relation to me is more complex. People sometimes ask, “Why thirteen wives?” “Oh,” I always say, putting on my brightest smile, “you can’t have too much of a good thing!” In truth, the answer is less simple than that, though the precise nature of the answer remains elusive even to me. What’s clear is that I love my wives, each alone and all together, and can’t imagine a life without all of them. Even though I married my wives one after the other, over a period of nine years, I never did so with the thought that I was replacing one wife with a better one, or abolishing my former wives by starting over. Never have I considered myself to be a man with thirteen marriages but rather a man with a single marriage, composed of thirteen wives. Whether this solution to the difficult problem of marriage is one that will prove useful to others, or whether my approach will add nothing to the sum of human knowledge, is not for me to say. I say only that, speaking strictly for myself, there could have been no other way.