William Gay - I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down - Collected Stories

Just shut up, she said. I don’t want to hear your drunken nonsense. A man killed his wife and his brother, the man wasn’t even killed in here, it was the backyard. We saw it on the TV, both of us saw it on the news. It didn’t affect this place one bit.

He unscrewed the cap and raised the bottle and drank. The face of his wife, the room itself, darkened like a world abruptly cut to half power. He imagined holding a cigarette lighter to the cheap paneling until it caught in a thin blue spreading flame, holding her away one-handed while fire climbed the walls like roses. If suicide was feasible, was murder beyond conjecture? But when he glanced at the inside of his left wrist the blood still kept its appointed rounds through the dimly visible veins, its slow blue pulse as regular as the ticking of the clock. He screwed the cap on and set the bottle on the carpet between his feet.

Do you want a cup of coffee? It occurs to me that you could use one.

I suppose I could drink one, he said agreeably, and leaned his head against the cool vinyl of the couch. When she raised an arm to open a cabinet door her robe fell open and he could see her rounded breast, the dark smudge of her pubic hair. Then she turned her back to him and held the bowl of the coffeemaker to the sink. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them she was crossing the room carrying two cups of coffee. She set one on the table before his knees. There was a swivel rocker beside the television set and she seated herself there and turned the rocker slightly toward him, adjusting the robe closer about her knees. She sipped her coffee and watched him with a look almost of speculation.

Karas had not yet taken up his cup. He took up the Ron Rico and drank from the bottle. He had felt the first uncomfortable intimations of reality, as if you really could drink yourself sober, as if he’d been on some dark journey and the first harbingers of his destination had reared up starkly against the horizon, and it was a hostile and barren place he did not want to go to. He felt as if this day had used up all the emotions he possessed save a bleak and bitter despair.

Well, she said after a time. What are your plans?

I thought I might sleep here on the couch tonight.

That’s what I expected you might think.

Is it all right?

I suppose it is. I don’t want to live with you anymore, but I don’t want you killing yourself in a car wreck. Or killing a carload of innocent people.

Just on the couch, he said. I won’t bother you and I’ll be on my way first thing in the morning.

She smiled at him, not a particularly pleasant smile, a smile that said she knew him better than he knew himself and that he was continuing to live down to the expectations she had for him. You’re so facile, she said.

You don’t have to use words like facile, he said. We both know you went to college.

All right then, how’s this? You’re such a bullshit artist. You’re so manipulative. Words are all you care about and you think you can do anything with them. Don’t you think I know what’s wrong with you? It’s sex. You’re used to it every night or two and it’s been what, three weeks? You want to spend the night with me. You’ll lie down on the couch when I go to bed, then you’ll get up. Then you’ll stand in my bedroom door and ask if you can lie down beside me. Just for the company, you won’t touch me. Then you’ll put your arm around me.

Karas wondered if any of this might be true. He suspected that just such a thought might have been nibbling at the corner of his mind, like a cautious but persistent mouse.

Do you have any money with you?

What? Karas asked. He had been thinking that spending the night in her bed might be just the ticket; it was possible that he might persuade her to come back to him, and failing that perhaps she was right, it was just sex, something might collapse in him like a dam breaking and all the images of despair and blood and suicide might vanish in a clean orgasmic rush and he would be himself again, a sensible and literate middle-aged man writing a book about Robert Johnson. But the sudden shift in the conversation from sex to money threw him off balance.

When I moved in here the electricity didn’t work. The meter base or something was broken. It cost me three hundred dollars to hire an electrician and the realty company hasn’t reimbursed me. When I left I said I didn’t want anything from you, but I do. The repairs left me three hundred short of what I need this month, and that’s what it’s going to cost you. If you want me half as badly as you say you do then that ought to be the bargain of a lifetime.

Hellfire, he said in a kind of appalled despair. That isn’t what I wanted. Why didn’t you just ask me for the money? Why didn’t you just screw the electrician and cut out the middleman?

That isn’t what you wanted? You didn’t want sex?

Well. I don’t know. Of course I did, but not like this. I wanted us to make up, to get back together. Then go to bed, and everything would be the way it used to be.

It will never be the way it used to be, she said. And I thank God for that when I wake up every morning.

Karas was silent a time. That seems a reasonable figure, he finally said.

IN THE BEDROOM moonlight fell through the gauzy curtains. She slipped off the robe and lay atop the covers. She lay on her back, hands folded placidly across her stomach. He kissed her and gently stroked her breasts. Her lips were pliable, rubbery and unresponsive, and after a while he just sat on the bed beside her, elbows on his knees, his hands clasping the bottle.

What’s the matter? Can’t you do anything?

Why hell yes, I can do whatever needs to be done. It’s just this place, I keep wondering if it’s the same bed … let’s go to a motel.

What?

If you won’t go home with me then let’s go to a motel.

Don’t be so ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with this bed.

There’s just something about this place. Something … unhealthy about it.

You’re just too sensitive, she said in a sleepy ironic voice. At any rate I’m not going to a motel. I like it here.

Karas sat in silence, listening to the various nighttime hummings and whirrings of the trailer. They began to sound like voices, sourceless and disembodied, replaying old accusations and recriminations, words he could almost but not quite decipher. The very atmosphere had turned oppressive and claustrophobic, the perfect setting for the story Borum had told him, and he wondered if any of it was real, if he was real. When he glanced at his wife her eyes were closed and her mouth slightly open. He saw to his surprise that she had fallen asleep.

The exact nature of his malady perplexed him. You could stand on a street corner waiting for a traffic light to change and see a dozen women who were prettier, more smartly dressed, more confident in their congress with the world. There had always been something tentative about her, a look that said, All right, here I am. I hope you won’t hurt me, but if you have to, go ahead. Only a thin silver cord still bound him to her. He watched the measured rise and fall of her breasts and wished that she would do something so appalling the cord would snap like a kite string, as he had been unable to snap it with the penknife.

He saw that they had, hand in hand, come to a crossroads. They had been walking one of Robert Johnson’s fabled red backroads and they had come to a crossroads. The Storm Princess had scarcely glanced to the right or the left, without a falter or a stitch in her pace she had made her decision and gone on without a backwards look. But a crossroads presented Karas with too many options. Confounded, he had sat down on his suitcase to smoke a cigarette and think about things.

He rose from the side of the bed so abruptly the bottle rapped the edge of the dresser and she stirred but did not awaken. She turned over on her left side and pillowed her head on a folded arm and drew her knees up, her naked body in the filigreed moonlight at once real yet as remote and lost as a dusty nude study stacked in a museum’s forgotten corner.