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

More and more she sought out the light painter. She’d sit hour-long and watch him work. He seemed to be her last refuge, as though he could make her fit, make her part of the gaudy crowd coming and going in shiny cars.

Finally Tidewater mentioned it to Claire.

I can’t see how you think it’s Lisa’s problem, she said. She has her own life to live. It was always you Jenny wanted anyway. And when she’s away from here she has her own set of friends, who I don’t want Lisa involved with.

When he brought the subject up with Lisa she snapped at him. You need to open your eyes, she told him. You never know what’s going on right under your nose. She’s changed. She’s gross, she lets these awful boys do things to her. She does things to boys.

In Tidewater’s view of the ways of the world he suspected that most girls let boys do things to them and perhaps some of them even did things back. He guessed what was at issue here was a question of decorum.

Yet he didn’t say this or anything else in his own defense because he was appalled at himself: in a moment of clairvoyance he suddenly saw that he knew Jenny better than he would ever know this smooth, confident young woman, as if Jenny had vouchsafed him a glimpse into the disordered interior of her very soul, a lowering of barriers that all the rest of the world had denied him. Blood or no blood he had to admit that he was not a very big part of Lisa’s life anymore, perhaps no more a part than Jenny herself. It was nothing he could rationalize away, nothing he could make right. It just was.

JENNY WAS IN her sixteenth year when the decision to blackball her was made. Like most of the decisions that mattered in Tidewater’s life this one had been made by a committee of Claire and Lisa and passed down to him.

He couldn’t argue that things hadn’t changed. Jenny’s life had the appearance of unraveling. They saw her less now, sometimes it seemed to Tidewater that she came only when she had nowhere else to go. She stayed away longer and longer, like something you have tried to tame reverting to wildness. Lisa brought home rumor after rumor about her. She was suspended from school, she was pregnant, she was on drugs. Lisa watched Tidewater as she told these stories at the dinner table, like a cat laying dead mice at the feet of its master.

Tidewater and Claire were lying in darkness save for the fluorescent face of the clock.

I don’t think you can just throw people over the side, Tidewater said to the ceiling. She grew up with us, this is home to her.

That’s just the point, Claire said. She is grown up. And she’s thrown us over the side as much as we have her. She has other interests, and they’re interests I don’t want Lisa taking up.

If you mean sex then maybe you ought to talk to her.

Talk to her? Maybe she ought to be talking to me. I expect I could learn from her.

I wonder if her mother talked to her.

For God’s sake. Don’t put me in this position, Charles. Make me a total bitch while you stand aside and let what happens happen. The way you do. And anyway sex is not what I meant. It’s part of it but by no means all. I mean drugs and alcohol and the whole nine yards. What if she and Lisa are out together with a bunch of drunks and drive head-on into another car? What if it came down to her or Lisa? If you were forced into a choice what would you say?

God, Tidewater said, lying still in the darkness, wishing every question had one answer and one answer only, and that he knew them all. Wishing everything was black and white instead of incremental variations of gray.

Besides, she’s not even Lisa’s friend anymore, no matter how hard you try to pretend they’re still ten years old. For the last several years she’s been your friend, not Lisa’s. You’re the only one she cares about.

That’s crazy.

And you’ve always had a soft spot in your heart for her, Claire said, then added: Or a hard one someplace else, which is what I always wondered about.

He lay in silence a long time before he answered. Finally he said, That was a sorry thing to say, Claire.

You’re right. It was a sorry thing to say. I guess I meant it to be funny. Hard, soft. It was just something to say.

It wasn’t funny, Tidewater said.

No. It wasn’t.

Tidewater’s position was made more ambiguous by his secret, and he lay there in the dark thinking about it. His mind worrying it the way a tongue worries a sensitive tooth.

A while ago he had fallen asleep watching a football game and sometime in the night Jenny shook him awake.

You fell asleep on the couch.

I guess I did.

They’re asleep, everybody’s asleep.

What time is it?

Two o’clock in the morning.

I guess I ought to go to bed then.

Charles?

What, Jenny?

I like it here, Charles. I don’t want to have to leave.

Hey, kid, nobody’s going anywhere.

Okay. Can I kiss you goodnight?

Sure, he said thinking — surely thinking, this was import — she meant a peck on the cheek. When he offered his cheek she laid a palm alongside his jaw and turned his face and covered his mouth with hers. Her robe fell open and he could still see her body all white light and ebony shadows. Her naked breast touched him like a jolt of electricity and her sharp little tongue was alive in his mouth.

When he shoved her away she almost lost her balance and they struggled for an insane moment, him expecting any second Claire or Lisa to materialize in the doorway the way it would happen in a movie and he knew it looked exactly as if he were trying to wrestle a sixteen-year-old girl onto the couch.

She released him and took one graceful step back and calmly adjusted her robe. Goodnight, Charles, she said, her one-cornered smile opaque and enigmatic as always, the smile that said: You think you know what this means, but you’re badly mistaken.

If you feel this strongly about it we can wait a few days and see what happens, Claire said. Maybe she’ll move in with somebody or something.

I suppose we’ll have to do something sooner or later, he said. Do whatever you think best.

♦ ♦ ♦

EVERYTHING WAS ON A PATH that seemed imbued with inevitability, events ran forward like ball bearings on a grooved incline.

A boy let her out in Tidewater’s yard. They were arguing. The boy got out and slammed the door. They struggled for possession of her purse. Tidewater watched from the porch. The boy slapped her. The straight fall of her hair swung with the force of the blow. He seemed not to know that Tidewater was The Lightpainter, not to care that he was creating a disturbance in The Lightpainter’s yard.

Keep your hands to yourself, Tidewater said, coming down the doorstep.

How about trying that with your mouth, the boy said. He looked far older than Jenny, not even a boy, perhaps a man in his twenties. Tidewater saw that he was drunk. That The Lightpainter might have bitten off more than Tidewater could comfortably chew.

I don’t want trouble with you, Tidewater said. But I want you away from my house.

Or what?

Tidewater hadn’t thought that far ahead. Or I’ll call the law.

Call the son of a bitches then. But that little thief of a slut’s got my property and she’s going with me.

When Tidewater grabbed him the man’s feet slid apart in the gravel. His dishwater blond hair fell lankly across his face. Tidewater was trying to turn him. There was a rank feral smell about the man, a smell of sweat and whiskey and slow ruin. Tidewater wrestled him about into a hammerlock and walked him backward to the open car door and half threw him onto the seat. An audience had aligned itself on the porch. The man came up off the seat with a longneck beer bottle out of the floorboard and slammed Tidewater in the face with it. Tidewater went backward with his hands over his face. The motor cranked, tires slewed sidewise in the pea gravel.