John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Louise,” he whispered.

She was asleep. All the street was asleep. He held his breath to listen to her breathing.

3

He awakened stiff and miserable, the covers tangled around his knees, the rest of his huge hairy body exposed to the morning chill. A patch of hair on the side of his head had been pressed the wrong way against the sheet and stuck up now, rigid and cold, as if it had been starched. He evaded the question that had troubled his sleep all night. His wife, too, had the covers off, but she’d pushed them away on purpose. She lay on her side, facing him, naked breasts softly, comfortably resting on the frame of her right arm, her left hand under the pillow just under his neck. He got up on one elbow and slid his jaw forward, studying her as though she were a stranger. Beside his own enormous bulk she was childlike and pitifully vulnerable, he thought, and his heart went out to her — or went out, rather, to all of them — Louise, Uncle Tag, his father and mother, his memory of himself as a child. Her hair was thinning a little on top, and the precise hairs rising from the white of her scalp made him think of the wax figure he’d seen once at Sutro’s in San Francisco, a self-portrait of a Japanese wax artist the hairs of whose head were, alas, all too literally numbered. With a detachment faintly disturbing to him he observed that Louise was still pretty, even in the morning, even with her dark, naturally curly hair slightly matted, a little coarse-looking, and her skin blotchy with sleep and the slowing of the blood. The trouble was that he did not feel drawn, stirred, interested. It was the dreams he’d had, that was it. Nightmares which began in a world radiant with a beauty organized and harmonious and full of light, like naked women to the eyes of an adolescent. The hills in his dreams shone as Louise had shone when he was first in love with her, or as the world had shone when he was still in love with the world: full of springtime sunlight, the hope of mysteries, when there were angels perched among the apples and plums and pears. But the dream world kept going monstrous, as life had done. Nothing shone for him that way any more, outside mere dreams. Not because of sins of commission or sins of omission, not because he had tasted the knowledge of good and evil, but because he was what he was, merely a man. His half-mad uncle would understand.

He lay back and closed his eyes. He’d been through all that before, without the dreams. It was exactly what made this Buffalo rat race so monstrous and, at the same time, so neurotically satisfying. One was born to a world luminescent with mother-and-father love, a mere upsurge of animal instinct never meant to be translated into idea, vision, and yet inevitably translated by the very nature of that terrible accident Man. One projected onto the indifferent breezes — onto the indifferent greens or the softness of snow — the absurdities of one’s human temperament — beauty, holiness, truth. One made of sticks and stones and rivers and mountains the grandiose affirmation of human heads. Thus the writer to the Hebrews on the subject of Faith: an outreaching of the mind beyond what it immediately possesses. Self-transcendence. But the reach did not imply the existence of the thing reached for. One knew it even as one reached.

But that too he had been through before. It was one thing to know that “first love,” or one’s first idea of God, or one’s first shock of reaction to a work of art is mere chemistry, a trick of the universe on its victim. It was another to be able to resist.

He’d talked with Ben Jr, long ago — it was the year before Ben Jr died — about painting. They were up in the Musicians Union Hall, waiting for Ben Sr to come pick them up in his truck and drive them home. The Civic Orchestra had just rehearsed. It was late, half-past eleven or so. Main Street, below where they sat looking out, was dark and quiet.

Will had said, “I wish I could paint sometimes, a night like this.”

Ben stood tall and gloomy, the French horn still cradled in his arm, blond hair vague in the darkness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see it. Tonight, anyway.”

Will scoffed. “ ‘See it.’ Talk about grand affectations! ‘I can’t see it.’ “

Ben said nothing, and after a moment Will said guiltily, “Forget it.”

Ben put his long shoe up on the windowledge and looked at the mouthpiece of the horn. “Something happens to your eyes,” he said. “Sometimes you decide you’re going to paint, and you work and work, and — nothing. You ever stop to think how many artists take drugs, or get drunk, or screw around with women — abandon their families?”

“Well.”

“There’s a reason. The world is not beautiful. Tonight, say. I look out and it’s nothing but junk. Like the orchestra tonight. Everything sounded out of tune; Civic Orchestra’s always out of tune, we all realize that, but sometimes your ear does things to it, it all starts swinging. Same with painting. Sometimes you look at some hills or something and you get out your paints and everything you do is right — you could give the paints to a cow and it would be right, or anyway great, something you could fix. It’s inspiration. When you’ve got it, everything’s terrific, and when you haven’t, the world is all worms,”

Will thought about it. “I need a beer,” he said, then laughed abruptly. “If you got painting you’d be in a different mood, pretty soon.”

Ben laughed, too, hollow and terrible, and a year later when the news came that Ben Hodge Jr was dead in Korea, Will Jr would hear that laugh again, like a comment from beyond the grave. That night, lunging drunkenly along the bank of the Tonawanda Creek, flailing his arms and crying, Will Jr though he did not believe in prayer had prayed that when the machine gun caught him Ben Jr had been seeing like an artist, the waters alive. Will had fallen then, his feet tangled in a roll of rusty barbed wire, and had gone to sleep, the whole world wheeling around his drunkenness, and while he slept he had a dream in which Ben Jr came to him and said, “Everything will be all right.” He sat wide awake in the wet grass, the wire cutting into the calves of his legs, and in the place where Ben Jr had been standing there was nothing. He got up, cold sober, and made a small pile of stones. Then he went home.

The room was full of sunlight around him, and Louise had gotten up. He must have slept, then. He would be late for work. But he still resisted the effort of will that would throw his legs over the side and hoist his head up into the room. He could hear Danny and Madeline chattering happily, down in the breakfast room, and now and then Louise’s voice commanding them to eat. The voices blended with the sunlight and the dancing motes, and the sunlight blended with the walls, the yellow maple of the highboy, the covers no longer in a tangle around his knees but drawn up over him and gently tucked in around his shoulders. Everything is going to be all right. No sooner were the words established in his mind than his belly closed tight and sour around the thought of his uncle. Telling Clumly what he knew was out of the question, obviously. Should he go to his father? Uncle Ben? Should he hunt Uncle Tag himself? His mind worked quickly and efficiently, raising up obstacles. The emotions that might have given him some signal would not stir.

He got up, groaning with pain, drew on his bathrobe and padded into the bathroom. He got the roll of Tums from the medicine chest, then sat down on the toilet. His bowels burned like hot bricks moving down, and when he looked, afterward, there was blood. Well, he would live. He’d lived this long. He brushed his teeth and shaved.

If a man were really wise he would not merely wait for the waters of inspiration to move, he thought; he would freeze his heart against their moving. He would refuse to be deluded. A gritty, corpuscular universe, a grating of stiff and angular machines. Beware the colored lights that turn mere stagecraft into dinosaurs and singing rivers from the morning of the earth. Beware of chemistry, counsellor! What man not born a witch can tell the pastures of Paradise from the devil’s green illusions? Take the narrower view. I am not a man unaffected by chemistry, but I have at least this: I can try to withstand my poisons.