John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

The taxi drivers with their golfer’s shirts and dirty-yellow imitation bandsmen’s hats looked equally fat and satisfied, and so did the hotel doormen with their padded coats and buttons down their backs and gold epaulettes on their shoulders. He looked at fat, darksuited businessmen, gloomy as Indians, graying at the temples, hurrying along in small shoes that shone on the sidewalk like tinted steel, and it seemed to him that they were grimly satisfied with their lives of hard bargains and tricky deals. Like wolves, all of them, the same as the people in the jail, but these were the wolves who made it. Even the women. He could have been afraid of them, if he’d let himself. They walked in tight clothes that shone like knives, and their soft, pretty faces or square, blunt faces knew just how to get what they wanted, some by a pretense of helplessness, some by a sweet false gaiety, some by foxy irony or bellowing or crying or endless timid whining. It was not a street, it was a battlefield, and though they might smile from time to time, Walter Benson was not fooled; they were at war, and every man-woman-child of them was fighting for himself. If some of the salesmen were polite, they were polite because that would make the sale. If it worked just as well, they’d have gladly cracked open the customer’s jaw with a pistol. If he, Benson, were to step through the low revolving door and snatch the woman in the green dress, the young one picking through the used-looking talcum bottles on the counter, and hurl her to the floor and smash her head against the marble tile (or whatever it was), not a one of them would lift a finger to save her. They would scream, duck down, look out for Number One. A sobering thought. It filled his chest with a coldness.

He came into the scruffier section now; the department stores and banks and expensive shops had fallen away behind Mm; ahead of him lay the hunting grounds of less powerful thieves, shoemakers working at basement windows, a medical supply store with Maidenform corsets and bras in the window, a body shop with a red and yellow sign, YOU WRECK ’EM I FIX ’EM. He passed two painters working on the front of a beauty salon. Their sleeves were rolled up on their lean brown arms and showed their swollen veins. One of them was swearing. The sign over his head said CHARLES OF PARIS, and there was a picture of a lady with bright blue hair. Charles of Paris would pay those painters through the nose, and Charles’ customers would pay, after that, because it wasn’t enough, just getting along, just making ends meet, paying the bills: a man had to get ahead, retire to the country, a cottage on Silver Lake. He passed a restaurant where people were eating hamburgers in a quick, nervous, wolfish way as though they had important work and could only spare a minute. Some of the people eating were old men who sat alone and had their hats on. By the window sat a man with lifted eyebrows, pouting lips, and a fixed stare; he seemed to be struggling to remember something. In the back of his mind Walter Benson had a feeling he was to blame for all this, too. He walked still more quickly, lost in reverie, and before he knew it he was hurrying down McKinley, his own street.

He slowed down, suddenly remembering his weak heart — his bad ticker as he put it to himself, a phrase less frightening to him. His dread of meeting his wife washed over him again. He’d been away a long time, this time. He could hardly blame her if Marguerite was cross with him, driven past the limits of her patience. What had never entered his mind before came absolutely clear to him now: it wasn’t a kindness he’d done her, bringing that roomer in; it was more work, more worry. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

He walked on toward his house, still a block away, and as he walked he hunted through his suitcoat pockets without the faintest idea what it was he was hunting. In his inside coat-pocket he came upon The Pocket Book of Favorite Poems. Finding it gave him a just barely perceptible touch of comfort. Even so, walking up to his own front porch he felt more like Walter Boyle than like Walter Benson. He glanced over his shoulder, then went up the steps and tried the door. It was locked.

That was something he could not possibly have expected. Marguerite never went out any more, not since she’d broken her hip that time. Had she fallen down again? He tried the doorbell. No answer. He went over to the window behind the porch swing-chair and peered in, but except for the familiar old brown overstuffed chairs and davenport, the mantelshelf with the pictures of her family on it, the standing lamps, and the television, the artificial flowers, there was nothing. It was as if she’d died. The thought alarmed him, and he went around to the side door, where he had a key beside the meter.

Inside, everything was as usual, except that Marguerite was gone. The plants in the kitchen, in clay pots set on old kitchen dishes, were in perfect health; the linoleum shone as usual; everything was clean and excessively neat. Only one trifling irregularity caught his eye, a paperback book on the kitchen table, Castro’s Revolution. It was not the kind of thing she would read. The roomer, then, Benson decided. Leaning over it, he noticed that there was a newspaper clipping in it for a bookmark. He opened the book and, because the print of both the clipping and the book itself was very small, carried it to the window beside the washing machine where he could see. The clipping was about a Negro church being bombed. As for the book, the pages were cluttered with underlining, and along the margin at one point there was a wild, vertical bar in bright red ink.

Walter Benson blinked his protruding eyes and pursed his lips and read through it twice. Then he closed the book on his finger and stared up at the wall as if half-expecting a voice to come out of the wall and explain. At last, glancing over his shoulder again, he put the book down exactly where he’d found it and went over to the refrigerator to get himself an Orange Crush. It came to him that she might be in the back yard, working over her flowers, say, so he carried the pop with him to the back door and out onto the porch. She was not there either. The lawn hammock was there, though, and all at once it looked inviting. He went down the rickety steps and across the lawn and got cautiously into the hammock, where he lay on his round back, arms hanging out on either side, almost relaxed though he was still not easy about her being away. Benson closed his eyes.

Here in the back yard it was like being in the middle of the forest, miles from civilization. True, he could see the back yards of all the people on this side of the block, or if not the yards then the trees and garage roofs; and true, he could hear the traffic of the city, the roar of an occasional jet overhead, the televisions a little ways off; but this was, nevertheless, his yard, and even though he could be seen by anyone who bothered to look from a nearby yard or some upstairs window, he felt private here: he felt he was himself. He caught the scent of a barbecue and felt, one moment, pleased by it, the next, restless again. Suppose something had happened to her? Suppose she’d been murdered in her bed, or no (he had looked in her bed), lured out of the house and murdered in the street. He wondered for the hundredth time whether the police had worked out, finally, what he’d failed to tell them, that it was no one else but the Sunlight Man who’d come to let the Indian out. Could it be he was planning some terrible murder and needed the Indian’s help? The murder of Benson himself?

He found himself worrying as badly as he’d worried all that time in the jail. It was dangerous for him. The doctor had said so. For his ticker’s sake if for no other reason, he had to get himself out of this state. He took a drink from the pop bottle, then closed his eyes and lay with his arms hanging over the sides of the hammock as before. But comfortable as the hammock was, good as it was to be drinking Orange Crush again in his own back yard, he could not drive away his heavy dread. He drew the pocket book of poetry from his inside suit pocket and opened it where it opened easiest, from many past readings. The poem began to affect him even before he began to read.