John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

The bed creaked. Somebody was sitting up.

Mr. Nuper said as if sadly, “I can’t stay any longer, love. Pamphlets to deliver.”

“Must you?” she asked. A groan of satisfaction.

A sound of kissing. “Forgive me, dearest.”

Giggles.

The sense of what they were saying broke into Benson’s mind and his eyes widened with alarm. He got downstairs and out of sight just in the nick of time, before Mr. Nuper came padding barenaked out to the hall and down the stairs behind him. Benson fled to the kitchen and stood there clenching and unclenching his fists, wondering why the devil he’d run away. It was his house, wasn’t it? It was his wife, too, in fact. He heard Mr. Nuper dressing in the livingroom, whistling to himself under his breath and then having another drink. Again just in the nick of time Walter Benson got out the back door and down on the lawn, out of sight, before Mr. Nuper came into the kitchen. As he crouched at the foot of the steps, waiting, Benson’s hand accidentally fell upon a dew-wet two-by-four he’d forgotten to put away a month or two ago when he was fixing the back-porch steps. His heart raced. He lifted it up — it swung easily, a little like a baseball bat — and he ducked behind the spirea to wait for Mr. Nuper. When the man reached the bottom step Benson would leap out behind him and blam! He clenched his teeth and held his breath, smiling.

At last the back door opened. Peeking up through the leaves, Benson could see him coming toward the steps with a box on his shoulder — no doubt the pamphlets he’d mentioned to Marguerite. Benson kept absolutely still, almost painfully alert. He could smell the rich earth under his shoes, the spirea like violent perfume, and he could hear sounds as much as a mile away — a garbage-can lid grating down onto the can, a motorcycle out on the highway, a man’s voice calling a dog. Louder than thunder, it seemed to him, was the soft footfall of Ollie Nuper coming down the steps, momentarily passing out of sight behind the spirea. Walter Benson knew now that he was going to do it, he actually was, and he felt a ghastly joy. When Nuper reached the bottom step, Benson waited only a fraction of a second more, then leaped out behind him, bringing down the club with all his might. But at the last quarter-second he pulled back and swerved the club to one side so that it missed, and Benson, in confusion, ducked back into hiding. Nuper had shifted the box to his head; the blow would have had no effect. Benson panted. He wanted to cry and pound on the earth.

Nuper, moving on, oblivious to it all, put the box in the back seat of his car, reaching it in through the open left-rear window. Then, instead of getting in at once, he walked around behind the garage. Benson could hear him urinating against the garage wall. The sound went on and on. Suddenly, on a lunatic impulse, Benson dropped the two-by-four, darted over to the car, and, for fear the door might give him away, squeezed in through the window and huddled, panting hard, behind the driver’s seat. Only then, with his knees pushing into his chest, did he realize his predicament. He had nothing to fight with, and Nuper would certainly discover him here the moment he reached in for the box. He raised up his head, like a madman newly come to his senses, and he meant to climb out the same way he’d come in; but Nuper was coming now. Benson ducked down again so quickly that he scratched his ear on a spring coming out through the back of the driver’s seat. Nuper opened the door, making the light go on, and slid in, still whistling to himself. He started up the engine.

3

In point of fact, Benson need not have worried. Ollie Nuper was exceedingly drunk, in the first place, and in the second place, the box of pamphlets was a ruse, a device for escaping Marguerite and moving on to further adventures. It was true (as Benson would later learn) that Nuper was a distributor of pamphlets, an organizer, a devout radical — a Communist, in fact — willing to lend his talents to any cause he believed to be worthy — and whatever one might finally think of him, he had his most definite, most righteous beliefs.

His chief belief was that most people are not merely foolish or short-sighted or lacking in imagination but consciously and viciously hypocritical. His father was the manager of a savings and loan association in New York, an aging junior executive who kept a house he couldn’t afford on Long Island and a cottage he shared with two other people on Lake George. He’d spent a lifetime smiling politely in the general direction of people he detested, including, some of the time, his son; and though he loved his wife he was not always strictly faithful. Both he and his wife had thought at first that they were very lucky to get a bookish, nervously intelligent son: Ollie was going to go far, his father said. Later, though, the father grew less sure of this. All through school and even through his undergraduate years at the University of Connecticut, Ollie Nuper had no friends. It was the usual story. He’d learned to read before he went into grade school, but he hadn’t learned to play. When other first-graders stood in the playground watching the older children play kickball and dodgeball and steal-the-sticks, learning the mystical secret of play by watching other people do it, Ollie Nuper, full of six-year-old righteousness which both his parents and his teachers admired, retreated to books. When he did play, he cheated or got into fights which he always lost. He was not completely antisocial, however. He discovered very quickly that he could gain at least a kind of admiration by knowing things before other people did, and he had a not too-surprising knack for guessing what the people around him were about to want to know. In high school he became an authority on sex, a distributor of obscene slides, a notorious drinker, a smoker of marijuana. Despite all this, his marks were excellent. In college he suddenly matured. He became a coffee-house poet, an unwed father, so to speak, and a follower of Trotsky. He tried the twelve-string guitar, for a time, but people told him he had no ear. (This enraged him. Not so much the fact that people said it to him, though that hurt, of course, as the fact that he really did have no ear. He became, because of this, a confirmed atheist and wrote long, closely reasoned letters to famous ministers, among them Bishop Pike. None of the ministers answered him, but the letters were for a short time widely circulated at the University of Connecticut, and some were passed around even at M.I.T.) In graduate school — Brooklyn College, where he majored in philosophy — he at last came into his own. He discovered the doctrine of hypocrisy, and discovered, best of all, that if he was neurotic it was emphatically not his fault. It was not even his father’s fault, in fact. It was the fault of America, of Capitalism, of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. Of “the Western Crime.”

He dropped out of school; volunteered for the Peace Corps but didn’t get in; burned his draft card; marched to Mississippi and came home profoundly disillusioned with Negroes; moved to Buffalo, N.Y., where according to a friend there were going to be riots any day. The cliché might have gone on and on except for the accident of his moving in with the Bensons.

He himself could not have told you how or why it happened, but one night, sitting in the kitchen, drinking bourbon and telling his tragic story to Mrs. Walter Benson (old enough to be his mother), he’d found himself making sexual advances. She had not exactly returned them, but she had not exactly rejected them either. She had said, “I’m so confused!”—but she had not looked confused. In the morning, looking down at her with pity and disgust (her false teeth were crooked), Ollie Nuper had been unable either to flee in revulsion or confess to her that she was revolting to him. Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror he had said to himself, in abject misery, “Well, you’re not so pretty yourself.” The girl he’d lived with at U. Conn. had hit it on the head. “Your face isn’t really so ugly,” she had said, “it’s just, well, silly.” And so now the great hater of hypocrisy had fallen into a life of gloomy hypocrisy. He spent hours waiting on Marguerite Benson — taking her shopping or off to movies he himself couldn’t stand, talking with her politely about Thorstein Veblen and Bertrand Russell and Karl Marx (her false teeth clicking all the while she talked), swivving her night after night with a look of wild rapture on his face and a prayer that it soon be over in his head. It was worse by far than any marriage, God knew, and he hoped America would burn in Hell for bringing him to this.