John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

It was no dream, she realized suddenly. He’d had her half-naked before she knew what was happening — prattling at her, poking her, tickling her roughly, and like smoke her blouse and brassiere were gone — but then the lightning struck: she saw again now, as clearly as before, the fire-blasted face, the close-set, startled eyes, the arm rising to shield his ugliness. His shadow, black on the lightning-white wall, showed every hair distinct. Poor bastard, she thought, filled with pity and disgust, for she saw now his shame and pain as well as her fear. And then all at once the joy of victory ran through her: she could defeat him, body and soul. His sleight of hand could not make thin air of the pain if, opening her arms to him, she stabbed a knee into his nuts. She could do it. She’d thought of it before, not just once, not just with one man; had calculated the jab and had resisted, plunging to victory in her mind. Or like the Basque shepherds, she could bite. Or she could defeat him more subtly and terribly, by pain worse than physical pain, pick his bones and snap them in her jaws, destroy him with the image of his own ruined face.

She half-imagined, half-dreamed of getting up, dressing in purple and red, a golden plastic bracelet on her wrist set with precious-looking stones, and going softly to him with poisoned tea in a golden cup. Her mind cleared, and she was afraid for a moment, then calm again. Yes, she thought. So once in Jeff Peters’ apartment in Hartsdale she’d lain in the bluewhite stillness of a January morning, waiting for Jeff to come back, poor Luke’s beloved idol, his history teacher (“How can we do this?” Jeff had said; “it’s unthinkable!” and they had laughed); and because she had found he had other women — and despite the fact that it did not matter in the least to her — she had lain on top of the covers smiling, planning the terrible vengeance that, in the end, she had not taken. But it was different now, not justice merely, and not merely justice for herself. She felt warm, relaxed. She might seem to them as vulnerable as any bird, defenseless as a swallow, but she could pick the flesh of kings, the belly-meat of captains if she chose. She opened her eyes again and saw that it was later; she seemed to have dozed.

She sat up as quietly as possible, and still there was no sound. Perhaps they really had left, it came to her. Vanished like nightmares. She rose to her feet and listened. No sound but the steady dripping from the corner of the house; no motion but the pendulum of the clock. Through her stocking feet the carpet felt stiff as the bristles of some animal in a field, long dead. They were gone. She felt mysteriously lucky. It was the way she’d sometimes felt after a night of abandon, when she’d thrown all caution to the winds and made love to some man beneath her husband’s nose — in the kitchen, once, when Will had gone into his cluttered, rabbinical study to work on some papers — and, not caring whether or not she was caught, she had miraculously not been caught. It was as if the universe was in conspiracy with her, which perhaps it was: for there was a law, surely, against men like Will Hodge, or against the conspiracy of Will and Ben and all their plodding, wooden-hearted kind. She was, at any rate, no sneaking pleasure thief: she made no bones about it, confronted the world with as much boldness as her lover of the moment allowed her. A natural force, unconstrained, and not merely ignorant either; prepared for the worst — and sometimes it had come — and she had survived. They were the cosmic outlaws, not she: they lurked in shrubbery, spying in (so Will Jr had told her, Will Sr pursuing an adultery case for a client who wanted a divorce; and Ben had gone with him and they’d parked Will’s car at the edge of the woods where they could watch the house, and there they’d sat all night, waiting, their eyes shining like the eyes of murderers. Will Jr had refused to be a party to it: “For Christ’s sake hire a detective!” he’d said); but no shrubbery for her, no lurking and spying; her lines and life were free, or as free as was possible, she being a woman. That was what was so dreadful in Luke’s stupidity. For him all doors were open, he might have been anything — a man, not a woman — yet he chose to cower, to cringe and hiss, to hide under rocks, though he might have struck down the sun if he’d had the heart.

He still had not moved, and looking at the awful immobility of his wristbone she had a moment’s panic. She quickly overcame it. Better off if he was dead, she thought, safely knowing him alive.

She strained to hear any faintest intimation of movement that would tell her they were still here, but there was nothing. At last she walked toward the diningroom door, still in her stocking feet, and pressed it open. There was only the glitter of the china closet, the heavy old buffet, the lamps and bric-a-brac of the dead Runians. She closed the door again, still listening, then turned toward the kitchen.

Nick Slater sat at the table absolutely silent, motionless except for the fingers turning a cigarette around and around, rolling the ends to points. The pistol lay on the table beside his elbow. He raised his eyes to her.

When she was calm she said, “Where’s your friend?”

“He left.”

She waited a long time, but he was volunteering nothing.

“For good?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“He took Luke’s truck?”

But when she looked out over the cellar door she saw Luke’s pick-up truck still there, and up the hill, in the semidark beyond the open barn door she could see the rear end of the semi. Luke’s coupe was still here too, standing by the gas pump beyond the garage.

She said, “How long will he be gone?”

Nick looked back at the cigarette, and she knew now that nothing she said would make him talk to her. “You should get out,” she said slyly. “You’d have a better chance alone. A man like that stands out like a sore thumb. Everyone who sees him …” She folded her arms to keep her fingers from trembling and looked out toward the road. There were pines where the road and the driveway met, and she had walked there once with her brother Gil, who long after that had killed himself, the best of her brothers. She said abruptly, firmly, “Nick, you must turn yourself in.”

Nothing.

“Nick, listen to me,” she said, “I’m going to call the police. I have to. For Luke’s sake, and Ben’s. I have to. You see that, don’t you?”

She waited a full minute, or pretended to. Waiting had nothing to do with it. If she moved toward the phone his hand would move toward the gun, and if she drove him to it, he would kill her. It was incredible: not terrifying but quietly beyond understanding; she was not waiting for Nick’s reaction but for insight, a parting of the veil. She asked sharply, “What are you thinking?”

He said nothing.

“You make the phonecall,” she said. It came to her that the phone was probably not fixed yet. But she said, “I hear when you give yourself up of your own free will they go easy on you.”

He was turning the cigarette again, his eyebrows lowered so that between the flat of his forehead and the flat of his cheekbones his eyes were like the slits in a medieval helmet. It came to her that she needed a cigarette terribly, and she turned to open the cupboard over the sink where Luke kept his.

Nick said softly, “I killed somebody last night.” The voice seemed to come from very close, as if from inside her. She waited, frozen.

“Three people, that makes,” he said. “The first one completely by accident, the lady in the car. Then the next one a little less by accident. I didn’t know I would do it, but then when it was done I knew I did it, so that it was different from the other. I knew I had a choice, but I only knew afterward for sure. Then last night the third one, only just barely by accident. We heard her coming, and I knew I had the gun and maybe I’d kill her, and I knew I better not, it was bad enough already, but I was thinking, What would it feel like? — wondering if I really could do it on purpose, and he said, ‘You shoot off that gun, boy, and you’ll have the whole city on top of us,’ and I was wrapping it up in the blanket from the bed and all at once she was there and I knew she was going to scream and I had it aimed at her wrapped inside the blanket and I squeezed. I wondered if the blanket would slow the bullet down, but the way she jerked it must have hit her hard.” He broke the cigarette in half and dry tobacco fell from the center, spattered on the tabletop and lay still. He said, “And all the time he was standing there watching me, pulling at his beard with his hand.”