John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“If you’d read the play maybe you could follow it,” she whispered.

“Hah!” he said. “I can follow it all right.”

She cringed and put her finger to her mouth. “Sh!”

The people in front of them turned to look. She smiled.

It was a new play called The Devils, the first New York production, and even if it was not good (it was brilliant, in fact), anyone else would have been grateful for the chance to see it. Not Hodge. He would rather sit with his Rotary pals, listening to some perfectly asinine speech, or play checkers with the judge with the long red nose, staying down the hall from them at the Washington Hotel (another outrage), or talk about Thomas Dewey with some black elevator boy.

Afterward they went to the restaurant Jeff Peters had recommended, a French place, expensive, with superb wine, and Hodge ate salad with thousand-island dressing. She was boiling mad now — even the dressing seemed a personal affront. “All right,” she said, “so you think you followed it. What did you get out of it.”

“A lot of yammer,” he said. He stared at his plate. “A lot of righteousness.”

She exploded. “Righteousness! For the love of God, Will, that was the point! — the righteousness of those who suppress life!”

“You talk like a book,” he said.

“That would naturally bother you.”

He chewed and held his peace. He ate with his head low, eyelids lowered, as though she had over the years destroyed whatever there might have been in him, just as he had destroyed whatever there might have been in her. His suitcoat hung open, and she could see his wide, gray and white suspenders. A terrible sorrow welled up in her. She pitied him as much as she hated him, and pitied herself as well. “Well,” she said, “it’s an interesting play historically.”

“Hah,” he said.

She put down her fork. “What do you mean, ‘Hah’?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“That’s largely how it was, you know,” she said. She leaned forward. “For centuries people with stupid theories have been murdering people who try to just live, enjoy life, seize the day and make the most of it. Priest, politicians. Truth is mostly in the sewer. You wouldn’t understand, of course.”

“I understand all right,” he said.

She heard her laugh outside her like crystal ringing. “Really!” she said. “You wouldn’t know a symbol from a cider barrel!”

“That’s different,” he said. “You weren’t talking about symbols.”

“What did I say? Repeat exactly what I said.”

“You said—” He pursed his lips crossly. “You said people with theories don’t understand people who have a different theory.”

“No. You see? You can’t even repeat what I said! No wonder you leave trials to other people!”

“In substance, what you said—”

“You tell me about substance!” She stabbed her fork into her steak.

He said no more. She had beaten him, as always. She bit her lower lip to hide the trembling, and her eyes were filled with tears, so that the candles were a blur of yellow and white.

In the car he said, “I didn’t mean to spoil your evening.”

“Never mind,” she said. “The trouble is, you keep trying to control how I think, as though I were a child. It’s insidious.”

“I apologize,” he said flatly.

He took a wrong turn on the way back to the hotel. She rode with her eyes clenched tightly shut — she could have told him the turn, could easily have directed him anywhere in the city — but she was still full of sorrow over forcing him again to admit his stupidity; and it pleased her to see him go wrong, see him knowing he could not get anywhere without her. That night, standing at the window of their hotel room — Hodge in bed already, sleeping with his head under the pillow to close off the light — she had a frighteningly strong urge to jump. How he did it she would never know, but the truth was that by every gesture, every glance, he made her feel worthless, brainless, obscene. She could make a laughingstock of him, turn all his sober arguments to the jabbering of a monkey; her very appearance made him clownlike, bumpkinish; and yet his wordless righteousness, more insidious than anything in the play — a righteousness without rational foundation, indefensible and therefore mute — made a gaudy whore of her. What had she done? Where had she gone wrong? In marrying him in the first place, a fool might say. How simple! One escaped from one jail into another and then to another and another until one escaped to the tightwalled grave. Oh, she might have done better — might have married a man who would not have padlocked her legs together, or anyway tried to, but there was no real escape, not for a woman. And therefore no escape from the guilt of destruction that had nothing to do with the man destroyed — an act of nature, the teeming universe, things and their motions. There was only progression, the old orchard giving way to the new. And was it sane to call the new orchard a betrayal of the old? Yet how well she understood their feeling! It grieved her that the old orchard was old. But she would not be deluded. Her father stood in the church doorway, smiling and holding out his arms to her. “Poor baby,” he said, “my poor, pretty little girl.” Oh, how she had loved him! But she’d grown older, through no fault of her own, a victim of time, like any tree, and he too had grown older, and the vital spirit in him had shrunk, and little by little he had died and had been replaced. And so it had been with Will, too; for whatever they might think, those casual observers so ready to judge, she had loved him with all her heart for a little while, after that night in the orchard. She had schemed to get him, and not for himself but for his name. Nevertheless — and not ironically but inevitably, she understood now — she had fallen in love with him. For all her tears, only partly feigned, she had laughed at him that night, and had been pleased with him and with herself. And later — after they were married, in fact — there had come that same vaulting joy she had felt with Ben — the same yet altogether different. She was lying in bed watching his reflection in the mirror as he undressed, and all at once she had found him, framed by the mirror, to be beautiful. It was a discovery more than physical: an entirely new way of seeing the world, as if, for the first time in her life, she was seeing with her own eyes, not the eyes of other people. Ben was bronzed from his forehead to the line of his belt and from the hem of his shorts to the soles of his feet — bronzed like a figure on a poster. But Will was tanned — or reddened, really: as red as new brick — only where his workshirt, overalls, and boots didn’t cover him: red of face and neck, but below the red V at his collar, white as grade-school paste: and yet not sickly — not at all! — because the muscles of his shoulders and arms were square and awesome, and below his wide chest his waist was (in those days) small, and below his bellybutton the parallel muscles of his abdomen were firm as a boxer’s, and each of his thighs was as thick with muscle as the waist of a young girl. His body hair was black as crows’ wings and curly and thick, and the hair on his head was brownish, bleached by the sun. It struck her with terrific force that his head did not go with his body — seemed more socialized, tamed, more “advanced,” less her secret property, exactly as his thought belonged to her less than his feelings did, or anyway his feelings as her new, loving husband. What he felt on other matters was in those days of no importance. He snapped out the light and came to bed naked, as he always did in those days, and she, naked too, put her arms around him and pressed herself to him and said, “Will, I can’t believe my luck, getting you for my husband. When I think how close I came—” She let it trail off. He lay still, thinking — wondering, she knew, if he could believe her. “I love you very much,” he said formally. She laughed and kissed him, delighted that even with his muscular body tight against hers he could be formal. After a long time he said, “Millie, did you ever … with anyone besides …” Her heart beat lightly and quickly, partly from fright, and she moved her hands gently over his body. At last she said, “Will, will you hate me if I tell you something?” He waited, and she said, “I was lying to you — about Ben. It was you I wanted. Right from the beginning.” And after another moment. “It’s the truth, Will. Can you forgive me?” For all she knew, perhaps it really was the truth. He said nothing for so long she began to be frightened. “Will?” she whispered. Then, as if a dam had broken, a great sob came from him. “All along!” he bawled. “Oh, Millie! Millie!” They had both loved each other from the first. They clung to each other like children and wept and rutted half the night and swore they would always be faithful, and at last they slept. But days passed; seasons; and as Luke, not yet born, would one day howl above the hellfire jangle of his banjo, love grows colder.