John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Kleppmann bent down, grieved and indifferent, to look.

“Well, everybody likes something different,” the Senator said. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

Kleppmann straightened up and turned to look at the Senator mildly but critically. “I never noticed that,” he said. “Seems to me everybody wants the same thing. Curved driveways whether or not there’s anything to curve around. Wife that looks half-starved to death. Dogs, cats, horses.”

“Come now, Mr. Kleppmann,” the Senator said, “you like expensive things yourself.”

Kleppmann shrugged as if meekly, like a Jewish tailor. He patted the Senator’s arm in a way he knew the man would find offensive, and said, “I suppose I do. I suppose we’re all made of the same stuff under the skin.”

He ate his dinner — a cold hot beef sandwich and a glass of milk — in a small, filthy hash-house in south St. Louis. The potatoes were lumpy, the beef underthin and overcooked, the gravy watery; but Kleppmann did not notice. He was not simply indifferent to food, he was fanatically indifferent. He knew good food from bad, expensive from cheap, and he could use his knowledge to impress his business associates, as he called them, when necessary; but he had no respect for what is known as fine food — meats cooked with wines and spices brought in flaming, as though they would look and taste of decay in their natural state; vegetables chopped or diced or shredded in the decadent French manner, as if for the toothless gums of superannuated uncles and aunts of the royal house. It was not the food itself that disgusted him: it was edible enough, though not appealing. What turned his stomach — and turned his stomach violently — was the people who admired such food: piglike people (whether they were fat or thin, he saw that pig’s-eye glint in their piggish little eyes) who prided themselves (as even pigs do not) on knowing which marination was considered superior by persons of superior discernment. What turned his stomach was people who took one sip of wine and glanced expertly at the corner of the room and passed judgment with the greatest solemnity, as if the head of the winemaker hung on their sentence—”nutty,” or “tart,” or “bland,” or “smooth,” or some other perfectly obvious designation of a perfectly obvious, wholly unimportant sensation. As for those who could say, and with a fair measure of accuracy, “1963,” or even “1937”—a thing he certainly could not do himself — he felt a kind of moral outrage he could barely hide from even the most obtuse observer. It was not simply the connoisseur, the snob, that Kleppmann detested. He was equally revolted by people who took smacking delight in fried chicken or porkchops or Christmas ham, or by people in the suburbs who ate rare barbecued steak and could not help wincing when asked by a guest for a piece “well done.” (Kleppmann unfailingly asked for his steak well done, in the hope of offending.) He was no more pleased by the “simple Negro” with his affected and self-conscious taste for chicken necks and gibbets (or giblets or whatever they were called); and he hated with equal intensity the Occidental who learned to eat with chopsticks and the Oriental who ate “naturally,” that is, with his mouth at the level of his plate and his sticks slightly higher than his head. For these reasons and others, Kleppmann ate alone whenever possible, just as he went to the bathroom alone, and paid no more than he had to for the privilege.

His wife was of a different inclination, of course, not only with respect to eating but with respect to almost everything in life. She liked big houses, beautiful views, and parties where dinner was served by candlelight. Kleppmann suffered her as he suffered the rest of mankind. She was of use. Nevertheless, when there were no guests and therefore no reason to bend to the ridiculous and annoying fashion of eating by light one could not see by, Kleppmann took dinner in his room, as he called it (his wife called it his study), in solitude. He made no pretense of loving her and never went to bed with her. It was a business arrangement, by no means mutually satisfactory or for that matter more than tolerable on either side. She loved luxury and had so little taste that he could pawn off on her the most disgusting baubles. As for Kleppmann, he liked making fools of people (though he did not like that or anything else in this world very much), and his wife not only provided a willing subject, as quick to sit up and beg as any fawning, stinking lap dog, but also helped him to make fools of other people.

The diner was alone when he entered it — he might not have entered it otherwise — but when he was halfway through his clammy hot beef sandwich two teen-age girls came in. One had blue pock-marks; the other was tanned and pretty except for a suspicious, slow-witted, cowlike look, a slightly affected pout, and large, square ankles. Kleppmann wiped his mouth on the paper napkin and pushed his plate away. Leaving no tip — he never left tips except to impress — he carried his restaurant check to the ornate, ostentatiously large black cash-register, long obsolete but still very grand, counted out the exact change, and went out to the street without a word. He walked to his car, unlocked it, and got in. A freight train stood on the siding across the street, and Kleppmann shuddered, went pale, averted his eyes.

At home, among other messages awaiting him, he found this:

W.B.H. has a tax claim against him, in amount of $40,000. Own firm has advised him to buy them off, case too chancy.

Kleppmann nodded. He crossed to the window, picked up his Barron’s Weekly, and sat down on the stiff, plain wooden chair he always used for serious reading — a chair fit for a monk.

4

What happened was obscure to Will, afterward. He had, strange to say, no particular regrets: it was all hardly more real than a dream, and though he would never have imagined that he would feel that way, he found that it scarcely occurred to him to feel guilty. It was as if, taking a wrong turn of no particular consequence, he had found himself in a sweet shop where the air was heavy with the scent of candies, and display cases were piled high with pink and yellow and white things and chocolate things and things in fancy wrappings. They stood in the kitchen, he remembered, the music howling in at them from the livingroom, the girl perhaps in bed somewhere — he’d lost track of her — and Buz was saying, holding up the martini pitcher to watch the level, pouring in gin, “Say what you like, there’s nothing in this world more fantastically beautiful than each of your hands on a different girl’s breasts and your legs wrapped around two more sets of breasts, and one of them sucking and another one giving you a kiss with a taste of gin.” He cackled with pleasure.

Will watched the martini turning round and round in the pitcher.

“Right,” Buz said, nodding as if Will had spoken.

Will’s head was not as clear as he would have liked. He felt stimulated by it all, and the sexual stimulation was the least of it. He felt new worlds were opening up before him, and what he wanted at the moment was not to explore them, plunge into the raw adventure of it, but think out, boldly, without shrinking, the implications. Buz handed him his martini, surely knowing he was already drunk as a skunk. “May be too wet,” he said, “try it.” He beamed. Will sipped and nodded — at that moment he might as quickly have approved plain kerosene. He lifted the glass toward the ceiling and said, “The world is round!” “Round!” Buz echoed. They drank to rotundity.

He remembered saying later, slowly and carefully — several drinks later it must have been—“It’s immmoral, that’s my obshection to it.”