John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“That’s right,” Buz said. “Immmoral.”

However, there was another side to it, no question about it, and they spoke of it in lofty phrases. An aesthetic side. (They were sitting out on the lawn now. He couldn’t remember coming out, but he was here: Buz in the aluminum lawn chair across from him, growing more quiet, more dignified moment by moment, and mentioning often how much he valued this rare opportunity for conversation.) “There is an aesthetic side to the question,” Will said. He solemnly belched. “Note the frequency of extraliteral relationships—” Extraliteral? he thought. He decided to brave it out. “Of extraliteral relationships among painters and poets and the like. It’s very interesting.”

“Right, I’m glad you mentioned it,” Buz said.

“Now painters and musicians, we may safely presume—” He slung out his jaw and frowned, judicial. “Painters and musicians have a marked aesthetic proclivity.”

“Exactly! Exactly right!” He banged his fist on his knee.

“Good. Bien. Bongiorno.” He giggled. “So far so good.”

“Right.”

“If the Universe is apprehended aesthetically, which is to say in terms of sensation—”

“Exactly! Sensational!”

“—then any curialing—”

“Exactly!”

“—of the aesthetic proclivity is, in one word, immm-oral!” The idea filled him with righteous rage.

“Whooey!” said Buz. He agreed. Then, realizing Will had finished, he looked slightly puzzled.

Will leaned toward him and spoke more confidentially. “We must live life fully.”

Buz nodded, musing.

“We must understan’ that there are situations which entail commitment, and there are situations in which no commitment is implicated.”

“None.”

“Nothing different from eating with a person, or playing a game of golf with him, or, as the case may be, her.”

“Not a parcital.” He laughed, then looked sinister. “Or a tracklium.”

Will laughed too. “Rise above ourselves.”

“Excelsior!”

“Shaving cream!”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Will pursed his lips but the belch came anyway. “I better go bed,” he observed.

“Excellent,” Buz said. “You want company?”

Will frowned, dizzily waiting.

Buz said, leaning forward and touching his knee, “It would give me great pleasure—” The word came out badly and he formed it again. “Pleasure to unzip your pants.” He smiled like a dog, his face very blurry, like a white flower under water.

“What?” Will said. He tried to stand up.

“You said yourself—”

“You monster!” Will said, deeply shocked.

Buz shrugged, slowly and loosely. “Well.”

“I’m astonizzhed!” Will said. “Astonished.” That’s better.

Buz brought out, just intelligibly, “You weren’t astonizzhed when I told you about burying a girl in feathers, or pouring syrup over them—”

“Stop!” He had made it to his feet now. “This is horrible,” he said. “What’s the matter with you people?” With what he knew himself was ludicrous premeditation, he raised his martini and dashed it, glass and all, to the sidewalk. The noise rang through the night more loudly than he’d expected. Buz laughed sadly, and after a moment Will laughed too.

“Help me up, old college frien’,” he said.

Will went over to him carefully, and carefully bent to help him up out of the chair. Then, very slowly, reeling with every tilt and lurch of the wobbly planet in its fall through the void, they worked their way to the porch steps. On hands and knees they made it up to the porch, and the light went on. “Just joking, Will old friend,” he said. They laughed and scratched at the door.

“I understand,” Will said. “A cunning joke. I must try, tomorrow—” He’d lost the thread.

Hours later, as it seemed to him, a girl in a yellow bathrobe opened the door for them. They laughed and patted each other’s backs and rolled in. (It came to him that his suitcoat was gone.) The door closed behind them, and the girl disappeared. He had an impression — but he couldn’t be sure — that the girl was not the same one. Then he must have passed out. It must have been sometime after that that he awakened to the half-dream half-reality of lying naked in a dark room, with a naked woman pressing her bush to his face, thighs clamped to his head, pushing at him, her smooth back arched and one hand closed around his penis. He never saw her face and afterward he sometimes was not quite sure that she was real. It was all, well, very strange.

And sitting in his office in Buffalo, giving in once more to bemused staring, eyes passing over his closely reasoned, now meaningless page, he knew what it was about it that was weird. He could see nothing either wrong in it or especially right. He’d betrayed people before, from time to time, in trivial ways, like any man — though he’d never betrayed Louise before, not sexually — and he would have said he knew very well what betrayal was, by his chest. But if so, this was no betrayal. He felt nothing, not even disgust. If she learned about it, which she wouldn’t, he knew, he would be sorry about it, but not unduly. If she took it for more than it was, then that was her problem. It was all exactly as people claimed — a trifle, a thing one could easily get used to, not at all the shocking and terrible sort of experience he had imagined. It would be different, perhaps, if the girl were someone he believed he loved. But sex, pure sex—”like food,” Buz had said, or a game of golf — it was merely a pleasure, meaningless and harmless. Or was it he himself who’d said it? The fact that all his life he’d guessed wrong about how it would feel, was a shock to him. And more shocking yet was the fact that it seemed, afterward, only a dream. He understood clearly, all at once, that if he did it a hundred times, a thousand, it would still be mere dream, as vague in his mind as his morning recollections of love-making with Louise. That was the reason for the ropes, it struck him, and the six-in-a-bed, and the rest. The pleasure was unspeakable, but only for a moment, like the unspeakable pleasure of dinners forgotten long ago.

He was arrested by a memory, sharp as a vision, of Danny talking with the Indian boy at Uncle Ben’s farm. They were in the chickenhouse, and the Indian was hunkering in front of Danny, teaching him to whittle. The word was musical on the Indian boy’s tongue, and Will had remembered — as if all the time between had vanished in smoke — how the word had sounded when he himself was a child and someone — Uncle Ben, or maybe his grandfather, or some hired man at Stony Hill, he couldn’t remember any more — had bent down to show him how. Danny took the knife in one hand, carefully, the stick in the other, and Will kept in his uneasiness about a four-year-old’s handling a jackknife. He watched the small face, haloed in light from the chickenhouse window, furrowed with concentration, tongue between teeth. The knifeblade cut in and moved slowly, jerkily, down the point of the whittling stick. I was whittling willow, he remembered with a start. I was going to make a whistle. It was Uncle Ben. He kept his hand on my arm, and not to steady me, but because he wanted to.

And now, fists clenched, remembering the pistol in his briefcase, Will thought: What makes it die? Wordsworth. Trailing glory. And when it’s dead — mere duty, is that it? To what?

He found the new package of Tums and opened it and ate one. Still staring at the papers on his desk, he hardly noticed June, his secretary, when she came in with the collection forms for him to sign. He was aware that all lines were sharper than usual this afternoon, that his eyes were curiously sensitive to trifling detail — dust specks in the air, the pages of the book on the desk beside the papers — and he was sensitive to smells as well. It was her scent that made him glance up at her, raising his eyes only to the level of her waist, where the hip-flesh jutted out. He looked up at her face. She was looking a little past him, lifelessly pretty. It had begun to come to his attention, recently, that every woman in the world was sexually attractive.