John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Sweetie-pie, that ain’t no guess.”

“I give,” he said.

“That’ll be the day!” she said, and then “Ooh! The ole rake blushes.”

“Millie,” he said.

She put her hand to her collar and he blushed more deeply, knowing she knew he’d been looking down inside, and suspecting, in the same instant, that that was why she’d gone around and bent over to look up through the horse’s legs in the first place. She’d been planning it for days. She was a whore, a bitch; God only knew what diseases he might have gotten! But he knew he was lying. It was his own fault, all of it. The next instant she was coming under the horse to him, knowing very well that the sorrel was skittish (it lifted a hoof, hesitated, tentatively set it down) and she smiled at him, standing between him and the horse, and touched his arm with the fingertips of one hand. He touched her waist with his left hand, holding the stupid curry comb in the other, and after a long time their mouths came together and a shock of her sweetness went through him. He let the comb drop and clung to her, kissing her hard, pressing his body against her, sick with hope and shame. Millie pulled back and sucked her lips in between her teeth as if they’d gone numb. She shook her head slowly, lips parted. “Have you guessed?” she whispered.

“No.” He searched her eyes.

She said, “I’m getting married to your brother Will.”

His stomach jerked as if she’d jabbed it. “Don’t, Millie,” he said, “that’s not funny.”

But she drew her head back, still holding him. “It’s the truth, Ben.”

“It’s not. It’s dumb.”

And now she was not smiling. “It’s the truth.” And he realized that it was. She waited. She was not soft and coy now but awesome to him, outwardly the same but in her mind dark, ancient, and terrible as a stone tower under stars of ice; and if there was something she wanted him to say, there was not enough of him left to say it. Even the punishments his father dealt out did not leave his heart so shaky. The mare breathed deep and sighed, letting her back sag, infinitely weary of all man’s paltry machinations, and Ben Hodge, servant of sunlit visions, whose heart was set on holiness — like the girl in the story his father told, who threw roses in the air — was silent. She looked down, smiling again, though her eyes had gone wrong, then turned, went back slowly through the tack room, as she’d come, lightly trailing her fingertips over the leather of the saddles on the row of wooden frames.

At the other end of the barn, at the foot of the stairs leading up to the haymow, Art Jr stood in the shadows watching with his arms folded. He came out now — Ben had no idea how long he’d been there — and stood by the old sorrel’s head. Art Jr was constructed all of squares — square face, square chest, square fists, square feet — and his mind was a diagram. He said, “She wanted you to fight for her.” Ben shook his head, baffled by the linear simplicity of his younger brother’s world. It was true, no doubt. About the relations between A and B he was never wrong. Ben said, “How could I?” and Art Jr said, “I wouldn’t know,” as if that was that.

And so Will and Millie had gotten married, and Ben had held out, had matched, later, with an otherworldly gentleness and eyes-turned-inward passivity like his own, pale light unto pale light. They had lived in peace, a haven for Will’s sharp scapegoat pain, looking on from a distance at Millie’s resounding destructions. And he had thought sometimes that they were there, Will and Millie, as a foil to his life, a shadow that made him clear. There was no need, no use for such rage and pain as they suffered except that it made his serenity distinct. (But Vanessa said once, for she was just and merciful, though sometimes jealous, “She might have been different with you, though, Ben. That’s possible.” To which he’d replied, “I’d as soon have married my dad!” He was not sure how much Vanessa knew.) In any case, whether or not he had ever felt real love for Millie, he would not have his life any way but as it was. It was to Ben and Vanessa that their children came — Will Jr, Luke, Mary Lou — for a chance to grow up whole, or nearly whole. To Ben, not to the eldest of the sons, that their mother had come in her last months, to die. Vanessa would read to her hour after hour, the same passages over and over, for her intelligence was gone, or Ben would sit up with her, hearing her ramble through past and present, now that all times had collapsed to one. Once, sitting in the dark beside her bed, at peace with himself, just as she was once again at peace, the green nightlight close to the floor throwing her terrible features on the wall, he had remembered vividly that when she was young she was beautiful. She had red-auburn hair that she wore piled high on her head, and her flesh was white and soft. (He’d lain in bed, pretending to be asleep, watching. They were going out, and so he’d cried, and though his father roared, she’d brought him here to her room where she could be with him a little longer.) She had on only her undergarments, as she called them; and now his father stood beside her, fully dressed, elegant, huge and dangerous and beautiful (to Ben’s child-eyes) and fearsome beside that gentleness and softness; but he stretched out his hand toward her as if timidly and touched her shoulder, looking over her head into the mirror at her, and after an instant she turned her head, gracefully, bending forward slightly, the way a blooded mare would turn its head to a groomsman’s touch, relinquishing nothing, though submissive, and she brushed his hand with the side of her face. “I think I’ll move Ben to his own room,” his father said. She smiled. “Do,” she said. Her permission and command. That’s what it all means, he’d thought that night long afterward, remembering and now understanding as he gazed at the terrible shadow of her profile — a silhouette of barren mountains, a bombed city. In peace like that in her own house once, she had died. There was no other life he’d have chosen in preference. If he’d loved Millie once, the part of him that had inclined, overmatched, toward darkness and war was long dead and buried, and he was grateful. He could pity her, forever torturing herself and Will and the children, but he need not approve her, need not return her good for the evil she’d done him and all his family. She had not earned from him any right to protection. For that matter, she probably needed none. No doubt she could manage Taggert as easily as any other man. No doubt she had tied his balls in knots already.

The woods were unmoving and hushed. There was no sound anywhere but Taggert’s far-away voice inside the house, a stream of words — you might have thought he was auctioning something — a monologue never broken by a sound from the others. There were no lights on in the upper-story windows. The gables of the house stood out against the sky, darker, more solid than the trees surrounding, but not more motionless. The air was pleasantly cool. He remembered sleeping out on the lawn with his brothers, in his childhood, and sitting up in the middle of the night to look toward the house like a watcher from a distant planet, hearing his father’s voice in the study arguing with a guest. And he felt again the feeling that had come to him then, that all was well, though he himself was not part of it; the feeling a man might have if he could come back from the grave and find life not changed by his absence. Then the voice in the house stopped. The trees waited. The dark gables appeared to take on weight, grow older. Kneeling with his forearm resting on his leg, his head bent, listening with every nerve, Ben Hodge breathed more lightly and shallowly, and then did not breathe at all.