John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

But the fact remained, she was a sight. It might be she was past repair already. “My dear Millie, we must try to get more sleep,” he said. “When we sleep, our metabolism helps us to get rid of waste products in the skin and restores essential ingredients — minerals, vitamins, hormones. Yes indeedie! Cut down on sleep and you impair circulation and contract the capillaries, which causes hydration and sagging. The skin is robbed of saline solutions, the tissues sink, and the collagen becomes alas! increasingly visible. In other words, dark circles. Do think about it.”

She said nothing but moved her eyes to his face and gave a trace of a smile. It was he who looked down, this time. He said, “Still a spark of life, eh?”

Nick said, “We got to leave.”

“When it’s right,” he said.

“Tonight. No shit.”

“Go when you like,” he said. “You’re free. Millie, you know about these things. Explain to the young man about freedom.”

She said nothing. She put her fork down and dropped her hand into her lap. His heart sped up.

“Tell him about the gratuitous act, Millie,” he said. He bent toward her, fierce. “Tell him.”

Her voice was thick from disuse. “There’s no such thing.”

“Ah!” He turned to Nick. “Listen well, boy! There’s no such thing!” He turned back to her, eyebrows lifted, eagerly waiting.

“There’s no freedom,” she said. She met his eyes. “There’s only commitment and confusion.”

“A philosopher! A lady philosopher!” he cried with glee. But he said no more. His voice was not in control.

She shifted suddenly to French, her eyes ice cold, and he understood that she did it to give him pain. They’d talked French together long ago at Stony Hill, when he was just learning it. She was still better at it than he was. From whoring around in Paris, he thought. But that was wrong, he knew; her French was bookish, and what gave him pain was not the memory of Stony Hill but the revelation of her alter-soul’s entombment: She came alive, speaking French; all her humor irony and wrath came suddenly together like fire and powder, and the Millie who’d survived went dark and fell away, and the woman she’d once meant to be rose out of the grave of abandoned hopes, came striding forth, as confident as a smiling ghost at dusk. He tried to think how to stop her, but nothing would come.

“Tu es un meilleur professeur que tu le saches,” she said, soft and fast. “Si quelqu’un peut se vanter de la franchise, de l’acte gratuit, c’est moi. Mais le cerveau est toujours croche à l’animal, petit frère; on dit au cerveau, ‘Ne le ha ï s, cerveau!’—Comme on dit sur la croix, ‘Pardonnez la merde, il ne sait pas ce qu’il fait!’—mais le corps est en feu, et le coeur pompe, ‘Haïssez! Haïssez!’ Et même si tu libères l’âme, aliènes en esprit et voyages des lieues et des siècles, chéri, le corps que tu as laisse dans son lit se levera quand il aura faim; il mangera ou fera la cour ou tuera quelqu’un par plaisanterie.”

“Is that why we do it, Millie?” he said, heart thudding.

“Tu dis.”

Nick said fiercely, “They’re coming. You know it, and you just sit here and listen to jabbering.”

“Shut up,” he said. “Not tonight.”

“ Il en a tué trois,” she said. “Combien tu en as tué?”

He sucked in breath. “Stop it. That’s enough.”

“Ou est-ce que tu simplement fais le fou? Pourquoi?”

“That’s enough, I said.” He caught hold of the table and meant to heave it toward her, knock her to the floor; but he stopped himself. “Keep that up and I’ll tie you in the cellar.”

She said no more, but her mouth — not her eyes — smiled.

After a long time he said, almost a whisper, “There are no laws, my boy.” He did not look at her. “Only the laws of man, which are easily beaten, and the laws you make up for yourself, which may be obeyed, once they’re made up, but only then. That is my lesson for this evening.”

“Une leçon sotte,” she said under her breath, but he heard it; no doubt he was meant to.

“Not really,” he said. “One ought to be engagé, I admit it. But the state is not always attainable — like the state of grace. In Rome do as the Romans do, yes. But if you live in the garbage dump, my dear—” He let it trail off, looking again at Nick. “The next man you kill, it’s on purpose,” he said. “But also, the next man you don’t kill that will be on purpose, too.”

“Pas vrai,” she said.

He looked at Nick. “Maybe not,” he said at last. He stood up. “I have work to do. You’ll keep an eye out?”

Nick nodded and glanced up. “Leave the gun,” he said.

The Sunlight Man shook his head. “Not this time.” He went to the garage and began his preparations. An hour later, running behind time and beginning to feel panicky (“Like any common laborer!” he thought), he went in and, evading the question of what to do with Millie, demanded Nick’s labor. “No,” Nick said. The Sunlight Man was forced to draw the gun and strike him on the cheek. Afterward, breathing hard, he said, “I’m sorry. You’ll see it’s for the best. Now get on out there.” “No,” Nick said. He raised the gun again; the boy changed his mind. Time, the Sunlight Man realized, was running out on him fast.

“Millie, you should be on my side,” he whispered, “not theirs.”

“You have no side,” she said.

“Not so, sister. My actions misrepresent me. The pressure of events. It’s happened to me before, if I tell you the truth.”

“To all of us,” she said.

He had, suddenly, a terrible urge to embrace her and sob, ask for help, but he said, “I have terrible urges to embrace someone, cry out for help.” He laughed, “My whole nature howls ‘Stop! Why can’t we start over, fresh?’ In the graveyard, for instance, when I knew for sure … almost for sure … that my sons were dead. ‘This can’t go on!’ I said. ‘We’re human beings, a common cause! We ought to present a united front against the wolves and the trolls and the Worldsnake.’ Yes! I resolved to confess my terrible guilt to Mr. Paxton. However—”

She closed her eyes.

“—I thought better of it. I decided to turn instead to a life of art.

Millie Hodge in whites and pinks,

Reads hard books and thinks and thinks,

Lives life fully, learns it stinks,

Longs for long lost stoves and sinks!

You approve my decision, of course?”

“No comment,” she said. Lights swept over the wall. He paid no attention, then suddenly snapped awake. Millie, too, came suddenly alert. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. No time for this, he thought. No time to spare for trouble. Nick waited like a cat.

4

She hardly noticed the lights passing over the wall behind his head, thrown there by headlights coming up the driveway; hardly noticed even the grinding motor of Hardesty’s panel truck. He too, the Sunlight Man, had been off his guard for once. His hands stopped moving and his eyebrows lowered. Though he seemed on the surface, even now, indifferent, infinitely calm, she could feel his concentration in the chill of her blood. There was hardly a chance that Hardesty had not seen him. When the knock came at the back door, the Sunlight Man said, “Let him in.”

What happened was very clear to her afterward, but why it happened was not clear. She would never know why he’d said simply, “Let him in,” had not even bothered to move out of sight but had waited, holding the pistol in his left hand, standing with his back to the woodshed door but his head partly turned so that he could watch when Hardesty came. Hardesty opened the door a foot and stuck his head in, beaming, neighborly, fat cheeks shiny as varnish under his squint, and he said “Hoddy,” his limp hat hanging from his hand. Then he saw the Sunlight Man and they stared at each other, and Nick Slater stood with his hands held away from him as though they were wet. Suddenly, with a jerk of effort that made his face look wild, Hardesty pulled his head back and pulled the door shut behind him and ran.