John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“You’re excited, Mrs. Clumly,” Miller said. “Take it easy, now. Stay loose.” He touched her hand, and again she was startled to find he was so close.

“I have reason to—” She stopped and swallowed and did not continue until she was sure she could control her voice. “I think I have reason to be excited,” she said. “I haven’t told you the worst. He wasn’t alone.”

“Who?” Miller said.

“Mr. Hodge, the lawyer. He came and asked these questions, and he pretended he was all by himself, but right outside the door, right on the porch, or beside the porch, I’m not sure, there was someone listening — taking it all down, I think.”

“Taking it down? How could you tell?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” she said. “But I had the distinct impression. Sometimes people in my situation—” Again her voice failed her and she waited, swallowing. He patted her hand. “And there have been other things,” she said. “Someone came from the Federal Government, late at night. Or anyway they said that’s what they were, if I remember. He sounded Russian, a little. He left a message, a strange one. I hardly dare—”

“Strange?” he said.

“Well, it was written on a paper airplane.” She waited for Miller to laugh, but he was silent. It frightened her.

At last he said, “I’ll look into all this, Mrs. Clumly. I give you my word. I’ve been so blasted busy … Meanwhile, don’t fret. All right? Go home and take a hot bath — or buy yourself a hat — take your mind off all this. It’s nothing, I know that already, but I’ll check. Ok?”

“I’m not finished,” she said.

After a while he said, “All right, go on.”

She drew the tapes from the sewing bag. “I found these. They’re his. I think they’re the evidence. I don’t know. I thought since he trusts you — since you’ve always been a very loyal, well — I thought you should know they exist.”

Again the frightening silence. At last he sighed. “Mrs. Clumly, if the Chief wanted me to hear these things he’d bring them to me.”

“Yes I know. But as I said—”

Miller shifted in his chair. “I can’t take them. I’m sorry. I understand how you feel, but it’s impossible. Really.”

“Then listen to them at least,” she whispered. “Please, Mr. Miller. Then if anything happens — if the people behind all this do something awful to him — at least there will be someone who knows. I beg you.”

“I can’t. That’s final. As a policeman—”

“As a friend! That’s all I ask. Just listen.”

“Look,” he said. He thought a moment. “If I believed in this plot, as you put it, then all right, that would be something else. But I don’t. You see? You found them hidden in the house, right? He didn’t want you to see them, or me, or the Mayor, or Jesus, or anybody. Right? How can I just plug in the machine and—”

“Please,” she said.

She heard him getting up, moving away from her. After that, silence. He was staring at her, or staring out the window, or standing with his eyes shut, she couldn’t tell. At last, quietly, but like an explosion, he said, “All right.” She listened to him moving toward her, and without a word she held up the tapes to him. He took them, and after a moment she heard him putting the first of them in the tape recorder on the desk. She heard the button jump in, and then the whirring, a sort of groaning noise, several sharp thumps. Now the tape ran quietly, and there were voices, far away and muffled. Miller made them louder.

Then, very clearly, they heard the words: What are you fiddling with, there inside your shirt?

“Jesus,” Miller whispered.

“What?” she said.

I might have known. Very well, just as you please. Then a laugh.

Miller switched off the tape.

“What is it?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. She could hear him unwinding the tape, taking it off.

“What is it?” she asked again, sharply this time.

When he spoke his voice was too even, and she knew that, whatever it was she’d done, she had ruined her husband and had made it impossible for even Miller to help him now. “It’s the Sunlight Man, Esther,” Miller said. “The man we’re after.”

“Then Fred’s found him,” she said desperately. “He’s talked to him.”

“That’s right,” Miller said. “But he hasn’t talked to us.” He put the spool of tape very gently in her hand. “Here,” he said. “Put it where you found it. Or burn it. Do what you want with it. I don’t want to know it exists.”

“Is it so bad?” she said, knowing.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said.

She stood up, listening with the back of her mind to the crackling of the radio in the other room. “I’d rather walk,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Whatever you like.” He put his hand on her arm, thinking of saying more perhaps, but nothing more came. The hand went away, and a moment later she heard the door come open behind her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She pressed the hanky to her mouth.

Miller was silent.

Mr. Uphill, the Fire Chief, said, “What is all this?”

Esther jumped.

“Nothing,” Miller said.

“Nothing my hat!” Uphill said.

She backed away, her hand over the tapes in her sewing bag.

“Now hold on, Miller,” Uphill said. “You listen here.”

Miller touched her arm. “It’s all right,” he said.

And so, at midnight, after walking the city streets restlessly the whole day, she stood alone in the bare third-floor room of the empty house, not crying now, only her chest crying, one hand lightly resting on the side of the window that stood open before her, tall blind eye looking at the darkness of the city (she could hear traffic, far away, an occasional whisper from the leaves of the trees around the house), her lips moving, not making a sound, not even making any sense any more, a movement independent of what thoughts passed through her head, it seemed; and she remembered years from some other life, far away and trivial and sweet as a fairytale, a young girl’s sorrows over trifling things, a mother’s sweet and touching madness, a sailorboy walking through a wood with her, holding her hand with a sweet and ridiculous tenderness, and they made pictures with stones and he talked of the weather and she said with, oh, infinite righteousness, that she did not believe in indiscriminate kissing (but she was going to have an operation, and afterward, who knew? perhaps she would see as well as anyone, and then it would be she who talked of the weather — ah, how eagerly! how little he saw, really saw! — and, tenderly pressing her mouth to his, she would teach him that all his life he had been blind); but it had failed. “Sorry,” she whispered. The dark street heard her — or so it seemed to her momentary fancy — and the earth, cooling from the heat of the day — and a wind came, warm and comforting, and some neighbor coughed, struggling futilely to clear the grit and sludge of his long day of smoking, and she thought of Clumly coming home from his concubine, finding her there on the lawn — or dangling, it might be, from the roof of the porch — and, in short, for better or worse, she could not act. She had meant to be his comfort, his intercessor, but she had destroyed him. She bowed her head. “Sorry,” she whispered again, unable to weep. “I too have a life, don’t I?”

Then Esther Clumly went down to her bed and lay there, with all her clothes on, even her shoes, nose pointing at the ceiling, arms at her sides, inert and absurd as … She furrowed her forehead, trying to think what it was that she looked like, lying there, and suddenly she knew, and the insight was almost pleasing because it was so right. “Like a chicken,” she said, and sobbed. “In this house of tragedy, lying here like a horrible, stiff chicken.”