John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Thank heavens,” Mrs. Kleppmann said from the shadow of the pillar where she waited, “you’ve come!”

It rang false — but everything was ringing false. He nodded, smiling politely, and moved toward her. She took his hand. “Thank you,” she said. Perhaps she meant it. He felt queerly indifferent.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“This way.” She drew him toward her and down the wide-boarded hall.

They came out on a parking lot lit in gray-white, like the platform on the other side of the depot, and she led him to a long blue station wagon that he might have known at once belonged to Mrs. Kleppmann. It had no chrome, no decorations, no radio, even, and he could not tell what kind it was but knew it was expensive.

“Nice car,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“What’s up, Mrs. Kleppmann?”

“Later,” she said. She nodded toward the man in the driver’s seat, waiting for them. He had his hat off because of the heat.

They got in then and arranged what little he had in the way of gear — not much: his briefcase, the hat he for some reason felt he should carry, not wear, the raincoat Louise had insisted on his bringing. The driver switched on the motor, quiet as a vacuum cleaner, and the car slid back out of its parking slot and as if without change of direction, smooth as a barque turned in the wind; started forward. Soon the pale light of the town sank behind them and they were moving through a darkness deeper than any he had seen since earliest childhood.

“You’re a long way from civilization,” he said.

She reached over, matronly, and patted his hand. “Farther than you think,” she said. Not sly. She meant him to understand it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She laughed.

They flowed into what might have been the limits of the world, the depths of the Midwest, oakwoods and farmland where St. Louis was a dream and Chicago an old wives’ fable, Cimmerian country. There was no sign of the moon, only mist and cloud, and it was hard to believe that in the morning there would be sunlight.

“You sounded worried,” he said. She had, in fact, but he understood the game.

“I am.”

In the darkness, Will smiled.

At last there was a yellow glow in the mist — the sharp yellow of mosquito bulbs — and there were pillars and lighted windows.

“That your house?” he said.

He felt, rather than saw, her nod in the darkness. She closed her hand on his more tightly, and he understood that for her it partly wasn’t a game. More the pity for her then. His armpits itched, and he thought, I’m afraid. And yet he was not. It was as if he had nothing more to do with the fears of his common mortality.

She withdrew her hand.

“You had nothing to say to me?” he said. “—For the record.”

After a moment: “Nothing.”

Will sighed and slipped his hand into his pocket where the gun was. And now, suddenly, he saw how absurd it was: the gun was no protection, a weighty inconvenience. “I’m a fool,” he thought.

“Do you think so?”

He had not meant to speak out loud.

They were up in the driveway turn-around now, and the car had stopped. Time, too, seemed to have stopped. He saw Kleppmann’s huge barn, clean-lined against the mist, windows lighted as on a Christmas card, and Kleppmann’s long chickenhouse of cinder-block, and to the east, the ornate, absurd old house, sheltered by maples. The grass was white from the mist; the light coming out through the windows was orange. With the motor off, the world was as quiet as the North Pole. Kleppmann bowed, opening the door. “Ah yes,” he said. “You’ve come.”

Will bowed back, abstracted and polite. “Certainly.” His stomach closed as if what he confronted were not a man but an upright crocodile.

Strange meeting. One saw too much television, no doubt. In any case, it took him a long time to get used to it. He had come half-prepared to kill or be killed, but Kleppmann was having a party. The guests moved all through the house, talking, their voices blending to a roar as indefinite as the overhanging mist, and Kleppmann the Terrible stood on the front lawn like an elderly serpent looking after his barbecue. Like a middle-class merchant. He was cooking not on a barbecue grill of the usual sort but on a long, wide trench with cinderblocks around the edge and, across the middle, steel rods and chickenwire. He stood in his white apron, pouring wine on the meat like a drink-offering to the newly dead — or, to be precise, pouring beer first, and afterward wine, and after that, when the fat began burning, water. Finally he sprinkled flour on the meat, his fluttering fingers incongruous against his somber death’s-head face. Grimly, as though any humorous gesture were the farthest thing from his mind, he intoned: “Amen.” Tentatively, watching his eyes, Will smiled.

“We usually have nothing but steak,” Kleppmann said. “Young heifer. But these people — echh! My wife’s friends, as you’ve guessed. However, for you a coal black ram without a spot.” He pointed with his fork.

“I wouldn’t have known the difference, you know,” Will said, and smiled again.

“You are a wise man,” Kleppmann said.

“Not really.” He shrank back then, an instant late. The old man was angry, overflowing with hate, or anyway seething, waiting; and Will had been a fool to expect it to be different. He studied the face gray-orange and still as lead cooling in a smelter’s mold, Kleppmann bending toward the fire, looking in, and decided abruptly that he, too, could wait.

“Join the party if you like,” Kleppmann said. “Don’t let me keep you.”

“I may do that,” he said, but remained. He became conscious of the rumble of a train now, somewhere in the distance. No light from it reached him.

Kleppmann was making no further pretense of talking. Will took a Tums and moved away a little to stand looking out into darkness. Casually, he asked, “What have you got on me, Kleppmann, that makes you so brave?”

Kleppmann gave no sign. “Brave?” he echoed politely.

“This property’s yours all right,” Will said, looking up into the trees. The branches and the leaves were sickly yellow from the mosquito bulbs on the porch. “The car’s yours too, and the horses or chickens or whatever’s out there in the barn.”

“I never mean to take advantage,” Kleppmann said. It seemed to Will — but it was hard to be sure — that the directness made Kleppmann uneasy.

“It can’t be merely the long hours I put in,” Will continued as if Kleppmann hadn’t spoken. “You’re a foxy old man, so I imagine you see through the long hours. They’re not struggle for survival, not a pain in the neck that would make me vulnerable to, say, some gratuity from you. They’re for pleasure.”

“It’s a good thing when a man likes his work,” Kleppmann said. He was a dead man, all mechanical good manners, or the Wizard of Oz, his mind far away, behind some curtain pushing buttons and watching with tiny, sharp eyes. He needed jarring.

“I know now! The business in Chicago.”

Kleppmann glanced at him, then away.

Will’s voice was not booming with confidence now, or so it seemed from inside, but it made no difference. He wasn’t bluffing. His hatred swelled his chest; not anger but the feeling one has toward things with cold blood. “The drinking, the orgy. I suppose you know about all that. Well, I’d be sorry to have it come out, that’s true. For the children’s sakes, and Louise’s.” He frowned, checking his emotions to see if it was true — if anything at all in his attic of old opinions, as Uncle Tag used to say, was true to his feelings. But the question was hard, and he put it off. “Not for my own sake though, not for myself. That is, I wouldn’t drop pursuit of you merely to keep that quiet. It doesn’t strike me as sufficiently evil, though I suppose I know how other people might feel — so I wouldn’t pay. Also—” He folded his hands around the glass he was carefully not drinking from and sucked at his teeth, collecting his thoughts. “Also, fact is, I believe my wife would feel the same, ultimately. We’re not desperate, like some, for complete approval from everybody on the block.” (“Love,” she’d scornfully echoed, he remembered, meaning “What is love?” It was a question people were always asking nowadays, scornfully — at the cafeteria where he ate with Sol and Hawes and the others, in the tiresome art films, at parties. It infuriated him that he couldn’t snap out the answer at them. It seemed to him he had it on the tip of his tongue. Just the same, he thought, I love her, as well as I can. Such things exist.) Then, less than certain that the troublesome shade was at rest for good, he returned his attention to Kleppmann and the fire. “In short,” Will said, “if it was in your mind that you might blackmail me off your ass, so to speak, with the Chicago business, forget it.”