John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He looked at the clock over Figlow’s desk. He felt weightless. It was as if the earth had dropped from under him or had fallen, dragging him with it, off balance with the sun.

2

The phone rang, loud in the emptiness of the house, and Millie Hodge turned to stare at it. She had not known it was fixed. She thought a moment, eyebrows lowered, then raised herself carefully from the couch and crossed, turning the ice around and around inside the glass, to answer it.

The connection was bad, and at first she could not recognize the voice. The small of her back knew before her brain that it was Will. She half-closed her eyes.

“Millie?”

“This is Millie. Is that you, Will?”

“I have bad news,” he said.

“Talk louder.” She leaned over the phone and pressed her lips closer to it. “I can’t hear you,” she said. She had a weird sense that the Runian sisters stood listening behind the door.

She heard him clearly now. “Luke’s dead, Millie.”

She was silent. She heard, or imagined, the dead sisters’ sharp intake of breath. Oh my! No! The poor woman! The voices were clear and distinct. Was it only the wind?

“Are you there, Millie?”

“I’m here,” she said.

“Luke’s dead. Do you hear me?”

She nodded, silent.

“He ran his truck off a bridge. The others—”

She waited.

“They got out. They must have suspected. There was only one body.”

It wasn’t possible to cry.

One body? the sisters exclaimed. Only one? They tipped their heads together like weeds in a wind.

“Will,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Millie,” he said. That was all. The connection broke. She listened to the wind, and there were no ghosts’ voices now. No time for fantasy. The house was empty. She turned mechanically away from the phone. The room was cold, for the hot summer had at last broken, and autumn was descending in a rush, as always in Western New York. She drew the ragged old red and purple afghan from the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders. She stood at the window with her arms crossed over her bosom holding the makeshift robe in place. Stony Hill was burning, a red glow northeast of the prison’s flat white light. She stood looking. Her arms were white, her elbows like daggers. Her eyes were like emerald, her lips like amethyst, and in her mourning she was beautiful again; she was calm as stone.

3

She sat on the bedside wringing her hands while Clumly dressed. She could have told him, at least, she was thinking in anguish. But she hadn’t, and the anguish was pointless, not that that did a thing to make it less: She was not going to tell him even now, and she knew it. You can’t ruin a man after all those years of living with him and then tell him, “Oh, say, I ought to tell you something.” She had asserted her rights, had surrendered herself to whatever waves must carry them now; she would wait it out, and suffer with him or for him or from him whatever it was she must suffer, whatever was right. My duty, she thought. The word darted in and away again and hovered somewhere in the dark of her mind like a mysterious bird that could change its color, and there in the dark, outside her reach, she could feel it changing, teasing her toward a thought. She clenched her fists beside her knees, resolving to wring her hands no more, then instantly forgot. But he saw nothing of it as he dressed, lost in thought.

A meeting, he said. A speech to the Dairyman’s League. Was it true? But whether it was true or not no longer mattered. He had a life of his own, it was none of her business. A life to spend or squander as he saw fit, as independent of her as she was of him. That was what she’d learned, a startling and terrible but also exhilarating discovery that brought with it a sudden sense of vaulting joy, of freedom — an escape into wilderness and boundless time: she could kill herself if she pleased, she had realized, standing at the open window dreaming of it; because the pain was hers, not her husband’s, whatever pain of his own he might feel. The decision was hers, and if she chose against it for his sake, she did it voluntarily, as his equal. So he too, long ago, might have chosen to stay out of weakness, from dependence on her dependence on him, yes, but even then, his weakness: she was not, after all, his prison. She felt prepared almost for joy, but first she had tonight and tomorrow and perhaps next year to stumble through.

He was mumbling something as he dressed, and she closed off the back of her mind to listen.

“My friends, I’d like you to think back to the story of Cain and Abel,” he was saying. “I know that sounds like a minister talking, and I know a man’s known by the company he keeps—” Something was wrong with it, he seemed to think, and he muttered it again, with a slightly different expression. More heavy-handed, in her personal opinion.

“Should you really say that, Fred?” she said.

“Esther, please,” he said.

She sighed.

“—and I know a man’s known by the company he keeps,” he whispered.

Well anyway, he does have a speech to make. It’s not likely he’d stoop to an outright lie. Something wrong with a marriage where people can’t help but suspect each other. She thought of all those years when again and again she’d wondered with an aching heart if perhaps there was someone else he loved more than her. The Indian girl with the blue eyes. And others, a girl he stood talking to once at a School Board meeting. The waste of it all, she thought dismally.

But that was wrong, of course. There was always some waste, it was the method of Nature, and besides it was none of her business. She listened to him swallowing, pulling his tie snug, and then the almost inaudible yet to her ears distinct scrape of stiffly starched cloth as he put his cufflinks on. He went over to the closet in his stocking feet and she heard the squeak of coat hangers: then he came back, and the suit came down on the bed beside her and she caught the clean smell. She heard him straightening the trousers, then putting them on. He drew in his breath, slipping the belt on, buckling it. Then he leaned toward her again for the coat. “You look tired,” he said.

Before she could answer, the phone rang. She touched her forehead with the fingers of her left hand, meaning to get up for it, but Clumly put his hand on her shoulder gently. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Don’t trouble.”

“It’s no trouble, Fred,” she said. But she didn’t get up.

He carried the phone from the hallway into the bathroom and closed the door, and when he spoke it was too softly for her to hear. She sighed. Her heart felt drained and withered. But after the first words he no longer kept his voice at a whisper. “Dead?” he said. A moment later: “Go on.” He listened again, and then he said, “You’ve got everything in control then? I’m supposed to give—” Another long pause. “Ok. Check. I’m supposed to give a speech, so if you need me I’ll be at the Grange. Right. Ten-four. Right. G’bye.”

He hung onto the receiver a moment before he put it in its cradle. Then he came slowly back down the hall, put the phone on its shelf, and came back into the room. “Luke Hodge is dead,” he said. “It looks like suicide.”

“No,” she said. The room was full of distances, sounds farther off than they ought to be, as though it were the room, not the news, that was not to be believed. She could feel Luke’s presence distinctly, unquestionably alive; but she knew he was dead.

“He drove his truck off a bridge,” Clumly said. “The State Police are there, and Miller’s going over. His father’s at the scene, too, Figlow says.”