John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“California,” Clumly said solemnly. “That’s what he’ll be.” But on his hands, where the flesh had not been damaged, the prisoner had no tan, and that was strange. He had large white hands like those in pictures of King David in the Bible. The tip of the cigar was sharp and acid on Clumly’s lip and he thought again of quitting, but he knew he wouldn’t. It passed through his mind that there was a beach somewhere in California where there was a car, a 1935 model, he couldn’t remember what make it was, and inside the car a couple of lovers made out of old wire in the back seat, and some ladies’ underpants. It was supposed to be an art work. Clumly had used it in a speech to the Rotary once. A sign of the times. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s where he’s from all right.”

“Monkeys,” Salvador said. “Shoo!”

That night Chief Clumly stood for a long time at the door of the cellblock looking at the scarred and bearded prisoner. Then he went out to his car and sat there awhile, brooding, half-listening to the radio, and then he drove home, shaking his head, thinking. He was sixty-four, and he’d lived in Batavia his whole life, except for the three years he’d spent in the Navy, and half of that he’d spent staring at a hospital wall down in Texas.

“It’s a funny business,” he said aloud, above the noise of the police radio. He searched for words, squinting into the half-dark of the treelined street. (He was driving down North Lyon now, past tall, narrow, two-story houses with porches that went the full width of each house, old latticework at each end of the porches, and here and there a bike leaned up against the steps. Even with their lights on, the houses looked abandoned, like habitations depopulated by plague. You had a feeling there would be dragons in the cellars, and upstairs, owls. The curtains in the livingroom windows were drawn, and there was no one out, not a car on the street except his own. No light showed but the incorporeal glow of television sets. On some of the lawns there were bushy evergreens, and yet he could remember when all this was new, the lawns plain and bare, the trees along the sidewalks all small and straight and as self-conscious-looking as the new, white houses, now gray or dark green or fading yellow. He could remember when the evergreens were six feet tall, full of colored lights at Christmas, and the snow on the lawns reflected the light, pale blue and yellow and pink. He’d driven a Wonder Bakery truck in those days — Good Bread for Six Reasons — and before that he’d been the Watkins man — panaceas and potions — for the Indian Reservation.) But no words came, only the light of a cat’s eyes beside the curb. At LaCrosse he slowed almost to a stop and turned. The houses were older, even taller here, like old-time castles. They stood in the cool, cavernous gaps between oak trees a century old. He went up the gravel driveway to where his garage sat half-hidden under burnt-out lilacs and surrounded by high weeds. In the glow of the headlights, the weeds looked chalky white and vaguely reminded him of something. It was as if he expected something terrible to come out from their scratchy, bone-dry-looking obscurity — a leopard, say, or a lion, or the mastiff bitch that belonged to the Caldwells next door. But nothing came, and only the deepest, most barbaric and philosophical part of Chief Clumly’s mind had for a moment slipped into expectancy. He put the car away, locked the garage, and walked around to the front of the house for the paper. It took him awhile to find it. The trees blocked the light from the streetlamp, and as usual there were no lights on in the house. He’d told her and told her about that. He found the paper by the side of the porch steps, almost under them, where you’d swear the little devil could never have put it except on purpose. Then, very slowly, weary all at once, he went in, unfolding the paper as he went. “Funny business,” he said again thoughtfully, as he locked the front door behind him. He could hear her in the kitchen. The house smelled of stew with cabbage in it.

“Is that you, Fred?” she whined.

He held his nose lightly with his left hand and thought, as he’d occasionally thought before, how weird it would be if it were not him but some stranger, some lunatic escaped from the hospital up in Buffalo. The man would stand smiling, not answering, his glistening eyes bugging out like a toad’s, surprised at the sound of a voice in the unlighted house, and after a moment she would appear in the near-darkness at the diningroom door, her high, chinless head alert and listening, white as death.

“Fred?” she called again, “is that you, Fred?”

“Just me,” Clumly said, calm. He snapped on the lights.

He sat picking at his food, across from her, saying nothing while he ate, as usual. If there were hairs in the stew, he did not notice. Years ago — so long ago he could hardly remember it — he’d said something to her once about a hair in some food, and it had set off a terrible scene. She’d cried and cried, and she’d locked herself in the bathroom and said she was going to kill herself. “I’ll cut my throat with a razorblade,” she said. “Where are the razorblades?” And he’d stood bent over outside the bathroom door calling to her through the keyhole, begging her not to; he’d even sobbed, but purposely, hoping to persuade her, not really from grief. She had complained that he didn’t love her, she was a burden to the world; and even as he reasoned and pleaded with her Clumly had realized, calmly, sensibly, that all she said was, well, sad but true. But in the same rush of clear-headed detachment he had recognized, like Jacob of old when he found he’d got Leah, whose arms were like sticks and whose mouth was as flat as a salamander’s, that he’d have to be a monster to tell her the truth. What would the poor woman do, no beauty any more, without a skill or a talent in the world? He’d made a mistake in marrying her, one he might never have made if he’d been a few years older when they met, but his mistake, nevertheless. A mistake he was stuck with. He’d been twenty when they met, and she’d been eighteen. He was in the Navy, just getting his eyes opened. He’d gone to his first house of prostitution when they’d put in at the Virgin Islands, and they all sat in one small room with a radio playing foreign music, three other sailors and himself and the four brown, queerly familyless women (it seemed to him) in their slippery dresses and no underwear, their black hair as slick as silk — all of them drinking sludgy black stuff which smelled like Luden’s Cough Syrup, but which they said was rum. He felt caught in an ominous spell. They looked like gypsies with crowns of plastic flowers in their hair. The room smelled rotten, the drink was poison, and touching the woman he had happened to end up with thrilled and repelled him — she was thirty if she was a day. Vockshy, Vasty, her name was. Something. Before long, whether from the poisonous drink or from Presbyterian shame, Clumly was vomiting in the street more violently than he would have thought possible for a human. He had to stand watch bent double the next day, and ever since that night his liver had been bad and whenever he was tired he’d walk slightly bent at the waist. Nevertheless, this is living! he’d thought. “Work like the devil, play like the devil,” they said on the ship. Bam. When he went back to the whorehouse, Vockshy or Vasty was “occupied,” he had to take a different girl. This queerly upset him. And then, home on leave, he’d found the pale and musing blind girl standing there soft as a flag beside an oak tree with burning green leaves — or, rather, the nearly blind girl: at that time she had sight enough to be put in charge of younger children from the Blind School, to lead them around laughing like circus people in time of pestilence, help them with their schoolwork, or, like the eldest orphaned child, punish them when they were bad. They were playing in the shaded hollow below her, and she, standing by the oak tree, was watching and listening and smelling the wind, she said. Her talk was like poetry in those days. She’d grown out of that later, as one does. Her voice was as soft as a southern breeze on the Mediterranean, so soft Clumly had to lean toward her to hear — blushing, twisting the sailor’s hat in his hands. And so for two weeks they met every day, as if by accident, to walk and talk among the large trees or make pictures in the dirt with sticks or stones, or to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon (the thought of her breasts beneath the brassiere and high-collared blouse made him pale), and when he had to leave again she promised she would write. Eventually they’d gotten married. She seemed saintlike to him, and noble as a queen. He felt such an ache of tenderness for her, such reverence, almost, for what he called then her quiet courage, he could hardly sleep nights. He wrote to her constantly, slavishly, after the first two weeks, before he’d even thought about marrying her, and the letters that came to him from her (on pink or blue scalloped paper, awkwardly typed because she couldn’t see well enough to read over what she’d written or even make sure what she said made sense) he read over and over and kept at the head of his bunk where he could smell them as he went to sleep. The others had teased him some, but not for long. People could say what they liked about them, sailors were the gentlest people in the world. Even now it could make his eyes mist, thinking about sailors. It was the sea that did it, old and bottomless with mystery, as people say, capable at times of unbelievable rage, and capable, too, of a peace that baffled you. As he’d tried to explain to Mayor Mullen once, to a man locked up in a steel ship, the sea was, well, really something. It changed you. Especially at night. Then the sickness had come, turning Fred Clumly to a grublike, virtually hairless monster, and he’d stopped writing, hoping to spare her. But his parents had sought her out and spoken to her, of course. She’d written to his buddy. Dog, they called him. He looked like a fancy dog with a too-erect head and large pink eyes. (Clumly could no longer remember the boy’s real name. Walter Brown?) Dog had told her how it was with Clumly — how he felt about her and how he felt about, poor devil, himself. And so Clumly’s love had bravely borrowed the money for a bus trip to Texas. “You look as beautiful as ever to me,” she said in her soft voice, and they both wept. Her voice was unmysterious, faintly alarming. Dog came to the hospital and wept too. She read to him from a book in braille about Sir Lancelot, some story of adventure and romance so touching and foreign to them both that it made them blush and stop the reading for a while from embarrassment and fear. They were married, soon afterward, there in the hospital. That was all far in the past now, nearly forgotten; and even that night when she’d locked herself in the bathroom he could remember the beginning of it all no more clearly than one remembers a dream days later. She’d been plain to start with, except for her chestnut-colored hair. As she grew older she grew pinched and sickly-looking as a witch, and her hair became streaked with wiry gray. She began to tipple wine a little when he wasn’t at home. Standing at the bathroom door that night, calling to her through it, he saw the years stretched out before him like a cheap hall rug in a strange and unfriendly hotel, and he thought — with such violence that it made him shaky — how it had felt to be totally free, standing looking down at the prow of a ship dimly lighted at night, with the ocean stretching away on all sides ambiguous as an oracle and glinting with unearthly silver, as calm and steady in its rhythm as the blood in your veins. Though he’d firmly put it behind him, he had not in all his years forgotten that vision, that temptation. One’s struggle with the devil never ends. But he’d made her come out of the bathroom at last, groaning and stretching out her arms to him, and if there were hairs in the food tonight, or last night, or sometime last year, Clumly did not know it. If her slip showed or she smelled of wine, he did not notice it. Chief of Police Fred Clumly had renounced the world.