John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Boyle had squinted, feeling naked and vulnerable with his shirt and glasses off, and the doctor had pressed, “Golf? Pinochle? Model ships? I have a brother-in-law does that, model ships.” (The office looked down on the heart of Buffalo, Sheridan Drive, huge office buildings like imprisoning walls of smoky granite and brick and concrete that might have been a thousand years old. Boyle had sat looking with his hands behind his back, his shirt in one hand, miserably racking his brains for some healthful interest. Ships. He and Marguerite would go down to the docks sometimes and watch them unload the coal boats — black ships, black earth, black freight cars under the black steel scaffolding. She loved water, even here where it smelled of oil and was thick and green as cold pea soup, with something like spittle floating on the top, and pieces of paper, and rubbers. “Faraway Places” was her favorite song. She called to the gulls and waved to the people pulling out for Crystal Beach, over in Canada, across the lake. But Boyle had no feeling for ships. None. Often when he went with her he would take along a newspaper.) The doctor was studying him, smiling politely (he was a sly little Jew, around thirty: Kleiss, or Fleiss, something like that). Boyle blurted out in sudden desperation, as though he could feel his health falling away like the pigeons dipping swiftly between smoky buildings toward the street: “I memorize poetry, sometimes.” He added at once nervously, for fear the doctor might misunderstand or, worse, disbelieve him:

The little toy dog is all covered with dust,

Yet sturdy and staunch he stands;

The little toy soldier is red with rust …

He stopped, blushing scarlet.

“Excellent!” the doctor exclaimed, and he seemed downright delighted by it, as though it were the best cure possible. “Go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Say the rest.” He called the nurse in to hear it, but Boyle would perform no more, could only smile as he’d done (he remembered suddenly and vividly) in grade school when Mrs. Wheat called the Principal to hear him.

And so when Boyle had left the office he’d felt thirty years younger — no doubt partly because he had finally told someone his secret, and the man had not laughed. He felt as if nothing could ever worry him again as long as he lived, and he said almost aloud as he walked past the glittering, grave-cold storefronts, “Do not say that thou art weary, O my soul, do not say, ‘This Life is grief, the Strife is grim. …’”

He had worries, nevertheless. He had always done all right, as well as most people did these days, and yet he’d never gotten ahead. Now, with his later years creeping up on him, he couldn’t help thinking about the future. What would happen to them if he too should get sick, the way Marguerite had done? (She’d been employed at a bakery until two years ago, but then one morning she’d fallen downstairs — she was heavy and couldn’t see her feet — and she’d broken her hip and been laid up for over a year. Even now she wasn’t right.) Where would the money come from then? What would happen to the house?

There were worse things than that. Marguerite had gotten more and more to be a worrywart, these past few years. She knew he could never be positive how long he’d be away, and for a long time she’d seemed resigned to it — resigned even to his failing to phone for sometimes weeks at a time. And she knew, too, that there was nobody in this world more safe than he was. They’d been boyfriend and girlfriend for thirteen years before he’d popped the question. “I know Walter Benson like the back of my hand,” she liked to say. (Benson was his name at home.) But lately, for all that, his extended stays seemed to worry her more and more.

“Walter, I get so worried,” she said. She sat on the top step of the green back porch, fanning herself; the cotton dress stuck to her thighs and shoulders, and there were sweat patches. He was sitting on the metal chair in the neatly clipped grass below her. He liked the baking July sun. Always had.

He looked at her, then past her. He nodded. “Gotta fix that screen door.”

“Walter,” she said, “you’re a thousand miles away.” She began to cry.

It was that that had made him decide to put in a want-ad for a boarder, someone who’d be there at night to make the place feel safer, keep prowlers away and chew the fat with her from time to time. And so now Walter Boyle had another worry. Would the man pay promptly? Would he smoke in bed and set the house afire? What were those tons of mimeographed papers lying among hamburger wrappers in the back of his car? In the back window he had a thing hanging, a leadlike ball with raised letters on it, like letters from some kind of printing machine.

Boyle sighed.

Marguerite would be sitting there right now, of course, worrying where on earth he was, and it was a week yet before his trial. It wasn’t healthy, a man that was fifty-five years old, with a known bad ticker, lying in a drafty jail cell not getting his sleep and worried sick. And what if they should find him guilty this time? It seemed impossible, they had nothing on him, nothing that would stick. But he was worried. The man with the beard, that was the thing. Benson, he had said. Boyle shuddered.

The bearded one said now, scornfully, as if set off by something the Indian had said, “Pain! Let me tell you about pain, boy. You get inside my skin for one week, you go live for just one day with my blind, crippled mother with her ‘Bruce did you this’ and ‘Bruce did you that‘—or you talk for one hour with my poor palsied father, or watch him — pitiful! — sweeping the sewers of Dallas, Texas, with his knobby knees bumping and his shrunken head bobbing — an heir to the crown of Poland once! — then maybe you’ll know something about pain! O Father, forgive them! They know not whom they screw.”

Boyle clamped his eyes shut and pressed his hands to his ears. Still the voice ranted on, but it was faint now, and it seemed to come from behind him instead of in front. He could feel his pulse against the heels of his hands and could hear it thumping like a streetcar hitting rail joints. It frightened him. He heard the Indian laugh shortly, full of scorn. Then, for a while, it was quiet. He tried to sleep, but he couldn’t for a long time. The bed was narrow and hard as a rock, and a wrinkle in his shirt, underneath him, poked into his flesh. He thought of Marguerite lying like a mountain in the middle of their queen-size bed, her mouth collapsed with the teeth out, her legs wide apart and her arms thrown out to the sides. How good it would feel to crawl up beside her, nudge her great bulk over with his back (his feet braced against the cool wall) and give himself up to that mattress! Even the fold-down seat in the Rambler would be fine compared to this. All sensation had gone out of his arms and legs now, so that he had a feeling of falling, possibly dying. To help check his fear he imagined himself stretched out in the Rambler with his shoes in the open glove-compartment and the doors of the car locked. He usually parked just off the main street of whatever little town he was passing through. Back streets made him nervous. If there was a Y.M.C.A. or a cheap hotel where he was working or in any of the towns within driving distance, he stayed there. He had seen things in his time all right. Poor people, sick people, crazy people. The world was getting worse. That was why he and Marguerite were childless. It was criminal to bring children to a world like this. But he could get along, of course, himself. When he finished for the day he would settle with a paper and would pass his eyes along the words, or he would memorize poetry by Edgar A. Guest, or would doze. At home he would sit in his yard with a bottle of orange pop (he was not a drinker) or would water the flowers or, rarely, watch television, and he could not really say he was dissatisfied.