John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

It occurred to him suddenly that he was hungry. Ravenous. He thought of going down to the refrigerator, or to the cellar, where he had, if he remembered right, two cases of Carting’s Beer.

“Do you hear something, Fred?” she asked softly.

There was someone in the yard. He heard it distinctly, or felt it through the walls and beams of the house and the dark packed earth below the grass. Both of them lay perfectly still. Minutes passed. Now the prowler was inside, feeling his way through the cluttered blackness from the cellar door toward the stairs that led up to the pantry. There were snakes down there, and spiders, and long, lean rats. He’s fished one out of the cistern a month ago. The prowler stood listening at the door to the pantry, head bent almost to the porcelain knob. Then nothing, not a sound for fifteen minutes. It came to him that his wife was asleep, he’d only imagined that she’d spoken to him. There was no one in the cellar, not the bearded, disfigured magician, as he’d thought, and not anyone else. In the gaunt, high-gabled wooden husk they were alone, as usual. He could just make out the darker places on the wallpaper, the crooked trail of vines and the large gray smudges, diagonally receding, a foot apart. Roses.

Hours later he awakened with a start, hungry. The night was silent. If I just had a sandwich, he thought. He could taste it. There was bologna — he could eat a whole package of it— and there was lettuce, crudely torn apart and somewhat wilted, thrust into a Baggie and tucked in the crisper drawer. And cheese, and salad dressing. Perhaps a little chicken. There was a pocket of water in his cheek and he swallowed, and he thought again of the beer. He’d have done it once, when he was younger; would have sat up in bed and slipped his feet over the side and would have gone down to stuff himself. But it was bad for you, that kind of thing. Not just because it made you fat, made your heart work harder than an old heart should, but bad in ways more insidious — the same as buying without shopping first for a reasonable bargain, or buying what you didn’t need, or not buying at all, on the other hand, because your mind was too much on the column of numbers written under “Deposits” in your bank book. He’d thought all that out long ago — it might as well have been centuries — and he knew he was not going down to the refrigerator, however seductive the images coming unbidden into his head. Again the thought of the coffeepot and the waitress came sliding into his mind. Now he was angry. A man sixty-four years old needed his sleep. What was wrong with him? he wondered. But the question was not difficult. Every nerve in his body was jangling because of that prisoner. Or partly that. He’d been nervous for months, to tell the truth; the prisoner was the final straw. What he needed right now was a pill.

Before he knew he would do it he swung out of bed and then padded, jaw clenched, to the bathroom to get the sleeping pills. At the bathroom door he paused, scowling; then, furtively, he went on to the head of the stairs. Not a sound behind him. Softly, like a man drawn by voodoo, he went down, avoiding the steps that squeaked, and felt his way to the kitchen.

He ate by the light from the refrigerator door. Then, stuffed, dry of throat and as hungry as ever, he went soundlessly down the cellar steps, lighting his way with the flashlight he kept at the top of the stairs for when fuses blew. In the flashlight’s dim glow the damp stone walls of the cellar were like walls of a dungeon. Drafts moved through the dark like fish. The air was moist and chilly. He thought he heard a rat scamper, but the next instant he wasn’t sure. He stood for a long time with his hand on the neck of the bottle, undecided whether to open it or not, his eyes tightly focused on a cobweb. It seemed to him, in the back of his mind, that here in the cellar, if he listened hard, he could hear what was happening in every house in the city: lovers talking on livingroom couches, murderers climbing through kitchen windows, cats eating mice, old men at Doehler-Jarvis shoveling coal.

Abruptly, awake and trembling from the cold, he put the bottle back and turned to go up. When he reached the livingroom he found that his wife had gotten up, as she did sometimes when she couldn’t sleep or woke up nervous. She had gotten out her sewing, a kind of dress she’d been working on, if he wasn’t mistaken, for years.

“Good night,” he said. He kissed her forehead.

“Good night, dear,” she said.

Clumly went up.

2

He felt better in the morning, as he always did, at least for a little while. Not because he had slept well but because it was morning. The world had expanded, warmed, gotten back its good sense. While Esther fixed breakfast he went out to stand on the front porch in his uniform, his hands behind his back, pot belly comfortably protruding, and he sucked in the clean, cool air. He faced the round orange sun that hung just clear of the trees and housetops four blocks away, at the end of the street which began just opposite his yard, and he said, like an old king satisfied with his accomplishments, “Ah.” The music of songbirds rose all around him like bubbles in a cup of ginger ale, a battle of sparrows and robins against jays. He watched Ed Wardrop start up his car and light a cigarette and pull out from the curb, and when the car turned onto LaCrosse and he saw Ed duck his head and glance over to see if he was there as usual, he nodded solemnly and waved, a little like the Pope. The younger Miss Buckland came out and called her cat.

He had papers up to his eyebrows down at the station, but they’d waited this long, he decided. They could wait one day more. It was a day for inspections, and for trying to talk with that lunatic, and this afternoon was Albert Hubbard’s funeral. (Flowers for Paxton, he reminded himself.) As a man got older he spent more and more of his time at funerals, or sending out funeral flowers, or standing in the hush where old friends were laid out in their livingrooms or at Turner’s or Burdett’s or Bohm’s.

Fred Clumly enjoyed funerals. It was a sad thing to see all one’s old friends and relatives slipping away, one after the other, leaving their grown sons and daughters weeping, soberly dabbing at their eyes with their neat white hankies, the grandchildren sitting on the gravestones or standing unwillingly solemn at the side of the grave while they lowered the coffin. But it was pleasant, too, in a mysterious way he couldn’t and didn’t really want to find words for. There stood the whole family — three, four generations — the living testimonial to the man’s having been; all dressed in their finest and at peace with one another; and there stood his business acquaintances and his friends from the church, the schoolboard he’d once been a member of, all quarrels forgotten; and there stood his friends from the Dairyman’s League or Kiwanis or the Owls or the Masons. The coffin rolled silently out of the hearse, and his friends, brothers, sons took the glittering handles and lowered him slowly onto the beams across the hole and then stood back, red-faced from their life’s work as truckers or farmers, or sallow-faced from the bank or grocery store or laundry. And there it was, a man’s whole life drawn together at last, stilled to a charm, honored and respected, and the minister took off his black hat and prayed, and Clumly prayed, with tears in his eyes and his police cap over his fallen chest, and so, with dignity, the man’s life closed, like the book in the minister’s hands.

Poor Albert Hubbard. He’d inherited his nursery business from his father and he’d built it up little by little for years, and then, maybe fifteen years ago now, he’d taken in his oldest son and, soon after that, his second oldest. The youngest had moved to Syracuse. Some kind of engineer. The sons had big ideas, and it must’ve been hard on poor old Albert. They filled up two acres with their greenhouses, and they bought up farmland for a half-mile in either direction. They could no more pay for it than fly. It’s the twentieth century, they said. They’d been away to college and learned about economics. You just keep up the interest, they said, don’t you worry about the principal. Old Albert got crankier and crankier. When Clumly would stop by he’d be potching along among the bins of plants, more plants than any ten nurseries could sell, and he’d be wearing the same old felt hat he’d worn twenty-five years ago, or it looked the same, and he’d have on the same old overalls and hightop shoes and his applepicker’s bib.