John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

She said, “What was he arrested for this time?”

He went on staring into the garage. “Who?”

“Nick, of course.”

The corner of his mouth drew back. “Who cares? I come home and they call me up and they tell me he’s there, him and his brother. Tried to steal a car from somebody, ended up killing this woman.”

“They were drunk?”

“Naturally. Somebody gave the little bastard some booze and he went out helling it up with his brother.”

“His brother must be crazy. How old is he?”

Luke shook his head, the muscles of his face tense. “It’s not just his brother. It’s both of them. He’s worse, for Christ’s sake.”

“Do you really think so?” It was too much to hope for. Luke was a sentimental idiot, and Nick Slater was officially in his keeping.

Luke didn’t seem to have heard her.

She said, “Well, you mustn’t think about it. It will all come out in the wash. Father will think of—” She paused, distracted by her having slipped into calling him “Father,” as though nothing had happened.

Luke groped with his left hand for the lightswitch, found it, and turned the truck lights off. “Let’s go in,” he said. “I need a fucking pill.”

There was a gentle south wind and a flickering of lightning to the west. The air was weighted, the storm much closer now. When she glanced over at the house it looked eerie in this light, as if made not of wood and stone but of strange jewels — of jasper and sapphire and chalcedony and emerald. She shuddered. She jerked at the doorhandle until it caught, then forced the door open with her shoulder. When she was down, she saw that Luke had made no move to open his door, sat pressing the heels of his hands to his forehead. She remembered his fierce rage earlier, utterly forgotten now, on his side, at least, as though it were not himself but someone else whose life she had mysteriously ruined — as though he were a four-year-old again, and she his gentle and innocent mother. She thought: Jesus’ nuts. (Sol Ravitz would be sitting in the lecture hall, his big left hand wrapped around his pipe, pretending he was not still smoking, here where smoking was forbidden, his kingly bald head tipped back as if with arrogance, knees up on the seat in front of him. When the speaker came out — she couldn’t even recall who was speaking tonight — Sol would close his hand tightly over the pipebowl, smothering the pipe, and would applaud by slapping his knee with his long right puddingsoft hand with hairybacked fingers. In the row in front of him — Sol would be in the very last row — some college student would be elbowing another discreetly, saying, “You know who that is, the bald one? That’s Ravitz, on TV.” And Millie, if she were there, would poke him in the ribs and say, “You have been spotted.” Ah, how he would grin!) She reached up her hand. “Can I help you down, Luke?” After a moment he slid toward her. “Thank you.” There was anger in his voice, but now it was not anger directed toward her. Thinking of Sol, but standing here under the eaves of Luke’s garage, giving her son her shoulder to lean on like some long-suffering, docile old mother — aware that whatever was between them, whether his anger or his crippled love, was meaningless, pointless, a time to get through because it was there — she felt a cruel urge to laugh. She stood here for the moment nameless, a human presence, nothing more; a kind of ghost; not out of charity or duty or guilt but because she stood here. “By the virtue of the fact,” as Sol would say. Who knew nothing of the virtue of pure fact, fact prior to words, shocking and unnatural.

“I’m all right,” he said, shaking her hand loose. He started ahead of her through the darkness of the garage toward the steps into the kitchen. She waited until he had the door open and the light on, then picked her way through the trash. When she reached the kitchen he was already in the bathroom taking a pill, playing his own physician, as usual. He came back at last and went over to the green wooden table and sat down. It wouldn’t take long, but it would hold him only for a while. She took off her hat and hung it on the back of one of the green wooden chairs. Then she too sat down. She took her mirror from her purse and once more settled her red-brown hair (but before the rinse it was white as snow). It was soft to the touch. She noted the fact with satisfaction. She lit a new cigarette.

“I’m sorry to be doing this to you,” he said. Already the pill was beginning to take effect.

Two steaks lay still wrapped in white butcher paper, oozing blood, on a grease-blackened cookie sheet on the table. It was what he always gave her when he invited her out. It was as if it were all he’d ever heard of. “Shall I put on a barbecue fire?” she said.

“I’ll manage,” he said. A whine.

“Fine and dandy.”

He went on just standing. She wished he would offer her a drink, but she could get by. He would remember when the pain was eased a little more. Outside, the wind was howling now, making the pines moan, a kind of mindless choral singing. He would have to make his fire inside the garage. A clap of thunder shook the walls and lightning filled up the windows. The rain came hard and all at once. In a matter of seconds it was as though it had been raining for hours.

“It must give you great satisfaction,” he had said, and she: “You’ll never know the half of it.” That wasn’t exactly true. He would never know the particulars, but sooner or later he would know how it was, when he grew past imagining himself unique and, more ludicrous yet, tragic. What did he do up here nights, alone? Wander from room to room, no doubt, looking at the garbage that had been in the house when his father got it for him, turn the things over in his hands — broken candlesticks, pewter pitchers, books with clumsy old-fashioned engravings, rickety tables, chamber pots, letters — imagining they carried the history not of the Runians whom no one remembered any more (two old sisters, fat and colorless, with growths on their necks and arms and legs and protruding through the cheap cotton-print dresses that covered their loose, fallen bellies, the last of what might have been despite all evidence some noble old line, or the last except for the dull-witted nephew who had smashed their skulls with a ball-peen hammer, imagining the mattresses or cookie jars or the upright piano to be crammed with a king’s ransom in old dollar bills: finding instead for all his trouble and perhaps grief (because the nephew had lived with his aunts as a child) nothing but dust, pressed roses, and corset hooks, so that after he’d buried his aunts like dead calves in the manure pile — trueborn country boy — and washed the caked blood from his hands and arms, he’d been too disappointed to run away, too sunk in angry gloom and disgust to talk sense to the Baptist minister when he came to call, and was waiting there still when two days later the sheriff came, and was waiting yet, hands folded on his knees, a mile from here, in the prison) — the history not of the Runians but of Luke Hodge, Esq., and his ancestors, a fallen splendor. He was twenty-two and tortured by headaches, not lucky like his brother or his mother, both of whose nervous troubles showed up in the form of rectal bleeding. So he had to be excused, for now. He would come to his senses, eventually. It was a time to be gotten through.

God help us to wise old age.

She had stood on the rock ledge overlooking the quarry, her hands folded behind her back, Ben standing beside her, his hands in his pockets. In the glassy water the reflection of the moon was as clean and distinct as the moon itself, but off to the right, where the hills rose more sharply and there were locusts and skeletal crabapple trees, there was fog moving in, coming onto the water slowly, tentatively, like a skater trying the thickness of ice on a pond. Millie was cold; she’d left her sweater in the car, but she knew it might be dangerous to admit she was chilly. He might give her his sweater, and then again he might snap at the chance to take her home. She knew well enough that Ben felt guilty, bringing her here. All night she had sensed that there was something troubling his mind. She would know later that she had guessed at once what the trouble was, but she had not yet admitted that she knew.