John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

After a long time he said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it.”

She nodded, knowing he was watching her though pretending not to. “I like it that you like pretty things,” she said. She looked toward her shoes, for a moment, embarrassed and conscious that her embarrassment was attractive to him. There was a light wind that picked at her collar and unfurled her skirt, and she knew that that too was good. He slid his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms, and she let her hands drop casually to her sides. Sooner than she had imagined he would dare, he closed his right hand around her left. The reflection of the moon grew sharper.

“It makes you want to make speeches,” he said, “or say poetry or something.”

“What does?”

He waved toward the water and she laughed.

“I heard you speak, Ben,” she said. He had been in the VFW contest. He was the best of them all but his brother Tag had beaten him. All the Hodges had beautiful voices, deep and resonant as their father’s, and they looked on a platform as if they’d been born there. Ben talked as if softly, though it filled all the room, and thoughtfully, as if he were letting you hear him think it out for the first time, speeches filled with fine images and pleasant ways of saying things and sudden connections that made your heart beat faster for a minute, so that people leaned forward, here and there in the audience, exactly the way they might lean forward when the pole-vault bar was at eleven feet, higher than any Batavian had in those days ever gone. He was beautiful, splendid, or so she believed; but Tag, four years or more younger than he was, had wild yellow curls and light blue eyes: he could do amazing things with his face and voice, a comedian; he could make you laugh when all your family had just been drowned in a cistern, her mother said. He won not because he was better than Ben but because for a boy of fourteen he was a genius. His speech said nothing, it was out of a library book.

She said again, because he hadn’t answered, “I went to the contest and heard you.”

He nodded. “I saw you.”

“Ben,” she said, “tell me what’s the matter.”

After a long time he said, “Millie, I’m in love with you.”

She turned to face him, taking his other hand, dead serious for all her excitement. “Is that so bad?”

He met her eyes, saying nothing, and she thought over and over, like a command, Ben, kiss me. Ben! Then suddenly he took her in his arms, and he kissed her lips and cheek and throat, so that she could say it out loud at last, “Oh Ben, my dear, dear Ben!”—or absurdly believed she could, imagining herself unique and, more ludicrous yet, tragic (an error which not even over thirty years later, unconsciously pressing the back of her hand to her forehead, sitting in her son’s kitchen, could she fully accept, she knew, for what it was) — and “Ben, I love you, I’ve waited so long for you to kiss me.” His hand came to her armpit gentle, then went to her waist and inside her blouse and brassiere to close on her breast, all his beautiful timidity replaced by a beautiful boldness, and she wanted to scream. Now she was not cold but burning up, saying, “Do what you want with me, anything!” (and saying mentally thirty years later, a word picked up from Solomon Ravitz, Oy). He began to take away his hand and she clung to his arm, trying to keep him from it. “Ben, what’s the matter?”

He was biting his lips together. “Millie, forgive me.”

“For what?” She was frightened, knowing already, having known for hours. “I don’t mind, Ben. I love you.”

But his hand was gone and he had stepped back and stood now with his fist against his forehead. And already she was beginning to hate him, feeling tricked and befouled, seeing him not as tall and splendid but as a hulking baby, sentimental and stupid. “Ben,” she said gently, “why?”

“I was lying,” he said. “How can I explain? I don’t love you, it was just that I thought I could get you. From the first time I gave you a ride to town, or even before that, when I would drive past your yard and you’d be sitting on the stump watching the kids, looking pretty, dressed like some kind of hobo’s kid. People said—” He stopped and ran his hands through his hair, then slid his hands back into his pockets. He looked sullen, distant.

“Said what?”

“People said you were ‘possible.’”

It was as if he had hit her in the stomach. There was nothing she could say: it was as if some kind of skin had been peeled from her eyes and she was seeing the world for the first time as it was. The fog had covered the moon’s reflection in the water, but even so every blade of grass, every stipple in the wide flat rock they stood on, every indefinite shadow in the fog was as definite as a razor cut.

She said angrily, “Then why did you stop?” She had not known what it was she would say, but the moment she said it, something came clear in her mind, not yet risen to her consciousness but there in the darkness waiting, never to be lost.

“How could I?” he said. “It wasn’t true. You’re good. Kind … gentle …”

“I am a whore,” she said. “That is, I’m willing.”

“Millie, don’t talk that way. You know what you are.”

“You’re afraid,” she said.

“That’s not true.” He laughed angrily.

She snatched his arms, caught up in something she didn’t understand; not love, now. Not desire. “Ben, make love to me. Do it! What difference can it make? I’m Millie Jewel. Have you forgotten? Old Clarence Jewel’s daughter. What in hell’s the difference!”

He looked at her calmly, pitying her, Christ on the mountain. “You read too much,” he said.

She felt crushed, and in the same motion of the mind she was in love with him again, because it was true, he’d seen through what she hadn’t seen through herself: she was playing sentimental poor-girl. And she loved him, too, and more than ever, because his tongue was quick. She too had a lightning tongue: he was making a mistake, she knew how to make him happy.

She said, “Ben, how do you know you don’t love me? I excite you, you know it. And you think of me at night, the same as I do of you.”

He looked at the fog on the water, not thinking about it, she suspected; he had thought about it already. She went on waiting, and at last he looked at her forehead and kept his gaze there as though she had something written on it. “I think of a few minutes with you, not a whole lifetime. I don’t know you.”

“You do,” she said. She opened her arms. “Look.”

But he only looked away. “Maybe you’re right.” He took her hand then (a thing she could not understand even now, squinting at the rain washing down Luke’s window) and started back to the car with her. When they got there he opened the door for her, closed it behind her gently, and walked around the front, oddly smiling. He cranked the engine and came around to his side without a word and pulled out onto the road.

“You feel virtuous, don’t you,” she said irritably.

He nodded.

After a while she said to soften it, though she was lying, “I do too.”

When they passed Stony Hill Farm the study lights were on. His father up working, as always, at three a.m. She wondered if Ben was going to get hell when he finally got home. She was, you betcha. Her mother would come to the door in her slip, or maybe, if her mother was really angry, her father would come in his gray long Johns. Yes, that was how it would be tonight. They would try to whip her, and she would fight back, an old ritual, stupid and boring and almost without passion, the children peeking out from their bedroom like red-eyed mice; it would go on and on until at last she began to cry in disgust, and as though a switch had been snapped, it would be over. She began to feel a little sick, anticipating it. She might have years left before she escaped it. Except that one of these nights she would leave. She had thought of it often, and once with frightening clarity, a few nights ago, standing over the well drinking from the red and white tin dipper. As though it were actually happening she had seen herself climbing out her window to the slippery porch roof, dropping her bundle to the dirt yard as softly as possible, swinging over the eaves-trough to the loose porch post as she’d done a thousand times in play, snatching up the bundle without stopping to look back (the house all dark, no sound but the dripping of the cistern pipe and the rattle her father made when he slept) and running for the highway.