John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Ben sat with his head tipped, thinking, his fingers light on the steering wheel. His lower jaw was pushed forward in that funny way all the Hodge boys had, like their father, a look humorously rueful. It came to her that she had lost him, and almost before she knew what she was thinking she slid over beside him and pressed her head to his shoulder as if sleepily. She’d never been more wide awake in her life. Her left breast still tingled from his touch, and all that he had said ran through her mind, distinct and frightening now, like words in a dream. I think of a few minutes with you. She had lolled through daydreams of living as his wife at Stony Hill (it never entered her mind that they might live anywhere else), but she too had thought chiefly of minutes — the few minutes when she saw him next, the few minutes when finally he would make love to her. In her bed, in the dark, she had thought — with an intense sensation of mingled dread, joy, and guilt — of Ben Hodge’s secret parts, a quasi-mystical vision compounded of all she had ever seen or guessed, the small naked organs of her little brothers, the hairy erection pictured on a card Sonny Wall had shown her once, the awesome rod and stones on Mr. Kistner’s bull. But she saw now, leaning on his shoulder, not visions but lost reality: she would have been a good wife to him, would have borne him sweet children, supported him through troubles, listened to his talk. She would have been a lady, refined and beautiful, all at her ease and never even lifting her voice — like his mother.

It came to her — and she knew it was final — that, one way or another, she would marry a Hodge.

She said as if sleepily, moving her cheek on his arm, “You know, I really don’t understand you. What made you stop?”

“Honor,” he said.

She laughed, patting his arm. “How dear.” She peeked up at him and saw that he was smiling. She said: “What would you do if I took off all my clothes right now?”

“Probably run the car into a tree,” he said. A second later he said, startled, “Darn you, I think you’d do it!”

“Nope,” she said, smiling. “I’ve made a great decision.”

He crinkled his neck to look at her. “You’re going to be a nun.”

“Mmm, something like that.” She thought about it. “Something very much like that.” Then: “Ben, honey, how old is your brother Will?”

He looked at her again, squinting. “Why?”

She kissed his muscle.

It was always the same. By the time they’d finished dessert and coffee, the pain was beginning to overwhelm the pills and Luke was irascible again, baiting her, nagging her as though he did not know as well as she did why they went through these scenes. She could almost wish the bad part would come on him at once, so that the whole thing might be over sooner. She got herself a glass of bourbon from the diningroom cabinet, carried it to the kitchen for ice, stirred it in slowly, knowing he was waiting at the fireplace impatiently, eager to be digging at her again, make her see clearly once and for all that all her life and all her thoughts were hollow sham. That was the bitterest part of it. He was bright. They might have said things to each other. And was it from living with Ben, too, that he’d learned that awful righteousness? He could never forgive her for “cheating” on his father. His word, not hers. A child’s word. “Selfish bitch,” he’d called her once, he who knew nothing of selfishness or bitchery, no more than he knew of selflessness or whatever the opposite of bitchery was (sophrosyne?), knew only his own colossal ego, too self-centered even to understand why he couldn’t simply dismiss her as evil and forget it. Sweet Christ how she hated him! But no. No more than she hated his father. It was past that. Caught in impossibilities, but knowing, at least, why she hated the part of herself she hated and why she could not escape, ever, for all the grinning cow-catchers and whistling boats and twinkling propellers in Christendom. Ah, Christendom! she thought.

When she reached the livingroom with the drink he was staring at the door as if he’d been staring at it all the time she was gone, and maybe he had. “Luke,” she said quickly, before he could speak, “you really should think of getting rid of this place. You know you’re not cut out to be a farmer.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“My dear child, I don’t give a damn one way or the other, and that’s God’s truth.”

“God’s truth,” he sneered. He leaned forward in his chair and pressed his hands to the sides of his head. He was handsome, with his ears covered. All the Hodge features cut fine, for once: a face triangular as an elf’s, a chin square and strong but small, compared to the others, cheekbones as high as the Indian boy’s. The firelight flickered on his hair and shoulder and gleamed, bright red, on his shoe. She listened to the pouring rain, another huge shudder of thunder.

“I just think you ought to try graduate school,” she said at last, crisply. “I know you’re convinced they have nothing to teach you, but who knows? maybe you’d find someone who’s almost as clever as you are.” It was a stupid thing to say. He was right to ignore it. She crossed her feet on the hassock and sipped her drink. At length she said, flip, “You know I’m right, Luke. Farming’s impossible. It’s been impossible for years, unless you’re the Bell Telephone Company. Try something where you’ve got a chance.”

“Sure,” he said, looking down, grinning horribly.

She sighed.

She felt stifled in his junk-filled house with its high, dark ceilings, gloomy wallpaper, threadbare floral rugs. A place for dying, a house for sick old women, not a twenty-two-year-old boy. But maybe it was right. Her son was a sick old woman, not a boy. (He’d come home in the middle of his first semester of grad school at Syracuse — a history major — and had refused to go back. Because of the headaches, he’d told his father, and probably it was the truth, or partly the truth. Pressure could bring the headaches on, they’d found out later from the specialist. He’d moved into his father’s apartment — it was not long after their divorce — just two weeks after she’d sold Stony Hill — and had settled down to a life of drinking gin and ice and reading mysteries and playing his ridiculous banjo. Will had put up with it for a while, as Will put up with everything, potching at the sinktrap with a loose old pipewrench, humming his one tuneless, fragmentary song as though the banjo were not going, refilling the ice-trays which Luke left empty, and going nearsightedly over the papers (talking to himself, scoffing, grumbling) he brought home every night from the office. He had never asked what Luke’s plans were. (No one had told her that, but she knew him.) Had merely waited, enduring it because that was his way — Will Hodge had patience where other people had blood, she’d once told him — and eventually Luke’s brother Will Jr had said, “Luke, boy, you ought to try your hand at farming. C’est vrai! Great emoluments of the spiritual variety in toiling close to Nature.” And so his father had gotten him a farm, had foreclosed on the man who’d bought it, with Will’s help, from the Runian estate.)

They sat in silence until Luke could no longer stand it. He said, “The cops had me down for questioning this afternoon. D’you hear?”

She glanced at him, then looked into her drink.

“They think I’m the one that let him out, either me or Will. Because we’re bad guys.” He laughed palely.

“What are you talking about?”

“Somebody let him out, that’s all, and they think it was one of us.”

“Was it?”

“Why not? Think how easy it would’ve been. Either one of us could have gone up to Salvador, with a note from Dad, say, or maybe Judge White— he wouldn’t know what their writing looked like. Or we could’ve just said we wanted to talk to him, away from the other prisoners. He’d have opened up. Hodges, you know. Grand old Hodges. And it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from me or Will. Antisocial. Revolutionary. Dirty Commies.”