John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

She understood, too, his restless arrogance, the disgust he felt for teachers, principals, Education professors at the university, parents who were riding high in the world, who spoke kindly, condescendingly to him as though his fallen condition were of course a punishment for sins. (And yet he was lying to himself, he knew; they did not scorn him but merely passed by, oblivious even to the fact that he scorned them. Insiders.)

“It’s temporary, Tag,” she said. “You’ll be on your feet soon, you watch.” He slept with her sometimes — that was before the accident — and often he would lie with his hands behind his head and listen with egoistic pleasure to her analyses of his condition. She had a throaty, New York Jewish voice, eyes like a piece of sculpture out of Syria. “You were the one with the smarts,” she said, smiling, nodding, toying with how it must have been. “Also the schmertz. And the baby of the family, that’s what did it.”

He was not fooled by his pleasure. As indifferent to that as he was to almost everything, in those days. Everything but his sons. As if saying to himself, “Very well, you too like flattery.” He could have been bored by his vulgar humanness, but he was beyond it. She said once: “The magic tricks are interesting, though. They’re the key, if you want my opinion.” At her apartment, the light on in the kitchen, visible from the bedroom where they lay. On the record player a Broadway musical.

“I don’t,” he said, “—want your opinion—” and grinned in the half-light falling from the doorway.

“Yes you do,” she said casually. He did not protest “The way I figure, you were always quick, and people made a big fuss about it, and pretty soon it was a game. The quickness I mean. You learned all this stuff, but you didn’t really understand it. Like a quiz-kid or something. You just skittered on it, hike a waterbug. A thin film of sense. And they all said Ooh! Aah!’ That’s how it was.”

He frowned.

She said, “Too bad.”

For a long time they were both silent, and then she said again, as if to herself, “Too bad.” She put her arms behind her head, making her breasts rise.

“I need a cigarette,” he said.

After a minute she sat up as if to get them, but looked at him. “Hurt your feelings, Tag?”

He shook his head. “Mere truth. A butterfly’s wing.”

She slid out of bed then and went to the dresser for the cigarettes. She lit one for each of them.

“What started you on the magic tricks?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your father, I think.”

Hodge grinned, then nodded. “Started me on everything. He was—” He had hunted a moment for appropriate words, then let it go. “A forceful personality, as they say.”

“A casket for everything he loved.”

And that too was true, it had seemed to him, but he caught the truth lightly, half-evading it as he caught it, the way you catch a fast pitch that will break the bones of your hand if you take it straight on. “He was beautiful,” he said. “Which is nothing much, in a way, I guess. Not uncommon. But he was.”

Helene nodded. “I thank God my father was somewhat a klutz. He let me be.”

“You’re pretty,” he said. He was tempted to quote her Sappho; but that was for Kathleen. Now it seemed to him that it wasn’t true — was too easy — blaming their failure on the Congressman. Directly under her eyes he palmed the cigarette, made it reappear, palmed it, made it appear, and continued to do it, over and over, mechanical. He watched his painfully won skill dispassionately, with artist’s pleasure, as though he were not the magician but only the assistant, a dutiful instrument. “It was once commonly maintained that Beauty, Goodness, and Truth were subsistent entities,” he said. “That is, that they are properties which attach to existent particulars, but which might without absurdity be supposed to attach to nothing.” He saw the words cut into the wall in precise, ornamental calligraphs.

“Here we go,” she said. She smiled politely. It pleased her to be loved by a man who was clever, though she was not interested.

“I’m serious,” he said and saw it in italic. “As long as the world was solidly theistic, the absolutes were plausible; when it got fashionable to speak of the death of God, people began to talk as though Beauty, Goodness, and Truth were psychological effects — probably base ones. For instance, beauty is described as the sense of relief experienced by ‘living tissue’—that’s jargon for mind and soul — when it’s able to adjust present experience and remembered attitudes, in other words, is able to stop worrying. Some people didn’t believe this account …”

She was leaning on her elbow, watching the cigarette slowly appear and disappear in his hand, her lips drawn to a half-pout half-smile, eyebrows lowered with concentration; but she was thinking neither of what he was saying nor of what his magician’s hand was doing: remembering something out of her own life, or planning where she would eat tomorrow night, or making a list. Her breasts were like a young girl’s, firm and small, and they would rise surprisingly to his touch. He knew that by the simple flicking of a switch he could understand her, move into her experience if only for a moment: it was exactly what he was trying to tell her. He had seen such things, and it was not true that they had to be destructive. On the contrary, that was the greatest of heresies. His father, busy at his work, looked up from his desk, recognized him, smiled. Even if it was only for a moment, it was complete. Politics ceased to exist for him that moment; and as for the small boy in knickers — the casualty of Christmas past — the high, polished, formal room, the crossed flags behind the desk, the littered filing cabinets, the books — all came down to a homely familiarity, mere frame around the Congressman’s face. He had thought at first that he was special to his father, like Benjamin in the Bible, but it wasn’t so, he learned later. To the old man, all that stirred was special — the geese flying over the capitol building, for instance.

(Look! he’d said, and hunkered in solemn attire

to lift his son, like any God or farmer,

and pointed. Over the capitol dome, to the west,

a wing of one-and-many geese went sliding,

honking south like old Model T’s redeemed,

gone glorious. Oh, not for the lesson in it,

not for the high-falutin, falling mind

organizing itself to swim or fly

with ease searching out the dire vacuity:

not for that: for thisness: twenty-four geese

enroute from swamp to swamp, encountering a dome

at twilight, passing and touching an unseen mark;

they freeze, fall out of time and into thought,

an idiograph in the blood of man and son.

No image. The pure idea of holiness.

His mother said when they told of their vision, “Ah!”)

That was how it was. When they were together at supper — the big room bright, the table as loaded with his mother’s old china serving dishes as a table would be at the Grange Hall, the four brothers and their tanned, boyish sister contending busily, passionately for truth and mashed potatoes and applesauce — the old man, white hair streaming, saw them all, reached out with his heart and mind and knew them. He made them more themselves than they normally were, not in the sense that he forced them to some identity of his own choosing: he looked at them, guessed out what went unsaid and made them clearer to themselves and also surer. Not always. He too could be abstracted, sunk inward to his own considerations. His white hair lay like dirty cotton on the collar of his coal-black formal suit, his liver-spotted white hands lay on his belly like the hands of a man in his coffin, his chin protruded like a snowplow blade, and his eyes grew calm as stones in the bed of a stream. For hours he wouldn’t move a finger, wouldn’t even sniff. After such spells he was a hurricane of energy and joy. A manipulator, an orator, a writer of bills and crafty epigrams. They had not minded his periods of remoteness. One intense moment is longer than a thousand years. And the moments when his concern for them turned on were dependably frequent. He became a knower of gestures, a pure imagination. He knew a man’s character by becoming it, like the flagae who lurk in the mirrors of the Hindu. When strangers came to the house he would sit tense with concentration in his chair, huge old gentle hippopotamus with shaggy brows, tie askew, and before the talk was over he would know the man and would know, besides, the road to the man’s conversion. Not that he sat in judgment, ticking off rights and wrongs. There was nothing in him of righteousness, hard doctrine. To think that a man’s opinions were wrong was for him no more to think less of the man than to think that a tree planted in the wrong place was wicked and pernicious. He was impatient with men who refused to stop speaking platitudes, but it was against his faith in life to suppose such stubbornness proved stupidity. He was a work of art, and living with him was like living in the presence of art. The absolutes of human intuition took on the weight and form of reality. The Good became, in his presence, an aquastor, an ethereal form made as visible and tangible as an angel standing on a stone. It was impossible to say afterward, “There are no angels.” At worst one must say — Taggert Hodge must say— Dear God, where are the angels?