John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

And so (he remembered, floating in the dark), knowing he could reach out with a simple question and know her, be translated in an instant to the beach in her mind, or the list she was making, or the fear she was toying with, and knowing, on the other hand, that he could reach out with his hand and touch her breast, make it rise to him, and knowing, finally, that she was not hearing a word he said, Hodge had gone on talking, struggling to tease his feeling into knowledge. He burned more delicate calligraphs into the clay-dead bedroom wall. “The difference between knowing and understanding may be obscure at first — the distinction between ‘whatness’ and ‘thisness’—but it’s one we commonly recognize in ordinary speech. All men acknowledge that no human being can ‘know’ another one: I can know your name, your age, your classifications. But understanding is beyond the brain’s analysis. When I say I understand you I mean we’re the same. Imagination.”

“It’s chilly,” she said. “You notice?”

He stopped the motion of his hand, the cigarette half concealed, half showing. If she had looked she would have known how the trick was done.

“You’re right,” he said. They hung motionless in the vacuum between the light in the kitchen and the darkness beyond the window of the bedroom.

The cicadas continue uninterrupted.

With a vain emptiness the virgins return to their homes

With a vain exasperation

The ephèbe has gone back to his dwelling,

The djassban has hammered and hammered,

The gentleman of fifty has reflected

That it is perhaps just as well.

“Shall I turn up the heat?” he asked.

“Yes, do.”

“I love you,” he said thoughtfully and falsely, though it was true.

“You love your wife,” she said.

He nodded. The truth is larger than you think.

The child in the hallway full of hollowly resounding clicks and thuds and voices studied him soberly, seeing what use he was. “Do you have any children?” she said.

“Two boys,” he said.

She turned it over in her mind. “I have a brother,” she said. “I don’t like boys.”

“Hold off judgment,” he said. “There’s good in everything.” It wasn’t true, it came to him, that she looked like Kathleen.

OHM

In the beginning was the wod, and the wod was with gord, and the wod was gord

He remembered his brothers walking the peak of the barn roof, Ben and Will. His heart stirred with panic and cried out in secret, Be careful! But he went on standing, as if casually, his hand lightly resting on Kathleen’s arm, and made himself go on watching until his heart was calm with probability: they had not fallen yet; they would not fall. It did not frighten him to walk there himself: he got joy in it, positive that he would not fall or that if he fell he would catch himself or if not, would not die, or if he died would not mind dying. He knew the feel of the slippery new cedar shingles under the rubber soles of your shoes, the comfortable tension at the ankles, the warm wind through your shirt. You could see everything, up there. The hills falling away to Alexander, the railroad track cutting through the fields a half-mile back of the house, the rails gleaming like newly sheared tin, ties black and neat as a logical argument fully understood, the woods in the distance yellowgreen with spring, like the grass in the cemetery, and above the woods a sky of mottled clouds as pure and venerable as his father’s stone. His emotion went out and made an aerialist’s net around the barn, and he stood stock-still, like a pole supporting a guy wire. Ben stood up slowly, with a bundle of shingles on his shoulder, saw that his younger brother was watching, and waved. All balance, alert to the gentlest stirrings of the breeze, Taggert raised his arm, waving back.

Kathleen said, “Could we go up there?”

“We’d better not,” he said. His heart slammed. “Our good clothes,” he began.

But she was running toward the ladder, her yellow dress sharp against the gray surroundings, her red hair flying behind her. “Come on, sissy!”

He laughed and followed. She reached the roof, in her stockingfeet now, and went easily and lightly from the ladder onto the shingles. Ben stood perfectly motionless, watching, smiling as if with certain reservations. Will scowled. “You’ll get slivers in your feet,” Tag called up to her, but she laughed. He swung around past the prongs of the ladder onto the roof and started up behind her, quick and careful. It felt good. He was not afraid for himself, and he was able to believe that she too was being careful and would be safe. She walked the peak like a tightrope-walker, her outline sharp as an open razor-cut against the sky. He went up the roof at an angle to catch up. “Now be careful, there,” Will said. Ben stood under his shingles like a boulder. She came to the end of the barn, where the square wooden silo went up to the steeply pitched silo roof, ten feet above. She looked back, throwing a smile, then started up the silo braces toward the top. He looked down without meaning to. The roof fell shimmering away then abruptly broke off, and his gaze plummeted on down to the small round rocks far below in the barnyard, fenceposts like toothpicks, hoof-prints filled with water reflecting the sky.

“You’re far enough,” he said. “Why do you have to go farther?”

She kept climbing. “To see if I fall, silly!”

He could reach up now and catch her foot if he wanted, but he was afraid to. It might make her fall. But in secret he knew that it wasn’t what he was afraid of. She might kick at him, purposely, viciously — except without quite knowing that she meant it to be vicious — and it would be he who fell. He couldn’t tell whether the fear was right or wrong; but he didn’t catch her foot. It was not because he believed her all goodness that he loved her. He had known all his life that nothing could be all goodness. Counterbalanced against the iron is the sweet lyre-playing. “Wait for me!” he called.

“You two be careful!” Will shouted. Ben was still.

She was clinging to the eave, struggling to get up over it, and though she smiled, twisting her head to look down past her shoulder, her face was white.

“Let me help,” he said. “You can’t do it alone.”

She waited, clinging to the rusted eavetrough with her elbows, the silo brace with one foot. He steadied himself below her and bent his head so she could stand on his shoulders. When she was up, he swung up after her. And now at last, thank God, she’d had enough. Getting up over the overhang had scared her, and she sat against the roof-pitch bracing her feet on the trough and looked around her, going no higher. “Thanks,” she said. He reached out slowly, all balance, to touch her hair. “Crazy little bitch,” he said. They could see for miles from here, down to where the foothills rose blue in the south. “I wish,” she began. She lifted her hand as if to touch his but thought better of it. “I wish I could be a seabird who with halcyons skims the surf-flowers of the sea.”

He smiled. “Alcman of Sparta.”

Kathleen pouted. “Pedant.”

Now, on the barn roof below them, Ben was moving again, walking slowly down the pitch with the shingles. “Dang little monkeys,” Will said.

They had not fallen, that time. That was as much as you could ask.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde

aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Pedant.

pedant.

Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s’ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient.

(But all shall fall, and all shall pass,