John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“How’d you get into Will Hodge’s apartment?”

“As for me, my situation is as difficult as your own. I propose that we talk. Negotiate, so to speak.”

“Tell me where you are.”

“Sorry. Come to the sanctuary of the Presbyterian church at midnight tomorrow night. Be alone.”

“Why there?” Clumly said, “—why midnight?”

“Because it amuses me.”

“All right, all right. Tell me just one thing. …”

The line went dead.

He dialed the operator on the absurd chance the call could be traced. As he hung up he remembered the car and crossed quickly to the window. The car was pulling away just as he looked out. He drew his revolver, on some impulse, but hesitated and slipped it back into its holster. “What the devil?” he said. He rubbed his head. Had the person in the car made the phonecall? — tapped in from right outside his house?

Behind him the door to the stairway opened, and when he turned Esther was standing there, listening in his direction. She had her eyes out. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said gruffly. “Everything’s all right. Go to bed.”

“You had your gun out,” she said.

He shivered. “It’s all right,” he said. Then, gently: “Everything’s all right.”

Very well then, I’ll meet with you, my “friend.” And yes, I’ll come alone. It’s irregular, I’m cognizant of that. But I’ll find you out, and sooner or later I’ll nail you. I give you my word.

Chief Clumly felt mysteriously calm. Also, he felt ravenously hungry. This time he did nothing to resist the urge. He made himself ham and tomato sandwiches in the kitchen, then carried them down cellar with him. There he sat in the half-dark, silent as a huge block of ice, chewing solemnly, and drank two bottles of beer.

1

of release. Sometimes she can hardly remember, and she is confused by dreams. It was very much like a dream, and now it has been a long time since the operation failed. There was a round greenish light and the shape of a head (perhaps) bending toward her, the doctor’s head it must have been, but she couldn’t see his features, perhaps she had never been able to see people’s features, she was confused about that — saw only light with colors in it, and shapes of people and forms like objects in a fire — but after the operation she would see things clearly: “We can never know for sure about these things,” they said; “there’s a very good chance.” So she fell from the round greenish light into darkness and the operation that was going to make her well at last, released from all bungling and stumbling and confusion and released from pain — the operation began, and failed. “Esther,” he said, “my dear, dear Esther,” and she understood that it was even harder for him than for her: they must live out their lives like two people in a dungeon, and for her the dungeon was blindness, and she could rail against it and hate it and scorn it and eventually learn to tolerate it, but for him the dungeon was his wife. “I’m so sorry,” she said. He said, “No no no. Don’t say that. You act as if it was your fault.” It was not, that was true. But just the same she was his dungeon and he would not be free till she was dead, and since she was younger than he was, and since women live longer, he would not be released until the day he stepped into his grave. “I’m sorry,” she said. Well, she’d loved him. She’d wanted to die, and one night when he’d been kinder than ever before to her, more gentle than anyone had ever been, so that the moment when the climax came was like fire exploding through all the room (it was September; she smelled burning leaves and there was a taste of winter in everything: the time of year when her mother would sit at the window, depressed, looking out without hope as though winter were all that remained for her — and rightly, yes, because all her life she must live in September or the memory of it or the fear of September) she, Esther, got up quietly when he was asleep, and put her clothes on, full of sweet pity for herself, and walked out on the lawn of the house they had lived in then, by the creek, and walked quiet and unseen as a druid to the footbridge and stood there believing she would drown herself, free him, but not yet, in a minute or two, not yet. The wooden railing was cold and damp and she could smell the water below her, and she could hear it, though it moved quietly, a sound as sweet and gentle as the pity for herself that filled her heart. In a minute, she thought. She could not tell how it was or how far below her. The air was warm but it had the smell of winter and burning leaves in it and …

Who listens to such stuff? I will not think. Won’t think …

Words. Will not. Won’t.

Dear God prevent

(She stood in the darkness and smell of winter and burning leaves, her long blind hands clenching the splintering and yet soft wood of the railing, blind eyes looking down at the brown-green sluggish Tonawanda that she did not know then must be brown-green and sluggish as witches’ brew, for in her mind at least there was dignity yet, and romance and poetry and revenge: she would slip into the moonlit water as silently as a mossy stone and be carried away without grief or remorse and without even fear except for, of course, the first shock, like the shock of the ice-cold water around her body, biting at the white of her thighs and invading the funereal and elegant black dress, transforming cloth to the indifferent murderous lead that would drag her downward and soon, before she knew what was happening (she who had planned it) swallow her alive. Not yet, she thought. Her blind hands clung like roots to the damp-softened wood of the railing, and she thought, clinging, Let me die. Her life was, she thought, an indignity, and it made his life an indignity as well: and though she could not change it, neither by urgent smiling and cheerfulness nor by flight from him, because she knew he would pursue her, not from need or love or even duty but from his lack of any reasonable argument against it, she could end it: she could raise her fists to the sun and say: It’s not good enough. But not yet. Her life was a fall from light to darkness and a brainless hope for light that would never come, but she had at least this: she knew that her hope was brainless, she could refuse to be deluded, refuse to hope. That much at least. She was moved by the beauty of the idea of dying, the clear moonlight water closing above her, her pale corpse drifting through enchanted groves by the Tonawanda Creek to the Genesee River and in time the Atlantic, possibly, and behind her the healthy sorrow of release. (But the water was green, she was able to suspect, and she would be found, black, bloated, absurd, in the slime at the edge of some farmer’s pasture; and perhaps there was no moon that night after all.) Not yet, she thought, and waited a fraction of a second too long and discovered that the thing was impossible. And years afterward, sitting at the supper table, her husband reading aloud to her a piece from the paper about a girl who had thrown herself into the creek and been found two days later on the Cole farm, she would understand what dignity she had missed. But she had returned to the house, with her jaw set, and had found him asleep as if nothing had happened, and two or three days later she’d said with half-conscious malevolence that she would kill herself, she was a burden on him, and he had said “No! Please! Please!” She had felt like a whore, or like some medieval saint split down the middle between lust for evil and the longing for good. She wanted to sacrifice, be crucified for him, for in a part of her heart she was innocent and childlike and pure as beryl, but the other part of her laughed at that and said Esther, you stick with me and we’ll make us a life. Well, what could she do? She had given in.)