John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

How incredible, though, that faith in life! No wonder if sometimes one envies him — and sometimes almost hates him. Heavy-minded, ponderously reasonable, he muses on the fitness of unreasonable things, and drops like old wood clothespins to a basket the pros and cons of giving a child a life devoid of vision. “A lot of them make great musicians,” he said. I laughed. Freddy can’t tell high from low on a piano.

“Well,” he said, getting up, “I’ll leave it to you. That’s only fair.”

I did not want it left to me, and it was not fair.

I wanted — what?

No, words again. Large gestures.

I wanted to be beautiful.

I wanted to be loved for myself alone, as God loves even giraffes.

There is a moral to this. There is no such thing in this world as love. Until the day we go to Heaven, there is only childish infatuation and jealousy, duty, despair.

A sickly moral, admittedly, but better than endless burning.

I wanted him to make me feel pretty. Isn’t that sad?

“I am not myself today,” Esther said.

2

She awakened to find the bed empty, as usual, and the weight of wordless, irrational unhappiness still over her. She sat up and waited to be completely awake, then turned and reached her legs down, long and thin and white, she could guess; more dreadful than her darkest fears. She began immediately to move her lips, resuming her endless dialogue with her soul. It was a long time since Clumly had made love to her. It was because he was getting old, he said, but she knew it was more than that. They’d been, generally, morning lovers, in that glowing first age now endlessly receding like her memory of sight. She would awaken to the gentleness of his hand on her breast — she’d had pretty breasts once, though they were small — his leg lying lightly over hers, his penis growing against her hip, and she would turn to him, still half-asleep, and smile, and he would kiss her, just a peck, and climb up on top of her, and she would part her legs and close around him like a fist. But something had happened, and now she lay waiting through the months like an etherized patient for what would never come. Her waiting disgusted her and made her feel ashamed: she was old, her desire was to her obscene. Her very womanhood, all she could offer him once, as it seemed to her, had become a revolting imposition. He had learned to get up and go downstairs before she awakened, and she, if she awakened too soon, had learned to pretend to be asleep until he made his escape. After they were up and dressed it was better, almost exhilarating, a trap avoided. When he was gone finally, she felt relief. Relief for his freedom, not just her own. She would begin her chores, endlessly talking to herself without uttering a sound, watering the ivy and the dining-room ferns — one finger in the dirt to find the level of the water — dusting, sweeping, mopping, waxing; she would talk on the phone to the boy at Loblaws’ Market or to Vanessa Hodge or to the Superintendent of the Methodist Sunday school where, sometimes, she taught (she’d taught there regularly once, but she’d had discipline problems); she would fix her lunch — a braunschweiger sandwich and a glass of wine — and would begin down the long, drab corridor of afternoon.

It is easier to bear a cross than to be one. She still sometimes thought, but without real interest or hope, of suicide. And at times, strange to say, she suffered acutely from jealousy. When she met a young woman, she could sometimes not resist the temptation to ask to touch her face. Even if the girl was plain, Esther would tell herself she was pretty and would wonder if her husband did too. She knew he was not that kind of man, and yet for all her certainty, the fear was there. How she longed to release him, or at very least show him some proof of her gratitude! She was unable even to say the words any more, because her voice, which had once been soft and sweet, had grown harder now.

She always spent almost the whole of the afternoon preparing supper for Clumly, always stew, but she had many varieties of stew, and sometimes soup for a first course, with side dishes of frozen peas or stringbeans or spinach. When she tried to make steaks or some kind of roast she burned her fingers. While she cooked she had a little wine. Not much, just enough to bring a feeling of warmth.

And so she made do, today as on other days. Something was wrong down at the police station, that was the trouble. She could always tell. He blamed himself for that young policeman’s murder, of course. That was like him. And he blamed himself for the escape of that insane magician, and that too was natural, though it was not his fault. If there were only anything she could do!

At five-thirty, when she had supper ready, her husband had not yet come home. He was late almost every night, these days. She stirred the stew irritably and turned the burner off under it. She had no right to feel irritable, of course. He wasn’t staying down there for the fun of it. He might have phoned, though. That was like him, letting her worry and fret. If she told him afterward that he’d worried her sick he would behave as though that were merely her problem — as though there wasn’t a reason in the world for her to have worried, even now, right after two murders in Batavia, when everyone in town was worried sick and the papers were full of it, people told her. “Everything’s fine,” he would say to her. He would talk cheerfully of this and that, or would settle with his newspaper and after a while read the obituaries aloud. Sometimes she was ready to believe he did it on purpose, to make her miserable. But that was thinking negatively. It was of course necessary to guard against thoughts like that. To keep her mind busy she examined the question of what to have for dessert. “Canned peaches,” she said. She went down the cellar stairs and moved easily through the darkness to the shelves of canned fruit, took a jar from the section where the peaches were, and started back up. She heard something and paused for an instant. Rat, perhaps. “Filthy cave of a place,” she said. Her foot bumped something and she bent over. Empty beer bottles. She went chilly for a moment, then dismissed it. She continued up into the house and locked the cellar door behind her, as usual. (She had no strong feeling about locking doors, herself. It was one of her husband’s rules.) She put the peaches away in the refrig and went in to the livingroom to turn on the television to listen to the news. There was nothing interesting. They hadn’t yet caught the magician.

At six-thirty the phone rang. It was Fred.

“Esther,” he said, “I won’t be home until late tonight, maybe even early in the morning.”

“Is something wrong?” she said.

“No no, everything’s fine.”

She said, “I had your supper all ready.”

“I’m sorry. You have yours and put a little away for me, I’ll warm it up when I get home.”

“You sound tired,” she said. It crossed her mind that he did not sound tired. He sounded full of excitement.

“Well, yes, tired,” he said. “You’ll be all right?”

“Try not to be longer than you need to,” she said.

“That’s fine,” he said, “don’t worry about a thing.” He hung up. As soon as the receiver was on its hook she was wearied by the thought of spending the whole evening here alone, fretting. She went to the kitchen to have a little wine and halfway through her second glass she decided she would go out.

It was very pleasant out at this time of day, which was why she had decided against calling a taxi. It was beginning to cool. The sun was no doubt fairly low by now. Sounds carried more clearly than at other times, the way they would carry across a lake. She listened to the shouts of a group of boys a block or so away, playing flies and grounders, if she wasn’t mistaken, and the sound of a hose spraying grass a house or two from where she walked. She could hear traffic moving, far in the distance. She walked quickly, though she was not in a hurry. The sidewalk on LaCrosse was old and broken, and here and there it buckled abruptly, throwing one slightly off balance. At Oak Street she turned right, toward the center of town, but before she reached Main Street she cautiously crossed the street and took the cut-through to Ellicott and then Washington. Here the air felt closer — the close-set houses and the trees impeded the breeze — and sounds took on a new density: her footsteps came back to her from all directions at once, from the walls of old houses, the windows and old metal signs of walk-down grocery stores and beauty shops, from parked cars, from thick old hedges clipped at the level of one’s waist. No one spoke to her. She thought of calling on the new organist at the Methodist church; she lived here somewhere on this street. But she couldn’t think which house it was. Now she was hearing, far away, the noise of a drum and bugle corps or, possibly, a band. Coming from the high-school athletic field, probably. The school was right at the end of this street, where Washington ran into Ross.