John Gardner - October Light

“Horace,” she’d said upstairs afterward, worried as a mother, “what if the Flynn girl gets pregnant?”

“It’s more like a question of when,” he’d said.

Now, staring at her book, she saw again, through it — as if the paper and the print were a frail screen — the Flynn girl’s eyes. Such was woman’s lot, the lot of all victims of the world’s high righteousness: to sneak and cower and forever lie below. Not defenseless, quite. There was always guile. There was always conspiracy, secret insolence, the comfort of the victim’s hidden scorn. Once Horace had spanked her. (He hadn’t been perfect; she never said he was.) It was common in those days, husbands spanking wives. Horace had been better than most, in fact; he’d never beaten her, as James would beat Ariah if she ever dared look at him cross-eyed. “Yes dear,” Sally would say to Horace thereafter, smiling sweetly, whispering black murder inside her mind. And there were always stories to give women secret comfort, like the legends of old Judah Sherbrooke’s crafty young wife.

It was that that gave her pleasure in the paperback novel, she realized. To all that would tyrannize — the flag and religion and the domination of men — the novel smiled sweetly, like a loving wife, and … She hunted for the image and, with delight, jumped it: smiled sweetly and let a little fart.

She read on.

4

SUICIDE AND RAPE

Dr. Alkahest was no fool. He guessed at once that the first place to look for that “fishingboat” must be Fisherman’s Wharf, and if he didn’t find it there, he must search the surrounding wharfs and docks from San Francisco to the ends of Sausalito. The cargo, after all, must be coming in, not going out. All the back gardens in the city could hardly have yielded such a load as that.

Enfeebled though he was by his night’s excitement, he leaned toward the taxi driver’s ear — he was an elderly black man with steel-wool hair — and called, slightly whining, “Cabby, let’s drive around the docks awhile. I have a kind of thing about old fishingboats.” The driver nodded and leaned sideways to look at him in the mirror. Dr. Alkahest added, “I think I’d like to see all the docks, all around the Bay — if I don’t get tired and tell you otherwise.” He leered. If that boat was docked anywhere, he’d smell it.

The driver said, “That’ll take a week, old man. Wheah you wanna start?”

Dr. Alkahest gnawed at his lip, distressed. “Well,” he said, “what I especially like is those big old fishingboats, the kind that go out to sea for days and days, you follow? I like the kind that list a little, old trash-heaps you wouldn’t think a sane man would go and risk his life on. It’s the texture, ye see. In my younger days I was a photographer.”

The driver laughed. “You shittin me, man. You workin for the FBI and you lookin for dope.”

Dr. Alkahest smiled from ear to ear, terrified. “A man my age?” he said.

The driver laughed happily and turned left into a narrow, pot-holed road that went up into some trees and at the crest of the hill looked down over San Francisco Bay. For all Dr. Alkahest’s fear, the man drove harmlessly …

Here again several pages were missing. The novel resumed:

… he knew it was hopeless. His heart was racing from the unusual exertion, and his head and lungs were filled with the thick stench of diesel fuel and fish. Dr. Alkahest leaned once more toward the driver and gave him the address of his home. Then he leaned his head back, and the next thing he knew, the driver was gently lifting him from the taxi to the wheelchair, already set up on the sidewalk, asking him was there anything more he could do for him.

“No no, thank you,” Dr. Alkahest said, and got out his money-clip. For no reason, he burst into tears. The cab driver leaned toward him, reaching across the chasm of race and class to lift him by the armpits and set him up more straight. “You want me to wheel you in?” he asked.

“No no,” Dr. Alkahest said, and bit back a whimper. “Thank you. You’ve done more than enough. How much is it?”

“Eighty dollars,” the man said.

He was startled at that, but after all, they’d driven for most of the night. He gave the driver ninety.

“Thank you, sir,” said the driver, and saluted.

Alkahest returned the salute and pushed the right turn button, starting in.

When he reached his floor, the ninth, he hardly even glanced at his cleaning girl, Pearl, though on many occasions he had watched her for hours, looking subtly past a book he was pretending to read or peeking through a keyhole, thinking about the rape of the Trojan women, the million raped women of Bangladesh. No two ways about it, that little Pearl was a juicy number, born to be a queen, or the wife, perhaps, or better yet, mistress, of some rich black lawyer in Chicago, or better yet, white. That someone should sooner or later attack her had been practically inevitable.

But his thoughts, this morning, were not primarily on his cleaning girl. Old John Alkahest had lost all hope, all reason for living. It would take him days to find that boat; he was convinced of that now; and the boat, of course, would not be there for days.

He drove the wheelchair to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. On the far side of his large brass bed, French doors opened onto a concrete-balustered balcony, which had plants all around it — flowers and ferns and an enormous rubber tree — and just enough room for him to sit in his wheelchair and take the air. Tired as he was, and sick with confused and turbulent emotions, including a background awareness of Pearl, he drove to the balcony and sat gazing down.

“My life has lost all meaning,” he said aloud. It was not so much a question of whether he ought to kill himself as how. He could, if he liked, ram the wheelchair forward and throw himself onto the concrete railing and, desperately scrambling, grunting and panting like an elderly lover, pull himself over it and fall, flailing, easily piercing the clean light and air to smash through the sidewalk. He leaned forward to look down through the balusters, and felt woozy. Better to use pills, he thought. He remembered an acquaintance, a famous intellectual, who’d killed himself years ago by drinking lye. He’d had his expensive, red velvet curtained apartment cleaned, and he’d carefully gone around and set up black candles, and he’d set out poetry here and there for his friends to find — touching sentiments from Rossetti and favorite works of his own — and he’d put on his velveteen smoking jacket and, with as much elegance as possible, considering, had rammed down the lye with a brandy glass, after putting in a phonecall to his friends. When they came they found tables tipped over and the velvet curtains torn down, the candles knocked akilter, and everywhere the filth of the miserable body’s indignation, girlish resistance, and reluctant sleep.

Dr. Alkahest, crying now, pale hands trembling, backed off the balcony, closed the French doors and white silk curtains, then drove, breathing hard, to the telephone by his bedside. SUI–CIDE, he dialed, and while he waited for someone to …

Here again she found one of those infuriating gaps. Two pages later the story went on:

… farther from my mind. Who have I to get even with? No, this is a reasoned suicide. I’m the loneliest young man in the world.”

“You’re young?” she said. She seemed faintly excited.

“I’m disguising my voice,” he said, and found he was a little excited himself. He imagined her breasts.

“You’re kidding me,” she said. “You’re old.”

“Why would I kid you? I’m at the point of death. I phoned you, didn’t I? That must mean I want help, so why would I fool around with you?”