John Gardner - October Light

She put the apple to her mouth, lined up her dentures, and bit. Juice sprayed. Carefully chewing, she set the apple down and climbed back into bed. She pulled up the blankets and took up her book again. “Now where were we?” she said, and adjusted her glasses a little. Into her mind came an image of Mr. Nit, in his black cap and black sweater, talking of atheism and accidents. She saw that she was picturing him as her Ginny’s husband, Lewis Hicks, and it made her smile. And who was Peter Wagner? Sally couldn’t say yet, except that he was tall, with beautiful, sad eyes, and blondish.

6

PETER WAGNER’S VISION

“God bless you, sailor!” the Captain bellowed, pounding him somewhat violently on the back. And then, apparently to those around him: “He’s alive. Just a bump on the nose where he met with the floor, ha ha!” They laughed, as filled with joy as the risen saints.

Peter Wagner felt spray and headway wind. They’d brought him up on deck to revive him.

“If we only had some whiskey to pour on his face,” the girl said.

“There’s cold coffee in the galley,” Mr. Nit said.

“Good!” the Captain said. “Get it!”

Hastily, Peter Wagner opened his eyes and got up on his elbows. They were buried in fog, the engines running Full Ahead and nobody up in the wheelhouse.

“He’s coming around,” Mr. Goodman said, leaning down, hands on knees to look at Peter Wagner.

Peter Wagner groaned and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It came away bloody. He instinctively tensed himself to fight, but caught himself.

“That was a nasty fall, sailor,” the Captain said. “Here, smoke this.” He reached down his pipe.

Peter Wagner sniffed, winced back like a cat, then reconsidered. It was pot. He took a puff. A more than physical calefaction spread through his broiling chest and head, and the contrasting chill of the breeze and fog made him shudder. All four of them saw it, watching him like sea-hawks. “He’s cold,” “He’s shivering,” “Get him inside,” their voices all said at once. Before he could avoid them, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Nit had his shoulders and legs and were carrying him up onto the bridge. He was too tired to resist. He let his arms drag, and puffed in and out, in and out, on the pipe. The violence in his heart evaporated.

Then he was in a dim room — the Captain’s cabin. There was a flag on the wall, the red and blue slightly faded.

“Welcome aboard, sailor,” the Captain said heartily. The others echoed it, and they slapped Peter Wagner’s shoulders so cheerfully that he would have fallen down if they’d given him room to. “Sit here,” the Captain said, and they forced him to a chair. Now they all had pipes. Blue smoke rose around him, thicker than the fog out on deck.

“This is Mr. Goodman,” Mr. Nit said. “Mr. Goodman’s who saved your life.”

Mr. Goodman beamed, childlike, and his pipe-charge burned bright red.

“We’re like a family, here on the Indomitable,” the Captain said.

“We have our little disagreements, of course,” Mr. Goodman said quickly, earnestly, as if it were very important that things be kept straight.

The Captain laughed like an alligator and Jane patted Mr. Goodman’s musclebound cheek.

“We’re like a society in small,” the Captain said, growing more philosophical, leaning back in the chair Mr. Nit had produced. A foghorn boomed, dangerously close. No one but Peter Wagner seemed to notice. The Captain appeared to be far away, almost invisible in the smoke. It was excellent pot, quick-grabbing.

“Mr. Nit represents technology.” The Captain chuckled, delighted with himself, then pointed with his pipe to the smoky shadow of Mr. Goodman. “Mr. Goodman here is our moral guardian, as his name implies. The clergyman, the humanist, in his small way the artist.”

It flickered dimly through Peter Wagner’s mind that in German “Fist” was “Faust.” Very interesting. Then he forgot again.

“I believe,” Mr. Goodman said apologetically, as if slightly alarmed, “we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. That’s the only true law, I feel.”

The Captain chuckled wickedly. “And Jane here—” he began. He paused, seemingly at a loss, and leaned forward until his snaky eyes emerged from the murky smoke. “What was Guinevere to King Arthur’s court, or the Virgin Mary to the Christian religion? The coronet! The jewel that gives it all meaning!” He laughed till he coughed.

“I see,” Peter Wagner said. It was fascinating, astounding, like an insight into modern physics. He was stoned. When he closed his eyes he saw brightly lit clouds with globes where wide beams of sunlight burst through, and standing on the sunbeams, waving to him like people in home movies, angels. Now there was music, some patriotic hymn, and the Statue of Liberty strode into the picture, carrying not a torch but the American flag, which was flapping grandly in the Technicolor wind. He was standing on the wide, gleaming deck of some ship — he saw the name in red and gold on a snow-white life-saver: The New Jerusalem. He opened his eyes. The room was dark and distorted and filled with smoke. Jane was sitting now on half of Peter Wagner’s chair, looking slightly cross-eyed down her pipe. She had her arm around his shoulder.

“And you, sailor—” The Captain’s eyes were now inches from his own. His tone became ominous, as if brought from the midnight depths of the sea where unimaginable fish preyed on whales. “All is not well with the Indomitable.” He slid his eyes sideways, as if watching for ghostly spies. The others’ eyes slid sideways too, all inches away from Peter Wagner’s …

Other things happened at the Captain’s party, but nothing Peter Wagner would remember.

He dreamed that night that he slept with his wife, with whom he hadn’t slept in a year or more — except that, as sometimes happens in dreams, it seemed she both was and was not his wife. She stood naked in front of him, radiating light like Tinkerbell, as dream-women will, her breasts erect and pinkish with desire. He put his hands on her hips and pressed the side of his face against her belly. He had forgotten how it felt. Her lower hair was silky and, surprisingly, black.

“It’s been so long,” he said. She tipped his face up and kissed him, then straightened up slightly and guided his lips to her nipple. The next moment (something had happened to time) he was between her legs, plunged deep inside her, his open mouth locked, laboring, on hers. The moment after that, as if it were the same moment, she was talking to him, murmuring gently in his ear as she had done when he’d first known her.

“Why the bridge?” she seemed to say. “You’re so beautiful, so gentle. What made you feel you had to? Are you a Pisces?”

“I don’t know,” he said; “it’s not the first time. Maybe it’s a habit.” He pretended to laugh. Groan, groan, groan. She laughed too, but lovingly, as if completely unafraid of him. She had changed. She was like a living Playboy foldout. “Tell me about it,” she said.

It was as if they had met in some neutral place — a medieval garden with grass and flowers like a featherbed, and, over their heads, interlocked limbs drooping hazel and oakmoss. It was a place where they might try, for once, for an honest truce, a new beginning. “Rapist,” she had called him. “All men are rapists.” It wasn’t, he felt, true. Certainly he was more often the seduced than the seducer. Nor was her general thesis true. The Indian brave raping the wife of the soon-to-be scalped white settler, the settler raping the wife of the soon-to-be-massacred Indian, that was no proof, as she claimed — pompous and professorial and mired deep in facts — that womanhood was always the ultimate victim, the final enemy of Everyman. It made the woman the enemy’s chief revenge, his ultimate insult to the husband. With the same mad leap of the pervert heart, the Vikings had torn down cathedrals. She, his wife, had been thoroughly unpersuaded. Men beat their women, she pointed out, echoing, he knew, some women’s-center dyke; and men’s laws, for five thousand years, had forgiven it. “In Russia, peasants beat their ikons,” he’d said.