John Gardner - October Light

“I want all the lives that are possible,” he said. “Not only for me. For everybody. I want to live everything that’s possible to live, a hundred thousand novels. I want everybody to. It’s—” He tried to focus her, but the dream-woman wouldn’t come clear. She was not, it seemed to him now, his wife. Her fingers moved, infinitely gentle, over his testicles and penis. It felt, as dreams will, too real to be a dream. He moved his hands on her breasts. She moaned with pleasure and again, little by little, he grew hard.

“And what happened?” she murmured in his ear.

“Long drunken talks late at night,” he said, “each of us trying to explain to the other, both of us feeling imprisoned and betrayed. Arguments; fights. I’d come to myself and she’d be lying on the floor, out cold, and I’d think she was dead. It was horrible; stupid. I never wanted to hurt her. I just wanted to live, wanted everybody to live — free, trying to find happiness, as innocent and simple as Dick meets Jane — live like crazy, like squirrels or deer or lyric poets, because everything around us was retreating.” The phrase gave him a subtle thrill, the rushing sensation in the plumbing of the chest that would lead, in a child, to tears. “But I couldn’t explain it, even at the moments when I believed it was true, because the possibility was always so obvious that maybe it was a lie, mere childish selfishness. ‘Do you love me?’ she was always asking, sometimes angrily crying, and I honestly didn’t know. She was always talking, disagreeing, quoting articles. I would storm off and leave her sometimes, late at night, when I’d drunk myself stupid and I knew there was bound to be a fight, or else we’d already have had the fight, I’d kicked her black and blue in some neighbor’s yard. I remember waking up in an old friend’s house once, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling as you do when you’re a child and don’t know where you are. The ceiling was papered, a rented house, and the design was busy, vulgar, faded — gray and silver, I think it was — and directly above my head there was a light fixture, harsh black metal. I started, and then suddenly I remembered where I was, and I felt free. Free enough to soar. I thought of friends I could visit that she hated. Thought of riding the motorcycle I’d just bought maybe a month ago, over her dead body — almost literally. Thought of living the way I was born to live, loose as a tramp, independent as a hermit, fornicating — like a rapist, you may say. The phone rang, and I heard the friend I was staying with talking in his bedroom. He told me that morning that it was my wife who’d called. She was crying, he said, and he dropped it. But I remembered — oh, bitterly! — all the times she’d cried, all the times it seemed to me that I was all she lived for — and all she lived on, like beetles on an elm — despite the other times … So I went out and took some sleeping pills — don’t laugh, though I admit it’s somewhat funny — and I laid myself down on the railroad tracks, and when I woke up the train was roaring by and some whiskered old drunks were leaning down over me, tisking, pouring water on my face.”

She rolled over on top of him and lay kissing his eyes and nose and lips. She became still.

“I used to be religious,” she said. “I’m still religious, some of the time, some ways. Anyway, I worry about it. Sometimes. Have you ever been to a party of freaks?”

“That too,” he sighed.

She said, “The first freak party I went to, the people all got undressed. Or some of them. They sat and lay around the floor smelling incense and playing strange instruments, a lot of them things they’d invented themselves. Two girls made love to one man, right there in front of us all, including this bearded Arabian with a turban. I went into another room — I still had my clothes on — and a boy named Berner and some girl whose name I didn’t hear were looking through this telescope at the stars. They told me they had his sperm on the lens, and they wanted for me to come look. I felt strange — horrified and disgusted — and yet I looked. It was ugly, grotesque, I thought. And yet I also thought it wasn’t. It was … strange. There were colors. I went back inside, and everything was crazy. There were people on the floor, doing things, you know, but also there were people sitting up in chairs, smoking and talking, ignoring the others — or not even that, dismissing all they did in what seemed a friendly, indifferent way. It blew my mind. There was a woman reading palms. I wanted to get out of there and I was ashamed to leave. A man in a suit with a lacy white shirt out of some other century came over and said, ‘My friend, you seem tense. Can I get you something?’ I shook my head. He looked at me, sort of friendly, harmless, for a long time. All at once he smiled and said, ‘Are you afraid the police will come?’ I hadn’t realized it was mainly that, but it was. I wanted to have a good record, you know? I nodded. ‘I don’t think they will,’ he said. He touched my hand. ‘But don’t stay if you’re afraid. Nobody here will be insulted if you leave. Nobody’s going to judge you.’ I laughed, because I believed him. It wasn’t true, actually. There were people there who were judging every second, but he wasn’t one of them. ‘Does this embarrass you?’ he said. I said, ‘No. I like it. I just don’t want to do it.’ He started talking about the public schools, about busing girls to schools when there were only boys. He had three children. We talked until the sun came up and it was, you know, nice. Part of the time he held my hand. Then his wife came — she’d been in one of the bedrooms and still had her clothes off — and the three of us talked. After a while they left, and then I left. I knew it was wrong, or something. I mean, it wasn’t normal. My mother would have died if I’d written her about it. She thinks if you smoke pot you’ll inevitably jump out of a speeding car. She hates the modern world. Filth and violence in the movies, dirty books, the pill … But I liked that party, when I thought back to it. I wished somebody would invite me again. It was like learning to swim, or flying — only scary in the beginning.”

There were tears in her eyes, he dreamed. He felt guilty again that he’d abandoned her, for now it seemed to him again that she was the wife he’d loved, as sometimes it had seemed to him that his wife, when he was falling-down drunk and they were making fierce love, had been somebody else; such was life’s fidelity. “No secrets between us anymore,” he said “no anger, no hitting.”

He heard her laughter, too real for a dream. The dream had turned nightmare. “I’m not your wife, silly,” she said. “I mean, J e-sus!”

He clung to her, struggled to focus her face, and now it seemed that she wasn’t his wife but some man, big-shouldered, with eyes like steel. The huge man, sharp-nosed, wearing steel-rinimed glasses, lifted Peter Wagner in his arms and, like a wrestler, hurled him down. He saw the wrestling mat coming toward him as if from hundreds of miles below, and there was fire-green grass at the edges. It was a grave, an angel sitting at the head of it with folded wings. The moment before he hit he awakened, staring out into some pitch-dark room. He was alone, his body bathed in sweat. “Margaret,” he whispered. She stood, in his memory, erect as a steeple, tits like Akhaian breastplates. He clenched his eyes shut. All his fantasies, the best and the worst, were trash. He reached out suddenly, angrily, for the eels. The table was gone. His hand came down on the soft, warm flesh of some woman.

He labored, full of panic now, to rise out of the dream. A black, furry hand came toward him, extending a red-glowing pipe.