John Gardner - October Light

“I’ll take it,” he said as if crossly, shocked by the price. “I’ll take red.” He glanced at the others. “Any you want a glass?”

They looked uneasy, shrugged, smiled, and shook their heads. He was reminded of three talking horses he’d seen in his childhood, time of some election. It occurred to him only this minute to wonder if the horses had really talked. No, of course not, he realized and, sixty years late, felt cheated.

“Just me then,” he said. As soon as Emily was out of earshot he leaned forward and explained, “Got a bowels problem.” He looked sternly at the table.

A draught of cold air welled around him as someone came in or went out, and he glanced toward the door. Two college girls stood there. They were Bennington girls; you could always spot ’em from a mile away. They usually didn’t get out this far from the shadow of Mount Anthony — hung around The Villager in North Bennington, picking up ’lectricians. They stood blinking, letting their eyes adjust, one girl fattish, with a scarf and gray coat and a dark green beret, heavy-lidded eyes, thick lips — Jewish — the other girl tall, pretty except she looked empty as a box. She stood like a lady on a magazine cover or a clothing store ad, one leg thrown forward, elegant as a deer’s, hands in the pockets of her long brown leather coat. He pulled his eyes away and pursed his lips, sucking at his dentures with his tongue.

“Well well,” Sam Frost said, winking.

James heard one of the girls speak, much nearer than he’d have expected, and turned his head just slightly to look again. They’d come up to the table of strangers to say hello. The tall girl was stretching out her hand to the man with the coarse gray beard — the black-eyed man was introducing them. “I’ve read all your books,” she said. The gray-bearded man got up, almost knocking down his chair, and jokingly seized the girl’s hand with both of his. They did more introductions. The man with funny ears was a writer too. Emily came now with the wine and poured a little in his glass. He signalled for her to keep pouring and slid three dollars and twenty-five cents onto the table. Sam Partridge was whining something, “… damn place is changing,” but James didn’t listen. He was listening, ears tingling like a hunting dog’s, to the table of strangers and to the Bennington girls, peeling their voices from the surrounding thrum.

The Bennington girls had moved on past the strangers now, over to the three young village men. The voice of the shorter, fatter one said, “You guys want company?”

The black-haired boy said — Albert, his name was, the old man remembered—“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

James sipped his wine. The taste was better than he’d expected, reminded him of something a long time ago — some important memory, but he couldn’t quite jump it. He sipped again and then on impulse — his generalized anger, his loss of his own past — he abruptly tipped up the glass and drained it.

“Good wine?” Henry said. He sat with his fingers on the edge of the table, his square, slightly bug-eyed head tilted and thrown forward as if he’d never seen a human being drink wine before.

“You want some?”

Henry raised his hands, palms out.

The fat girl was saying, “What are your interests?”

James Page turned his head again to look. She was talking to the Graham boy. She had her coat off now. The Graham boy was looking at her. “You really want to know?” he said, grinning.

“That’s why I asked.”

The tall girl drew herself up and looked at Albert. “Are you for real?” she said.

At their table the strangers were gathering up checks, getting ready to leave.

“One more for everybody,” the bearded man sang.

The red-headed woman leaned toward him, smiling, but her voice, the old man somehow knew, though he couldn’t quite hear it, was like ice.

“Screw yourself,” the bearded man answered. The words slipped out as casually as a murderer’s knife and easily carried the length of the room. Heads turned. The man seemed not to notice.

The woman blanched and everyone at the table hung hushed and motionless for an instant, like people caught off guard in a photograph. Then the blond, long-haired boy put his hand gently on the drunken man’s shoulder and said something.

The bearded man bowed his head and touched his nose, then abruptly pushed his chair back and, helping himself with one hand on the chairback, the other on the table, stood up. The man in the light suit and monkey ears hurried around to steady him, grinning, saying something and making a funny face. The gray-bearded man mumbled something back, apologetic.

James Page poured himself more wine and sipped it, trying to analyze the sensation in his chest. He felt exposed, the whole room mysteriously unsafe. Furtively, he watched them pay Merton at the bar. At the door the bearded man paused for an instant, and it seemed to James that he was about to turn and look back, straight at him; but if that was what was in the man’s mind he thought better of it — or in his drunkenness forgot it — and went out. James slowly turned his head. Through the window he watched them help the man over to the foreign car and into the back seat. When the others had gotten in, the motor roared like a race-car engine, the lights went on, then the back-up lights — the lights of the American car went on a second later — the cars backed slowly from their parking places, one after the other, and in a minute both of them were gone.

2

The incident, trifling as it was, had an odd effect on him. Now as his three old friends talked on he was a thousand miles away, going over it in his mind, still trying to identify the deep disquiet in his chest. The man with black eyes was a teacher, he decided — since the Bennington girls knew him — and likely a teacher of literature, like Sally’s friend Estelle — since someone had mentioned that his friends the gray-bearded man and the other one wrote books. Maybe all three of them wrote books. James Page was not a great reader of books himself, though he’d bought one, once when he’d driven Estelle and Sally to the Greyhound bus station, because it said on the cover it was a “comic blockbuster,” and he was curious to know if it was true or just more empty babble. He’d read about two sentences, had leaped forwards about a hundred pages and had seen it was all sex, and had thrown it in the garbage for the pigs. It was some kind of masterpiece, according to the cover. No doubt the black-eyed teacher and the writers would agree. Those were the books people liked, these days, those were the books people learned, these days, to live from. “Books that tell the truth,” they’d no doubt claim, the teacher and the writers. Pure hogslop, same as TV. Where would it end? Bunch of black-eyed Brazilians made a pornographic movie where they finished by actually murdering the actress, and if the acting was right and the language was vile enough, people would be hard put to figure out why it wasn’t art.

Outside it was blowing, as if the weather had been following James Page’s mood. Two state policemen were hurrying across the parking lot, their coats billowing, their right gloves pressing down their gray fur caps. Behind them, hickories and maples bent back and forth, back and forth, hurrying, black against the mountains, the moon- and cloud-filled hastening sky, and leaves tore loose in shaggy clusters, fluttering in haste through the lighted parking lot and then away again, batlike, fleeing into darkness. When they were halfway to the door, a fat man bundled in an old sheepskin jacket came up to the policemen and stopped them. They talked.

By the light of the Old Grand-Dad clock above the bar it was after eleven. He could hardly believe it, and when he looked at the bottle and discovered he’d drunk more than half of it, the impression was confirmed: Time had shifted gears, or was leaking, like energy from the universe, so he’d heard. He couldn’t remember at first where he’d heard it, but then it came to him: Sally’s minister. Talk about change! They’d never have allowed such a man to stand up in a church and preach, fifty years ago — or twenty, come to that. They’d have locked him away in an insane asylum. Teachers, ministers … It was as if there was a plot against the world’s survival, disaster on its way irreversible as a railroad car broken loose on a twenty-mile grade. He filled his glass and drank, heartsick, then excused himself and walked, bent over, to the toilet. His bowels were still jammed, tough as snakewood. He urinated and sat a while with his trousers around his shoes, waiting, then at last gave up.