The Sunlight Dialogues (31 page)

“It must give you great satisfaction,” Luke said.

Her anger rose sharply, but she said, “You’ll never know the half of it.” She sounded calm and collected.
A place for doleful creatures, a dance of satyrs.

He shifted into low and the truck jerked forward. He was squinting badly, and, precisely though Millie Hodge understood the familiar chaos of her emotions, there was nothing she could do against the touch of nausea rising and growing inside her like ugly weather. It was unreasonable that she should be asked to regret for his sake what had nothing whatever to do with him, nothing even to do with his father, little as Luke might understand that; and unreasonable that merely because she was there she should be asked, required, to endure his childish and confused vengeance for wrongs in which she had no part. He was a baby, a twenty-two-year-old baby: the slightest cut, the slightest affront, and home he came howling to mother, the source of all grief.
I’m sick of it,
she thought, but even as she thought it she knew it was rhetoric.

(She had waited in the livingroom, pretending to read the novel that had come from an old friend, male, that afternoon, knowing Luke would be purposely late and carefully not worrying when the time they had agreed on came, but worrying in spite of that, growing angrier with the passing of each of the minutes she had known would pass, because Luke was childish—she could never be sure
how
childish—and because she, Millie Hodge, self-regarding bitch, as she described herself, invincible to all reasonable and honest attacks, had been forced again into the silly and degrading role of poor suffering Mama. He had been betrayed by his Indian boy; he’d broken out of jail. The minute she’d heard it—Ben Hodge had told her, stopping by with some of that honey from his bedroom wall (inedible, as always, yellow-gray and specked with unidentifiable pieces, wings maybe)—she had known she was in for trouble. Within half an hour—Ben Hodge was barely out the door—Luke had called, asking if she’d come to supper. “Why Luke!” she’d said coyly, well aware that the girlish act repelled him, but not aware until later just why she’d turned it on. Luke had ignored it. So far he was only upset, he hadn’t yet distorted the Indian boy’s trifling betrayal of Luke’s ridiculous faith into something cosmic, unavengeable except on his mother. Or at any rate—since he’d called, after all—he had only just now begun to distort it. There was a pause, after she’d accepted—no sound but the inevitable humming and clicking of Luke’s country line—and she had said sympathetically, “Ben was here. He says Nick’s broken out of jail.” Luke had said, “Yeah. Bastard.” That was all. But she had known (waiting like Whistler’s Mother in the livingroom) what Luke’s irritation would lead to. When he arrived not in the car but in the pick-up truck—but at least, thank God, it wasn’t the semi—she knew he was angrier than she’d expected, and she’d taken a quick Miltown before going out to him. She’d said only, “Hail the late Mr. Hodge!” “Car wouldn’t start,” he’d said. She’d said, “No, I imagine.”)

They had crossed Route 20 and were climbing the Attica hills, toward Luke’s farm overlooking the Attica Prison.

She said, half by accident, “Beautiful time of day.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.

“Well do notice. Don’t be a philistine.”

“Oh, I come by it naturally enough.” He stared fiercely ahead, fists clenched on the steering wheel; and almost without thinking, as lightly and quickly as she’d have swatted a fly, she said: “Not on
my
side.” Instantly she saw she’d cut deep, and she realized what she’d realized before and conveniently forgotten a thousand times, that Luke could cut, but he couldn’t take it—or no, worse: he couldn’t even cut; would say merely childishly snippy things so far from the mark that they carried no sting, then would wither at just one word from her because she knew every sore spot he had, all sixteen hundred and six of them and all with one name: Father.

“You,” he said, choking, “what would
you
know?”

“Skip it,” she said. He was speeding up though, taking the curves too fast already—the cars on the lower road, half a mile down, had their lights on, and the sky, the creek far below them, the dirt road ahead of them were gray, the hills, stretching away toward the town of Wyoming, black. In studied slow-motion she got out a cigarette and lit it. “Why do we put up with each other?” she thought. But the time wasn’t right for saying it. “It’s turning out to be one hell of a date,” she said.

“Stop it,” he hissed.

I exist; and nothing else. No one sees me.

(Seven-thirty, according to her watch. If she hadn’t had to come hold Luke’s hand she’d be riding up the Thruway now with Sol Ravitz, to the lecture at Buffalo U. She’d be sitting laughing and smoking and talking, telling him he hadn’t the faintest idea what Plato meant by imitation, because Sol liked being attacked head-on—and because it was true, he really was all confused about Plato—and she would feel unnaturally alert, alive, both her body and her mind; would be conscious—as though she were balanced on a tightrope—of the distance between himself and her and the distance between herself and the door on her side: conscious that she smelled good, that when he glanced over at her she was pretty, so that sooner or later it would occur to even Solomon Ravitz that perhaps after the lecture and the drinks, coming home along the Niagara River or driving through the park, they might stop for a little; she might not take offense. She thought,
I have my world.
They had come, in her mind, to where blue-white lights splayed over the Thruway, impersonal and stark as the lights at the prison, to their left and right the outlines of tall buildings, the lights on the far-off office windows as precise and clean-cut as stars. The night air would be thick and warm, tinged with the smell of the chemical plants a mile away, and with the city all around them, the cold lights on the pavement, the car would be cozier than ever, the conversation full of overtones Sol would not yet be catching. “It’s absurd to trace art to ritual,” she said. “It’s as silly as saying sex began as religion.” He glanced at her, smiling. It came to her that what she was saying was truer than she’d realized at first. “Art and sex are very much alike,” she said. “I suppose the similarity is the reason for Freud’s mistake.” “What I like about you is your humility,” he said. She blew smoke at him and laughed. When she reached to the ashtray to scrape off her cigarette her hand was less than four inches from his, and she concentrated on the flutter of excitement she felt, wondering if he too felt it now and whether he ever felt it any more with his fat, stupid wife. It was impossible that he should, she knew. Perhaps he was not repelled by her, as she had been repelled for God knew how long, living out her best years with Hodge. But the thrill was dead, inevitably; created to die from before the beginning, like all illusions, and impossible to revive except feebly, momentarily, when one happened to be made jealous. “Love is revolt,” someone had told her—Stanley Burrish, when they met in San Francisco three years ago—and it was true. A flight from the humdrum, from reality: you shucked off all you had been before and the world that went with it, you became the enemy of the universe and imagined your lover to be another just like you, and so for a moment the two of you were free, lifted out of all ordinary dullness, out of the old vulnerability, became godlike or childlike or a little of both, and the world, no longer a fence around you, was beautiful. So that love was doomed, the new world sickened like the old. Move on. She stood in a white dress waiting at the underpass, half a mile from the paintless tenant-house where her father sat on the porch staring, spitting sometimes, his mouth sunk until the tip of his nose almost touched his chin, cracks of black dust encircling his neck, a ne’er-do-well, but no worse than her mother who whined and cried and peopled the yard with worthless Jewels, the boys doomed to tenant-farming like their father, or to factory work, or to working as guards at the Attica Prison, the girls doomed to whining and childbirth and sour old age: but not Millie, waiting in a white dress, standing erect and dignified (she was sixteen), as casual and as wide awake as a lynx. She knew the lights of the Hodge Pierce Arrow the minute they appeared at the top of the hill, and she put her hand out awkwardly, as though she did not know how to hitchhike. She waited until they had already seen her before she smiled as if with pleased surprise. More often than not it would be Ben, and he would tip his cap grandly, like his father at election time, and say, “Millie Jewel!” as though he too were surprised. Ben was a year older than she was, in Millie’s opinion the most beautiful boy on earth. He drove with his left hand clinging to the windshield post, all the windows wide open, the leather top roaring behind her ears, his right hand not closed on the steering wheel but walking it with his fingertips. He would say, “Where tonight?” “To class,” she would say, and he would smile, kind, as though there were a sweet, sad secret between them, and she would think, terribly moved,
Oh Ben, Ben!
but would stay where she was, pressed to her door, erect and polite, smiling.

One night she said, “Where are
you
going, Ben? There a track meet tonight?”

He glanced at her, thoughtful, then grinned. “A practice, sort of.”

“I hear you’re very good,” she said.

He laughed. “People lie. I’m miserable, but the others are even worse.”

“I wish I could see you sometime,” she said. (She had seen him many times, in fact—watching from the end of the football field. He had powerful shoulders and powerful legs and a waist like a girl’s. When he stabbed the pole in the box and twisted upward, his bare feet pointed like a diver’s, rising smoothly, as if in slow motion, his dark hair would fly over his face and stay there until he was above the bar, turning and arching over, quick, like a fish leaping, and then when he snapped back his head and shoulders, his hair would fall into place again, as though the whole trick were not missing the bar but preserving one’s grooming. She had seen him flip off balance once and drop flailing into the sawdust, and she had seen that when he got up he was limping and one leg was bleeding, spiked. She had wanted desperately to run to him, but she had been afraid. She had covered her eyes, sick, and that night, walking alone in the pasture, she had cried, and had called in the darkness courageously, “Ben! Oh, Ben, Ben!”)

Ben said, “Believe me, you’re not missing a thing.” Then, quickly, as though the talk made him nervous: “How’s class?”

“It’s awful,” Millie said. She added at once, because she’d let out more emotion than she’d meant to, “But no doubt it will improve my character. I’m going to be much, much nicer once I learn French. You wait and see.”

He laughed. After a minute he said, “Why French, though?”

Her cheeks burned and she wanted to say something withering, but she could only say, defiantly, “Why not?”

He smiled as if from infinitely above her. “Everybody who’s anybody speaks French, right? And you want to be anybody.” He shook his head.

“Anybody but who I am,” she said, confused. Again she knew she ought to lighten it, but she couldn’t seem to think clearly. Ben looked at her as if studying her features closely for the first time.

At last he said, his voice strangely like his father’s all at once, “You’re a nice girl, Millie.”

She thought her heart would break. “No I’m not,” she said. “I’m a bitch.”

He said nothing. The Hodges didn’t use words like that. The mistake reawakened her to the abyss between them: she might as well have decided to fall in love with a statue of King Edward. She remembered—this time with more horror than usual—the victory party her father had taken her to at Stony Hill. There were lanterns along both sides of the road and over the gates and hanging from the huge dark trees in the yard. On long white tables beside the driveway there were cider barrels and paper cups—the first paper cups she’d ever seen—and wherever you looked there were women in beautiful long colored dresses and men with suits on. Even the boys had suits—Ben, Art Jr, Taggert, and the oldest, the funny one, Will—suits from Washington, D.C., her father told her, and their sister had a full-length gown (it was pink), like the grown-ups. Their father the Congressman stood on the porch, white-headed and terrifying, as big as a house, shaking hands and offering sweet cider toasts and laughing like a railroad engine. And
her
father—oh honey-sweet balls of Christ!—stood spitting tobacco, his striped Sunday pants tied on with a rope, his hair sticking up like the bright blue bristles of a burdock.

She said, “Excuse my French.”

Ben laughed. “No harm. I know how you feel.”

“You don’t,” she said. “You really don’t know at all.”

“Don’t be too sure,” he said, smiling. It was merely a pose, and he knew it as well as she did. Nevertheless, she was flattered and excited. He was so handsome she thought she might die of a heart attack.

They’d come almost to Batavia, to make things worse, and she was feeling the sensation like homesickness that always came when she knew her ride with Ben was almost over. The rolling hills were cleanly outlined and oddly close in the moonlight. It was late May, a scent of orchards in the breeze.

He said, “I was lying before.”

“What do you mean? About what?” Her mind plunged into confusion. She felt shaky with guilt, about to hear her worst fears about herself put into words.

He walked his finger up the steering wheel for the turn leading into the railroad crossing. “About track practice,” he said. “There really isn’t one tonight. But I knew you’d need a ride to town.”

“Why, Ben!” she said. Her reeling thoughts fell into sense, as though she were thinking clearly all at once, and more swiftly than ever before. She said, “Why, thank you!”

He laughed. “There, I feel better. Would you like me to pick you up, after?”

He loves me,
she thought.
Could he?

Her heart was beating so hard it hurt. “Well—if it’s really no trouble …” She pressed her fingertips to her chest to calm the beating, thinking,
If this is love, give me aspirin.
She said, “I really would be pleased, Ben.”