The Sunlight Dialogues (82 page)

Will watched the martini turning round and round in the pitcher.

“Right,” Buz said, nodding as if Will had spoken.

Will’s head was not as clear as he would have liked. He felt stimulated by it all, and the sexual stimulation was the least of it. He felt new worlds were opening up before him, and what he wanted at the moment was not to explore them, plunge into the raw adventure of it, but think out, boldly, without shrinking, the implications. Buz handed him his martini, surely knowing he was already drunk as a skunk. “May be too wet,” he said, “try it.” He beamed. Will sipped and nodded—at that moment he might as quickly have approved plain kerosene. He lifted the glass toward the ceiling and said, “The world is round!” “Round!” Buz echoed. They drank to rotundity.

He remembered saying later, slowly and carefully—several drinks later it must have been—“It’s immmoral, that’s my obshection to it.”

“That’s right,” Buz said. “Immmoral.”

However, there was another side to it, no question about it, and they spoke of it in lofty phrases. An aesthetic side. (They were sitting out on the lawn now. He couldn’t remember coming out, but he was here: Buz in the aluminum lawn chair across from him, growing more quiet, more dignified moment by moment, and mentioning often how much he valued this rare opportunity for conversation.) “There is an aesthetic side to the question,” Will said. He solemnly belched. “Note the frequency of extraliteral relationships—” Extraliteral? he thought. He decided to brave it out. “Of extraliteral relationships among painters and poets and the like. It’s
very interesting.”

“Right, I’m glad you mentioned it,” Buz said.

“Now painters and musicians, we may safely presume—” He slung out his jaw and frowned, judicial. “Painters and musicians have a marked aesthetic proclivity.”

“Exactly! Exactly
right!”
He banged his fist on his knee.

“Good.
Bien. Bongiorno.”
He giggled. “So far so good.”

“Right.”

“If the Universe is apprehended
aesthetically,
which is to say in terms of sensation—”

“Exactly! Sensational!”

“—then any curialing—”

“Exactly!”

“—of the aesthetic proclivity is, in one word, immm-oral!” The idea filled him with righteous rage.

“Whooey!” said Buz. He agreed. Then, realizing Will had finished, he looked slightly puzzled.

Will leaned toward him and spoke more confidentially. “We must live life fully.”

Buz nodded, musing.

“We must understan’ that there are situations which entail commitment, and there are situations in which no commitment is implicated.”

“None.”

“Nothing different from eating with a person, or playing a game of golf with him, or, as the case may be, her.”

“Not a parcital.” He laughed, then looked sinister. “Or a tracklium.”

Will laughed too. “Rise
above
ourselves.”

“Excelsior!”

“Shaving cream!”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Will pursed his lips but the belch came anyway. “I better go bed,” he observed.

“Excellent,” Buz said. “You want company?”

Will frowned, dizzily waiting.

Buz said, leaning forward and touching his knee, “It would give me great pleasure—” The word came out badly and he formed it again.
“Pleasure
to unzip your pants.” He smiled like a dog, his face very blurry, like a white flower under water.

“What?” Will said. He tried to stand up.

“You said yourself—”

“You monster!” Will said, deeply shocked.

Buz shrugged, slowly and loosely. “Well.”

“I’m astonizzhed!” Will said. “Astonished.” That’s better.

Buz brought out, just intelligibly, “You weren’t astonizzhed when I told you about burying a girl in feathers, or pouring syrup over them—”

“Stop!” He had made it to his feet now. “This is horrible,” he said. “What’s the matter with you people?” With what he knew himself was ludicrous premeditation, he raised his martini and dashed it, glass and all, to the sidewalk. The noise rang through the night more loudly than he’d expected. Buz laughed sadly, and after a moment Will laughed too.

“Help me up, old college frien’,” he said.

Will went over to him carefully, and carefully bent to help him up out of the chair. Then, very slowly, reeling with every tilt and lurch of the wobbly planet in its fall through the void, they worked their way to the porch steps. On hands and knees they made it up to the porch, and the light went on. “Just joking, Will old friend,” he said. They laughed and scratched at the door.

“I understand,” Will said. “A cunning joke. I must try, tomorrow—” He’d lost the thread.

Hours later, as it seemed to him, a girl in a yellow bathrobe opened the door for them. They laughed and patted each other’s backs and rolled in. (It came to him that his suitcoat was gone.) The door closed behind them, and the girl disappeared. He had an impression—but he couldn’t be sure—that the girl was not the same one. Then he must have passed out. It must have been sometime after that that he awakened to the half-dream half-reality of lying naked in a dark room, with a naked woman pressing her bush to his face, thighs clamped to his head, pushing at him, her smooth back arched and one hand closed around his penis. He never saw her face and afterward he sometimes was not quite sure that she was real. It was all, well, very strange.

And sitting in his office in Buffalo, giving in once more to bemused staring, eyes passing over his closely reasoned, now meaningless page, he knew what it was about it that was weird. He could see nothing either wrong in it or especially right. He’d betrayed people before, from time to time, in trivial ways, like any man—though he’d never betrayed Louise before, not sexually—and he would have said he knew very well what betrayal was, by his chest. But if so, this was no betrayal. He felt nothing, not even disgust. If she learned about it, which she wouldn’t, he knew, he would be sorry about it, but not unduly. If she took it for more than it was, then that was her problem. It was all exactly as people claimed—a trifle, a thing one could easily get used to, not at all the shocking and terrible sort of experience he had imagined. It would be different, perhaps, if the girl were someone he believed he loved. But sex, pure sex—”like food,” Buz had said, or a game of golf—it was merely a pleasure, meaningless and harmless. Or was it he himself who’d said it? The fact that all his life he’d guessed wrong about how it would feel, was a shock to him. And more shocking yet was the fact that it seemed, afterward, only a dream. He understood clearly, all at once, that if he did it a hundred times, a thousand, it would still be mere dream, as vague in his mind as his morning recollections of love-making with Louise. That was the reason for the ropes, it struck him, and the six-in-a-bed, and the rest. The pleasure was unspeakable, but only for a moment, like the unspeakable pleasure of dinners forgotten long ago.

He was arrested by a memory, sharp as a vision, of Danny talking with the Indian boy at Uncle Ben’s farm. They were in the chickenhouse, and the Indian was hunkering in front of Danny, teaching him to whittle. The word was musical on the Indian boy’s tongue, and Will had remembered—as if all the time between had vanished in smoke—how the word had sounded when he himself was a child and someone—Uncle Ben, or maybe his grandfather, or some hired man at Stony Hill, he couldn’t remember any more—had bent down to show him how. Danny took the knife in one hand, carefully, the stick in the other, and Will kept in his uneasiness about a four-year-old’s handling a jackknife. He watched the small face, haloed in light from the chickenhouse window, furrowed with concentration, tongue between teeth. The knifeblade cut in and moved slowly, jerkily, down the point of the whittling stick.
I was whittling willow,
he remembered with a start.
I was going to make a whistle. It was Uncle Ben. He kept his hand on my arm, and not to steady me, but because he wanted to.

And now, fists clenched, remembering the pistol in his briefcase, Will thought:
What makes it die? Wordsworth. Trailing glory. And when it’s dead—mere duty, is that it? To what?

He found the new package of Tums and opened it and ate one. Still staring at the papers on his desk, he hardly noticed June, his secretary, when she came in with the collection forms for him to sign. He was aware that all lines were sharper than usual this afternoon, that his eyes were curiously sensitive to trifling detail—dust specks in the air, the pages of the book on the desk beside the papers—and he was sensitive to smells as well. It was her scent that made him glance up at her, raising his eyes only to the level of her waist, where the hip-flesh jutted out. He looked up at her face. She was looking a little past him, lifelessly pretty. It had begun to come to his attention, recently, that every woman in the world was sexually attractive.

“My, you’re all dolled up,” he said. She was not. Her eyes snapped into focus on his face and she looked alarmed and pleased. Will Jr looked down, flushing.
She would do it,
he thought. His chest filled with a pleasurable panic.
Horrible,
he thought. But he couldn’t think of why.

It was just as he was leaving, a little after seven, that Mrs. Kleppmann called. He was alone in the office and answered it himself.

“Mr. Hodge, please,” she said.

“Who is this?” he asked, though the voice was unmistakable.

“Oh, Mr. Hodge,” she said, “it’s you.”

“Who is this?” he asked again.

“I need to see you,” she said. “About my husband. It’s urgent. Is it possible?”

“Where are you?” he said.

“Just listen. I can’t talk long. Have you a pencil?”

He stared a moment longer, mind a blank, then took out his ball-point pen and clicked the head into position. “Ok,” he said, “shoot.” He chewed his lower lip and wrote it down. Afterward, the memory of her walk came over him, and he had a sensation like fear and like joy, a shortness of breath. He reached in his pocket automatically, with his left hand, for the Tums.

5

Will had something on his mind, she saw at once. At first she thought it was the meeting tonight, one of those Civil Rights shows he was always getting himself involved in, but when she mentioned it at the supper table she discovered he’d forgotten that.

“Aren’t you going, then, Willie?” she said. “You don’t
have
to,” she said. “Plenty of people don’t, you know. If you don’t see any sense in it—”

“Not the point,” he said. A piece of spaghetti dropped from his lip and he tried to catch it with his fork, missed it, and spattered his tie a little. “Damn,” he said.

“Christ’s sakes,” Danny said, smiling.

Will glanced at him, then down again at his plate.

“You’re really in a mood,” Louise said. “You’re really fun. A million laughs.”

“Oh lay off, will you?” He chewed harder, angry and guilty, and she knew she could drop it but decided the hell with it. She was tired. Danny had been rotten all day, and Madeline, ever since she got home from school, had been making hay on it, playing the goody-goody. There had been times Louise had wanted to throw a pot at them both, or drown them in a tub of boiling oil or something. She had held herself in, saying only—in a voice like jagged iron—
“Can’t
you watch
cartoons
or something?” Maddie would vanish for a while after that, but then there she would be again, hovering beside her when she worked at the sink, or flitting around at her heels like a shadow just thick enough to trip you, consoling her for her sad, sad life in a tone that weighed on Louise like chains, half honest sympathy no doubt, yes, but also half pleasure in showing herself sympathetic. “If you really want to help, wash the lettuce,” she snapped. And then, close to tears, wanted to laugh. It was like throwing good plates at a ghost. For fifteen minutes, there stood Maddie, ineffectually washing the lettuce, then the carrots and radishes, prattling until Louise felt ready to explode, and tying up the sink, and trying so hard to be good, Louise felt, that it wasn’t fair to be anything but kind. She’d taken an aspirin and a glass of water and had relaxed for a minute in the livingroom, exactly as the TV commercials advised, but that too was a joke. Her minute of rest, supposedly refreshing, was shattered three times by cries from Danny—he’d gotten his finger closed in a drawer he knew he was not supposed to be in, and then he’d spilled milk, trying to pour it without taking it out of the refrigerator, and then—what?—yes, had gotten slapped by Maddie, allegedly for trying to bite her. To which Will, coming home, had contributed only his abstracted look, his deafness, and the stink—after all these years—of a Goddamn stupid pipe. “What in hell are you smoking?” she’d said.

“I take it it doesn’t quite sweep you off your feet,” he said. He didn’t bother looking up from the
Evening News.

“It makes me want to kill and things like that. Is that good enough?”

“Look, Mommy Louise, I’m tired,” he said. It was supposed to console her, that “Mommy Louise.” It was what he’d said long ago in college, the first time she gave him a tit. Well it didn’t console her. It was
sick.

“‘Mommy Louise, I’m tired,’“ she mimicked. “Nobody else can be tired, of course.” Then to Danny, coming in on the tricycle she’d told Will he shouldn’t let him ride in the house, “Danny, you get that damn thing out of here, Daddy’s tired.”

Danny looked up at her, then at Will.

“Will,
you
tell him, once.”

“You heard Mommy, Danny. Do what Mommy says.”

“‘Mommy,’“ she mimicked. She wanted to spit.

“Well Jesus,” he said, jerking the paper away from his eyes to stare at her, “you’re in a mood all right! What’s
your
excuse?” In a minute she’d be crying.

She had taken a deep breath, sucking down rage, then had turned and gone back to the kitchen. A minute later she could hear him talking with Madeline. She was giving him her goody-goody stuff, and he was gulping it down like dog-sick. “You bastard,” she thought. “You
bastard.”
But she had controlled herself then, had calmed down and had come out of the kitchen smiling, or more or less smiling, talking lightly of the antiquing kit that had come this morning from Sears. She was meaning to fix the chest of drawers and the dresser in the master bedroom. And even when he’d ignored all she said, she’d managed to keep her spirits up, though God knew what the point was. Now, suddenly, with his growl wrecking dinner, turning the food sour in her stomach, she felt herself letting go, relaxing into rage.