The Sunlight Dialogues (93 page)

Louise said, “You’re never home nights any more.”

“Half-crazy with work,” I said. “Have you any idea?”

“You’ll be crazy all the way. You don’t play with the kids. You have nightmares night after night after night. Sometimes I’m afraid of you.”

“It will be over. Take it easy. Be patient.
C’est la vie.”

“And your French is horrible,” she said.

Hawes said, “Take an extra day, Will. Listen. Let me lend you my bunny key.” Bent closer. “Fantastic place, that club in Chicago. Girl named Molly. Watch for her. Tell her Clarence sent you.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“I mean it, ole pal.”

“No thanks. Got things on my mind. I recommend the same. Get your mind back on mergers. What were this last year’s total assets for the Dansville First National? What’s the population complex? New industry coming? Farm loans secure? Got to have it by heart Hawes. Got to make the Feds say ‘hmm!’ Got to wake ’em up with the tragedy of it all. Monumental injustice. They get bored, that’s the secret. You’d be bored too, sitting there reading a thousand pages of crap that’s no interest to anybody. So they come to the hearing and they’re half-asleep. Try cartoons in the margins. Dirty pictures maybe. Wake ’em up.”

“Take the bunny key.”

“No. Got things on my mind.”

Perdu.

Voices:

Circuit court, Division Nine, now in session. Honorable Christ the Lord, Judge.

Good morning, gentlemen. Young fellow, call the docket.

Heaven and Earth versus William Hodge.

Would you care to make an opening statement?

We would, your Honor.

Proceed.

Room very large, excessively bright despite the layers of blue-green smoke, mercurious, stiffening to mare’s tales before the tiered dais.
The Judge is bored. Beware of a bored Judge, Counsellor. A bad beginning. This bodes ill, oh ill! for William Hodge, acting in his own defense. A fool. Colossal idiot. It is impossible to act in one’s own defense. Miserable. Well,
C’est la mort.

I will not be judged by Him.

Kleppmann is my judge. O lead us not into Milwaukee, deliver us from Pittsburgh.

Sholly hoolibash! Niscera willy-bill bingle-um gimpf!

Don’t mock me, Kleppmann. We’re past that, you and I. Another martini?

Don’t mind if I do. You’re paying, of course?

Naturally. Or my firm is. Naturally.

Smile.

You had me running for a while there Kleppmann, I’ll give it to you. Well, that’s over.

The pistol in his hand (so he imagines) is utterly still and comfortably warm.

A woman with a sweet voice mumbled something, and he smiled, and she mumbled it again. He opened his eyes.

“Fasten your seat-belt, please, Mr. Hodge. We’re landing.”

“Is something wrong?”

She smiled and tipped her head. She had not heard him.

‘Les amis’ my foot. Secretly married, quintuplets in the stroller, at home with her husband who was born in Ely, Iowa. At heart a pig grower; by trade, a bicycle mechanic.

He could see the lights of St. Louis shooting out behind the wing like sparks, stretching out forever, beautiful. And then the plane was diving, as it seemed to him—now leveling again. Before his stomach was ready for it, the landing-gear bumped on the runway.

He caught the train south (with an hour to spare) and sat reading of earthquakes and the walls of Jericho. It made him remember, more vividly than he would have thought possible, his cousin Ben Jr, head tipped nearly to his shoulder, grinning, arguing about whether God, like Merlin, was so powerful he could make a cage so strong He couldn’t get out of it Himself. Or was the Merlin story another of Ben Jr’s lies? And then he was remembering a song Ben would sing—irrelevant, surely.

King David was my dancing man,
And a juggler too as well;
The way he thrown his balls around
I’ll dance with him in hell!

2

In fact, he had no idea what it was he expected. It was as if he had thrown away his compass, in the classical way, and had ventured into the thickness of the woods prepared for whatever he was destined to meet (Phaiakians?), including the man with the gun in the public lavatory. She had said she wanted to talk to him, and it was pleasant to think it was really that—pleasant not so much in any sexual way as metaphysically, if that was not too big a word for it: pleasant to think she might innocently tell him the truth. But he didn’t expect it.

He was pleasantly numb from the martinis on the train, but not so drunk he was entirely indifferent to matters of, as the expression goes, life and death. The pistol was not in his briefcase but in his pocket.

He was almost alone on the concrete platform. A few students had gotten off—it was a college town—and there was a man with a sunken, Southern mouth, an engineer’s cap, a frock, and pantlegs limply cylindrical, walking along beside the train looking under it, as if watching for a rabbit for his hounds. It was a small town, and, after the hurtle of motion he’d endured this past hour, he had a sharp sense of its spatial isolation—the expanse of bare farmland on every side, the profound darkness outside the pale rim of dead white light from the depot lamps. Against the wall there were taxi drivers, but they did not call out to him or even, as far as he could tell, notice his presence on the platform. He put the pipe in his mouth, selfconsciously solemn, and walked toward the waiting-room doors.

“Thank heavens,” Mrs. Kleppmann said from the shadow of the pillar where she waited, “you’ve come!”

It rang false—but everything was ringing false. He nodded, smiling politely, and moved toward her. She took his hand. “Thank you,” she said. Perhaps she meant it. He felt queerly indifferent.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“This way.” She drew him toward her and down the wide-boarded hall.

They came out on a parking lot lit in gray-white, like the platform on the other side of the depot, and she led him to a long blue station wagon that he might have known at once belonged to Mrs. Kleppmann. It had no chrome, no decorations, no radio, even, and he could not tell what kind it was but knew it was expensive.

“Nice car,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“What’s up, Mrs. Kleppmann?”

“Later,” she said. She nodded toward the man in the driver’s seat, waiting for them. He had his hat off because of the heat.

They got in then and arranged what little he had in the way of gear—not much: his briefcase, the hat he for some reason felt he should carry, not wear, the raincoat Louise had insisted on his bringing. The driver switched on the motor, quiet as a vacuum cleaner, and the car slid back out of its parking slot and as if without change of direction, smooth as a barque turned in the wind; started forward. Soon the pale light of the town sank behind them and they were moving through a darkness deeper than any he had seen since earliest childhood.

“You’re a long way from civilization,” he said.

She reached over, matronly, and patted his hand. “Farther than you think,” she said. Not sly. She meant him to understand it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She laughed.

They flowed into what might have been the limits of the world, the depths of the Midwest, oakwoods and farmland where St. Louis was a dream and Chicago an old wives’ fable, Cimmerian country. There was no sign of the moon, only mist and cloud, and it was hard to believe that in the morning there would be sunlight.

“You sounded worried,” he said. She had, in fact, but he understood the game.

“I am.”

In the darkness, Will smiled.

At last there was a yellow glow in the mist—the sharp yellow of mosquito bulbs—and there were pillars and lighted windows.

“That your house?” he said.

He felt, rather than saw, her nod in the darkness. She closed her hand on his more tightly, and he understood that for her it partly wasn’t a game. More the pity for her then. His armpits itched, and he thought,
I’m afraid.
And yet he was not. It was as if he had nothing more to do with the fears of his common mortality.

She withdrew her hand.

“You had nothing to say to me?” he said. “—For the record.”

After a moment: “Nothing.”

Will sighed and slipped his hand into his pocket where the gun was. And now, suddenly, he saw how absurd it was: the gun was no protection, a weighty inconvenience. “I’m a fool,” he thought.

“Do you think so?”

He had not meant to speak out loud.

They were up in the driveway turn-around now, and the car had stopped. Time, too, seemed to have stopped. He saw Kleppmann’s huge barn, clean-lined against the mist, windows lighted as on a Christmas card, and Kleppmann’s long chickenhouse of cinder-block, and to the east, the ornate, absurd old house, sheltered by maples. The grass was white from the mist; the light coming out through the windows was orange. With the motor off, the world was as quiet as the North Pole. Kleppmann bowed, opening the door. “Ah yes,” he said. “You’ve come.”

Will bowed back, abstracted and polite. “Certainly.” His stomach closed as if what he confronted were not a man but an upright crocodile.

Strange meeting. One saw too much television, no doubt. In any case, it took him a long time to get used to it. He had come half-prepared to kill or be killed, but Kleppmann was having a party. The guests moved all through the house, talking, their voices blending to a roar as indefinite as the overhanging mist, and Kleppmann the Terrible stood on the front lawn like an elderly serpent looking after his barbecue. Like a middle-class merchant. He was cooking not on a barbecue grill of the usual sort but on a long, wide trench with cinderblocks around the edge and, across the middle, steel rods and chickenwire. He stood in his white apron, pouring wine on the meat like a drink-offering to the newly dead—or, to be precise, pouring beer first, and afterward wine, and after that, when the fat began burning, water. Finally he sprinkled flour on the meat, his fluttering fingers incongruous against his somber death’s-head face. Grimly, as though any humorous gesture were the farthest thing from his mind, he intoned: “Amen.” Tentatively, watching his eyes, Will smiled.

“We usually have nothing but steak,” Kleppmann said. “Young heifer. But these people—echh! My wife’s friends, as you’ve guessed. However, for you a coal black ram without a spot.” He pointed with his fork.

“I wouldn’t have known the difference, you know,” Will said, and smiled again.

“You are a wise man,” Kleppmann said.

“Not really.” He shrank back then, an instant late. The old man was angry, overflowing with hate, or anyway seething, waiting; and Will had been a fool to expect it to be different. He studied the face gray-orange and still as lead cooling in a smelter’s mold, Kleppmann bending toward the fire, looking in, and decided abruptly that he, too, could wait.

“Join the party if you like,” Kleppmann said. “Don’t let me keep you.”

“I may do that,” he said, but remained. He became conscious of the rumble of a train now, somewhere in the distance. No light from it reached him.

Kleppmann was making no further pretense of talking. Will took a Tums and moved away a little to stand looking out into darkness. Casually, he asked, “What have you got on me, Kleppmann, that makes you so brave?”

Kleppmann gave no sign. “Brave?” he echoed politely.

“This property’s yours all right,” Will said, looking up into the trees. The branches and the leaves were sickly yellow from the mosquito bulbs on the porch. “The car’s yours too, and the horses or chickens or whatever’s out there in the barn.”

“I never mean to take advantage,” Kleppmann said. It seemed to Will—but it was hard to be sure—that the directness made Kleppmann uneasy.

“It can’t be merely the long hours I put in,” Will continued as if Kleppmann hadn’t spoken. “You’re a foxy old man, so I imagine you see through the long hours. They’re not struggle for survival, not a pain in the neck that would make me vulnerable to, say, some gratuity from you. They’re for pleasure.”

“It’s a good thing when a man likes his work,” Kleppmann said. He was a dead man, all mechanical good manners, or the Wizard of Oz, his mind far away, behind some curtain pushing buttons and watching with tiny, sharp eyes. He needed jarring.

“I know now! The business in Chicago.”

Kleppmann glanced at him, then away.

Will’s voice was not booming with confidence now, or so it seemed from inside, but it made no difference. He wasn’t bluffing. His hatred swelled his chest; not anger but the feeling one has toward things with cold blood. “The drinking, the orgy. I suppose you know about all that. Well, I’d be sorry to have it come out, that’s true. For the children’s sakes, and Louise’s.” He frowned, checking his emotions to see if it was true—if anything at all in his attic of old opinions, as Uncle Tag used to say, was true to his feelings. But the question was hard, and he put it off. “Not for my own sake though, not for myself. That is, I wouldn’t drop pursuit of you merely to keep that quiet. It doesn’t strike me as sufficiently evil, though I suppose I know how other people might feel—so I wouldn’t pay. Also—” He folded his hands around the glass he was carefully not drinking from and sucked at his teeth, collecting his thoughts. “Also, fact is, I believe my wife would feel the same, ultimately. We’re not desperate, like some, for complete approval from everybody on the block.” (“Love,” she’d scornfully echoed, he remembered, meaning “What is love?” It was a question people were always asking nowadays, scornfully—at the cafeteria where he ate with Sol and Hawes and the others, in the tiresome art films, at parties. It infuriated him that he couldn’t snap out the answer at them. It seemed to him he had it on the tip of his tongue. Just the same, he thought, I love her, as well as I can. Such things exist.) Then, less than certain that the troublesome shade was at rest for good, he returned his attention to Kleppmann and the fire. “In short,” Will said, “if it was in your mind that you might blackmail me off your ass, so to speak, with the Chicago business, forget it.”

Kleppmann smiled, still hiding behind his curtain pushing buttons. “These are shameless times,” he said.