The Sunlight Dialogues Read online

  “Is that you, Fred?” she whined.

  He held his nose lightly with his left hand and thought, as he’d occasionally thought before, how weird it would be if it were not him but some stranger, some lunatic escaped from the hospital up in Buffalo. The man would stand smiling, not answering, his glistening eyes bugging out like a toad’s, surprised at the sound of a voice in the unlighted house, and after a moment she would appear in the near-darkness at the diningroom door, her high, chinless head alert and listening, white as death.

  “Fred?” she called again, “is that you, Fred?”

  “Just me,” Clumly said, calm. He snapped on the lights.

  He sat picking at his food, across from her, saying nothing while he ate, as usual. If there were hairs in the stew, he did not notice. Years ago—so long ago he could hardly remember it—he’d said something to her once about a hair in some food, and it had set off a terrible scene. She’d cried and cried, and she’d locked herself in the bathroom and said she was going to kill herself. “I’ll cut my throat with a razorblade,” she said. “Where are the razorblades?” And he’d stood bent over outside the bathroom door calling to her through the keyhole, begging her not to; he’d even sobbed, but purposely, hoping to persuade her, not really from grief. She had complained that he didn’t love her, she was a burden to the world; and even as he reasoned and pleaded with her Clumly had realized, calmly, sensibly, that all she said was, well, sad but true. But in the same rush of clear-headed detachment he had recognized, like Jacob of old when he found he’d got Leah, whose arms were like sticks and whose mouth was as flat as a salamander’s, that he’d have to be a monster to tell her the truth. What would the poor woman do, no beauty any more, without a skill or a talent in the world? He’d made a mistake in marrying her, one he might never have made if he’d been a few years older when they met, but his mistake, nevertheless. A mistake he was stuck with. He’d been twenty when they met, and she’d been eighteen. He was in the Navy, just getting his eyes opened. He’d gone to his first house of prostitution when they’d put in at the Virgin Islands, and they all sat in one small room with a radio playing foreign music, three other sailors and himself and the four brown, queerly familyless women (it seemed to him) in their slippery dresses and no underwear, their black hair as slick as silk—all of them drinking sludgy black stuff which smelled like Luden’s Cough Syrup, but which they said was rum. He felt caught in an ominous spell. They looked like gypsies with crowns of plastic flowers in their hair. The room smelled rotten, the drink was poison, and touching the woman he had happened to end up with thrilled and repelled him—she was thirty if she was a day. Vockshy, Vasty, her name was. Something. Before long, whether from the poisonous drink or from Presbyterian shame, Clumly was vomiting in the street more violently than he would have thought possible for a human. He had to stand watch bent double the next day, and ever since that night his liver had been bad and whenever he was tired he’d walk slightly bent at the waist. Nevertheless, this is living! he’d thought. “Work like the devil, play like the devil,” they said on the ship. Bam. When he went back to the whorehouse, Vockshy or Vasty was “occupied,” he had to take a different girl. This queerly upset him. And then, home on leave, he’d found the pale and musing blind girl standing there soft as a flag beside an oak tree with burning green leaves—or, rather, the nearly blind girl: at that time she had sight enough to be put in charge of younger children from the Blind School, to lead them around laughing like circus people in time of pestilence, help them with their schoolwork, or, like the eldest orphaned child, punish them when they were bad. They were playing in the shaded hollow below her, and she, standing by the oak tree, was watching and listening and smelling the wind, she said. Her talk was like poetry in those days. She’d grown out of that later, as one does. Her voice was as soft as a southern breeze on the Mediterranean, so soft Clumly had to lean toward her to hear—blushing, twisting the sailor’s hat in his hands. And so for two weeks they met every day, as if by accident, to walk and talk among the large trees or make pictures in the dirt with sticks or stones, or to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon (the thought of her breasts beneath the brassiere and high-collared blouse made him pale), and when he had to leave again she promised she would write. Eventually they’d gotten married. She seemed saintlike to him, and noble as a queen. He felt such an ache of tenderness for her, such reverence, almost, for what he called then her quiet courage, he could hardly sleep nights. He wrote to her constantly, slavishly, after the first two weeks, before he’d even thought about marrying her, and the letters that came to him from her (on pink or blue scalloped paper, awkwardly typed because she couldn’t see well enough to read over what she’d written or even make sure what she said made sense) he read over and over and kept at the head of his bunk where he could smell them as he went to sleep. The others had teased him some, but not for long. People could say what they liked about them, sailors were the gentlest people in the world. Even now it could make his eyes mist, thinking about sailors. It was the sea that did it, old and bottomless with mystery, as people say, capable at times of unbelievable rage, and capable, too, of a peace that baffled you. As he’d tried to explain to Mayor Mullen once, to a man locked up in a steel ship, the sea was, well, really something. It changed you. Especially at night. Then the sickness had come, turning Fred Clumly to a grublike, virtually hairless monster, and he’d stopped writing, hoping to spare her. But his parents had sought her out and spoken to her, of course. She’d written to his buddy. Dog, they called him. He looked like a fancy dog with a too-erect head and large pink eyes. (Clumly could no longer remember the boy’s real name. Walter Brown?) Dog had told her how it was with Clumly—how he felt about her and how he felt about, poor devil, himself. And so Clumly’s love had bravely borrowed the money for a bus trip to Texas. “You look as beautiful as ever to me,” she said in her soft voice, and they both wept. Her voice was unmysterious, faintly alarming. Dog came to the hospital and wept too. She read to him from a book in braille about Sir Lancelot, some story of adventure and romance so touching and foreign to them both that it made them blush and stop the reading for a while from embarrassment and fear. They were married, soon afterward, there in the hospital. That was all far in the past now, nearly forgotten; and even that night when she’d locked herself in the bathroom he could remember the beginning of it all no more clearly than one remembers a dream days later. She’d been plain to start with, except for her chestnut-colored hair. As she grew older she grew pinched and sickly-looking as a witch, and her hair became streaked with wiry gray. She began to tipple wine a little when he wasn’t at home. Standing at the bathroom door that night, calling to her through it, he saw the years stretched out before him like a cheap hall rug in a strange and unfriendly hotel, and he thought—with such violence that it made him shaky—how it had felt to be totally free, standing looking down at the prow of a ship dimly lighted at night, with the ocean stretching away on all sides ambiguous as an oracle and glinting with unearthly silver, as calm and steady in its rhythm as the blood in your veins. Though he’d firmly put it behind him, he had not in all his years forgotten that vision, that temptation. One’s struggle with the devil never ends. But he’d made her come out of the bathroom at last, groaning and stretching out her arms to him, and if there were hairs in the food tonight, or last night, or sometime last year, Clumly did not know it. If her slip showed or she smelled of wine, he did not notice it. Chief of Police Fred Clumly had renounced the world.

  She said, “You look tired, Fred.” Clumly’s wife went out of her way to find phrases like “you look” or “I see that …” They all did that, blind people. He had a theory it was something they taught them at the Blind School, the same as they taught them to walk slightly faster than normal people, with their heads drawn back so they wouldn’t hit first with their chins.

  “Aye-uh,” he said. “Tired. Gets harder every year.” For all his annoyance, he spoke kindly, as was right. He
glanced at her. She was shaking her head, the eyes turning with the face, and he looked down again.

  After a moment she said—too loudly, as always, as though her voice had to be loud to get past the darkness she inhabited—”Vanessa Hodge called.”

  “Mmm,” he said. He pushed the last of the gray stew against his bread and put it in his mouth, then wiped his hands on his napkin.

  “It’s about those Indian boys you’ve got locked up. Hodges are their guardians, you know. Or they used to be. Poor Hodges.”

  He pushed the plate away and drew the coffeecup closer.

  “It’s been terrible for the Hodges. Poor Vanessa’s not up to snuff since that little stroke or whatever it was, and she’s not getting any younger. Even when things are running smoothly, she doesn’t get around like she used to. She said they’d come in at all hours of the night, and sometimes their drunken friends with them. She said one night last winter Ben found that oldest boy lying on his bed just as naked as the day he was born, not a cover on him. She said when Ben touched him he thought he was dead. As cold as clay. She said Ben said he never knew before that when they say ‘ stone drunk’ that’s exactly what they mean.”

  Clumly sucked in the lukewarm Sanka and said nothing. He minded the way she went on and on and the blankness of her face, as though it were not a woman talking but the face of a horse on the merry-go-round, but though he minded, even now after all these years, he did not think about it. He was thinking of the bearded one from California. Could be he really was a little crazy. You heard sometimes about people going crazy from a bad burn. He prattled and babbled from morning to night, bothering the guards, bothering the other prisoners, and when he saw you watching him he made faces, or said a prayer for you, or he jerked up his hands like an animal about to claw you. But it didn’t really seem like lunacy to Clumly. It seemed like an act, no less an act than those magic tricks he did, and the fact that the man went on with it day after day made Clumly uneasy. What went on inside their minds, people like that? Oh, they’d find out he was sane all right. Clumly would bet ten dollars on that. He was sane but he didn’t think the same as other people. He was up to something. Over and over, the past few days, Clumly had found himself going over the jail routine, as if expecting a break—he felt like a man told to lock up Houdini—or searching his brain for where he’d seen before that face he knew he had never before laid eyes on. He waited for trouble from the prisoners, but there was nothing, and he knew all the while that there would be nothing. This morning, a little surprised at himself, he’d checked the pistol he hadn’t had out of its holster for God knew how long. His hand was shaking like an old, old man’s.

  She was saying, “The oldest one would come wake them up at three in the morning, just as drunk as could be, and he’d say, ‘ It’s all taken care of now. He’ll be a different person tomorrow.’ Three in the morning. Imagine. Poor Ben has to get up at dawn to milk the cows.”

  “That’s all over,” Clumly said abruptly. “They’re out of the Hodges’ hands.”

  “It’s that bad?” she asked. Her face drooped to a pattern of upside-down V’s.

  “Aye-up.” He finished the Sanka and pushed away the cup.

  She poured herself more tea and said nothing for a moment, merely moved her lips, talking to herself. He was aware that he’d cut her off curtly. Her life wasn’t perfect either, God knew. At last, since life must go on, she said, “You’re still keeping that madman, I suppose?”

  “Still keeping him,” he said. To keep her from saying more he opened the paper.

  But she said, “I don’t suppose he’s dangerous.”

  “Not there in the bucket,” he said.

  She raised her teacup, distressed by his tone, and she touched a button on her blouse with her left hand. He watched her drink and then lower the cup again slowly, lowering her left hand to the saucer to guide the cup down. He felt sorry for her, fleetingly, and looked up at the light above the table, then down at the Daily News. At first, because he’d been looking at the light, it seemed that the paper was empty, no news whatever today, neither good tidings nor bad. But after a moment he could see once more, vermillion print that gradually settled to black. There was a picture of a wrecked tractor-trailer and the Thruway behind it, a hundred yards or so away. He’d heard it all on the police radio this morning. He turned to the comics and read them slowly and solemnly, word for word. Then he read the obituaries.

  “Clive Paxton died,” he said.

  “No!” she said.

  “Seventy-six.”

  She had heard he was ailing. He’d left a pretty penny to his sons and that poor sad daughter of his, you could bet on that. They didn’t live here any more, they’d moved away to places like Florida and California and Paris France. “Poor Elizabeth,” she said. Clumly made himself a note to send flowers.

  He was in bed ahead of her, as always. He lay in the dark listening, his mind almost comfortably blank at last. He heard the water running in the sink, the noise she made brushing her teeth, the clatter of, perhaps, the soap dish falling, and, after a while, the flush of the toilet. She came through the darkness of the hall and opened the door very quietly, to keep from waking him in case he should be asleep. He listened to her taking out the bobby pins, dropping them softly one by one in the chipped seashell on her dresser. At last she turned down the covers on her side (he lay with his back to her) and climbed into bed. He didn’t need to watch to see it all in bitter clarity: her long skinny legs, more agile than his, as ghostly white as the white silk nightie, the long, webbed feet as limber as the feet of an ape. Her lips would still be moving. Or had they stopped? He had a feeling she was looking at him with her blind eyes, as she did sometimes—watching him with every nerve in her body. He lay motionless. She drew the sheet and coverture to her bony chest and lay still on her back, her head pressed firmly into the pillow, her nose, even sharper when her eyes were out, pointing at the ceiling. She looked like a chicken in bed. He lay on his side with his hands folded, his small, close-set eyes fixed on the wallpaper a foot away, staring at it as a mouse would stare at a place where he once saw a cat. Through the springs of the mattress he could hear their two heartbeats, his own slow and awesome as the nightlong pounding of a big ship’s engines on a calm sea, hers quick and light as squirrel feet. He was imagining it, he knew. She lay as motionless as a dead chicken. It wouldn’t surprise him if, turning, he found that her feet were sticking in the air.

  “Fred?” she said.

  He thought of the rouged, naked breasts of the waitress with the coffeepot. But the image no longer stirred him. He saw himself walking along a beach where the sand was tiny grits of color, blue and green and deep red and yellow, like minute pieces from a stained-glass window. Four men who looked vaguely like Mayor Mullen sat scowling, watching him approach, with towels around their waists. He looked toward the sea and wide green sky, distressed.

  It occurred to him suddenly that he was hungry. Ravenous. He thought of going down to the refrigerator, or to the cellar, where he had, if he remembered right, two cases of Carting’s Beer.

  “Do you hear something, Fred?” she asked softly.

  There was someone in the yard. He heard it distinctly, or felt it through the walls and beams of the house and the dark packed earth below the grass. Both of them lay perfectly still. Minutes passed. Now the prowler was inside, feeling his way through the cluttered blackness from the cellar door toward the stairs that led up to the pantry. There were snakes down there, and spiders, and long, lean rats. He’s fished one out of the cistern a month ago. The prowler stood listening at the door to the pantry, head bent almost to the porcelain knob. Then nothing, not a sound for fifteen minutes. It came to him that his wife was asleep, he’d only imagined that she’d spoken to him. There was no one in the cellar, not the bearded, disfigured magician, as he’d thought, and not anyone else. In the gaunt, high-gabled wooden husk they were alone, as usual. He could just make out the darker places on the wallpaper, the crooke
d trail of vines and the large gray smudges, diagonally receding, a foot apart. Roses.