The Sunlight Dialogues (33 page)

He was biting his lips together. “Millie, forgive me.”

“For what?” She was frightened, knowing already, having known for hours. “I don’t
mind,
Ben. I love you.”

But his hand was gone and he had stepped back and stood now with his fist against his forehead. And already she was beginning to hate him, feeling tricked and befouled, seeing him not as tall and splendid but as a hulking baby, sentimental and stupid. “Ben,” she said gently,
“why?”

“I was lying,” he said. “How can I explain? I don’t love you, it was just that I thought I could get you. From the first time I gave you a ride to town, or even before that, when I would drive past your yard and you’d be sitting on the stump watching the kids, looking pretty, dressed like some kind of hobo’s kid. People said—” He stopped and ran his hands through his hair, then slid his hands back into his pockets. He looked sullen, distant.

“Said what?”

“People said you were ‘possible.’”

It was as if he had hit her in the stomach. There was nothing she could say: it was as if some kind of skin had been peeled from her eyes and she was seeing the world for the first time as it was. The fog had covered the moon’s reflection in the water, but even so every blade of grass, every stipple in the wide flat rock they stood on, every indefinite shadow in the fog was as definite as a razor cut.

She said angrily, “Then why did you stop?” She had not known what it was she would say, but the moment she said it, something came clear in her mind, not yet risen to her consciousness but there in the darkness waiting, never to be lost.

“How could I?” he said. “It wasn’t true. You’re good. Kind … gentle …”

“I
am
a whore,” she said. “That is, I’m willing.”

“Millie, don’t talk that way. You know what you are.”

“You’re afraid,” she said.

“That’s not true.” He laughed angrily.

She snatched his arms, caught up in something she didn’t understand; not love, now. Not desire. “Ben, make love to me. Do it! What difference can it make? I’m Millie Jewel. Have you forgotten? Old Clarence Jewel’s daughter. What in hell’s the difference!”

He looked at her calmly, pitying her, Christ on the mountain. “You read too much,” he said.

She felt crushed, and in the same motion of the mind she was in love with him again, because it was true, he’d seen through what she hadn’t seen through herself: she was playing sentimental poor-girl. And she loved him, too, and more than ever, because his tongue was quick. She too had a lightning tongue: he was making a mistake, she knew how to make him happy.

She said, “Ben, how do you know you don’t love me? I excite you, you know it. And you think of me at night, the same as I do of you.”

He looked at the fog on the water, not thinking about it, she suspected; he had thought about it already. She went on waiting, and at last he looked at her forehead and kept his gaze there as though she had something written on it. “I think of a few minutes with you, not a whole lifetime. I don’t know you.”

“You do,” she said. She opened her arms. “Look.”

But he only looked away. “Maybe you’re right.” He took her hand then (a thing she could not understand even now, squinting at the rain washing down Luke’s window) and started back to the car with her. When they got there he opened the door for her, closed it behind her gently, and walked around the front, oddly smiling. He cranked the engine and came around to his side without a word and pulled out onto the road.

“You feel virtuous, don’t you,” she said irritably.

He nodded.

After a while she said to soften it, though she was lying, “I do too.”

When they passed Stony Hill Farm the study lights were on. His father up working, as always, at three a.m. She wondered if Ben was going to get hell when he finally got home.
She
was, you betcha. Her mother would come to the door in her slip, or maybe, if her mother was really angry, her father would come in his gray long Johns. Yes, that was how it would be tonight. They would try to whip her, and she would fight back, an old ritual, stupid and boring and almost without passion, the children peeking out from their bedroom like red-eyed mice; it would go on and on until at last she began to cry in disgust, and as though a switch had been snapped, it would be over. She began to feel a little sick, anticipating it. She might have years left before she escaped it. Except that one of these nights she would leave. She had thought of it often, and once with frightening clarity, a few nights ago, standing over the well drinking from the red and white tin dipper. As though it were actually happening she had seen herself climbing out her window to the slippery porch roof, dropping her bundle to the dirt yard as softly as possible, swinging over the eaves-trough to the loose porch post as she’d done a thousand times in play, snatching up the bundle without stopping to look back (the house all dark, no sound but the dripping of the cistern pipe and the rattle her father made when he slept) and running for the highway.

Ben sat with his head tipped, thinking, his fingers light on the steering wheel. His lower jaw was pushed forward in that funny way all the Hodge boys had, like their father, a look humorously rueful. It came to her that she had lost him, and almost before she knew what she was thinking she slid over beside him and pressed her head to his shoulder as if sleepily. She’d never been more wide awake in her life. Her left breast still tingled from his touch, and all that he had said ran through her mind, distinct and frightening now, like words in a dream.
I think of a few minutes with you.
She had lolled through daydreams of living as his wife at Stony Hill (it never entered her mind that they might live anywhere else), but she too had thought chiefly of minutes—the few minutes when she saw him next, the few minutes when finally he would make love to her. In her bed, in the dark, she had thought—with an intense sensation of mingled dread, joy, and guilt—of Ben Hodge’s secret parts, a quasi-mystical vision compounded of all she had ever seen or guessed, the small naked organs of her little brothers, the hairy erection pictured on a card Sonny Wall had shown her once, the awesome rod and stones on Mr. Kistner’s bull. But she saw now, leaning on his shoulder, not visions but lost reality: she would have been a good wife to him, would have borne him sweet children, supported him through troubles, listened to his talk. She would have been a lady, refined and beautiful, all at her ease and never even lifting her voice—like his mother.

It came to her—and she knew it was final—that, one way or another, she would marry a Hodge.

She said as if sleepily, moving her cheek on his arm, “You know, I really don’t understand you. What made you stop?”

“Honor,” he said.

She laughed, patting his arm. “How dear.” She peeked up at him and saw that he was smiling. She said: “What would you do if I took off all my clothes right now?”

“Probably run the car into a tree,” he said. A second later he said, startled, “Darn you, I think you’d do it!”

“Nope,” she said, smiling. “I’ve made a great decision.”

He crinkled his neck to look at her. “You’re going to be a nun.”

“Mmm, something like that.” She thought about it. “Something very much like that.” Then: “Ben, honey, how old is your brother Will?”

He looked at her again, squinting. “Why?”

She kissed his muscle.

It was always the same. By the time they’d finished dessert and coffee, the pain was beginning to overwhelm the pills and Luke was irascible again, baiting her, nagging her as though he did not know as well as she did why they went through these scenes. She could almost wish the bad part would come on him at once, so that the whole thing might be over sooner. She got herself a glass of bourbon from the diningroom cabinet, carried it to the kitchen for ice, stirred it in slowly, knowing he was waiting at the fireplace impatiently, eager to be digging at her again, make her see clearly once and for all that all her life and all her thoughts were hollow sham. That was the bitterest part of it. He was bright. They might have said things to each other. And was it from living with Ben, too, that he’d learned that awful righteousness? He could never forgive her for “cheating” on his father. His word, not hers. A child’s word. “Selfish bitch,” he’d called her once, he who knew nothing of selfishness or bitchery, no more than he knew of selflessness or whatever the opposite of bitchery was (sophrosyne?), knew only his own colossal ego, too self-centered even to understand why he couldn’t simply dismiss her as evil and forget it. Sweet Christ how she hated him! But no. No more than she hated his father. It was past that. Caught in impossibilities, but knowing, at least, why she hated the part of herself she hated and why she could not escape, ever, for all the grinning cow-catchers and whistling boats and twinkling propellers in Christendom.
Ah, Christendom!
she thought.

When she reached the livingroom with the drink he was staring at the door as if he’d been staring at it all the time she was gone, and maybe he had. “Luke,” she said quickly, before he could speak, “you really should think of getting rid of this place. You know you’re not cut out to be a farmer.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“My dear child, I don’t give a damn one way or the other, and that’s God’s truth.”

“God’s truth,” he sneered. He leaned forward in his chair and pressed his hands to the sides of his head. He was handsome, with his ears covered. All the Hodge features cut fine, for once: a face triangular as an elf’s, a chin square and strong but small, compared to the others, cheekbones as high as the Indian boy’s. The firelight flickered on his hair and shoulder and gleamed, bright red, on his shoe. She listened to the pouring rain, another huge shudder of thunder.

“I just think you ought to try graduate school,” she said at last, crisply. “I know you’re convinced they have nothing to teach you, but who knows? maybe you’d find someone who’s almost as clever as you are.” It was a stupid thing to say. He was right to ignore it. She crossed her feet on the hassock and sipped her drink. At length she said, flip, “You know I’m right, Luke. Farming’s impossible. It’s been impossible for years, unless you’re the Bell Telephone Company. Try something where you’ve got a chance.”

“Sure,” he said, looking down, grinning horribly.

She sighed.

She felt stifled in his junk-filled house with its high, dark ceilings, gloomy wallpaper, threadbare floral rugs. A place for dying, a house for sick old women, not a twenty-two-year-old boy. But maybe it was right. Her son was a sick old woman, not a boy. (He’d come home in the middle of his first semester of grad school at Syracuse—a history major—and had refused to go back. Because of the headaches, he’d told his father, and probably it was the truth, or partly the truth. Pressure could bring the headaches on, they’d found out later from the specialist. He’d moved into his father’s apartment—it was not long after their divorce—just two weeks after she’d sold Stony Hill—and had settled down to a life of drinking gin and ice and reading mysteries and playing his ridiculous banjo. Will had put up with it for a while, as Will put up with everything, potching at the sinktrap with a loose old pipewrench, humming his one tuneless, fragmentary song as though the banjo were not going, refilling the ice-trays which Luke left empty, and going nearsightedly over the papers (talking to himself, scoffing, grumbling) he brought home every night from the office. He had never asked what Luke’s plans were. (No one had told her that, but she knew him.) Had merely waited, enduring it because that was his way—Will Hodge had patience where other people had blood, she’d once told him—and eventually Luke’s brother Will Jr had said, “Luke, boy, you ought to try your hand at farming.
C’est vrai!
Great emoluments of the spiritual variety in toiling close to Nature.” And so his father had gotten him a farm, had foreclosed on the man who’d bought it, with Will’s help, from the Runian estate.)

They sat in silence until Luke could no longer stand it. He said, “The cops had me down for questioning this afternoon. D’you hear?”

She glanced at him, then looked into her drink.

“They think I’m the one that let him out, either me or Will. Because we’re bad guys.” He laughed palely.

“What are you talking about?”

“Somebody let him out, that’s all, and they think it was one of us.”

“Was it?”

“Why not? Think how easy it would’ve been. Either one of us could have gone up to Salvador, with a note from Dad, say, or maybe Judge White—
he
wouldn’t know what their writing looked like. Or we could’ve just said we wanted to talk to him, away from the other prisoners. He’d have opened up. Hodges, you know. Grand old Hodges. And it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from me or Will. Antisocial. Revolutionary. Dirty Commies.”

“Stop it,” she snapped.

“Why?”

“It’s sentimental tripe. Speech-making. You sound like somebody on TV, full of self-pity. It’s childish.”

He leaned forward, glaring, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. The room filled with the sound of the rain, a rattle like a river going by. He said at last, quietly, driving the words out by intense pressure, “What did you expect us to be? Are
you
a grown-up? Is Dad? How do you think it was all those years, listening to you two bitch, the same old sentences over and over, neither one listening for a second to the other, like a couple of deaf idiots shouting at each other in the dark? Every word he said was moronic, according to you, and any fool could see what
you
said was moronic, not that the Old Man didn’t trouble to point it out. And you were the people we were supposed to listen to!—take orders from! Jesus, I’d sit there in the livingroom hearing you blather at each other out in the kitchen, the Old Man sitting there fuming at the table with his bib tucked under his chin like a baby’s, and you slamming around at the sink saying clever clever things like some brat to her mean old papa. Talk about childish! And then you’d go to bed and he’d come in in his stupid damn nightdress and beg you like a kid that can’t have candy, and you’d sit there wide-eyed like an outraged little virgin. By God it was an education! Prepared us for the world, that’s a fact. The great university, for instance, where the stupidest people you ever saw in your life get to
teach
you. You don’t know what it’s like. You’re so stupid you believe them—or some of them, which is dumber than believing all of them. It’s the truth. Listen.” He suddenly stood up, as if afraid she would cut him off. “They’re like chickens, big fat stupid chickens. They come examine your brain like chickens inspecting the inside of a clock. I had an English teacher, he had us buy an anthology and then he got a different one, and every question he ever asked, the answer was there in that other book. There wasn’t one single thing he knew! Not one! But Jesus what a show that horse’s ass put on. He had all the gestures. He knew how to make his eyes light up just like a human being. And oh was he kind—to fat, dumb girls. And he would lecture on what trouble they used to have getting the snow cleared off the sidewalks at Hahvid. Yeah. With diagrams on the board. And another one. He taught us how to find symbols in novels. Like this blue parachute that comes down in
Lord of the Flies.
‘Blue,’ he’d say. ‘What does
blue
make you think of?’ He looked like Dylan Thomas, but with yellow hair and pink cheeks. He was in Counter-Intelligence during the War, which is why the fucking War took so long. ’Blue,’ he would say. ‘Think now. Blue.’ Some fat dumb girl with blue pimples would say, ‘The Virgin Mary?’ and he’d say ‘That’s it!
That’s IT!’
Sweet Jesus please us! One class I was in, the lady brought in a
World Book
salesman. I swear to God. He took half an hour giving his pitch to the whole fucking class. And then the math classes. That was worse. Man would spend an hour writing out on the board the same explanations you could get in the book, except the book was faster and clearer, and he knew it. He cut class maybe twenty-some times in one lousy semester. But history! Jesus!”