The Sunlight Dialogues (81 page)

“I’ll tell you all about it. ’Mon out.”

They were leaving the business district now. He held the cold pipe in his hand and closed his eyes again, thinking how good a martini would taste. He thought of Louise, who disapproved of martinis, and whose anger and distress when he drank filled him with fright like the fright he’d felt when he’d done wrong in his childhood. When he opened his eyes, much later, the taxi was gliding up a winding street with trees on each side. The houses were low and expensive and had diamond-shaped windowpanes. The driver slowed down, looking up at street numbers, then slowed more and pulled over. “That’s it,” he said. He nodded up at it. It was big, modern, and even from outside it had the look of an overpriced doctor’s waiting room. Will got out, paid the man, and—hitching up his trousers, straightening his coat—started up the flagstone steps. Before he reached the first step of the porch itself, the porch light went on. A moment later, when he reached for the doorbell, the button lit up before he touched it, and he heard the bell ring inside. Then Buz was there, beaming. “Dr. Harold Marchant at your service,” he said, and that too, his position in life, delighted Dr. Marchant. He’d gotten fatter since Will had seen him last, had grown a moustache, and had balded slightly. But he still seemed boyish—unnaturally so, now that he was in his thirties—short, pushy, a kind of bounce or dance in his step. He had a red and black paisley vest.

Will grinned, troubled, thinking of Louise.

There was folk music hooting from the stereo in the livingroom. It was ungodly—such was Will Jr’s opinion—a rattle of banjos and iron guitars and what might as well have been hammers banging oil drums. The singers sounded like owls. He thought of Luke.

“So come in,” Buz said. “Maid!” he howled above the music, “bring our guest a—a what?”

“A martini.” Blood prickled in his neck.

“A martini.” He caught Will’s hand and pulled him joyfully through the door. “Take the load off,” he said. “Look around. Make yourself ’t home.” He snapped his fingers and a light went on in the corner over the red leather chair. Buz beamed again.

“Pretty clever,” Will said. He should ask to use the phone.

Then the girl was there—the maid, as Buz called her—a short, dark-haired girl with a squeezed-shut face, huge bosoms, an excellent butt. She had a silky shirt, red as the furniture, and a black skirt with a slit.

“This is Caroline,” Buz said. “Caroline, my old friend Will Hodge. From college.”

Will nodded, taking the martini (clear and frosty-beautiful as a glass rose), and Caroline smiled. She had a second martini for Buz and one for herself.

“Caroline works at the hospital,” Buz said.

“I see.”

“She helps out. Straightens up and things, now that I batch it. All the girls have been great, just great.” He beamed and the girl smiled prettily again and, through her deep tan, blushed. “Have an M&M?”

The bowl had passed Will before he registered. The girl took a handful, her eyes bright, and shyly kissed the air.

“Well, well, well,” Will said heartily, terrified. His blood more than his brain remembered: So his mother had kissed the air in the direction of her lover once, old friend of the family, and his father had stared like a donkey at the floor. As soon as the memory came it shot away again, like a light glimpsed through the window of a hurtling train.

He forced a sardonic grin. If Mama Louise could only see him now!

“Hey!” Buz said. “You got to see the bedroom!”

The girl blushed and smiled again and then, as if because she too could find nothing to say, gave Will a wink. They were on their way there, by this time, Buz hustling Will by the arm, the girl following a step behind. “Let there be lights!” Buz said grandly, and the hall light went on by itself. He threw open the door at the end and said, “Now!” Slowly, a reddish light came on in the bedroom. Will glanced uneasily at the girl. She smiled, and her lashes dropped slightly on her brown, shining eyes. The bedroom walls were of red flocked wallpaper, and the bedspread was red and black. The bed was enormous, with a carved head and foot, and on the ceiling there were mirrors, round ones in the corners, full-length mirrors hung sideways along the sides of the ceiling. Over the head of the bed hung an obscene variation on the Buddha.

“Hmm,” Will said. “Well, well.”

“Like wow, eh?” He poked Will’s belly with his elbow.

Will laughed, experimental. “It’s got to be a joke.”

“No joke,” Buz said. He put his arm around Will and ushered him out again, and the girl stepped back smiling, sipping her martini, as they passed.

“Well, well, well,” Will said. He was filled with a strange annoyance, as though he had been—or someone close to him had been—insulted. But Buz was all kindness, unmistakably glad to see him. They came back in range of the music. “I’d say you two have quite a little pleasure palace here.” He closed his hand around the pipe in his suitcoat pocket and reflected on whether or not to get it out. He thought of his uncle and was momentarily racked by guilt.

“All the girls have been great.” He cocked his head, smiling, moustached like a cat, cat’s eyes humorously watching Will, and, nervously, Will smiled back.

At last Will said, “They … know about each other?”

Buz laughed, reaching around Will’s heavy shoulder to pat his back. “Know
about
each other? Sometimes we do it six in a bed—I bet you can’t believe that!”

Will cleared his throat, and still Buz was smiling.

“The sheer logistics of such an undertaking—” Will began.

“Come let us fix you another martini, and I’ll tell you the whole secret.”

“Do,” Will said. It came to him that his fingertips were numb already. He had a sudden, fierce hunger to tell him about Kleppmann and the tragic madness of his Uncle Tag. “Yes,” he said, “do. By all means! Yes!”

3

At the corner of the house, standing in the twilight shadow of hundred-year-old oaks and eight-year-old maples, in the cool perfection of pointlessly curving stone walls and wide slate shingles, the Senator paused and pointed across the broad, flawlessly mown and deeply shaded lawn toward a long stone building as handsomely gabled and ornately dressed as the house itself. “Old mews,” he said. “Left empty for years, but my son-in-law’s been fixing it up. He’s the City Manager in Ferguson. Great future ahead of him. Well, he’s got horses in it now. Thurbreds from Texas. Beautiful animals, horses!”

R. V. Kleppmann looked at the mews, and his expression of mournful patience and scorn did not change. “I was bitten by a horse once in Europe,” he said as if innocently.

“They’re known for that,” the Senator said. He grinned. “But I like an animal with spirit.”

Kleppmann went on staring, standing with his hands in the pockets of his cheap gray coat.

“My father kept Tennessee Walkers,” the Senator said. He had his hand on Kleppmann’s elbow again and was guiding him toward the long, wide, gracefully curving driveway where Kleppmann’s Ford was parked. “Beautiful animals. Beautiful. But every man to his taste, I say.
De gustibus.”
He laughed, orbicular by study. “Now this birdbath here,” he said abruptly, stopping and extending his arm toward it, “came over here from England over seventy years ago. Came from a church. Just the base is old, originally part of a cross or something. Chiseled out by hand, as you can see. Now that’s something! Notice the interlace. Proves its antiquity. Anglian, I think they said. You can tell it’s hand-carved because these squares here are all different sizes. They
look
pretty much the same, you see, but if you look there closer you can see there’s no two of ’em alike. Like snowflakes.”

Kleppmann bent down, grieved and indifferent, to look.

“Well, everybody likes something different,” the Senator said. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

Kleppmann straightened up and turned to look at the Senator mildly but critically. “I never noticed that,” he said. “Seems to me everybody wants the same thing. Curved driveways whether or not there’s anything to curve around. Wife that looks half-starved to death. Dogs, cats, horses.”

“Come now, Mr. Kleppmann,” the Senator said, “you like expensive things yourself.”

Kleppmann shrugged as if meekly, like a Jewish tailor. He patted the Senator’s arm in a way he knew the man would find offensive, and said, “I suppose I do. I suppose we’re all made of the same stuff under the skin.”

He ate his dinner—a cold hot beef sandwich and a glass of milk—in a small, filthy hash-house in south St. Louis. The potatoes were lumpy, the beef underthin and overcooked, the gravy watery; but Kleppmann did not notice. He was not simply indifferent to food, he was fanatically indifferent. He knew good food from bad, expensive from cheap, and he could use his knowledge to impress his business associates, as he called them, when necessary; but he had no respect for what is known as fine food—meats cooked with wines and spices brought in flaming, as though they would look and taste of decay in their natural state; vegetables chopped or diced or shredded in the decadent French manner, as if for the toothless gums of superannuated uncles and aunts of the royal house. It was not the food itself that disgusted him: it was edible enough, though not appealing. What turned his stomach—and turned his stomach violently—was the people who admired such food: piglike people (whether they were fat or thin, he saw that pig’s-eye glint in their piggish little eyes) who prided themselves (as even pigs do not) on knowing which marination was considered superior by persons of superior discernment. What turned his stomach was people who took one sip of wine and glanced expertly at the corner of the room and passed judgment with the greatest solemnity, as if the head of the winemaker hung on their sentence—”nutty,” or “tart,” or “bland,” or “smooth,” or some other perfectly obvious designation of a perfectly obvious, wholly unimportant sensation. As for those who could say, and with a fair measure of accuracy, “1963,” or even “1937”—a thing he certainly could not do himself—he felt a kind of moral outrage he could barely hide from even the most obtuse observer. It was not simply the connoisseur, the snob, that Kleppmann detested. He was equally revolted by people who took smacking delight in fried chicken or porkchops or Christmas ham, or by people in the suburbs who ate rare barbecued steak and could not help wincing when asked by a guest for a piece “well done.” (Kleppmann unfailingly asked for his steak well done, in the hope of offending.) He was no more pleased by the “simple Negro” with his affected and self-conscious taste for chicken necks and gibbets (or giblets or whatever they were called); and he hated with equal intensity the Occidental who learned to eat with chopsticks and the Oriental who ate “naturally,” that is, with his mouth at the level of his plate and his sticks slightly higher than his head. For these reasons and others, Kleppmann ate alone whenever possible, just as he went to the bathroom alone, and paid no more than he had to for the privilege.

His wife was of a different inclination, of course, not only with respect to eating but with respect to almost everything in life. She liked big houses, beautiful views, and parties where dinner was served by candlelight. Kleppmann suffered her as he suffered the rest of mankind. She was of use. Nevertheless, when there were no guests and therefore no reason to bend to the ridiculous and annoying fashion of eating by light one could not see by, Kleppmann took dinner in his room, as he called it (his wife called it his study), in solitude. He made no pretense of loving her and never went to bed with her. It was a business arrangement, by no means mutually satisfactory or for that matter more than tolerable on either side. She loved luxury and had so little taste that he could pawn off on her the most disgusting baubles. As for Kleppmann, he liked making fools of people (though he did not like that or anything else in this world very much), and his wife not only provided a willing subject, as quick to sit up and beg as any fawning, stinking lap dog, but also helped him to make fools of other people.

The diner was alone when he entered it—he might not have entered it otherwise—but when he was halfway through his clammy hot beef sandwich two teen-age girls came in. One had blue pock-marks; the other was tanned and pretty except for a suspicious, slow-witted, cowlike look, a slightly affected pout, and large, square ankles. Kleppmann wiped his mouth on the paper napkin and pushed his plate away. Leaving no tip—he never left tips except to impress—he carried his restaurant check to the ornate, ostentatiously large black cash-register, long obsolete but still very grand, counted out the exact change, and went out to the street without a word. He walked to his car, unlocked it, and got in. A freight train stood on the siding across the street, and Kleppmann shuddered, went pale, averted his eyes.

At home, among other messages awaiting him, he found this:

W.B.H. has a tax claim against him, in amount of $40,000. Own firm has advised him to buy them off, case too chancy.

Kleppmann nodded. He crossed to the window, picked up his
Barron’s Weekly,
and sat down on the stiff, plain wooden chair he always used for serious reading—a chair fit for a monk.

4

What happened was obscure to Will, afterward. He had, strange to say, no particular regrets: it was all hardly more real than a dream, and though he would never have imagined that he would feel that way, he found that it scarcely occurred to him to feel guilty. It was as if, taking a wrong turn of no particular consequence, he had found himself in a sweet shop where the air was heavy with the scent of candies, and display cases were piled high with pink and yellow and white things and chocolate things and things in fancy wrappings. They stood in the kitchen, he remembered, the music howling in at them from the livingroom, the girl perhaps in bed somewhere—he’d lost track of her—and Buz was saying, holding up the martini pitcher to watch the level, pouring in gin, “Say what you like, there’s nothing in this world more fantastically beautiful than each of your hands on a different girl’s breasts and your legs wrapped around two more sets of breasts, and one of them sucking and another one giving you a kiss with a taste of gin.” He cackled with pleasure.