October Light

by John Gardner

  Oh yes, he was your True American, her brother James. He could be downright dangerous if you got him on the subject of immigrants, or workmanship, or almost anything else. More than once she and Horace had fallen silent before James Page’s wrath. More than once they’d had to sneak and lie to save young Richard from his opinions, especially when he’d been courting the Flynn girl—“an Irish and a Catholic,” as James had called her, his eyes bugging out with indignation. It was a tragic story; her brother would never know the half of it. It was mostly at their house, or at Horace’s office, that the two would tryst. She was eighteen, a tall, frail looking slip of a thing, with large, strange eyes and some queer Irish name—a beautiful girl except perhaps just a little bit knock-kneed—and when they met it was like iron and a magnet, you could feel the pull.

  He was tall and shy, her nephew Richard. One year older than the girl. They would sit on the couch in the living room (Sally’s living room), far apart but holding hands, listening to the music, Horace smiling and nodding to the beat, and after a while her Horace would yawn and say, “I don’t know why I’m so tired tonight,” shaking his head as if it baffled him; and then, not long after, “Well, I give up. Sally, you ready for night-night?” Richard would lean forward, as if willing to go home, though you could see his reluctance all over his face, and as for the girl, she looked downright panicky. “No, no,” Horace would say, “don’t let me drive you off! It’s early yet.”

  Once, when they were up in their room, sitting up in bed, side by side, Horace reading, she at her knitting, Sally had said: “Have you thought what would happen if James should come by some night and find them?”

  He’d looked up over his glasses, staring straight ahead, and the strength of resolve she’d glimpsed that instant had frightened her. “I’ve considered it,” he said.

  She’d breathed a little prayer that his resolve need not be tested.

  She knew for certain, as it happened—Horace only guessed—what it was that they did down there alone. One night when she’d gone down for a glass of milk she’d glanced in at the two, half by accident—the music was still playing, the lights were turned low—and she’d seen that Richard was lying on top of her, she had her legs spread for him, though they both had all their clothes on. Her skirt was hiked up, just a foot or so, so that her knees showed. Richard’s face had been turned away, blond hair shining, so that he hadn’t seen her looking in. The Flynn girl hadn’t seen her either, at first. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open. She was breathing heavily. If they weren’t making love Sally Abbott was hard put to find a better word. Then the Flynn girl’s eyes had popped open and stared straight at her, as wide and dark as the eyes of a deer. Her face was expressionless, helpless and resigned, her eyes like those of an animal surprised by a hunter and no place to turn, no course but surrender. Their eyes had met for a long moment, hers and the Flynn girl’s, and a mysterious emotion had passed through Sally, a recognition for which she had no words—a sudden hushed knowledge. Frail as she was, the Flynn girl was a woman, exactly as Sally was—for an instant it was as if they were the same woman—and Sally felt a thrill of, what?—perhaps love mixed with terror. Though he hadn’t been moving, so far as she could see, Richard seemed all at once more still than before, as if by some means, through the girl’s body, he’d become aware of her. Quickly, without a sound, Sally had fled like an evil shadow—that was how she felt—from the doorway.

  “Horace,” she’d said upstairs afterward, worried as a mother, “what if the Flynn girl gets pregnant?”

  “It’s more like a question of when,” he’d said.

  Now, staring at her book, she saw again, through it—as if the paper and the print were a frail screen—the Flynn girl’s eyes. Such was woman’s lot, the lot of all victims of the world’s high righteousness: to sneak and cower and forever lie below. Not defenseless, quite. There was always guile. There was always conspiracy, secret insolence, the comfort of the victim’s hidden scorn. Once Horace had spanked her. (He hadn’t been perfect; she never said he was.) It was common in those days, husbands spanking wives. Horace had been better than most, in fact; he’d never beaten her, as James would beat Ariah if she ever dared look at him cross-eyed. “Yes dear,” Sally would say to Horace thereafter, smiling sweetly, whispering black murder inside her mind. And there were always stories to give women secret comfort, like the legends of old Judah Sherbrooke’s crafty young wife.

  It was that that gave her pleasure in the paperback novel, she realized. To all that would tyrannize—the flag and religion and the domination of men—the novel smiled sweetly, like a loving wife, and … She hunted for the image and, with delight, jumped it: smiled sweetly and let a little fart.

  She read on.

  4

  SUICIDE AND RAPE

  Dr. Alkahest was no fool. He guessed at once that the first place to look for that “fishingboat” must be Fisherman’s Wharf, and if he didn’t find it there, he must search the surrounding wharfs and docks from San Francisco to the ends of Sausalito. The cargo, after all, must be coming in, not going out. All the back gardens in the city could hardly have yielded such a load as that.

  Enfeebled though he was by his night’s excitement, he leaned toward the taxi driver’s ear—he was an elderly black man with steel-wool hair—and called, slightly whining, “Cabby, let’s drive around the docks awhile. I have a kind of thing about old fishingboats.” The driver nodded and leaned sideways to look at him in the mirror. Dr. Alkahest added, “I think I’d like to see all the docks, all around the Bay—if I don’t get tired and tell you otherwise.” He leered. If that boat was docked anywhere, he’d smell it.

  The driver said, “That’ll take a week, old man. Wheah you wanna start?”

  Dr. Alkahest gnawed at his lip, distressed. “Well,” he said, “what I especially like is those big old fishingboats, the kind that go out to sea for days and days, you follow? I like the kind that list a little, old trash-heaps you wouldn’t think a sane man would go and risk his life on. It’s the texture, ye see. In my younger days I was a photographer.”

  The driver laughed. “You shittin me, man. You workin for the FBI and you lookin for dope.”

  Dr. Alkahest smiled from ear to ear, terrified. “A man my age?” he said.

  The driver laughed happily and turned left into a narrow, pot-holed road that went up into some trees and at the crest of the hill looked down over San Francisco Bay. For all Dr. Alkahest’s fear, the man drove harmlessly …

  Here again several pages were missing. The novel resumed:

  … he knew it was hopeless. His heart was racing from the unusual exertion, and his head and lungs were filled with the thick stench of diesel fuel and fish. Dr. Alkahest leaned once more toward the driver and gave him the address of his home. Then he leaned his head back, and the next thing he knew, the driver was gently lifting him from the taxi to the wheelchair, already set up on the sidewalk, asking him was there anything more he could do for him.

  “No no, thank you,” Dr. Alkahest said, and got out his money-clip. For no reason, he burst into tears. The cab driver leaned toward him, reaching across the chasm of race and class to lift him by the armpits and set him up more straight. “You want me to wheel you in?” he asked.

  “No no,” Dr. Alkahest said, and bit back a whimper. “Thank you. You’ve done more than enough. How much is it?”

  “Eighty dollars,” the man said.

  He was startled at that, but after all, they’d driven for most of the night. He gave the driver ninety.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the driver, and saluted.

  Alkahest returned the salute and pushed the right turn button, starting in.

  When he reached his floor, the ninth, he hardly even glanced at his cleaning girl, Pearl, though on many occasions he had watched her for hours, looking subtly past a book he was pretending to read or peeking through a keyhole, thinking about the rape of the Trojan women, the million raped women of Bangladesh. No two ways
about it, that little Pearl was a juicy number, born to be a queen, or the wife, perhaps, or better yet, mistress, of some rich black lawyer in Chicago, or better yet, white. That someone should sooner or later attack her had been practically inevitable.

  But his thoughts, this morning, were not primarily on his cleaning girl. Old John Alkahest had lost all hope, all reason for living. It would take him days to find that boat; he was convinced of that now; and the boat, of course, would not be there for days.

  He drove the wheelchair to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. On the far side of his large brass bed, French doors opened onto a concrete-balustered balcony, which had plants all around it—flowers and ferns and an enormous rubber tree—and just enough room for him to sit in his wheelchair and take the air. Tired as he was, and sick with confused and turbulent emotions, including a background awareness of Pearl, he drove to the balcony and sat gazing down.

  “My life has lost all meaning,” he said aloud. It was not so much a question of whether he ought to kill himself as how. He could, if he liked, ram the wheelchair forward and throw himself onto the concrete railing and, desperately scrambling, grunting and panting like an elderly lover, pull himself over it and fall, flailing, easily piercing the clean light and air to smash through the sidewalk. He leaned forward to look down through the balusters, and felt woozy. Better to use pills, he thought. He remembered an acquaintance, a famous intellectual, who’d killed himself years ago by drinking lye. He’d had his expensive, red velvet curtained apartment cleaned, and he’d carefully gone around and set up black candles, and he’d set out poetry here and there for his friends to find—touching sentiments from Rossetti and favorite works of his own—and he’d put on his velveteen smoking jacket and, with as much elegance as possible, considering, had rammed down the lye with a brandy glass, after putting in a phonecall to his friends. When they came they found tables tipped over and the velvet curtains torn down, the candles knocked akilter, and everywhere the filth of the miserable body’s indignation, girlish resistance, and reluctant sleep.

  Dr. Alkahest, crying now, pale hands trembling, backed off the balcony, closed the French doors and white silk curtains, then drove, breathing hard, to the telephone by his bedside. SUI-CIDE, he dialed, and while he waited for someone to …

  Here again she found one of those infuriating gaps. Two pages later the story went on:

  … farther from my mind. Who have I to get even with? No, this is a reasoned suicide. I’m the loneliest young man in the world.”

  “You’re young?” she said. She seemed faintly excited.

  “I’m disguising my voice,” he said, and found he was a little excited himself. He imagined her breasts.

  “You’re kidding me,” she said. “You’re old.”

  “Why would I kid you? I’m at the point of death. I phoned you, didn’t I? That must mean I want help, so why would I fool around with you?”

  “You’re really young?—disguising your voice?”

  He imagined her crotch. “I’ve already told you twice.”

  The fool was convinced. “You’re very good, you know that? I mean, are you an actor?” Her excitement was increasing. He was discovering, for no clear reason, the will to live.

  “I am an actor, actually. I’m amazed that you got it so quickly!”

  “But you’re out of work,” she said with deep sympathy.

  “That’s it! Right on!”

  “But surely, with a talent like yours—” She let it trail off, perhaps hoping he’d speak. When he said nothing, she continued, “Are you an actor I might have heard of? TV?”

  “Movies, actually. You’ve heard of me all right.”

  “Not Brando,” she whispered.

  “My God,” he said, “how do you do it?” Noisily, he hung up. Yet even as he laughed with rackety glee, he was not amused—felt increasingly depressed. He’d forgotten how inadequate women were to a person’s needs—like the world. That was why, in the Middle Ages, they’d been the Church Fathers’ great symbol of “the World.” No wonder preachers railed against them, and conquering armies raped and slaughtered them! He indulged himself with a brief, dead serious fantasy of seeking her out, this Judy of SUICIDE—lying in wait for her, a pipewrench in his hands. He felt, simultaneously, exhilarated and despairing. In secret he couldn’t deny to himself that her girlish voice had touched and distressed him with a hunger for the perfect, for heaven’s glory and absolute justice, for the girl-faced, golden-winged angels of his childhood, things he’d known for years he was never to have in this world—in this or any other—so that, hungering for the possible, he could think only of filth and death: the deflowering and smashing of beautiful young women, or suicide, which was the same. There was no third choice, metaphysically, except perhaps waking sleep—sweet mystic Mary Jane! He saw himself floating, as in a sportscar ad, or an ad for toothpaste or shampoo, his wheelchair surrounded by flowers and beautiful young women and effeminate young men, Judy of suicide leaping toward him through tall yellow grass in slow-motion, CONCEPTROL printed in the blue sky behind her.

  Thai’s my dream, thought Alkahest, bitterly weeping, wringing his fingers, not making a sound. That’s everybody’s dream, the whole length and breadth of America. And not to be had!

  As old Dr. Alkahest sat weeping, something came to him from nowhere. Perhaps it was illusion—he was tired enough, certainly—but then again, perhaps it was a memory, buried in his consciousness and peeking out only now, timidly, like a lizard from behind a rock. It seemed to him that—faintly, so faintly he hadn’t noticed at the time (if it was not in fact a dream)—a voice had said, down in the darkness below the cutter, “He’s a human being. We couldn’t just let him down.” It was all Dr. Alkahest could recall from the exchange, but now, going over it in his mind, he was so excited his brain began to tingle and he thought he might faint. The fellow who’d jumped from the bridge had been picked up by the fishingboat! Perhaps he was still alive, then! Perhaps he could still be found!

  It was a slim lead, but reason enough to go on living. He’d start at once, not a moment to lose!

  But he was faint with exhaustion. The white of the morning was like steady lightning, hammering at his eyes, and the vacuum cleaner, in the tower now, was like thunder or the roar of a surf. Incredibly—considering how much was to be done—he found himself slipping physically and mentally, sinking toward nothingness, heavy of brain and body as a stone. By desperate effort, he drove himself into the elevator, away from the monstrous suggestion of the bed, rode up to the tower and out into the white, octagonal room, meaning to ask Pearl to get him coffee, pep pills, tobacco—bring him back to life.

  “Pearl!” he tried to call, but his voice was inaudible. “Oh no!” he wailed inwardly. It was unspeakably unjust—intolerable! But the dimming continued, as when the electricity falters and fails in an old hotel, and at last Dr. Alkahest gave in to it—helplessly endured the obscene violation, abandoning his rights.

  ~ ~ ~

  It was the end of the chapter, but Sally Abbott was enjoying herself now, and she had nothing but time. She went on without a moment’s hesitation.

  5

  MR. NIT

  Peter Wagner awakened to a foul, green darkness that seemed an intensification of troubles in his stomach. Things moved, ugly shadows as in a William Burroughs novel; he couldn’t focus them. Black things began to impinge on the green, now weed, now seaweed, so that he couldn’t tell whether he was drowning or merely in hell. Mouth open, eyes squinting, he thought of his wife, source of all misery and cruel disenchantment; never mind that he was, for her, the same. Once—maybe half of that first year of marriage—when he’d looked at her he’d seen her, as he’d seen all the world, integral and transcendent, like a lemon in sunlight, and he’d been indivisibly, unthinkingly one with her as a child and a day in July are unthinkingly one (or a lemon and sunlight). That was long past, now; might have been a dream. He saw now, discrete as numbers, her tics and oddities. When she tur
ned her hand palm up, holding her dark brown, pencil-thin cigar, he saw the gesture in perfect isolation, raised from the life-giving mulch of its surroundings and logically finite, as if the hand were severed at the wrist.

  So it was in everything these days. He had reached—and it seemed to him everyone had reached—the decadent age of analysis. Eden’s bright apple had turned in his mouth to dust and blowing ashes. Like his wife, like what he’d once thought of fondly as his country, life had turned trivial-minded and bitchy, filled with unreasonable complaints. He closed his eyes, felt sicker—his head was pounding—and slept again.

  The next time he awakened he was in a large cabin, mysterious as Ben Franklin’s tinkering room, thick with alchemistical smells. He felt at once the familiar hovering of a docked ship—a gentle, more-than-physical restlessness, speculum of Peter Wagner’s world: an eagle trying forever to land on the limb of a forever falling tree, a sentence snaking ominously downward in Spengler’s Decline of the West. Through his blood and bones came, from time to time, the thud of the boat’s outer wall against a wharf. He could feel the heaviness of the water beyond the iron hull, silt and sewage, old condiments and condoms, pages from popular psychology books, and he could feel, or imagined he could feel, the slippery bump of, hopefully, dead fish. He was lying on a wooden bunk suspended from the bulkhead by chains. He moved his arm. It was stiff. He lay still, oppressed by a sense of déjà vu, then remembered: all that was happening had happened in some novel he’d read about a hoax.

  Then the smells came over him more heavily. Like a zoo. He tensed himself to identify the smell, and suddenly remembered, with strange joy, the Reptile House in St. Louis. The alligator pit and, somewhere nearby—was it pea-vines?

  At last he saw well. A second officer’s cabin, once well fitted out, black now, decayed. There was a wooden table, once a mess table, he guessed. It was so close to his bunk he could have reached out and touched it. There were things on it, vaguely alive. Five feet or so beyond the table there was a desk and, beyond the desk, a wall of books. At the desk there was a man. The light was dim, only a Coleman lantern above the man at the desk. Once more, Peter Wagner closed his eyes, this time to think.