Dusk and Other Stories

He was wearing a white shirt and a sport coat, expensive at one time. The kitchen seemed cold. Far off was the faint pop of guns.

“Come in,” she said. “It’s chilly out here.”

“I just came by to see if you had anything that needed to be taken care of before the cold weather set in.”

“Oh, I see. Well,” she said, “there’s the upstairs bathroom. Is that going to be trouble again?”

“The pipes?”

“They’re not going to break again this year?”

“Didn’t we stuff some insulation in there?” he said. There was a slight, elegant slur in his speech, back along the edge of his tongue. He had always had it. “It’s on the north side, is the trouble.”

“Yes,” she said. She was searching vaguely for a cigarette. “Why do you suppose they put it there?”

“Well, that’s where it’s always been,” he said.

He was forty but looked younger. There was something hard and hopeless about him, something that was preserving his youth. All summer on the golf course, sometimes into December. Even there he seemed indifferent, dark hair blowing—even among companions, as if he were killing time. There were a lot of stories about him. He was a fallen idol. His father had a real estate agency in a cottage on the highway. Lots, farms, acreage. They were an old family in these parts. There was a lane named after them.

“There’s a bad faucet. Do you want to take a look at that?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It drips,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

She led the way upstairs. “There,” she said, pointing toward the bathroom. “You can hear it.”

He casually turned the water on and off a few times and felt under the tap. He was doing it at arm’s length with a slight, careless movement of the wrist. She could see him from the bedroom. He seemed to be examining other things on the counter.

She turned on a light and sat down. It was nearly dusk and the room immediately became cozy. The walls were papered in a blue pattern and the rug was a soft white. The polished stone of the hearth gave a sense of order. Outside, the fields were disappearing. It was a serene hour, one she shrank from. Sometimes, looking toward the ocean, she thought of her son, although that had happened in the sound and long ago. She no longer found she returned to it every day. They said it got better after a time but that it never really went away. As with so many other things, they were right. He had been the youngest and very spirited though a little frail. She prayed for him every Sunday in church. She prayed just a simple thing: O Lord, don’t overlook him, he’s very small…. Only a little boy, she would sometimes add. The sight of anything dead, a bird scattered in the road, the stiff legs of a rabbit, even a dead snake, upset her.

“I think it’s a washer,” he said. “I’ll try and bring one over sometime.”

“Good,” she said. “Will it be another month?”

“You know Marian and I are back together again. Did you know that?”

“Oh, I see.” She gave a slight, involuntary sigh. She felt strange. “I, uh…” What weakness, she thought later. “When did it happen?”

“A few weeks ago.”

After a bit she stood up. “Shall we go downstairs?”

She could see their reflections passing the stairway window. She could see her apricot-colored shirt go by. The wind was still blowing. A bare branch was scraping the side of the house. She often heard that at night.

“Do you have time for a drink?” she asked.

“I’d better not.”

She poured some Scotch and went into the kitchen to get some ice from the refrigerator and add a little water. “I suppose I won’t see you for a while.”

It hadn’t been that much. Some di

“You wish it hadn’t happened.”

“Something like that.”

He nodded. He was standing there. His face had become a little pale, the pale of winter.

“And you?” she said.

“Oh, hell.” She had never heard him complain. Only about certain people. “I’m just a caretaker. She’s my wife. What are you going to do, come up to her sometime and tell her everything?”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I hope not,” he said.

When the door closed she did not turn. She heard the car start outside and saw the reflection of the headlights. She stood in front of the mirror and looked at her face coldly. Forty-six. It was there in her neck and beneath her eyes. She would never be any younger. She should have pleaded, she thought. She should have told him all she was feeling, all that suddenly choked her heart. The summer with its hope and long days was gone. She had the urge to follow him, to drive past his house. The lights would be on. She would see someone through the windows.

That night she heard the branches tapping against the house and the window frames rattle. She sat alone and thought of the geese, she could hear them out there. It had gotten cold. The wind was blowing their feathers. They lived a long time, ten or fifteen years, they said. The one they had seen on the lawn might still be alive, settled back into the fields with the others, in from the ocean where they went to be safe, the survivors of bloody ambushes. Somewhere in the wet grass, she imagined, lay one of them, dark sodden breast, graceful neck still extended, great wings striving to beat, bloody sounds coming from the holes in its beak. She went around and turned on lights. The rain was coming down, the sea was crashing, a comrade lay dead in the whirling darkness.

VIA NEGATIVA

There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. His index finger is the color of tea, his smile filled with bad teeth. He knows literature, however. His sad bones are made of it. He knows what was written and where writers died. His opinions are cold but accurate. They are pure, at least there is that.

He’s unknown, though not without a few admirers. They are really like marriage, uninteresting, but what else is there? His life is his journals. In them somewhere is a line from the astrologer: your natural companions are women. Occasionally, perhaps. No more than that. His hair is thin. His clothes are a little out of style. He is aware, however, that there is a great, a final glory which falls on certain figures barely noticed in their time, touches them in obscurity and re-creates their lives. His heroes are Musil and, of course, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bunin.

There are writers like P in an expensive suit and fine English shoes who come walking down the street in eye-splintering sunlight, the crowd seeming to part for them, to leave an opening like the eye of a storm.

“I hear you got a fortune for your book.”

“What? Don’t believe it,” they say, though everyone knows.

On close examination, the shoes are even handmade. Their owner has a rich head of hair. His face is powerful, his brow, his long nose. A suffering face, strong as a door. He recognizes his questioner as someone who has published several stories. He only has a moment to talk.

“Money doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “Look at me. I can’t even get a decent haircut.”

He’s serious. He doesn’t smile. When he came back from London and was asked to endorse a novel by a young acquaintance he said, let him do it the way I did, on his own. They all want something, he said.

And there are old writers who owe their eminence to the New Yorkerand travel in wealthy circles like W, who was famous at twenty. Some critics now feel his work is shallow and too derivative—he had been a friend of the greatest writer of our time, a writer who inspired countless imitators, perhaps it would be better to say one of the great writers, not everyone is in agreement, and I don’t want to get into arguments. They broke up later anyway, W didn’t like to say why.