The Sunlight Dialogues Read Free Page A

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