Nightlight

by Michael Cadnum

  “We are supposed to be having a vacation, after all,” she said.

  “That’s right. And everyone knows you have picnics all the time on vacations.”

  “I was reading the Song of Solomon last night. ‘O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! For your love is better than wine.’ And I wanted to have a picnic. And there’s no reason to be chained by the weather. We can do whatever we want to do.”

  “Do you often read the Bible?”

  “I read everything I can get my hands on,” she answered. “I read Freud in the sixth grade, hiding the book from my parents and the teacher because it mentioned things like vaginas and masturbation. And, of course, the phallus.”

  Paul glanced around. One did not, exactly, say “vagina” or “phallus” in a grocery store in Calistoga. A wrinkled man in a straw cowboy hat sniffed the end of a cantaloupe.

  “And recently working on Donne’s sermons, I’ve read a good deal of the Bible. King James, not that claptrap Revised Standard stuff.”

  She was an amazing countryside of knowledge. He felt ignorant, and hefted a bunch of bananas to recover his self-assurance. Surely he could not ask such an amazing creature to marry him. He wasn’t a total idiot. Far from it. But she had depths. He was a shiny, sparkling stretch of water children could wade in, and sail paper boats. She was a river of unexplored shoals and depths.

  She looked into his eyes, impossibly beautiful. “The Bible is so self-contradictory. I think the most important things are.”

  Paul nodded thoughtfully, and selected a slender bottle of rosé.

  He drove to the edge of a vineyard, and then, carefully, very nearly into it. He turned off the engine, and the rain was loud on the car roof.

  They did not get out of the car, but they opened the doors so that it felt like a picnic. Paul gouged the cork with the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife. Bits of cork bobbed in the wine by the time he wrestled the bottle open, and he reminded himself never to use that particular corkscrew again.

  The Camembert was barely ripe, but it suited the wine. They sipped from Styrofoam while a blackbird stared at them from the chimney of a smudge pot, then looked away, as if they belonged exactly where they were.

  “See, these sandwiches aren’t so bad,” Lise said, chewing happily.

  Paul swallowed a mass of mucilage, flavored faintly with tuna.

  “I love picnics,” she breathed. “I suppose it’s the only speck of romanticism in me.”

  “This is what they call a pointed rebuke.”

  “No, it’s the truth.”

  The wind gusted rain into the car for a moment. The grass among the grapevines was neon green, and a crow crawled slowly across the sky.

  “Besides,” Paul said, “there’s a lot of romantic in you.”

  “Not as much as you think.”

  “Not as little as you think. That’s what I like about you. You’re a little bit of everything, but not in a sloppy, tossed-together way. You’re very accomplished.”

  “I took piano lessons once,” she mused. “I hated them.”

  “Everyone hates piano lessons. I suppose even great pianists hate actually sitting down and practicing. It’s something they have to do to do what they like.”

  “Which is?”

  Paul chewed his sandwich, and chased it quickly with a gulp of rosé. “Performing, I suppose. What do I know about pianists?”

  Perhaps it was the feeling that she was enjoying herself, or the flush of wine so early in the day, or the fact that he didn’t really mind sitting in a small car in the middle of a vineyard, but he chose that moment to unravel the subject he had been keeping to himself. “We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of years,” he began.

  She rolled the sandwich wrapper into a ball, and sipped her wine.

  “Off and on,” he continued.

  “Mostly on,” she said, in what sounded like an encouraging tone.

  “Mostly.” Except for a man built like a bear, a bearded astronomer she had gone rafting with once. Paul didn’t think anything significant had passed between the bear and Lise, which is to say he couldn’t imagine them in bed.

  Paul couldn’t talk. It wasn’t going at all well. He should have begun talking about it last night, or much later, before a crackling fire. But he had begun, and he had to continue.

  “And I’ve decided,” he said in a rush, “that it might be best if after all this time seeing each other we actually went ahead and got married.”

  He could not look at her. Rain drooled down the windshield, and a crow laughed slowly in a stand of trees.

  The nakedness of what he had said coiled between them. Paul wrapped what was left of his sandwich, and looked away from her, watching water drop gently off the snaking branches of the grapevines.

  Her hand was on his hand, and then she held him, as well as she could with the gearshift jabbing them like a robot’s erection. She breathed into his ear, and he held her, but then she drew back. “I knew you were going to ask me,” she said. “I don’t know how, but I could tell.” She was blushing, and he had never seen her blush before. He thought it was with pleasure.

  “What do you think?” he asked, hoarsely.

  “It’s wonderful that you should mention it,” she began.

  Paul held his breath.

  “And in a very strange and wonderful way, I feel honored.”

  Paul waited.

  “Because certainly if I were thinking of marrying anyone, it would be you.”

  Paul exhaled very slowly.

  She looked away, and he followed her gaze through the bleary windshield toward the perfect gray sky. “A long time ago I decided how I was going to live my life. I was just a girl, walking home from the library with books that I really wasn’t going to understand very well at all. Darwin. Milton. Melville. Anything I could get my hands on that I had heard grown-ups mention, or had read about in the encyclopedia, I wanted to read. And I decided that someday I would be a scholar, and know practically everything there was to know.”

  The steering wheel was cold, and the chill that surrounded the car breathed slowly into it.

  “Naturally, it was difficult. Both of my parents were basically undereducated. High school, period, and not very sophisticated high school. I don’t think college is the only way to get an education, but my father doesn’t even know who Milton, or Keats, or Dickens were. Never even heard of them. And my mother’s idea of good writing is a little collection of Hallmark inspirational verse, the sort of book with cartoon lambs cavorting in it, and butterflies with smiling faces. Butterflies, for Christ’s sake. Smiling insects!”

  Paul opened his mouth to stop her, but words fled him.

  “Neither one of them was at all interested in my going to college, and I had to work my way, as you know, hauling linen out of motel rooms, and pouring coffee for lechers. I’m not complaining. But I finally got a grant to do graduate work and nail a PhD, and nothing is going to stop me.”

  “But someday …” Paul began.

  “Someday, soon, I’ll have my dissertation polished off, and then I’ll go to teach at maybe Stanford, I don’t know. Or stay at Cal; I think they might want me. I have connections at Yale. Former professors who swear they would kill for me. I’ve made a good impression.” She spoke wistfully, as if she were not quite sure it was all true. “Of course, I don’t know everything. I have studied myself to the point that I know the extent of my ignorance.”

  Paul knew about ignorance. He seemed to suffer from it most of the time. He suffered from it now, not knowing what to say to the woman he suddenly loved more than ever.

  “I have never thought in terms of marriage. I have given myself over to becoming a scholar, as if I were becoming a nun.”

  “You’ve scarcely been celibate,” Paul murmured.

  “If I misled you, I’m sorry.” She shook, weeping. “I don’t want to hurt you, Paul. I just can’t say yes.”

  Paul ground his forehead into the steering wheel
, wishing that its hard, cold strength could help him. “I don’t want to hurt your career. Our marriage would not do the slightest little harm to your profession. You could go on learning, and we can move anywhere. I’m sick of my job, anyway.”

  She looked away, trembling.

  “All right. I won’t press it. God knows, it took me so long to mention it, I’ll probably never say another word about it. I don’t want you to say no, and then feel that you have to stick to that answer out of stubbornness. You like to make up your mind what you’re going to do, and then go right ahead and do it. I appreciate that. More than that, I admire it. You are the most remarkable woman—the most remarkable person—I have ever met. I think, hell I don’t know what I think anymore. I want you to be happy. I want us to be together. So promise me this—you’ll think about it. Okay? You won’t say for sure one way or another, but you’ll think about it. Will you?”

  She nodded, blinking. “I’ll think.”

  “Good. Good. You’ll think. I’ll settle for that for the time being.”

  “But you promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “That you won’t mention the subject until I say you can.”

  Paul controlled a quick response, and said carefully, “I can wait.”

  “And you won’t give me meaningful, searching looks. We can just go ahead and have a nice little time away from everything, just like we had planned.”

  “Sure. We’ll pretend like this conversation never happened. If that’s what you want.”

  But it was clear to Paul that while Lise liked him, and was “honored” by his love for her, she was not quite as fond of him as he was of her. Oh, they were good friends. And lovers, and very affectionate. But she would rather be a scholar. It made her, in a way, all the more alluring. The scholar as beauty.

  “I’m glad to be away from it,” she said. “People think of academia as an ivory tower, but it’s more like a factory. People slicing poets thinner and thinner, representations of self in Herbert, introspection in Marvell, the influence of Dante on the Romantics. Not that these studies don’t matter. But that the motive for performing the erudition is to acquire a more lustrous name, so you can move to a better university, get more money, buy a better car. Like those experiments on mice they do over and over again. Everyone knows if you make a white mouse drink a half liter of vodka a day something funny will happen to it, but they pop open thousands and thousands of animals so they can whip their livers into pâté and look at them under a microscope. I think of the poets as mice, only thank God they can’t be hurt, even the living ones, if they have any sense.”

  The mice had something to do with the two of them, but Paul was not sure what. Her weariness with her studies had somehow made her tired of everything, even love. Or not love, exactly, but commitment. She had taken on so much that she could not stand any more demands.

  “You’ll be a magnificent professor,” Paul said. “You’ll become the most incredible thing that ever hit the academic swamp.”

  “I don’t want to be incredible. Just competent.”

  “You’ll be great.”

  “The competition is appalling.”

  “Terrible, or very good?”

  She smiled wanly. “Very good. There are about two job openings a year and about eight thousand brilliant crazed animals struggling to get in.”

  He wanted to tell her: anything, anywhere. I will do anything for you.

  He shifted the car into neutral without starting it, and wobbled the gear shift back and forth for a moment. “We’ll have lots of picnics,” he said.

  He started the car. He eased the car over the uneven gravel road, as if the birds that peppered the spaces between the rows of grape vines were all the ways that he could lose her. He drove carefully, deliberately, so they would not take flight.

  11

  The road twisted through vineyards, some vines ancient with black, arthritic stumps, others new, youthful vines on glistening black stakes. The road cut along hills, and looped across bridges over creeks of high water. The creeks were cocoa-brown with runoff and boiled over boulders like huge skulls.

  Paul enjoyed the drive. He had driven this part before, and dodged the occasional pothole easily. He enjoyed the drive so much he had to step on the brake and back up. “We missed the turnoff,” he said.

  This road was different. Trees whispered over the top of the car in places, and water dripped from their branches in irregular splatters. Vineyards, when they were visible, were rows of black fists in wedge-shaped parcels of land. The rare house was a plume of chimney smoke from the crotch of a hill.

  The houses grew more rare, and the hills were steep on both sides of the road, as the road narrowed, a thin paste of asphalt over rough stones. A sheep stood in the middle of the road, and Paul stopped the car, rolling down the window to say hello to it. The sheep shied away, and ran, leaping a barbed-wire fence.

  Paul turned up a gravel road, past a sign that said: McCORCKLE VINEYARDS—TASTING. The car lurched along the gravel, and Paul pulled into a yard plastered with wet leaves, and the debris of unharvested walnuts.

  He answered Lise’s unasked question. “This isn’t the way. I just wanted to stop for a while.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple. As he drove he found it impossible to stop thinking about the dream, and the trip seemed more and more wrong. He had to stop to rest his hands, which were numb from gripping the wheel. He needed contact with a stranger, someone casual whom he would never see again, to restore his calm.

  A gray horse watched from behind a fence. Paul walked over to the horse, telling the horse that he was pleased to meet it. The animal watched with quiet, black eyes, but when Paul tried to pat the center of its forehead, the animal flinched, and backed away.

  “Nervous,” Paul explained, miffed.

  A figure was watching from a doorway. The figure shrank back into darkness as they approached. They consoled each other that horses around here might not see many people, but Paul knew that they must see enough people not to be easily frightened.

  They stepped into the protection of a large, aluminum-sided warehouse, and as they slipped into the building an odor like cinnamon enveloped them. Barrels lined a wall.

  “Take a look around,” said a voice. A figure sidestepped into light from a yellow bulb. Paul had expected a sturdy, older man. Instead he faced a thin young man, who held his place in a book with a finger.

  There was, really, nowhere to look. Stainless steel tanks gleamed among shadows, and a drain grinned in the center of the concrete floor.

  The young man touched the lip of a copper basin. A residue as dark as blood reflected the yellow of the bulb, a mustard-bright smear. The finger slipped out of the book, and the slit in the pages closed, as if forever.

  “Taste?” said the young man.

  “Of course,” said Paul, although he did not really want to taste. In this chilly dark he felt that he was being tasted, if only by salesmanship. But he put forth a hand and accepted a hock glass brilliant with a finger’s-width of white wine.

  “We start with the dry, and work up toward the sweet,” said the young man. How else? thought Paul, but he sipped, pursed his lips and spat into the copper basin. It was the sort of basin typical of ambitious wineries. A bowl the size of a medieval shield, it rested on a table to receive the wine a taster might not want to swallow.

  A pause. A response was required before the wine could be named. Paul knew how to respond in a dozen ways. He knew how to charm. But what was charm but the ability to beguile, the ability to lie? Paul wanted to be honest. “Pleasant,” he said. “A little effervescence. But a little thin.”

  “That is our driest wine,” said the young man.

  Paul turned, as if addressing Lise, who was in the act of spitting into the basin herself. “It’s easy to mistake lack of taste for dryness,” he said. But he stopped himself, immediately regretting his honesty. “But it has its good points. A good food wine.”

&nb
sp; The young man relaxed slightly, and his hand closed around the neck of another bottle. “This is a young red.”

  Black wine glittered in the glass. Paul did not taste it at once. He did not want to taste wine. It was a liquid that was ripe with magic, with the power to ease. He did not want to be eased. It was just another way of pretending. He wanted truth. He sipped, and spat.

  “Petite Sirah,” said the young man. “Where are you two headed?”

  “West of here, toward the coast,” Paul said.

  The young man picked up the next bottle.

  “And then off the main road—if you can call this road a main road. To a place called the Parker cabin.”

  “Let me give you fresh glasses.”

  “These are fine.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We get so few visitors. One other couple, maybe two, all day yesterday.”

  With a touch of nausea Paul considered that the spat wine in the copper basin was thrown out only every day or two. They both accepted new glasses of a hideously sweet white wine. Paul nodded, and half-missed the basin. “Sweet,” he said, like a man saying “Shit.”

  “Our sauterne.”

  “I like it!” said Lise.

  “Yes, it’s by far our most popular,” said the young man, but his voice was without interest.

  Paul asked after prices, and admired the color of the first wine—“like mountain air,” whatever that meant—and then asked, “Have you heard of the Parker cabin?”

  This was a crude way of asking, but Paul was not in the mood for building up to inquiry. The young man touched the mouth of a bottle thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Paul took out his wallet. He selected a few bills, and laid them on the table beside the copper basin. “We’ll have a couple bottles of the sauterne,” he said.

  “A good choice,” said the young man, rummaging in a box. “Most of it comes from the vineyards you see around here. We are very proud of it.”