A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

I was chagrined by the proceeding. I realized immediately that Elijah Riddell was using me as a pawn, but I couldn’t foresee how the game would play out.

  “Thank you for your generous offer,” I said after a moment. “I’m not sure how I should respond.”

  Ben laughed and took a large swallow of whiskey.

  “You should tell him to go to hell,” he said. “You should say, ‘Mr. Riddell, no disrespect intended, but please go to hell.’ And tomorrow, you should send him a thank-you note for your meal. (It’s only proper, as it was quite delicious.)”

  “I’d rather continue working on Riddell House,” I said to Elijah, ignoring Ben’s caustic advice. “If it’s all the same.”

  “It’s not all the same,” Elijah said sharply. “I will sack you; then you will have nothing. Where will you go then?”

  “You won’t sack him,” Ben snapped, his temper rising. “He doesn’t want to go to Oregon City. He doesn’t want to be a manager or a general manager or a regional manager. He wants to stay here with me in Seattle.”

  “I am thinking of his future,” Elijah said with a resigned sigh.

  “No you aren’t. You aren’t thinking of Harry at all. You are thinking of you. You’re thinking of Alice, of whom you are so fond. You are thinking about the one hundred dollars you had to pay that poor sap carpenter—the one who opened a door he shouldn’t have opened and exposed himself to the ‘indecencies’ that take place at The North Estate—to keep his mouth shut, all the time wondering how low you could drive the bargain and still ensure his complicity. And where is he now? Somewhere in Minnesota, I suppose, tapping maples for syrup.”

  “You do take an interest in the business when it concerns you,” Elijah said.

  “I am in charge of The North Estate as part of our bargain,” Ben said. “I decide who works on the house and who doesn’t!” He paused, then added dramatically: “You gave me your word.”

  “I did give you my word,” Elijah agreed. “And you gave me yours. But you don’t seem to be holding up your end quite so well.”

  “I’ll go see her tonight. I’ll go see her right now!”

  “Not that part. The part about ending this nonsense. The part about putting aside your youthful adventures and turning your attention to more adult things.”

  “Adult things!” Ben scoffed. “What do you think of that, Harry? You must be quite honored to be so diminished by the great Elijah Riddell!”

  “I think I don’t know why I’m here for this,” I said. “I haven’t said a word.”

  “A very wise boy,” Elijah said. “Another reason to send him to Oregon City.”

  “You won’t send him anywhere,” Ben warned. “I’ll make the decisions on this matter.”

  “Your decisions are all wrong!” Elijah shouted. “You insist on having this boy of yours in full public view, even after you’ve become engaged to Alice. And you’ve conducted yourself with such indiscretion—I’ve spent how much time and money fixing this already? Your dalliances on the coast and in the woods and at the house. It must end, Ben. He must go to Oregon City, or he must disappear entirely. Those are the choices.”

  “Who are you to make this demand about my life?”

  “I am your patriarch!” Elijah commanded, summoning up some strange voice, some spirit that filled his voice with power and depth. “I am the creator of all things! Everything you have, your entire world, including your very life’s breath, has been created by me! I am your God, and I say he must go! He must leave the garden, Benjamin Riddell, and he must leave it now!”

  The words of Elijah echoed through the house, and the power of his voice surprised me, for I felt as if he were God himself, banishing me from Eden. I had half a mind to slink out of the room and head eastward in shame. Ben felt the impact of Elijah’s words as well, for he did not speak immediately. Elijah said no more, but stood still, panting, his face red, his finger raised. And I realized that only my intervention would quell this argument.

  “I don’t know what you were trying to prove when you carried on like that in front of workers in the house,” I said to Ben, because I followed Elijah’s reference to the carpenter who had walked in on Ben and me one afternoon, when we were engaged in activities of an indecent nature. “I already told you I was done with you.”

  The words sounded so strange to me, even as I said them. But I had to say them because I knew that Ben was using me against his father, and I knew also that he was using me against himself. Rather than openly confess his homosexuality to his father, Ben used me as a painful splinter in his palm, something he could push on to remind himself that he was alive, that his passion was real. So he could feel the pain freshly. He was torn between two worlds, and I could see that our forbidden relationship and the antagonism it caused with Elijah was distracting Ben from his true mission. He shouldn’t have been fighting about me! He should have been fighting with his father about the forests, about conservation, about the working conditions of loggers—things he truly believed in, and things that mattered!

  But what I understood, Ben did not. He turned toward me slowly and shook his head, dumbfounded.

  “Do you stand behind that? Are you done with me?” he asked in such a way, with such a hurt tone that I felt something break between us.

  “You have obligations,” I said, plunging ahead. “Commitments. You have a world to change, and it is not for me to interfere with your work. There’s so much you want to accomplish, and I’m in your way. I’ll take the job in Oregon City.”

  “But, Harry—”

  He tried to embrace me, but I rebuffed him.

  “Harry!” he cried in dismay, and I knew that he felt the breaking, too.

  Elijah turned to me swiftly and said, “Ben’s only using you to bring me down, as all ungrateful sons do. He doesn’t care about you at all.”

  “You bastard,” Ben spat, and in a flash of rage I saw him change. His entire body reconfigured. His shoulders, his arms, his haunches. He coiled, and then he sprang at Elijah, the old man. Ben had his claws out, his fingers ready to tear at the flesh and rip his father apart. Elijah cowered, held up his arms to defend himself; so quickly it was happening, and Ben was so large compared to his father, I feared for Elijah’s life, so I leapt forward to intervene.

  I intercepted Ben midway to his target. I took him down with my shoulder under his ribs, because I knew he would have killed his father in that moment, he would have torn him to shreds. The two of us toppled to the ground as Ben raged and Elijah stood watching us.

  Ben struggled to get up, to get at his father, but I held him. I had wrestled with Ben enough to know his tendencies, so I could thwart his attempts to rise each time he tried. And my moves frustrated him so, he raged harder and harder against me until, in one final effort, he slammed me to the floor, driving his elbow into my left shoulder with so much force a loud pop sounded and a white pain filled my vision and all my nerves cried out and my muscles went limp; my shoulder was dislocated.

  Everything stopped in the wake of the grotesque sound, so loud and so obvious, the room itself cringed, as if it were alive. Ben sat back on his knees. Elijah lowered his arms. And I writhed on the floor in pain. But it was more than that. Something had gone terribly wrong.

  “What have you done?” Elijah cried.

  Ben put his hands on me, he touched my shoulder, but the pain was so brilliant I couldn’t keep still, I pushed with my feet and flailed on the floor, and when he touched me I cried out and swung at him with the fist of my good arm, connecting with his jaw. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Thomas enter the room in haste. He stopped short.

  “Oh my!” he said.

  “Send for the doctor,” Elijah ordered, and Mr. Thomas quickly left. Ben had stopped trying to help me; he sat on his knees, hunched over, holding his jaw.

  “What have you done?” Elijah repeated.

  “I’ve broken him,” Ben said soberly. He stood up and swiftly left the room.

  I don’t know how long it
was before I settled into my pain, before I was able to breathe through it and coexist with it. Mr. Thomas returned. He and Elijah lifted me to my feet and led me into the kitchen and had me sit on a bench next to the stove.

  I was alone then, for a time, indulging in my pain, for the physical aspect was only so much. There was also the pain of having Ben treat me the way he did. My mind drifted to our first weeks on the Coast and how there was nothing in our world but us, and then this. As if our physical bodies were in our way, our physical existence impeded our real connection.

  “Fair warning,” a voice said softly from somewhere far off, “it’s going to hurt more before it hurts less.”

  I opened my eyes, and he was there before me. He had returned for me. My vision darkened with pain as he lifted my limp arm and folded it across my body, then gently up and, with a pop, the joint came together. “Better?” the voice asked. Oh yes, better. So much better. I wanted to thank him for fixing me, I wanted him to hold me. But when I opened my eyes, no one was there. Ben was already gone.

  When the doctor arrived an hour later, I was nearly asleep on a bench in the kitchen, my head tipped precariously against the corner of the stove.

  “I thought you said it was dislocated,” I vaguely heard the doctor grumble, his coat still on, his bag in hand.

  “It was,” the voice of Elijah said, mystified. “He must have reset it himself.”

  “Impossible,” the doctor said sharply. “Or nearly so.”

  “Maybe it was a ghost,” I heard Mr. Thomas offer.

  The doctor growled with dissatisfaction and clomped noisily out of the kitchen and back to his warm house on First Hill. Mr. Thomas and Elijah roused me enough to get me to the maid’s room on the ground floor, where I could sleep in one of the small beds kept for the help. As they laid me back on the hard mattress, I opened my eyes and looked at them both.

  “It was Ben,” I told them. “He came back for me.”

  But they didn’t hear me, for they were already gone.

  April 25, 1904

  I returned to The North Estate the following day with my arm in a sling. The main house was woefully behind schedule and still a skeleton in parts, though the cottage, my home with Ben, was a comforting oasis. It was our haven, as Ben had promised me. A place of spectacular beauty and peace. It was my home.

  Ben stayed away for several days, and when he finally returned, he seemed to have grown smaller. He seemed tired. I was sitting at the table in the cottage eating venison stew the cook had prepared, reading some Sherlock Holmes, which was my guilty pleasure and not the sort of reading Ben would like to have me do—he was so insistent on my philosophical development, sometimes I wondered if he had lost the ability to experience guilty pleasures entirely.

  “I’ve ruined it, haven’t I?” Ben said when he opened the door and saw me at the table.

  “I’m not sure ‘ruined’ is the word,” I replied, not angrily in any way, but certainly reserved. “You’ve changed it.”

  Ben nodded, understanding my meaning. He didn’t enter the room, he didn’t remove his coat or his boots.

  “I wonder if you’ll ever forgive me for hurting you like that.”

  “I’m sure you’ve suffered more than I have for these few days,” I said.

  “I’ve suffered,” Ben agreed. “I don’t know why.”

  “Because you acted against your nature,” I said.

  “And what is my nature, Harry? Since you are the keeper of wisdom.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But trying to force yourself into a role that confounds your spirit will always break you. You taught me that, and I will always remember it.”

  “But I contain multitudes,” Ben said. “So why is it difficult?”

  “We don’t really contradict ourselves,” I said, trying to put meaning to Whitman’s words. “We simply don’t see the connections, and so we think we’re contradicting ourselves. I’m sure, from a distance, we would appear to be one, without contradiction. Though, from our own vantage point, we are nothing but contradiction.”

  “I don’t feel that way,” he said. “I feel like I’m a distortion, a Siamese twin. I have one heart, but two of everything else.”

  “Then listen to your one heart, and it will tell you where to go,” I said.

  “Are you really done with me, Harry?”

  “I’m sorry for saying that,” I said. “I knew it was the only thing that would satisfy your father. And maybe it would be the best for you, as none of us can live in two worlds simultaneously.”

  “It hurt me,” he said.

  “I know, and I’m sorry. But I’ve been seeing things differently, like I’m high in a tree looking down on what’s happening. I know you’re struggling within yourself, but I see you as perfect, and I love you for it.”

  “But there’s a distance. You’re in the tree and I’m on the ground and there is a great distance between us.”

  Ben seemed so sad. I understood his internal battle—at what cost progress? At what cost happiness? I wished there was something I could do to help him, but there was not, other than be with him and support him in whatever path he chose to take.

  “I know our life is a compromise,” he said. “I cannot give you what you would like: a public commitment. I have family and business obligations that prevent it. But I promise you, Harry. This place we are building. This will always be our place. I will commit to that with everything I am. And when we are gone from here, this most beautiful place on earth, the eternal forest will return to take our place.”

  – 26 –

  DICKIE DANCES

  Before dinner that evening, Serena was charged up. She was on fire. She put my father and me to work washing the fancy china from the formal dining room, where we would be dining. After that, my father and I were set to polishing the silver. She had Grandpa Samuel sweeping the porch and washing windows with vinegar and newspaper.

  Serena, for her part, baked and cooked and chopped and whisked—her mixing bowl clasped tightly to her breadbasket and her wrist snapping around so quickly it was only a blur. She paused to take her relaxation breaths frequently, a quasi plié with her fingers arching at the ends of her gracefully bowed arms as she inhaled and then bent over to stretch. I was impressed with her flexibility, but then, one would assume maximum flexibility from a seductress of her caliber, I guessed. We were having fresh bread and homemade aioli, orange and fennel salad, an olive spread thing, and a dish of thinly sliced raw beef, which was called carpaccio. She’d found the recipe in a copy of Bon Appétit, I deduced from the frequently consulted magazine lying on the counter. I’d never eaten raw beef, but Serena assured me I would love it; it was a summery dish, she said.

  All of this commotion was because Richard, a.k.a. Dickie, was coming to dinner.

  Dickie was Serena’s alleged boyfriend. I thought of him as “alleged” because he had yet to make an appearance at Riddell House, and how close can you be to your boyfriend if he never stops by the house? I quizzed Serena about him, but she was less than forthcoming with details. I knew that Dickie was in real estate, and that Serena supposedly worked with him but not for him, but I didn’t know how they met or how long they’d been dating. I gleaned, through a process of deduction in which I factored nonresponses, as well as likely falsified answers and plausibly correct answers, that Dickie was responsible for the telephone-directory-size blue binder my father had been toting around since we’d arrived. Proposal for the Development of . . .

  Which meant Dickie was part of the deal, which was good, because Dickie would help facilitate the reunion of my parents, insofar as exploiting the land for profit would result in everybody being happy again. But it was also bad, because the deal ran contrary to the desires of a ghost who seemed to have singled me out for direct communication and implementation of a different agenda. And, to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to carry on a conversation with a ghost, especially if the ghost was telling me to do something that would dash my fathe
r’s plans and, no doubt, snuff out any hope I had of getting my parents back together. So it was with a certain measured caution that I anticipated meeting Dickie. Because I really wasn’t sure how Dickie would take to the latest development in the Proposal for the Development of . . . saga.

  Dickie arrived, and he was a very large man. He had an incredible amount of flesh slathered over his six-foot-three frame, and all of it was packed into a lightweight suit he’d clearly bought forty pounds ago. His flesh was literally pressing out at the seams of his clothing, and I could see the stitching of his shirt through his jacket; I could see the seams of his briefs through his slacks. Dickie’s largeness made me fear for Serena; I remember wondering if he might squash her when they had sex.

  Dickie entered the kitchen with beads of sweat on his brow, and, when he sat down, I felt small and insignificant, as if Dickie could crush me with one of his ham hock hands.

  “Trevor, this is Dickie,” Serena announced. “And now I must get myself together. I’ve been cooking all afternoon.”

  She glided out of the room the way she did, her lovely blue toes touching the ground only to steer her. And then Dickie looked at me.

  “How old are you?” he asked with an impressive baritone that resonated in my diaphragm.

  “Fourteen,” I replied. “Just.”

  “Call me Richard, then,” Dickie said. “You won’t be able to call me Dickie with a straight face, will you?”

  “Dickie,” I said with poker in my eyes.

  “You smiled.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You’re pretty good,” he said. “Just one corner, but I saw it. More of a smirk.”

  “Dickie,” I said again, and Dickie stared at me until I grinned. “Richard,” I said, and I didn’t smile.

  “See?”

  “But what happens when she calls you Dickie?”

  “Collateral damage,” he said. “You know what that means?”

  “Unintended civilian deaths in a military strike.”

  “If you laugh when she says it,” Richard said, “I can’t complain. But if you laugh when you say it, I want to smack the grin off your face, and I have some difficulty with my impulse control. So call me Richard. You know how to open a bottle of wine?”