Twilight

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Johnson, Rebecca

Every day when the sun went down, he would have her mix him a gin and tonic before she wheeled him onto the porch where the world was blurring into darkness. Having been married to him for forty years, Marian did not balk at doing it, but he could see the invisible frown reflected in the creases of her forehead as she poured the clear stream of liquid into a glass on the kitchen counter. It irritated him; did she begrudge him this, his only real pleasure, even now?

But he knew she would never say anything. It wasn't her way. And he had long since grown used to that face of hers, with its air of weary determination and silent reproach. He was convinced that she knew it made him more angry than if she had actually spoken. So he did not speak, either, only wrapped the fingers of his good left hand around the tumbler and listened to the ice clink hollowly against its cold sides while she walked behind him, pushing him through the living room and the front hallway and out to the porch.

He could have gotten there himself, but the hall was narrow for the bulky chair, the door opened inward and then, too, maneuvering over the threshold was difficult, with the extra step on the outside. He was only dependent on her for those few seconds to escape from the house whose rooms, large and airy though they were, seemed to shrink and stifle him when he spent too much time between their walls. When he had been a standing rather than a sitting man, he had been able to spend days inside, during a winter snowstorm, for instance, without having this claustrophobic impatience creep over him that made him feel as though a pair of thumbs were pressing at the back of his eyeballs with a steady, unvarying force. But now that he could no longer come and go whenever he wanted, now that he could not even drive his car, or descend the front stairs without aid, the feeling would come once and sometimes many times a day, until even his skin seemed to tighten and constrict him and he wanted to cry out for relief from the burden of this body, with its numb right side like a foot already in the grave.

The only thing that calmed him then was going outside, and at nightfall it was like an ache, he needed the open air, the sound of the wind stirring in the leaves of the trees, even the dim brilliance of the dying sun. Once they were past the sill he would have Marian push him to the very edge of the porch, where he could see the sky, round and infinite, falling into darkness, and the sun's eye sinking beneath the horizon that curved into itself, going on forever. The porch had railings along the sides but not in front, and being on it gave him a feeling of airy weightlessness, as if in a moment he would rise up and fly over the valley below. Instead, he would watch the shadows stretch and lengthen along the sides of the green hills until they faded to black and feel his mind calm and go empty and the tension in his body ease. Sitting there, soothed, he would take small sips from the corner of his mouth that gradually warmed his insides, while the cool air played gently across his face.

His wife rarely stayed with him. She was too practical a person to stand there, gazing into the dusk, while there were dishes from the meal she had just cooked still sitting in the sink, and other work to be done. Before long she would go back inside, leaving the screen door open in case he called for her. He had never understood her urgency in performing these mundane tasks, but she had always been that way, scouring pots and clearing the table after dinner before he had even finished gathering up the last crumbs of dessert with his fork, or gotten out his pipe. And he was not sorry to be left alone with the twilight, the moist air, and the first faint scattering of stars along the milky band of the galaxy's arm. Her breath, her movements, the mere presence of another body on the porch beside him, might have diminished things. As it was, he could pretend he was alone in the universe, except for the hiss of water through the pipes and the rattling of plates and silverware on the other side of the kitchen window. At such times, the only thing he longed for was, perhaps, a cigar; and since he could not have that, he contented himself with breathing the humid fragrance that the night brought rising from the damp soil of the garden below.

That was his best time of day. It was summer, which had always been a particularly aimless time of year for him, and as the months wore on, he found his greatest problem was boredom. They did not go out much, besides the occasional trips to the hospital where the doctors monitored his hypertension and told him not to drink so much-told him, in fact, not to drink at all. He would rage in the car on the way home. He had quit smoking five years ago, and though he had succeeded, it had been one of the most hellish experiences of his life. What more did they want from him? He'd be damned if he'd give up anything else. It made him angrier to realize Marian was only vaguely listening to him, nodding her head more in time with the music on the radio than in agreement with what he was saying, as she kept her eyes fixed on the road.