John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Again his pale blue eyes had the dead look, though tonight there was no sign of rage in them. He puffed at his pipe every three or four words, as if drawing what little life he had from it, his left hand closed lightly around the pipe bowl, his right around the rim of his martini glass. King Rolf, the Alsatian, lay beside him, his head on his paws; Evan’s black-and-tan, as large as a lion, lay by the sliding glass doors that went out to the pool. You could hear the drone of the television coming from upstairs, where the children were watching God knew what — nothing worse than their life. He said:

“We’ve got to talk, you say. But it’s futile to talk. There’s no reason left in the world anymore, not even the illusion. It’s like Johnson saying with the greatest sincerity, ‘Let us sit down and reason one with another,’ and lying about everything from Tonkin Bay to the price of a Job Corps T-shirt. Not that he didn’t ‘mean well,’ understand. But it’s over, that’s all. No trust left, no faith. Why talk fairly with someone who obeys no rules, intends to destroy you? Better we trade insults, see if we can give each other heart attacks.”

“It must be terribly painful to be the last honest man,” she said. She lit another cigarette. Though her voice was calm as steel, her fingers trembled.

“You have a sharp eye. Yes indeed, my suffering’s a rare and splendid thing.”

“We don’t suffer, of course.”

“ ‘We’ being, I presume, you and the children, the great united front.” He rolled his eyes up, as if in brief prayer to some ferocious, bored god, no doubt some half-wit god jugged to the gills.

“You could try to talk,” she snapped. “You’re supposed to be this marvellous lecturer, the finest in your department, as you so frequently remark.”

He pushed his chair back angrily and stood up, not to leave but to be farther from her, free to pace if he should need to. “When in hell am I supposed to have called myself a marvellous lecturer?”

“Except of course when you don’t bother to show up.”

His eyes widened, enraged but also baffled. He looked terrible — scratches all over his face from his rampage last night, bleary, baggy eyes. “Name one single time since I left San Francisco—”

“You’ve forgotten. You can’t remember anything anymore. You drink and drink — it’s a wonder you can sometimes still remember your name.”

“God damn you,” he roared, “stay on one subject for fifteen seconds, will you? What are these classes I’m supposed to have missed?”

“Plenty, Martin! Do you really think everybody doesn’t know? I’ve tried to get hold of you a dozen times — ask Georges Fauré, ask John Porter. Nobody can find you. You’re supposed to be in class, they say, but there’s nobody in the room.”

“That’s impossible!” But he was staring at her, perhaps trying to remember, perhaps trying to judge whether or not she’d found something out.

“Does she massage your shoulders? Does she like to be fucked in graveyards?” She smiled, mock-sweet.

He stared. His breathing was growing calmer; he was thinking something, she had no idea what. Finally he said, swirling his drink around and around, speaking as if to his glass, not her: “You fight with great spirit, but your stupidity beats you. Beats me too, in the end, but never mind; it doesn’t matter.” He raised his glass, extended it toward the darkness outside, to the right of the swimming pool, where the trees began to circle out, as if offering a toast to evil spirits. “Behold here the ruin of centuries of Nature’s blind plodding. I give you, in this lady, the glorious culmination of a bold experiment, homo non sapiens: centuries of careful evolution in clans, selective breeding until the last trace of judgment was eradicated, nothing in the universe right or wrong but by virtue of its plaid and the loch it had the honor to get born beside; then a final bit of polish in the American South, magnificent Eden of noninterference, though black men turn on lynchers’ ropes and trash eat clay: all argument abandoned, debate forsworn, no action permitted to the human mind but sad empty songs about love grown colder and heaven’s six gates — oh yeah , my Lawd—”

“Martin, you’re sick. You’re really sick.”

“That’s true.” He waved his glass. “And over here I give you this gentleman, or rather this specimen, this noblest achievement of modern teratology, born with a gavel and Robert’s Rules of Order and a bachelor of science in Talmudic law, no hasty construction, this monster of angular good sense, this tremulous howl in the wilderness of lies, this gibberish singer of decaying Truth—”

“You think this kind of talk makes me look stupid?”

He turned to look at her. “You remembered the subject! How’d you do that? You must’ve wrote it down.”

Though he mocked her, there was no anger in his eyes now; even the dead look — or maybe possessed look was more accurate — had sunk away. She was suddenly aware of the pain in her right leg and midsection, from her pelvis to lower chest. It had been there, she realized, for a long time. She felt a touch of panic, as she always did when she thought about the pain, and got up abruptly to fix herself another drink. It was stupid to have another one — it meant Martin would, too — but she didn’t care, tonight. Liquor was better than the drugs were, Dr. Crouse had said.

Martin said behind her, “You hurting?”

She dropped ice into her glass and glanced up at his reflection in the window. She saw her own there too. They didn’t look like two people who would hate each other. How strange it was — how strange everything was, she thought fleetingly. People called them a handsome couple. The pain licked up sharply into her chest, then died down again. “I’m all right,” she said. “It makes me mean, that’s all.” She carried the pitcher of martinis to him. He held out his glass and she poured. Smoke from his pipe spiralled upward. “Let’s not get drunk tonight,” she said.

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

They sat down again, across from each other at the round formica table. She lit a cigarette, pushed the matches toward him. “You feel better when you’re writing. You should try,” she said.

“Tomorrow, maybe.”

“What’s wrong? Really, I mean.”

He said nothing, looking into his glass.

“I love you,” she said. “You don’t believe it, but I do.”

He smiled, politely scornful.

She said, more crossly than she’d meant to, “How can you stand it, not believing in anything?”

“Oh, I believe things,” he said. “I just don’t think any of them will help.”

She watched him puffing gloomily at his pipe, following drops down the side of his glass with one fingernail.

“Do you want a divorce, Martin?” she said calmly, full of fear.

He pursed his lips, seemed to think about it. “Makes no difference,” he said. “No.”

“Because of the children,” she flashed angrily.

“Partly that,” he said. “Mainly because the whales are going extinct, and I don’t have much faith in the life after death, and we haven’t yet run out of gin.”

“Jesus, you do rave on,” she said.

“I do?” he said.

Martin’s parents, in contrast to Joan’s, were noisily, articulately religious. Often, when Martin was very young, they would gather after sermons at his grandfather’s house and debate the veracity of what was said by the man behind the pulpit. Martin’s grandfather was a farmer and country schoolmaster with a brilliant, stubborn, morose mind (a child of Sagittarius) and a photographic memory with which he merely made trouble. At the age of forty-five he’d been tricked into marriage by the first lady lawyer in New York State, an Irishwoman (Protestant) as stubborn as he was, a determined red-head who by wily manipulation had put Luther Doane Orrick — such was his triumphantly gloomy name — into a position that threatened foreclosure on his two-hundred-year-old farm, but she offered (she was just twenty-eight at the time, a partner in the office of her father and uncle) the alternative of her not very noticeably gentle hand in marriage. He was flabbergasted, a confirmed bachelor, though a handsome man with coal-black hair that swept and curled out, edged with silver, fierce as his opinions, at his collar and around his ears. In his black top hat he was a man to reckon with (he was not, by any means, an advance-guard dresser), and the way he gripped his cane when just walking along — his arthritic knuckles bulging like the knuckles of an eagle at the moment of the strike — gave every living creature that stood within range of his eye or ear stern warning.