John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Abruptly, Elaine Glass said, “That’s sick!”

“Me or Darwin?” Craine asked.

“Darwin,” she said; but she was censoring herself. The tone was reproach.

There was no place to park. He pulled halfway up onto the sidewalk alongside Faner, switched off the engine, pulled the brake on, and opened his door. At once, as if materialized from nowhere, as a reprimand, a blind boy appeared and came tapping toward them, walking faster than a person with sight would walk, overcompensating, making trouble. Craine clamped his jaw and got out, let come what might.

Elaine slammed the door on her side, then saw the blind boy and cried, “Look out for the truck! There’s a truck on the sidewalk!”

The boy jumped a foot, swinging his head around, first right, then left, convinced he was about to be run over. In panic, his left hand thrown out to the side, the cane in his right tapping rapidly, far ahead of him, he rushed toward the street, felt the curb and spun around and rushed, tapping, toward the wall of the building. Elaine stooped quickly, put her books down, and ran to him. “Let me help you!” He swung his face at her and said something, angry, or so it seemed from where Craine stood. She gave him some answer, calming him — calming both of them — then walked with him, cupping his elbow, around past the truck. When she released his elbow he thanked her and set about explaining something, gesturing with both hands. She nodded, answering, smiling nervously, eagerly. He continued gesturing and explaining — by the wheeling and slashing of his cane in the air, it might have been the woe of existence he was explaining — and Elaine went on smiling and nodding. Craine looked at his watch. Three twenty. This delay too, of course, she would blame on Craine. Rightly, no doubt, from a certain point of view. At last, his explanations concluded, the blind boy turned away from her and, after a last brief hesitation, went tapping down the sidewalk. Elaine turned her head to look reproachfully at Craine, then started for the entrance and the stairway.

“You forgot your books again,” Craine called.

She stopped and simply stood there with her back to him. He stepped to the books, scooped them up, and hurried toward her. When she held out her arms for them, he pretended not to notice.

“Which floor’s your class on?”

“Second,” she said.

“We better hurry, you’re twenty minutes late,” he said. He made a slight movement in the direction of the door, then waited. She compressed her lips, then bent her head — in profile, her face was like the face on some ancient coin, Craine thought — and, together, they started for the entrance.

“Listen, I’m sorry if I wasn’t on time,” he said, not turning to look at her. “I hurried as fast as I could, scout’s honor. I’m also sorry I put the truck where the blind boy could run into it. I really am. Look, Miss Glass, stop being mad at me.”

“All right,” she said. She glanced at him sideways and, seeing that he was watching her, gave a shrug. “So all right.”

He reached out ahead of her to open the door, and perhaps against her principles, she stood politely waiting till it was open, then stepped through. “I’m also sorry about the mindless chatter about Darwin,” he said as he started up the stairs behind her.

“I didn’t mind. It was interesting.” Whether or not she was still angry seemed impossible to tell. Ruefully, he watched how her brown-golden legs took her springing up the stairs — he, Craine, laboring behind her, winded by the time he reached the first-floor landing. By the time they reached the second, where her class was, he was ready to gag, like Royce bent over with an attack of emphysema. She went striding down the hall. He hurried, coughing into his hand, trying to catch up with her. At one of the classroom doors she stopped and stood for a moment with her head bent, listening. Craine went up to her to give her her books, his legs aching, almost trembling, from his climb. She nodded, awkwardly taking the pile.

She said, meeting his eyes and then looking away, embarrassed, “I should talk to you sometime about that thing we were talking about before, the difference between people and animals, the way we lose touch because of words — remember? I was thinking about what I’ve learned in analysis, and I think — I’m not certain, I mean, but — I think you’re wrong.” She turned from him to look through the little square window into the classroom.

“I’ll be waiting,” he said. “Anything you like, I’m your servant. Craine’s Last Case. One last feeble push for humanity, and then amen, amen .”

She jerked her face around, her eyes very wide behind the magnifying lenses. She’d understood him better than he’d meant her to, he saw. He winked and grinned to throw her off, but her expression did not change. Without a word, she turned the doorknob, opened the door just a little, and slipped in.

Craine watched her out of sight. The professor was saying, working up interest, though she’d said it a hundred times, no doubt, “If you could put all the people in the United States on a postage stamp, that’s how many rods there would be on a single retina. And as for the cells of the brain itself, if people were scaled down to the size of cells, we could hold the whole population of the earth in our two cupped hands, and there wouldn’t be enough to make a brain of.”

There the door clicked shut, and though he could still have heard if he were willing to strain, Craine gave up listening. He turned away from the classroom, folded his hands behind his back, and for a moment stood gazing out the large, gray-tinted window.

The sunlight fallen over the campus seemed now ever warmer, more golden, bronzing the trees, making them like trees in some noble old painting from the eighteenth century.

There on the dark, quiet lawns and the shaded brick and stone entranceways where students stood waiting, inaudibly talking — they all seemed now features in some classic oil painting, fallen out of time. The Golden Age, Craine thought, and gave a little nod as if someone else had said it. Strange, downright mysterious, how placid university campuses could seem. He knew well enough that it was partly an illusion. It was here, after all, that Ira Katz made his living, full of anger and sorrow at the failure of his marriage. You could pretty well bet that once, at least, he’d loved that wife of his; no doubt believed, when first they’d gotten married, she was the prettiest creature that ever walked this earth, and the cleverest too — Wendel Davies, his chairman, seemed to think so, so to Ira, who’d loved her, it must have been all the more obvious. Emotions like that would be hard to get over: his memory of how it was at the beginning of their marriage (it was always the same, that first stage of marriage, like the first stage of a drunk), all the time love-making, night and morning and under the not-yet-paid-for kitchen table; and his memories of the hospital, when she was having their children, how she’d clung to his hand as if to crush the bones, rolling her widened eyes at him, mouth opening for a scream; and memories of moments when she’d shone and he’d been proud of her — some party where everyone was surprised at her wit or sweet modesty, whatever (more likely wit, Craine decided, studying the photograph in his mind): say she was wearing a dress she’d made herself, very tasteful, stunning, the neck perhaps a slash that showed her cleavage. There’d be no doubt, of course — against all those painfully sweet memories he carried — that their Eden had gone awry; indeed, looking back, he would see that their marriage had been awry from the beginning. Perhaps she had a jealous streak, or a sullen streak, or a mean streak, something he’d noticed — if only he’d paid attention — the first day he’d met her. There’d be no doubt in his mind that it was mainly her fault; at any rate no doubt in the part of his mind where the light was on. For all his poetry, Ira Katz was no wiser than any other poor doltish male. It was a premise with all men, Craine had long since observed, that everyone ought to feel exactly as they did; to feel otherwise was to show oneself emotionally defective — infantile, or hysterical, or cloddishly insensitive. Most men were quick to assert this premise, and proud of it. Women, who worked from the same premise, confused things by hotly denying that that was how they worked. And so they’d fought the age-old fight, tiresomely the same, from the viewpoint of the gods, generation on generation. What each of them had loved, if it had ever been love — the central mystery of the other one’s being — they’d attacked with the cunning and (behind the loud skirmishing) deadly calm of professional murderers. Each convinced, of course, that he did it to save himself, not really to hurt the other — and, ironically, each one right. An old, old story. Ira Katz would have no real doubt that he’d been right to leave, in the end: she’d been killing him, he could tell himself, and very likely it was true. But ah, how terrible it must be for him now to look out at this peaceful scene, this green-golden Eden lost to him forever though he stands in the center of it! “This softness in the air,” he would think, “this is how it was the night I took her to that John Wayne movie.” Or, “The way the shadows are beginning to stretch out, that’s the way it was the night she gave me the surprise party, the night I passed my orals.” Ah, Eden, Craine thought, wincing and shaking his head without knowing it, terrible, terrible place! No man — or almost none — in Ira Katz’s position could keep it entirely secret from himself that in fact it was his fault. Poet. Squeezer, poisoner of emotion, himself the ancient enemy, sly old viper. Craine would bet anything you cared to bet that even now, in his misery, what Ira Katz was writing nights was poems about his former wife, or maybe — yes, more likely — his children. “Nobody learns a damn thing,” Craine muttered aloud, then, hearing himself, shut his mouth and swallowed. Restlessness, ambition, that was the enemy of marriage, always; that was Katz’s sin — perhaps the girl’s as well, he wasn’t sure. Sin or madness. Something Elaine had said darkened the edge of his mind, then broke in—“what I’ve learned in analysis.” Why it felt connected he wasn’t exactly sure: perhaps the way the campus, in the afternoon light, had made him think of Eden, or childhood, same thing … Yes, anality and all that, the child’s possessiveness, playing with his feces, feces symbolically transmuted into money, into time, great monuments, cities walling out Nature, Death … All very vague; he hadn’t thought about Freud in a long time, though he remembered he’d more or less believed it as he read, in fact had seemed to remember, though of course it was impossible, nobody really remembered that far back. He’d believed ever since he’d read those books — he no longer remembered exactly which ones — that everything men did, or men and women, perhaps (he’d have to think about that)— everything they did was a fraud and a delusion, a game played against Death on a rigged roulette wheel, Death playing for the house. Music, mathematics, Egypt’s cities of the dead (the brains of the corpses drained out through the nostrils and discarded as of no use), all the magnificent works of man were mere blind birds’ battering nights against the roof, bluffs against Death’s dull, invincible hand, a flailing of “sublimation.” It was all nothing, Chartres cathedral, UNIVAC, “the shadow of a dream,” as some old-time poet said. No doubt Ira Katz had read those same books. He’d refused to be persuaded, the drive to live forever too strong in him. So he’d sit up all night, intense, eyes glowing, exactly like the “hackers” Professor Weintraub had mentioned, at the computer center, and when his wife said, “Ira, aren’t you coming to bed?” he’d said, “Half an hour more,” lying, praying she’d fall asleep and never know if he stayed up far longer, as he intended to do, hunting for some rhythm that was the perfect music and matched perfectly the words for his sorrow or rage or sense of loss. He’d stayed up till dawn sometimes, or worked straight through, skipping a night, or maybe two nights in a row — at any rate he did that now, sometimes; no reason to doubt that he’d done it when he was married. His heart would tug from his chain-smoking, the veins in his wrists and hands would ache. He’d have to be crazy to think he was driving Death away, when obviously he was beckoning to him, waving both arms, yelling “Here! Over this way!” So all right, he was crazy: variant of the universal madness. Fooled himself by claiming he was capturing life, that is, emotion in its flow, translating time into eternity. And what was he doing? Making things up! Not reliving emotions and capturing them forever in the exact right words — no, making up scenes drawn partly from life and partly not, blending fact and fantasy till afterward he wouldn’t know which was which, murdering the past as it really was, tearing it down like a worthless machine for spare parts. Surely he must feel some guilt over that. He could hardly forget that his feeling for his wife had been real, once, powerful — his feeling for his children no less so, perhaps. Yet he had used those feelings, changed them just slightly, for some aesthetic reason — or even if he got them exactly right (which was unlikely, but never mind) had altered them by the very act of setting them apart from the flow of things, as a beautiful young woman is one thing, darting naked from the bedroom to the bathroom, another caught forever in her flight by stiff, glowing paint. Surely no poet, not even the very finest, could help but feel to some extent a betrayer of life. If he loved his children as profoundly as he claimed, why was he sitting here sucking on his pencil while his children lay asleep in the other room? Not that poets were worse than other men; not at all. But there was no denying that poets, more than most men, were in a bad position for keeping up the helpful lie. Exact description or re-creation of feeling was their special expertise. As the chairman of Ira Katz’s department had pointed out, every device in the tradition they lived by was designed for no other purpose than getting the emotion just right. So now, looking out at the soft golden sunlight, the shaded lawns of the university, Ira Katz must no doubt be pretty well aware how rotten his life had turned. He must know pretty well how his wife felt, too — careful student of emotion that he was — and how his children felt. He who had seemed their hope had proved their destroyer, he must be thinking. And what would he be thinking, given all that, about the death of April Vaught? “Dismal,” Craine said aloud, then bit his mouth shut. No doubt he’d slept with her often. At any rate, it seemed general knowledge that they were having an affair. Yet she was not the first, not the only affair. So Ira Katz’s guilt, in his own eyes — to Craine it hardly mattered — was darkened. That childhood self Katz had talked about was betrayed with a vengeance, then. And with her death — assuming he had nothing to do with it himself, not an easy assumption — the picture darkened still more.