John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

He thought of her weightless, long hand on his arm and pondered the image of her smile inside his mind. Exactly what he was thinking he could hardly have said: something about cancer, and murder, and his peculiar sense of peace.

The room was white. There was snow outside. That was a rare thing in Carbondale. Voices coming in were like muffled bells. There were faraway voices — children playing by the street — and nearer voices — those of the attendants at the end of the corridor. Here in the sunroom there was no sound at all, though the television was on — just the picture, sufficiently in shadow that he could just make it out. But what Craine was mainly aware of — seated on the cold gray plastic couch, magazines around him, the Bible in his lap — was the dazzling winter light, so brilliant, glancing off icicles and snow, that his eyes, however long he squinted, refused to adjust. He was like a man just emerged from imprisonment in some cellar, who takes in the world by cautious peeks, then squeezes his eyes shut and sees it all again, vermilion. He was alone this afternoon, except for an old woman in the chair by the television. She sat head down, as if fast asleep, though she was not asleep, merely wilted; when she slept, she snored. Each time Craine looked, for over an hour, she was exactly the same. Then once when he opened his eyes for a moment he saw that she was raising her head, slowly, and slowly turning it, like a ghostly sunflower, more or less looking in his direction. He realized now that there was someone beside him. He looked up: a young woman — early middle-aged — a fellow patient, though not in a hospital gown like his. She wore a clean, unwrinkled white robe, expensive. A shining haze of blond hair hung, brushed and electric, to just below her shoulders, carefully fastened with a clip that glittered like a diamond.

Craine nodded, timidly, or rather bowed, a gesture grotesquely exaggerated, an observer would have said, but plainly not meant to be ironic. He drew his large feet closer to the couch, meekly offering the stranger more space. She moved away a little. On her small, stockingless feet she had pale leather slippers. Craine wished he had a drink and reached to the pocket of his pajamas, then the pockets of his robe, hunting for his pipe, unaware that he was doing it until he realized that indeed he had no pipe, nothing in his pockets but some wadded-up Kleenex, no defense against the eyes of the stranger but the Bible in his lap. He looked at her again, trying to read her face, but the brightness made her a blur. Though her face was turned slightly to one side, she appeared to be watching him, neither friendly nor, so far as he could guess, openly hostile. Watching him, though, that was the thing. It was that, chiefly, that made him aware to the bottom of his slippers that this was a woman from a different world from his. Rich, probably. He smiled, almost fiercely, and bowed to her again, then opened the Bible in his lap and put his finger down at random, preparing to read, or, rather, pretend to.

As he lowered his head she said, “Good afternoon.” Distantly, coldly. A voice with an unnerving authority in it. He looked up once more, wondering in panic why she spoke to him.

“Which are you,” she asked, “alcoholic or mentally ill?” The question made his heart jerk — the terrible directness. She was a teacher, it came to him; a lady professor. He should have known by the glasses hanging down by a cord, the boyish yet severe way she stood. She waited, partly turned away from him, not meeting his eyes, but expecting him to answer; requiring him to.

“You might say both,” he said. Then, after a moment, making a bold leap. “Which are you?”

She turned away more and took a step toward the window as if the question annoyed her, too stupid to waste time on. Craine shrank inward. She had a cigarette in her hand, and she held it in a way that seemed to him disdainful. As she drew it toward her mouth it began to wobble violently. It struck him like a bolt of lightning that she was sick, miserably unhappy, for all her degrees or whatever, just a woman, a child. He doubted the insight; perhaps it was something else. Though she alarmed him, seemed clearly to blame him for something, he was conscious of watching her — that is, squinting blearily up in her direction — as Meakins would, full of helpless sorrow. Abruptly she changed her mind, turned to glance at him, then looked away. She stood now in front of the window, dead center, her bathrobe and hair like fire. In a voice bristling with hatred she said, “Someone committed me.” She gave a sort of laugh.

“I’m sorry,” Craine said.

For a long time she said nothing, ignoring him, smoking, her hand jittering like a machine. “I’m as sane as anyone,” she said suddenly, as if to herself. “There’s a professor in my department, lives right next door to us, he carries a clothespin in his pockets so he can always touch wood. He’s fat and little. Jewish. Black suits. Brilliant mind, very famous — but let me tell you, he’s a swamp. Walks down the sidewalk with an umbrella on his arm and his nose in a book, and when he comes to a corner where he has to turn right, he turns in a circle three times to the left. Never stops reading. I’m as sane as that.”

Craine nodded, noncommittal. Her words weren’t really loud enough to hear, though mysteriously he’d heard them. Again she stood silent, jittering and smoking. Then abruptly she came back, taking quick little steps. “How come the Bible?” She spoke loudly now, as if she thought he might be deaf. “Are you a minister?”

Craine tipped his head and shrugged, almost cringing, apologetic. “I was a detective,” he said.

“You’ve shifted to higher criticism?” She shouted it, flashing a smile like a razor.

Again he shrank from her. She turned, somehow offended, and walked in rage to the window. She stayed there a long time, smoking and whispering, with her back to him. He leaned forward, thinking of leaving, but he hesitated too long, and she edged back toward him, keeping her eyes from him till the last minute. Then she looked at him, frowned angrily, smiled again. “They put you here to watch me.” Her index finger — the hand that held the cigarette — jabbed at him. Ashes struck his knees.

Craine shook his head. Now, for some reason, he could see her features clearly — petulant, like a child’s; beautiful even in their wrong-headed fury, or so it seemed to him. Her cheeks were very pale, as if powdered. In spite of his distress, he was tempted to smile, as at a child’s performance of a tantrum. Her eyes were narrowed, her shoulders pushed forward. When he failed to speak, she was checked a little, and darted her eyes away. He leaned back. She remembered the cigarette and drew it to her mouth, trembling violently again, and sucked at it. Craine said, “I’m in no condition to watch anybody. They put me here because I pretty near blew a man’s head off.” It was not, strictly speaking, the truth, but it expressed Craine’s feeling.

“Maybe he deserved it.” She liked the idea. Scent of blood.

Craine nodded thoughtfully, avoiding her eyes, and clasped his hands together. “It’s a mystery.”

She sucked at the cigarette again, then let out smoke through her nose and mouth in a way that showed practice, maybe practice long ago with a mirror. “Bullshit,” she said, cold as ice. “Mystery.” She laughed. She turned away but did not leave, stood instead staring out the window, elbows stiffly at her sides except when she remembered to take a pull at the cigarette. Craine watched her, squeezing his hands together, straining to make her form come clear; but the sunlight and snow and the whiteness of the room were, if anything, brighter than earlier. Something made him think all at once that she was crying — standing there, hands at her sides, letting tears run down her face. His mouth opened, and he thought, for a fleeting instant, of Elaine Glass. “Crying,” he said to himself, a kind of whimper, thinking simultaneously of the professor and Elaine. It was like seeing the stars from the perspective of a new geometry.