John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

The whole left side of the building, as you entered from the street, was the Duggerses’ apartment. It was the most beautiful apartment she’d ever seen, though not as original or even as spectacularly tasteful as she imagined at the time; she would see many like it in San Francisco, and far more elegant examples of the white-on-white style in London and Paris. Everything was white, the walls, the furniture, the chains that held the chandeliers, the wooden shutters on the windows. Against all that white, the things they’d collected stood out in bold relief: paintings, presumably by friends, all very curious and impressive, at least to Joan — smudges, bright splashes of color, one canvas all white with little scratches of gray and bright blue; sculptures — a beautiful abstraction in dark wood, a ballet dancer made out of pieces of old wire, museum reproductions, a mobile of wood and stainless steel; books and records, shelves upon shelves of them. Their record-player was the largest she’d ever seen and had a speaker that stood separate from the rest. Once when Jacqui invited her in, to write Joan her check for her week’s work, Jacqui, leading the way to the kitchen, stopped suddenly, turned with a ballerina’s step, and said, “Joanie, I must show you my shoes, no?” “I’d like to see them,” Joan said. Jacqui swept over to the side of the room, her small hand gracefully flying ahead of her, and pushed open a white sliding door. Joan stared. On tilted shelves that filled half the room’s wall, Jacqui had three hundred pairs of tiny shoes. She had all colors — gold and silver, yellow, red, green, some with long ties as bright as new ribbons, some with little bows, some black and as plain as the inside of a pocket. “Where’d you get all these?” Joan said. Jacqui laughed. “Mostly Paris.” She gave Joan a quick, appraising look. “Dahling, Paris you are going to love. There is a store, a department store, Au Printemps. When you go there, blow a kiss for Jacqui!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ah, the French!”

Years later, the first time Joan shopped at Au Printemps, she would remember that, and would do as she’d been told. And she would remember Jacqui too a few years later when, at Lambert Field in St. Louis, deplaning with her family from a European trip, a news crew of very cool, very smart blacks from KSDF-TV approached her with camera and wind-baffled shotgun microphones and asked if she had any suggestions for the improvement of services at the airport. “Way-el,” she said, smiling prettily, batting her lashes, and speaking in her sweetest Possum Hollow drawl. She tapped her mouth with a bejewelled finger and gazed thoughtfully down the baggage area, then said pertly, as if it were something she’d been thinking for a long time and rather hated to bring up, “Ah thank it would be nice if awl these people spoke French.” Her performance was included in that night’s local news. Her parents missed it, as was perhaps just as well. Relatives called to tell them with pleasure that Joanie had been on television. No one mentioned that anything she’d said was funny, much less “peculiar.”

“I wonder if I ever will get to Paris,” she’d said thoughtfully, that afternoon in Jacqui’s apartment.

Jacqui had laughed like a young girl, though she was then over forty. “Keep playing the piano and don’t theenk twice,” Jacqui said. “If you don’t go to Paris, then Paris will have to come to you.”

Where would they have gone, Joan wondered now, when the neighborhood had grown too dangerous to live in? Were they still alive? It came to her suddenly, for no apparent reason, that Pete Duggers had looked like the hero of her favorite childhood book, Mr. Mixiedough, in the story of the whole world’s slipping into darkness. It was a book she’d wanted for Evan and Mary, but there seemed to be no copies left anywhere; not even the book-search people from whom Martin got his rare old books could find a trace of it. Had it been the same, perhaps, with Pete and Jacqui Duggers — swallowed up, vanished into blackness? She’d asked about him once at the Abbey, on 13th Street in New York, when she’d gone to, three times, a show called The Hoofers , which had brought back all the great old soft-shoe and tap men. On the sidewalk in front of the theater afterward, while she was waiting for Martin to come and pick her up, she’d talked with Bojangles Robinson and Sand Man Sims — they’d shown her some steps and had laughed and clapped their hands, dancing one on each side of her — and she’d asked if either of them had ever heard of Pete Duggers.

The Sand Man rolled up his eyes and lifted off his hat as if to look inside it. “Duggers,” he’d said, searching through his memory.

“You say the man worked out of San Looie?” Bojangles said.

“I played piano for his wife,” Joan said. “She taught ballet.”

“Duggers,” said the Sand Man. “That surely does sound familiar.”

“White man married to a ballet teacher,” Bojangles said, and ran his hand across his mouth. “Boy that surely rings a bell, some way.”

“Duggers,” the Sand Man said, squinting at the lighted sky. “Duggers.”

“He used to go faster and faster and then suddenly stand still,” she said. “He was a wonderful dancer.”

“Duggers,” Bojangles echoed, thoughtful, staring at his shoes. “I know the man sure as I’m standing here. I got him right on the tip of my mind.”

“Change our lives?” Martin said, as if wearily amused, raising his eyebrows. It was Joan who had made the absurd suggestion, watching with narrowed eyes as Paul Brotsky stood stirring the martinis, around and around, looking at the carpet, thinking his own thoughts, or listening to the circling music. The suggestion wasn’t really absurd, of course; more painful than that. He knew what changes he would make, if change were possible. But he, Martin, was fighting no more fights. Should he admire men stronger and braver than himself, destiny hunters who left skeletons in their wake like Melville’s whalers — like Melville himself, when it came to that? He would accept what by chance and stupidity he had become: straight man to a clowning, half-wit universe, merry-go-round of Dame Fortune, stiff, groping zodiac. He would bury himself in events one more time, and one more, and one more, learn to breathe without air. He would write when he was able, patch up the age-old necessary illusions as painters repair old carousel panels, and would keep himself, the rest of the time, just slightly, not belligerently, drunk.

He looked over at his children, seated back to back with an oversize, woven Greek pillow between them on the waterbed couch beside the door leading out to the front lawn. Their long blond hair, the gentleness of their faces, the stillness with which they sat were almost identical—“Of course , my dear boy, two Capricorns, you see!” John Napper would say. Which suggested that they were there to see that all went well — Capricorn vigilance. No need to fear, my beloved cautious watchers , he thought; but they couldn’t know that, after all they’d been through; nor could he. “Cancer and Leo!” John Napper had said, shaking his wild, majestic head, eyes twinkling merrily, standing away from his painting a moment to consider from this new, unexpected angle the miracle of life. “Makes for the stormiest of all possible marriages — high water and hell respectively, you know — but splendid when it finally settles itself!” He lifted his head, lips pursed, that strange, mad joy of his bursting from his eyes and hair like Blakean sunlight, or like the light that redeemed all memory in one of his own incomparable landscapes. “Splendid,” he said, and hung fire like a conductor delaying for an instant the expected jubilant final chord, beaming with delight, divinely impish, then said it again, the universe from end to end his shining orchestra: “Splendid!” And Martin, for all his doubts about his marriage, had believed him absolutely. How could one doubt such authority? But he was now less certain of the things he’d believed that summer in England, in John Napper’s sun-filled studio: remembered his feelings only as one remembers the feelings one had while reading, say, Anna Karenina sometime fifteen years ago.