John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Though it was true, of course, that his watchful Capricorns had influence. More influence, probably, than any to be found in the warring Crab and Lion. Loving his children, he could not help but be marginally optimistic; observing how they loved their mother, he couldn’t help but see that his absolute distrust of her must be — in some way he couldn’t yet fathom — a mistake. For that reason too he would bury his feelings, watch and wait. — Yet that was not, he would realize later, what he did. Mockingly, meaning to provoke wrath, he said — though he was unaware himself that his voice was mocking—“How in the hell are we supposed to, as you say, change our lives?” He held out his glass, and Paul Brotsky poured martini in from the pitcher he’d just mixed.

Stirring again, allowing the martini to water a touch more before pouring one for Joan, Paul said, “I don’t know, I think change is possible.” He spoke casually yet seriously, subtly avoiding confrontation by treating the question as essentially abstract, philosophical. He stood looking at the floor, stirring absentmindedly. He was black-bearded, short and heavy, stooped with what looked like weariness or too much thought, though he wasn’t yet thirty. Without looking up he turned and carried the pitcher to where Joan sat, surrounded by large pillows, on the waterbed couch opposite the children’s. He walked, as always, like a man slowly pacing, alone in his office. There were reasons for that. In Viet Nam he’d been separated from the company he’d trained with — temporarily drawn from the group for a desk job — and in their first mission every one of them had been killed.

He wrote fiction now, or tried to. He had the necessary sympathy born of pain, the necessary intelligence and insight, even wisdom, and more than the necessary ability with words. But grief and self-doubt made his heart unsteady, undermined his purpose. He was still too close to that dramatic proof of the ultimate senselessness of all human acts to walk with much confidence on solid ground.

“Joan, you ready for more?” he said. She held out her glass, touched her throat with her left hand, and nodded. She wore a midnight-green Japanese robe with golden dragons, a plunging neckline, a golden belt, one of the many things she’d bought on their trip for the U.S. Information Service. Watching the two of them, his head tipped down, his two hands closed on his martini glass, Martin Orrick thought, coolly, objectively, what dramatic promise the scene would hold if one were to see it on a movie screen: a luxurious room overlooking a lighted swimming pool, an elegant wine rack — nearly full — across most of one wall, an abundance of standing and hanging plants, all furiously healthy, so that the place was like a jungle, and at the center of the shot a magnificently beautiful, tallish, slim red-head, and, pouring her martini, a brown-eyed, round-faced, elegant young man — he might have been a Polish officer out of uniform — and [CAMERA PULLS BACK, REVEALING: ] himself, a strange-looking older man — he would seem, on film, much older than either of them, in shoulder-length yellowish-silver hair, his look of slightly too studied gloom intensified by the clean gold, red, and black of his Japanese raw silk smoking jacket. The music in the background, or, rather, coming from all around the room, is Mozart, so the drama is to be, of course, philosophical and tragic: keenly intelligent, sophisticated people are driven by dark, secret passions to … whatever.

“Yes, everything’s possible,” Martin said, speaking lightly, jokingly, because the children were listening. “But is it worth anything, this changing one’s life? Shall we be astronauts? Barbers?”

“I shall be—” Evan said, looking up with a sudden smile from his book, “a fifteen-point master of Go.”

“I thought you were going to be a shepherd,” Paul said, mock-sternly.

“Only in the summer,” Evan said, still smiling.

Mary said, not looking up from her book, “Vous êtes un schnozz.”

In his mind, absently — watching Paul move back to the large, round white formica table where his own glass waited — Martin played out the dramatic possibilities. Young man falls desperately in love with red-headed lady; she returns his love; her husband, the man with the yellow-silver hair, is insanely jealous. Despite the terror and grief of the children, helplessly drawn on by their violent passions … A plot for fools, unfortunately, or at any rate a plot for a duller, therefore more dramatic cast. They were in love already, the red-headed lady and the young man now pouring a martini for himself. In love but as cautious and dignified as characters out of James. They talked to each other twice a week on the phone, when he had to be away at his office in Detroit. Nor was their love less scrupulous, less Jamesean, for the fact that when he could come for a visit they slept together from time to time, or sometimes the three of them slept together. Though it might have been shocking to someone somewhere, or excitingly kinky to some fool somewhere else, it was nothing you could make a movie of. They were as careful of one another, when the three were together, as the Flying Wallendas on the high wire; and their sexual pleasures were ordinary, mundane. Mostly, in fact, they sat side by side smoking and drinking martinis and told stories of their childhood or talked about books and articles they’d read or people they knew, or they simply joked, putting on accents and gestures like curious old coats at the Goodwill:

“Herman, how come you don’t get in the whaleboat?”

“Have you considered, Captain, that from time to time when the soul looks out at the rough, anarchic sea—”

“Herman, the others are all in the whaleboat. If you’d join us, if you’d just kindly step into the whaleboat—”

“Aye, Captain, if I’d just! But what argument, I ask you, has the heart of poor miserable man with the mighty Leviathans of the deep? What cause for dispute, what unanswerable insult—”

“This particular leviathan is escaping, Herman.”

“Go in peace, then, says I. Let ’im squint a while longer at the antique obscurities — bask off Calcutta, for all I care! — ponder with that half-ton brain for another three decades or so the malevolence of this world and its miraculous bornings. Little good it’ll do him, that’s my opinion, and maybe a good deal more harm than Mr. Kirk’s harpoon.”

“Please, just get in the fucking Goddamn boat.”

“Hell no, Captain! How do I know it don’t leak?”

“It’s been inspected. — Mr. Barret, is it not the case that you inspected this boat just this morning?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Exactly! And did it leak?”

“No sir, not to speak of.”

“You see, Herman? Look, I’m a patient man. I’m the patientest captain—”

“What if I get sick?”

“Herman, we got pails , we got whaler’s hats , we got the whole Goddamn motherfucking ocean.”

“Captain?”

“Well?”

“I quit.”

If they hurt each other’s feelings, Paul Brotsky and the Orricks, they did it because they’d drunk too much, and when it happened they apologized quickly and seriously and, as soon as possible, put it behind them. They were useless characters to prove theories by, or to stimulate pious shock or stir up pleasantly unwholesome titillation. For fiction they were, in short, worthless, like two somewhat moody old brothers and their mostly cheerful, mostly spritely old sister in some deteriorating farmhouse in New Hampshire. What Martin Orrick evaded or stubbornly refused to do or at best did ineptly, Paul Brotsky did easily and with pleasure — repairs around the house, shopping errands, above all, talk with Joan. She loved simply talking — talk about everything and nothing. Martin by nature made earnest speeches — noisy rhetoric to which he was only for the moment committed — or he said nothing, comfortably thinking his own thoughts or, more precisely, sinking into his own empty trance, his normal dull swing of alpha waves, his mind becoming like an abandoned airport in flattest Oklahoma with the slow-wheeling searchlight left running. He was glad to have her present — or the children or Paul — but quick to grow impatient and irritable when she or anyone just talked, that is, chatted idly, interested — like her father or her uncle John Elmer — in life’s dwarfs and car wrecks, its diurnal trivia, all that Martin Orrick had severed his heart from long since. Part of what made Paul Brotsky exceptional was his gift for talking with either or both of them, drawing Martin out by casual mention of theories in which Martin had at least trifling interest, since they might prove matters of lasting importance — the universe as doughnut with holes leaking Time, or split-brain psychology, or Baxter’s psychic plants — and keeping Joan in the conversation because, unlike Martin, he enjoyed her quips (Martin would for the most part simply register them, like a computer keeping more or less faithful count but rarely exploding into laughter) and because, also, Paul understood and partly sympathized with her indifference to the ultimate truth Martin Orrick had no faith in but was forever in quest of.