John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Oh, come on, Martin,” Paul said now, playfully, though with a touch of irritation. “You’re always saying, ‘Ah woe, life’s worthless.’ If you really don’t take any pleasure in all this”—he waved, taking in the room, the big house behind it, the woods and hills, perhaps the stars—“you should give it to my brother Frank.”

“That’s true, you got me,” Martin said, and smiled. “I like it all. I should be happy.”

“Glanted, of course,” Paul added, leaning forward — and suddenly his smile, his squint, his bow were to the last inch Chinese—“having nice house and good famiry is not rike getting Vradivostok back from filthy Russians.”

“Exactry!” Martin said and bowed.

Joan smiled too, but she was in pain tonight, so that her mood was sombre, slightly cranky. “Martin, what is it you really think you want? What is it you think we’re keeping you from?”

“It’s not you,” he said, and though even in his own ears the words sounded doubtful, he meant it, more or less. It was not her fault that, as he was noticing when she spoke, the color of the chlorinated water in the pool was an affront to nature, as repulsive as painted lips and fingernails, or worse in fact, since it was not only artificial but also phony pure. So should he pour in filth from the horse pond? Introduce frogs, dark sacks of mosquito eggs?

“Then what’s missing?” she insisted. “What is it you think you want?”

He looked at her, pretending to be daydreaming. That was more and more his way, he’d begun to notice — more and more his stock evasion tactic. She was watching him with her eyebrows lowered, and it seemed to him for a moment that she was trying to make him explain what it was that she desired, why she, too, was dissatisfied. Perhaps even Paul, busily lighting his thousandth cigarette, his eyes on the match, was waiting, masking an unreasonable hope. Martin Orrick could have told them in an instant what they needed, in point of fact: a life of service, self-sacrifice. But they wouldn’t have believed him, or, simple as it was, wouldn’t have understood, would have resisted him on grounds of style, the grounds on which poor stupid human beings make all their most important choices, judging presidents by their grammar, philosophers by their gall; they would have thrown up reasonable, unanswerable objections — some unanswerable because too stupid and cynical to be worthy of an answer (however right the objections, from a computer’s point of view, or an English-speaking spider’s), some unanswerable because a trifle too profound, hinting at the central debilitator of the age, the dark, spinning hole at the core of things, the emptiness hurling all their reasonings outward, faster and faster, toward the final fsst of das absolute Wissen, the punchline no one would hang around for.

“My desires are simple,” he said, too cheerfully, raising his glass. “Happiness, eternal life for everybody, an interesting adventure.”

“These things we expecting next week,” Paul said, Jewish. “Today we got fresh-baked bagels.”

They laughed, including the children, looking over from their books. Martin listened to the laughter, his own and the others, and gazed out at the pool.

Paul blew out smoke, rubbed the ash from his cigarette on the ceramic ashtray, then quickly put the cigarette back in his mouth and drew on it, as if breathing without the cigarette had become difficult for him. He said, “I had an adventure once, when I was younger.”

“Really?” Joan said.

He nodded, serious. “One time we were at home alone, and my brother Frank sucked my eye out.”

Martin coughed up part of his martini, laughing. “You’re kidding! ” he said. Joan was laughing too, blushing as her father would.

Paul was solemn. “Nope. He really did. He ran over next door and got the neighbors and they pushed it back in.”

“Jesus!” Martin said, laughing.

“Lucky you were in good with your neighbors,” Joan said.

The scene leaped up before them and Martin became, instantly, the irritable neighbor. “Your ring my doorbell one more time, you kid, and I warn you, I’m calling the cops!”

“Please, Mr. Karinsky,” Paul Brotsky whined, wringing his hands and cowering, “ya gotta help me! I sucked my brother’s eye out.”

“You got a big mouth, you lousy kid.”

Joan said sweetly, playing Mrs. Karinsky, “You sucked his eye out?”

“We was just kiddin around like, and fwupp , out it came.”

“You didn’t swallow it, I hope.”

“Oh no, ma’am, it’s still hangin in there, like.”

“How did it taste?”

“I don’t know. Salty. Like a oyster.”

“Ethel, you gonna stand here talkin with this fart? He sucks his brother’s eye out, that’s his business. Git home, kid, before I sic the dog on ya.”

“But sir, please , sir, my little brother needs help.”

“I ain’t no eye doctor. Shit, I ain’t even a fireman.”

“I wonder what an eye would taste like cooked.”

“God damn it, Ethel, you start goormay cooking people’s eyes and that’s definitely it , it’s over , I’m movin in with my sister Claire.”

“It was just a thought.”

“Mr. Karinsky, if you help me I’ll mow your lawn for you free. I’ll wash your car. Also your storm windows, and put up the screens.”

“Like hell you will. The first time you find me asleep in my hammock, fwupp !”

“Was it very salty? How big was it, exactly?” She leaned toward him with a witchy sweet smile. “Little boy, let me whisper in your ear.”

“Ma’am?”

“FWUPP! FWUPP!”

They laughed a while longer, drunk enough that anything might seem funny. Then, except for the record-player, the room was silent. Steam hung over the swimming pool. When there was a pause in the music, Martin could hear the drone of the television the children had left on, hours ago, upstairs. Ours but to reason why , he thought all at once, for no reason.

No, no movie here , he thought, no novel . Maybe a photograph, a painting, a piece of music, since photographs and paintings dealt with isolated instants, not the dizzying swirl of all Time and Space, and music made mention of grandiose desires and glorious satisfactions, or tragic disappointments (equally of interest) without naming them. No such luck for the poor fool novel — or the brain’s right lobe; a stupid art, in fact, from the spiritual point of view of those nobler arts. Unless, of course, one ducked the whole business of the novelist for wild-man characters with windblown beards and eyes like sapphires, people whose hearts swelled with love or rage or the hunger for revenge, with none of the usual ambivalence or dreary simple-mindedness, people who moved among towering crags or dark, antique, brown-fog-filled cities, creeping or brawling their way through plots hung thick with suspense and metaphysical implication, all hedged and fenced or hurled into the world like a Mississippi flood by mincing or bellowing rhetoric. He’d written such novels and would no doubt write more of them. But they left him angry, dissatisfied. Why shouldn’t a man’s life develop reasonably, like a plot, with choices along the way, and antagonists with names, and some grand, compelling purpose, and a ringing final line? But he knew, no one better, that the question was foolish. All art, even music, is invented from scratch, has nothing to do with birds or the rumble of thunder. The urge to make art discover truth was a childish, wrongheaded urge, as his friend Bill Gass kept crabbily insisting in article after article for The New York Review , as if hoping if he said it enough he’d at last grow resigned to it. Well, not Martin Orrick. It filled him with the rage of a hurt rhinoceros — though he’d admit it was true — that human consciousness had no business in the world, that the world was its relative only by accident, and a relative no more friendly than Joan’s sunken-eyed, long-black-bearded, snarling uncle Zack. Writing his fiction, struggling for hours to get a gesture just right, or to translate into English the exact sound of the first large drops of an August rain on a burdock leaf, he would look up suddenly with a heart full of anger and a belly full of acid from too much black coffee, too many hours at his pipe, remembering again that all he so tirelessly struggled for was false from its engendering: he was tortuously authenticating by weight of detail, by linguistic sleight-of-wit, actions that never took place on this earth since Time began and never would, never could. Nature’s love stories had nothing to do with those novelists make up; nature’s suspense has no meaning beyond the obvious, that that which is mindlessly, inexorably coming has, for better or worse, not yet arrived. It was finally the same in all the arts, no doubt: all composers wrote country dances, all painters made their names on descents from the cross. If they broke with tradition, seized truth by the throat, they ended up mere oddities, bold revealers not of truth but of their personal quirks, painters of pictures at their best under black lights, writers of endless metaphysical novels in baby talk. Tradition doomed you, escape doomed you, and straddling the charging horns of a dilemma was a patently bad idea.