John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

The children were asleep, their blond heads fallen toward one another, their books in their legs. Paul was mixing a martini in the pitcher. The music had gone off.

He carefully relit his pipe, then said, “Once when I was teaching at San Francisco State I had an interesting student. She was middle-aged or so, from New Orleans. It was a class in creative writing and I was talking for some reason about astrology. To make my students wake up more to differences in character, I think. Anyway, I was busy disclaiming any interest in whether or not astrological theory was true, arguing merely that reading descriptions of the various types would help them to notice more things about people, and this middle-aged student said — her name was Myrtle Payne—‘You can always tell what sign a person was bone undah, you know, once you’ve gotten acquainted with them.’ I said, of course, ‘Mm, yes,’ politely. Except for San Francisco hippies and teachers who wanted to be their friends, nobody in those days would flat-out admit he believed in astrology. Except my uncle George, maybe; but for his opinions I had a special box. — But she wouldn’t let it go. She was a very nice lady, an ex-schoolteacher — dressed and talked like any other clean, middle-aged, intelligent southern schoolteacher — and I’d never seen a sign before that night that she might be slightly bonkers. She said — we were halfway through the semester at the time—‘For instance, I b’lieve I could guess the sign of almost everone in this room.’ I thought we were in for an embarrassing situation, but what could I do? I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Would you like me to try?’ she said. ‘You’re a Cancer, of course.’ And she told me what it meant to be a Cancer.

“Crazy as it sounds, she went through the whole class — maybe twelve, fifteen kids. I missed half of it, trying all the time to figure out how she’d done it, that is, how she’d gotten ahold of all our birth dates — not that she named the exact day. Anyway, I was wrong, I think now. She really knew. John Napper could do it too.”

Paul nodded. He’d stayed with them for a few weeks in London and had seen John Napper often. He said, “And his brother Pat had that horoscope description of his son, remember?”

Martin glanced at him. “I’d forgotten you saw that.” It had been made a few days after the child was born, then put away, unread, in a bank for six years. It was like witchcraft. He raised his drink, just tasted it, thinking. Joan was leaning back into her pillows, eyes closed. He said, “I read about you, my Virgo friend. Or Joan or the kids or—” He let it trail off; then: “It’s mildly uncanny. I know all the arguments against it. They read like the French Academy’s debunking of hypnotism. For instance, the argument that what influences a child born in the northern hemisphere couldn’t influence one born in the southern, which is sort of like saying that mustard gas can kill you only if you’re facing it. Anyway, I no longer resist it. I’m as ruled from outside as any character in a book, and not just physically, like Newton’s cannonball, but ruled where it matters most. I don’t like it much, but it makes it hard for me to look at, for instance, the Winged Victory and solemnly resolve to change my life.”

Paul Brotsky blew out smoke, tamping out his cigarette, and reached, mechanical as a German clockmaker’s piano player, for another. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think people can change.”

“Maybe,” Martin said.

Joan opened her eyes, turned her head from side to side, then smiled. “I must’ve been asleep,” she said. As she sat forward she winced, seemed to go pale. She took a deep breath, then got up. “Anybody hungry?” she said.

“Sure,” Paul said, “always. I’ll help you.”

She shook her head — harder than necessary, shaking her hair out. “No, you sit still and let Martin talk to you.”

They laughed. When she’d left them, turning on the light in the music room as she passed and moving on into the kitchen, they sat silent for two or three minutes, thinking, probably, the same thoughts. At last Martin said, “Not just the stars, and I don’t mean, God knows, that there’s some wonderful plan. But we’re boxed in from every direction. It shouldn’t matter, I know — only fools or drunks even talk about it. Decent people just live it out, like bees. Tell jokes, play games, go to work in the morning, get drunk again at night—”

Paul Brotsky said, careful and serious, scraping the ash from his cigarette, not meeting Martin’s eyes for fear of giving offense, “If I’m in the way, Martin—”

Martin squinted, baffled, glanced over at the sleeping children, then back at Paul. “What the devil makes you think—”

“Well, you seem to be implying—”

Martin studied him. It was easy enough to see that he was hurt, but what Martin had done to hurt him he had no idea. He said, “You’re not in the way. I’m glad you’re here. You picked up something that wasn’t there, or anyway something I didn’t mean to put there. Because you’re a Virgo, too sensitive to detail, or because neither of us can do anything for Joan, and helplessness makes us guilty, or because — who knows? The box again — or not a box, a cosmic spiderweb. The genes of your parents and your parents’ parents back to Adam. Also the weather, the spinach in your stomach, the color of the carpet, a helicopter ride you took one time in Viet Nam—”

“It’s strange the way you keep picking at it. I mean, the whole thing’s so insignificant, so irrelevant. So the world’s run by chance. So what’s the bad news?”

“It’s stupid, I agree.”

“I don’t mean it’s stupid.” He spoke more carefully than ever, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “But you keep honing for this thing you imagine you can’t have — freedom, or something. Freedom to do what? You make us all feel—” He glanced up at Martin, then down again, and reached out quickly to scrape the ash of his cigarette away. He said, “You make us all feel that we’re the spiderweb. If you want to be free where I’m concerned, just try me, Martin, just say, Paul, get out. As far as Joan’s concerned—”

Just that instant there was a scream and a crash from the kitchen, and they both leaped up. Paul put down his cigarette and started for the door, almost at a run, and a second later, Martin followed. There was another crash and another, and Joan’s screams of rage. When Martin reached the kitchen door, Joan was in Paul’s arms, her muscles tensed, her face dark red, not accepting the embrace, accepting nothing, crying, wild with anger. All over the floor there were pieces of broken plates, bits of bacon and lettuce. The kitchen window had been smashed out, also the glass on one of the cupboards.

“Jesus Christ,” Martin roared, “we said we’d help you!”

Paul jerked his head around. “God damn it, Martin, get out of here.”

Martin turned, outraged, planning to walk out on them all. The children were in the doorway, looking in, wide-eyed and pale. He did not notice — though he would remember it later — that they shrank back from him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Your mother’s just…having a tantrum. Better go to bed.”

They turned, moved away, and their helplessness stoked his fury higher. Evan — Christ! — was almost fourteen. What was going to become of them in this crazyhouse? “Good night,” Martin said, and this time there was no trace of anger in his voice, only sorrow, equally poisonous despair — he heard it himself. “It’s all right,” he said — as he was always saying, to Evan’s black-and-tan just after the car hit him, breaking his jaw, to his own big black horse when he shied from a deer that went bounding suddenly across the trail, to Joan when she lay in bed crying, saying, “Martin, what are we going to do ?” He touched the two children’s shoulders gently, absently, with hands like clumsy wood. “Go to bed. It’s all right.” And as they went silently up the stairs, he turned toward the new room looking out at the pool, went down the step and over to his drink on the white formica table. It was almost empty. He drained it and carried the glass to the bar to make another. His heart was beating fast and his face felt hot. Who it was he was angry at he could easily have said if he’d stopped to think, but he couldn’t, that moment, stop to think. He would remember later, thinking back to that moment, that he’d done the same in London once. He and Evan were crossing a wide, busy street — Evan smiling and eager, looking up at the gables of the Parliament building — and leading him through traffic, not holding his hand, Martin had called back confusing signals, so that Evan had run when Martin meant for him to wait, and a car had almost struck him. The driver hit his brakes — a cripple in one of those state-provided three-wheel cars — and Martin had turned and had raged at the man, though the driver had done nothing, nothing whatever except stop with great skill in an emergency. But it was only after the poor man had driven off that Martin had understood that he, he alone, not the driver, not Evan, was in the wrong. So now. But his fingers shook and his heart beat violently, and when, after a moment, he heard Paul and Joan coming into the room behind him, he did not turn.