John Gardner: Stillness & Shadows

“Have you ever had anything like this before?” the one in San Francisco had asked.

“It’s been happening for a long time,” she said. “Off and on, I mean. No one’s been able to figure out what’s wrong.”

“Hmm,” he’d said, and had pulled at his moustache with the tips of two fingers. “Well, whatever you had before, you’ve got it again.”

She was terrified all the time, day and night. She knew no psychology, but she knew it was important that all her dreams were nightmares. Yet she couldn’t tell Martin. When she jerked in her sleep, she let him believe it was muscle spasms. To tell him the truth would be to make him more helpless, more guilty for no reason — more suicidal. Often she wished she could die and be done with it — but then what of the children? She knew well enough what would become of Martin if … something happened to her. And so she wept in secret, or secretly raged behind her mask of calm and weariness, pitying herself, hating herself, pitying and hating the world.

She took a deep breath, glanced over the bannister at the students in the room, none of them watching, then started carefully up the stairs. At the top of the stairway she could see the beginning of the wall with family pictures on it, her family, Martin’s, their two blond children at various ages, the dogs, the horses, the houses they’d lived in in St. Louis, Iowa City, Oberlin, Chico, San Francisco … She stared hard at the wall of pictures as if it might draw her to the safety of the landing. She felt the stairway growing brighter, solider, and felt the lines of the picture frames, the door to Evan’s room, the dented brass wall-sconce becoming sharper, sharper — unnaturally sharp — and understood too late that she was fainting.

Martin, in the new room, broke off mid-sentence. “Listen! What was that?” He stumbled toward the sound, up into the music room and into the livingroom’s darkness toward the stairs. He found her at the foot, sprawled unconscious. She lay impossibly still and ghostly pale, with her eyes open, and where she’d struck her head on the newel post the blood gushed out like water from a hose. The pool of blood around her grew quickly as he watched, and though he knew about scalp wounds he was instantly certain that he’d finally done it, had finally killed her. (Why he should be guilty was a question that never crossed his mind. It went without saying that the fault was somehow his, however obscurely — and given the general complexity of things he was no doubt right.) “Christ,” he whispered, and felt for her pulse. He could get nothing. He called for help.

In a matter of seconds they had the limp body loaded into Martin Orrick’s car. It was then that the nightmare began in earnest. Because he was too shaky, he thought, to drive, he gave the keys to his Rambler to his friend the poet Bob Randolph, an easterner who might with luck get the car to town over the wet glare ice, as no one born here where ice was rare could do, and he himself took the keys to Bob Randolph’s Volkswagen. Bob Randolph took the lead, Martin following in Randolph’s car. They moved tortuously down the driveway, fences and trees on each side blindingly glittering, tires skating. Both cars made the turn, made the dip into the valley, and managed to snake up the winding hill that followed, then began, carefully, the second, much steeper, descent. Hunched over the steering wheel, watching the black car ahead of him — all around him the world aglitter like a diamond, everything white but the Rambler’s two tail-lights — he saw the road’s sharpest turn approaching, sliding toward them like a flaw in the dazzling, faceted brightness, and he knew — knew as if he’d seen it already, like the providential God Boethius understood — that Bob Randolph wouldn’t make it. He slowed the Volkswagen almost to a stop and, as in a slowed-down movie, watched the black Rambler slip slowly, as if casually, toward the edge of the high-crowned, white-fire road, where it hovered a moment, as if thoughtfully, then gradually tilted up like a capsizing sailboat and fell, still slowly, thoughtfully, out of sight. He stopped the Volkswagen where the Rambler had left the road, got out too quickly, and banged down hard onto the ice. Trifling as the fall was, it knocked out his wind, and he lay straining for what seemed a long, long time before air would come. Then, rather than struggle to get up, he crawled to the edge of the shoulder.

The embankment was gradual but went down twenty feet. Below, the weedy field was ablaze with light, unearthly, ironically Christmassy, like a vastly magnified view from inside some exotic crystal, and at the center of all that light the Rambler stood sharply outlined, forlorn, coal black. Bob Randolph and the three who’d been riding with him were already climbing out, struggling to pull Joan from the backseat. She hung limp between them, like the figure of Christ in some descent from the cross. Their shouts came up to Martin as if from infinitely far away, and his friends’ movements around Joan’s inert form were like a clumsy dance. Martin was not himself, or at any rate not his best self. He simply watched, as one watches the northern lights (once, on their farm, his mother and father had seen perfectly clear angels in the northern lights, and a perfectly clear, unmistakable cross: they were not sentimentalists or religious fanatics and had simply watched, amazed, as he watched now, and later they’d wondered if they’d really seen it — a doubt he understood, because as a child, told to look for the Big Dipper, he had seen, not knowing what a dipper was, a clearly outlined frying pan as viewed from the top: it was the sharpest image he carried from his childhood except for one other, a frozen image of his cousin Joan, now his wife, when they were four), and even as they struggled up the glazed embankment, sometimes sliding back, her body sliding with them, his friends calling up to him in increasing anger, he hung suspended, outside time and space, watching as if it were a movie or a vision on which his life depended, though he himself was indifferent, until they managed to scrape and cut their way near enough that he could take off his coat and hold it out to them like a rope and help them to the road.

She still showed no slightest sign of life. He drove, took the wheel without thinking, though shakier than ever. He would not remember, afterward, the drive to town. His memory would go back only to the hospital corridor, where he stood, still trembling, drinking black coffee—“You’re drunk,” the nurse had said, crackling with hate — his hands bleeding from when he’d fallen beside the car, his student friends seated on the long wooden bench, ashen-faced, dishevelled, Dr. Crouse saying (distant, as if reserving judgment), “That’s one more time you’ve been lucky as hell, whole lot more lucky than you deserve, that’s the truth.” Even after that violent letting, her blood pressure was dangerously high. If she’d made it to bed, the odds were close to a hundred to nothing she’d have died of a stroke before morning.

“What should I have done?” Martin Orrick said.

To Crouse his eyes looked defiant, hostile. His breath, his skin, his clothes, filled all Sikeston with gin-stink.

“Well I don’ know,” he said mildly. He was a soft-voiced Missourian with a private smile, obviously friendly, obviously noncommittal. For no good reason, he liked Martin Orrick — the novels, perhaps. Martin Orrick was a far better man in his books than in his life, God knew, yet he had a kind of madman’s charm, some way. Charm like a tiger’s. He was beautiful, powerful, the way mad poets were supposed to be, but he was also, in his madness, dangerous and stupid, burning up his life — everybody’s life — like sunbaked kindling. Dr. Jimmy Crouse had no time for fools, but with Martin Orrick he kept putting off decision. He said: “The way you people live out there, Joanie sick as hell, and you behaving like …”