John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

They moved to Iowa and were happy, apparently, Joan teaching a great flock of Bohemian-American musical naturals (so she wrote), Martin sometimes helping, more often studying and writing every day, all day long, far into the night. Her letters were full of happiness and there was really no question that everything was wonderful, except that they couldn’t manage money. They were of course not the kinds of letters that encouraged you to read between the lines. Emmy would learn only long afterward that (as she’d suspected) they had their trials. They had fights sometimes. They had violent tempers, both of them, and Buddy — Martin — was selfish, prickly, he wanted to do nothing but work in his room. He was also resentful. He didn’t like it that Joan earned most of the money, didn’t like, ever, to be told what to do, hated even her gentlest suggestions, even hints that he might possibly clean his fingernails or buy new shoes when the soles were flapping when he walked. (On the other hand, of course, her “wit’s cutlery,” as Martin called it, was not always her best friend.) Martin was also secretive, sullen, and occasionally dishonest — he’d sometimes pretend he’d been at school all day when in fact he’d been home writing. He was a mess, really, though at times when they weren’t fighting that wasn’t Joan’s opinion. Beautiful, sunny Joan loved her sad-eyed Martin more and more. Partly she pitied him — held him when he had nightmares, soothed him when his black depressions got frightening. But also they had a good time together. The fiction he was writing now seemed to her fairly good, and he had cheerful moods when he would actually, as she put it, come out and play.

They collaborated on musical comedies, which earned them money and praise, and Joan, who’d never before acted, played comic parts and was an immediate sensation. When he met her after the first night’s performance, Martin was smiling, looking straight at her — he rarely looked straight at anyone. “You were funny,” he said. “As a matter of fact, you were fantastic.” Hard as both of them were working, there were numerous other things they did just for fun. They played in various little Czech village bands, both of them switching from instrument to instrument, when Joan wasn’t conducting. They gave summer music and painting lessons and threw parties where Joan’s teaching friends and Martin’s student-writer friends played games, from charades to volleyball, and no one got drunk, no one slipped away with someone else’s wife — in short, they were happy.

Only twice during those graduate-school years did she suffer that mysterious, searing pain. At the university hospital the doctor said, “Mrs. Orrick, we simply can’t help you. There’s really nothing there.” She knew, as Martin did, though they weren’t quite able to believe it yet, that whatever the X-rays showed or didn’t show, he couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Though he was cranky and odd, arrogant, even insubordinate — as an instructor in the sophomore poetry course, he threw out the course plan for one of his own making, which lost him his job — Martin did well in graduate school and was even well liked by his professors and fellow students. He had a curious, small-boy innocence that sometimes made Joan love him till she thought her heart would break and sometimes made her want to stove his head in. Everything, with Martin, was principle. He might attack some classmate or professor without mercy, but never for an instant — as it seemed to him — could anyone imagine it was personal. No one, as he thought it must go without saying, could be more ignorant, more cowardly, more base than himself. Often he’d leave the victim of his attack in psychological shambles, and he wouldn’t even know it. Often, unfortunately, the victim was Joan. It began to emerge that the difference between them was serious, perhaps dangerous. He had none of her brilliance, none of her wit, but studying endlessly, with mind-crushing orderliness, reading some one poem again and again until every little nuance was clear to him (“The hourglass whispers to the lion’s paw” or “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”), or reading some one book over and over — Plato or Blake or Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus — until he was sure he understood every sentence in it, he developed a background of authority she couldn’t match or deal with. She had no wish to know the kinds of things he knew — certainly they didn’t make him a more lively conversationalist, it seemed to her — but all the same, she felt intimidated. Even about music — incredible irony! — he could make her feel stupid. She began to attack him more frequently — flash out at him, with her light, quick wit, some insult he would get only tomorrow in the shower. Why she’d attacked he would have no idea, as sometimes even she had no idea. He began to be occasionally impotent.

They had other problems. There were certain things that were obviously his responsibility, not hers (as Joan at that time understood the world) — responsibilities he refused to deal with: the car, things around the house that needed fixing. He was becoming more than ever before a drudge, moreover; he never wanted to go out, and when they did he frequently embarrassed her. Or friends would come over and he would sit smiling politely, witlessly, never saying a word, obviously not listening. It was even worse if he was feeling cheerful. He’d talk at endless length of things no one cared about, stories of famous chess players who’d gone mad, for instance. Half of them he made up. He’d still be holding forth, laughing loudly, fully persuaded he was the life of the party, when she finally gave up and went to bed. Sometimes she’d wake up, hours later, as it seemed, and she’d hear them all laughing in the livingroom, still there, as if the things he said really were of interest. She would be all at once terribly lonely, seeing with icy clarity that, for all her early promise, her supposed beauty, she was already, at twenty-three, a failure. Tears filled her eyes and she wished bitterly that she’d never grown up. Princess my ass, she said, and wept at the loss of her innocence.

Yet when she looked back at them later, they seemed to her good years even so, those years when they were making it. Martin got exactly the kinds of jobs he wanted — good schools, first Oberlin, then San Francisco State, where the pressure was not so great he’d be prevented from writing fiction, yet the quality was decent; and wherever they went, she taught, concertized, took an occasional course, began composing a little. (He too composed. He was unbelievably bad.) Their fourth year in California, she taught in what was known, inaccurately, as a ghetto school and won the California Teacher of the Year Award. Martin was proud and had a party for her — unspeakably embarrassing. He got obscenely drunk and read the citation and the whole Chronicle article aloud. It actually crossed her mind that she might leave him. But mostly it was better. They went to plays, met painters and sculptors she admired (Martin had never heard of them), met doctors and lawyers everyone had read about (Martin had never heard of them), and newspaper columnists, even movie stars (Martin had never heard of them). It was the life she was born for. They had, by this time, a large old house in pre-earthquake San Francisco, in the Mission District, and Martin was doing well. Reviewers said of him, “A brilliant new writer has arrived upon the scene.” Of her they wrote, “Few pianists now at work can match the articulation of Joan Frazier’s right hand,” and “her sheer joy in performance recalls technicians like Levin.” “Who’s Levin?” Martin asked. “Character in some old fable,” she snapped. Martin was, in short, the same old Martin, gloriously handsome, with tragic, soulful eyes — though not as tragic or soulful as he imagined, she sometimes irritably thought. At three in the morning, getting up and going into his study, she’d say, “Are you ever coming to bed, Martin?” He’d be sitting at his desk, the room full of pipe smoke, an untouched martini glinting like a diamond beside his typewriter. He’d turn his head, stare at her like an owl, or maybe like E. A. Poe’s ghost, jugged on visions, perhaps not even noticing that she was naked. The windows of his study were high, round-arched; they looked out across the city. “What you need is a black panther, like Lord Byron,” she said. “Pardon?” he said. “Oh, fuck yourself,” she said. From sheer misanthropic perversity he defended Lyndon Johnson and the Viet Nam war, argued in favor of capital punishment when all San Francisco was talking of Caryl Chessman, and in print described John Updike as “mentally disabled.” “Martin,” she said, “how can you think such things?” She spoke cautiously, like a welfare worker uneasy about prying. “The time has come,” he said, “for thinking the unthinkable!” Then, more like himself, “Come on now. They argue like maniacs, all on the same side. I try to give their pompous rant a little dignity.” “Dear Martin, you’re such a kind man,” she said. He bugged his eyes out and waved his arm like a Shakespearean actor. “A little less than kiss and more than cunt,” he said. “Oh Jesus,” she said, and rolled her eyes up, and closed the study door.