John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

She would learn, later, a metaphor for the helplessness she felt, when Martin and Paul would talk of the right and left lobes of the brain, the left one intelligent and verbal, tyrannical, the right a poor ignorant womanish thing, too stupid to say pencil when the hand it controlled had a pencil in it, but a lobe that understood music instantly and totally, without words, and took paintings to heart, without knowledge of perspective or schools or strange jargon like “pointillism.” Though their thoughtful, intellectual conversations almost never got through to her, almost never penetrated her defensive wall of jokes and suddenly remembered chores — escapes from the room in which the talk went on — their talk of the poor, sad, miserable right lobe had stirred her to attention. It was the lobe that controlled the left side of the body, the sinestre , the lobe that had to do with intuition, mystical leaps, with her own ability — or so she translated their talk — to guess the first names of people she’d never met. She’d discovered it first at her father’s factory. She could look at a man who worked for her father and know immediately that his name was Ray, or Virgil, or Ben. She’d probably been wrong more often than she remembered, she realized, but that wasn’t what mattered. Often she was right. And in the same way she could look at a woman and know what kind of house she lived in, what the furniture was, what kind of children she had. Martin had been telling her since before they were married that she ought to be a novelist, and for all his own novels he got her to help him with what people should be called, what their houses should look like, what games they should play. They talked of the right and left lobes of the brain, Martin and Paul, soberly reasoning, saying to each other that what both of them needed, as writers of fiction, was a more highly developed right lobe of the brain, and they would hold out their hands to the light from the fireplace in the Vermont house she’d lately gotten Martin to buy, observing to each other how both their left hands were blotchy and poorly defined, weakling in comparison to their deeply lined, muscular right hands, proving that their right lobes were sickly, unable to assert themselves; and she’d realized they were talking, without meaning to, about her. She’d felt a partisan’s sadness for the sickly right lobe, and she’d realized, sitting in the flickering light in that huge Vermont house without furniture, that she was all both Martin and Paul were not, could do all they futilely demanded of themselves; and she’d realized, in the same flash of insight, that like the right lobe they spoke so admiringly of, she was mute, inarticulate, couldn’t possibly make clear what she was and stood for, because as soon as they gave her the freedom to speak she would forget what it was she’d intended to say, would laugh and blush, like her father, and make some joke.

All that was in the future. What she knew as she lay in the Kaiser Hospital was that leaving San Francisco to return to Missouri was like a death. Why was she doing it? — There had never been any question about her not doing it. But for all her pain and sorrow and confusion, the question was locked into her flesh like some medieval instrument of torture: Why am I doing it? It would present itself even more dramatically later: he would beat her senseless, chase like a vacant-lot puppy after bitches, and though she was the proudest woman in the world, she would cling to him. Why? Neither the stupidest woman she’d ever met, a faculty wife for whom all the world was a sorry comedown from Lincoln, Nebraska, nor the shrewdest and most powerful woman she knew, one of her two closest friends in San Francisco, the Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn, would have put up with such nonsense for an instant. The longer she endured it, the more she saw of salvation by divorce, the more her pride should have pushed her away from him. But it was never a question. It wasn’t reasonable, and at times she would admit it was hard to call it love. But she’d decided. Why? She had decided.

I’ll go with him , she thought. I’ll take him for every fucking penny he ever earns.

Then the pain struck again, and she forgot her rage. She rang for the nurse. No one came. She became frightened and rang again, then again. Still no one. The pain came out of nowhere, possessed her in a flash, and then was gone again, leaving no trace but a rawness, a feeling exactly like a skinned knee, but inside, and everywhere. A shadow fell across her, though there was no one in the room. “Martin,” she cried out, “don’t leave me here!” Then the nurse came, fat, stupid. Joan couldn’t have a shot for at least another hour. “Doctor’s orders,” she said. “I’ve got to,” Joan said, but the nurse shook her head, sublimely boss. “No use to playact. That’s the doctor’s orders.” Joan saw at once what she was dealing with and threw the pitcher across the room, screamed with all her might, raised the hospital roof. They at once called the doctor, who told them sternly that they should have called him sooner. She got her shot. She slept.

To Martin she said nothing of her horror at the thought of returning to Missouri. Her father had had a light heart attack; that was one of Martin’s reasons for wanting to return, or so he told her now. He wanted Evan and Mary to know their grandparents and cousins. What could she say? He was telling the truth about his reason for wanting to go back, though not all of it.

She remembered fishing with her own grandfather, in one of the sinkholes on his farm. He’d sit on the log that ran down into the water, in a patch of leafy shade, yellow sunlight all around him, and he’d give her advice on baiting the hook or casting toward the middle, or he’d tell her stories of mules he’d had, or his odd Dutchman neighbors, or stories of barns that had burned, or crazy fellers — there’d been one that lived right behind his place, used to come and steal eggs, same as a fox — and all at once, while he was talking, Joan would get a bite, and she’d jerk the pole upward, and he’d yell, “Thar ye go! Haul in now!” and out of the still water, glittering and flashing in the air like something dangerous, or anyway startling, after all that quiet, would come a sunfish with an eye like a frightened mule’s, and her grandfather would tell her if the fish was big enough to eat.

Meanwhile the hospital tests dragged on. A month passed, then two. There was nothing they could find.

“Mr. Orrick,” the last of the neurologists asked Martin, “has your wife ever experienced psychological problems?”

“Not that I know of,” Martin said. “You mean you think her pain’s — imaginary?”

“That’s a possibility we’re inclined to consider,” the doctor said.

Martin looked at him thoughtfully, looked up at the ceiling, then once more looked into the doctor’s eyes. “You’re wrong,” he said.

They moved to the Ozarks, a stupid university, a stupid little town, or so she thought at first, though she found a nice house, miraculously — a large old farmhouse with pillars, five miles from the village. It rained all winter long. The roads turned to gumbo, occasionally glazed with ice. Martin bought wormy old horses for himself and Evan and Mary, then wormy old dogs, and he tried to make the children learn to ride, though they were afraid of riding, and his yelling made them cry. The so-called university had no buildings yet, though construction was in progress, huge box-shaped horrors towering above weeds. He had his temporary office, with six other people, in a small, white house, the kind poor people live in in drab Ozark towns, a partly fallen chimney, a rusty porch glider on the sagging, peeling porch. Hippies with squeezed-shut hillbilly faces came and smiled and hunkered on the ground and talked, asked to borrow the horses, fucked their pale-eyed, long-haired girlfriends in the woods, the mow, the garage, the bathroom, and if no one was looking stole hayforks, grain, even lightbulbs speckled with whitewash from the barn, and drove up in their vans, when Martin’s Rambler wasn’t there, and emptied the gas tank by the barn. When Martin came home from work, if that was where he’d been, he would saddle up one of the wormy horses and ride off by himself into the gray, cold woods, and the wormy black-and-tans would run behind him. She couldn’t go with him, couldn’t ride at all. Either she was in too much pain to sit up, or she was light-headed with drugs. She tried again and again, stubbornly, but it was useless; as soon as they’d begin to go fast, she would fall, cracking her ribs, wrenching her back, bruising herself from head to foot. There was very little she could do, in fact, except sleep and hate herself and read. The children came up to her bedroom sometimes, trying to cheer her, and they partly succeeded, sitting beside her, reading or drawing pictures, or playing with stuffed animals. Evan was beginning to learn card tricks now. She hated card tricks with a holy passion — she wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was because of the kind of people she’d known who’d done them when she was in high school and college — but Evan was funny, his hands small and clumsy, so that complicated tricks that went smoothly in his mind came out through his fingers with a charming clunkiness, as if done by a small clown in gloves. Mary would watch him admiringly, sometimes playing straight man or accomplice, and she, Joan, who was supposed to be watching very carefully, would close her eyes and be glad they were beside her and would wonder what was to become of them. They never seemed to fight — as she and Martin did constantly, the little he was home, not teaching or riding or sealed away from reality in his study. She should do something, he kept telling her. She laughed, furious. What a fool he was! She had too many years of experience to get a teaching job. The state had made a law against the schools’ exploiting her, with the result that the schools, miserably poor and hopelessly backward, could afford to hire only inexperienced, young teachers. They might not have hired her in any case. The one time she’d mentioned to the county superintendent — she’d been driven by desperation into bringing it up — that she’d once won the California Teacher of the Year Award, he’d looked up at her over his spectacles with undisguised loathing and said, “You don’t say. Well I declare.” She knew his kind — maybe they were all his kind, here in southern Missouri. Crooked politicians; not educational dimwits, worse than that: indifferent, even hostile to schools and teachers and children. He’d fussed with papers, waiting for her to get up and leave, and so at last she’d stood up. At the door she’d said with a Missouri drawl and a sweet smile she knew he would understand, “You ought to get some air freshener in this office, Mr. Creed. Ah b'lieve they sell it in the dimestore.” —It didn’t matter, of course, that no one would hire her. She was on drugs all the time now. She frequently wondered if she’d ever again be able to think clearly, clearly enough even to write one really good, funny letter to her San Francisco friends.