John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

One afternoon, almost by accident, Dr. Crouse, their general practitioner in Sikeston, made a discovery. If an X-ray was taken when she was standing up, it was strikingly different from one taken when she was lying down. He ordered an exploratory operation at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, by a Dr. Saul Krassner—“not much of a bedside manner, I’m told, but he’s one of the best in the business,” their Sikeston doctor said — and what he’d suspected proved true: she was a mutant, her internal organs weren’t anchored to her body walls, and, partly because of that, she had a malrotated colon. All that could cause discomfort, but it wasn’t the reason for the mysterious pain. She was one of those fairly rare people who grow adhesions, Dr. Krassner explained — delicate flesh tubers that begin in inflamed tissue — after a fall or an operation, for instance — and grope out through the darkness of the body — potato sprouts — tentacles of an octopus — thousands of little strands, completely invisible to the X-ray camera, feeling their way like timid snakes through the maze of her workings, closing around bone or intestine or liver, wrapping around the tiny electric switches of her nerves, locking her pain signals into the “on” position, so that from her knees to her shoulders she was one great howl of pain. When she was unusually tense, or went through a period of unusual exertion, the adhesions, like her muscles, tightened, closed like a fist. It had all begun, apparently, when as a child she’d had her appendix out — it was around the scar on her abdomen that the adhesion growth was thickest — but she’d suffered, since then, many falls, many blows. There were signs of those flesh weeds everywhere, groping through her body.

“What can be done about it?” Martin said. He sat absolutely still, pale.

“Well,” the doctor said, rubbing his hands, “periodic operation can keep tearing ’em out, or tearing a lot of ’em out, that is—”

“And starting up more—?”

“That’s the hooker, of course.” Dr. Krassner shook his head, one brief, hard jerk, as if marvelling at nature’s destructive cunning.

Joan and Martin waited.

“It’s something we have to live with,” the doctor said. “No use lying to ourselves, it’s a losing battle in the long run, but at least you get a good, long run. It’s not like being told you’ve got inoperable cancer. People can live years and years with this thing. But it hurts a lot, of course. Aye, there’s the rub. Makes life no bed of roses. We have to try to learn to ignore it, that’s all.”

Martin stood up, went over to the window. “We,” he said acidly. He couldn’t see, as she did, the doctor’s look. He was a man of maybe fifty, very tired, for all his false heartiness. He was not personally to blame for the world’s illnesses, though that moment he seemed, despite the bluster, willing to accept at least part of it. He took her hand and squeezed it a little roughly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Orrick.”

She nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

He said, “The reason I say we have to learn to ignore it is there’s really no hope of getting rid of that pain, anyway not all of it. Kind of doses that would take, the drugs would get you quicker’n the other thing. You grasp my meaning?”

She nodded, just perceptibly, the faintest possible stirring of her head against the pillow.

“You’ll be feeling, by the way, a whole lot less pain for a while now — that is, after you’ve mended from the cutting — the operation. You may have — who knows? We never know about these things. Everybody’s different. Takes all kinds, they say.” He flashed his grin, then glanced over at Martin, who was staring out the window. Forest Park lay below them, where she and Martin and their families had gone, long ago, to those silly, tenderhearted musicals at the Muny. She remembered suddenly, and tears filled her eyes — useless to say it was stupid, sentimental: the human heart has no taste, no sense—

Springtime, Springtime, Maytime,

Will you love me ever?

Dr. Krassner said softly, his hand on her wrist, “You need a pain shot, Joanie?”

She nodded. “Yes, please.” She was thinking, Buddy, kiss me . Tears ran down her cheeks.

When the doctor was gone she said, more to the room than to Martin, “What he’s telling us is, I’m dying.”

“Not exactly,” Martin said.

“No. No, of course. Not exactly.”

She learned to live with pain and the idea of a shortened life, though she didn’t exactly swear off all drugs, except at first. It helped that after the operation wound had healed she had — as Dr. Krassner had predicted she would — a long period when she was almost completely free of pain. Though she waited nervously, knowing it must come back — watching her insides with the blank expression of an Ozark hunter watching leaves in a woods — she would sometimes go for days at a time without remembering her condition. In spite of herself, she began to find herself hoping that the doctor had been presenting only the darkest picture possible, that in fact the adhesions were gone for good now, the whole thing was over. She was not therefore happy, though she had periods of such happiness that she was shocked and baffled when her troubles with Martin flared up again. A thousand times they were at the edge of divorce, and now there were magazines and women’s groups to make her feel stupid and guilty for so stubbornly clinging to him, or, rather, to their life. Often it seemed to her that for Martin she was dead already. He bought a huge old motorcycle and wrecked it the first week, grew his hair much longer, had passionate affairs one after another, and even when he tired of them or she somehow managed to bring them to an end — it usually meant some drunken scene and sometimes she and Martin would nearly kill each other — he’d go on writing to the women or phoning from his office, go on liking them as if they were dear and harmless old friends. He insisted, when she could make him say anything at all, that there was nothing wrong in it, insisted that she had no hold on him — love not freely given was not love, he said, but mere socially convenient slavery, and he refused to be socially convenient or anybody’s slave. They’d been married for nearly half their lives; they were neither of them the same people, he said, who’d taken those pious, wildly optimistic vows. “Martin,” she said, “don’t you remember us?” “Characters in some old fable,” he snapped. She tried to understand it, accept it. She had affairs herself, but it was never the same. She loved Martin, only Martin — perhaps it was, as people hinted, a sickness — and Martin accepted, approved of her affairs, even when they made him slightly jealous, because he had this theory about love, and he would rather die than abandon a perfectly good theory.

It was true that he’d changed radically. He’d never been her slave, whatever he might think — such was her opinion — but since they’d moved from San Francisco he’d done exactly as he pleased in everything, independent as some new Jesse James, or maybe Genghis Khan. It was he who bought the house they’d been renting, without consulting her. (He paid far too much money. Scornful of dickering, even when he knew he must lose by his scorn, he took the seller’s first offer.) He went through, in fact, a period of real insanity, as she learned when she finally got him to a psychiatrist. When they’d first moved from San Francisco, he was turning off his hearing, even his sight, at will, psychotically withdrawing from anything that “bored” him — that is, the doctor said, threatened him. Whenever they had parties he’d get so drunk he could hardly stand, and he’d go sleep in the barn, or reel crazily through the woods, singing or ranting Shakespeare, waving his arms, falling sometimes, bellowing at the stars: