John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,

Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf

Armies of pestilence, And they shall strike

Your children yet unborn and unbegot,

That lift your vassal hands against my head

And threat the glory of my precious crown…”

The children, at such times, were afraid of him. So was she, for that matter. Though he ranted against “mindless, self-pitying existentialists,” he’d developed a conviction that he was a Nietzschean superman. The kinds of rules she lived by, the kinds of rules her parents had always lived by, were moronic. They led to happiness, yes; a happiness of circling insects. All rules were moronic; all happiness was finally insect fodder. He threw away her psychiatric bills, threatened hunters with violence when they came onto his land, though the land wasn’t posted, parked his old Rambler where he damn well pleased. He no longer paid attention to traffic lights, merely looked, somewhat casually, to see if anyone was coming. But terrible as that period had been for them all, his psychiatrist claimed it was in a certain sense healthy. In his sickness as a child, he’d lost confidence utterly, fled from pain and conflict and from emotional attachments, leaned entirely on Joan, who seemed so competent, so willing to do the work — even the emotional work. Yet he’d always hated what seemed to him his weakness. And now suddenly, however crazily, he was choosing to run his life. She needn’t be surprised if he seized the reins fiercely, looking angrily over his shoulder, spoiling for a fight. He was determined — unconsciously, so to speak — to grow up.

Joan listened, squeezing her hands together, occasionally raising her Kleenex to dab at her eyes. The psychiatrist was fat, square-bearded. He looked like a cartoon of a psychiatrist. The way he leaned forward, studying her as if paternally, made it seem as if he thought it had been all her fault. For some reason, God knew why, she’d worn a suit to this meeting with Martin’s doctor, and had pinned her hair up in back. She felt now for all the world like his mother, some domineering bitch a man would have every reason to resist. She thought of telling the psychiatrist she didn’t always look like this, there were people who thought she was Goddamned beautiful. In a dress with a plunging neckline, with her hair falling free …She started to say it, and then for some crazy reason changed it in the middle. “I don’t always look like this, Dr. Bern. Sometimes I look really horrible.” Silence, exile, cunning , Martin had said once, quoting something. It came to her that that was what she too was up to, just now. Why? But she had no time to think.

He took off his glasses, leaned further toward her. His vest had a stain of some kind on it. Food perhaps. She hated him. “My dear,” he said, “this has all been unbelievably painful for you.” He reached toward her. There was hair on the back of his short, fat hand. “Let me ask you just one question. Is it worth it?”

She started, realizing what side he was on. “He’s my husband,” she whispered. No doubt her hatred showed. “I’m his wife. Nobody understands that anymore. It’s crazy.”

He patted her hand. He’d been hated before. It was nothing to him. “You are a very brave woman,” he said. “Make no mistake.” Then, drawing his hand back, he told her more about Martin’s rebellion. He spoke not to her but to his glasses now. Small, steel-rimmed glasses. Fashionable. Martin’s wish to grow up, face life squarely at last, admit his weaknesses but also assert his rights as a man — a decision encouraged, undoubtedly, by his success as a writer — was the reason he’d moved, abruptly, ferociously, to the barbaric Midwest he’d always loved — whatever the consequences for her and for the children. “You see,” Dr. Bern said, “he is a fanatic about truth. A problem of his Christian upbringing.” His decision, not quite conscious, to confront life head-on was the reason he was writing more darkly now — and, it might as well be granted, writing more beautifully, letting his pain in — than he’d ever done before. The wish to be himself, grow up, face the truth, was the reason why, when other women showed the slightest interest, he fell violently in love with them, or imagined he did.

“You understand what I’m saying?” Dr. Bern said, glancing up.

“I understand you think I should divorce him,” she said.

He smiled and shook his head. “Not at all, Mrs. Orrick. I am saying he has no sense of you. None whatever. To your husband you are a symbol of evil and repression. He may grow out of this, though the odds are not good. He may well become an artist of some stature, and he may become a healthy and confident man, but his attitude toward you — not to put too fine a point on it—” He paused, considered, put his glasses on. “You are an exceedingly beautiful woman, Mrs. Orrick, and, I understand, a very talented one. The risk to you personally, in this whole affair—”

It came to her now that she’d been wrong about Dr. Bern. She said, perhaps only to see how it would sound, “Yes. I understand. I’ve been wrong. I’ll divorce him.” She was sick with grief and fear.

He was embarrassed and took his glasses off. “Perhaps,” he said.

For all his scorn of shrinks, Martin admitted ruefully that what his doctor had told her was perhaps true. But what of her, what of the children? she asked. “I’ll get to that,” he said, so grimly that she was frightened.

That year he accepted a one-semester position as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Detroit, and they met Paul. Paul wrote beautiful fiction, though it went nowhere, trailed off into a sorrow that made the plot unfinishable, the theme unresolvable. There seemed nothing he didn’t know and nothing that was of use. He could talk easily, brilliantly, of science, music, literature, art. He could tell, with dark humor like that of Martin’s uncle George, of things he’d seen in Viet Nam — how captured Viet Cong were pushed out of helicopters so that the one left would tell whatever trivia he knew, how joke-telling, freckle-faced kids became inhuman — a helicopter pilot with pink sunglasses with a piece of tape across one lens, another with a bushy black beard grown halfway down his chest, human bones for a bracelet, another who flew in a derby and tailcoat — could tell of small Buddhist girls in the hire of the U.S. Army, whose families had been murdered, no one knew by whom, and who sat, expressionless, typing out fraudulent reports of heroism, their faces expressionless, though sometimes, coolly, mechanically, they would reach up and wipe away a tear as other people wipe away dust or sleepiness. Paul Brotsky knew, in his own view, nothing, believed in nothing. Even to Martin his nihilism was frightening.

She said, “I’m in love with him, Martin. It’s insane. He’s just a child.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

She began to believe something was changing, it would perhaps be all right.

“There are no individual causes, no discrete effects,” Orrick wrote.

Martin Orrick had fled—“half unconsciously,” as his doctor said — to the only solid truth he could remember: the stormy, humid, narrow-minded, murderously potent Midwest. If it was an act of self-assertion, the first real act of self-assertion since his life had gone off orbit, it was also an act of self-resignation: as people capable of believing in God can resign themselves completely to the will of God, throwing away the compass, abandoning desire, acting spontaneously in response to a call as clear, if not as literal, as the one that came to Samuel in the middle of the night, so Martin abandoned himself to a place — a set of emotions, principles, if you like, translated into the solidity of red earth, low, angry mountains, huge, slow-moving rivers, cyclones, birds and snakes. The place—“wasted heart of the country,” Joan called it — did not fail him. The woman who would awaken him to the truth about his wife was inevitable there, and he would find there, also, the Ferndeans, who would recall him to himself.