John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Paul Brotsky came to visit and stayed three months. She became still more beautiful, more terrifying. He — Martin — would stand, big-shouldered, long-haired, baggy-eyed, slightly fat, morosely watching as they went briskly down the sidewalk, Paul and Joan — and frequently Evan and Mary — on their way to Harrod’s to get groceries and flowers, and he’d be so filled with sorrow he could barely get his breath. Not jealousy, not the faintest flicker of that, or so he told himself. He loved Paul Brotsky very nearly as he loved the other three. But loss, the loss of his whole life. He remembered how, when they were young, when he was teaching at Oberlin, he’d looked at her as if from an enormous distance — as a ghost might have looked at her, incapable of making himself known to her — had studied, feature by feature, her beauty, and had wished in a kind of agony that he could buy her fine clothes, beautiful jewels before her beauty passed. Lying beside her, touching her breasts, the splendid hollows on each side just above her pubic hair — as fiery red as the hair above: he could not touch it, ever in his life, without seeing its miraculous color in his mind — moving his hand lower, closing his fingers on her crotch, magnificently firm and as square as a box, he had wanted to weep at the waste of such beauty, such nobility beyond his means. She slept on. She’d been concertizing then, flying in and out, making just enough money to pay for the plane trips but loving what she did, and getting good reviews. Except at parties, he almost never saw her when she wasn’t too tired to talk, or else asleep. He couldn’t write when she was practicing, so she practiced over at the music building — went there early in the morning, before he was awake — and if they met for lunch, there was nothing much to say. He had never been talkative, and her talk was anecdotal, and no anecdotes are formed in a concert pianist’s practice room. So he would lie beside her, touching her as she slept, and when she grew moist under his fingertips he would gently part her legs and make love to her, hungry and sorrowful, wondering if she was really asleep. Sometimes, sitting in a concert hall in some city near enough that he could go too, watching her play — her head thrown back as if defiantly, striking the keys with such controlled violence you’d have sworn it was a powerful man you were hearing (but her hair flowed down her back, dazzling, and the sheath she wore, metallic blue, split open to show the sweet cleavage between her breasts) — or her head lowered almost to the keys of the piano, tipped sideways, listening as if hungrily to pianissimo notes flying by like summer rain — he would feel, besides pride — oh, unspeakable pride! — a kind of horror at the thought that that woman was his wife. He had thought all that would change, once he himself grew famous. He imagined himself getting letters from adoring readers in Dallas or, say, Binghamton, New York, imagined college girls coming up to him after readings, Joan looking on with timid love. But it was the dream of a fool. He would indeed get the letters, and college girls would indeed come up to him and make love with their eyes; but she was the strong one, and would always be. She was, as some fool would at some point say to him, learning that he was the husband of Joan Frazier — she was, as the fool said, “dynamite.” As he would write, in one of his earlier novels, only slightly disguising his dire situation, “Have you tried making love, my friend, to a famous violinist? Your member, though so grand you sometimes step on it, can be nothing in comparison to her trembling, plunging bow. Though you touch her with the gentleness of the Angel Raphael, Mendelssohn was there before you, and Mozart and Bartók, and, my friend, you will never compete.” He watched them walking down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, Paul Brotsky swaggering, full of youth and good humor, almost comically square-shouldered and mighty of chest (“Shall we speak, tiresomely,” Martin Orrick would write, “of beautiful noses? Philip Baratovich had a beautiful nose: exactly the right size and shape and color, so perfect one almost didn’t notice at first, and arching out above it on either side, with Russian abandon, two perfect black eyebrows on a forehead worth more than all Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Beethoven’s quartets, or — let us speak recklessly, for Art is Art — the Wisdom of the Bible. He also had large, yet elegant feet. His teeth, however — for which I thank God — had imperfections.”), Joan glowing in his company — there was some ad Martin Orrick had read one time in the New Yorker , which, needless to say, he hated — an ad for shirts or ties or something — that said, “Your man is your most important accessory” —and Paul Brotsky was that, and not just physically. The children were laughing at some joke of Paul’s, Evan with his blond head majestically thrown back, his camera swinging from his shoulder strap, Mary laughing in a way that made her suddenly American again.

And he felt, on one hand, that his work, his passions, his sickness had made all this possible, and it was good, supremely beautiful; and felt, on the other hand, utterly, tragically separate, cut off. He felt in his bones Camus’s image of the man who sees the world through a glass, through which no sound can pierce. On the street, marching gaily toward the bus stop, the very Platonic image of joy, vitality; in his heart, suicidal blackness. (Once, downtown, he met his former love Neva. She was fat now, but still, in his eyes, beautiful and good. They embraced, clumsily, and had tea together. She gave him, furtively, her London address. That night he went walking, intending to go to her, but instead, for some reason, he went into a pub. He awakened the next morning in his own garden, his crutches beside him, his face scratched and bruised. He had a feeling — but he couldn’t remember — that he’d tried to kill himself.) They had said, “You want to go to Harrod’s, Martin?” “No, you go,” he’d said. “I sort of feel like working.” They reached the bus stop, and Mary stood with her head cocked, pointing her finger at Paul, saying something that Martin couldn’t hear. Joan made a swooping rush at her, like an eagle or a witch, and everybody laughed. Tears filled Martin’s eyes and he whispered in the doorway, “Dear God, somebody please help me.”

Two weeks later the Ferndeans arrived in England. Martin Orrick quit writing and spent all his time going to museums, studios, parties with John. All he would remember clearly, afterward, was that one afternoon, sitting in the apartment the Ferndeans had rented, a jazzy little place that made you laugh at first sight of it — Victorian grandiose in a ten-by-ten room — he’d said, “Damn it all, John, that cough of yours is really disgusting. You’ve got to quit smoking those cigarettes. Take a pipe.” And he’d given him the pipe he was smoking. “Pipe?” John Ferndean said, with that wonderful cockney innocence he could put on. “Say now, there’s a bitta class!”

They learned at the end of their stay in England that John had lung cancer. Back in southern Missouri, they saw each other almost every night. They never talked about death unless John Ferndean brought it up. However, they talked about it regularly, because, in a way, it was a rare opportunity: Martin Orrick was a writer of the first rank, and John Ferndean an artist so good he could never be tricked by the faintest breath of sentimentality. It became, between them, an unspoken pact that John would tell Martin every flicker of feeling that came over him. What they learned was, finally, that there was nothing to say: that the single most striking fact about dying was that it was embarrassing. People behaved strangely toward a dying man, and the dying man became — with full awareness and humor, in the case of John Ferndean — paranoid. “One of the things ye do, lad, when yer dying, is you worry about money.” And grinned. And: “It’s like dogshit ye can’t get off yer shoe.” And: “It’s a curious thing. I’m the healthiest man I ever knew, except for this cancer.”