John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“If it happens, I’ll be a good wife,” Sarah said.

“It will,” he said firmly.

She kissed his hand. She wanted it to happen, wanted to believe him. But it was a fact that when he went on reading trips, it was Joan he took with him, and the children. Under her mask of serenity, she was annoyed, timidly suspicious. Because he was honest when he talked about Joan — honest about her humor, her fears, her talent — Sarah understood she wouldn’t get him without a fight, for all his protestation. She hesitated — characteristically. It would be enough, she told herself, if they could just be lovers. But lying on the pallet beside him, moonlight streaming in, she would study his sleeping face, puffy from too much drinking, and tough under her fingertips — like the face of anyone who drank too much milk, ate too much meat — but nevertheless a good face, well constructed, phrenologically the face of a man who would die old if he could learn moderation, learn to slow down, and she knew it would not be enough for her merely to be his lover. She wanted him as, so far as she could remember, she’d never wanted anything, and wanted children by him. “Yes, she will make me fight for you,” she said. He opened his eyes and she smiled. She hadn’t meant for him to overhear. But she saw that he was still asleep, even though he looked at her. “Well then,” she whispered, and her eyes slightly narrowed, “I will fight.”

She cooked for him, when he came to her, as she’d never cooked before. She’d been well trained, and at each new taste she introduced him to he would say, staring at his chopsticks, “That’s amazing!” She typed for him half the night, not very accurately, but working till her fingers ached and she could hardly see. She massaged him, taught him Do-in, convinced him that he was magnificent, drunk or sober, happy or sad, played him her tapes of gypsy music, sometimes played piano or guitar for him, and again and again, though when they’d first become lovers he’d occasionally been impotent, made love to him. She was an artist on the pallet; she could make anyone believe he was the world’s greatest lover. But she knew, also, how to talk to him, usually, or so she believed, and it was partly true. It was by talk, in fact, that she’d attracted him in the first place, when she was sitting in on one of his English classes. She talked mostly about the things he cared about. That was as it should be, in Sarah’s opinion. The whole idea of women’s liberation made her sad, made her laugh. She had been liberated all these years — in the sense, at least, that she’d gotten every job she’d ever cared about, had traveled as she pleased, had made money, had lived with men. She was ready to be a simple, devoted wife. Tentatively, at least. Though she loved him so hard her heart would leap when she heard the crunch of his tires on the drive, she knew, with a tiny corner of her mind, that love was still an experiment for her, she was prepared, in the end, to fail — not that she was planning on it. She would fight for him, and if she won, his love for her would take care of her faint reservation.

Joan Orrick needed no formal announcement that the fight was on. When Martin told her his plan to divorce her immediately after the trip to Spain, she flew at once to the most powerful weapon available: the Ferndeans. She told them on the phone of Martin’s love affair and of hitting Martin with a log and of his terrible, dazed drive to Indianapolis. The Ferndeans, shocked and grieved, asked them to come over. Then, fierce-eyed as her grandma Lulu Frazier, but with no evil in her heart, nothing in her heart but a violent longing for a loving, absolutely faithful marriage like her parents’ marriage, or that of Martin’s parents, she told Martin what she’d done.

“How could you?” he said, and by his horrified look she knew it was as bad, in Martin’s eyes, as her smashing of Sarah’s clock.

She had no answer to give him. It had not been a conscious act of self-defense, and it hadn’t been at all that she wanted them to see how he treated her, wanted them to see that gross, black bruise. She had acted, simply. And now, seeing through Martin’s eyes how painful it would be for Nadine and John — because what could they do? — she thought, like Martin, that what she’d done was wretched, inexcusable.

But they went, Joan’s bruise grotesquely covered by white cream, Martin’s head misshapen, and sat crying in the room where John Ferndean lay, crying with them, breathing with difficulty — beginning to drown — his wife puffy-faced on the side of his bed, crying as she’d been doing since Joan Orrick phoned.

“We love you,” Nadine said. “Why must you kill each other?”

Martin could remember none of it afterward, except their sorrow and helplessness and his huge load of guilt. He watched Joan talking to them — he himself said almost nothing — and couldn’t even hate her for having done this thing. She was like a child, a child he’d loved. He thought of how all her life she’d ruled him, led him around, guided him to dark rooms or groves for their childhood love-making, thought of how he’d loved her voice when she called him at his father’s house from St. Louis, how they’d laughed together, holding hands, when his uncle George told stories, or played French horn and piano together, under Yegudkin’s sharp black eye. Why couldn’t they have been like her parents? he wondered. But they’d been similar kinds of people, her mother and father, just as his parents had been similar kinds of people; and all their lives he and Joan had been deadly opposites. He remembered how he’d loved going to church as a child — loved the singing, the responsive reading, the long pastoral harangue. Joan was indifferent to all that. If she went at all, it was for the organ music. She was so little interested in the ideas and myths that she used “heaven” and “Armageddon” interchangeably. (He would learn much later that he was wrong about her there. She was in fact interested, but her ignorance made her shy of asking. Every time she went to her psychiatrist in Detroit, she would go with Paul to the cathedral, now attended mainly by blacks, and she would bask in its beauty — and the merry, chatty, holy foolishness of the congregation, shaking hands on all sides, wandering up and down the aisles, putting up colorful signs: JESUS IS NUMBER ONE — as her mother had once basked in the order and dignity of the Mass, the warmth of grass and flowers on a convent lawn. Joan Orrick was in fact, like her mother, profoundly religious.)

“We just wish there was something we could do,” John Ferndean said. “We feel so helpless.”

“I know,” Martin said. “Look, we’re grateful—”

“I know, I know.” John Ferndean touched his wife’s hand, and the love in the gesture made Martin sick with grief, thinking, Why you, not us? And: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

John died within a year. Martin and Joan watched, visited nearly every night, took care of his family as well as they could, given their own desperate situation, and went to Spain and southern France with them afterward to stare at famous ruins, Martin looking helpless and stable as a wall, no longer mad, though more eccentric than ever, and full of sorrow. Nadine Ferndean spoke to him as he’d heard her speak to her husband, in the trips they’d taken before, saying, “Hannibal couldn’t have crossed the Alps.” John would have answered, “Of course he could! Look there!” But Martin could say nothing. Even if his eyes were not blurred by tears, what did he know of Hannibal? They went down into the dark and frightening cave where people had hidden at the time of the Inquisition. “Reminds you of Stonehenge, doesn’t it,” she said, “—the feeling, I mean.” He had never been to Stonehenge. Johnny, lad , he thought, I forgot to tell you. I hated you for dying.