John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

At the end of the Spanish trip, Joan began to cry, hour after hour in their stateroom, not asking for sympathy or attention, simply.mourning her marriage, her children, Martin, and the beautiful, talented child-Joan wasted and betrayed. She had decided to kill herself. Martin, when he learned, squinted in disbelief, then said, helplessly, “Don’t. I’ll stay.”

“Will you really?” It was a plea. She was beyond shame now.

He nodded.

Sarah Fenton was small and thin. Like all macrobiotics, she had an Oriental look — large, mournful eyes, straight, lively hair (it was as black as coal), and the dry, pale mouth of someone who has lost blood. She was thirty-five (Martin Orrick was forty) and had been everything — a teacher in Brooklyn, an off-Broadway actress (she was then twenty-five, but in the photographs one can discern no difference between Sarah at twenty-five and Sarah ten years later), a teacher of yoga on 24th Street, a translator from Spanish, Italian, or French, whatever was needed, at the United Nations. She was a fair actress, judging by her reviews, but she had no faith whatever in reviews — indeed, had no faith in herself at all. She was (Martin Orrick pointed out to her) a Pisces, a back-stabber whose knife went unfailingly into her own slim back. She had done — what else? She’d lived for two years in Spain, with gypsies — it was there she’d learned guitar. Though she never played it well, she played it in the long-fingered gypsy style, and never in her life was she guilty of hillbilly hammer-ons and pull-offs. She’d also lived for two years in India, in the courtyard of a temple, where she’d divided her time between meditation and watching healings. She would become, herself, a sort of healer. She had no explanation of what she did, and could achieve no miracles, but she could change people, simply by her presence, could make them receptive to whatever restorative powers time and chance might afford. Both her mother and father were southern Missouri doctors, general practitioners, sad, intelligent people who’d been divorced for years. They both loved her and were baffled and disappointed by her strange way of life, never settling down, living with riffraff, cranks, and gurus. But if Sarah was home, they’d sometimes send her their hopeless cases, and she would massage them and talk with them and make them imagine they felt less pain.

Except for quirky theories about diet, she had no code, no beliefs, or at any rate none she had words for. She’d lived comfortably for a year in Arizona with a professional thief, a good poet, she believed (Martin Orrick, when he saw the poetry, agreed and wanted to promote the man, but Sarah claimed she had no idea where he might be by now: it was not in her nature to keep track of such things), and she’d studied and later taught Tibetan sexual exercises which aimed at spiritual transcendence. Like all her rare and beautiful kind, she wore large hats, long purple or wine-colored dresses and curious-looking shoes, as if her beauty were a secret to be carefully guarded. She spoke very little, never without carefully rehearsing what she would say, and never unkindly, even when she was angry. She watched people as a child does, and soon knew all there was to know about them, none of which she minded. If she had faults — or such was Martin Orrick’s opinion — most of them were faults of style. Having lived so much of her life with untouchables, God’s children in India, gypsies in Spain, Mexicans, American Indians and blacks, her laugh was too loud for polite society. And in her thirty-five years she’d found nothing yet to give absolute commitment to. Martin Orrick might have changed that. She loved him as she’d never loved anyone before, but unfortunately — as she at last saw, more clearly than he did — he loved his wife. She lay weeping in his arms, unable to tell him yet what made her cry, because he wasn’t yet ready to understand that it was Joan, always, only Joan that he loved. And in the morning she got up and washed her face and, mentally, changed her life.

She still had not told him when he visited her in Boston, where she was taking, partly out of idle curiosity, partly from a romantic wish to believe, a course on the raising of the dead. The class took place in a large upstairs room in downtown Boston, and she could see, slyly watching him, that he had assumed from the first instant that the students were all insane. Some sat stiff-backed on their Japanese mats, spines absolutely straight, so that the power of Ky could come rushing down into them from the universe. (“Sit up straight, Martin,” she would sometimes tell him, “think of your poor miserable electrical system.”) Others lay sprawled out, fat and splotched, with lifeless, frizzled hair — she knew them and was fond of them and could have explained so that even Martin would forgive them: they came to this place because they were incurably sick, or lost, or hungry for religion, and those who came out of loss or hunger would almost certainly be helped, and those who came because medical science had given up on them would either get better, half by accident, or would die. (“Martin, Martin, be gentle ,” she would say, subtly controlling his every move, and would kiss his fingers, “they don’t hate you, they aren’t even looking at you.”) Still others leaned miserably against the wall, unwashed and hairy, big tall pimply-faced boys who were always angry and trembling at the edge of tears. They needed to be made love to, needed their cocks sucked, needed to be told, hour after hour, how strong they were, what beautiful, mysterious eyes they had. There was no irony, no cruelty in Sarah Fenton’s thoughts. That was what they needed, and if she could have found girls for them, she would have done so.

Martin studied her, affectionate and curious, and observed that her hint of a smile was smug, as if she was proud of these people, these specimens, whatever he might think. He looked at the people in the room again, then back at her. She touched his knee with her gentle, emaciated hand. Then the teacher arrived, one Michio Kushi, and greeted his strange class without seeing it. They all prayed, silent, sometimes clapping their hands smartly. The lecture on the raising of the dead began.

Martin watched and listened in awe and not unfriendly disbelief, his thick, dark meat-eater fingers laid on Sarah Fenton’s translucent hand. It was insane but also fascinating, this sober-minded talk of raising the dead. Crazy as he might be, the man was no charlatan. He demonstrated the breathing, ten thousand years old, he mildly claimed, that would suck down the powers of the universe, and spoke of how first one must revive the brain.

“Blain die first, you understand?” If a man had been dead for as much as fifteen minutes, his mind, when you brought him back to life, would be like a child’s. But between fifteen minutes and fourteen hours — the maximum — there would be very little difference. “Next we must levive the pancleas.” Next the heart. In his black suit, black hair, thick plastic-rimmed glasses he looked like a Japanese monk. After every important pronouncement he bowed. He spoke of yin and yang, the earth’s rotation, the cycles of the moon, spoke of sodium and potassium, the powerful electrical charge in the earth — the reason people sometimes come back to life in the grave. He spoke at length, thoughtfully and carefully, of the moral considerations involved in the raising of the dead — how it was a sin against nature to raise a man who had not died by mistake, to raise a man who must die again tomorrow or next week. He demonstrated the orthodox modern method of starting up the heart by pounding violently on the victim’s chest, spoke of the orthodox revival of the heart by electric shock, and showed— strange — a badly taken photograph of an old Chinese painting of a corpse being struck in the chest by a physician. As Martin listened, expressionless — not tempted to laugh: crank or not, Kushi was a holyman — he was aware all the time that she was watching him out of the corner of her eye, from the ambush of her long, dark lashes. At the end of the session — it closed with a prayer — she whispered in his ear, “But he’s a good man, mmm?”