John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Immediately afterward, there was a session advertised as “The Cure of Cancer.” She wanted him to hurry back to the fine old dark house and make love to her, but he wanted to attend. “You goon,” she said lovingly, “I’m not signed up for that. It costs twenty-five dollars for six weeks, and the way this place works, one session costs the same as the whole lot.”

“I’ve got twenty-five dollars,” he said.

“OK,” she said, and smiled and shrugged. “I’ll wait for you.”

“No,” he said, coming out of his trance, “I’ve got fifty dollars. You stay too. I’m a rich and famous novelist.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, and raised his hand to her lips, then lowered it, and with the fingertips stroked her own breast. He remembered with a shock how it had been with Joan, when they were kids. He remembered the next instant that fifty dollars was more than she spent, living in her macrobiotic commune, in a month.

Kushi had left the room. Though the class was supposed to begin at once, he was gone for half an hour. Outside the high, bare, round-arched windows, the sky was red. It would soon be dark. Martin’s seat was numb. He hadn’t sat cross-legged since God knew when, and the class in the raising of the dead had taken two full hours. It was surprising, in fact, that he felt as well as he did. The leg he’d broken, that time he fell in London, was throbbing slightly, but it wasn’t really painful. Nevertheless, he decided to give up his dignity and sprawl. If fat, teenaged girls could do it, and bearded freaks, why not the great Martin Orrick? What would Joan think, he wondered, if she could see him here? But his mind flinched away from it in something like fright. She would say, standing in the eight-foot-high doorway, her face alive, as theirs were not, her attire immaculate, her eyes as bright as jewels, whereas theirs were dusty — except Sarah’s, he thought: Joan would have liked Sarah, in some other world, some other time — a world and time that would never come, now — Joan would say, standing in the eight-foot-high doorway, “Have we time to exterminate these people, Paul? What time’s the concert?”

He sprawled on his side, and gently, shamelessly, Sarah snuggled up beside him. How simple and reasonable it seemed. I love you , Sarah, he thought with all his heart. — But at dinner, in the big, dark-beamed house, when someone had asked Sarah to pass the God-knows-what, he’d nudged her out of her trance saying, “Joan, would you pass the …” She hadn’t seemed to notice that he’d called her Joan, though surely it was impossible to miss a thing like that. If she did notice, she instantly forgave him, as she forgave everything. But it preyed on him a little, that slip of the tongue. He and Joan had been married more than half their lives, their habits were like rock; yet even that wasn’t what struck him, troubled him. Calling Sarah Joan, he’d said it with affection, and the feeling that had slipped out for an instant from the darkness of his mind or, maybe, heart — the absolute identity of his feelings for Joan and Sarah, and the reminder of Joan’s priority — shook him. The more he thought of it, the more suspicious it looked that Sarah had not blinked an eye — had expected it and didn’t mind. He had dimly planned, ever since the Spanish trip — without quite daring to think about it — that one day, like some character in an Updike novel, he would muster up his courage and break with his family, sometime when Joan was strong enough to take it, and would settle for the rest of his life with Sarah. It dawned on him now that it might never happen, and not, as he’d imagined, because he was afraid.

Kushi arrived, bowing and apologetic, blushing like Joan’s father, though his skin was dark. He had with him a man who claimed to be a Harvard medical professor, and a woman with, he said, metastasized cancer. It was no doubt true: she was wasted and gray. With a little start, Martin came awake: it was all not as innocent as he’d all this time imagined. The Harvard professor was going to certify that the woman was, yes, dying, and then Kushi would demonstrate … He touched Sarah’s hand. “Let’s leave,” he said. She glanced at him and nodded.

They walked through snowy Boston streets, holding hands, looking into stores, admiring brightly lighted window displays — clothes, books, jewelry, paintings, furniture, television sets, things for which she had not the slightest desire. She owned, in all the world, a piano, one beautiful hand-made tablecloth, four books, a record-player and eleven records, a magnificent hundred-year-old Spanish guitar, two dishes, a cup, one spoon, one knife, enough clothes to fill her large leather suitcase, and one pair of chopsticks.

“Martin, there’s something I must tell you,” she said. He studied her face but could see nothing, except that she’d carefully arranged it. He remembered that she’d been a schoolteacher, because that was the way she was looking at him now, exactly: as if he were a child who’d done something very wrong, and though she was fond of him, and not angry, she must bring it to his attention.

“Are you sure this is the time?” he said, not knowing what it was she had to say but knowing most certainly that he didn’t want to hear it.

Her composure broke, her gaze flicked away from him, and she said, “Perhaps not.”

They walked on, with more purpose now, moving toward the trolley that would take them to Brookline and her house, her room, her pallet laid out on the wooden floor on a line that went exactly north and south.

I must tell him in the morning , she thought, and suddenly knew she wouldn’t, hoping against hope.

He returned to southern Missouri looking rested and well fucked and loaded down with bags of mysterious junk he insisted would be good for them. Joan said, not crying, looking bleak and abandoned, “She gives you something you need. I wish I knew what it was, I’d give you the same, and more, more than anyone could possibly give you.”

“It’s the health food,” he said, and his smugness, though it should have made her furious, made him handsome, sexy.

“I wish you could love me too,” she said.

“I do,” he said.

She flew to Detroit, and said to Dr. Behan, “I want you to help me change myself so that Martin will love me.”

“Is that all?” he said, and smiled.

“I’m serious,” she said. She told him about the fights — he’d heard at least something of that from Paul Brotsky — about how Martin, when he was drunk, became, as it seemed to her, a different man, how he called her awful things, hit her sometimes, or worse yet, stormed off in the middle of the night, sometimes in the car. What frightened her most of all was that some night, driving a hundred miles an hour and so drunk he couldn’t see, he would kill somebody. That, if he lived through it, would break his heart, drive him crazier than he was.

“You’re sure your perceptions of this aren’t a little distorted,” he said. He was silver-haired and lean, so good-looking one thought one might have seen him in some movie or on television. Paul had been right about him; she could tell already. She’d been to enough psychiatrists to know he was extraordinary. If he had any method, she would learn over the next few months, it was simply to listen carefully, catching the little lies — for instance, if you said “one” when you really meant “I”—and saying exactly what he believed, as an ordinary, decent human being, a committed physician. He would suggest often that her perceptions were distorted. Frequently she would have no idea, after a session with him, just what it was he’d said; but she began to move through the world as if Dr. Behan were watching her, began judging her behavior as he would judge it; and she felt herself changing, changing quickly.