John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

All their time in Japan they had only one fight, and even that was brief and trivial, a matter of her jealousy. Though it hurt her to think of Sarah, she no longer hated her, if she ever really had. As she would understand more and more clearly as time went on, Sarah had worked a miracle in Martin: had made him sexually well, as probably no one but a stranger could have done. It hadn’t been pure charity, of course. What she’d done, as Joan finally got Martin to describe it, was exactly what the California sexual therapists were supposed to do for impotent, self-hating and woman-hating men. She’d done it so exactly in order, stage by stage, if one could believe what one read about sexual therapy in magazines, that Joan Orrick couldn’t help but suspect that Sarah Fenton had worked by plan, putting him through a program. When she got him to read the article, Martin looked thoughtful and said nothing. It was important to him, of course, that Sarah should have loved him, not merely helped him. But if he had doubts there, he was a fool. Nevertheless, they never spoke of Sarah now, Martin because he had quietly abandoned his promise to her and was ashamed of himself, Joan for another reason.

It was a rainy summer night, dark as pitch except for the lights of the Mercedes and the yellow light in the windows of Sarah’s small house. As the car drove up, Sarah came out onto the porch, smiling, imagining it was Martin. But when Joan got out in her glistening black raincoat and made a dash to the shelter where Sarah stood, Sarah’s face went suddenly pale and showed a brief struggle between fright and a decision to be brave. At the top of the porch steps Joan stopped, put her hand on the railing as if tentatively, shyly, and with the other hand pushed back the rain hat. “Hello, Sarah,” she said. Her voice was friendly, and though she herself was surprised, it was not a tone she had to fight for.

“Hello, Joan.” Sarah stood perfectly still, distant, her thin hands folded in front of her, arms straight.

Joan took a step nearer, gave a slight laugh and said — foolishly, as she thought the instant she said it—“It’s raining.”

Sarah said nothing, merely looked at her, solemn.

Joan looked away, feeling somehow as if she, not Sarah, was in the wrong. But no one was really in the wrong, she knew; or anyway so she’d told herself, again and again, before she’d started out. Sarah knew only what Martin said, that she, Joan, did not love him, and if what he said were true, Sarah might be right to try to take him from her, even at the expense of … She shook her hair out, wiped the rain from her face. “Can we talk, Sarah?”

Sarah thought about it, then nodded and glided in her long, faded robe toward the door. She opened it, still without speaking, and Joan went in. The room smelled of cooking oil, incense, and kerosene; Sarah used lanterns. There was no furniture, only flat Japanese pillows and one low table. Sarah came in, closed the door softly, and after a moment they both sat down. At last Sarah asked, “What did you wish to say, Joan?” Her words sounded carefully planned, rehearsed. Her expression was impossible to read. Guarded, perhaps beaten, withdrawing.

Joan tried to think, listening to the rain, then brought out without plan, “You love Martin, and you think I don’t, but you’re wrong.” Her eyes filled with tears; she ignored them. To keep from crying she made herself cold, efficient, and she continued: “You’ve made him love you. I don’t blame you for that, but I do love him, so you’re wrong to try to take him from me. He loves you partly because you’re so fair, so reasonable. If that’s true—

“Why should I believe you?” Sarah said quietly. It dawned on Joan only now that Sarah was scared to death of her.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” she said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

In panic, she tried to think what Sarah had asked, then abruptly remembered. “But you do believe me. Look at me.”

Sarah did, then looked down. “Very well, perhaps I do. Nevertheless—”

Joan said, “Martin and I grew up together. We’ve been married more than half our lives. We’re like the same person. That’s the truth, Sarah. Though it’s also true that … something’s gone wrong. I can’t please him, I frighten him. But I’m trying to change. I am changing. There are things I have to save — not just myself, not even just myself and Martin and the children. There are things—” Before she knew she would do it, she found herself telling about their parents, their friends in San Francisco, Uncle George’s books.

Suddenly, like an actress — but it was real enough — Sarah turned away. “Please, don’t do that.”

Joan kept still, watching her. Though Sarah’s face was as expressionless as ever, tears ran down her cheeks. She sat motionless, as if hoping to ward off attack. At last Joan said, “There are things you do for him that I don’t know about. If I knew what they were, you couldn’t compete, you wouldn’t have a prayer.”

Sarah laughed, a sort of groan.

“Tell me what they are,” Joan said.

“Why should I? What about how I feel?”

Joan Orrick closed her eyes a moment, concentrating. She had the feeling she sometimes had with Evan, playing checkers: there was a way to win if she could just stay wide awake, not let her mind wander for even part of a second. “He loves you because you’re fair, honest.” She spoke quickly, softly. “If I knew exactly what you do together — what I do that’s wrong, without knowing I’m doing it—”

Sarah’s eyes widened. “You’re asking me to tell you—”

She refused to be distracted. “It would be fair then, wouldn’t it. If there are things you know, that I haven’t learned, and you keep them secret, and if after that he marries you because you’re fair and honest — in other words because you’ve tricked him—” Relief flooded in, exactly as when she managed to set up the winning move in checkers, and she watched like a spectator, enjoying the beauty of the move as poor Sarah squirmed. She could be sorry for Sarah if she let herself, could even ruin the move for compassion’s sake; but she resisted the temptation. Let Sarah sacrifice. Somebody had to lose.

Sarah stood up, retreated toward the window. “Joan, this is crazy. Please, I’d like you to go.”

“I want you to tell me everything you do.” She saw that in a moment Sarah would be crying, and she was tempted more strongly than before toward compassion, but again she held firm, thinking, You’re beaten, Sarah. I know why he loves you, but somebody has to lose .

“I can’t tell you. It would hurt you. I know you, Joan. I know you better than you think.”

“Yes. It will hurt me. But we have no choice.”

Sarah swept her hair back and pretended to gaze out the window at the rain. “I can’t tell you. But you’ve won. I’ll stop seeing him.”

Joan stood up, moved toward her, then paused, six feet away. “It’s not enough, Sarah. There’s someone else like you, somewhere.”

There was a long silence. At last, crying, Sarah nodded.

It had not been by Sarah’s techniques that she had won him, or if it had been, Joan Orrick would be the last to admit it; but she knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how to keep from hurting him, how to show the love that had made her cling to their life.

“Am I becoming a better person?” she would say. He would look at her, shaking his head as if in wonder, and she was happy. She began to feel confident. She was never afraid of him now, and not often afraid for him. For no reason that she could exactly explain, he no longer drank, or, rather, drank only now and then, at a party, and even if he got himself so drunk he couldn’t walk, he never turned on her — never in icy rage called her “catshit,” or stormed off to walk or gallop like a maniac on his horse or, worst of all, drive crazily off through the mountains. When he was roaring drunk, he did impersonations of famous men, and often, as in the past — but more joyfully than in the past, it seemed to her — he and Paul Brotsky did famous conversations, for instance between Czerny and Beethoven, or Shakespeare and Marlowe, or Wilbur and Orville Wright: