John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“It won’t fly, Wilbur.”

“It’ll fly. Now just get in the fuckin airplane.”

“No. My shoe’s untied.”

“Never mind your shoe’s untied, get in the airplane!”

“I think we should’ve made it of aluminum.”

“Aluminum’s not even invented yet. Just get in the—”

“Wilbur, I’ve got an idea.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s invent aluminum.”

“Orville, you Goddamn clown, we spent two thousand dollars and nine years of work and—”

“Wilbur?”

“Yeah?”

“You fly it. I’m too young.”

Even Evan and Mary began to grow confident, began, that is, to believe that the changes were permanent. “Daddy’s different,” Mary said one night, and had a cautious look much like Martin’s.

“How?” she said, knowing, wondering if Mary would dare say it.

“His eyes crinkle. His mouth never smiles, but—”

“We’re all of us different, honey,” she said.

She refused to think about the fact that her insides were changing too. Sometimes, when the pain was really bad, so that all she could do, despite the drugs, was lie in bed and cry — Martin would come and lie beside her and hold her, telling her he was sorry, wishing there was anything at all he could do — she would be frightened, so frightened that she’d begin to sweat, though she refused to think what frightened her. (“Have you noticed, Mr. Mixiedough, that the world is becoming increasingly dim?”) When she slept, she had nightmares: Sarah came with word that Paul Brotsky was dead, and when Joan went sobbing to find Martin and tell him, he was gone, no one had been in his study for what looked like years — his leather chair was rotten, there were cobwebs on the typewriter. She called out in terror to Evan and Mary. The house was empty, silent except for the ticking of a clock. Even the dogs were gone, had left no trace. When she looked out at the mountains, gray, unstirring in the winter rain, she knew her family was not there either. The clock ticked on. “Martin!” she would scream, and would wake up shaking violently, and he would be holding her, out of breath from running, telling her, “Joan, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

Life is fleeting , he wrote, even the worst of life is fleeting .

“Martin,” she whispered once, “it’s not all right.” And at the look that came over him, she knew she must not mention that again.

Once Evan frightened her as badly as she’d ever managed to frighten herself. They were in a restaurant in Japan, at the New Japan Hotel, the four of them eating and laughing, a picture-book family no one would believe — and as Evan was telling some endless story, Martin smiling politely, looking past him with glazed eyes, waiting for it to finish — Evan suddenly stiffened and gave a faint cry of terror and reached toward Martin as he’d have done if the floor had suddenly dropped from under him. “Evan, what’s the matter?” Martin said, and caught him in his arms.

“Daddy, I saw something!” Evan said, white.

“What did you see? There’s nothing.”

Evan was looking around the room as if lost, the way you look around a room when you wake up and don’t know where you are. “I saw something,” he said again. Mary, too, was looking around, afraid.

“It’s all right,” Martin said, and held Evan tighter.

“You were looking at me,” Evan said a little later, “as if I was dead, or invisible, and then—” But he couldn’t remember what happened next.

She remembered her grandmother, and Martin’s uncle George, and she clenched her hands into fists to make the trembling stop. She remembered that Martin had said one time, “I’m as ruled from outside as any character in a book.” That’s not true! she thought — and it came as a revelation: I’ve proved it’s not true in my life . Paul had read to her from his astrology book: “The Leo child is daring, unflinching, and unafraid.” She said: “Are you aware, Martin, that I am daring, unflinching, and unafraid?”

“I am indeed,” he said, and actually grinned, so that even Evan grinned and drew back, slightly embarrassed, out of his father’s arms.

She remembered — guiltily, for some reason — that Paul had read of the Pisces — Sarah Fenton—“The Pisces child is a mystic and self-sacrificing seeker of harmony.” Anger flashed up in her for an instant, and she thought, I can run circles around her mysticism and harmony , remembered: “The Leo is proud and jealous.” Abruptly, with pleasure, she laughed. She was proud. She liked herself, and the whole world loved her, and they had better keep it up or by God there was going to be hell to pay.

Though brilliant, Joan Orrick was not a woman who often had ideas. She had one now. Perhaps Martin was determined by outside forces, like a character in a novel — perhaps Cancers and Pisces and Virgos like Paul Brotsky, even Capricorns like Evan and Mary — were determined and, because they were determined, needed the subtle, medicinal influences of all Time and Space to heal them, save them. Leos were free. Even though she never did concerts anymore, the metaphor for her life was the concert stage. These people she loved — these beautiful blond children rushing toward adulthood, and even Martin Orrick, famous novelist — were not her equals, though she couldn’t move a finger without them: they were her audience. For you, my loves , she thought, I wear this golden dress, these diamonds and rubies, flashing them up and down awesome chromatic scales. For love of you I resurrect the dead of Vienna, also St. Louis dancers, black-bearded hermits, crazy-eyed old women, the bullet-ridden bodies of no-’count drunken Frenchmen. Sit up straight and listen, and God damn you if you cough! This is a love song you’re hearing! No praise will be too great, but there will be, please, no applause. A silence will be sufficient, such a hush as would give the frail mystical Pisces a heart attack .

Mary said, leaning toward her father, “Why is Mommy wearing that wicked grin?” (Wicked was one of the words she was using in her fiction lately.)

“Wicked?” Joan said. “Your gentle, sweet mother? Wicked?”

One night, toward the finish of one of his tours, he did a reading at Bennington College in Vermont. It was a cheapie, as she called it. For readings, these days, he got a thousand dollars a night. But Bennington supported young writers, and Martin had a messianic passion for backing promising beginners, now that he had clout. He had several young writers he wanted Bennington to invite up for readings from New York. She went with him, as usual, and it was the usual great success. He read the kind of thing he was famous for, poetic and dark, a tragic piece that made human existence seem senseless and useless and, by virtue of its very waste, or perhaps by virtue of its redemption through art, worth clinging to. She remembered some critic’s having written of him once — and it was truer now than ever — that “his characters move terror-stricken, adrift in a universe grown wholly unfamiliar.” She remembered the words because she’d wondered at the time why people were always so impressed by such things — why they thought him a great artist when he made everything seem sad and hopeless. Yet it was beautiful writing, there was no doubt of that, and not shapeless, self-regarding like, say, Mahler when he tried something heavier than a song. All the same, it was a view of the world that Joan Orrick did not share. How incredible, she thought, that intelligent people should find misery and pain, even at one remove, in fiction, so attractive!

It was a pleasant place for a reading — a small, comfortable hall in what had once been a barn, wooden floors worn smooth and shaped by generations of students, small-paned windows of a kind she’d found common in the east, the whole thing totally unpretentious, which was precisely why one felt here so real, so classy, so solidly connected with the past and therefore the present. The people gave her the same feeling — their clothes, the way they sat, the structure of their faces. They might have been sitting here, calmly listening — without intense Midwestern hunger or squinting fascination, without mulish reservation or timidity or gall — as long as the low, accommodating mountains of Vermont had been listening, as long as flat eastern voices like Martin’s had been speaking of life’s steady sorrows and hurrying joys.