John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

He was reading in a black robe with a great, silver chain, as he often did lately. He was such an eccentric it looked natural on him, very handsome, in fact, his prematurely silver hair flowing down his back, his English-Irish-Welsh voice singing through language as the voices of his preacher teacher lawyer ancestors had done all those years, or centuries rather, calling in vain for heaven’s mercy. People wept, listening. She could have wept herself, but against the power of the story, against the “dark vision” his reviewers absurdly, perversely praised, her pleasure in his looks, his power to move strangers, triumphed. He was now distinctly fat. She liked him fat. And it struck her that, whatever his faults, he had never lost that childlike fairness: principles were evil, never people, in his fiction. He created no bad characters, and if he’d seemed not to love her, from time to time — the complaint was behind her — it was nevertheless true that all through the years, every heroine he’d put on paper was recognizably herself. All but one of them were red-heads. In fact in one of his novels — he was obviously unaware of it— all the characters were red-heads. It startled her to notice that just now, here in this roomful of “Bennington girls,” also talented and handsome eastern woman-teachers — musicians, novelists, scientists, painters — she felt perfectly at home — in fact queenly. She recalled that her father had called her “princess” when she was little. (Her mother, because of the Parkinson’s disease, now trembled, no longer drove a car, wrote letters in which the penmanship was so small you very nearly needed a magnifying glass. But she seemed wiser than she’d seemed when she was pretty and young. When she and Martin visited her parents now — and the same was true when they visited his parents — they all talked like friends, like adults. They were all, of course, proud of him, and he was properly grateful; he would mention in interviews all they’d done for him.)

He was coming to the end, building toward it like a Russian composer, turning the lights out one by one, unostentatiously, forcing nothing, offering no opinions, the music speaking for itself. She was startled by an odd discovery, and though no one sitting near her would have noticed the change, she came suddenly wide awake, thinking, He believes all that! It was, she would write in her own novel — the one she began in her mind that night — the most important discovery she’d ever made about him. She saw him all at once as different from herself — after all this time with Behan, trying to learn to see people as essentially like her, encouraged or wounded by the same kinds of things — saw him as a completely separate human being with separate problems: nothing was her fault. He was simply like that, and her love, or her failure to love him as she should, had nothing whatever to do with it, had only to do with how things stood between them. She found herself loving him, pitying him, admiring him with absolute detachment. It was as if the room had suddenly grown enormous, as large as the universe he was forever bringing into his stories and novels, and he was a star at the edge of it, rushing outward from the calm, hushed center, and it was not her fault.

When he finished reading his typically mighty final line, there was a moment of stillness while the usual chills ran up and down the people’s backs (not that she meant to be unfeeling; it was wonderful, wonderful; but she’d been through it many times): then applause, intense and prolonged. He was instantly transformed to his ordinary self, shy, slightly suspicious that they couldn’t really mean it, unworthy of this frightening honor. When the crowd of adoring maidens thinned she went up to him. “You were terrific!” she said. As they were leaving, going to the party, he took her hand.

Casually, over drinks, someone asked if he’d be interested in teaching at Bennington College for a year. He grinned and asked her what she thought. She said, “Certainly!” “Really?” he said, surprised. “I like it,” she said, “—not that I want to boss you, understand.” “Boss me?” he said, and actually looked blank. She smiled, radiant, for the benefit of the others, and Martin, looking slightly baffled, said, “If Joan thinks we should come, I guess we should come.”

No one doubted for long that she’d been brilliantly right, as usual. In Bennington the children could go to good schools that offered interesting courses not available at home, and they could play in the Sage City Symphony — she and Martin as well. The man who taught strings and conducted the orchestra in the Mount Anthony Junior and Senior High schools turned out to be Daniel Antoun, as fine a teacher and musician as anyone in the east, knocking off concerts, one after another, that few civic orchestras could have touched. Evan would turn, overnight, into a really first-rate horn player, and Mary would begin taking lessons on the harp in Schenectady. Joan, one afternoon, found a house for sale, a splendid old place with leaded windows, a hanging staircase, a third-floor ballroom (which they would immediately turn into a theater). It cost half what their house in Missouri cost, and it was right next door to the oldest house in Vermont and the most beautiful church. “Could we?” she said. “We could live here six months and in Missouri for six months. The children love it, Martin.” Which was true. He called his publisher, got an advance on a new novel. They signed the papers.

She met, at one of the Bennington parties, a New York City anesthesiologist who made some use of hypnotism — or mesmerism, as Martin stubbornly insisted on calling it, in memory of his uncle George. He could teach her autohypnosis, he said, and at least to some extent get her off the drugs. She could kill at least part of the pain and still compose, perhaps teach. (She had no immediate need of a job. She was doing psychotherapy, on those days when she was well enough, at the college. She imitated Dr. Behan’s method, but added touches no one but Joan Orrick would have thought of. She gave students the words to “When You Walk Through a Storm” and “Climb Every Mountain” and urged them to sing them with feeling whenever depressed.) Though both Martin and Paul Brotsky had been urging her to try autohypnosis for years, the hypnotist’s suggesting it made it suddenly a concrete possibility — in fact, she knew at once that it would work. She had to do something, she knew. She was working as much as possible on her novel now, and it was infuriating that she couldn’t think clearly.

“If I could only concentrate,” she’d said to Dr. Behan, “I think I might turn out to be, you know, really good .”

He’d smiled. “Does it matter?”

“Oh, very much ,” she’d said.

And he: “If you are, what will Martin think?”

She’d said without an instant’s hesitation, knowing it was true, “He’ll think it’s wonderful.” Then, a second later: “But he’ll hate it if it’s bad. It won’t be anything personal — nothing to do with whether or not he loves me — but oh my God will he hate it!” And then suddenly, exactly as she’d done as a child, she’d laughed: “So let him hate it! Fuck him!”

Dr. Behan smiled, looking her over. “That should do it, yes.”

The minute the hypnotist suggested he could help, she excused herself and went to find Martin — he was talking to a dignified gray-haired lady named Babs — and dragged him back to where the hypnotist sat. She told him what the hypnotist had recommended, and said, “Could we try it, Martin?” “What’s this ‘Could we’?” he said.

She began the lessons, flying down twice a week to New York. It was at first disappointing, and she would soon learn that her hopes had been too high; but the hypnotist insisted that her progress was miraculous, considering the dosage of drugs she was on. “Serious pain isn’t easy to talk yourself out of, Joanie,” he said.