John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Yet however they might work to dampen it, her humor bubbled up, ever funnier, more cruel. Serious people told her, though they too laughed, that she was arrogant and mean and should be ashamed of herself. She half believed them. (Her father’s mother was famous for cruelty.) Her younger brother’s illness, and the attention he got, of course intensified Joan’s self-doubt. And the obvious fact that she was different from other children, so that even with her friends she felt, or was made to feel, separate, abnormal, made her doubt even stronger. The idea that she was, in spite of everything, not what she should be became more or less fixed.

At least half persuaded that no one really loved her — with one important exception — Joan mugged and joked and earned a fair amount of money (she played for, among other things, a tap-dance studio on Olive Street), won applause on every side, and poured her unhappiness or anyway confusion into Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach. She played hour after hour.

For her mother, especially, it was a difficult period. It was impossible for her mother to ask Joan to stop practicing and do the dishes or clean house. What had they worked so hard for, she asked herself, if not this? — to say nothing of all that money spent. So her mother did the work, feeling persecuted, and even when she stopped to take a nap she got not a moment’s rest. A serious pianist, as everyone knows, does not often play music straight through when practicing. Working up a piece by Mozart or Schubert, Joan skimmed with her eyes the parts she could play without difficulty, then went over, again and again, the parts that were hard for her, until she had them in her fingers. It’s doubtful that Joan’s mother heard once in her life a complete Beethoven sonata until she heard Joan play it on the radio or the concert stage. What she did hear, day after day, was five measures, or three and a half, endlessly, maddeningly repeated. It was impossible, of course, for Joan’s mother to say, “Stop! You’re driving me insane!” Instead, she would tense up her soul and wait like a painted Indian in the bushes, and at supper, Joan, eating salad, would close her teeth on the fork, then slide the fork out, leaving lettuce in her mouth, and her mother would cry angrily, with tears in her eyes, “Must you eat that way? You’re driving me insane!”—a complaint Joan’s husband would echo later, more sullenly, less dramatically, until he broke her of the habit; and then, without ever having seen her mother do it, their golden-haired daughter, Mary, would do it, and Joan’s husband would sink his head into his hands and moan, “Jesus. Must be DNA.”

But unhappy as she was at this time of her life, Joan had one great comfort: she was in love.

“Martin, don’t you remember any of that?” she would rage, years later, clinging as he struggled to push her away. “God damn you, Martin, I love you.

“You love nobody, not even yourself. You need .”

“And you don’t. You don’t need a fucking living soul.”

“That’s right.”

He was so cold he terrified her. His eyes, when he was drunk, became a paler blue, as soulless as the eyes of a dead man except for the hatred in them. It was incredible that anyone could hate her that much — hate anyone or anything that much. She would try to think, sometimes, what it was that she’d done wrong, but she’d be filled, immediately, with confusion and fright and would be unable to concentrate, unable to remember for more than a few seconds what it was she was trying to understand.

“Martin, come to bed.” She dug her fingers into his arms, trying by sheer power to break through that wall of ice.

“No thank you.”

If anyone had asked her why she wanted him, what in heaven’s name she saw in him — as her psychiatrist would ask her a short time later — she could hardly have said. It wasn’t the money: she’d have traded it all — the big, white pillared house with its towers, the Mercedes, the Essex, the trips to Europe and Japan — for a single day of the life they’d had when they were poor and he still loved her. It wasn’t, God knows, because he seemed to her handsome, though she knew to her sorrow how handsome he seemed to other women — women who saw his neurotic unhappiness, his sexy arrogance and occasional childlike gentleness, his joy on a horse or a motorcycle — and had never seen that murderous glint in his bleary, ice-blue eyes, a glint like rifle bluing. But it would come to her, finally, what it was that made her cling to him, and she would know — then quickly forget again — that Martin’s cruel accusation was partly right, that she clung out of need. He was her past, her whole life, and if he left her, as again and again he threatened to do — even tried to do, running to some floozy, some graduate student or girl from the past or colleague’s wife — her whole life would be cancelled, made meaningless, would vanish in an instant without leaving a trace, the way the universe would do, he claimed, if Time should all at once be suspended. And so she would phone him at his floozy’s house, would cry, would even use the children as a weapon, and he would finally come back, hating her and making her hate herself, and the children would move numbly through the big, cold house, gentle and beautiful and unquestionably doomed if she couldn’t find some way to save them — save them all. Martin’s father, at the time of his worst unhappiness, had been suicidal, had fought against the urge with all his might and had barely won. Now Martin was the same. She had no idea when he stormed off late at night, drunk and furious and full of that senseless, terrible grief, whether or not she’d ever see him again. If he killed himself, the odds against Evan’s survival — hypersensitive and private as his father — were frightening. — And yet it wasn’t just that, wasn’t just concern about Evan and Mary or fear that her life would turn suddenly into waste, that made her fight to hang onto him. Once she had loved him more than anyone or anything, and though it seemed that the Martin she’d loved was dead, she knew it wasn’t true. Sometimes, reading his big, gloomy novels, she would recognize with a shock of mingled pain and pleasure the Martin she’d long ago settled on for life. And there was a time when, waiting for her baggage at Kennedy Airport, she’d seen him without at first recognizing him — she’d had no reason to expect him there — and she had thought, in the flash of time it took her to adjust, What a strange, nice-looking man! Even after she’d realized that it was Martin, the memory of that feeling persisted like the next day’s memory of a dream. For all the eccentricity of his hair and clothes — he was like a man who’d stepped out of a nineteenth-century American painting — he was a man you’d turn to if you needed help, a man inherently gentle and solicitous — to strangers, anyway — the kind who, even on the New York subway, would get up to give his seat to a lady, an old man, a child loaded down with packages.

“Martin, I order you to come to bed.”

He laughed, and his eyes were so crazy she was afraid to press him. More than once he’d thrown her across the room when she tried to control him.

“What’s happened to us?” she cried. “Look at us! For Christ’s sake, what’s happened?” Before she knew it would come over her, she was sobbing, and though she knew how he scorned her crying, convinced that it was one more trick, it was impossible to stop. When she loosened her grip on his arms he jerked back, and she instinctively covered her face, thinking he meant to hit her. But he was backing toward the door, fleeing again, though it was four in the morning and raining.