John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

That evening, however, he had an experience he would vividly remember all his life, in the sharpest possible detail, though it was one he would find, even after he’d become a famous novelist, impossible to put into words. Shortly after sunset, when the last of the whippoorwills were quitting and the heavy, wet midsummer air hung close, Joan and her family came driving out from town, piled out of their car shouting their greetings with voices that were like singing, and came rushing over to him, Joan and her two brothers, so wide-eyed, so charged with jubilant energy, sheer joy-of-life, that they seemed to be not of the same species as these good, slow country people, Betty Lou’s family, with whom he’d been staying. Though Joan was at the moment in her unbeautiful period, he had time only to notice it fleetingly and forget again, because for Buddy that night it was as if the world’s sound had been turned to full volume and its action sped up as in an old-time comic movie. She was the funniest girl he’d ever met. She amazed him. From the instant he first saw her getting out of the car (to borrow an expression from three decades later, but one which is here exactly accurate), he was high.

Despite her fears, it was not a time he forgot when their marriage was at its worst. Part of Martin Orrick’s trouble, and no doubt part of his strength as a novelist, was that he forgot very little. He could drop back to almost any period of his life and run it through his mind like an old movie; he could remember, for some reason, the furniture in houses he’d visited only once when he was seven years old, and he could remember in imagery as sharp as that in any photograph not only the faces but also the hands, the clothes, even the shoes of people he saw only once or twice when he was nine or ten. But though his memory was extraordinary, he had no faith. He could remember loving Joan and believing she loved him, but he believed, looking back, that their love was an illusion. Stumbling through the rain, choking with drunken self-pity and rage, falling, laboriously getting up again, the three big dogs circling him in distress and bafflement, he thought the foul weather fitting, an appropriate symbol of his existence, the lot of poor idiot mankind. His chief virtue had been, once, that he was reasonable, fair-minded. He’d learned — so now he told himself — that the universe had no slightest interest in such things. Joan dismissed people for faults they could not help — dismissed them utterly and finally because their eyes were too close together or their ankles too thick. She imputed selfish or malevolent intent to acts harmlessly foolish, even generous; and her friends applauded her as if viciousness, cruelty, and cynicism were the healthy breath of truth. All very well to say that her views were not Martin Orrick’s business, that she was one person and he another, and each had a right to his own identity. It wasn’t true — not that he thought all this out at this moment. It was a part of him, a roar in his chest. She poisoned his life at the source, accusing him of evil motives when his real ones were nothing of the sort, and shifting the grounds of her attacks with wild whimsy, revealing what was obvious in any case, as it seemed to him, that she attacked not from conviction but for the sadistic pleasure of attacking. His best friend when he was an undergraduate — a young man as intense and neurotic as Martin himself, one with whom he would talk for hours, working out the structure of a Henry James story or a Shakespeare play, learning in the best way possible (he would have said) one of the essential ingredients of his art — was, according to Joan, a homosexual. Ah, what evil she could wring out of that stuffy, ladies’-mag word! Useless to cry out in righteous indignation, “That’s not true!” because the next moment, according to Joan, Martin only liked him because, like all his superpious family, he had a penchant for sickies, and the next because he was Martin’s “first Jew.” In the end she’d made the friendship too painful to keep up. It was not that she didn’t want Martin to have friends — he told himself in rage — merely that she preferred to choose them. It was a part of her character not likely to change. Martin, hating scenes — being, in fact, afraid of scenes, not overloaded at the best of times with self-confidence — had retreated to his study, putting his emotion where it was safe, into fiction; but it was inevitable that sooner or later he must emerge, and that the character of their war must change. He fought her with reason, but the battle was absurd: she would not reason, fired wild shots like a troop of circling, yodeling Indians, and he would drink and grow bold and full of hot self-righteousness and would try once more to fight her with reason and would be beaten to silence and crackling woman hate and flight. Running, slipping and sliding in the clay mud she hated as she hated everything on this farm he’d chosen as his place of retreat from cities — his battleground, pirate’s cove, hermit’s shack — stumbling and falling in erosion ruts, scratching his face on the branches of trees, he fled toward a place she’d never dare look for him, the creek, the pitch-dark caves along the farm’s back fence. The dogs ran beside him, whimpering as if they knew what stupidity he was guilty of, his children back in the house, probably awake, frightened, beginning to learn the hopelessness he’d gladly have protected them from if protection were possible in this hellhole world. He was not crying, as he would have done when he was younger, when there was, he thought, still a chance for him. It was as if he had seen one death too many, had lost utterly the power to feel grief — as if he had finally understood that this was the world’s essential nature: idiotic conflict with no prayer of resolution — raving Arabs, raving Jews, raving blacks, raving whites; destruction of the innocent, Evan and Mary lying in their beds, listening. “Let’s not drink anymore,” he and Joan would say in the morning when they woke up and couldn’t remember what had started it; but his hatred would still be there, burning like a coal, and her absolute insistence on her rightful ownership of his every emotion, and he would drink, yes yes yes, Christ yes!

He could hear the water now, deep and slow-moving, weighed down by silt, dragging dark masses and branches like the bodies of old men toward the Mississippi. He moved toward the sound, the dogs running closer now, perpetually circling, herding him back. He came to the caves, the smell of foxes, and he stopped, leaning on the slippery rock, panting. When he crawled in, the air was icy cold. The dogs came in after him, shook off water, pressed against him and settled. He listened to the rain, thinking of his children, thinking of his own childhood, the people who had shaped him and those who’d shaped Joan, or damned them, more like, though they’d meant no harm and though finally it was nobody’s fault but his own, not even Joan’s. He shivered, closed his eyes. The ground under him was smooth and cold, like a coin.

He couldn’t remember, waking up shivering and numb in the morning, why it was that he’d come there.

Both families were religious. Joan’s went to church, did what was asked of them there and more, and never spoke, even in church, of religion. Someone who knew nothing of the lives of ordinary religious people — someone who knew only lapsed Catholics or lapsed fundamentalists, some unlucky member of that great unlucky class Martin Orrick would describe (with typical rancor and the plain injustice that served as his main form of irony) as “cynic-intellectuals, keen-eyed analysts of the interface subtleties of shit and Shinola, finger-wringing, foot-stamping, failed Neoplatonists,” or, in another place, as “the gentle libertarian who curls up his lip when he says ‘Wasp,’ ”—might perhaps have dismissed Joan’s parents as hypocrites or trimmers, or — finding no disparity between their regular, seemingly mechanical and unreasoning attendance at the Ferguson First Methodist Church and their generally upright, warmhearted, and generous everyday behavior — might have put them down, simply, as two more credulous, pitiful ciphers in that vast majority whom Thoreau alleged to live “lives of quiet desperation.” Nothing, in fact, could have been farther from the truth.