by John Gardner
And so he’d driven down, following Tim’s directions, to the farm outside South Gibson, where Tim’s wife’s cousin Charles Lepatofsky had the Jeep. Lepatofsky was a smiling, chatty man, fat and short, with oversized nose and hands, thick curly hair peeking out at his collar and matted on his arms, almost hiding his tattoos. He had his four- or five-year-old daughter with him, a silent, shyly smiling red-head, something wrong about her eyes—maybe just a dreamer. Lepatofsky automatically put her up on his shoulders, not asking if she wanted him to, hardly even glancing at the child in fact. Automatically she put her hands around his forehead, carefully not covering his eyes, and they started across the neatly mowed back yard toward the weeds beyond. Mickelsson walked with them through brittle, high grass and ragweed down a lane thick with raspberry and elderberry bushes, past a shaggy pony and two brown horses, part of an old tractor and an upside-down truck, up a hill to a sagging, paintless barn with its door wedged shut by a locust post. Without taking his daughter from his shoulders, the man tugged hard at the post, veins standing out on his forehead and wrists.
“Are you your daddy’s pal?” Mickelsson asked, holding one finger to the girl’s face, close to the chin. She did not look at him.
“Lily don’t talk much,” Lepatofsky said.
Now he had the brace-post unwedged. After Lepatofsky got the door open, Mickelsson cautiously stepped in and then stood—shocked, to say the least—simply looking.
“There she be,” Lepatofsky said.
“Yes, that’s right,” Mickelsson said, slowly nodding.
From the looks of it, the Jeep hadn’t been driven in years. It was moored by cobwebs heavy as ropes and weighed down by mounds of pigeon droppings, so mud-stained and weed-specked it looked as if it had been sunk in some marsh and, long afterward, salvaged. One back tire was flat, and one side panel had been banged in in three places, as if a crazed ram had come after it.
“Ain’t much, is it,” the man said, and smiled, then winked. “But you gotta admit the price is right.” He wore his sleeves rolled up, a crushed pack of cigarettes under one of them, on both arms large tattoos.
“You think it still runs?” Mickelsson asked. He couldn’t tell whether he was delighted by the thing or horrified. It would be a shocker, down on the university parking lot, if he could get it that far. (He imagined Jessica Stark or some handsome young-lady graduate student climbing into it, heading, in Mickelsson’s company, to some party.) On the other hand—perhaps because of its oversized tires, or because it stood all alone in the rotting, empty barn, wide bars of dusty light draped over it—it looked like the largest, most hard-worked, somehow most serious Jeep he’d ever seen. It was a 1973 Wagoneer, Lepatofsky told him. A snowplow came with it (he had it in the “grodge”) and it also came equipped—Lepatofsky said it as if he thought it very special—with a brand-new chrome-covered trailer hitch. “Tell you what we’ll do,” Lepatofsky said. “Lily and me will pump up the tire and we’ll drive you owt for a ride.” He winked at his daughter. For the first time, the little girl looked thoughtfully at the professor.
While Mickelsson waited, his hand on his pipe, moving slowly around the Jeep, studying the rust and the blistered whitish-yellow paint, the plastic, red-haired troll-doll hanging from the rear-view, mirror (the Jeep also had side mirrors, one of them broken), Lepatofsky, with the child still on his shoulders, went back to the house for an old tire-pump. It took him half an hour, sweating like a horse, the girl pressing her palms against her knees beside him, to get the tire up high enough to run on. At last, leaning the pump in the doorway and taking his daughter’s hand, he said, “OK, hop in!” When he’d gotten into the driver’s seat and settled Lily in his lap, he looked over at Mickelsson, waiting. Mickelsson looked at the dirt on his own seat, a quarter-inch thick, thought of wiping it off with his handkerchief, then sighed, grimaced, and, taking the pipe from his mouth for a moment, climbed in. Perhaps for Mickelsson’s benefit, Lily reached up and tapped the troll-doll, making it swing. She smiled to herself.
The motor roared to life at the second turn of the ignition key—it had been driven more recently than Mickelsson had thought, apparently—and Lepatofsky, twisting around to look out the back window, backed the Jeep, coughing and bucking, out of the barn. “It needs to warm up,” he said, and winked. The engine did settle down, after a minute, though not to the point of hitting on all of its cylinders. He drove straight down to a shallow, reedy swamp, shifted to low-low and four-wheel drive, and started through it. Water oozed up onto Mickelsson’s shoes, making him lift his feet and glance at Lepatofsky. The daughter smiled. Mickelsson sat rigid and unbalanced, hanging on with both hands, feeling slightly injured by the child’s amusement and thinking how it would feel to have to walk, with the child smiling at him from Lepatofsky’s shoulders, through all that muck to dry land. Just outside his window a ratlike thing—a muskrat or small beaver—paddled away in alarm, its eyes rolled back.
To Mickelsson’s amazement, the Jeep inched on through the water and reeds and at last climbed to solid ground. Lepatofsky shifted out of low-low and grinned.
“Jesus,” Mickelsson said, and slowly lowered his feet.
“You telling me,” Lepatofsky said, and laughed with relief, winking at his daughter. The whole side of his face moved, as if the wink were a tic.
For all his talk about the price being right, he hadn’t yet mentioned one. Now, when Mickelsson asked him about it, he said, “Seven hundred, firm.”
“I see,” Mickelsson said. Then, after a moment, “That’s fair, I guess.” He studied his pipe. “I’d been thinking of trying a used-car lot, maybe, where I could trade in the Chevy. …”
“That’s up to you, a course,” Lepatofsky said. “I can tell you right now you won’t get a Jeep like this at a used-car lot, with a snowplow and everything. Not for seven hundred. If I was you I’d just keep that Chevy for a spare. The plow alone’s worth seven hundred.”
He gave that same argument again and again, mostly in the very same words, as they drove around. They rode up a logging trail, up and down steep banks, once up and over a partly fallen stone wall. “It’s built high,” Lepatofsky said. “You won’t get hung up, that’s one thing.” To Mickelsson’s slight annoyance later, they didn’t think to try it on the road. Lily reached up, from time to time, to reposition the troll-doll.
“OK,” Mickelsson said at last, his heart anxious but his expression grim, “I’ll take it.”
Slowly, dreamily, not making a sound, the child clapped her hands.
The first time Mickelsson drove the Jeep, after it was his own, two tires blew out and he discovered that, though it was terrific at negotiating swamps and stone walls, it had a maximum road-speed of sixty miles an hour downhill. According to his careful, neat figures, it got nine miles to the gallon. (Fear leaped up in him. He would be ruined!) Nevertheless, he retired the Chevy to his own empty barn—not as empty as Lepatofsky’s; there were dried-out, twenty-year-old bales of hay, coils of rope, lengths of pipe and scattered, rusted farm-machinery parts—and, partly for style’s sake, partly to get the old vehicle in condition for the difficult haul when snowtime came, Mickelsson cleaned up the Jeep and made it his regular means of transportation back and forth from school. “Hey, wow!” students would say when he pulled into his parking slot, and sometimes they’d come over to look at it. Witlessly, shyly, the red-haired troll-doll, still swinging on its short, rusty chain, would grin. He must remember to take that doll back to Lepatofsky’s daughter, he reminded himself now and again. But he kept forgetting.
The university was thirty-five miles—more than an hour’s drive—from the house on the mountain. He liked that, the distance between his two worlds. He could clear out his head, driving to school in the beat-up Jeep. (He’d left the Peugeot in Providence with his wife.) It was late September, no sign yet that the leaves would soon be turning, but when he set out, mornings, the house and mountain would be surrounded by fog, so that he had to poke slowly, carefully down in
to the valley, across the iron bridge, and up to the highway heading north out of the mountains into New York State. Sitting high above ordinary drivers, fists closed tight on the steeringwheel, shoulders thrown back and chin thrown forward, like a king fallen on hard times, he could think at leisure about his classes and appointments, remind himself of letters he had to write (he was badly behind, the desk at his office deeply buried), and make mental lists of books he must pick up at the library. He’d thought from time to time of installing an FM radio in the Jeep, but so far he hadn’t done so, and it seemed to him increasingly unlikely that he would. Wind in his hair, morning sunlight gleaming in the swirls of fog and on patches of glass-smooth river in the valley below and to the left of him—here and there, rising through the fog toward visibility, a barn with high silos, a village of white houses, a neon motel sign precariously craning to the level of the Interstate—he felt himself changing as if magically from whatever he was on the mountain to Mickelsson the teacher, the colleague, the committeeman.
Not that he was much of a colleague, he would admit. After a year at this place, he knew hardly any of the people he taught with—five or six in philosophy, one or two in English, Jessica in sociology, perhaps a half-dozen others, more faces than names; but he was closer to these people, sad to say, than to any of the people he’d taught with in California or, before that, Ohio, not to mention those he’d met during his Fulbright year in Germany, none of whose names he remembered. (He saw his former friends from California occasionally at philosophy conferences, where they struck him as odd dressers and prematurely aged, full of crackpot West Coast opinions—thought as an effective physical impulse or “charge,” and so on. His friends from Ohio, Hiram College, he never saw anywhere.) As for other people he and his ex-wife had known, Mickelsson had put them, through no fault of theirs, almost wholly out of mind. The thought of Providence, with its beautiful old trees and dark-brick buildings, its classy, troubled students, its long, drunken parties and gloomy flirtations, above all its oceanscape, at one time so dear to Mickelsson and his children—the thought of Providence filled him with such a feeling of waste and hopelessness that he preferred to consider the whole place swallowed by the Atlantic.
But if strictly speaking he was a colleague to nobody, he knew better, instinctively, than to admit that fact too openly to himself. Sometimes after telephone conversations with his wife, whether the tone she took was haughty or cajoling, he sensed how precarious his hold was on the world. He must find something to live for—his work, his students—otherwise sure as day he would wake up some morning strapped down hand and foot, full of guilt and dim, dreamlike memories of himself in garish dress, solemnly bent to impassioned, tearful conversation with a mouse in a trap or the shattered remains of a dog beside the road, PHILOSOPHER CLAIMS DIRECT ENCOUNTER WITH BEING! It was a harmless lunacy. He was inclined to believe he was at his best when “not himself.” Nevertheless, any hint that he was slipping could make his fingers tremble. And so—as he’d drunkenly told Jessica the night he’d stayed late—by stubborn acts of will Mickelsson shaved in the morning, read his journals, soberly prepared classes. Let those things slide, as already he’d let his writing slide (a book on the ethics of genetic manipulation, several articles, a paper for the March convention of the A.P.A.—all very current and important, but nothing his heart was in), and he’d be doomed, subtly and irrevocably called into the shadowy world he felt always not far off, as close and dark and ingeniously patterned as the woods on the mountain above him. Closer. As close as the walls of whatever stark, inhospitable room he happened to be standing or sitting in in the old, allegedly spirit-ridden house.
And so, soberly, knowing what he was doing, Mickelsson acted the role of teacher, committeeman, jovial colleague. (His right hand left the steeringwheel, gesturing, trying to make things plain to the windshield.) It was in fact a character he had always enjoyed and could enjoy even now, with certain reservations, so long as he knew he could take it off, like his suitcoat and the annoyingly narrow tag, “Ethicist,” when he left for home. Mickelsson had always been a friendly man, or so he believed, but he was not in a mood, at this stage of his life, for socializing. He was indeed in a period of redefinition, reassessment, or perhaps, to be accurate, mourning.
Mickelsson frowned and slowed down a little. A hitch-hiker, illegal on the Interstate, held out a thumb to him; a tramp-faced man in a long brown coat. Mickelsson slowed more, then changed his mind and sped up again. As the Jeep passed him, the hitch-hiker slowly, as if ominously, shook his head.
Period of mourning, Mickelsson thought, and nodded, lightly tapping the steeringwheel with the heel of his fist.
Jessica had been seated on the couch across the coffeetable from him, leaning toward him, lightly frowning, her eyes darker than usual in the dimness of the room. She’d turned out all the lights but the entryway light, the light in the kitchen (throwing its bluish fluorescent shaft over the far wall and the tall, evil-looking African drum), and the light on the fern-stand just behind his chair. The couch she sat on floated, sectioning off one quarter of the room. Beyond her he could make out wide French doors, a vase of silk flowers, a painting. It had not seemed to him that night that she’d turned off lights to make their talk more romantic, though now sometimes he wondered if he’d misjudged—missed a chance. Feeble as it was, the light behind him made her gold chain and eyes—slanted a little, like an ancient Persian’s—gleam like whitecaps at twilight or coins found in childhood. He wondered if a woman as large as she was—perfectly proportioned, but goddess-size, nearly Mickelsson’s size—had trouble buying clothes. He drank slowly and carefully, pacing himself, taking no risks.
“Why do you say you’re a failure?” she’d asked. “What are you—fifty—forty-five?”
“I know it sounds like self-pity,” he said, “or too much gin.”
She dismissed it with a wave.
“Of course I’ve got very high standards,” he said. He opened his hands, then once more clasped them lightly between his knees, his feet square on the floor like a farmer’s. Her long, slim legs, the grace of her left hand draped over the couch-arm, made him feel heavy, wide as a truck; yet he did not feel ugly tonight. In fact, no doubt because she watched him with interest, he felt handsome. The sportcoat he wore had just come from the cleaner’s; the pale blue shirt was the first he’d bought since he’d left Ellen. He reached for his pipe, found it still half full of tobacco, and felt for his matches.
“Usually when people of our age say they’re failures,” she said, “they’re telling the truth. In your case, I don’t believe it.”
“ ‘Our age,’ ” he mocked.
She laughed. “I’ll say this: you’ve got your act down pat.”
“I don’t mean it as an act,” he said, then grinned. “Probably you’re right.”
“What were you like?” she asked. “I mean, when you were younger.”
“You wouldn’t have cared for me,” he said. Now he had his pipe lit. She waited.
He shook his head as if in admiration of the young man he’d been. “I was a name to conjure with, in my grad-school days,” he said. “I’d played a little football as an undergrad, which people still remembered—I may have mentioned that.” When he glanced at her, she nodded, and he saw that he’d mentioned it too often. “Well, now that I threw myself into it, I found I was pretty good at book-work too,” he said. “Did a dissertation—published later by Temple University—on Luther, Nietzsche, and the modern predicament. Got some pretty fair reviews.” He scowled, mock-petulant. “Nowhere important, to tell the truth. Philosophy Today. ‘A bold and original contribution to the Nietzsche reassessment’—that sort of thing. It really was, in fact.” He made his face modest but tucked his thumbs under his armpits. “I don’t mean to brag.”
Jessica rolled her eyes.
He said, smiling again, still mock-modest, “I showed in great detail how Nietzsche—and Nietzsche’s deep-down hatred of Martin Luther—lies behind every co
ntemporary philosophical leaf and flower. Nietzsche is contemporary thought, in a way. He’s the trunk whose branches are Freud, Sartre, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger—whatever still thrives on that maddening sap.” He cocked one eye as if surprised and displeased by the pun, then waved it away with the backs of three fingers.
“So the book was good, in fact.”
“Not bad,” he admitted.
But the book had not been linguistic, he explained with a sigh, which had been sufficient reason, in those days, for dismissing an argument unread. His present chairman believed even now that analytic philosophy was philosophy enough, much to Mickelsson’s disgust. He pursed his lips, rubbed his palms together, and decided to tell her of his first run-in with Tillson, at some party soon after Mickelsson had arrived here. Tillson had said—eyes bugging, mad smile twitching, his index finger six inches from Mickelsson’s chin—”Do you realize that, of the jobs announced in this year’s Proceedings, only twenty per cent are not in analytic? And do you realize how many of that twenty per cent are not in ethics? I do not say, believe me, that ethics is an insignificant concern! Heavens no!” He leaned closer. “But statistically speaking it is not exactly the central fascination of our time!” He’d jerked forward, laughing, spitting out cracker crumbs and tiny bits of cheese, his head returning to its rightful place, level with the hump on his back. “He must’ve been drunk,” Mickelsson had later said to friends. “No, no,” they’d said, “that’s just his way. You’ll get used to old Tillson!” “I hope not,” Mickelsson had answered sternly—his deportment (he would have to admit, looking back) self-righteous, bordering on ridiculous. Well, so be it.
“Tillson’s probably a better man than you think,” Jessica said, and looked down at her sherry glass. “I can’t judge how good or bad he is as a philosopher. But his students like him.”
“He’s got me there,” Mickelsson said, and gave her his crazed grin.
