by John Gardner
“Why are you smiling?” she asked. “Does it please you that some of your students dislike you?” He could say this for her: she did not come at you crooked, like a wolf, but straight, like a striking Alsatian.
He leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers together over his paunch. “Students are a necessary evil,” he said.
“Really? Is that what you think?” Though her expression was noncommittal, her eyes nailed him where he sat.
“No,” he said. He brazened it out with a smile, but if there was someone invisibly keeping score, he thought glumly, Mickelsson had lost another point.
It had been something that the work of a young philosopher should be noticed at all, and his book had in fact received praise from philosophers of the kind whose respect he most valued. (His wife had put it succinctly, not meaning to hurt: “Old men.”) And it would not be quite right to say that from there his work had gone downhill. He’d written two textbooks which had remained in print for several years and a short, quite brilliant book (in Mickelsson’s opinion) which looked at medical ethics from a more or less Darwinian point of view. He’d known, of course, that in taking that long-abandoned tack, scorned by Nietzsche and dead in ethical theory at least since 1903—G. E. Moore’s demolition of naturalism (Jessica suppressed a yawn)—he had been asking for it. That had always been part of the game, for Mickelsson. He had not guessed how “controversial“—that is, how deeply hated in some quarters—his book would be. (He found himself glaring at Jessica as he said this; she smiled blandly back. Was it possible that she wasn’t listening? He leaned closer, glaring harder.) Nor had he guessed the depths to which his critics would be willing to sink. He could show her reviews. (“Please don’t!” she said, raising her hands as if to fend him off. So she was listening. To some extent. He hurried on.) He should have expected it, their shrill, mindless wrath. He himself had dislocated Nietzsche’s great, dark secret, how in his rage at those who had “stolen Christianity“—those holiness perverters who had reached their obscene peak in Martin Luther—Nietzsche had purposely couched his in fact liberal Christian philosophy in language designed to make burgher Christians squeal. What Nietzsche had done to Christians, Mickelsson had done to the surds of Academia, and he’d reaped the same harvest: scorn and indignation. He could tell himself that his friendlier reviewers were right about him: if he was occasionally careless, at times drawn too far by his love of rhetoric and inclination to shock, he was nonetheless a better philosopher—bolder and more original—than a vast majority of the nit-picking dullards one encountered in the so-called discipline these days. Though his enemies were intent upon injury and insult, he could defend himself with his old football-field combativeness. Yet there was no denying that the attacks had surprised and wounded him.
He found himself staring at her downright angrily, as if it were she who’d scorned his book, and at once he changed his expression to what he recognized—too late—as an angry grin. He reached for his drink, discovered it to be empty, and stood up. Together they went to the kitchen, Mickelsson talking again, gesturing with more fury than he let into his voice, Jessica trailing, leaning on the door as he opened the gin, then the vermouth. When he’d put ice in his glass and reclosed the refrigerator door, he leaned on the kitchen counter, meaning to continue here, but Jessica—eating a cold hors d’oeuvre, chewing with her mouth open—moved back into the livingroom, and, hardly aware that the choice had been hers, he followed.
Well, after the initial jolt (Mickelsson continued, his voice and manner more reasonable now, his shrug mature), after the first bloody spray of polemics, he’d let it go, dismissing the gnats’ complaints against him, commending their tiny souls to God. Extravagantly praised in other quarters, sought after by well-paying popular magazines where few real philosophers had a chance to get a hearing, he had underestimated the extent to which, personally and professionally, he’d been undermined.
Jessica yawned, smiled and shook her head apologetically, then reached down with one hand to slip off her shoes. She brought her feet up onto the couch beside her and leaned back.
His book, he told her—not meeting her eyes now, aware that he was abusing a privilege, turning her interest into an excuse for letting out bottled-up anger that probably had nothing to do, in fact, with the reception, all those years ago, of his ethics book—his book, he said, had come out ten years before that annoying piece of foolishness, Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, with which his work was now carelessly linked. A tic pulled at his mouth, beginning a sneer. He raised his hand to cover it.
“I’m really not yawning because I’m bored,” Jessica apologized, fighting yet another yawn. “I haven’t been up this late since God knows when. Kenya, I think.” She glanced at him. He imagined her towering above a crowd of admiring Kenyans.
“I should let you get to bed,” he said, and swallowed a yawn himself. Just when he thought he had the yawn beaten, his mouth, of its own volition, opened wide, like a fish-mouth. “Whoo-ee!” he said, then clenched his teeth. They both laughed.
“I like being up this late,” Jessica said, “though I’m badly out of practice. It’s like being in college again.”
“Women do that too?” he asked. “Sit up all night talking philosophy?”
Her expression went sly, the eyes more noticeably slanted. “Not philosophy, usually.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so. Too smart for that.” He smiled one-sidedly and winked.
“That’s it,” she said. “So go on with what you were saying.”
“I can’t believe you consider it all that interesting,” he said. He leaned toward her, meaning to bully her a little.
“Not in the way you’d like.” She smiled back. “I’m interested in why you get so angry when you talk about ideas.”
He studied her, then shook his head. “Pure ego,” he said. “I hate it when I don’t get due praise.”
“Everybody does.” She shrugged.
He said, “It’s more than that, really. The sociobiologists make my skin crawl.”
“Brings out the old football-field combativeness,” she said. She mimicked his look and tone so well that he was thrown into confusion. He raised a knuckle to his mouth and looked at her. He’d known actresses, friends of Ellen’s, who could do that, nail every nuance of tone and gesture.
“Well,” he said, blushing, hastily recouping, “it’s not as bad as being linked with that crank Ayn Rand.”
“Surely no one links you with Ayn Rand!” Jessica said, and laughed.
An odd fact struck him, so that again he felt confused. Jessica’s legs were densely freckled—and so, he noticed now, were her arms and the upper part of her chest. The lower part, revealed by her V-neck, was tan, or bronzy, dotted only here and there. Her face, too, had only a few freckles—on the cheeks and nose. Yet her hair was almost black. … No, dark chestnut, silver-streaked. He’d spent hours with her—tonight and earlier, at other parties—yet he’d missed what any child would spot at once, that Jessica had the strangest skin in the world, unearthly but beautiful, as if she were a figure built up of precious metals and then transformed, imperfectly, into an ordinary mortal. Her freckles were buried level after level, like stars in the Milky Way: she was a thousand colors, like some dense impressionist painting. Strange! He tried to remember what they’d been talking about. She watched him as if trying to read his mind. At last it came to him.
“We’re closer than you might think, Ms. Rand and I,” he said. “It’s not all that strange. Nobody can be wrong all the time.” He leaned over his knees again. “In the ethics book I wrote, I described my approach as ‘survivalist.’ A grave tactical error, I know now.” He shook his head, glanced up at Jessica, then back at the pipe in his two hands. “I don’t know how much you know or care about Rand’s ideas. God knows there’s no reason you should. Anyway, both of us reject the kind of relativism that reduces ‘the good’ to ‘the habitual.’ And what’s more important, both of us maintain—tho
ugh by a different chain of argument—that the life of an organism constitutes its standard of value. What promotes and enhances the organism’s life is ‘good’ and what threatens its life is ‘evil.’ That much we have in common, but in the end there’s all the difference in the world between Rand’s ideas and mine.” He broke off and shrugged, suspecting he was growing tiresome.
“Such as?” she asked. She sat poised, half smiling, delicately balanced—as it seemed to him—between interest in what he had to say and fear that he would lecture all night.
Mickelsson sucked his cheeks in, hunting for a way to put it briefly. “Well,” he said, “such as this. I claim that by our very nature human beings value the idea of human life more than we value our individual lives. That’s what I sometimes call the Nietzchean ‘foundational moral experience,’ the immediate human sense of life’s sacred quality, if you know what I mean—the explanation of the way our hearts lift when we hear of examples of the so-called ‘supreme sacrifice.’ Soldiers who die to save their buddies, things like that. Ayn Rand thinks survival is an absolute value, which it is, rightly understood. What she fails to see is that individual survival is a relative value, at least for highly evolved life-forms—us, whales, dolphins maybe, probably gorillas. … Nietzsche says somewhere, ‘The world is full of things people will die for.’ It’s obviously true. What I’ve done is help explain why. It’s an important idea, especially just now, in this stupid, pragmatic, improvisational age—”
One moment her thoughts seemed miles away; the next, Jessica was saying (diving at him like an eagle, he thought): “Your hands are shaking.”
“It’s true,” he said, looking, abruptly laughing. “I get fired up.”
“I think you’re angry at yourself,” she said, studying him with that cool, level gaze of hers. “But I’m not sure why, yet.”
“You’re very psychological, you people of the tribe of Freud. If I see evil and stupidity in the world, you check out my potty-training.” All at once, as if he’d decided it was time to leave (he’d decided nothing), he stood up. Then, as if on second thought, he drifted around the coffeetable and the couch she sat on and moved with his pipe to the French doors. She sat behind him now. He did not turn to see if she were watching him. The doors opened onto her back yard and garden: immense dark trees against a starry sky, below them shapes he couldn’t identify, flowers or bushes, something that might be a grape arbor. When he lit his pipe, the face that briefly glowered back at him from the glass was unexpectedly puffy, disheveled. “I’ve wasted a lot of time,” he said. He shook out the match, then gestured impatiently. Dissertation and committee work, university politics, reviewing, the editing of unimportant articles and books by other people, the teaching of courses in which, especially of late, he felt no interest … And as for his true work, his philosophical writing … Deep down, he believed the worst his unfriendly reviewers had to say of him. He was fond of quoting Collingwood’s line: “All widespread errors contain some truth.” Clearly there was, at some level, something very wrong with the philosophy of Peter Mickelsson. Such a mood did not make continued effort—Hegel’s aufheben, Nietzsche’s sublimieren—an easy leap.
He turned toward the couch, where she sat perfectly still, not as relaxed as she pretended, watching him. “Middle age,” he said, and gestured vaguely. (He had a definite pot belly and touches of dead yellow and iron gray in his hair; he had a forehead as wide and flat as a bull’s, three or four broken vessels in his cheeks from too much drinking. …)
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“What?”
“Why did you sigh like that, just now?”
“Did I?” He grinned, lest her concern steal too much advantage.
She met his eyes. Her eyes, normally gray, were black now, stalking the darkness where he hid. “Were you thinking about your wife?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible.” He had not been. “I suppose I was.” After a moment, he nodded. He remembered that Jessica’s husband had died.
She asked, “What do you think went wrong? Were you to blame?”
Mickelsson pulled his lower lip up in between his teeth and tensed his forehead, tempted by her friendly curiosity, knowing they weren’t playing the same game. He glanced at her. She was smiling—queenly, he thought: Scheherazadelike—and in some not quite sexual way seductive. She reached past her skirt and feet to pat the couch. “Come sit,” she said.
He moved toward her, turning over possibilities behind the mask of his smile.
“Why the guilt?” she asked. “Did you leave her for someone else?”
“No,” he said, “certainly not.” He ran his hand over his face. “It’s true that I cheated on her, as they say. I hurt her plenty, and plenty of times.”
“And did she cheat?” Jessica asked.
He breathed deeply, then put down his pipe, put his elbows on his knees, and lowered his head into his hands. If he told her all this he would certainly lie; how could he not? He’d do everything in his power to make himself look good, seduce this beautiful soft creature beside him with his pretended virtue, and then hate himself more, and eventually get found out and be hated for his lies or, worse, pitied. … He was painfully conscious of Jessica’s foot just inches from his leg. His penis stirred, waking up.
“She started it,” he said at last, almost a whimper.
After a moment he felt her foot touch the side of his leg.
“So why the guilt?” she asked. “Why all the misery?”
Tears came to his eyes—guilt, self-hatred, an ache of desire he was afraid to act on, even half drunk as he was.
“Wouldn’t it help to talk about it?” she asked. She let him sit silent awhile, then asked, “You still love her, is that it? Part of you wants not to be here?”
“Oh, I want to be here, all right,” he said.
“Part of you. I know. Don’t think I haven’t been through the same, though with a death it’s—” She broke off.
Furtively, Mickelsson wiped his eyes, then gently lowered his left hand onto Jessica’s foot. He was startled to find it bare; he’d thought she had stockings on. The foot was cold, very smooth, the bones delicate. A tremble of desire—almost a shudder—came over him, and the ache at the root of his groin was now fierce. “I’m not sure what makes me feel guilty,” he said. “It’s the way I always felt with her.” He moved his fingertips to Jessica’s ankle and then a little beyond. With her other foot, firmly, she stopped him.
Ellen had not been a student of philosophy but “a theater person,” as she’d liked to say with a wry twist to her mouth. A literature student—comparative literature—who had moved, by the time she was in graduate school, entirely into drama. It was in graduate school that Mickelsson had met and married her. Since her special interests were Ionesco and Beckett, whom she took to be “dramatic philosophers“—he’d been unable to help making fun of that—her concerns and his had, in her opinion, overlapped. He told Jessica of his remembrance of how Ellen would read his papers in graduate school, her school-marm glasses low on her small, white nose, her sensuous, sharply defined lips compressed. They had lived, in those days, in one of those dreary university quonset huts, which Ellen had made brighter, more livable (though strange) by painting the plasterboard walls gray and gold and hanging framed sheets of crudely sketched costume designs by a girlfriend of hers (of whom Mickelsson had felt jealous) and a framed theater poster, also by a friend (of whom he’d also felt jealous), for Euripides’ Medea.
She had found somewhere, probably in Chicago where she’d studied as an undergraduate, a grotesque old voodoo-doll, a two-foot-tall monstrosity of vaguely Mexican design, which had come (she told friends) full of jelly-beans. “Jelly-beans?” the friends would say, glancing at Mickelsson, who would grin and look down. “Contraband. Jelly-beans are illegal in Haiti,” Ellen would say. Her eyes would widen dramatically and she would smile as though there were stagelights on her. He had loved, at first, her slightly crazed sense of humor, h
er native theatricality. Later, when he’d come to see how it imposed itself, how it refused all restriction, thrived on havoc—anything for effect, as if all the world really were a stage and one’s sole obligation this side of the grave were to keep the very chairs and drapes amused—and when he’d come to see, too, what black, bottomless depressions followed when the chairs and drapes remained stiffly unsmiling—he’d begun to find her theatricality less appealing. Not that he’d discouraged her. It was the only real talent she had, in his opinion. (He glanced at Jessica and caught her frowning, slightly evasive.) Ellen had refused to keep lists of any kind (even her class notes were a jumble), refused even to make a shopping list or save her grocery receipts so that he could look them over. Her dresser drawers had no system whatever, so far as he could tell, and no matter what he did—whine, shout, or tease—she had never voluntarily closed a closet door. Yet they’d adjusted, more or less. She would say, back in those happier days, removing her school-marm glasses and staring at the wall of the quonset, “That’s interesting, Mick! You remember that place in Enrico Quattro …” If he pointed out, gently, that her reading was wrong, indefensible, she would smile with a kind of eagerness, almost wildness, that should have warned him clearly of all that was to come. She never had what Mickelsson would call intellectual insights. Ideas, true or false (she hardly cared), were, if anything, suggestions for gestures, stagelighting, props. There she did have, he thought, a kind of genius. Heidegger would have loved her. The rift! The rift!
Ellen had taught part-time in the local public school, snatching graduate courses as she could and doing well in them, to Mickelsson’s surprise. (She never studied until the last minute and immediately after the exam forgot—maybe consciously demolished—everything she’d learned.) Mickelsson had been on fellowships, not so readily available to women in those days, and it had thus been Ellen who’d earned the money to pay their bills, though it was Mickelsson, of course, who’d had to sit down and add them up and write checks or apologies. He had disliked the arrangement, to say the least, and had sometimes started quarrels, never on the subject at the heart of his anger, his dependency. She didn’t want a husband, he sometimes told her, she wanted an accountant. “That’s the kind of thing men are good at,” she’d said, instantly close to tears. It was not just the damage to his male ego. He liked buying books, especially those fine, gray Oxford editions—books he looked forward almost hungrily to reading, at the time he bought them, but then, more often than not, was too busy to read. To Ellen, who held the purse-strings, Mickelsson’s habit of buying books, some of them in languages he hadn’t yet learned, seemed lunacy. (He smiled, self-mocking, as he told Jessica this; her returning smile let him know she understood those eager-young-philosopher feelings.) Ellen had preferred to use books from the library and save her money toward a trip “abroad“—it was Poland she had in mind (fantastic theater, she said)—or, later, when it was clear that, by the nature of his profession, they would never be world travellers, never have a “get-away apartment” in New York, preferred to spend her money on the kinds of things she liked, if in fact they must be holed up in this hell-hole wilderness—plants, a used Jaguar, furniture, a piano (though neither of them could play), and theater trips.
