by John Gardner
(“It sounds as if you were a real shit,” Jessica said matter-of-factly. “I guess I was,” he said.)
He could happily have lived out his life in some attic room or country shack so long as the walls were lined with books and in all that really counted he could live like a king. But he was beginning to see that by his overhasty marriage to a shallow, childish woman who cared only about objects and empty sham (her extreme interest in theater now seemed to him pitifully significant and of course a little sick—all theater people were, he’d decided, sick), he had forever put that noble ideal out of reach. He hadn’t had the nerve to strike out directly, and Ellen, by some instinct too deep for cunning (it was only now, saying it to Jessica, that he understood this), Ellen had clung to her power while she could.
Once, still in graduate school, he’d broached with Ellen the subject of his getting a part-time job himself. As an undergraduate, he’d pointed out, he’d worked as a bank teller, a farm hand, a salesman of World Book Encyclopedias. Ellen’s reaction had been one of surprisingly heated indignation. She shook her fork at him—they were at supper at the time. “You have the potential to be one of the world’s great philosophers!” she’d said, leaning toward him. “Do you think I intend to allow you to throw all that away for a few measly dollars?”
He’d looked at her in surprise, his own fork poised halfway between his plate and his mouth. “Ellen, that’s ridiculous!” he’d said, and tentatively smiled. Her look was so intense, eyes widened, mouth open, head thrown far forward, he couldn’t tell whether to laugh or back off in fear.
“You do, Mick,” she said. “I know!”
For another instant he’d met her eyes, that stare so absolute it looked more like acting than like life. “But suppose I don’t,” he said. His voice went thin with nervousness, and abruptly he began to wave his fork, forgetting it still had spaghetti on it. “Suppose I turn out to be this perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary philosophy teacher at some college in Nebraska?”
“You won’t,” she said, almost a shout.
Now it was he who leaned forward, almost shouting. “I damn well could,” he said. “Such things happen. You’ve worked out our whole life like it’s a play, that’s what you’ve done! What if I’m miscast?” The instant the words came out, he’d wished them unsaid, because he’d seen that he was right: to Ellen the whole shebang was theater, with all the once-for-all-time deadly seriousness of theater; and he’d seen too—though he couldn’t have said in what way her expression changed—that she was suddenly realizing that it might be true, all she’d been taking for granted about him might be fantasy.
She lowered her fork to her spaghetti and turned it around and around, looking at her plate, winding the spaghetti but not raising it to her mouth.
“We have to face reality,” he said, speaking softly now.
She glanced up at him for a moment. “Fuck reality,” she said.
The rest of the night she’d hardly spoken to him. She sat in the wicker chair in what served as their livingroom, bent over a book, a pencil in her mouth like the bit of a bridle, her brow knitted, pretending to be deeply engrossed in her reading but seldom turning a page. The cat, Horace, lay curled up, sleeping against her feet. Mickelsson had been tempted to ask if she was writing a new life-drama for them, but he’d decided he’d better not. When he’d finished the dishes he’d hung around for a while, cleaning and recleaning the counter top, rinsing out the cat dish, straightening up the canned goods in their cupboard. At last, drifting nearer to where she sat, he’d said, “Well, I guess I better hit the books.”
“OK,” she said. “Go do it.”
He stood looking down at her, thinking—injured—that all he’d asked was the right to do a little part-time work, earn a little money he could spend as he pleased. Surely her little drama could accommodate that! But all right, he would withdraw the suggestion for the duration. “Look, Ellie,” he said, “I’m sorry—”
She looked up at him, blank, pretending she’d forgotten the whole thing, then pretended to remember and waved him away. “Forget it,” she said. “Go hit the books.” She smiled.
Perhaps that really had been the end of it. She’d never again mentioned her expectations for him. In the years that followed they’d moved more and more toward separate lives, he becoming stuffier (as he saw it now), increasingly self-controlled and bookish, Ellen increasingly taking on the free-spirit habits and dress, not to mention the neuroses and easy liberalism, of her theater friends. They met for meals and sometimes read the Sunday New York Times together (it was strange to think, now, what pleasure they’d gotten out of the Sunday New York Times—or mushroom soup, or limejuice—it was like trying to remember one’s original feelings about Dumbo, or Snow White). Occasionally they’d gone to parties together, where, as in other things, they went separate ways. She still read his papers, some of them anyway; and he, for his part, checked in from time to time on her theater activities. With all his heart he encouraged them. Intellectually, as he could not help telling her when she pressed for his opinion, she was hopeless. She seemed to understand that it was true.
(“Jesus,” Jessica said. Mickelsson thought about it, then abruptly rose and went out to the kitchen for more gin. This time Jessica waited on the couch. She was reclining, her head back on a cushion, when he came back and once more sat beside her. Outside, a chorus of birds now warbled and cheeped.)
No one could have been more pleased than Ellen when his work met with success, or more fiercely defensive when his work was, she thought, undervalued. But each of them had less and less sense of what the other was up to. The pattern they’d developed in graduate school had continued throughout their life together: Mickelsson working long hours in his study or hurrying off to meetings at eight at night or seven in the morning, Ellen—full of energy, smiling like a model (though she was now somewhat heavier and wore her blond hair long and straight)—teaching junior college, keeping tabs on her theater groups, and dealing, in her reckless, unsystematic way, with the world, the house, the children. Thinking back, he could more or less understand what had happened between them. Her recklessness and indifference had forced him to compensate, taking on the manner of a stickler, a harper on detail, a gloomy bully. “Oh, Mick,” she would say when he suggested that perhaps they might plan their week’s meals (they were forever having to throw out rotten food), “you know I’m no good at things like that. Besides, I hate it, knowing that Wednesday I’ve got to eat hamburger, come hell or high water. Maybe we could get a pig!” (They were living in a faculty apartment at the time.) If he mentioned, rather coolly, her habit of allowing the children to go to bed in their clothes, or, worse, sleep wherever they happened to fall, like leaves—they often slept that way until Mickelsson found them and carried them to bed—she would answer with a sigh, waving away the smoke from her cigarette, hardly looking up from her magazine, “I know, they’re growing up just like animals.”
In California—San Francisco—she began to do, besides her teaching and occasional reviewing, a little directing, “very experimental“—actors who dressed like clowns or mimes or wore nothing at all (skinny or lumpy, misshapen bodies he found it painful to look at, so that at times he desperately longed for the cigarette that—ironically, considering what was happening on stage—he was not allowed); plays without scripts, frequently with no props but toilets. (Nietzsche on Zola: “the delight in stinking.”) It was all unspeakably boring, not to mention annoying, to Mickelsson, though he praised her for her work; all the more annoying for the fact that it took place in what had once been a church. He would have dismissed the whole business as insane, but apparently serious people took it seriously, among others a young man who never wore shoes but edited some famous university-based drama magazine, for which he invited Ellen to write articles, which she did. Mickelsson had for the most part kept out of the way, now and then raising an ironic eyebrow but in general reserving judgment. It was the early sixties; the world was coming apart at the se
ams. Whether the “new theater” was part of the worldwide collapse or part of the moral reconstruction he couldn’t make out. Possibly both, he’d thought. He’d read her articles, hoping to be enlightened—sometimes he helped her with the proofreading, as she helped him with his—but her writing had left him more puzzled than before. Either the articles were gibberish (as he suspected) or they required a background of knowledge he lacked. They were loaded with concern, a frantic social consciousness he was inclined to admire, though with misgivings. Every paragraph was filled with what someone like himself, if he didn’t know her, would call gutter arrogance and pseudo-Maoist cant. But he did know her, knew the honest ferocity of her devotion to the deprived, knew what strange creatures she proudly brought home with her to their ramshackle, bare-roomed Mission-district house. They would sit up, after Mickelsson went to bed, smoking pot and softly laughing, talking about “The Man.” (He’d thought at first they meant himself.)
Ellen, in the company of her theater friends, would be radiant, as if supercharged with electricity (like the Frankenstein monster, he’d secretly thought). She organized fund drives to help defend them from “the Establishment,” helped them organize non-Equity “companies,” all of which went bust within three months or disappeared at once, taking the money with them. Some of her friends were rumored to be rapists, even murderers. (If he showed horror or indignation, she was ashamed of him.) He remembered trying to talk one night with a man called “the Hammer,” from Los Angeles, or, as they all insisted on calling it, Movieville. He no longer remembered what they’d talked about, probably the revolution. He remembered only that the man wore an expensive three-piece suit and a wide, gray and green polkadot tie, and that whatever one asked him, he would sit for a long time, maybe twenty full seconds, meeting one’s eyes, and then would answer in one sentence alarmingly strange. Mickelsson had wondered guiltily—not too carefully hiding his irritation—whether the man was hostile, high on drugs, or just crazy. Was it possible that he was right, even brilliant—speaking not words but the very Grund des Wortes, or rather, underground? All the others, including Ellen, seemed to look up to him, though apparently what he did for a living was not open to discussion with outsiders.
That, an outsider, Mickelsson had certainly been. (Someone had once said to him casually, apparently meaning no offense: “Athletes are notoriously conservative, aren’t they? ‘Anything for the team,’ and so on?”) He had kept his distance, faintly suggesting his disapproval, no doubt, and sometimes, alone with Ellen, risking a scornful little joke. It was not a crowd in which Mickelsson could easily dominate, as he liked to do. He might be taller by a head than the rest of them, but neither his books nor his football days impressed them. In their presence he felt like, at best, a member of the Cattleman’s Association, or a small-time Republican politician. He served drinks (to the few of her friends who drank), found ashtrays for them—all with exaggerated courtesy—and retired as quickly as possible to his study. If they were planning to blow up a bank, he would rather not know.
It would have been easy to dismiss the whole thing as a conceivably useful craziness, a repugnant but necessary step in society’s evolution; but every now and then he’d met someone who made all his doubts seem shameful. One typical winter San Francisco night, half fog, half rain—foghorn moans coming in off the Bay, deep electronic animal sighs—a knock had come at the door, timid but persistent, around three in the morning, and Mickelsson, in pajamas and bathrobe, had at last irritably gone down to see who it was, the old cat Horace at his heels. Ellen was out, not yet back from one of her parties. He’d opened the door a few inches, with the chain attached, and, looking out, he’d seen a middle-aged bum with two old bulging suitcases. He was bald, spectacled, with heavy-lidded Oriental eyes, dressed in a ragged shapeless brown three-piece suit twenty years out of fashion. Where the watchfob chain should be he had a ratty piece of twine. The man was nearly bald, around his ears tufts of steelwool hair. He wore thick glasses; the whites of his eyes were yellow.
“Hello,” the man said. “Is this the Mickelsson residence? I’m sorry to disturb you so late at night—”
“It is,” Mickelsson had said. The street beyond the man was absolutely still, no lights anywhere but the streetlamps.
“My name is Geoffrey Stewart,” the man said, and smiled apologetically. “Your wife, that is, Mrs. Mickelsson, suggested … I’m sorry to trouble you—”
Reluctantly, Mickelsson unlatched the chain. “Come in,” he said. For all his irritation, he’d opened the door wide, as if sensing—correctly, he would later understand—that the man would not enter if the invitation seemed half-hearted.
“I’m sorry to trouble you so late at night,” the man said again.
“No trouble. Come on in.”
The man obeyed and, not yet setting his suitcases down, looked up the long stairway, then into the livingroom. “Beautiful house.”
Then the name clicked. Mickelsson said, “Are you Geoffrey Stewart the poet—from Chicago?”
The man grinned, his head bent forward, as if the question might be harder than it sounded. “That’s me.”
“Come in!” Mickelsson spoke somewhat more warmly now, gesturing in the direction of the livingroom. “Can I get you something to eat? Something to drink?”
“Noooo thanks,” Stewart said. He looked down at the cat. “You must be Horace,” he said. His eyebrows slid upward. “Hellooooo, Horace.”
Geoffrey Stewart, street poet, was said to be the author of things like “Hell no, we won’t go,” and “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” It was also said that, to avoid income tax, and thus involvement with “the criminal government,” Stewart earned and owned almost nothing. (His two suitcases, Mickelsson would discover, contained not clothes but pamphlets.) Mickelsson said, “I’m pleased to meet you!”
“Same here,” Stewart said, and smiled. “I read your book.” Carefully, fussily, he aligned his suitcases with the entryway wall, where they wouldn’t interfere with people’s passage, then clasped his hands together in front of him and followed Mickelsson into the livingroom.
Two hours later, when Ellen came home, they were sitting almost knee to knee; they’d been talking about politics, religion, ethics, race, aesthetics. Stewart was serene, gestureless, his manner that of a pastor in his study.
“Geoffrey!” Ellen cried, running somewhat drunkenly to lean down and hug him as, awkwardly, he tried to rise from the couch and greet her. Their heads bumped and both of them laughed. “This is Geoffrey Stewart,” she said, turning with a dramatic sweep of her arm toward Mickelsson.
“I know,” he said.
“Geoffrey!” she cried, and hugged him again, then immediately burst into tears. Mickelsson had gone out to the kitchen to fix her a Scotch. It was morning now, ocean-clear sunlight falling over the overgrown garden behind the house.
They hadn’t slept at all that night or the next day; or rather, only Ellen had slept, and that just for an hour or so. While Mickelsson was fixing pancakes for the children—then five and two—Stewart had played old hymns on Ellen’s piano.
“They taste all crumbly,” the boy said—Mark—looking up mournfully, as if it were really no worse than he’d expected. His hair had at that time been yellow, like Ellen’s.
“They’re supposed to taste crumbly. They’re made of all-natural, stone-ground wheat-flour,” Mickelsson said. “You’re lucky they taste at all.”
Both children pouted, touching the pancakes with their fingers.
“Come on,” he pleaded, bending down to be level with them, pretending to look hungrily at the syrupy mush, “give it a try! Two-three hup!”
Thoughtfully, experimentally, his daughter poked his nose with her syrupy finger, then laughed.
In the livingroom, where the piano was, Ellen was saying, slurring her words, “Geoffrey, doesn’t it bother you that when people like you are living in poverty, people like us have Baldwin pianos?”
Stewart smiled.
“The world’s got to have pianos,” he said.
He’d stayed four days, the first stranger in years to make friends with grumpy old Horace, and an instant uncle to Leslie and Mark. Mornings and afternoons he talked at schools and at San Francisco State (Ellen’s arrangements), burning money and flags, speaking of pacifism and “the message of Jesus.” He spoke—sternly, without gestures—of the Jews killed during World War II, the first real test of modern society’s right to survive. Not that it was all brand new. The Germans had been mass-murdering Africans for years, killing every eldest son to keep the tribes in control, so that when Hitler arrived the machinery was pretty much in place. As for L.B.J. … And so on.
