by John Gardner
“Would you care to join us?” the chinless woman asked.
He wondered if she knew that he was seeing—or at any rate had once seen—the town prostitute. Improbable, he thought. They would not readily believe that such a thing existed in their fair city.
(Cruel and uncalled-for, he thought. They were good people. Not pious or self-righteous. They were honored that Peter Mickelsson, philosopher, should be their neighbor, fellow citizen. If they were to learn that he’d gone mad over a prostitute, they would not crackle with indignation; they would be sweetly distressed, dismayed.)
“I’m afraid not tonight,” he said. “Another time, perhaps?”
They all spoke at once, insisting that he be with them next time.
The man with the long nose said, “I didn’t actually read your book, but I hear it’s very good. God knows it’s needed! I’m a doctor myself.” He smiled meekly, his eyes fixed on Mickelsson’s forehead as if there were a ruby there. Perhaps there was. More veins popped every day.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” Mickelsson said. He laid down his tip beside his plate, one corner of the dollar bill peeking out. He would pick up his check at the counter.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” the woman who seemed to be their leader said, and took his hand again. “If you ever need anything—”
“Thank you,” he said. He bowed to the others, almost clicking his heels like one of Nietzsche’s Prussian officers. “Thank you!”
It crossed his mind—a wave of distress—that the woman meant it. If he should ever need anything, she would be there. They would all be there. It made him stoop a little, backing away from them, falsely smiling. One might say, if one were mad, “I’d love to stay longer, but there’s a teen-aged girl I must go fuck.” A shadow fell over him, almost a physical coldness. The chinless woman herself, down under those stylish, medium-expensive clothes, was no doubt beautiful. Ironically, Mickelsson’s infatuation made every woman in the world seem sexually attractive. Fool, fool! he thought. When the waitress hurried past him as he waited to pay his check at the counter, he managed to brush her thigh, so lightly she didn’t seem to notice, with the back of one hand.
Out on the street again, his right hand closed snugly around the silver lioness-head, Mickelsson found the sidewalk and pavement almost dry, here and there a large, dark, glassy puddle that sharply reflected the bluish-white neon of the Acme sign, the colors of the traffic light, the headlights and taillights of an occasional passing car or truck. The sky overhead was black and starless. He walked to his Jeep, intending to drive home, but then, standing in the street with his hand on the handle of the door, he frowned, second thoughts tugging at his coattail. The beep of an old car approaching on his side of the street startled him from his reverie, and he pressed closer to the Jeep, though in fact the car had plenty of room to pass. Right beside him the car slowed still more and beeped again, and, scowling into the dimness of the car’s interior, he made out, in silhouette, a big man leaning close to the steeringwheel, waving at him, and on the passenger side, nearer to Mickelsson, the ghostly image of a white-faced, smiling child. The taillights were halfway up the hill, bound for Lanesboro, before it came to him that the driver of the car was the man he’d bought the Jeep from, Lepatofsky. Belatedly, Mickelsson waved.
He decided to see if Donnie had come home while he was eating. He could see from here a faint light in her front window, suggesting that she might be there. Giving a decisive little tug to his hatbrim and glancing once, furtively, at the watchers on the bench, he turned from the Jeep and walked quickly to the entrance of her building, stepped inside, then paused for a moment, touching the tip of the cane to the floor but not leaning on it, the fingers of his right hand restlessly playing, closing and unclosing, on the cane-handle, his heart as weighty as some dead thing at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The lightbulb in the entrance-way had burned out; one looked up, as if from the bottom of a pit, at the dim glow of some bulb not visible at the top of the first steep rise of stairs. Except for the faint sound of television sets, the building was asleep. Though his mind had come to no decision, he began to climb the stairs. Like a thief, he kept close to the walls, where the treads of the stairs were less likely to cry out. At the third-floor landing, the floor below hers, he stopped again. Then, firmly setting his smile and removing his hat, carrying it in his left hand, he climbed the rest of the way to her landing and door.
Though he knocked and repeatedly called out to her, not too loudly, no answer came from the apartment. Once he thought he heard someone moving about inside, but he couldn’t be sure. Here, as at his own house, beams and boards creaked, futilely searching for a comfortable position. No light came out onto the threadbare carpet below her door. The longer he stood there, memorizing the grain in the door panels, the more sounds he became conscious of—refrigerator motors, fans, air-conditioners, TV voices and music, a regular clinking sound he couldn’t identify, the faraway mewing of a kitten.
At last he put his hat on, nodded to himself, and, closing his right hand on the worn-smooth railing, started back down to the street. When he stepped from the entrance-way, the bench people were still there. He climbed into the Jeep, laid his cane on the seat beside him, and started up the engine. “Well, no luck,” he said aloud. He U-turned and started up the steep hill leading to the outskirts of town and eventually his house, but then on second thought pulled over, two wheels up on the sidewalk, yanked on the emergency brake, and turned the lights off. He sat thinking, talking to himself, then abruptly got out, closed the door, and, swinging his cane almost jauntily, like an English banker, climbed the steep sidewalk until he came to the alley behind the building containing her apartment, where without a glance to left or right he turned in. He moved past garbage cans and huge, square bins, past rusty, louvred ventilators and metal-faced doors, and stopped directly below the black silhouette of a raised fire escape. Nowhere in the darkness around him was there any sign of life. A television voice cried out, “Stop right where you are, Ferguson!”
He tested in his two hands the security of the canehead’s fit to the cane, then reached up as far as he could, trying to hook the bottom of the fire escape and pull it down. He was short by a good three feet. He tucked the cane under his arm and went back to the nearest garbage can. It was full, and when he moved it water sloshed in the bottom, but he lifted it, trying not to get garbage on his clothes, and carried it, as quietly as possible, back to the fire-escape extension. Standing on the can-lid, he found he could reach the fire escape with ease. It would not budge, perhaps frozen in position by old rust. “Bastard,” he whispered. He pulled himself up on the cane, holding it with both hands, so that his feet rose off the garbage lid. Still nothing—at first. Then, as he was about to call it quits, something gave: with a faint sandy groan the extension tilted a little, then sank gently toward him. He swung free of the garbage can and, when his shoes touched solid ground, climbed hand over hand up the cane until he caught hold of the fire escape itself. With one hand he jerked the garbage can out of the way. Seconds later he was up on the tar-and-pebble roof, where he could look in through the windows of the third-floor apartments. How he would get to her bedroom window, still a floor above him, he did not know, but he was convinced now that he would make it.
Carefully, so that no one below might hear him, he crossed the roof, keeping low and avoiding the third-floor apartment windows. There were four of them, three of which were dark. As he passed the one lighted one—lighted only by the flickering bluish fire of a television set—he raised up enough to peek in. He saw a clutter of bulky, dark shapes—an immense old wooden wardrobe with its doors hanging open, shapeless, colorless clothes draped on the doors; overstuffed chairs that looked rotten with age, some of them piled high with unopened boxes and plastic-bagged electronic parts; several TV sets in various stages of disassembly; a sturdy antique piano-table piled high with odds and ends (jumper cables, new-looking plastic clocks, a stack of dirty clothes); a round-front
dresser with glass handles, also cluttered; an old-fashioned glass-doored bookcase packed tight with old magazines. Exactly in the middle of the room, with his back to the window, sat the man who had collected all this—an immensely fat man wearing steel-rimmed glasses and what appeared to be a policeman’s hat. He had on a filthy gray workshirt with the sleeves rolled as high and tight as they would go; the rest of him was hidden from Mickelsson by the overstuffed chair the fat man sat in and the steamer trunk beside it, piled deep, like everything else in the room, with junk.
Preparing to duck his head and move on, Mickelsson nearly missed the most interesting thing of all. Later it would seem to him that it was the first thing his eyes landed on, and that, by some quirk that only a Dr. Rifkin could explain, his eyes had moved away from it, the brain refusing to register what it saw, flashing Will Not Compute. Stacked among other things on the steamer trunk, right by the man’s bloated, hairless left arm, lay a glass refrigerator tray filled with money: packages of bills wrapped in colored paper bands, packages of the kind Mickelsson had dealt with in his undergraduate days, when he’d worked as a teller at Wisconsin Farmers Trust.
Now, though Mickelsson had made no sound, the fat man’s head began to turn. The profile came into view, small-nosed, small-chinned, alert. Mickelsson waited no longer but ducked below the window ledge and flattened himself as well as possible against the sooty brick wall. He held his breath, listening, but if the man in the room was moving—rising, coming to look out—the noise of the television masked the sound. Minute after minute he waited, still as a rock. Just as he was deciding it would be safe to move away, he heard the soft rattle, directly above him, of a window-shade being pulled down. His muscles locked and for nearly a minute he held his breath. At last he did breathe again, but still he did not move. Even when he heard the television channels switching he remained as he was; the fat man might well have a remote-control switch. It was equally probable that he had a gun.
He looked straight up and realized, after he’d stared at it a minute, that what jutted out above him was the iron-mesh floor of a fire escape. It went directly past her window. He should have known, of course, that there had to be a fire escape, though he could not have hoped it would give him immediate access to her room. He had not noticed it before only because its darkness blended in with the black-brick darkness of the building. For an instant, desire leaped in him; but then he thought again of the probable gun, the probable genius of the fat hoarder’s paranoia. It was unlikely that she was there; maybe she’d gone on vacation with his seventy-five dollars. In any case, the chance that she might be there hiding all evening in her apartment with only one dim light on, was not quite worth his life.
He stayed motionless for what seemed to him another twenty minutes, then carefully made his way back to the edge of the roof and the fire escape leading down to the alley. The escape extension creaked loudly as it lowered him the final twelve feet. Was it possible that it had made this much noise before? “Ah, the mind, the mind!” he whispered. Dogs barked sharply, two or three of them, down by the garbage he must pass. He held the cane like a bat and moved confidently toward them. At the first fierce swipe—it fell harmlessly on the lead dog’s shoulder—the dogs fled, yipping in indignation.
Only when Mickelsson was seated in the Jeep, reaching for the emergency brake, preparing to drive home, did it occur to him that the man was, of course—or perhaps had once been, some years ago—a thief. Mickelsson was so frightened he could only sit trembling, so loose of muscle it was as if he’d turned to milk. But even as he sat helpless, sick with the knowledge that he could have been killed, a strange, evil dream came over him. He would watch for the man, and someday when he saw that he was out of his apartment—sitting on the watchers’ bench by the traffic light, perhaps (he had a feeling he’d seen him there)—Mickelsson would hurry up to his apartment window and break in, and his financial troubles would be over. Acid welled into Mickelsson’s throat and he fumbled through his pockets for a Di-Gel. He imagined himself going to the post office—as in fact he would do three days later, not quite intending to—and looking through the Wanted posters, hunting for the fat man’s face.
As he reached the edge of Susquehanna, the night became alarmingly dark. A suicidal deer leaped out in front of him, but Mickelsson, as if he had known it was coming, hit his brakes just in time and missed it. “Bastard,” he whispered, as if the deer were part of the conspiracy.
His mailbox showed up, stark in the flame of his headlights, and he remembered that he hadn’t looked into it in days. He pulled over, opened the metal door, and reached in. There was, as usual, a great pile in it, gray as conch. Bills. Envelopes from collection agencies. He dropped it angrily on the seat beside him and, a minute later, carried it into the kitchen with him, where he threw it on the stove top—the formica counter was crammed with earlier mail and wallpaper rolls—intending not to look at it. But something made him stop and finger through it. There was a small pink envelope with flowers on the back, on the return-address corner one word: Matthews. He tore it open.
Dear “Professor”:
Your fucking check bounced. (Excuse the pun.)
I guess you think that’s pretty funny!!
My Frends will be in touch with you.
D.
He went to the telephone book and found her name. He let the phone ring fourteen times before he quit.
He wrote:
Dear “D”:
I will give you not only seventy-five dollars but my very life. I am deeply and profoundly in love with you.
I told you I have terrible financial troubles, but I have means of dealing with them. Believe me, my love, my precious darling, I will make you happy!
Adoringly,
M.
He tore it up. Never before, except when drunk, had he behaved so stupidly. He wrote a long letter to his ex-wife, then tore it up.
He painted all the next day (a teaching day; he called in sick) and most of the night in the upstairs bedrooms, white on the walls, battleship-gray on the wide-boarded, uneven floors. His muscles ached fiercely, especially his back, forearms, and wrists, but the pain pleased him. He’d never known anyone who could put in longer, harder hours than he could, once he put his mind to it. It was perhaps not much to be proud of, but it was something. His heart tugged. (Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger.) From time to time, struggling not to think about Donnie, or the thief, or the I.R.S., or his children, he brooded on Finney’s complaint, the one solid thought his mind could get hold of. The portable radio chattered and sang like one of Luther’s small devils in the corner; he listened only when talk of the so-called Presidential race came on.
It was true, of course, that he was a foolish dreamer, as Finney maintained; that something, somewhere, had gone wrong with his fix on reality. He was offering, in his proposed settlement, more than he could honestly expect to earn, never mind the debts or his own new expenses, which he recklessly increased from day to day.
Whether it was a common complaint or unusual he was unable to make out, but something in Finney’s anger made him see that the so-called episodes—to say nothing of the present absurdity of his life—were the least of it. It was clearly true that the world was, at least in very large part, pigshit, Porphyry’s rancid honey. He’d plodded through it, mired to the knees, year on year; yet he’d stubbornly refused to believe it.
He felt something beckoning at the back of his mind. He was rolling shining white paint onto the frames of the old louvred doors in the master bedroom, the whole room around him as white as snow, all except the stark, black windowpanes looking out on what might have been deep space or the center of the earth. It was perhaps the thought of Finney—all those jokes about Eden—or perhaps the whiteness that brought on the memory: he saw the church where he’d gone every Sunday with his parents as a child—shiny white walls, skyblue ceiling, on the wall behind the pulpit a large, naive painting of Adam and Eve in the garden, their private parts not visi
ble, and looped around the tree a rather friendly-looking snake.
What his reverend grandfather had had to say about Eden he couldn’t remember, probably nothing good, but it seemed to him now that his grandmother had told him a hundred times the story of those two naked people and the serpent. She told it with spirit, as she told all her stories, but no moral conviction; it had not been—in contrast to the story of God’s calling Samuel in his sleep, or Noah’s flood—a story full of meaning for her. She told it exactly as she told stories of her childhood in unimaginable Stockholm, or told the stories she made up to explain the pictures in his Charlie McCarthy coloring book. She told him, with ice-bright, merry eyes, how the snake had talked and Eve had bitten the apple and the pair had been thrown out of the garden, so that afterward human beings had to be farmers and storekeepers. So far as he could tell, the moral of the story was that because the snake had spoken to Eve, all snakes in the world ever since had to crawl on their bellies, perhaps so they’d be far from people’s ears.
Every Sunday, once he knew the story, Mickelsson—then five or six—would sit, hardly hearing his grandfather’s drone, gazing up, rapt, at the picture. It had never occurred to him that this was not the real snake, the picture not as true as a photograph, nor had it ever occurred to him, so far as he knew, that the story might not be a literal report of facts. He studied the expressions of the man, the woman, and the snake in wonderment—especially the snake: sad-eyed, misunderstood, suffering perhaps a premonition of the trouble to come but as yet knowing nothing, as innocent as the apple on the tree. He tried to imagine what the snake might be saying—that part was never quite clear in his grandmother’s account—but nothing would come to him, not even a guess. He could not help but think it had all been a peculiar misunderstanding, though nothing of much consequence, since it was obviously pleasant to be a farmer or storekeeper, though it was sad that people must now wear clothes. (One could not discuss with his grandmother the oddity of wearing clothes.) When he was eight, the church—which had originally not been Lutheran but something else, vaguely pagan—had held a fund drive and, to Mickelsson’s sorrow (also his father’s and uncle’s), the sanctuary had been changed, the wood stripped down and stained almost black, as it was supposed to be, according to someone, and an organ installed—a huge whale-mouth full of teeth—where the picture had been. He’d realized now that it was a bad thing to be thrown out of Eden, though it was nobody’s fault, so far as he could tell. After the reconstruction—or sanctification, as his grandfather had called it—his uncle had stopped going. It was interesting to him now that the son of a Lutheran minister should be able to rebel so whole-heartedly. But perhaps in the final analysis his father had been the greater rebel. He’d continued going, but, from all evidence, only for the hymns—he gloried in singing and grieved at his son’s inability—and for Sunday entertainment, and to visit his friends.
