by John Gardner
“Don’t you have something to do, Peter?” Ellen asked.
There was no arguing with them. Because reason had been misused by corrupt forces in the Establishment, Ellen’s friends now scorned the use of reason, scorned self-analysis, even rational self-defense. They would not talk, would only sneer or attack, bully both their enemies and each other.
In their filthy little playhouse, ex-Protestant church—walls of black, a few spotlights, tape-recorder, old cracked folding-chairs for the audience—Vince and a black called Errol appear on a coolly lighted set which consists of a lamppost, a wheelbarrow, and a mirror, the two of them in shabby clothes, Vince (tall, bearded, with knobby knees and elbows) leaning on the lamppost, center stage, Errol pushing the wheelbarrow around and around him, for no apparent reason. Occasionally, Vince looks in the mirror; he will not let Errol look. Sometimes they do the play with words (mostly obscenities), sometimes as mime. Vince (this is the play) hates the audience. When he uses words he calls them “dumb mashed-potato fuckers,” “wet, middle-class steamy shit on an onion roll,” et cetera. (Vince has a flair for the vividly vile. This does not necessarily make him likeable.) Errol begins in agreement with Vince, gradually shifts to preferring the audience to Vince, decides to abandon the stage. Vince will not allow it. Errol has always been on the stage, and the audience is a bunch of et cetera, et cetera. Errol slips off his boots and makes a dash to join the audience; Vince shoots and kills him. (The death is frighteningly convincing.) The End. When the performance goes well, the audience feels insulted, financially and artistically cheated, hurt, diddled with, confused (What does it mean? What is the symbolism of the mirror? Who is Vince?), sickened and enraged.
Does the play raise the social consciousness of the audience? Who knows? Sometimes the troupe barely escapes alive, and this, Mickelsson sees plainly, begins to be their kick. One day, not long after Geoffrey Stewart, the street poet, has denounced them, talking of “the imitation of Jesus Christ,” Ellen’s crazies see, by whatever epistemological means it may be that convince them, that they must work not on middle-class audiences but directly on the oppressed. The ordinary black on the street must learn to let it all hang out, quit repressing, stand up and shoot. San Francisco street theater is born.
They put on whiteface, wear odd costumes: a fat, rich Wall Street banker’s attire, the kosmoi of a wealthy, aristocratic lady (cigarette holder—Ellen’s, ironically—and lorgnette); they go up to gentle, ordinary blacks who are minding their own business, maybe walking the kids in Golden Gate Park, and the actors engage the innocent victims in improvisational dialogue. There are flowers everywhere, the smell of new-cut grass on the rolling lawns between eucalyptus trees, the smell and soft wind of the Pacific.
“Hey, nigger!”
The man tries to edge away, shooing his kids ahead of him. It’s not necessarily that he thinks he’s in danger or even that he doesn’t understand what they’re up to; he may even understand that they’re doing it all for his people’s good. He’s no fool, he reads the paper—during his lunch-break in the basement at I. Magnin’s, or at the Legal Aid office, where he’s a lawyer, head of the housing attack force—it’s just that, for himself and his kids, he wants no part of this.
“Hey, you! You-boy!” They move in on him.
He knows this foolishness better than they do, these high-assed kids with their mission and their expensive acting lessons. His grandfather was a make-’em-sweat preacher in Georgia: “You! Sinner! You wid dat bottle!”
The black man in the suit and tie, holding his two children’s hands, knows the game. Who doesn’t? Since they’ve cut off his escape, he tries asking them to leave him alone, please. He tries to reason with them. His kids are afraid now. Bystanders pause to watch, a few drawing near. The actors and actresses are ecstatic. The street play has begun! If they’re lucky, punches will ensue, people will throw stones at them. Mickelsson, sick with disgust and pity, fades back into the crowd.
“Why do you stay married to her?” a friend had asked—Carol, a female grad student in poly sci at Berkeley, whom he’d often talked with over coffee or sitting on the grass by the library; nothing heavy, though both of them had thought about it.
“I keep hoping it’s just a passing phase,” he said.
She looked at him, waiting in the soulful, non-directive Rogerian way that had been popular at the time.
“And then there’s the fact that we’ve got kids,” he said.
She nodded.
“I keep pretending it’s not happening,” he said, and ruefully smiled. “I rarely see their ‘performances,’ and when I do, I pretend each time that this one’s probably exceptional.”
“Sounds like they all are.”
He nodded, looking down. He loved her large, solid knees.
He had been right at least that with Ellie it had been just a passing phase. Today she lived in a mansion of sorts and gave tea-parties. If she directed or produced a play, it was The Seagull or Krapp’s Last Tape. She was no longer one of those who struggle against the way of the universe, the unalterable outward drift of wreckage, the greenhouse effect here on this one piece of junk—the irreversible rise of COs in the atmosphere, the accelerating transformation of everything on earth to rot. “Betrayed!” her actors cried now, without hope, shaking their well-trained, long-fingered hands up at the spotlight. Perhaps in a deeper sense she was still up to her old tricks, drugging the world with beautiful might-have-beens. (Nietzsche on Art: “Humanity owes much of its evil to these fanatical intoxicates.”)
He rolled his head on his pillow. The irony was, he missed those awful days in San Francisco—missed Ellen’s stupid, passionate friends. Believers.
“He that reflects not in his heart,” the ancients said, “is like the beast that perishes.” Not true. Everything is like the beast that perishes.
There were sounds downstairs, something rhythmical; like walking. When he concentrated, it stopped. He rubbed his eyes. It was nothing. No doubt the brain still kidding around after its surcharge of laboring blood, too much weight-lifting.
Poor Jessica.
She’d been young, happy, travelling far and wide with her handsome tree-scientist—today Nigeria, tomorrow some committee of the United States Senate—and now all at once, reluctantly, she was surveying with her nervous, flashy eyes the paunchy host of bachelors and cast-offs for some arm not unduly unpleasant to lean on as she drifted toward declining beauty, old age.
Mickelsson closed his eyes tightly, saw strange things, and reopened them, despairing of sleep. He must put his student Michael Nugent on to Nietzsche, it occurred to him—Nietzsche for recognition of the central “perdurable evil,” as the boy would say, the essential human character, “so delicate, sensitive”—what was the phrase?—“so delicate, sensitive and something-or-other that we have need of the highest means of healing and consolation.” Nietzsche for nihilism transmuted, “the new way to Yes.”
He turned his head to look down the hallway through the partly open door, trying to penetrate the darkness. In a kind of waking dream he seemed to hear voices, two of them. Not really voices; sounds of some kind. He could not make out words. It was queer, those voices, or voice-like sounds—possibly some taut wire picking up a radio signal. It was—Tom Garret’s word—uncanny. Except that no, it was not uncanny, that was an exaggeration. One could make it uncanny by thought, make it like one of those experiences recorded by the hundreds in the book he had hidden in his desk—but he refrained.
Again, suddenly, so vividly that he might have been dreaming it, he saw lights coming at him, lighting up the trunks and lower branches of trees on each side of the road’s banked shoulders. He sat up straight in the bed, head rammed forward. It filled his windshield, seemed to fill his very skull with whiteness, rushing him like a blinding burst of water down a flume in the California mountains, and he felt again in his stomach and chest the sickening sideways sweep of the car in its miraculous, high-speed, roaring do-si-do around the doctor’s.
He wiped his forehead and lowered himself onto his back again.
“Better get some sleep,” he told himself gruffly.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was quarter after three. Was it possible that only fifteen minutes had passed since the last time he’d looked at the luminous dial on his wristwatch?—his son’s wristwatch, rather, a gift or loan just before Mickelsson had left. It was certainly too late to get up and phone Jessica. That was what he wanted to do, all right—tell her what had happened as he was driving home, not just the near-accident but also who it was that had been hurrying so, in the middle of the night, coming down the mountain from God knew where. It would be a comfort to puzzle with Jessica over Mabel Garret’s seeming foreknowledge of the event—a strange woman; he’d always thought so.
He rolled his head on the pillow. At the first thought of Jessica, his penis had begun to stiffen. “You’re not a well man,” Rifkin had said. Mickelsson thought: You should see me now, Doctor. He put his hand on the erection, encouraging it. Jessie, Jessie, Jessie. All right, it was not just comforting talk he wanted of her. He wanted her naked here beside him, or under him. He began to move his hand. He imagined that incredibly beautiful body with the clothes stripped away, imagined her kneeling over him, glistening, the full breasts finally revealed, dangling above him, the collarbone like wings, the perfect wet mouth, gray eyes like Homeric seas. As if she were really there he felt her lowering herself onto him, then felt himself coming. He clutched the sheet to the mess and, overwhelmed by disgust and gloomy wretchedness, shifted to the edge of the bed, where it was dry.
As always when he’d made imaginary love to her, what he felt now was not relief but shame and revulsion. If any man had ever been truly in love, he thought, he, Peter Mickelsson, was in love with Jessica Stark. (Rhetoric; bullshit. Could nothing stop the Thespian antics of the mind?) But he was thinking: he understood now the agonies of the silly courtly-love poets, moaning and groaning over the holy unattainable. Or Nietzsche hopelessly mooning over Cosima Wagner. It hadn’t been like this when Mickelsson was young, with Ellen. He’d been handsome then, or anyway, well-built; he’d thought highly of himself. Now he was gross, a proven failure, with no place to go but further down. (Bullshit, bullshit.) Thoughts crowded his head, as if to show more plainly his depravity. Always concepts, opinions, past history and books between himself and things. He thought of the whole absurd courtly-love scheme, and its Platonism: how the lover was the poor hopeless worm, writhing, writing verses in secret, hungering for the divine, and how the lady, if he was lucky, came to him like God, with grace. It was true—the misery of the lover, at least. All the rest was changed. The lady might pity him. He’d seen signs tonight that if he played his cards right she might sleep with him, though her reserve, even wariness, was hard to miss. She was no starry-eyed kid. Paradise, everlasting joy … Women were people too; that was the crushing wisdom of modern love. He had nothing to offer: big, maybe dangerous animal. In the end—and it wouldn’t take long—he’d be discarded. If he loved her less, that might be tolerable. (Something phoney in that thought too. He would refuse to notice.) If one were young and stupid, blindly optimistic …
Idly, bending his anger around to where perhaps it would do most good, he thought of suicide. It made a certain kind of sense, theoretically. He longed every day for his old life with Ellen, especially when he remembered her as she’d once been; but that was over, wrecked, and in a way he wasn’t sorry: with Ellen, or with those casual pick-ups at conferences, he’d never have experienced the pure pig sexual joy he’d found in Donnie Matthews—nor would he have met Jessica Stark. No magazine fold-out showed the likes of that lady sociologist—such was his opinion—and if he could not have her, at least not in the absolute way his soul demanded—if he could not own her absolutely, grow old with her, be loved by her without a trace of reservation, as if he were spiritually of equal worth …
He jerked his head, fighting the everlasting sick rush of thought. He would not kill himself, not because he was cowardly but because, like an old bull standing in a field among flies, he didn’t give a shit.
He breathed deeply, listening to the wheeze from too much smoking, then again thought of Mabel Garret’s precognition, or hunch. He frowned, turning over onto his side and staring deep into the darkness down the hall, eyes unblinking, trying to decide whether or not he believed in hunches. He believed in his grandfather’s hunches, certainly. Odd that one could believe the particular case but doubt the principle. Perhaps as he and Jessica discussed these things, he could edge her toward what it was that had gone wrong between them, an evening that had started out so well, as it had seemed to him. In his mind he again saw her slipping her shoe off, sitting on her foot. He thought again, with a sinking feeling, of Donnie Matthews. Shabby business. He was troubled now by the realization that had come to him the last time he’d been with her, that she felt for him more than she admitted to herself. Only a few days ago the realization would have filled him with joy. He saw again in his mind her sweet, childish pout—something slightly common about it, something studied—studied before a mirror, no doubt; modelled on the pout of some Grade B actress. He moved his right hand to cup his penis and testicles. As if she were there in the bed beside him, he smelled her scent, partly from a bottle, partly sweat. How strange it was when one compared it with the tastefully expensive scent of Jessica Stark!—yet even the dim memory of Donnie’s scent had the power to stir in him the beginnings of a new erection. Ah, Love, joiner of the unjoinable! He thought of Kurten’s theory of Neanderthal extinction and closed his eyes. He closed his hand around his cock and moved the hand slowly.
Poor Blassenheim! Poor Brenda!
Without wishing to, invaded, though he glared and shook his head against it, he thought of the Swissons, the Garrets, the Bryants, finally the Tillsons—saw them all in his mind’s eye so sharply it was as if they were there in the room with him, gathered like visitors at a sickbed. As if hunting for something, or alerted to danger, he looked carefully from couple to couple, still moving his hand. The Swissons, shyly smiling exactly together—except that the woman’s smile was less shy than the man’s, as her handshake was stronger, and the man, hard as they played at their game, cared more in the end about music than the woman did; one could see it in the trouble-lines fencing in his eyes. He thought of driving his cock into Kate Swisson. The thinking part of his mind tick-ticked on. Parts mixed unequally … They were doomed; he knew it as surely as he knew his name.
The Garrets. He could form no definite opinion about the Garrets. Good people, certainly—ten adopted children; and Tom was always, in his mild, Southern way, a man of liberal concern. (Mabel he would take from behind, up the anus. He drove the vision out, disgusted.) Strange pair: Tom, genteel aristocrat turned into a liberal verging on radical and living up here in the land of deep snow, with ten young children of a variety of races, married to a secretive, maybe psychic Russian Jew. One could make a life, of course, of strange ingredients. Nevertheless, it was indeed very strange. He had a feeling Jessica, if she should choose to speak frankly, would make short work of them, or at any rate of their chances—though why he thought this he couldn’t say. Of this much he was sure: when he was young he had believed, like Alan Blassenheim, in Truth, the great rock foundation of everything. It had seemed to him obvious that if one “behaved in accord with what one knew to be true”—an expression that had not then seemed puzzling to him—one would be safe, for all practical purposes invulnerable. But now he’d grown confused, like a once-carefree bob-calf come of age. The clearer his thought—the more rigorous his categorical distinctions—the more angry and confused he’d grown. It was as if he had stepped out of a room which for the time he’d been inside it he’d known to exist, and could now not find his way back to it—couldn’t find it on any map, couldn’t even find its theoretical justification, its chemical and mathematical possibility in so-called reality. He believed now in systems, an anarchy of
truth-systems spinning like the components of independent molecules—believed in them intuitively, as he believed in root propositions—but he was no longer altogether comfortable with tables and chairs. Tom and Mabel Garret, old-name Southerner and immigrant’s child … ten children of several races, whom they sat up with, perhaps sang Southern ballads to, or Mottel der Operator, perhaps read The Wind in the Willows and Charlotte’s Web … They were good people, and he liked them, but at the center of their life lay something that troubled him. He’d run across a phrase somewhere, Darwin or one of his followers: “The blind daring of Nature’s experiments …” (Beetle-browed Neanderthal marrying handsome Cro-Magnon, producing mules, dying out …)
He lost his train of thought. His eyelids were heavy. Perhaps he would sleep after all, except that his cock was huge now, still blindly hunting.
He mused with some twilit part of his brain on the arrangements of the Bryants and Tillsons. The Bryants had been married for thirty-one years, brutally mismatched as they seemed to be. (Edie had mentioned tonight at the Firehouse Five that their anniversary was coming up. “Three decades of holy deadlock and one year to spare,” she’d said. “Most marriages that last very long are three-legged stools.” The Swissons, holding hands, had looked interested for a moment.) Perhaps the truth was that the Bryants weren’t as badly mismatched as they seemed—and seemed to believe themselves. Was Phil really so classy, she really (with her noble old blood-lines) so vulgar? He was a fine shabby dresser and good at quoting poets, especially Shakespeare; but then, who wouldn’t be after twenty, thirty years of teaching Anguish? What he really cared about—what made his cheeks redden and his voice take on a quaver, what made him jab at the tabletop with a manicured index finger—was university scheduling, parking regulations, the careless policing of the faculty cafeteria. When his cheeks reddened, Edie would gently put her hand on his arm, not pausing to look at him, dropping not a word from the gently self-mocking monologue she was delivering to Jessica and the Swissons. Sometimes Bryant called her, as if ironically, with scorn, “my little chickadee.” It occurred to Mickelsson now for the first time that perhaps they loved each other. Phil the stunningly handsome young officer, Edie the dazzling Southern belle. Instantly the thought turned in on him and depressed him. He noticed that with the fingertips of his right hand he was feeling the pulse in his left wrist. He moved his right hand back to his crotch.
