by John Gardner
“Wow!” she said into his ear. “Wow!”
He slept, heavy as a bear in winter, more serene than he’d felt in a long time. Then—perhaps hours had passed, perhaps only minutes—he found himself desperately laboring up from slumber, gasping, full of fear, trying to make out what he must do. Then he was in the room, and understood that the shouting came from Jessica in her sleep. She was crying out with stinging, crackling anger, such blood-curdling rage that he was afraid to touch her and awaken her. Though the room was silent now, he realized that he’d heard the words clearly: “Get away! Just fucking stay back! Let me be!” It was like the voice of someone else. From all he knew of her, he could not have guessed her capable of such tones. She was still tense, he saw, and grinding her teeth like one of Luther’s devils. He rose up on his left elbow to touch her upper arm, then gently, cautiously kissed the side of her face. She was sweating as if with fever.
“Jessie,” he said softly.
She murmured something, still angry, but she relaxed a little.
Half an hour later it happened again. “Jessie, Jessie, Jessie,” he whispered, moving his hand on her head as though she were a sleeping child. He listened to the name in the darkness, the sound nosing out into the room as if in bafflement, trying to make sense of itself. Jessie? Jessie? One thought of, if not Shakespeare, fat wives of rabbis, or bitchy little English schoolgirls in perfect banana curls. What had it to do with this soft-faced midnight changeling? “Poor Jessie,” he whispered. Whether or not she’d been faking her pleasure, or yelling out at him that pure, ancient hatred, she was another poor miserable damned mortal. Jesus, he thought, what a stupid fucking existence. He blinked away tears. A moment later, he realized that his hand was no longer moving on her head; he’d drifted off. All are faithless, saith the angel. He stroked Jessie’s head from front to back twice more, then gave in to gravity.
7
He had been working at his desk for some time when he heard the upstairs toilet flush and knew Jessica was up. According to his watch it was nine-thirty. That was late, for her. He wondered if it meant that she’d slept peacefully at last. The thought stirred anxiety, and he looked back at the papers spread before him.
A few minutes later a knock came at his door, and he called, “Come in.” The door opened, and Jessica stood there in his white terrycloth bathrobe, tentatively smiling, one hand on the doorframe. She had on no make-up but had brushed her hair. A confusion of emotions rushed over him. Except for Donnie, he hadn’t seen a woman in her morning’s natural beauty for a long time: clear-eyed, human, nothing about her doll-like or prepared. It was so much like being married that he couldn’t make out whether the sight filled him with happiness or misery. (His cock had no such problem. It stirred like an old dog waking up, looking around.)
“Hi,” she said.
He nodded. “You must have slept well.”
“I did.” She came to him, put her hand on his shoulder, then moved her palm, massaging the muscle. After a moment she bent down cautiously and kissed him. When she’d straightened up again she gazed into his eyes—only for an instant, but purposefully, as if to tell him something—perhaps: everything can be changed, Nichts ist wahr, alles ist erlaubt. Now she was looking at the papers in front of him, covertly reading, ready to look away and play innocent if she must. Her eyes raced. “What are you working on?”
He put his left arm around her, then moved his hand to her left thigh. “I’ve been more or less unworking,” he said. His right hand waved off grandiloquence. “For a while now I’ve been fiddling at what I like to think of as a sort of blockbuster philosophy book, something to make the best-seller list and earn me a fortune.” She was amused, cautiously interested, sliding her eyes at him then hurriedly back to the paper, still reading. “I’d start out,” he said, “with superdramatic stuff: the graphic presentation of an imaginary case of child-molesting and murder committed by a quadraplegic nine-year-old, then a rape with ice-tongs, intended to cover up a devilish cloak-and-dagger conspiracy by government agents and the nuke people; and after I’d established my raison d’être …” He put his right hand over the page she was reading, his fingers spread wide. She smiled and mugged Not Guilty! “But this morning it came to me that the only really good parts so far are the roaringly dull ones. ‘Consequently,’ ‘To the contrary’ … So I’ve been sitting here crossing things out.”
“Who needs wealth, right?” With the back of her hand she snowplowed mountains of rubies to oblivion. “As long as you’ve got your happiness, and paid-up health insurance …”
He laughed. His erection was becoming a problem.
She slipped from his one-armed embrace and went over to the window. Her arms were folded, drawn in against her chest. “It’s beautiful out,” she said.
A soft snow was falling, mounding up over the birdbath, settling on the dark branches of the pines. The morning sunlight was bright again, deceptively warm-looking; the cloud cover had rolled away.
“Want me to make breakfast?” she asked.
“I can do that.” He made as if to push back his chair.
“No, really, I’d like to. You work a little longer—that’s what you’d be doing if I weren’t here, right?”
“I’d probably still be up in bed, hung over and groaning.”
She laughed. “Eggs? Scrambled?”
“Sure. Terrific. There’s bacon, I think. Peppers and onions in the bottom drawer of the fridge.”
“I’m sure I can find things. You drink coffee in the morning?”
“I finished off half a pot already.” He pointed at the cup.
“I’ll make some more.” She reached across him, took the cup, and went out, closing the door behind her. That pleased him, her closing the door. Ellen would never have done that. He’d have had to get up, after she was gone, to close the door himself, and would have felt, as he did so, petty, unsociable, spinsterish.
For a minute or more he sat staring at his page, his eyes going over and over the words, in his mind the image of Jessica at the window, her buttocks and legs strong under the tightly cinched, overlarge bathrobe, her jaw—when she turned her face to him—clean-lined, cheekbones high. With one hand he moved his erection over into the looseness of one pantleg, his fingers lingering a moment as he thought about going out and propositioning Jessica. Then, though the image of her was still in his mind, he began to get the sense of the words on the page and began to be interested. The old dog yawned and settled down to rest. Mickelsson picked up his pencil and slashed out a paragraph, then began writing in his small, meticulous script, more and more rapidly, in the margin. Over, he wrote, running out of space, and flipped the paper to continue on the back. He was so deep in thought he did not hear the sizzling of bacon or smell the rich effluence coming from the stove until she tapped on his door again and opened it. “Ready?” Hunger leaped in him, and he pushed back his chair.
They ate in the as yet unremodelled kitchen, large, gray, astir with chilly draughts. The chill seemed to him more pleasant than unpleasant; but then, he was fully dressed, wearing a sweater, whereas Jessica wore nothing but his terrycloth bathrobe. While she ate with her right hand, forking in her food like a teen-ager in a hurry, she held the collar closed around her neck with the left.
“Jessie, let me get you a sweater,” he said, and rose from the table.
“I’m all right,” she said, looking up as if he’d broken her train of thought. “Don’t let your eggs get cold. Anyway, I can’t put a sweater over this.”
“My sweaters are big,” he said, moving on toward the entry-hall where, if he wasn’t mistaken, he’d left his old black sweater with holes in the elbows. He found it where he’d thought he would, and returned to the kitchen. “Hands up,” he said, as he’d said long ago to his children. “Hang on to the cuffs.”
She turned to look up at him, unpersuaded and inconvenienced, then obeyed. “Jesus, the fuss you make about things,” she said, then laughed, her last sounds muffled by the lowering s
weater.
He allowed his fingertips to graze her breasts as they passed, and when her face popped out, he kissed her, then stood back to look. “It’s definitely you!” he said, wagging both hands, limp-wristed.
“Who else?” she grouched, then looked down at herself. It might indeed have been someone else, a hobo who’d recently lost weight. She did not smile. “So anyway,” she said, “eat your eggs.” She pointed with her fork.
He hurried to his chair and sat down. He liked her in the ratty, baggy sweater. He smiled, watching as she laboriously rolled up the cuffs. “You’ll admit, it’s nice to be warm,” he said.
She said, wrinkling her nose, “It smells of turpentine.” He knew that instant that nothing of Buzzy’s had ever smelled of anything if he could help it.
When he’d cleared away the dishes, piling them in the sink, and they were seated, each working on a third cup of coffee—the sun risen higher now, pouring into the kitchen from the entry-hall, making one bright place on the wall and floor, throwing the rest of the room into greater darkness—Jessie asked, breaking what had grown to an extended silence, “What did you make of Mr. Sprague’s talk about flying?”
“Do you mean do I think he believed it?”
She shrugged, then waited.
“They have funny ways of joking, around here. It used to throw me, but I guess I’m catching on.” He added after a moment, “It’s not like anyplace else I know of. I suppose if I were a sociologist—” When she glanced up at him, he moved his head as if nudging away objections. “All I mean is, everyplace has its own oddities, things that make people feel part of the group.”
“Nearly all human beings joke,” she said. “It’s one of the defining characteristics.”
“I know.” He raised his cup, cautiously sipping. When he’d lowered the cup again, he said, “But it’s something you especially notice in Susquehanna. Maybe it’s a way of denying that the whole place is moribund. Anyway, it seems unusual how much joking goes on. At the check-out counter down at the market, at the post office, on the street … There’s a farm, over by Gibson, where they have these strange-looking long-haired cows, they look like musk-oxen or something. One day when I was passing, the farmer was out with them, breaking open bales of hay, and I pulled over and asked him what kind they were. He looked at them, very thoughtful, pulling at his chin, you know; then he looked at me, as if puzzled that I didn’t know, and he said—very serious—‘Them’s mice.’ I laughed, but not him. You’d be surprised how long it took him to admit they were Highland Something.”
“He must’ve liked your company,” she said.
“He looked like a smart, discriminating sort of man.”
She sat very still, gazing at her coffee, smiling. Only one tapping finger showed her restlessness. “It’s funny, though. He sounded as if he meant it, about flying.”
“No doubt he’s used it for years,” Mickelsson said. “In fact somebody else here mentioned to me once they’ve got a man in these parts who flies. Maybe Sprague’s used that joke so long they’ve all come to believe it.”
“Pray he doesn’t try taking off from the roof sometime.” The finger tapped on.
He put his hand over her hand to stop the barely audible drumming. “I wonder if I should have offered him the use of my car,” he said, and watched her face. “The blue one, I mean. It just sits there in the barn, doing no one any good—”
“Are you crazy? If he went over one of those … moraines or whatever they call them, those big bluffs up there—”
“That would be flying,” Mickelsson said with a grin, then at once put on charity. She was a sucker for Christian charity, he was beginning to see. She’d been hanging around with the bleeding-heart Marxists too long. He wondered what would happen if he pushed it a little. “It did cross my mind that he might hurt himself,” he said gravely. “Not that I’d care about the car …”
“I understand.” An instant after she spoke, she looked at him, suspicious. He smiled benevolently and signed the air with three limp fingers, like the Pope. “Jesus,” she whispered crossly, not even pretending to smile, and looked away. “You really are crazy,” she said.
He’d finished his coffee. She still had half a cup, too cold to drink. “Shall I put on another pot?” he asked, his voice bright, trying to pull her out of her mood.
She shook her head. “I hate coffee.”
He sighed.
Uncomfortable as he was feeling—all this formal informality, these complex games they both somehow kept losing—he minded nonetheless that it would soon be time for her to leave; minded it more with each small failure. He hunted for something to say that might keep her longer, but it was hard to concentrate. He found himself haunted by images of Donnie Matthews. It was of course true that he could drop his little nightlight just like that, put all that behind him, a sordid but ultimately trifling affair of the sort human beings, shitty beasts that they were, were prone to get mired in. But even as he thus consoled himself, he knew it was not as true as he might wish. He couldn’t imagine himself telling Jessie about Donnie, nor could he imagine continuing this … whatever … with Jessie without confessing. Neither could he imagine—despite the brackish taste that came with the thought of Donnie, all those Di-Gels rising in armed revolt—that he could simply stop visiting Donnie’s apartment, put behind him forever the thought of holding her slippery, pale waist in his two hands, screwing her upright like some animal he’d grabbed from the pen, his trousers around his feet, his sick heart slamming.
Remorse rose into his gorge. Jessica too he’d grabbed from the pen, if he admitted the truth. Or they’d grabbed each other. If she was sorry for him, and attracted, she was also repelled, at very least distrustful. He again slid his hand over the tabletop toward her, inviting her to take it. After a moment, she did. Her hand was surprisingly warm and soft. The old dog stirred.
“Do you teach today?” he asked.
Rising out of some dark thought of her own, she asked, “What’s today? Tuesday?”
“If I haven’t lost track.”
Looking sadly at their clasped hands, she said, “I don’t go in on Tuesdays. But I have some editing I should do, work for the magazine. And there’s a meeting I promised to drop in on tonight. …”
“It’s nice to have you here,” Mickelsson said.
She thought about it, carefully not looking at him, then nodded. The next moment, changing her mind, she raised her shining, sea-gray eyes—was it tears that made them shine?—then abruptly looked down again. “I guess I should get dressed.”
“You could,” he said. “Or we could go back upstairs and, you know …” He pressed her hand.
She stood up with him, then moved into his arms. “OK,” she said, a smile bursting over her face. “I give in.”
They lay spent and at peace again in one another’s arms, talking, much as he would talk with Donnie, early in the morning—except, of course, that it was not the same at all, so different that from time to time his jaw muscles would tense, and part of his mind would formally resolve to tell Jessica everything, get it out in the open, let her think whatever she might think. Once she caught him at it.
“What?” she asked. Her dark head was on the pillow, facing his.
“Mmm?” he said, fake innocent.
“What was going through your mind just then?”
“Childhood sorrows. Misery of old age.”
“Bullshit.”
He closed his eyes to avoid those two dark lie-detectors. “Nothing, really.”
She traced the side of his face with two fingers. He remembered that he needed a shave. She said, “What was that funny look? Tell the truth.”
“Secret,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you sometime. I promise.”
“OK.” She seemed to let it go at that, but then, tracing the lines of his face again, she asked, “Somebody else?”
“Nothing like that.” He grinned, then leaned toward her to kiss her nose.
“You sho
uldn’t let it bother you, Pete,” she said, and turned her face away from him to look up at the ceiling. “I’m not demanding.” Her expression was sombre. “Even if I were your wife, I wouldn’t be demanding.” She smiled and briefly glanced at him, sad. “It’s wrong for people to hurt each other—cause jealousy, things like that. But also, someday we’ll be eighty—you know?—and we’ll have nothing but the past.” She pouted a moment, narrowing her eyes. “I have to be kind to that eighty-year-old woman.”
Mickelsson pondered it, or tried to. “Does that mean ‘Never let a sexual opportunity slip’?” he asked. “I’m not sure what you’re telling me.”
“People must do what they must,” she said, “and if what one must do would hurt someone, one must be sly.”
“It’s a good enough theory,” he said. “Works well for parents, anyway. Personally—”
She put her finger over his lips. “It’s not good to talk about it.” She studied his face as if figuring out the phrasing for her question. “Tell me more about Ellen,” she said.
He said nothing for a while, brooding on Jessie’s theory; then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I don’t know what to tell you. She was good-hearted, always giving people presents.” He frowned, staring up at the ceiling now, listening to the silence of the house, the snowy world beyond. “She would’ve made a good minister’s wife in some small town in Indiana. Making up baskets of goodies for the poor, teaching knots to the Girl Scouts. I’ll tell you a story.
“Once a friend of ours—man in the Philosophy Department with me—got hit by a bus when he was out one night, drunk. It just sort of nudged him, but it broke some bones and so on. He was famous for his drunks, and at the time of the accident everybody got suddenly righteous about it. Perhaps it was a Warning, a Blessing in Disguise, et cetera. No doubt they were right, but it was offensive. There he was lying in the hospital, one leg in traction, bunch of his ribs broken so he didn’t dare laugh—a crazy, bright-eyed Irishman who no more intended to mend his ways than … He kept propositioning the nurses, wanted them to put up the screens and climb up on top of him. Some of them were tempted! You’d have to know him, of course: boyish, quick-witted … So there he was, horny and so dried out he was seeing the Devil. … One night at visiting time Ellen went to see him, with her front all swollen as if she were pregnant, and when she got into his room she stepped into the john and emerged with a big red lighted candle and a tray with a glass and a bottle of Jameson’s on it, and potato chips and dip—” Mickelsson’s eyes filled with tears. They had more to do with the saying of it than with the remembering.
