by John Gardner
Also, at this point in her life she became, as old photographs show, slightly ugly. God moves in strange ways, and in the long run it was the best thing that could have happened to her, because it drove her to humor, added one more component of that splendid, living work of art she would later become. But it was a terrible thing at the time, for Joan. She had been, as a small child, beautiful. Years later, when she was a teacher, composer, novelist and wife of a novelist—also famous party wit—a friend would sometimes happen across, among other family pictures she had on the wall in the upstairs hallway, the picture taken of Joan when she was five, and would say, startled, “Is this you, Joan?” “That’s me,” she’d say and smile. And because she’d changed so, though she was beautiful now too, the friend would say, surprised into a childlike innocence exactly like that which the long-dead photographer had caught, “Why, you were beautiful, Joan!” To which Joan would respond, with just the right turn, just the right mock-sorrow (she was no longer one to take less than she deserved), “Wasn’t I, though!” And the friend would glance at her, and though he or she might not put it into words, would notice once more that Joan Orrick was, in simple truth, more beautiful than any painting or valley or tropical bird that ever flew.
But between the ages of about twelve and sixteen, Joan was, to put it mildly, not as pretty as she might wish. She suddenly grew tall—taller than most of the boys in her grade. Her head became large, with far-apart eyes and a wide-bridged nose that was always slightly red and which frequently, for no reason, gushed blood. Her mouth, in the shadow of that mighty nose, was small, and—because of how the corners turned down—looked rather like the mouth of a shark. Her chin was small, her neck long and thin, her shoulders narrow, her breasts undeveloped, her hips oddly wide. She became pimply, and, mysteriously, her teeth, which were small, became misaligned, so that braces, Dr. Vogler said, solemnly nodding, were really the only prayer.
In unobvious ways, her parents reacted to the change. It was as if she’d betrayed a trust. They changed subtly, of course; so subtly that they weren’t aware of it themselves, and even Joan, if anyone had asked her, couldn’t definitely have asserted that things were different. The war was just over, the factory was making money, Joan’s youngest brother was recovering from polio—a sweet, gentle boy who’d grow up to be the kindest, gentlest of men, plagued by a weak heart. What was wrong between Joan and her family, for all these reasons and for others, was hard to see. But it was nonetheless a fact that something had gone wrong, and it came down, finally, to this: she had been beautiful and brilliant; now she was only brilliant; and though her sense of humor improved—she was so funny, in fact, that she had to spend much of her school time in the hall: her remarks, though much quoted in the faculty lounge, disrupted classes—the humor had, her parents thought (and they were essentially right), a cruel edge to it. She had an eye for faults and for, worse, mere unhappy resemblances. Woe to the minister who had the chinless, triangular mouth of an elephant, the neighborhood pharmacist with a bunny rabbit’s nose, the otherwise pretty beautician who had the eyes of a turtle! Her eye for types was so keen and merciless, and her dislike for certain types so fanatical, that no new style of dress could be successful in the schools she attended, no new student, teacher, or principal could be popularly accepted, no moneymaking project could be mounted by either her school or church until the word was in from Joan. Of a tiresome woman at the Methodist church, Joan’s mother once said with careful charity, “Well, she’s good at heart,” to which Joan, then aged twelve, added quickly, with great innocence, “To make sure people notice, she wears light blue hats with white berries.” One laughed, but one couldn’t approve. (Her brother James, the eldest after Joan, imitated her humor and developed a harsh cynicism he would never get rid of. It would in the end nearly ruin his life.)
Yet however they might work to dampen it, her humor bubbled up, ever funnier, more cruel. Serious people told her, though they too laughed, that she was arrogant and mean and should be ashamed of herself. She half believed them. (Her father’s mother was famous for cruelty.) Her younger brother’s illness, and the attention he got, of course intensified Joan’s self-doubt. And the obvious fact that she was different from other children, so that even with her friends she felt, or was made to feel, separate, abnormal, made her doubt even stronger. The idea that she was, in spite of everything, not what she should be became more or less fixed.
At least half persuaded that no one really loved her—with one important exception—Joan mugged and joked and earned a fair amount of money (she played for, among other things, a tap-dance studio on Olive Street), won applause on every side, and poured her unhappiness or anyway confusion into Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach. She played hour after hour.
For her mother, especially, it was a difficult period. It was impossible for her mother to ask Joan to stop practicing and do the dishes or clean house. What had they worked so hard for, she asked herself, if not this?—to say nothing of all that money spent. So her mother did the work, feeling persecuted, and even when she stopped to take a nap she got not a moment’s rest. A serious pianist, as everyone knows, does not often play music straight through when practicing. Working up a piece by Mozart or Schubert, Joan skimmed with her eyes the parts she could play without difficulty, then went over, again and again, the parts that were hard for her, until she had them in her fingers. It’s doubtful that Joan’s mother heard once in her life a complete Beethoven sonata until she heard Joan play it on the radio or the concert stage. What she did hear, day after day, was five measures, or three and a half, endlessly, maddeningly repeated. It was impossible, of course, for Joan’s mother to say, “Stop! You’re driving me insane!” Instead, she would tense up her soul and wait like a painted Indian in the bushes, and at supper, Joan, eating salad, would close her teeth on the fork, then slide the fork out, leaving lettuce in her mouth, and her mother would cry angrily, with tears in her eyes, “Must you eat that way? You’re driving me insane!”—a complaint Joan’s husband would echo later, more sullenly, less dramatically, until he broke her of the habit; and then, without ever having seen her mother do it, their golden-haired daughter, Mary, would do it, and Joan’s husband would sink his head into his hands and moan, “Jesus. Must be DNA.”
But unhappy as she was at this time of her life, Joan had one great comfort: she was in love.
“Martin, don’t you remember any of that?” she would rage, years later, clinging as he struggled to push her away. “God damn you, Martin, I love you.
“You love nobody, not even yourself. You need.”
“And you don’t. You don’t need a fucking living soul.”
“That’s right.”
He was so cold he terrified her. His eyes, when he was drunk, became a paler blue, as soulless as the eyes of a dead man except for the hatred in them. It was incredible that anyone could hate her that much—hate anyone or anything that much. She would try to think, sometimes, what it was that she’d done wrong, but she’d be filled, immediately, with confusion and fright and would be unable to concentrate, unable to remember for more than a few seconds what it was she was trying to understand.
“Martin, come to bed.” She dug her fingers into his arms, trying by sheer power to break through that wall of ice.
“No thank you.”
If anyone had asked her why she wanted him, what in heaven’s name she saw in him—as her psychiatrist would ask her a short time later—she could hardly have said. It wasn’t the money: she’d have traded it all—the big, white pillared house with its towers, the Mercedes, the Essex, the trips to Europe and Japan—for a single day of the life they’d had when they were poor and he still loved her. It wasn’t, God knows, because he seemed to her handsome, though she knew to her sorrow how handsome he seemed to other women—women who saw his neurotic unhappiness, his sexy arrogance and occasional childlike gentleness, his joy on a horse or a motorcycle—and had never seen that murderous glint in his ble
ary, ice-blue eyes, a glint like rifle bluing. But it would come to her, finally, what it was that made her cling to him, and she would know—then quickly forget again—that Martin’s cruel accusation was partly right, that she clung out of need. He was her past, her whole life, and if he left her, as again and again he threatened to do—even tried to do, running to some floozy, some graduate student or girl from the past or colleague’s wife—her whole life would be cancelled, made meaningless, would vanish in an instant without leaving a trace, the way the universe would do, he claimed, if Time should all at once be suspended. And so she would phone him at his floozy’s house, would cry, would even use the children as a weapon, and he would finally come back, hating her and making her hate herself, and the children would move numbly through the big, cold house, gentle and beautiful and unquestionably doomed if she couldn’t find some way to save them—save them all. Martin’s father, at the time of his worst unhappiness, had been suicidal, had fought against the urge with all his might and had barely won. Now Martin was the same. She had no idea when he stormed off late at night, drunk and furious and full of that senseless, terrible grief, whether or not she’d ever see him again. If he killed himself, the odds against Evan’s survival—hypersensitive and private as his father—were frightening. —And yet it wasn’t just that, wasn’t just concern about Evan and Mary or fear that her life would turn suddenly into waste, that made her fight to hang onto him. Once she had loved him more than anyone or anything, and though it seemed that the Martin she’d loved was dead, she knew it wasn’t true. Sometimes, reading his big, gloomy novels, she would recognize with a shock of mingled pain and pleasure the Martin she’d long ago settled on for life. And there was a time when, waiting for her baggage at Kennedy Airport, she’d seen him without at first recognizing him—she’d had no reason to expect him there—and she had thought, in the flash of time it took her to adjust, What a strange, nice-looking man! Even after she’d realized that it was Martin, the memory of that feeling persisted like the next day’s memory of a dream. For all the eccentricity of his hair and clothes—he was like a man who’d stepped out of a nineteenth-century American painting—he was a man you’d turn to if you needed help, a man inherently gentle and solicitous—to strangers, anyway—the kind who, even on the New York subway, would get up to give his seat to a lady, an old man, a child loaded down with packages.
“Martin, I order you to come to bed.”
He laughed, and his eyes were so crazy she was afraid to press him. More than once he’d thrown her across the room when she tried to control him.
“What’s happened to us?” she cried. “Look at us! For Christ’s sake, what’s happened?” Before she knew it would come over her, she was sobbing, and though she knew how he scorned her crying, convinced that it was one more trick, it was impossible to stop. When she loosened her grip on his arms he jerked back, and she instinctively covered her face, thinking he meant to hit her. But he was backing toward the door, fleeing again, though it was four in the morning and raining.
“Time,” he roared, “that’s what’s happened. Ghosts. Dead people.”
“Martin,” she wailed, “I didn’t do anything.”
He stood with his hand on the doorknob, the lighted swimming pool behind him, and she stood perfectly still, as if precariously balanced: perhaps, drunk as he was, he would come to his senses if she made no threatening move, waited him out as he himself would wait out some vicious dog he was gentling.
“You never do anything,” he said. He spoke as if she weren’t human, as if she were all the world’s evils squeezed together in an ugly imitation of human shape. “You do what the wind does, what falling bodies do. You plan ahead like a rattlesnake asleep on a rock.”
Her anger was rising, impossible to fight. They were good at that, at least, good at stabbing each other. “What did I do? What started this?” He was too drunk to know, she knew, and her seeming control would make him still more furious.
His hand turned on the doorknob. She took a step toward him and said in panic, “Who are you going to? I’ll kill her.”
It was a mistake. The door was open now, rain blowing in. An image came to her, more real than the room, Martin in bed with some woman—white legs, dark hair, the face hidden—and she rushed at him in rage, but he was gone, the door was closed, and she fell. “Bastard,” she said, weeping, beating the carpet with her fist. When she looked up, sometime later, her thirteen-year-old Evan was kneeling beside her, expressionless, patting her back.
Two
They first slept together, as they would both tell friends at parties later, when they were two—slept together in a drawer, in fact, when Joan’s parents (and her Uncle John Elmer and Aunt Cora) drove east to visit the New York State cousins and help wallpaper the huge old faded-brick house the Orricks lived in. The Orricks owned a small dairy farm a mile outside the little village of Elba and were thought of locally as “old family.” Exactly what this meant was never clear to her: her father’s line went back to before the American Revolution, though west of the Mississippi such qualities weren’t much valued. Like Joan’s parents when they started, the Orricks were, despite their big house, as poor as church mice, and, except for their eldest son, so they would remain, though they might have claimed, if it had occurred to them, to be failed aristocrats: the family, a hundred years before, had been considerably better off. But very little concerning their social position occurred to the Orricks, it must be said to their credit. Like most people of their general class in the western part of New York State, they liked Indians, disliked Italians, voted Republican, put themselves down on official forms not as “Protestant” but as “Presbyterian,” openly loathed labor unions and secretly loathed Catholics. The mother—Joan’s father’s cousin—was a devoted church worker and English teacher, a plump, short red-head with sparkling eyes, who loved ripe tomatoes and the color blue. The father wrote poems while working behind his horses or, later, while riding his steel-wheeled or (still later) rubber-tired tractors and sometimes delivered sermons in small country churches—sermons that were, everyone agreed, moving, in fact inspiring, and made no mention of either heaven or hell, though full of fine language and a curious deep current of woe. He came from a long, long line of preachers, country lawyers, and schoolmasters, and would pass on his gifts as an orator to his eldest son.
Oddly enough, events from one of their first meetings would be the earliest memories either Joan or her cousin Buddy was to carry through life. She would remember, distinctly, how Buddy’s grandmother (her father’s aunt) had called from the bathroom, where she’d been giving Buddy a bath, “Everybody look out, a bear’s coming!” At the warning, Joan fled to the bedroom door, then looked back in alarm, and lo, down the hall came running not a bear but a bare, Buddy with no clothes on. She had laughed and laughed, and he had stopped, hands clasped, and looked at her with four-year-old fury and alarm, and she, understanding his strange nature even then, had instantly explained the joke to him, and then he too had laughed, though somewhat doubtfully. He would all his life be suspicious, easily offended, difficult—as Joan’s mother would say, “a dark one.” As for Buddy—or Martin, as he would come to be called—he remembered one single, powerful image: Joan in a bright yellow dress with white trim, her red hair glowing, full of sunlight, her dimple strange and wonderful, so that he stared and stared at it. She’d laughed at him for that and had taken his hand and led him around the house—as she’d be leading him from one place to another all their lives—chattering, making him play games.
From then on, Joan’s family and the Orricks would visit one another every few years—then oftener and oftener—and each time Joan and Buddy met they were surprised all over again by how much they liked each other. He visited her, as it happened—or rather, his family visited hers—at the time she had her appendix out, an occasion that would later prove grimly important for both their lives. Like all his memories of seeing Joan, that visit would have, when he thought back to it, a cur
ious glow, a brightness of color, a heightened reality that made it like a dream or, more precisely, like a novel—he was, at that time, an insatiable reader, though he did poorly in school.
He sat on the side of her bed—she had a light blue nightdress and a light blue silk ribbon in her hair—and they made together a picture of a kind he’d never seen before. There was, in the book she had, a line drawing of a ship, and there was another page with glue on the back (as on a postage stamp) and, on the front, parts of the ship in brilliant colors—primary red, blue, yellow, bright green—which one was meant to cut out and paste onto the drawing. He listened in a kind of daze to her voice as she told him her adventures at the hospital, deftly moving the scissors around the colorful shapes. It was a voice that seemed to him unbelievably lovely—soft, light, brimming with that southern warmth that made his nasal western New York accent plain as a fence post. And as he looked at the colors, the warmest he’d ever seen on paper, he thought—as warm as the red Missouri roads, the great, curious Midwestern trees—cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores—or Missouri’s bright cardinals—and listened to the voices of her parents in the next room—the same sweet accents, the same warmth and humor—abruptly, he began to cry. No sound, only tears. But her red-headed brother James looked up from the floor where he was playing and cried out with what seemed malicious glee but was perhaps in fact just surprise and embarrassment, “Buddy’s crying!” Buddy looked at Joan in alarm, not just ashamed but frightened, and saw that she was studying him, her face clouded. She said to her brother quietly, “Jimmy, you leave him alone.” He was in love with her, in short, though the word was one he would never have thought of. In love with her whole family, her world. Despite the odd care she took of him, he had no idea that she was also in love with him.
