Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  “I thought you were going to be a shepherd,” Paul said, mock-sternly.

  “Only in the summer,” Evan said, still smiling.

  Mary said, not looking up from her book, “Vous êtes un schnozz.”

  In his mind, absently—watching Paul move back to the large, round white formica table where his own glass waited—Martin played out the dramatic possibilities. Young man falls desperately in love with red-headed lady; she returns his love; her husband, the man with the yellow-silver hair, is insanely jealous. Despite the terror and grief of the children, helplessly drawn on by their violent passions … A plot for fools, unfortunately, or at any rate a plot for a duller, therefore more dramatic cast. They were in love already, the red-headed lady and the young man now pouring a martini for himself. In love but as cautious and dignified as characters out of James. They talked to each other twice a week on the phone, when he had to be away at his office in Detroit. Nor was their love less scrupulous, less Jamesean, for the fact that when he could come for a visit they slept together from time to time, or sometimes the three of them slept together. Though it might have been shocking to someone somewhere, or excitingly kinky to some fool somewhere else, it was nothing you could make a movie of. They were as careful of one another, when the three were together, as the Flying Wallendas on the high wire; and their sexual pleasures were ordinary, mundane. Mostly, in fact, they sat side by side smoking and drinking martinis and told stories of their childhood or talked about books and articles they’d read or people they knew, or they simply joked, putting on accents and gestures like curious old coats at the Goodwill:

  “Herman, how come you don’t get in the whaleboat?”

  “Have you considered, Captain, that from time to time when the soul looks out at the rough, anarchic sea—”

  “Herman, the others are all in the whaleboat. If you’d join us, if you’d just kindly step into the whaleboat—”

  “Aye, Captain, if I’d just! But what argument, I ask you, has the heart of poor miserable man with the mighty Leviathans of the deep? What cause for dispute, what unanswerable insult—”

  “This particular leviathan is escaping, Herman.”

  “Go in peace, then, says I. Let ’im squint a while longer at the antique obscurities—bask off Calcutta, for all I care!—ponder with that half-ton brain for another three decades or so the malevolence of this world and its miraculous bornings. Little good it’ll do him, that’s my opinion, and maybe a good deal more harm than Mr. Kirk’s harpoon.”

  “Please, just get in the fucking Goddamn boat.”

  “Hell no, Captain! How do I know it don’t leak?”

  “It’s been inspected. —Mr. Barret, is it not the case that you inspected this boat just this morning?”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Exactly! And did it leak?”

  “No sir, not to speak of.”

  “You see, Herman? Look, I’m a patient man. I’m the patientest captain—”

  “What if I get sick?”

  “Herman, we got pails, we got whaler’s hats, we got the whole Goddamn motherfucking ocean.”

  “Captain?”

  “Well?”

  “I quit.”

  If they hurt each other’s feelings, Paul Brotsky and the Orricks, they did it because they’d drunk too much, and when it happened they apologized quickly and seriously and, as soon as possible, put it behind them. They were useless characters to prove theories by, or to stimulate pious shock or stir up pleasantly unwholesome titillation. For fiction they were, in short, worthless, like two somewhat moody old brothers and their mostly cheerful, mostly spritely old sister in some deteriorating farmhouse in New Hampshire. What Martin Orrick evaded or stubbornly refused to do or at best did ineptly, Paul Brotsky did easily and with pleasure—repairs around the house, shopping errands, above all, talk with Joan. She loved simply talking—talk about everything and nothing. Martin by nature made earnest speeches—noisy rhetoric to which he was only for the moment committed—or he said nothing, comfortably thinking his own thoughts or, more precisely, sinking into his own empty trance, his normal dull swing of alpha waves, his mind becoming like an abandoned airport in flattest Oklahoma with the slow-wheeling searchlight left running. He was glad to have her present—or the children or Paul—but quick to grow impatient and irritable when she or anyone just talked, that is, chatted idly, interested—like her father or her uncle John Elmer—in life’s dwarfs and car wrecks, its diurnal trivia, all that Martin Orrick had severed his heart from long since. Part of what made Paul Brotsky exceptional was his gift for talking with either or both of them, drawing Martin out by casual mention of theories in which Martin had at least trifling interest, since they might prove matters of lasting importance—the universe as doughnut with holes leaking Time, or split-brain psychology, or Baxter’s psychic plants—and keeping Joan in the conversation because, unlike Martin, he enjoyed her quips (Martin would for the most part simply register them, like a computer keeping more or less faithful count but rarely exploding into laughter) and because, also, Paul understood and partly sympathized with her indifference to the ultimate truth Martin Orrick had no faith in but was forever in quest of.

  “Oh, come on, Martin,” Paul said now, playfully, though with a touch of irritation. “You’re always saying, ‘Ah woe, life’s worthless.’ If you really don’t take any pleasure in all this”—he waved, taking in the room, the big house behind it, the woods and hills, perhaps the stars—“you should give it to my brother Frank.”

  “That’s true, you got me,” Martin said, and smiled. “I like it all. I should be happy.”

  “Glanted, of course,” Paul added, leaning forward—and suddenly his smile, his squint, his bow were to the last inch Chinese—“having nice house and good famiry is not rike getting Vradivostok back from filthy Russians.”

  “Exactry!” Martin said and bowed.

  Joan smiled too, but she was in pain tonight, so that her mood was sombre, slightly cranky. “Martin, what is it you really think you want? What is it you think we’re keeping you from?”

  “It’s not you,” he said, and though even in his own ears the words sounded doubtful, he meant it, more or less. It was not her fault that, as he was noticing when she spoke, the color of the chlorinated water in the pool was an affront to nature, as repulsive as painted lips and fingernails, or worse in fact, since it was not only artificial but also phony pure. So should he pour in filth from the horse pond? Introduce frogs, dark sacks of mosquito eggs?

  “Then what’s missing?” she insisted. “What is it you think you want?”

  He looked at her, pretending to be daydreaming. That was more and more his way, he’d begun to notice—more and more his stock evasion tactic. She was watching him with her eyebrows lowered, and it seemed to him for a moment that she was trying to make him explain what it was that she desired, why she, too, was dissatisfied. Perhaps even Paul, busily lighting his thousandth cigarette, his eyes on the match, was waiting, masking an unreasonable hope. Martin Orrick could have told them in an instant what they needed, in point of fact: a life of service, self-sacrifice. But they wouldn’t have believed him, or, simple as it was, wouldn’t have understood, would have resisted him on grounds of style, the grounds on which poor stupid human beings make all their most important choices, judging presidents by their grammar, philosophers by their gall; they would have thrown up reasonable, unanswerable objections—some unanswerable because too stupid and cynical to be worthy of an answer (however right the objections, from a computer’s point of view, or an English-speaking spider’s), some unanswerable because a trifle too profound, hinting at the central debilitator of the age, the dark, spinning hole at the core of things, the emptiness hurling all their reasonings outward, faster and faster, toward the final fsst of das absolute Wissen, the punchline no one would hang around for.

  “My desires are simple,” he said, too cheerfully, raising his glass. “Happiness, eternal life for everybody, an interestin
g adventure.”

  “These things we expecting next week,” Paul said, Jewish. “Today we got fresh-baked bagels.”

  They laughed, including the children, looking over from their books. Martin listened to the laughter, his own and the others, and gazed out at the pool.

  Paul blew out smoke, rubbed the ash from his cigarette on the ceramic ashtray, then quickly put the cigarette back in his mouth and drew on it, as if breathing without the cigarette had become difficult for him. He said, “I had an adventure once, when I was younger.”

  “Really?” Joan said.

  He nodded, serious. “One time we were at home alone, and my brother Frank sucked my eye out.”

  Martin coughed up part of his martini, laughing. “You’re kidding! ” he said. Joan was laughing too, blushing as her father would.

  Paul was solemn. “Nope. He really did. He ran over next door and got the neighbors and they pushed it back in.”

  “Jesus!” Martin said, laughing.

  “Lucky you were in good with your neighbors,” Joan said.

  The scene leaped up before them and Martin became, instantly, the irritable neighbor. “Your ring my doorbell one more time, you kid, and I warn you, I’m calling the cops!”

  “Please, Mr. Karinsky,” Paul Brotsky whined, wringing his hands and cowering, “ya gotta help me! I sucked my brother’s eye out.”

  “You got a big mouth, you lousy kid.”

  Joan said sweetly, playing Mrs. Karinsky, “You sucked his eye out?”

  “We was just kiddin around like, and fwupp, out it came.”

  “You didn’t swallow it, I hope.”

  “Oh no, ma’am, it’s still hangin in there, like.”

  “How did it taste?”

  “I don’t know. Salty. Like a oyster.”

  “Ethel, you gonna stand here talkin with this fart? He sucks his brother’s eye out, that’s his business. Git home, kid, before I sic the dog on ya.”

  “But sir, please, sir, my little brother needs help.”

  “I ain’t no eye doctor. Shit, I ain’t even a fireman.”

  “I wonder what an eye would taste like cooked.”

  “God damn it, Ethel, you start goormay cooking people’s eyes and that’s definitely it, it’s over, I’m movin in with my sister Claire.”

  “It was just a thought.”

  “Mr. Karinsky, if you help me I’ll mow your lawn for you free. I’ll wash your car. Also your storm windows, and put up the screens.”

  “Like hell you will. The first time you find me asleep in my hammock, fwupp!”

  “Was it very salty? How big was it, exactly?” She leaned toward him with a witchy sweet smile. “Little boy, let me whisper in your ear.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “FWUPP! FWUPP!”

  They laughed a while longer, drunk enough that anything might seem funny. Then, except for the record-player, the room was silent. Steam hung over the swimming pool. When there was a pause in the music, Martin could hear the drone of the television the children had left on, hours ago, upstairs. Ours but to reason why, he thought all at once, for no reason.

  No, no movie here, he thought, no novel. Maybe a photograph, a painting, a piece of music, since photographs and paintings dealt with isolated instants, not the dizzying swirl of all Time and Space, and music made mention of grandiose desires and glorious satisfactions, or tragic disappointments (equally of interest) without naming them. No such luck for the poor fool novel—or the brain’s right lobe; a stupid art, in fact, from the spiritual point of view of those nobler arts. Unless, of course, one ducked the whole business of the novelist for wild-man characters with windblown beards and eyes like sapphires, people whose hearts swelled with love or rage or the hunger for revenge, with none of the usual ambivalence or dreary simple-mindedness, people who moved among towering crags or dark, antique, brown-fog-filled cities, creeping or brawling their way through plots hung thick with suspense and metaphysical implication, all hedged and fenced or hurled into the world like a Mississippi flood by mincing or bellowing rhetoric. He’d written such novels and would no doubt write more of them. But they left him angry, dissatisfied. Why shouldn’t a man’s life develop reasonably, like a plot, with choices along the way, and antagonists with names, and some grand, compelling purpose, and a ringing final line? But he knew, no one better, that the question was foolish. All art, even music, is invented from scratch, has nothing to do with birds or the rumble of thunder. The urge to make art discover truth was a childish, wrongheaded urge, as his friend Bill Gass kept crabbily insisting in article after article for The New York Review, as if hoping if he said it enough he’d at last grow resigned to it. Well, not Martin Orrick. It filled him with the rage of a hurt rhinoceros—though he’d admit it was true—that human consciousness had no business in the world, that the world was its relative only by accident, and a relative no more friendly than Joan’s sunken-eyed, long-black-bearded, snarling uncle Zack. Writing his fiction, struggling for hours to get a gesture just right, or to translate into English the exact sound of the first large drops of an August rain on a burdock leaf, he would look up suddenly with a heart full of anger and a belly full of acid from too much black coffee, too many hours at his pipe, remembering again that all he so tirelessly struggled for was false from its engendering: he was tortuously authenticating by weight of detail, by linguistic sleight-of-wit, actions that never took place on this earth since Time began and never would, never could. Nature’s love stories had nothing to do with those novelists make up; nature’s suspense has no meaning beyond the obvious, that that which is mindlessly, inexorably coming has, for better or worse, not yet arrived. It was finally the same in all the arts, no doubt: all composers wrote country dances, all painters made their names on descents from the cross. If they broke with tradition, seized truth by the throat, they ended up mere oddities, bold revealers not of truth but of their personal quirks, painters of pictures at their best under black lights, writers of endless metaphysical novels in baby talk. Tradition doomed you, escape doomed you, and straddling the charging horns of a dilemma was a patently bad idea.

  The children were asleep, their blond heads fallen toward one another, their books in their legs. Paul was mixing a martini in the pitcher. The music had gone off.

  He carefully relit his pipe, then said, “Once when I was teaching at San Francisco State I had an interesting student. She was middle-aged or so, from New Orleans. It was a class in creative writing and I was talking for some reason about astrology. To make my students wake up more to differences in character, I think. Anyway, I was busy disclaiming any interest in whether or not astrological theory was true, arguing merely that reading descriptions of the various types would help them to notice more things about people, and this middle-aged student said—her name was Myrtle Payne—‘You can always tell what sign a person was bone undah, you know, once you’ve gotten acquainted with them.’ I said, of course, ‘Mm, yes,’ politely. Except for San Francisco hippies and teachers who wanted to be their friends, nobody in those days would flat-out admit he believed in astrology. Except my uncle George, maybe; but for his opinions I had a special box. —But she wouldn’t let it go. She was a very nice lady, an ex-schoolteacher—dressed and talked like any other clean, middle-aged, intelligent southern schoolteacher—and I’d never seen a sign before that night that she might be slightly bonkers. She said—we were halfway through the semester at the time—‘For instance, I b’lieve I could guess the sign of almost everone in this room.’ I thought we were in for an embarrassing situation, but what could I do? I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Would you like me to try?’ she said. ‘You’re a Cancer, of course.’ And she told me what it meant to be a Cancer.

  “Crazy as it sounds, she went through the whole class—maybe twelve, fifteen kids. I missed half of it, trying all the time to figure out how she’d done it, that is, how she’d gotten ahold of all our birth dates—not that she named the exact day. Anyway, I was wrong, I think now. She really knew
. John Napper could do it too.”

  Paul nodded. He’d stayed with them for a few weeks in London and had seen John Napper often. He said, “And his brother Pat had that horoscope description of his son, remember?”

  Martin glanced at him. “I’d forgotten you saw that.” It had been made a few days after the child was born, then put away, unread, in a bank for six years. It was like witchcraft. He raised his drink, just tasted it, thinking. Joan was leaning back into her pillows, eyes closed. He said, “I read about you, my Virgo friend. Or Joan or the kids or—” He let it trail off; then: “It’s mildly uncanny. I know all the arguments against it. They read like the French Academy’s debunking of hypnotism. For instance, the argument that what influences a child born in the northern hemisphere couldn’t influence one born in the southern, which is sort of like saying that mustard gas can kill you only if you’re facing it. Anyway, I no longer resist it. I’m as ruled from outside as any character in a book, and not just physically, like Newton’s cannonball, but ruled where it matters most. I don’t like it much, but it makes it hard for me to look at, for instance, the Winged Victory and solemnly resolve to change my life.”

  Paul Brotsky blew out smoke, tamping out his cigarette, and reached, mechanical as a German clockmaker’s piano player, for another. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think people can change.”

  “Maybe,” Martin said.

  Joan opened her eyes, turned her head from side to side, then smiled. “I must’ve been asleep,” she said. As she sat forward she winced, seemed to go pale. She took a deep breath, then got up. “Anybody hungry?” she said.

  “Sure,” Paul said, “always. I’ll help you.”

  She shook her head—harder than necessary, shaking her hair out. “No, you sit still and let Martin talk to you.”

  They laughed. When she’d left them, turning on the light in the music room as she passed and moving on into the kitchen, they sat silent for two or three minutes, thinking, probably, the same thoughts. At last Martin said, “Not just the stars, and I don’t mean, God knows, that there’s some wonderful plan. But we’re boxed in from every direction. It shouldn’t matter, I know—only fools or drunks even talk about it. Decent people just live it out, like bees. Tell jokes, play games, go to work in the morning, get drunk again at night—”