by John Gardner
It came to her now that she’d been wrong about Dr. Bern. She said, perhaps only to see how it would sound, “Yes. I understand. I’ve been wrong. I’ll divorce him.” She was sick with grief and fear.
He was embarrassed and took his glasses off. “Perhaps,” he said.
For all his scorn of shrinks, Martin admitted ruefully that what his doctor had told her was perhaps true. But what of her, what of the children? she asked. “I’ll get to that,” he said, so grimly that she was frightened.
That year he accepted a one-semester position as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Detroit, and they met Paul. Paul wrote beautiful fiction, though it went nowhere, trailed off into a sorrow that made the plot unfinishable, the theme unresolvable. There seemed nothing he didn’t know and nothing that was of use. He could talk easily, brilliantly, of science, music, literature, art. He could tell, with dark humor like that of Martin’s uncle George, of things he’d seen in Viet Nam—how captured Viet Cong were pushed out of helicopters so that the one left would tell whatever trivia he knew, how joke-telling, freckle-faced kids became inhuman—a helicopter pilot with pink sunglasses with a piece of tape across one lens, another with a bushy black beard grown halfway down his chest, human bones for a bracelet, another who flew in a derby and tailcoat—could tell of small Buddhist girls in the hire of the U.S. Army, whose families had been murdered, no one knew by whom, and who sat, expressionless, typing out fraudulent reports of heroism, their faces expressionless, though sometimes, coolly, mechanically, they would reach up and wipe away a tear as other people wipe away dust or sleepiness. Paul Brotsky knew, in his own view, nothing, believed in nothing. Even to Martin his nihilism was frightening.
She said, “I’m in love with him, Martin. It’s insane. He’s just a child.”
“It’s all right,” he said.
She began to believe something was changing, it would perhaps be all right.
Sixteen
“There are no individual causes, no discrete effects,” Orrick wrote.
Martin Orrick had fled—“half unconsciously,” as his doctor said—to the only solid truth he could remember: the stormy, humid, narrow-minded, murderously potent Midwest. If it was an act of self-assertion, the first real act of self-assertion since his life had gone off orbit, it was also an act of self-resignation: as people capable of believing in God can resign themselves completely to the will of God, throwing away the compass, abandoning desire, acting spontaneously in response to a call as clear, if not as literal, as the one that came to Samuel in the middle of the night, so Martin abandoned himself to a place—a set of emotions, principles, if you like, translated into the solidity of red earth, low, angry mountains, huge, slow-moving rivers, cyclones, birds and snakes. The place—“wasted heart of the country,” Joan called it—did not fail him. The woman who would awaken him to the truth about his wife was inevitable there, and he would find there, also, the Ferndeans, who would recall him to himself.
When he moved from San Francisco to southern Missouri, the Ferndeans were away on sabbatical—actually one of the work-leaves John Ferndean took from time to time, just as Martin did. Now the Ferndeans came back to their farm just a few miles from Martin’s—John Ferndean, famous sculptor, his pretty, wildly energetic wife, and their beaming, noisy son, a year younger than Evan.
The first time Martin Orrick met them at a party he picked a fight with the sculptor, scoffed at him for riding to the hounds in a red coat because fox hunting, to Martin, was snobbery and fakery. (In all his life Martin had known only one person who’d ever ridden to the hounds—a tall, elegant lady who borrowed large sums of money which she never returned, and painted large pastel pictures of toilets.) But the sculptor, who’d grown up in England, was real, and he was a marvellous horseman—far better than Martin, who had the seat of an Indian but had never been trained—and he was also a truly extraordinary sculptor, teacher, husband and, perhaps above all, father. Like Martin, he’d come to this place because he loved it. (To be precise, he’d come for one semester as visiting artist from the Royal Academy of Art in London, and had at once bought a farm and settled in.) “Far as ye can see, lad, this land’s all mine—though not on paper, me attorney claims.” Though he stopped for red lights, he was no more than Martin a man bound by trivial rules. If his life was stable, conventional, “moral” (to use a word Martin Orrick describes in one of his novels as “obscene and despicable”), it was all those things by his free and conscious choice. In the life of John Ferndean, to put the matter briefly, Martin Orrick found rules he could approve of.
They rode together often, and sometimes Joan and the sculptor’s wife and all the children rode with them. (Ferndean took a month to get Mary and Evan riding like dragoons.) Temporarily freed from pain by Dr. Krassner’s operation, Joan Orrick could ride with pleasure now, and she learned, with some amazement, how beautiful the countryside was—fog in the hollows, deer poised like listening spirits on the hills, groves full of dogwood trees and waterfalls, and suddenly, when you least expected it, the wide, rolling river, circling eagles overhead. They counted rare species of butterfly, sang what they called horse operas, and after they got back ate lamb or wild goose, and Joan told stories that made everyone roar with laughter, or the sculptor’s wife told stories of life in South Africa (with many an “Achh, Huttt!”), or Martin and the sculptor talked earnestly, boomingly, of the principles of art, told jokes, played loud games, fiercely argued politics or education or religion, always both of them on the same side. The world grew warmer, healthier, it seemed to Martin—became, mysteriously, more beautiful. The two families took trips together—Mexico, England, Italy, and filled their houses with memory-packed junk. They all became, quite literally and quite perceptibly, more handsome. Even when they were tired, the children almost never fought. They made rambling, magnificent sand castles looking out at the Mediterranean, Martin and John Ferndean working alongside them, inspiring them to greater intricacy and nobler scale, and as they worked through the long, hot afternoon, the people around them—first children, then adults—Italians, Yugoslavs, and impoverished Englishmen—joined the effort one by one until for half a mile the beach was fortified. (“Look, Daddy,” Dennis Ferndean said, “that man’s peeing right into the Mediterranean!” “Nothing strange about that,” John Ferndean said, grinning, his shaggy eyebrows lifted, “standing so close like that, ’ow could he miss?” The children played bobby in Regents Park, built tree houses at home, painted, made clay figures, began learning to play musical instruments, held kite parties and badminton tournaments, played endlessly—though a stranger might have thought them too old for such things—with their innumerable stuffed animals and Legos. The two families, with all their friends, made an endless slapstick movie, in which the sculptor played the dashingly handsome hero and the dogs and horses (Joan Orrick observed) had all the best lines.
Time passed—a year, then another and another—and the Orricks were, much of the time, happy. If Martin Orrick didn’t actively love his wife, he could forget, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, his conviction that, essentially, she hated him. Joan blossomed, even fell in love with Martin’s mountains, as she called them, though there was something more suitable to her nature somewhere else, she knew, though she did not pine for it. Besides, now that Martin was making so much money—he’d had, by this time, three best-sellers—they could take off a semester for writing and travel where they pleased: the mountains were no longer a trap. She could sometimes believe for weeks and weeks, even though she was now in pain again, that the world had grown healthy, buzzingly alive, charged with that deep, jungle-rich Midwestern light she’d known in her childhood. She persuaded Martin that they should spend six months in Geneva, the next year six months in Paris, and the next full year in England. There Evan became a magician in earnest and it was there, too, that he began his work on photography—learning by the book, as he did everything, photographing not people or landscapes—except, of course, when his mother
insisted—but mainly dead leaves, cigarettes against a curb, the nostrils of a young giraffe at the London Zoo. Mary began playing the cello and writing poems and stories, sitting opposite where her father wrote, at the kitchen table in their Regents Park apartment beside the canal. When the music teacher at her school was taken ill, Mary went at once to the headmistress and said, with great seriousness and—after six weeks in London—an English accent as impeccable as any English child’s, that her mother was an excellent music teacher, in fact she’d once won the California Teacher of the Year Award.
“Is that so, Mary,” the headmistress said, tilting forward with interest. She was a spiffy lady who wore slacks and bright chokers and fine old rings which suggested that her family was well off.
“California is one of our largest states, actually,” Mary said.
“That’s very impressive indeed, I must say,” said the headmistress.
That afternoon the incomparable Mr. Lyman, second in command on the music front—ha HAH!—in flamenco boots and black trousers so tight he could barely bend his knees, his hair silver-white, though he hadn’t yet reached forty, his fingers aflutter in a way that in America would instantly have pegged him a raving homosexual (he had, in fact, not the slightest inclination), arrived at their apartment with a huge bouquet: “I have come, my dear lady, to seduce you if I can. —Oh, excuse me. I take it you’re Mary’s father? —Ah, madam!” And away he flew toward the livingroom, and Martin Orrick, unshaven, papers in one hand, a bottle of Whitbread’s Ale in the other, gazed after him. “Mrs. Orrick, I presume?” Mr. Lyman said, and bowed grandly and handed her the flowers. “I have come, my dear lady, to seduce you if I can.” In short, she was hired to teach music.
Winter came, and snow. Evan rode the underground to Rutherford School in a tailcoat and top hat, practicing card tricks—in his vest, a magic wand. Mr. Pringle came, mornings, in his horse-drawn milk cart to leave milk in glass bottles. When Mary spoke American it sounded like a clever but distinctly English imitation. Martin, climbing in through an upstairs window when he was so drunk he could hardly have stood on solid ground, fell two storeys into a rock pile and broke his leg. Spring came. He walked with a cane. Joan was composing now, as well as teaching. String quartets for children; then, as she grew confident, music for older people. Martin sat writing in the sunlit kitchen, hour after hour, for all the world like some smooth-running, bleary-eyed, and shaggy machine. Sometimes he would turn and stare for a while at the grass and flowers or the dark mirror-surface of the Regents Park canal. Sometimes he’d go walking, late at night, and would stare, heavy-hearted as a caged bear in rut, at the girls on passing buses. For the first time in his life he attended a pornographic movie. It made him sad, merely. Joan would come in from her work sparkling, that long, red glistening hair electric, tits high, as if she were in a perpetual state of arousal, as perhaps she was. “Baby,” she would say, kissing his bewhiskered cheek as he sat at the typewriter, “come fuck me.” He would obey.
Paul Brotsky came to visit and stayed three months. She became still more beautiful, more terrifying. He—Martin—would stand, big-shouldered, long-haired, baggy-eyed, slightly fat, morosely watching as they went briskly down the sidewalk, Paul and Joan—and frequently Evan and Mary—on their way to Harrod’s to get groceries and flowers, and he’d be so filled with sorrow he could barely get his breath. Not jealousy, not the faintest flicker of that, or so he told himself. He loved Paul Brotsky very nearly as he loved the other three. But loss, the loss of his whole life. He remembered how, when they were young, when he was teaching at Oberlin, he’d looked at her as if from an enormous distance—as a ghost might have looked at her, incapable of making himself known to her—had studied, feature by feature, her beauty, and had wished in a kind of agony that he could buy her fine clothes, beautiful jewels before her beauty passed. Lying beside her, touching her breasts, the splendid hollows on each side just above her pubic hair—as fiery red as the hair above: he could not touch it, ever in his life, without seeing its miraculous color in his mind—moving his hand lower, closing his fingers on her crotch, magnificently firm and as square as a box, he had wanted to weep at the waste of such beauty, such nobility beyond his means. She slept on. She’d been concertizing then, flying in and out, making just enough money to pay for the plane trips but loving what she did, and getting good reviews. Except at parties, he almost never saw her when she wasn’t too tired to talk, or else asleep. He couldn’t write when she was practicing, so she practiced over at the music building—went there early in the morning, before he was awake—and if they met for lunch, there was nothing much to say. He had never been talkative, and her talk was anecdotal, and no anecdotes are formed in a concert pianist’s practice room. So he would lie beside her, touching her as she slept, and when she grew moist under his fingertips he would gently part her legs and make love to her, hungry and sorrowful, wondering if she was really asleep. Sometimes, sitting in a concert hall in some city near enough that he could go too, watching her play—her head thrown back as if defiantly, striking the keys with such controlled violence you’d have sworn it was a powerful man you were hearing (but her hair flowed down her back, dazzling, and the sheath she wore, metallic blue, split open to show the sweet cleavage between her breasts)—or her head lowered almost to the keys of the piano, tipped sideways, listening as if hungrily to pianissimo notes flying by like summer rain—he would feel, besides pride—oh, unspeakable pride!—a kind of horror at the thought that that woman was his wife. He had thought all that would change, once he himself grew famous. He imagined himself getting letters from adoring readers in Dallas or, say, Binghamton, New York, imagined college girls coming up to him after readings, Joan looking on with timid love. But it was the dream of a fool. He would indeed get the letters, and college girls would indeed come up to him and make love with their eyes; but she was the strong one, and would always be. She was, as some fool would at some point say to him, learning that he was the husband of Joan Frazier—she was, as the fool said, “dynamite.” As he would write, in one of his earlier novels, only slightly disguising his dire situation, “Have you tried making love, my friend, to a famous violinist? Your member, though so grand you sometimes step on it, can be nothing in comparison to her trembling, plunging bow. Though you touch her with the gentleness of the Angel Raphael, Mendelssohn was there before you, and Mozart and Bartók, and, my friend, you will never compete.” He watched them walking down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, Paul Brotsky swaggering, full of youth and good humor, almost comically square-shouldered and mighty of chest (“Shall we speak, tiresomely,” Martin Orrick would write, “of beautiful noses? Philip Baratovich had a beautiful nose: exactly the right size and shape and color, so perfect one almost didn’t notice at first, and arching out above it on either side, with Russian abandon, two perfect black eyebrows on a forehead worth more than all Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Beethoven’s quartets, or—let us speak recklessly, for Art is Art—the Wisdom of the Bible. He also had large, yet elegant feet. His teeth, however—for which I thank God—had imperfections.”), Joan glowing in his company—there was some ad Martin Orrick had read one time in the New Yorker, which, needless to say, he hated—an ad for shirts or ties or something—that said, “Your man is your most important accessory”—and Paul Brotsky was that, and not just physically. The children were laughing at some joke of Paul’s, Evan with his blond head majestically thrown back, his camera swinging from his shoulder strap, Mary laughing in a way that made her suddenly American again.
And he felt, on one hand, that his work, his passions, his sickness had made all this possible, and it was good, supremely beautiful; and felt, on the other hand, utterly, tragically separate, cut off. He felt in his bones Camus’s image of the man who sees the world through a glass, through which no sound can pierce. On the street, marching gaily toward the bus stop, the very Platonic image of joy, vitality; in his heart, suicidal blackness. (Once, downtown, he met his former love Neva. She was fat
now, but still, in his eyes, beautiful and good. They embraced, clumsily, and had tea together. She gave him, furtively, her London address. That night he went walking, intending to go to her, but instead, for some reason, he went into a pub. He awakened the next morning in his own garden, his crutches beside him, his face scratched and bruised. He had a feeling—but he couldn’t remember—that he’d tried to kill himself.) They had said, “You want to go to Harrod’s, Martin?” “No, you go,” he’d said. “I sort of feel like working.” They reached the bus stop, and Mary stood with her head cocked, pointing her finger at Paul, saying something that Martin couldn’t hear. Joan made a swooping rush at her, like an eagle or a witch, and everybody laughed. Tears filled Martin’s eyes and he whispered in the doorway, “Dear God, somebody please help me.”
Two weeks later the Ferndeans arrived in England. Martin Orrick quit writing and spent all his time going to museums, studios, parties with John. All he would remember clearly, afterward, was that one afternoon, sitting in the apartment the Ferndeans had rented, a jazzy little place that made you laugh at first sight of it—Victorian grandiose in a ten-by-ten room—he’d said, “Damn it all, John, that cough of yours is really disgusting. You’ve got to quit smoking those cigarettes. Take a pipe.” And he’d given him the pipe he was smoking. “Pipe?” John Ferndean said, with that wonderful cockney innocence he could put on. “Say now, there’s a bitta class!”
They learned at the end of their stay in England that John had lung cancer. Back in southern Missouri, they saw each other almost every night. They never talked about death unless John Ferndean brought it up. However, they talked about it regularly, because, in a way, it was a rare opportunity: Martin Orrick was a writer of the first rank, and John Ferndean an artist so good he could never be tricked by the faintest breath of sentimentality. It became, between them, an unspoken pact that John would tell Martin every flicker of feeling that came over him. What they learned was, finally, that there was nothing to say: that the single most striking fact about dying was that it was embarrassing. People behaved strangely toward a dying man, and the dying man became—with full awareness and humor, in the case of John Ferndean—paranoid. “One of the things ye do, lad, when yer dying, is you worry about money.” And grinned. And: “It’s like dogshit ye can’t get off yer shoe.” And: “It’s a curious thing. I’m the healthiest man I ever knew, except for this cancer.”
