by John Gardner
When he learned that he had cancer, already metastasized, he still had the rippling, overdeveloped muscles of a sculptor and horseman. His voice was a little rough, and his cough was constant—dry, casual, more like a mannerism than like a serious cough—but no one would have dreamed he wouldn’t live to a good ninety. Or rather, no one but Evan would have dreamed. Evan read, religiously, the books handed down from Martin’s uncle George. Who knows why—(there are no individual causes, no discrete effects)—he believed absolutely what he read in those books. The books about horsemanship had been true to the last word; the books about magic had proved infallible—even he, the most helplessly clumsy incompetent in the world, as he viewed himself, could do tricks that amazed his family and made even John Napper, who was really a magician, beam with pleasure. And so he had accepted without question what he read in Uncle George’s books about palmistry, and when he read, for the first time, John Ferndean’s palm, one afternoon in London, he looked at the lifeline and felt suddenly dizzy, terrified, as if the earth had swung off course. His eyes flushed with tears, and he couldn’t think what to say. Nadine Ferndean said, leaning hard toward him, a Taurus, a woman of mysterious psychic energy—as he knew because once he’d held a coin suspended from a string above her head, and it had spun wildly, exactly as it did when he held it above Dennis Ferndean’s head—“Tell us about the lifeline.” He’d sucked in his breath and said laughing, scared to death, “According to his lifeline he should be dead by now.” All of them had laughed, but Nadine had leaned hard at John Ferndean, saying—who knows what it meant?—“You see, John, you see?”
John Ferndean said to Martin: “I can’t help feeling I asked for it. It’s hard to believe you got no control whatever. I read these Indian mystics, and when they tell me a man dies by choice, I believe ’em. But ye know, it’s peculiar. I wake up in the mornin, and the sun’s shinin in, and I jump out of bed like a cockerel off ’is roost. I never knew anybody that liked getting up more than I do. I run out and feed the horses, and ye’d think I got some kind of electricity in me pants.” He grinned. Dying had no effect on his grin. “You, now, lad, if ye woke up dead some mornin it’d make you a Christian. ‘Praise God’s mercy,’ ye’d say.”
Martin Orrick would remember, mainly, one image. The Ferndeans came to supper, and Dennis and his mother came blazing in, noisy as a cyclone, faces shining, eyes wide. Martin walked out onto the pillared front porch to meet John. He wasn’t there yet. It was a night without stars, no light but the yellow light coming from the house and, out by the barn, the bluish white light of the security lamp. Then, in the darkness around the huge old maple, he saw John Ferndean coming, slowly, carefully, like an old, old man. He had the huge sculptor’s body he’d always had, the same wildly, generously curling hair; but cobalt treatments had made his stomach bad, and his muscles, for all their size, were no longer in tune. He came through the darkness cautiously, sadly, and it seemed he might have come to Martin Orrick’s views. But then, coming out of his absentminded daze, he grinned and said, “Hey, lad,” as if they’d all survive.
It was a ghastly time, and not the least of its horror was that Martin was soberly, desperately, in love, and much as he’d have liked to have kept that fact from his dying friend, it was a secret impossible to keep. Joan, recognizing a threat more serious than any she’d ever had to deal with before, fought more ferociously than usual to hold him. The scenes at the Orrick house became monstrous. Once, when he was so drunk he couldn’t walk ten feet without lurching and falling but insisted, all the same, that he was going to Sarah, Joan hit him on the head with a fireplace log, hoping to save him by knocking him out (also, as she’d readily admit, she was furious, half-crazy with jealousy). The sharp edge of the split log cut deep, but Martin chose, that night, to be indestructible. He turned and slugged her in the face with all his might—her cheek, the next day, would be enormously swollen, so that her eye was squeezed shut, and the whole right side of her face blue-black—and then, in a daze, blood rushing down his face and the side of his head, he ran out to the truck he’d bought just two weeks before and headed it down the driveway, the big Alsatian on the seat beside him. Because he was dazed, he couldn’t remember where Sarah Fenton lived—couldn’t remember her name in fact, though his heart ached for her kindness, her strange, all-forgiving reasonableness—and so he simply drove, urgently, on and on, crazily hunting. When he came to himself, he was in Indianapolis. Perhaps it was his parents in New York State that he’d meant to run to. He stopped for gas—he’d no doubt stopped before, but he couldn’t remember—and while the attendant filled the tank, Martin went into the men’s room and saw, in amazement, how he looked, caked blood on his forehead and running down the sides of his nose, his hair stiff and messy, his chin darkly stubbled. He washed the blood off, as well as he could, then grimly marched back to the truck, paid for the gas, and turned around, heading back toward Missouri. He’d reached his decision. He would end the marriage, choose Sarah; but first he would wait out John Ferndean’s death and would take John’s family and his own to Spain as he’d promised to do. It would be a fitting conclusion, a natural breaking point. He had no doubt that the decision was right, though the thought of losing his children made the tears run gushing down his cheek. As for Joan, he had no love left for her, he thought. It had finally happened, what he’d expected for years: she’d tried to kill him. “That’s not right,” Joan said hours later, weeping, “I was trying to knock you out. I was trying to save you.” And he realized in guilty confusion that no doubt that was true. Nevertheless, he told her his decision. “Martin,” she said, “don’t do it. Please.” He said dully, icily, “It’s done already.”
Joan searched wildly for a way to defend herself, make him see sense, make him understand that she still loved him. She knew well enough that Sarah had the odds. Sarah was “reasonable,” “instinctively just,” he said. Oh yes. Terrific. “She can afford to be,” she snapped. “She’s not your wife.” But with every word she spoke, though it was all true, she knew she was burying her chances more deeply, because Sarah was, in Martin’s experience, gentle and reasonable; steadily, ploddingly, unfailingly. With her every attempt to save the marriage, Joan made the contrast between them, she knew, more obvious.
“She’s cunning, Martin,” she said. Then, trying to be fair, knowing his childish and unreasonable love of fairness at any cost, she added, “Maybe she doesn’t even know it herself, but she’s cunning: she’s after you, seducing you with talk and that horrible macrobiotic cooking, talking about only the things she knows you like—”
That, he could have told her, was not true. Sarah talked endlessly of health foods and exercises, which bored him to tears—though he was inclined to believe her theories about eating; at any rate, the nervous stomach that had plagued him all his life no longer troubled him when he stopped eating meat. Neither was it true, as Joan insisted, that he loved her because she was younger, prettier. She was only five years younger than Joan, and in everything she did she was as slow as an old woman. Sitting in her small house watching her cook, or watching her type one of his manuscripts, he was driven wild by the deliberateness with which she did everything, as if she expected life to go on forever. But he could put up with that. She was not, certainly, prettier than Joan; but her fundamental goodness and gentleness gave her a beauty Joan could not at that time match, in Martin’s eyes, and she commented on his fiction in a way no one had ever done before, naively treating his characters as actual people, urging him to see in them virtues he’d missed, persuading him to be kinder about their faults. She was uninterested in possessions—she owned practically nothing—but she had taste, an innate sense of what was solid and good, that Joan, in his opinion, lacked. She gave him a beautiful hundred-year-old clock, the most beautiful he’d ever seen. It made everything in his house seem to him trashy, quick and easy. He did not, of course, tell Joan where the clock had come from; but Joan had an infallible sense for these things. For all its beauty—lovingly
fashioned; firm, heavy wood; antique, wavy glass—the clock lasted just three weeks. That she could destroy such a thing astounded him. It was more shocking than her hitting him on the head with a log. He remembered what he’d put out of his mind for years, that when they were first married she’d “remodeled” a beautiful old chest his parents had given them—had sawed off the legs and put on idiotic handles. He was surer than ever that he must leave her right after the trip to Spain, start his life all over. He told Sarah his intention, as he’d told Joan.
“If it happens, I’ll be a good wife,” Sarah said.
“It will,” he said firmly.
She kissed his hand. She wanted it to happen, wanted to believe him. But it was a fact that when he went on reading trips, it was Joan he took with him, and the children. Under her mask of serenity, she was annoyed, timidly suspicious. Because he was honest when he talked about Joan—honest about her humor, her fears, her talent—Sarah understood she wouldn’t get him without a fight, for all his protestation. She hesitated—characteristically. It would be enough, she told herself, if they could just be lovers. But lying on the pallet beside him, moonlight streaming in, she would study his sleeping face, puffy from too much drinking, and tough under her fingertips—like the face of anyone who drank too much milk, ate too much meat—but nevertheless a good face, well constructed, phrenologically the face of a man who would die old if he could learn moderation, learn to slow down, and she knew it would not be enough for her merely to be his lover. She wanted him as, so far as she could remember, she’d never wanted anything, and wanted children by him. “Yes, she will make me fight for you,” she said. He opened his eyes and she smiled. She hadn’t meant for him to overhear. But she saw that he was still asleep, even though he looked at her. “Well then,” she whispered, and her eyes slightly narrowed, “I will fight.”
She cooked for him, when he came to her, as she’d never cooked before. She’d been well trained, and at each new taste she introduced him to he would say, staring at his chopsticks, “That’s amazing!” She typed for him half the night, not very accurately, but working till her fingers ached and she could hardly see. She massaged him, taught him Do-in, convinced him that he was magnificent, drunk or sober, happy or sad, played him her tapes of gypsy music, sometimes played piano or guitar for him, and again and again, though when they’d first become lovers he’d occasionally been impotent, made love to him. She was an artist on the pallet; she could make anyone believe he was the world’s greatest lover. But she knew, also, how to talk to him, usually, or so she believed, and it was partly true. It was by talk, in fact, that she’d attracted him in the first place, when she was sitting in on one of his English classes. She talked mostly about the things he cared about. That was as it should be, in Sarah’s opinion. The whole idea of women’s liberation made her sad, made her laugh. She had been liberated all these years—in the sense, at least, that she’d gotten every job she’d ever cared about, had traveled as she pleased, had made money, had lived with men. She was ready to be a simple, devoted wife. Tentatively, at least. Though she loved him so hard her heart would leap when she heard the crunch of his tires on the drive, she knew, with a tiny corner of her mind, that love was still an experiment for her, she was prepared, in the end, to fail—not that she was planning on it. She would fight for him, and if she won, his love for her would take care of her faint reservation.
Joan Orrick needed no formal announcement that the fight was on. When Martin told her his plan to divorce her immediately after the trip to Spain, she flew at once to the most powerful weapon available: the Ferndeans. She told them on the phone of Martin’s love affair and of hitting Martin with a log and of his terrible, dazed drive to Indianapolis. The Ferndeans, shocked and grieved, asked them to come over. Then, fierce-eyed as her grandma Lulu Frazier, but with no evil in her heart, nothing in her heart but a violent longing for a loving, absolutely faithful marriage like her parents’ marriage, or that of Martin’s parents, she told Martin what she’d done.
“How could you?” he said, and by his horrified look she knew it was as bad, in Martin’s eyes, as her smashing of Sarah’s clock.
She had no answer to give him. It had not been a conscious act of self-defense, and it hadn’t been at all that she wanted them to see how he treated her, wanted them to see that gross, black bruise. She had acted, simply. And now, seeing through Martin’s eyes how painful it would be for Nadine and John—because what could they do?—she thought, like Martin, that what she’d done was wretched, inexcusable.
But they went, Joan’s bruise grotesquely covered by white cream, Martin’s head misshapen, and sat crying in the room where John Ferndean lay, crying with them, breathing with difficulty—beginning to drown—his wife puffy-faced on the side of his bed, crying as she’d been doing since Joan Orrick phoned.
“We love you,” Nadine said. “Why must you kill each other?”
Martin could remember none of it afterward, except their sorrow and helplessness and his huge load of guilt. He watched Joan talking to them—he himself said almost nothing—and couldn’t even hate her for having done this thing. She was like a child, a child he’d loved. He thought of how all her life she’d ruled him, led him around, guided him to dark rooms or groves for their childhood love-making, thought of how he’d loved her voice when she called him at his father’s house from St. Louis, how they’d laughed together, holding hands, when his uncle George told stories, or played French horn and piano together, under Yegudkin’s sharp black eye. Why couldn’t they have been like her parents? he wondered. But they’d been similar kinds of people, her mother and father, just as his parents had been similar kinds of people; and all their lives he and Joan had been deadly opposites. He remembered how he’d loved going to church as a child—loved the singing, the responsive reading, the long pastoral harangue. Joan was indifferent to all that. If she went at all, it was for the organ music. She was so little interested in the ideas and myths that she used “heaven” and “Armageddon” interchangeably. (He would learn much later that he was wrong about her there. She was in fact interested, but her ignorance made her shy of asking. Every time she went to her psychiatrist in Detroit, she would go with Paul to the cathedral, now attended mainly by blacks, and she would bask in its beauty—and the merry, chatty, holy foolishness of the congregation, shaking hands on all sides, wandering up and down the aisles, putting up colorful signs: JESUS IS NUMBER ONE—as her mother had once basked in the order and dignity of the Mass, the warmth of grass and flowers on a convent lawn. Joan Orrick was in fact, like her mother, profoundly religious.)
“We just wish there was something we could do,” John Ferndean said. “We feel so helpless.”
“I know,” Martin said. “Look, we’re grateful—”
“I know, I know.” John Ferndean touched his wife’s hand, and the love in the gesture made Martin sick with grief, thinking, Why you, not us? And: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
John died within a year. Martin and Joan watched, visited nearly every night, took care of his family as well as they could, given their own desperate situation, and went to Spain and southern France with them afterward to stare at famous ruins, Martin looking helpless and stable as a wall, no longer mad, though more eccentric than ever, and full of sorrow. Nadine Ferndean spoke to him as he’d heard her speak to her husband, in the trips they’d taken before, saying, “Hannibal couldn’t have crossed the Alps.” John would have answered, “Of course he could! Look there!” But Martin could say nothing. Even if his eyes were not blurred by tears, what did he know of Hannibal? They went down into the dark and frightening cave where people had hidden at the time of the Inquisition. “Reminds you of Stonehenge, doesn’t it,” she said, “—the feeling, I mean.” He had never been to Stonehenge. Johnny, lad, he thought, I forgot to tell you. I hated you for dying.
At the end of the Spanish trip, Joan began to cry, hour after hour in their stateroom, not asking for sympathy or attention, simply .mourning her marriage, h
er children, Martin, and the beautiful, talented child-Joan wasted and betrayed. She had decided to kill herself. Martin, when he learned, squinted in disbelief, then said, helplessly, “Don’t. I’ll stay.”
“Will you really?” It was a plea. She was beyond shame now.
He nodded.
Seventeen
Sarah Fenton was small and thin. Like all macrobiotics, she had an Oriental look—large, mournful eyes, straight, lively hair (it was as black as coal), and the dry, pale mouth of someone who has lost blood. She was thirty-five (Martin Orrick was forty) and had been everything—a teacher in Brooklyn, an off-Broadway actress (she was then twenty-five, but in the photographs one can discern no difference between Sarah at twenty-five and Sarah ten years later), a teacher of yoga on 24th Street, a translator from Spanish, Italian, or French, whatever was needed, at the United Nations. She was a fair actress, judging by her reviews, but she had no faith whatever in reviews—indeed, had no faith in herself at all. She was (Martin Orrick pointed out to her) a Pisces, a back-stabber whose knife went unfailingly into her own slim back. She had done—what else? She’d lived for two years in Spain, with gypsies—it was there she’d learned guitar. Though she never played it well, she played it in the long-fingered gypsy style, and never in her life was she guilty of hillbilly hammer-ons and pull-offs. She’d also lived for two years in India, in the courtyard of a temple, where she’d divided her time between meditation and watching healings. She would become, herself, a sort of healer. She had no explanation of what she did, and could achieve no miracles, but she could change people, simply by her presence, could make them receptive to whatever restorative powers time and chance might afford. Both her mother and father were southern Missouri doctors, general practitioners, sad, intelligent people who’d been divorced for years. They both loved her and were baffled and disappointed by her strange way of life, never settling down, living with riffraff, cranks, and gurus. But if Sarah was home, they’d sometimes send her their hopeless cases, and she would massage them and talk with them and make them imagine they felt less pain.
