Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

“All religions are like that,” she said. Again she stopped his hand.

“I don’t know. The Mormons seem pretty special. Anyhow, they take care of each other. There’s something to be said for that.”

“I’d just as soon take care of myself,” she said, and closed her eyes.

He drew his hand back and lay still, looking at her eyelashes, the faint suggestion of veins in her forehead, feeling gloom rise in him, recalling to him its cause, that soon he must leave her.

It was true, Mickelsson thought: she really would just as soon take care of herself. A true, natural feminist—unless perhaps she’d gotten her ideas from TV. All at once he thought he understood something. She would talk with him for hours as if with interest, sometimes closely watching his face as he answered some question she’d put to him, exactly as she would do if she cared about his opinion, that is, loved him; yet she insisted, over and over, that she did not love him—liked him, certainly; liked everyone, why not?—but love: no; never. She’s wrong, he thought, and felt his heart lift. She’s lying to herself, from her fear of entrapment. How she could love him—how anyone could love him—was a question he did not feel up to this morning; but suddenly he was absolutely sure that she did indeed love him. In the crisp morning light, the cracked paint on the window sash was like writing, like some form of Arabic. His eyes moved on to the wallpaper, dark gray and green on a base so yellowed it looked scorched. The tight wallpaper design looked as though it, too, might be writing. He looked at the pattern of veins in her chest and thought—not quite seriously but seriously playing with the possibility—that at any instant, if in some way his mind-set could be minutely shifted, she too would be language, all mysteries revealed.

“I have to go,” he said.

She nodded, still with her eyes closed. “I’m glad you came.”

He eased up onto the side of the bed, reached down for his socks, and put them on, then got into his undershorts and shirt.

She asked, half sitting up, “Peter, could you hand me that plastic pill thing on the dresser?”

He did. It was a pink plastic, numbered birth-control-pill dispenser. She thanked him, got out a pill, then whispered, “Shit.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I forgot my damn pill yesterday,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll just take two today. It’s all right. Don’t look so panicky!” She laughed, delighted by the no doubt old-maidish look of horror on his face. “It’s all right, believe me. It’s happened before. Don’t worry about ole Donnie, kiddo! She’s strictly professional!”

“Christ, I hope so,” he said. He put on his shoes.

She lay back, moving over into the middle of the bed, now that he was out of it, and spread her legs wide. She smiled, not enough to let the broken tooth show. “Think of me,” she said, then pursed her lips as if to kiss the air.

“Don’t worry,” he said gloomily, cinching his belt. He turned his back to her, his heart growing heavier, darker by the moment, as much with guilt and self-revulsion as with sorrow; he counted out the money and slipped one corner of the stack of bills under the base of the elf lamp on her dresser; then he picked up his hat, cane, and overcoat in the livingroom, fixed the nightlatch so the door would lock behind him, and let himself out.

He hardly noticed when someone on the stairway said, “Morning, Professor.” But then it came through to him, and he stopped, looking down the third-floor hallway in the direction of the two black-coated young men. At the fat man’s door they stopped walking and, looking back, saw him watching them. The dark-haired one smiled and nodded a second greeting while the blond one reached toward the fat man’s door and knocked. Needless to feel alarm at being caught coming out of her apartment, he saw now. They wouldn’t tell. In all probability those poor shabby innocents didn’t even know what kind of business she ran. (Do them good, he thought; one night with Donnie Matthews. Both of them together, so they could spy on each other, keep up the ole support system.)

He heard the fat man’s voice, then the door opening on its chain. Odd that he would open it at all, Mickelsson thought. No doubt after a time one grew lax. He put his left hand on the bannister, his right holding the cane by its silver head, and started down.

Around eleven that morning he was roused from desperately needed sleep by the jangling of the phone. He got up, shaking his head, rubbing his eyes, clearing his throat to get his voice operational, crossed to the phone on the bedroom wall and answered. When he heard the voice at the other end, he at first thought someone must be playing a prank on him. The voice was absurdly nasalized and flattened, almost exactly the voice of Bugs Bunny, but the accent was desperately low-class Italian, too extreme by many degrees to be real, and the words the voice spoke were so comically mad—or such was Mickelsson’s first impression—so unprompted, simultaneously hysterical and bellicose, reminiscent of the long-ago radio-days wackos who lived on Allen’s Alley, that he smiled as he listened, trying to think who would do this to him, until little by little the smile decayed and he understood that the maniac on the line was serious.

“Professor Mickelsson?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Ernest diSapio, that’s right diSapio as in ‘sap,’ but don’t count on it; I’m with the Internal Revenue Service, Scranton office, and I have here on my desk a letter allegedly written by you to this office on October twelfth. You claim in this letter that the I.R.S. has been harassing and bird-dogging you, according to your presumption because you dint pay your taxes in seventy-nine or