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

The clear kind, perhaps. “I’m running late, as usual,” she said. “Do you want to fix us drinks? I’ll just have sherry.” Before he could do more than mumble “Fine, OK—” she was off down the hallway, calling over her shoulder, “Still raining?”

“A little,” he said, opening the doors of the Swedish-modern cabinet where she kept her small store of liquor: Beefeater gin and the cheapest vermouth available, X-brand bourbon, one good Scotch, an assortment of circusy, undrinkable liqueurs, a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream that had probably been there for two, three years. He decided on straight gin for himself and took out the Harvey’s for Jessica. He noticed that his cuff was ragged, almost fringe. “Could turn to snow,” he called, then rose, setting the bottles on top of the cabinet, and headed toward the kitchen for ice.

“You really think so?” she called back. “My shoes will be moosh. I suppose if I can find my what’s-its …”

Mickelsson laughed, still morose but coming around, unable to help himself. “Boots?” he offered. “Galoshes?” He dropped three ice cubes into his glass, then returned to the livingroom. Just as he finished filling her sherry glass, Jessica reappeared and sat down in a wide brown overstuffed chair, slipping off her shoe so she could tuck her right foot under her left leg. When she reached up for the glass he held out to her, trying not to let her see his ragged cuff, it struck him that the lift of her arm was exactly like a ballet dancer’s, yet natural, unconsidered. “What a day!” she said.

“Fights with the Marxists?” he asked, bending closer, looking down at her like a surgeon. He stole a peek at her bosom, then backed off, drink in hand, and lowered himself onto the couch. It had come to be a frequent topic with them, the Marxists in sociology—in Mickelsson’s opinion the stupidest so-called professors he’d ever met (not counting Levinson, perhaps), though in fact he had no evidence except for what he’d seen of one or two of them at parties—that and his invariable experience of Marxists elsewhere, both alive and in print. In Jessica’s view, or so she claimed, they were at worst no more than a nuisance, “sincere and earnest, whatever else,” she kept insisting, though once she slipped and referred to them as “like a squadron of mosquitoes in the bedroom.” When pressed she would admit that possibly someday they might prove a threat; she broke their solidarity. Not too serious a threat, presumably: except for the elderly chairman, she outpublished the pack of them, and in debate, if she chose to (she probably would not) she could whip their asses—Mickelsson’s expression, or President Jimmy Carter’s; anyway, not Jessica’s.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “you should be grateful for a chairman as smart and good-hearted as Tillson!”

“And good-looking,” he said.

There was distance in her smile. “That’s not exactly his fault, you know.”

He bowed, Oriental. “Dumb thing to say; most sorry.” He raised his glass. “Cheers!”

She touched his glass with hers. “And may the concert not be awful!”

They sipped ritually. He asked, “You think it might be?”

“Well, you saw the Swissons at the Blicksteins’, how they hide behind each other. ‘After you, dear!’ ‘After you, dear!’ That kind of thing could get pretty embarrassing on stage, maybe a contest to see who can make less noise.”

He smiled, studying her. “Whose idea was this concert, anyway?”

“I guess I asked you,” she said. She raised her shoulders and arms dramatically. “Well, somebody had to do it.” She laughed.

“That’s true,” he said, and nodded soberly. “You did the right thing.”

“Anyway, I’m sure it will be wonderful,” she said. “Aren’t they supposed to be famous or something?”

“We’re all supposed to be.” He shrugged sadly.

She laughed again, then raised her drink and sipped it.

He found himself bothered by the tone she was taking toward the Swissons. It was true that they weren’t instantly charming, but if they were excellent musicians, as they were said to be … Something about her view of them struck him as unpleasantly—secular. Not just irreverent; something deeper, that he had no word for. Clinical. A tendency to look at human specimens—perceiving nothing wrong in it—under an unfairly revealing light. Yet that wasn’t it either; she could be more just than he was—as she was, for instance, about Tillson. Were all women like that? Was it the case that men were all, like young Blassenheim, idealists—lovers of the Good, even when, like Mickelsson, they denied its existence, and therefore eager to give the benefit of the doubt, and made miserable by each inevitable lapse of flesh and brain—while women, for all their otherworldly attractiveness, were cold-blooded realists, indifferent to the rainbowed, celestial crypt, even at the noblest peaks of poetry or the loveliest moments in music planning out which hat to wear shopping? It was the opinion, he thought gloomily, of a male chauvinist pig.

It had been The Comedian, Ellen’s friend, more than Ellen himself, who had made him aware of how strong that impulse was in him. “You really believe that, don’t you,” the young man had said, smiling, far away. Mickelsson no longer recalled what his offense had been, but he remembered meeting the young man’s brown eyes and understanding with a shock that he, Mickelsson, was indeed, as the young man implied, a kind of living fossil, wrong through and through. Mickelsson had drawn back into himself and the rest of the night had refused to come out. “Stop sulking,” Ellen had said when the others had gone home. She flashed her smile, as wide and impersonal as the smile of a model in a Sears catalogue, and later, at something like two in the morning, she and the young man had gone off somewhere. It seemed to Mickelsson now that he’d been sulking ever since.

“… like my husband,” Jessica was saying, slightly smiling, looking down. “What a bum.”

He awakened to the realization that, for all her smile, she was speaking carefully, controlling