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

strong emotion, imagining Mickelsson to be listening with the interest and sympathy his expression seemed to show. Less bum than I am, he thought, fraudulently smiling on. He had a sudden sharp sense of the dead man he’d never known, a gentle personality adrift everywhere in the room, in the black leather chair, the tall African drums (he realized with a shock how absurd it was that all this time he’d felt superior to a man who knew trees, black African languages, the politics of ecology). … Jessica above all, touching her collarbone with the tips of two fingers, as if she were feeling a light pain there, was an expression of the dead man’s taste.

“But of course he was always the soul of tact,” she said, turning her shadowed eyes on Mickelsson. “Saying exactly what you meant was uncivil. You can see where that put me. South Borneo.”

“You’re tactful in the long run,” Mickelsson said. “Just trickier.”

She thought about it. “I hope that’s true.”

Woefully, he thought of the big, battered Jeep truck waiting outside in the rain, the front license plate dangling from one screw, the right front mirror angling out—as it had been when he’d bought it—like a broken dodo’s wing.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Shall we go or have another?”

He pursed his lips and lowered his eyebrows in a comic frown. It seemed to him conceivably an invitation to spend the evening, miss the concert. His eye fell on the stereo—futuristic, expensive, another tactful observation from beyond the grave. If she was as blunt as she claimed to be, he was a real dunderhead; the more he tried to figure out her signals, the more confused he became. He remembered how when he was moving his hand on her leg she’d stopped him, in no uncertain terms, with her foot. He looked at his watch. “I guess we’d better get going, if we’re going,” he said.

He couldn’t tell whether her smile was one of relief or just bafflement. He leaned forward, preparing to stand up.

“OK,” she said, still smiling indecipherably, “I’ll get my coat.”

They rose together; he couldn’t tell which of them had caused it, and even now he was toying in panic with the idea of staying. The idea of their future fell away like the corridor in one of those Texas super-motels he’d stayed in from time to time when attending conferences; but whether that was bad or good he couldn’t tell. While she searched through the closet beside the front door, Mickelsson put on his own coat. At the far end of the hallway, the bedroom door was open, dim light falling over the bedspread of fringed yellow-gold. Her dead husband, watching solemnly from the edges of the room, would approve. “Be good to my wife,” he would say, as Mickelsson had said in his heart to the young man who was able to be not just lover but friend to his wife. Ah, that this all too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, resolve itself. … He cleared his throat.

Jessica slipped her gloved hand between Mickelsson’s waist and elbow and gently laid the fingers on his arm. When they stepped outside, they saw that the rain had turned, as he’d thought it might, into softly falling snow. The Jeep, to Mickelsson, looked sullen and defensively self-righteous, as if thinking of the height to which the lady must lift her leg if she intended to get in. A dog stood on the sidewalk twenty feet away, looking up at them from something it had been sniffing. It lowered its head, apologetic, and moved off.

“What a beautiful night!” Jessica said, raising her face so the snow could fall on it.

Outside the Jean Casadesus Auditorium they saw everyone they knew, all dressed to the nines—the Bryants, Edith in a mink stole, Phil in the shabbily expensive attire of a British lord; the Garrets, Mabel in drab, funereal black, Tom in a black turtleneck sweater and a brown sport-coat, a prominent spot of blue paint on his otherwise impeccable French bell-bottoms; the Meyersons; the Blicksteins; several of his students. … Conversation roared like a sea around them. Suddenly, Tillson was at Mickelsson’s elbow, bowing and grinning, speaking in the cracked voice of an adolescent: “Good to see ya, Pete! Gosh, Jessie! Good to see ya!” He grabbed her right hand in both of his. “Isn’t this exciting?”

She nodded, smiling, resting her left hand on Mickelsson’s back. “Isn’t it?” she said. Mickelsson nodded and smiled.

“Well, I better get back to my place on line,” Tillson said, giving his head an extreme sideways jerk. “God bless you! Happy evening!” He fled.

“Poor Geoffrey!” Jessica said, and smiled.

It was true, as Freddy Rogers had observed at the Blicksteins’, that Katie Swisson had a “sweet, sweet voice”—sweet, pure, elegant, and young. But Mickelsson found it unpleasant to watch her. She seemed unhealthily pale, as did her husband at the piano, but that was the least of it. She had a queer way of striking her notes with the tip of her nose and her eyebrows, and she sang bent forward at the waist, hands eagerly clasped, eyes overlarge and bright, as if to say, “Isn’t this delightful? Isn’t this fun?” She wore a narrow-strapped, low-necked teal dress that looked to Mickelsson remarkably like a slip, and on the bun at the back of her blond head she had pinned a dark red rose. Her husband’s piano playing was if anything even more self-conscious than her singing. He leaned far back and occasionally shook his head as if to say, “Oh no! Oh no!” or nodded as if to say, “Oh yes! Oh yes!” then brought his blond head sweeping forward dramatically, as if to butt the piano, then at the last moment stopped, jerked his head up with an open-mouthed look of astonishment at what he’d nearly done, tossed a smile to his wife, who seemed to take wonderful pleasure in his antics, and leaned far back again as if to make