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

was—Tom Garret’s word—uncanny. Except that no, it was not uncanny, that was an exaggeration. One could make it uncanny by thought, make it like one of those experiences recorded by the hundreds in the book he had hidden in his desk—but he refrained.

Again, suddenly, so vividly that he might have been dreaming it, he saw lights coming at him, lighting up the trunks and lower branches of trees on each side of the road’s banked shoulders. He sat up straight in the bed, head rammed forward. It filled his windshield, seemed to fill his very skull with whiteness, rushing him like a blinding burst of water down a flume in the California mountains, and he felt again in his stomach and chest the sickening sideways sweep of the car in its miraculous, high-speed, roaring do-si-do around the doctor’s. He wiped his forehead and lowered himself onto his back again.

“Better get some sleep,” he told himself gruffly.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was quarter after three. Was it possible that only fifteen minutes had passed since the last time he’d looked at the luminous dial on his wristwatch?—his son’s wristwatch, rather, a gift or loan just before Mickelsson had left. It was certainly too late to get up and phone Jessica. That was what he wanted to do, all right—tell her what had happened as he was driving home, not just the near-accident but also who it was that had been hurrying so, in the middle of the night, coming down the mountain from God knew where. It would be a comfort to puzzle with Jessica over Mabel Garret’s seeming foreknowledge of the event—a strange woman; he’d always thought so.

He rolled his head on the pillow. At the first thought of Jessica, his penis had begun to stiffen. “You’re not a well man,” Rifkin had said. Mickelsson thought: You should see me now, Doctor. He put his hand on the erection, encouraging it. Jessie, Jessie, Jessie. All right, it was not just comforting talk he wanted of her. He wanted her naked here beside him, or under him. He began to move his hand. He imagined that incredibly beautiful body with the clothes stripped away, imagined her kneeling over him, glistening, the full breasts finally revealed, dangling above him, the collarbone like wings, the perfect wet mouth, gray eyes like Homeric seas. As if she were really there he felt her lowering herself onto him, then felt himself coming. He clutched the sheet to the mess and, overwhelmed by disgust and gloomy wretchedness, shifted to the edge of the bed, where it was dry.

As always when he’d made imaginary love to her, what he felt now was not relief but shame and revulsion. If any man had ever been truly in love, he thought, he, Peter Mickelsson, was in love with Jessica Stark. (Rhetoric; bullshit. Could nothing stop the Thespian antics of the mind?) But he was thinking: he understood now the agonies of the silly courtly-love poets, moaning and groaning over the holy unattainable. Or Nietzsche hopelessly mooning over Cosima Wagner. It hadn’t been like this when Mickelsson was young, with Ellen. He’d been handsome then, or anyway, well-built; he’d thought highly of himself. Now he was gross, a proven failure, with no place to go but further down. (Bullshit, bullshit.) Thoughts crowded his head, as if to show more plainly his depravity. Always concepts, opinions, past history and books between himself and things. He thought of the whole absurd courtly-love scheme, and its Platonism: how the lover was the poor hopeless worm, writhing, writing verses in secret, hungering for the divine, and how the lady, if he was lucky, came to him like God, with grace. It was true—the misery of the lover, at least. All the rest was changed. The lady might pity him. He’d seen signs tonight that if he played his cards right she might sleep with him, though her reserve, even wariness, was hard to miss. She was no starry-eyed kid. Paradise, everlasting joy … Women were people too; that was the crushing wisdom of modern love. He had nothing to offer: big, maybe dangerous animal. In the end—and it wouldn’t take long—he’d be discarded. If he loved her less, that might be tolerable. (Something phoney in that thought too. He would refuse to notice.) If one were young and stupid, blindly optimistic …

Idly, bending his anger around to where perhaps it would do most good, he thought of suicide. It made a certain kind of sense, theoretically. He longed every day for his old life with Ellen, especially when he remembered her as she’d once been; but that was over, wrecked, and in a way he wasn’t sorry: with Ellen, or with those casual pick-ups at conferences, he’d never have experienced the pure pig sexual joy he’d found in Donnie Matthews—nor would he have met Jessica Stark. No magazine fold-out showed the likes of that lady sociologist—such was his opinion—and if he could not have her, at least not in the absolute way his soul demanded—if he could not own her absolutely, grow old with her, be loved by her without a trace of reservation, as if he were spiritually of equal worth …

He jerked his head, fighting the everlasting sick rush of thought. He would not kill himself, not because he was cowardly but because, like an old bull standing in a field among flies, he didn’t give a shit.

He breathed deeply, listening to the wheeze from too much smoking, then again thought of Mabel Garret’s precognition, or hunch. He frowned, turning over onto his side and staring deep into the darkness down the hall, eyes unblinking, trying to decide whether or not he believed in hunches. He believed in his grandfather’s hunches, certainly. Odd that one could believe the particular case but doubt the principle. Perhaps as he and Jessica discussed these things, he could edge her toward what it was that had