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

gone wrong between them, an evening that had started out so well, as it had seemed to him. In his mind he again saw her slipping her shoe off, sitting on her foot. He thought again, with a sinking feeling, of Donnie Matthews. Shabby business. He was troubled now by the realization that had come to him the last time he’d been with her, that she felt for him more than she admitted to herself. Only a few days ago the realization would have filled him with joy. He saw again in his mind her sweet, childish pout—something slightly common about it, something studied—studied before a mirror, no doubt; modelled on the pout of some Grade B actress. He moved his right hand to cup his penis and testicles. As if she were there in the bed beside him, he smelled her scent, partly from a bottle, partly sweat. How strange it was when one compared it with the tastefully expensive scent of Jessica Stark!—yet even the dim memory of Donnie’s scent had the power to stir in him the beginnings of a new erection. Ah, Love, joiner of the unjoinable! He thought of Kurten’s theory of Neanderthal extinction and closed his eyes. He closed his hand around his cock and moved the hand slowly.

Poor Blassenheim! Poor Brenda!

Without wishing to, invaded, though he glared and shook his head against it, he thought of the Swissons, the Garrets, the Bryants, finally the Tillsons—saw them all in his mind’s eye so sharply it was as if they were there in the room with him, gathered like visitors at a sickbed. As if hunting for something, or alerted to danger, he looked carefully from couple to couple, still moving his hand. The Swissons, shyly smiling exactly together—except that the woman’s smile was less shy than the man’s, as her handshake was stronger, and the man, hard as they played at their game, cared more in the end about music than the woman did; one could see it in the trouble-lines fencing in his eyes. He thought of driving his cock into Kate Swisson. The thinking part of his mind tick-ticked on. Parts mixed unequally … They were doomed; he knew it as surely as he knew his name.

The Garrets. He could form no definite opinion about the Garrets. Good people, certainly—ten adopted children; and Tom was always, in his mild, Southern way, a man of liberal concern. (Mabel he would take from behind, up the anus. He drove the vision out, disgusted.) Strange pair: Tom, genteel aristocrat turned into a liberal verging on radical and living up here in the land of deep snow, with ten young children of a variety of races, married to a secretive, maybe psychic Russian Jew. One could make a life, of course, of strange ingredients. Nevertheless, it was indeed very strange. He had a feeling Jessica, if she should choose to speak frankly, would make short work of them, or at any rate of their chances—though why he thought this he couldn’t say. Of this much he was sure: when he was young he had believed, like Alan Blassenheim, in Truth, the great rock foundation of everything. It had seemed to him obvious that if one “behaved in accord with what one knew to be true”—an expression that had not then seemed puzzling to him—one would be safe, for all practical purposes invulnerable. But now he’d grown confused, like a once-carefree bob-calf come of age. The clearer his thought—the more rigorous his categorical distinctions—the more angry and confused he’d grown. It was as if he had stepped out of a room which for the time he’d been inside it he’d known to exist, and could now not find his way back to it—couldn’t find it on any map, couldn’t even find its theoretical justification, its chemical and mathematical possibility in so-called reality. He believed now in systems, an anarchy of truth-systems spinning like the components of independent molecules—believed in them intuitively, as he believed in root propositions—but he was no longer altogether comfortable with tables and chairs. Tom and Mabel Garret, old-name Southerner and immigrant’s child … ten children of several races, whom they sat up with, perhaps sang Southern ballads to, or Mottel der Operator, perhaps read The Wind in the Willows and Charlotte’s Web … They were good people, and he liked them, but at the center of their life lay something that troubled him. He’d run across a phrase somewhere, Darwin or one of his followers: “The blind daring of Nature’s experiments …” (Beetle-browed Neanderthal marrying handsome Cro-Magnon, producing mules, dying out …)

He lost his train of thought. His eyelids were heavy. Perhaps he would sleep after all, except that his cock was huge now, still blindly hunting.

He mused with some twilit part of his brain on the arrangements of the Bryants and Tillsons. The Bryants had been married for thirty-one years, brutally mismatched as they seemed to be. (Edie had mentioned tonight at the Firehouse Five that their anniversary was coming up. “Three decades of holy deadlock and one year to spare,” she’d said. “Most marriages that last very long are three-legged stools.” The Swissons, holding hands, had looked interested for a moment.) Perhaps the truth was that the Bryants weren’t as badly mismatched as they seemed—and seemed to believe themselves. Was Phil really so classy, she really (with her noble old blood-lines) so vulgar? He was a fine shabby dresser and good at quoting poets, especially Shakespeare; but then, who wouldn’t be after twenty, thirty years of teaching Anguish? What he really cared about—what made his cheeks redden and his voice take on a quaver, what made him jab at the tabletop with a manicured index finger—was university scheduling, parking regulations, the careless policing of the faculty cafeteria. When his cheeks reddened, Edie would gently put her hand on his arm, not pausing to look at him, dropping not a word from the gently self-mocking monologue she was delivering to Jessica and