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

“Maybe all women are.” She shrugged.

Foul blow! Ambushed! He held a match to the pipebowl to evade her eyes. He decided on frankness, the old nothing-to-hide play. “All right,” he said, “I feel threatened. God knows why. I like order.”

“Hmmm,” she said. He could feel her drawing back, preparing a new tack, less like a gambler than like an oral examiner briefly letting up on a student in trouble. “It is interesting that the names are the same,” she said. “I doubt that it means anything, but it’s interesting. I guess I know how I’d feel, if I were you. Here’s this mystery of ghosts—even if you don’t believe in ghosts, it must make you feel odd—and then you run into this second mystery, the mystery of coincidence. I think it would make me feel”—she shrugged—“as if something were creeping up on me. Make me feel vulnerable. And if I were feeling a little vulnerable already …”

“That could be it,” he said.

She laughed. “Bullshit.” Then abruptly she lowered her gaze. “So you still mean to talk with the Spragues.”

He nodded, drawing in smoke, then letting it out with his words. “You want to come?”

Like sunlight breaking through dark clouds, Jessica smiled. “Not on your life!” After a moment she asked, “When do you mean to do it?”

“Right away.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I’m sure you’re right about why I have to do it—the feeling that something’s … out of control. I suppose if I were sensible, understanding that fact would be enough.” He looked at her soberly. “You’re sure you don’t want to come?”

“I couldn’t, Pete,” she said. She caught a corner of her lip between her teeth, weighing the question in her mind. “I have appointments and meetings all day long, and anyway, if I went with you, how would I get back? It’s an hour out to your place, so if you drove me back it would be an hour in to town and an hour home again, for you, I mean.” She shook her head. “It would make no sense.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You could spend the night at my place. I have a guest room—of sorts. I have to come in again tomorrow.”

She met his eyes, then seemed embarrassed at having done so. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“All right.” He stood up. “I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

“Do!” she said, rising, then turned to the door. As she opened it she looked back at him. “Be careful?”

“Certainly.” Like a Prussian officer, Mickelsson clicked his heels and bowed.

“Oy,” she said, and rolled her eyes.

After she was gone he put on his light overcoat, walked out to the parking lot, and drove to the parking-lot gate. As he was about to pull onto Campus Drive he saw her coming across the lawn, running with surprisingly long strides, waving. She was tall and broad-shouldered, like a man, but ran with a woman’s special grace—ran, he thought, like a warrior-goddess out of Homer. He rolled down his window. When she reached him she laughed, out of breath, and called, “Hey, I changed my mind. Is that all right?”

“Hop in!” he called back, and laughed with her. Jessica hurried around the front of the Jeep, still smiling as if delighted and also dismayed by what she was doing. He reached across to the passenger-side door and unlocked it. She swung herself in.

“Could we stop off at my office for just a minute?” she asked. She was breathing hard. “I didn’t have time to put a sign up to cancel my appointments.”

“No problem,” he said. He felt two things at once, emotions distinct and simultaneous as two colors on a flag: a flash of annoyance at the age-old inconvenience of womanhood, and a flash of joy at her having left in such a hurry to catch up with him.

Later, driving down Highway 81, he asked, “By the way, why were you mad at me last night?”

“Was I?” she asked.

He gave her a look.

She half smiled, then frowned, gazing through the windshield again, and after a moment lowered her eyes to the large, graceful hands in her lap. “You should have invited me to your party before the others,” she said. “That would’ve been common courtesy.” She looked at him, her shoulders hunched inward, her face a living history of the Diaspora—morose, legalistic, gentle. The thought of Donnie Matthews came into his mind, then the memory of all those nights he’d sat up, pretending to work, checking the clock now and then against his will, wondering where the hell his wife was and glad he didn’t know.

The sky darkened increasingly as they wound up into the mountains. Here and there they passed parked cars or pickup trucks, probably deer-hunters, he realized when he saw two men standing in a field with guns. On the backs of their Day-Glo orange jackets they had hunting tags. As he passed his house Mickelsson pointed, telling Jessica, “That’s it! That’s where I live!” She looked out, then rolled down her window to look back at it after they’d passed. “It’s big!” she said. “I had no idea it was so big! It seems odd, though—a man all by himself … a house like that …”

“I have grandiose taste,” he said. “Who knows, maybe I’ll meet some little angel, have sixteen kids.”

“You should. You’d be a wonderful father,” she said. She shook her head. “I don’t know. A house like that, I’d go bonkers.”

An awkwardness settled between them, or at least on Mickelsson. It was as if Donnie Matthews were right behind them, in the back seat. He drove her from his mind. Jessica was distant again, as if sorry she’d mentioned children, or her fear of big houses. Mickelsson sighed and shook his head. He doubted that his daughter and son would agree about his gifts as a father, ignored and abandoned as they must feel. And angry, perhaps. Certainly it was anger in