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

She put her finger to his lips, leaning close. Her eyes were distant and thoughtful. She placed her mouth where he had no real choice but to kiss it.

Mickelsson lay beside her, trying to think, trying to come alive. Not that his body was asleep, non-functional. His body was a massive contradiction, his erection immense and violent, the rest of him—his fingertips and lips, even his large, cold feet—so timid, so constrainedly gentle, as if robbed of life-force by the ache in his heart, they were almost non-material. The smoothness of her skin, the fullness of her breasts—pale underneath, glorious with tan and color toward the shoulders—her perfect nipples, the dark, soft bush between her legs, all took his breath away: beauty beyond his wildest dreams. Yet his heart was drowning in wretchedness. “Pete, it’s all right,” she crooned, as if knowing his mind. She was lying on her side, her breasts touching his arm and chest. His sense of doom hovered over him like a foreign presence, worn out, icy with indifference. Yet here was this body of his in a state of jubilee! He hardly dared to touch her breasts, though he touched them, first with his fingers, then with his lips and tongue, hungrily. Women hate to be touched. Women are lunar. She kissed the top of his head, then his eyes, nose, cheeks—sweetly, tentatively, as though she knew the slightest error would make him draw away again, feeling foolish and fat. Oh, she was good—A-plus, five stars—no question! Or could it be that she was still unsure, afraid of him, holding back out of timidity? He moved his hand from the softness of her belly to her crotch and to his astonishment found it wet, more than ready for him. Rarely in his life—either in his married life or in his occasional affairs, even with Donnie Matthews—had he encountered such seeming evidence that he was desired. His mind, with all its doubts and considerations, switched off for a moment, his penis stealing his brain’s blood—ah, Nature! ah, Devil!—and his heart, like an animal beaten and shouted to activity, began to labor, sending reverberations through his body. He eased himself up over her and touched the lips of her vagina with the tip of his painfully throbbing cock. His heart hammered crazily now; he realized again that he could die. She raised her head from the pillow and, as if doing some magic charm, kissed him four times, quickly. Then he eased himself into her. They both gasped and almost laughed, and her arms came around him, clinging, as he clung to her. Her legs locked around him like jaws. Soon a motion he could not control came over him—over her as well—a terrible mechanical power he’d never in all his years been taken by, a mighty and yet effortless rocking that made him feel shaman-like, as if the curtain of illusion had parted and they’d fallen to the beginning of things. Her face shone, her smile wide. When at last the explosion came, he felt light, as if turned from heavy flesh into thin, shining air. Now he did at last laugh, and pressed his cheek against hers.

“Wow!” she said into his ear. “Wow!”

He slept, heavy as a bear in winter, more serene than he’d felt in a long time. Then—perhaps hours had passed, perhaps only minutes—he found himself desperately laboring up from slumber, gasping, full of fear, trying to make out what he must do. Then he was in the room, and understood that the shouting came from Jessica in her sleep. She was crying out with stinging, crackling anger, such blood-curdling rage that he was afraid to touch her and awaken her. Though the room was silent now, he realized that he’d heard the words clearly: “Get away! Just fucking stay back! Let me be!” It was like the voice of someone else. From all he knew of her, he could not have guessed her capable of such tones. She was still tense, he saw, and grinding her teeth like one of Luther’s devils. He rose up on his left elbow to touch her upper arm, then gently, cautiously kissed the side of her face. She was sweating as if with fever.

“Jessie,” he said softly.

She murmured something, still angry, but she relaxed a little.

Half an hour later it happened again. “Jessie, Jessie, Jessie,” he whispered, moving his hand on her head as though she were a sleeping child. He listened to the name in the darkness, the sound nosing out into the room as if in bafflement, trying to make sense of itself. Jessie? Jessie? One thought of, if not Shakespeare, fat wives of rabbis, or bitchy little English schoolgirls in perfect banana curls. What had it to do with this soft-faced midnight changeling? “Poor Jessie,” he whispered. Whether or not she’d been faking her pleasure, or yelling out at him that pure, ancient hatred, she was another poor miserable damned mortal. Jesus, he thought, what a stupid fucking existence. He blinked away tears. A moment later, he realized that his hand was no longer moving on her head; he’d drifted off. All are faithless, saith the angel. He stroked Jessie’s head from front to back twice more, then gave in to gravity.

7

He had been working at his desk for some time when he heard the upstairs toilet flush and knew Jessica was up. According to his watch it was nine-thirty. That was late, for her. He wondered if it meant that she’d slept peacefully at last. The thought stirred anxiety, and he looked back at the papers spread before him.

A few minutes later a knock came at his door, and he called, “Come in.” The door opened, and Jessica stood there in his white terrycloth bathrobe, tentatively smiling, one hand on the doorframe. She had on no make-up but had brushed her hair. A confusion of emotions rushed over him. Except for Donnie, he hadn’t seen a woman in her morning’s natural beauty