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

for a long time: clear-eyed, human, nothing about her doll-like or prepared. It was so much like being married that he couldn’t make out whether the sight filled him with happiness or misery. (His cock had no such problem. It stirred like an old dog waking up, looking around.)

“Hi,” she said.

He nodded. “You must have slept well.”

“I did.” She came to him, put her hand on his shoulder, then moved her palm, massaging the muscle. After a moment she bent down cautiously and kissed him. When she’d straightened up again she gazed into his eyes—only for an instant, but purposefully, as if to tell him something—perhaps: everything can be changed, Nichts ist wahr, alles ist erlaubt. Now she was looking at the papers in front of him, covertly reading, ready to look away and play innocent if she must. Her eyes raced. “What are you working on?”

He put his left arm around her, then moved his hand to her left thigh. “I’ve been more or less unworking,” he said. His right hand waved off grandiloquence. “For a while now I’ve been fiddling at what I like to think of as a sort of blockbuster philosophy book, something to make the best-seller list and earn me a fortune.” She was amused, cautiously interested, sliding her eyes at him then hurriedly back to the paper, still reading. “I’d start out,” he said, “with superdramatic stuff: the graphic presentation of an imaginary case of child-molesting and murder committed by a quadraplegic nine-year-old, then a rape with ice-tongs, intended to cover up a devilish cloak-and-dagger conspiracy by government agents and the nuke people; and after I’d established my raison d’être …” He put his right hand over the page she was reading, his fingers spread wide. She smiled and mugged Not Guilty! “But this morning it came to me that the only really good parts so far are the roaringly dull ones. ‘Consequently,’ ‘To the contrary’ … So I’ve been sitting here crossing things out.”

“Who needs wealth, right?” With the back of her hand she snowplowed mountains of rubies to oblivion. “As long as you’ve got your happiness, and paid-up health insurance …”

He laughed. His erection was becoming a problem.

She slipped from his one-armed embrace and went over to the window. Her arms were folded, drawn in against her chest. “It’s beautiful out,” she said.

A soft snow was falling, mounding up over the birdbath, settling on the dark branches of the pines. The morning sunlight was bright again, deceptively warm-looking; the cloud cover had rolled away.

“Want me to make breakfast?” she asked.

“I can do that.” He made as if to push back his chair.

“No, really, I’d like to. You work a little longer—that’s what you’d be doing if I weren’t here, right?”

“I’d probably still be up in bed, hung over and groaning.”

She laughed. “Eggs? Scrambled?”

“Sure. Terrific. There’s bacon, I think. Peppers and onions in the bottom drawer of the fridge.”

“I’m sure I can find things. You drink coffee in the morning?”

“I finished off half a pot already.” He pointed at the cup.

“I’ll make some more.” She reached across him, took the cup, and went out, closing the door behind her. That pleased him, her closing the door. Ellen would never have done that. He’d have had to get up, after she was gone, to close the door himself, and would have felt, as he did so, petty, unsociable, spinsterish.

For a minute or more he sat staring at his page, his eyes going over and over the words, in his mind the image of Jessica at the window, her buttocks and legs strong under the tightly cinched, overlarge bathrobe, her jaw—when she turned her face to him—clean-lined, cheekbones high. With one hand he moved his erection over into the looseness of one pantleg, his fingers lingering a moment as he thought about going out and propositioning Jessica. Then, though the image of her was still in his mind, he began to get the sense of the words on the page and began to be interested. The old dog yawned and settled down to rest. Mickelsson picked up his pencil and slashed out a paragraph, then began writing in his small, meticulous script, more and more rapidly, in the margin. Over, he wrote, running out of space, and flipped the paper to continue on the back. He was so deep in thought he did not hear the sizzling of bacon or smell the rich effluence coming from the stove until she tapped on his door again and opened it. “Ready?” Hunger leaped in him, and he pushed back his chair.

They ate in the as yet unremodelled kitchen, large, gray, astir with chilly draughts. The chill seemed to him more pleasant than unpleasant; but then, he was fully dressed, wearing a sweater, whereas Jessica wore nothing but his terrycloth bathrobe. While she ate with her right hand, forking in her food like a teen-ager in a hurry, she held the collar closed around her neck with the left.

“Jessie, let me get you a sweater,” he said, and rose from the table.

“I’m all right,” she said, looking up as if he’d broken her train of thought. “Don’t let your eggs get cold. Anyway, I can’t put a sweater over this.”

“My sweaters are big,” he said, moving on toward the entry-hall where, if he wasn’t mistaken, he’d left his old black sweater with holes in the elbows. He found it where he’d thought he would, and returned to the kitchen. “Hands up,” he said, as he’d said long ago to his children. “Hang on to the cuffs.”

She turned to look up at him, unpersuaded and inconvenienced, then obeyed. “Jesus, the fuss you make about things,” she said, then laughed, her last sounds muffled by the lowering sweater.

He allowed his fingertips to graze her breasts as they passed, and when her face popped out, he kissed her, then stood back to look. “It’s definitely you!” he said, wagging both hands, limp-wristed.

“Who else?” she grouched, then looked down at herself. It