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

“If I haven’t lost track.”

Looking sadly at their clasped hands, she said, “I don’t go in on Tuesdays. But I have some editing I should do, work for the magazine. And there’s a meeting I promised to drop in on tonight. …”

“It’s nice to have you here,” Mickelsson said.

She thought about it, carefully not looking at him, then nodded. The next moment, changing her mind, she raised her shining, sea-gray eyes—was it tears that made them shine?—then abruptly looked down again. “I guess I should get dressed.”

“You could,” he said. “Or we could go back upstairs and, you know …” He pressed her hand.

She stood up with him, then moved into his arms. “OK,” she said, a smile bursting over her face. “I give in.”

They lay spent and at peace again in one another’s arms, talking, much as he would talk with Donnie, early in the morning—except, of course, that it was not the same at all, so different that from time to time his jaw muscles would tense, and part of his mind would formally resolve to tell Jessica everything, get it out in the open, let her think whatever she might think. Once she caught him at it.

“What?” she asked. Her dark head was on the pillow, facing his.

“Mmm?” he said, fake innocent.

“What was going through your mind just then?”

“Childhood sorrows. Misery of old age.”

“Bullshit.”

He closed his eyes to avoid those two dark lie-detectors. “Nothing, really.”

She traced the side of his face with two fingers. He remembered that he needed a shave. She said, “What was that funny look? Tell the truth.”

“Secret,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you sometime. I promise.”

“OK.” She seemed to let it go at that, but then, tracing the lines of his face again, she asked, “Somebody else?”

“Nothing like that.” He grinned, then leaned toward her to kiss her nose.

“You shouldn’t let it bother you, Pete,” she said, and turned her face away from him to look up at the ceiling. “I’m not demanding.” Her expression was sombre. “Even if I were your wife, I wouldn’t be demanding.” She smiled and briefly glanced at him, sad. “It’s wrong for people to hurt each other—cause jealousy, things like that. But also, someday we’ll be eighty—you know?—and we’ll have nothing but the past.” She pouted a moment, narrowing her eyes. “I have to be kind to that eighty-year-old woman.”

Mickelsson pondered it, or tried to. “Does that mean ‘Never let a sexual opportunity slip’?” he asked. “I’m not sure what you’re telling me.”

“People must do what they must,” she said, “and if what one must do would hurt someone, one must be sly.”

“It’s a good enough theory,” he said. “Works well for parents, anyway. Personally—”

She put her finger over his lips. “It’s not good to talk about it.” She studied his face as if figuring out the phrasing for her question. “Tell me more about Ellen,” she said.

He said nothing for a while, brooding on Jessie’s theory; then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I don’t know what to tell you. She was good-hearted, always giving people presents.” He frowned, staring up at the ceiling now, listening to the silence of the house, the snowy world beyond. “She would’ve made a good minister’s wife in some small town in Indiana. Making up baskets of goodies for the poor, teaching knots to the Girl Scouts. I’ll tell you a story.

“Once a friend of ours—man in the Philosophy Department with me—got hit by a bus when he was out one night, drunk. It just sort of nudged him, but it broke some bones and so on. He was famous for his drunks, and at the time of the accident everybody got suddenly righteous about it. Perhaps it was a Warning, a Blessing in Disguise, et cetera. No doubt they were right, but it was offensive. There he was lying in the hospital, one leg in traction, bunch of his ribs broken so he didn’t dare laugh—a crazy, bright-eyed Irishman who no more intended to mend his ways than … He kept propositioning the nurses, wanted them to put up the screens and climb up on top of him. Some of them were tempted! You’d have to know him, of course: boyish, quick-witted … So there he was, horny and so dried out he was seeing the Devil. … One night at visiting time Ellen went to see him, with her front all swollen as if she were pregnant, and when she got into his room she stepped into the john and emerged with a big red lighted candle and a tray with a glass and a bottle of Jameson’s on it, and potato chips and dip—” Mickelsson’s eyes filled with tears. They had more to do with the saying of it than with the remembering.

“You miss her a lot,” Jessie said, her sincere look of sympathy as artful as his story.

“She was a nice girl,” he said, a whimper escaping with the words. “She married badly.”

“I imagine it was somewhat more complicated,” she said. Her glance told him that she could have said worse.

He turned his head away, sick unto death of bullshit, especially his own. “Well, anyway—”

For several minutes, neither of them spoke. Furtively, Mickelsson blotted his tears with two fingertips.

“Marriages are hard things,” Jessie said at last (somewhat ponderously, he thought) and breathed a sigh. “My husband, Buzzy, was a great believer in presents. When he went someplace without me, which happened at least every month or so, he’d always bring back something crazy—native beads, bone headdress, expensive gowns. He often bought clothes for me—in fact he’d hardly let me buy them for myself. Which was nice, in a way; flattering. But also it made me feel like one of those motorcycles they put more and more lights on. He loved me, I’m sure, but he could never find the balance. At parties he’d always be there near me, hovering around, earnestly listening to everything I said,