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

with a beautiful Jewess,” he whispered, rolling his eyes upward toward the confessional curtain. Jewess was to make Luther’s lips curl and his genitals quiver. “Every day she seems more beautiful and more wrong for me—and I for her—just as the other woman I see, Donnie Matthews, seems more repellent.”

Heavy breathing behind the curtain. “Who is Donnie Matthews?”

“A young whore, Father.” He put woe in his voice.

“Ah!”

“Alas, I am not, in Kierkegaard’s sense, ‘pure in heart,’ able to will one thing.”

“Kierkegaard?”

“A somewhat older whore.” (“Not funny,” Jessie would say, and would shake her head.)

“I see. Continue.”

The greater his desire for Jessie, he would explain, a desire heightened now by remembered images—the fullness of her breasts as she arched her back above him or swung from side to side, drawing him in deeper and deeper—the greater his sense of his worthlessness, her moral and spiritual superiority to him, even, alas, intellectual superiority. (“I’ve had carnal relations with them both, Father,” he would say. And Luther: “Ah, ah!”) He could not imagine making love with Jessie in the way he did, almost without shame or remorse, with Donnie. He could not say for certain that his sordid bestiality would be shocking to Jessie—it seemed unlikely, in fact—but he knew that he himself, at least, would be sickened by it, as sickened as he’d be by the most abhorrent acts of blasphemy. (Why he should hate blasphemy—copulation on church altars, or filthy jokes about Jesus—he wasn’t sure. Not because he was in his heart still a theist, he thought. It had more to do with his childhood; the insult to his small-boy innocence and faith in goodness, insult to the ardent love all human beings feel, if only now and then, for righteousness.) In his mind Jessie had become for him (though part of him knew that it had nothing much to do with reality) a sort of Platonic beacon of immaculacy, secular equivalent to Luther’s “Lord’s Supper,” the point at which the finite and infinite touch. And Donnie, poor kid, had become for him the soul and vital symbol of all things lubricious and lewd, meretricious, debauched, profligate and goatish—the dark side of Luther’s symbolism of the privy in the monastery tower. The more he brooded, self-flagellating, turning his bullish will against itself—striking out in his mind first at Jessie, then at Donnie—the more angry, confused, and anxious he became.

He’d dropped his little confession game, it came to him; turning his poisons inward, as usual. No matter. A stupid game anyway. He finished tacking in the headstop and stepped back to admire the finished door. Even unstained, it was a handsome piece of work. He dropped his hammer in the makeshift toolbox and picked up the measuring tape.

Thoughts of his worthlessness in comparison to the image of himself Jessie stirred in him—or recalled to him—made clearer old Luther’s doctrine, and Mickelsson’s grandfather’s, of all flesh as filth. “The world not only is the devil’s, it is the devil.” And he understood more clearly now than ever before, it came to him—understood in his bowels—Luther’s observation that never is God’s wrath more terrible than in His silence. Nietzsche’s starting point. That once mankind discovers that it has lost God, the only possible result is universal madness. If God is dead, Nietzsche had claimed, human dignity is gone, all values are gone. Cold and darkness begin to close in. If it were true that mankind is filth, and impotent, then indeed God, if He did not exist, would have to be invented. But for that, alas, it was now much too late. The knowledge that God is dead, and Heaven a fairytale, had settled and cooled like lava, becoming the ground. No alternative now but the old, mad Luther’s imperious longing for death, the sad old fiend limping on gouty legs from room to room, shaking his fists, demanding release from this wicked virgin-shit world, and the sooner the better. (And might his death be painless.) It was too late now even to cry out, fervently indignant, for death. Peter Mickelsson was living in the cynical, long-suffering age Nietzsche had foretold. Rhetoric was exposed; and suicide—all human feeling, in fact—was rhetoric.

He thought, suddenly scowling to himself, of Jessie’s distrust of poetry. He got a brief, silly image of Dante’s Beatrice, sixteen years old, dressed for the 1980s, saying, eyes fakely widening, “Gee! Really?” No one anymore, not even a cheerleader, could be trusted to be a fool.

He lined up the sill horn and dado and tapped the sill into place.

“To tell the truth, Father,” he said past the nails in his mouth, removing one, slanting it into the sill, then striking three times with the hammer, “there are times when it seems to me that if I ever do quit evading life—as eventually I must, since dying of woe is no longer a live option—if I ever do set my fat head firmly toward whatever future may be out there—I could hardly survive if my Jewess were not a part of that future. The thought brings me no peace, of course, only greater disquietude, almost—to be truthful—a feeling of existential horror.” He took the saw from the box.

He thought of Luther’s strange devotion to his ex-nun wife, “lord Kate,” as he’d called her—with all the usual Lutheran complexity: the sarcasm of a man who knows himself pussy-whipped, but also the worship of courtly-love-in-marriage: “I would not swap my Kate for France with Venice thrown in.” In the monastery (child of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) Luther had written lutesongs to God. Now he wrote them to both God and Kate. The most careful analysis, authorities said, could not figure out which was which. No man, Luther said, could be a true theologian who had not awakened with pigtails on his pillow. Well, Mickelsson had never aspired to theology. Or if he had, striving upward from marriage, he had stupendously failed at it.

“I have moments of respite, of course.” He chuckled falsely, gesturing with his