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

Now he had the second frame tapped in. He sat down on the sawhorse, admiring his work, another part of his mind rambling on.

“It’s part of my fanatic idealism that I wouldn’t be satisfied, hearing her say yes, unless her answer were rational in the fullest sense, that is, fully informed. I can hardly imagine myself telling her about Donnie. Even if I did, and even if she were, grudgingly, to accept it, it would poison the ideal she too has a right to insist on. And as if that weren’t enough, consider this: I don’t want her to say yes unless she does in fact love me, heart and soul; and of course not even Jessie, clever as she is, can know whether or not she loves me as my fanatical heart demands until she knows my heart. You follow? Protestations of love are always about seventy per cent wild hope.” He waved at the wall dramatically, showing his scorn of merely hopeful protestations. “Like a caster of spells, one proclaims as actuality what one wishes and, on the basis of present evidence, believes might eventually become actuality. I, however—unreasonably, querulously, foolish Platonist to the depth—I insist on a perfect exchange of love that cannot be until it is. I understand the trap; all the same, I’m trapped, like Epimenides the Cretan in his famous saying ‘All Cretans are liars,’ or like the madman who refuses to come down off his pillar until someone can offer him ‘good reason.’ Sometimes as I talk with her—once, especially, when we were standing in the parking lot, she holding my hand, her white scarf blowing in the wintry wind like the scarf of a kamikaze pilot”—with his right hand he showed the room how Jessie’s scarf had floated—“I felt a sudden wave of irrational irritation come over me: actually it was resentment of the human condition, but at that instant my anger zeroed in on Jessie’s inability to love me perfectly, without pity or reservation. My own capacity is of course no greater; but that thought was not in my head at the time. For no earthly reason, I have begun to suspect her of seeing other men. I laugh at myself; but once the suspicion has crept in, it has a way of lodging itself firmly, unevictable. Everything seems to confirm the suspicion. Sometimes when I phone her, even late at night, there’s no answer.”

Beyond the windows—he would tack up cardboard for tonight and glaze them tomorrow—it was twilight now. The day had been warm, springlike; he’d worked with only a sweater, not even needing gloves. But now a cold wind was rising: wind of a kind he had lately come to dislike. It would sing in the eaves and evergreens, inclining him to thoughts of hauntedness. Not that even now he was convinced that the house had ghosts. Nonetheless, the wind made him uneasy.

Martin Luther asked, “Do you repent these numerous and various sins?”

“I feel sorry for all the people I’m hurting,” Mickelsson said. “That’s my best offer.”

And so in everything, even his feelings toward Jessica Stark, Mickelsson waited for some miracle, some burst of illuminating, all-transforming light out of Heaven—Luther’s nearly castrating thunderbolt, perhaps—and refused, until it came, to lift a finger. The only exception to this was his house. Every free minute he could get (he no longer even looked at the manuscript on his desk), he worked at transforming the place—putting down the diningroom floor, plastering, rewiring. He was spending money (theoretical money) as if it grew on trees, but since Owen Thomas said nothing, trusting him, Mickelsson was able to pretend not to notice. He had no idea how high his bill was by now. Hundreds, no doubt. He blinked the thought away as he blinked away the dusty sweat that ran in rivers down his forehead. If he stopped for a minute to pay attention to his affairs, Mickelsson believed, he would see his doom, solid as the house itself, all around him. With a recklessness Rifkin would have no difficulty explaining, he went on spending, hand over fist, never real money, credit at the hardware store, elsewhere plastic promises, burying himself—as all the country was doing, according to the papers—in a mountain of irredeemable pledges. He worked like a maniac. His wrists grew thick, his hands cut, barked, and swollen.

Rifkin would whine in his nasal way, “Isn’t it just a new form of the old disease, Professor?”

“Maybe you’re mistaken,” Mickelsson said, pointing sternly, like a lecturer, at the empty air. “Maybe it’s some kind of magic that I’m involved in. How do you get martins to come eat your mosquitoes? You build a martin house. I’ve listened too long to you sensible people with your life-withering sanity. What do you do with the impetuous, dangerous torrents of the soul? You try to dry them up!”

“Ah yes,” Rifkin said, “freedom, holy self-abandonment!” Like a puppet he jiggled his head and waggled his two uplifted hands. Then, abruptly, he folded his arms over his chest.

“I’ll tell you something,” Mickelsson said, pointing the bight of his trowel at him, threatening. “All you say has been said before, millions of times. No doubt it was said by the tall, big-brained Neanderthals before they vanished from the face of the earth—for all their love of order! I’ll tell you what we say, the new breed of terrible invaders from the south: ‘We philosophers and free spirits feel ourselves to be shone upon by a new dawn with the news of God’s demise. Our heart flows over with thankfulness, amazement, presentiment, expectation. Finally! Our ships can embark again, and go forth to every danger! Every hazard is again permitted the inquirer! Perhaps there was never before so open a sea!’ ”

He broke off, banishing Rifkin from his livingroom. Just a few nights ago,