Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

men turn on lynchers’ ropes and trash eat clay: all argument abandoned, debate forsworn, no action permitted to the human mind but sad empty songs about love grown colder and heaven’s six gates—oh yeah, my Lawd—”

“Martin, you’re sick. You’re really sick.”

“That’s true.” He waved his glass. “And over here I give you this gentleman, or rather this specimen, this noblest achievement of modern teratology, born with a gavel and Robert’s Rules of Order and a bachelor of science in Talmudic law, no hasty construction, this monster of angular good sense, this tremulous howl in the wilderness of lies, this gibberish singer of decaying Truth—”

“You think this kind of talk makes me look stupid?”

He turned to look at her. “You remembered the subject! How’d you do that? You must’ve wrote it down.”

Though he mocked her, there was no anger in his eyes now; even the dead look—or maybe possessed look was more accurate—had sunk away. She was suddenly aware of the pain in her right leg and midsection, from her pelvis to lower chest. It had been there, she realized, for a long time. She felt a touch of panic, as she always did when she thought about the pain, and got up abruptly to fix herself another drink. It was stupid to have another one—it meant Martin would, too—but she didn’t care, tonight. Liquor was better than the drugs were, Dr. Crouse had said.

Martin said behind her, “You hurting?”

She dropped ice into her glass and glanced up at his reflection in the window. She saw her own there too. They didn’t look like two people who would hate each other. How strange it was—how strange everything was, she thought fleetingly. People called them a handsome couple. The pain licked up sharply into her chest, then died down again. “I’m all right,” she said. “It makes me mean, that’s all.” She carried the pitcher of martinis to him. He held out his glass and she poured. Smoke from his pipe spiralled upward. “Let’s not get drunk tonight,” she said.

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

They sat down again, across from each other at the round formica table. She lit a cigarette, pushed the matches toward him. “You feel better when you’re writing. You should try,” she said.

“Tomorrow, maybe.”

“What’s wrong? Really, I mean.”

He said nothing, looking into his glass.

“I love you,” she said. “You don’t believe it, but I do.”

He smiled, politely scornful.

She said, more crossly than she’d meant to, “How can you stand it, not believing in anything?”

“Oh, I believe things,” he said. “I just don’t think any of them will help.”

She watched him puffing gloomily at his pipe, following drops down the side of his glass with one fingernail.

“Do you want a divorce, Martin?” she said calmly, full of fear.

He pursed his lips, seemed to think about it. “Makes no difference,” he said. “No.”

“Because of the children,” she flashed angrily.

“Partly that,” he said. “Mainly because the whales are going extinct, and I don’t have much faith in the life after death, and we haven’t yet run out of gin.”

“Jesus, you do rave on,” she said.

“I do?” he said.

Four

Martin’s parents, in contrast to Joan’s, were noisily, articulately religious. Often, when Martin was very young, they would gather after sermons at his grandfather’s house and debate the veracity of what was said by the man behind the pulpit. Martin’s grandfather was a farmer and country schoolmaster with a brilliant, stubborn, morose mind (a child of Sagittarius) and a photographic memory with which he merely made trouble. At the age of forty-five he’d been tricked into marriage by the first lady lawyer in New York State, an Irishwoman (Protestant) as stubborn as he was, a determined red-head who by wily manipulation had put Luther Doane Orrick—such was his triumphantly gloomy name—into a position that threatened foreclosure on his two-hundred-year-old farm, but she offered (she was just twenty-eight at the time, a partner in the office of her father and uncle) the alternative of her not very noticeably gentle hand in marriage. He was flabbergasted, a confirmed bachelor, though a handsome man with coal-black hair that swept and curled out, edged with silver, fierce as his opinions, at his collar and around his ears. In his black top hat he was a man to reckon with (he was not, by any means, an advance-guard dresser), and the way he gripped his cane when just walking along—his arthritic knuckles bulging like the knuckles of an eagle at the moment of the strike—gave every living creature that stood within range of his eye or ear stern warning.

Caroline Slaine was by all this not greatly impressed. Though Anglo-Irish and a lawyer, she had no more scruple than a butterfly, no more fear of his bluster than a fox in a chicken house. Though she couldn’t so express it in that sober time, not even secretly, he was a sexy old bastard and she wanted him. She summoned him therefore to her small, dark green, cluttered, book-and-map-filled office and, with a sweet imitation of feminine sternness, presented Orrick with her foreclosure threat. Luther Doane Orrick, breaker of horses, harrumphed twice, struck the floor with his cane, and denied her on grounds of principle, the principle being that he did not love her, not her nor no other Irishwoman, madam—no sir, by thunder, not even though she dared to declare herself of Protestant persuasion. From his positions, he told her, she would find him unmovable, no gilded rooster on a barn, that will turn with every wind. “Nonsense,” she said, and at once set in motion the foreclosure proceedings.

When it appeared that the fool would rather give up his land than relinquish a principle, she trumped up an incredible criminal charge—yet was it so incredible after all, one wonders, considering the causes he was willing to support, the secret meetings he thought it honorable to attend?—at which point he said, or is said to have said, “Woman, what the devil are you after?” to which she is said to have responded—salaciously, considering the