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

had been real, once, powerful—his feeling for his children no less so, perhaps. Yet he had used those feelings, changed them just slightly, for some aesthetic reason—or even if he got them exactly right (which was unlikely, but never mind) had altered them by the very act of setting them apart from the flow of things, as a beautiful young woman is one thing, darting naked from the bedroom to the bathroom, another caught forever in her flight by stiff, glowing paint. Surely no poet, not even the very finest, could help but feel to some extent a betrayer of life. If he loved his children as profoundly as he claimed, why was he sitting here sucking on his pencil while his children lay asleep in the other room? Not that poets were worse than other men; not at all. But there was no denying that poets, more than most men, were in a bad position for keeping up the helpful lie. Exact description or re-creation of feeling was their special expertise. As the chairman of Ira Katz’s department had pointed out, every device in the tradition they lived by was designed for no other purpose than getting the emotion just right. So now, looking out at the soft golden sunlight, the shaded lawns of the university, Ira Katz must no doubt be pretty well aware how rotten his life had turned. He must know pretty well how his wife felt, too—careful student of emotion that he was—and how his children felt. He who had seemed their hope had proved their destroyer, he must be thinking. And what would he be thinking, given all that, about the death of April Vaught? “Dismal,” Craine said aloud, then bit his mouth shut. No doubt he’d slept with her often. At any rate, it seemed general knowledge that they were having an affair. Yet she was not the first, not the only affair. So Ira Katz’s guilt, in his own eyes—to Craine it hardly mattered—was darkened. That childhood self Katz had talked about was betrayed with a vengeance, then. And with her death—assuming he had nothing to do with it himself, not an easy assumption—the picture darkened still more.

All this while Craine stood motionless, staring out the window like a man in a trance, watching the sky change, dark, silvered cloud patches moving northward through the yellow, reflected in the windows of the buildings across from him, the leaves of the trees moving, inaudible to Craine, and he was thinking, despite his gloomy thoughts about Ira Katz, Strange, how beautiful it is, how peaceful! It was true, no mere illusion, he understood, not quite in words. It was not just that it seemed like some noble old painting, though it did, certainly; on the campus time had in some quite real sense stopped. Everyone noticed it, if only in jest. People distinguished between the campus and “the real world.” It was the last playground; that might be it, perhaps. The last slow, easy breath of childhood. They came here “students” and left “workers.” A grim thought. He remembered now something else he’d run into, in one of those books of Freud’s, that in the unconscious Time does not exist. He felt through his pockets and found a pencil, then a scrap of paper. “In unconscious, no past or future,” he wrote. He studied the writing, making sure he’d be able to read it when he came on it again, a week or a month from now, then folded it and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Almost at once he drew it out again, frowning, and added the words, “also sub-atomic particles, psychic experience.” The last few words were very small, almost off the paper’s ragged edge. He dropped it in his pocket again.

“Complementarity,” he said aloud. Two whole realities in double exposure. Pastoral peace, undeniable as young love, or the childlike old scholar’s endless play, up in his tower; yet in the same immortal garden, neurosis, terror, murder, Elaine Glass dreaming up her death in the colors of the Virgin, while down at the computer center …

He thought of Elaine in there scribbling in her notebook, then of how she’d run to the blind boy to help him and he’d almost knocked her down. What a strange marriage she was of awkwardness and grace! At once, with what felt like a massive blush, he remembered her flying toward him at Denham’s tobacco store, remembered the smell of chocolate malt on her breath, and his surprise that, thin as she was, she had well-developed breasts. Quickly, Craine closed the door on that, and even more quickly he pushed away the thought of Emmit Royce.

He needed a drink. When he looked at his watch—ten to four—he was astonished and once again convinced that it must not be working; impossible that he’d stood here that long, knowing he should go down to the truck and move it, and grab a quick restorative while he was there, handy by. It came to him that he hadn’t had a drink in hours, an incredible feat, he could claim, and anyone who knew him would admit that it was so—though strange to say, it seemed to him, for some reason, like nothing: he could go, if the whim took him, hours more. He wasn’t even shaky, and the sweats had forgotten him. He was feeling quite unusually well, in fact, except gloomy, as he always became when he was sober. Not that he minded. Mortal gloom was the unconfessed ground of being, in southern Illinois. You saw it even in the hogs and chickens, the horses standing in fields, with their heads down, and in the Black Angus browsing in the mustardy, thistle-ridden hills or the cool, heavy shade of woodlots. It was deep in the character of the people of Little Egypt, and it infected the students in no time. Just as well. Let the people all speak the same language.

He looked down at the paperback open