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

Three hours later, by a process of reasoning he couldn’t follow in the least, in fact made almost no effort to follow, Mickelsson was in the courtroom, tentatively committed to paying thirty thousand dollars a year to his ex-wife, every penny he made, and an additional twenty thousand this year “to put her on her feet.”

“Never mind,” Finney said. “We got a fail-safe. I slipped in a clause on ‘changed circumstances.’ If we find we’re in trouble we’ll just hop back into court.” He gave Mickelsson a fierce little salute. Mickelsson ignored it.

Then, blazing with rage, as if Mickelsson had tricked her, robbed her children of their birthright, publicly insulted and humiliated her, Ellen came into the courtroom with her lawyers, two old men and a fat, redheaded woman in a pants-suit. “Bastardl” Ellen hissed, bending her large, puffy face toward him, beet-red. “Asshole!” The judge at the bench scowled darkly. Mickelsson looked down at his folded hands and felt himself going cold all over. It was astounding what power she had over him, even now. “Liar! Fucker!” she whispered. The sound was like fire. Clearly she believed he had cheated her terribly. She was insane, simply. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman lawyer reach out gently for Ellen’s arm. Now huge tears streamed down Ellen’s face, streaking the mascara. Her black, thick hair looked dead. The pale blue eyes in the artificially darkened face—some kind of chemical tan—were unmistakably those of a madwoman.

When it was over, Ellen was led out first, with her lawyers. Mickelsson waited, his face in his hands, and when the coast was clear went up to the room where he’d passed all that time—he no longer knew why—and retrieved his coat and scarf. He could hear Ellen shouting in the hallway downstairs, her theatrical voice filled with sorrow and rage, utterly convincing but without any hint of real life in it, convincing like the elocuted rant of King Lear. And yet—though Mickelsson couldn’t fathom how it was that she could feel that way—he was convinced that, for all the disguising stage-voice, her righteous indignation, her Medea-wild feeling of betrayal was real. He felt no stirring of interest in the observation, even though, for the moment, he believed it to be sound. Our Dada, which art in Dada … She was swearing now; presumably she’d caught sight of Finney. Mickelsson imagined her contorted, painted face. It was an astonishing thing that all those years with him had changed her to this from what she’d been when he’d first known her, good-natured to a fault, high-minded, beautiful. … He stepped back from the memory as from an elevator shaft. Now, downstairs, he heard the voice of The Comedian soothing her. “Come on, El, let’s go eat,” the young man said. “You can eat?” she flashed back. But she wasn’t quite shouting now.

On the street outside the courthouse he found his daughter waiting in her beat-up convertible. When she saw him, she looked startled, then smiled. She waved, tipping her head, then opened the car-door, slid out, and came running to him. “Hey, man, is it over?”

“Honey,” he said, hugging her. Her littleness astonished him, and suddenly his eyes brimmed with tears. “Jesus, honey, it’s good to see you!”

She led him to the car, holding his hand. “Come to lunch with me?”

“Of course!”

She looked at her watch. “There’s a new place I could take you. It opened since you left. They know me, so they’ll treat us right, if you know what I mean.” She laughed, switching the key on, vrooming the engine. “I was a waitress there a couple of months. They thought I was very posh—talked wiz zee customairs wiz zees vairy sweet Fransh accent.” She pulled away from the curb as if the car were a rocket. Behind them, almost beside them, someone honked.

“I’m glad to hear your French is proving useful.”

“Now, Dad,” she said, and smiled at him.

He hardly knew her. “Really!” she kept saying, with a slight, odd accent—it sounded more like relly—and a curious intonation, as if she were jokingly imitating someone; he imagined some supersophisticate movie-star and saw her, in his mind, in a floppy French beret, the photography black and white, sharply focussed. Sometimes while they ate she reached out and held his hand on the table, this beautiful young woman who’d been the daughter he’d loved with all his heart through all their years together, now almost a stranger. He was painfully conscious that she had his face, except magically transformed, slimmed down, greatly gentled, merry as an elf’s and then at times, for an instant, forlorn.

She talked of her boyfriend—he gathered that she loved him rather more than the boy loved her; good thing that they’d be parting in the fall, going to their separate colleges—and of her work, mainly of her work. She was a cocktail waitress every night from eight to midnight, throwing herself into it, making good money. The tips, she said, were directly proportionate to the number of ribbons one wore in one’s hair. He listened fondly and coolly, as if from a great analytical distance. She was sacrificing a good deal for her work, all her nights, all her week-ends; and she had to be up every morning at eight for her classes. She never spoke of music except to mention disco, though she’d once been a good violinist. The waste! Mickelsson thought again and again as her talk drifted to some witless book; but gradually he saw that he was mistaken. She had character, this beautiful, rapidly chattering young stranger. She was in rebellion, yes—unwittingly, no doubt—turning with finality on all Ellen and he had “done for her,” the concerts, the museums, the plays and books, or at any rate turning on all but the French, which they’d long since begun to consider a mistake. The French and, he corrected himself, the expensive clothes.

As they drank their coffee, Mickelsson lighting up his