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

and everywhere the scent of perfumes and talcums, newly printed books, the leather of new shoes, a smell as exciting and at the same time cloying as a vault of roses in one of the big downtown flowershops, or the thick, sweet incense in a Catholic church. Suppose in the twinkling of an eye, Joan imagined, that whole world vanished, and the girl on the corner, herself at fifteen, looked, stunned and afraid, at a city gone dark and empty, at least by comparison with the teeming, bright, jubilant city she knew: there came a silence, as if all the gay sounds of the world had been abruptly turned off, like the music and static on a radio; and there came the same instant a visual stillness, as if a heart had stopped—no motion but three or four hurrying Negroes, strangely dressed, dangerous, with hair grown long and puffed up like that in a Tarzan picture; nothing else stirring but two pigeons overhead and a newspaper blowing along the pavement. “I’m in the future!” the imaginary Joan would have thought, “and there’s been some awful war, or a plague, and the world’s been ruined.” Who’d await the future if she could see it in advance? No use to tell the girl on the corner, “We’re happy, Joan. Don’t be afraid! There are beautiful places, though this one may be gone.” She’d have backed away, frightened and betrayed—yes, terrified, of course, it came to her now. What else could she be, addressed by a strange, wild woman in dark glasses such as Negroes wore then in the most dangerous parts of East St. Louis, a fur coat that looked as if the animal had died at an instant of terror, every hair on end—a woman whose beauty was like fine cutlery, hair falling plain as an Indian’s, except red, as brightly burnished and fiery as her own—leaning from the window of a dark blue Mercedes Benz driven by—how weird!—a sorrowful, baggy-eyed man with silver hair that swept down like angelhair past his heavy, hunched shoulders—a monster who was, she had a feeling, suddenly, someone she was meant to recognize. The girl would have stepped back in fear and anger, raising her hand to the braces on her teeth, and the real Joan would have called to her, shouting past the years in pity and anguish, “Child, child, don’t be silly! We’re as harmless as you are, we’ve betrayed nobody, nothing! Look at us!” Now the child did look, and recognition came into her eyes: the rich, wildly eccentric lady (who had beautiful teeth, Joan thought and smiled, feeling a surge of affection for the big-nosed innocent on the corner), the lady in the fur, with emeralds and a ruby and a diamond on her fingers, was herself—or her own “child,” Wordsworth would say—and the driver was Buddy Orrick, grown sadder and crazier, but still alive, and married to her: so they’d made it, they’d survived! She came a step nearer, her face eager, full of questions (we could drive her to Duggers, the real Joan thought; it’s only a few blocks) and her small hand came cautiously toward the real Joan’s hand on the Mercedes’ wing-window, both hands equally pale and solid, the child’s and the woman’s, until suddenly the child’s hand was gone and Joan Orrick was gazing at cracked sidewalk, a piece of dirty cardboard.

Martin glanced over and saw her tears. “Hurting?” he asked.

And yes, she was hurting, as she nearly always hurt, these days, sometimes such pain that she passed out for a moment—hurting even when the drugs were at work, as now, causing visions—but she said, “No,” and gave him a reassuring smile, “just thinking.”

He reached over, touched her hand. The light changed, and the big car glided forward without a sound.

She said, “Duggers School of the Dance was just up ahead. Remember?”

“Which building?” He ducked down over the steering wheel to look up.

She pointed as the car came abreast of it. It had been gutted by fire, like most of the buildings in this neighborhood. He scanned the boarded-up, blackened storefronts. She could see he wasn’t sure which one she meant.

Jacqui Duggers was tiny, the classic teacher of ballet but in perfect miniature, hair so tightly drawn back you might have thought from a distance that it was paint, as on a Japanese doll. She spoke with the accent all ballet teachers use, even those raised in Milwaukee or St. Louis, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist like an actress, called Joan “dahling” with perfect seriousness and unfeigned affection, though one might not have noticed the affection at first glance, since she was always hurried, always slightly tense, as if she had to catch a plane for Munich or Paris in half an hour. She was—or so it seemed to Joan—a superb dancer, though Joan never saw her dance more than a few steps; and old photographs suggest that Joan’s impression was right: the Jacqui Duggers in the pictures has that indefinable look—authority perhaps—that one sees at a glance in all real professionals, and she had danced with good companies of the so-called second rank in both the United States and Canada. “Ah-wone,” she would say, and Joan’s hands would move automatically on the keys of the piano.

Her husband, Pete Duggers, taught tap-dance in the mirror-walled studio below. He was nearly as small as she was, but thicker, almost stout, in fact, and he looked and moved like some Disney cartoon of a tap-dance teacher. He had a red face and wonderfully merry blue eyes, wore vests and old-fashioned arm-suspenders. If he ever touched the floor when he walked (and he did), it seemed at least to Joan that he did so by momentary whim. Jacqui’s movements at the barre had a look not of lightness, the cancellation of gravity, but of majestic, powerful control, as if her muscles were steel and could no more speed up or slow down against her will