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

He became overconscious of his own hand on her shin and looked at the floor, trying to think clearly, waiting for her crying to stop. It flitted through his mind that maybe she wanted him to make love to her. It was a startling idea, especially when he remembered that image in the mirror, but he’d lived long enough to know, he thought, that mostly things are simple, that women almost never turn to men except for love, and that love is, more often than not, physical. He drew his hand back and laid it on the muscle above his knee. It made sense, he thought, suddenly as crafty as she was, for all his weariness; sly as any lawyer: revenge on Blassenheim, and the age-old comfort of skin on skin—and she’d be needing comfort; these things were shattering to the ego. Who knew, maybe there might be a touch of revenge in it too. He’d gotten them together, so Garret claimed. He frowned, balking. Not revenge, no. Maybe not love of the healthiest kind … It was no news that students occasionally developed attachments to teachers. He wondered whether he, for his part, wanted to make love to Brenda, then quickly shied from the thought, despising himself and Brenda too, remembering Donnie Matthews. Yet the question remained. In his mind, though he carefully didn’t look at her, he saw how Brenda’s small breasts outlined themselves against her blouse. He thought of the occasional affairs he’d had, bodies and faces floating up out of the dark—what harm?—and he began to feel, in spite of himself, aroused. Brenda’s skirt and pantyhose were neatly laid out on the chair beside her bed. It was as if she’d placed them there on purpose, so that he’d see them. Preliminary statement of her case. Again his mind shied back. He remembered the idiot look lent by the drooping eyelid, and something about a dim, half-mile-long corridor in a Texas Holiday Inn.

“In a thousand years,” he said, grandly melancholy and sarcastic at once, old Fritz on his mountain, “all of this—”

She looked at him with exaggerated interest, and Mickelsson realized in dismay what a bore he had become.

He stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He’d left his pipe at home. “Have you got cigarettes?” he asked, a little testy. He kept himself partly turned away from her.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

He waved, perfunctory. What was the world coming to? Nobody smoked anymore, college kids, anyway. It was selfish and hedonistic, a decay of faith in goodness even beyond the grave, a shameful usurpation of space that rightfully belonged to the next generation. What times! Social responsibility was dead, a trampled corpse. Let the tobacco farmers fend for themselves, also the chemists who put in the sugar and formaldehyde. Every poor devil for himself!

For a time neither of them said anything, at least aloud, each of them looking, like tired visitors to a modern-art museum, at the mound of covers over Brenda’s feet.

Then she said, “I know it was wrong of me to call you.” When he bent his head, weary of fraudulence, both the fraudulence of phoney expressions and the fraudulence of “true” ones, she looked at him reprovingly. “I was distraught,” she said. He thought about her choosing the word distraught. “When I found out he was really doing it—I mean with her, a married woman, and so ugly—”

“She is a bit ugly,” Mickelsson said, and sighed.

She took a deep breath. “I guess I was a little drunk. But it was so bush!”

“Don’t be silly.”

“It was. Is. It sucks! I mean you just begin to think … that the world … Do you know what that class of yours is like, Professor?”

He suppressed a nasty smile. It had led, he might have mentioned, to this.

“My parents are divorced,” she said. “They never really liked each other anyway. They used to whack each other all over the place. Even at parties, once out in the yard behind these people’s house; they had to call in the police. I grew up with this feeling that … We’d go to the houses of these various different people, and we’d play with the kids, the other people’s, and then we’d all go to bed and the parents would switch. Once I got sick and I went to find my mother and she was in bed with this other man—he was—” She stopped herself. “Anyway, in your class … your class was like church or something.”

As if by way of apology, Mickelsson put his hand back on her shin.

She leaned forward a little, rounding her back. She said, “Every time I went into your class I’d feel better. I felt all at once like possibly there might be things to do in the world. I’d go back to the dorm and I’d feel like singing. Really! Only then there was nothing at all to do. I’d read Aristotle, and I mean, it sucked. And then this one time you told Alan I was smart. I’d hardly noticed him. I mean he’s so, well—” Her eyes narrowed. “I mean I know he’s an asshole. Anyway, he asked me to go to this meeting with him, and he told me what you said. … He hadn’t noticed if I was smart or not, himself—nobody does—but because you told him I was, he believed it. …”

Mickelsson asked, blushing, “What made you a swimmer?”

She flicked a look at him. “My parents had a pool.” Her lips stretched diagonally, making a face. “They had me swimming before I could walk. They put me in when I was one year old. They’d read this book. I took off like a fish, swimming underwater—at least that’s what they say. All over my room they had pictures of Mark Spitz and Johnny Weismuller, Esther Williams. … There was a class at the Y. For babies. I was