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

own thoughts, or listening to the circling music. The suggestion wasn’t really absurd, of course; more painful than that. He knew what changes he would make, if change were possible. But he, Martin, was fighting no more fights. Should he admire men stronger and braver than himself, destiny hunters who left skeletons in their wake like Melville’s whalers—like Melville himself, when it came to that? He would accept what by chance and stupidity he had become: straight man to a clowning, half-wit universe, merry-go-round of Dame Fortune, stiff, groping zodiac. He would bury himself in events one more time, and one more, and one more, learn to breathe without air. He would write when he was able, patch up the age-old necessary illusions as painters repair old carousel panels, and would keep himself, the rest of the time, just slightly, not belligerently, drunk.

He looked over at his children, seated back to back with an oversize, woven Greek pillow between them on the waterbed couch beside the door leading out to the front lawn. Their long blond hair, the gentleness of their faces, the stillness with which they sat were almost identical—“Of course, my dear boy, two Capricorns, you see!” John Napper would say. Which suggested that they were there to see that all went well—Capricorn vigilance. No need to fear, my beloved cautious watchers, he thought; but they couldn’t know that, after all they’d been through; nor could he. “Cancer and Leo!” John Napper had said, shaking his wild, majestic head, eyes twinkling merrily, standing away from his painting a moment to consider from this new, unexpected angle the miracle of life. “Makes for the stormiest of all possible marriages—high water and hell respectively, you know—but splendid when it finally settles itself!” He lifted his head, lips pursed, that strange, mad joy of his bursting from his eyes and hair like Blakean sunlight, or like the light that redeemed all memory in one of his own incomparable landscapes. “Splendid,” he said, and hung fire like a conductor delaying for an instant the expected jubilant final chord, beaming with delight, divinely impish, then said it again, the universe from end to end his shining orchestra: “Splendid!” And Martin, for all his doubts about his marriage, had believed him absolutely. How could one doubt such authority? But he was now less certain of the things he’d believed that summer in England, in John Napper’s sun-filled studio: remembered his feelings only as one remembers the feelings one had while reading, say, Anna Karenina sometime fifteen years ago.

Though it was true, of course, that his watchful Capricorns had influence. More influence, probably, than any to be found in the warring Crab and Lion. Loving his children, he could not help but be marginally optimistic; observing how they loved their mother, he couldn’t help but see that his absolute distrust of her must be—in some way he couldn’t yet fathom—a mistake. For that reason too he would bury his feelings, watch and wait. —Yet that was not, he would realize later, what he did. Mockingly, meaning to provoke wrath, he said—though he was unaware himself that his voice was mocking—“How in the hell are we supposed to, as you say, change our lives?” He held out his glass, and Paul Brotsky poured martini in from the pitcher he’d just mixed.

Stirring again, allowing the martini to water a touch more before pouring one for Joan, Paul said, “I don’t know, I think change is possible.” He spoke casually yet seriously, subtly avoiding confrontation by treating the question as essentially abstract, philosophical. He stood looking at the floor, stirring absentmindedly. He was black-bearded, short and heavy, stooped with what looked like weariness or too much thought, though he wasn’t yet thirty. Without looking up he turned and carried the pitcher to where Joan sat, surrounded by large pillows, on the waterbed couch opposite the children’s. He walked, as always, like a man slowly pacing, alone in his office. There were reasons for that. In Viet Nam he’d been separated from the company he’d trained with—temporarily drawn from the group for a desk job—and in their first mission every one of them had been killed.

He wrote fiction now, or tried to. He had the necessary sympathy born of pain, the necessary intelligence and insight, even wisdom, and more than the necessary ability with words. But grief and self-doubt made his heart unsteady, undermined his purpose. He was still too close to that dramatic proof of the ultimate senselessness of all human acts to walk with much confidence on solid ground.

“Joan, you ready for more?” he said. She held out her glass, touched her throat with her left hand, and nodded. She wore a midnight-green Japanese robe with golden dragons, a plunging neckline, a golden belt, one of the many things she’d bought on their trip for the U.S. Information Service. Watching the two of them, his head tipped down, his two hands closed on his martini glass, Martin Orrick thought, coolly, objectively, what dramatic promise the scene would hold if one were to see it on a movie screen: a luxurious room overlooking a lighted swimming pool, an elegant wine rack—nearly full—across most of one wall, an abundance of standing and hanging plants, all furiously healthy, so that the place was like a jungle, and at the center of the shot a magnificently beautiful, tallish, slim red-head, and, pouring her martini, a brown-eyed, round-faced, elegant young man—he might have been a Polish officer out of uniform—and [CAMERA PULLS BACK, REVEALING:] himself, a strange-looking older man—he would seem, on film, much older than either of them, in shoulder-length yellowish-silver hair, his look of slightly too studied gloom intensified by the clean gold, red, and black of his Japanese raw silk smoking jacket. The music in the background, or, rather, coming from all around the room, is Mozart, so the drama is to be, of course, philosophical and tragic: keenly intelligent, sophisticated people are driven by dark, secret passions to