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

“Yes, everything’s possible,” Martin said, speaking lightly, jokingly, because the children were listening. “But is it worth anything, this changing one’s life? Shall we be astronauts? Barbers?”

“I shall be—” Evan said, looking up with a sudden smile from his book, “a fifteen-point master of Go.”

“I thought you were going to be a shepherd,” Paul said, mock-sternly.

“Only in the summer,” Evan said, still smiling.

Mary said, not looking up from her book, “Vous êtes un schnozz.”

In his mind, absently—watching Paul move back to the large, round white formica table where his own glass waited—Martin played out the dramatic possibilities. Young man falls desperately in love with red-headed lady; she returns his love; her husband, the man with the yellow-silver hair, is insanely jealous. Despite the terror and grief of the children, helplessly drawn on by their violent passions … A plot for fools, unfortunately, or at any rate a plot for a duller, therefore more dramatic cast. They were in love already, the red-headed lady and the young man now pouring a martini for himself. In love but as cautious and dignified as characters out of James. They talked to each other twice a week on the phone, when he had to be away at his office in Detroit. Nor was their love less scrupulous, less Jamesean, for the fact that when he could come for a visit they slept together from time to time, or sometimes the three of them slept together. Though it might have been shocking to someone somewhere, or excitingly kinky to some fool somewhere else, it was nothing you could make a movie of. They were as careful of one another, when the three were together, as the Flying Wallendas on the high wire; and their sexual pleasures were ordinary, mundane. Mostly, in fact, they sat side by side smoking and drinking martinis and told stories of their childhood or talked about books and articles they’d read or people they knew, or they simply joked, putting on accents and gestures like curious old coats at the Goodwill:

“Herman, how come you don’t get in the whaleboat?”

“Have you considered, Captain, that from time to time when the soul looks out at the rough, anarchic sea—”

“Herman, the others are all in the whaleboat. If you’d join us, if you’d just kindly step into the whaleboat—”

“Aye, Captain, if I’d just! But what argument, I ask you, has the heart of poor miserable man with the mighty Leviathans of the deep? What cause for dispute, what unanswerable insult—”

“This particular leviathan is escaping, Herman.”

“Go in peace, then, says I. Let ’im squint a while longer at the antique obscurities—bask off Calcutta, for all I care!—ponder with that half-ton brain for another three decades or so the malevolence of this world and its miraculous bornings. Little good it’ll do him, that’s my opinion, and maybe a good deal more harm than Mr. Kirk’s harpoon.”

“Please, just get in the fucking Goddamn boat.”

“Hell no, Captain! How do I know it don’t leak?”

“It’s been inspected. —Mr. Barret, is it not the case that you inspected this boat just this morning?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Exactly! And did it leak?”

“No sir, not to speak of.”

“You see, Herman? Look, I’m a patient man. I’m the patientest captain—”

“What if I get sick?”

“Herman, we got pails, we got whaler’s hats, we got the whole Goddamn motherfucking ocean.”

“Captain?”

“Well?”

“I quit.”

If they hurt each other’s feelings, Paul Brotsky and the Orricks, they did it because they’d drunk too much, and when it happened they apologized quickly and seriously and, as soon as possible, put it behind them. They were useless characters to prove theories by, or to stimulate pious shock or stir up pleasantly unwholesome titillation. For fiction they were, in short, worthless, like two somewhat moody old brothers and their mostly cheerful, mostly spritely old sister in some deteriorating farmhouse in New Hampshire. What Martin Orrick evaded or stubbornly refused to do or at best did ineptly, Paul Brotsky did easily and with pleasure—repairs around the house, shopping errands, above all, talk with Joan. She loved simply talking—talk about everything and nothing. Martin by nature made earnest speeches—noisy rhetoric to which he was only for the moment committed—or he said nothing, comfortably thinking his own thoughts or, more precisely, sinking into his own empty trance, his normal dull swing of alpha waves, his mind becoming like an abandoned airport in flattest Oklahoma with the slow-wheeling searchlight left running. He was glad to have her present—or the children or Paul—but quick to grow impatient and irritable when she or anyone just talked, that is, chatted idly, interested—like her father or her uncle John Elmer—in life’s dwarfs and car wrecks, its diurnal trivia, all that Martin Orrick had severed his heart from long since. Part of what made Paul Brotsky exceptional was his gift for talking with either or both of them, drawing Martin out by casual mention of theories in which Martin had at least trifling interest, since they might prove matters of lasting importance—the universe as doughnut with holes leaking Time, or split-brain psychology, or Baxter’s psychic plants—and keeping Joan in the conversation because, unlike Martin, he enjoyed her quips (Martin would for the most part simply register them, like a computer keeping more or less faithful count but rarely exploding into laughter) and because, also, Paul understood and partly sympathized with her indifference to the ultimate truth Martin Orrick had no faith in but was forever in quest of.

“Oh, come on, Martin,” Paul said now, playfully, though with a touch of irritation. “You’re always saying, ‘Ah woe, life’s worthless.’ If you really don’t take any pleasure in all this”—he waved, taking in the room, the big house behind it, the woods and hills, perhaps the stars—“you should give it to my brother Frank.”

“That’s true, you got me,” Martin said, and smiled. “I like it all. I should be happy.”

“Glanted, of course,” Paul added, leaning forward—and suddenly his smile, his squint, his bow were to the last inch Chinese—“having nice house and good famiry is