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

An image of old Pearson from higher on the mountain floated into his mind. For a moment, just before he dropped off to sleep, he imagined he heard someone walking, slowly, as if puzzled, from room to room downstairs in the dark. An unpleasant sensation came over him, as if he were suddenly someone else, full of physical discomforts and anger. When he concentrated, the sounds and the strange sensation stopped together; or rather, the whole thing evaporated, like meaning from a word in a dream.

5

Though he was eager to get down to fixing the house, he was prevented from it, temporarily, by the fall semester’s starting up—not to mention lack of funds. His situation was now so hopeless that he’d for the moment given up entering his checks. Bouncing was more or less inevitable. God damn the theater, he thought again and again, meaning his wife’s absurd “investments“—most of them gifts, it had turned out, to down-and-out actors too childish to make sensible use of them. But the fault had not been hers alone. It was Mickelsson himself who’d bought the big house in Providence, the thousands of books, the Peugeot. He would accept the necessity of writing whining letters, making wild promises, praying that something would turn up, though nothing would.

“How can it be that bad?” Tom Garret asked once in the mailroom, his smile pleasantly baffled. Garret had ten kids, and nowhere near Mickelsson’s salary. To his credit, he made no pretense of feeling pity. “You must make at least twelve hundred a month after taxes. And all those textbooks. Don’t they bring something in?”

“We lived high,” Mickelsson said, giving Garret one of his gloomy, significant looks. The look suggested yachts, gambling casinos.

Stubbornly Garret smiled on, like ole massa making light of his slaves’ complaints. He swept his hands out to the sides, palms up. He smiled harder, in fact, his round cheeks bunching up, and said with maddening Southern gentility, “Everybody’s got debts. But with the money you make … When’s the last time you sat down and really tried to figure it all out?”

“Tom,” Mickelsson said, half turning away, controlling anger, “believe me, you’ve got no idea.”

“If I were you,” Garret said, “I’d get a graduate assistant, and I’d have him or her lay everything out in black and red. …”

Whatever more he said, Mickelsson did not hear; he’d left the mail-room.

It was true, of course, that Mickelsson was not very clear on where he stood. Adding up his bills—those he could find (he had them stuffed everywhere, in part of his bookcase, all over his desk, in brown manila envelopes under his desk)—then looking at the month’s statement from the bank, he would get chest-pains, and his head would cloud with confusion. He should certainly work out some plan, some schedule; but one could see at a glance that it was hopeless. For years his accounts had been neat and exact. Then Ellen had taken over. The thought of now unsnarling it filled him with anger and despair: he simply couldn’t do it. Sometimes when it seemed to him that he hadn’t written a check in weeks, so that there must be a fair amount in the bank, he would write a great swatch of them and mail them away with a prayer. Mostly he’d just send a thousand to Ellen and, for the rest, would let Nature take its course; that is, he would wait for the sheriff. He’d known in advance all Garret had to tell him, and something more, that Garret had not dared imply: that in a way he was purposely burying himself in debt and financial confusion. It was part of his general anger at the world, or in Heidegger’s special sense die Welt—the Establishment, conventional values and expectations. Whether or not he approved of the feeling, he felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. He had deigned to behave like an ordinary man, buying what the TV told him to buy, giving what his wife in her position as lady-in-the-world demanded, and now here he was, a giant entangled in strings. Rather than snip all those strings one by one, with the patience of an ant, he would die and rot on the hill where he was tied, let his sweet death-stench drive the Lilliputians from their island.

Rhetoric. It was his joy and salvation, not that it paid the bills. It was his cynosure in the rift between Welt and Erde, the inviolable domain of the mad superman, the L-13 balance between words and things. It was indeed a kind of madness, of course. If one posed the problem in George Steiner’s way (recalling Thomas Mann’s), as one between a classicism harmonically “housed” in language and a modernism in which the particular no longer chimes within an overarching universe, Mickelsson’s rhetoric was his noisy pox on both the many-mansioned house and the sticks-and-stones exile shanty. As Luther had hated the long dark shadow of the Pope, and as Nietzsche had hated Luther, Mickelsson hated everything, everybody, every remotest possibility. He hated works, he hated grace, he hated the retreat to love in all its permutations, from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Court of Love to the darkling plain of Matthew Arnold. He therefore despised his bills, was made angry and frightened by the very idea of debt. He would not think about it.

Not only was there, in addition to all his former burdens, the $224 a month that must go to house payments, and another $20 for fire insurance—required by the bank (fire was the only insurance he carried)—he’d also had to lay out $700, plus insurance, registration, and licensing, for a misshapen, cranky old Jeep. He’d met Tim Booker on the street, down by the Acme Market, on a bright September morning when the air had a smell of winter in it, and Tim had said, grinning, delighted to see him, “Hay, you geared up for snow, Prafessor?”

Mickelsson had laughed sociably. “I