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

old tobacco from Mickelsson’s pipe or, sometimes, cigarettes, and often in the morning it had, besides, a country barroom smell of beer or gin. Often, late at night, instead of working, he wrote long letters to his daughter and son, letters he would crumple and discard the next day, because they showed his drunkenness or—his children would think—imbalance.

Mickelsson, once the most orderly of men, a philosopher almost obsessively devoted to precision and neatness (despite his love of Nietzsche), distrustful if not downright disdainful of passion (his pencils always sharpened and formally lined up, from longest to shortest, even in his pocket), a man dispositionally the product of a long line of Lutheran ministers and one incongruous, inarticulately rebellious dairy farmer, Mickelsson’s father … Who would have thought that he, Peter Mickelsson, could come to this? Sweating, drinking, listening for visitors, sleeping off depressions or hangovers, he wasted so much time (more and more, these days) he began to feel almost constant guilt and panic. His stomach was so sour he was forced to eat Di-Gels like candy. “So this is what it’s like to be poor,” he would say to himself, cocking one eyebrow or staring, suddenly lost, at the broken plastic soap-dish in his rusty shower stall. Moving with the crowd at the Binghamton July-fest, inching past tables of leatherwork, canned goods, dolls, ceramic ware, or moving in and out of booths displaying paintings and photographs, lacework, cabinetry, and tinwork (none of which Mickelsson could afford), he would find himself brought up short by some whiskey-reeking pan-handler in four-day-old whiskers, with bloodshot milky-blue eyes beginning to fall inward. Quickly, after the first, startled instant, Mickelsson would push his way past the man—merciless, shoving him away—thinking, with a tingle of alarm: “So this is what it leads to!”

Sometimes the feeling that his life was hopeless—and his misery to a large extent undeserved (like everyone else’s, he began to fear)—would drive him down to the maple- or oak-lined streets at night, to prowl like a murderer, looking in through strangers’ windows with mixed scorn and envy, avoiding those streets where he was likely to meet someone who knew him, from the university, someone who might pity him for living like a starveling graduate student or first-year instructor after all he’d been once, not long ago, a full professor in a prestigious university, with a house that would put all of these to shame; or someone who might want him to stop and chatter about campus politics or the general decline of student ability and educational standards; or some Gelehrter riding high on the crest of his career, who would be secretly amused to see Peter J. Mickelsson out walking, muttering to himself, late at night, Mickelsson who’d fooled them for a time, all right, but look at him now, furtively gesturing, lecturing the empty air! (Weren’t there rumors that he’d had some kind of breakdown, back at Brown?) No doubt they weren’t all of them as villainous as he imagined; one or two in his department seemed decent enough, and there was one professor of sociology, Jessica Stark, who was pleasant to talk to—an original mind and apparently good-hearted, and beautiful, to tell the truth—but on the whole, the less he had to do with these people the better. He knew what they said of him behind his back, knew the narrow margin that had gotten him his appointment and the fuss certain members of the department had made about whether or not he should arrive with tenure—he, who had outpublished the pack of them, one of the only two members of the department who could be said to have a national reputation.

Lately, of course, he’d been publishing practically nothing—as they’d no doubt noticed—and if that damned apartment was not the whole reason, it was certainly part of it: airless, oppressive, so hot that even when it was balmy outside, as it sometimes was on summer nights in Binghamton, sweat washed down his flesh in rivers. One prayed for rainy nights, but then when the rain came gloom came with it, such sharp memories of playing Chinese checkers or chess with his children—rain washing down the leaded windows, ocean-wind groaning through the heavy old trees, his daughter’s soft blond hair lighted like hair in a sixteenth-century painting—he could no more work than fly. Often on rainy nights he would fix himself four or five large martinis in a row and go to bed (so much for saintly self-transcendence), where he would lie wide awake, staring at the ceiling or at the branches outside his window.

All this progressed.

Walking down the night or early-morning streets, most of them named for famous poets or composers, usually mispronounced (his own street was, locally, “Beeth-ohven”; but then, the State University of New York, his employer, was called “Sunny”), he would feel a great rage of frustration and general hatred of his complacent, well-off neighbors—though also he felt such terrible loneliness that sometimes he would find himself seeking out and moving slowly past the darkened apartments of unmarried female graduate students or middle-aged, unattached female colleagues. (Indeed, once or twice he even knocked at a door; once or twice he went in.) Sometimes he felt so misused and cheated, passing some large, dark, wide-gabled house, seeing a dim light burning in the bathroom, or the ghostly aura of a television set—two or three expensive bicycles on the porch—it was all he could do to keep from howling like a wolf, or snatching things up out of the gutter and throwing them through windows. What a joy it would be to hear those spotless, innocently staring panes go crash! He kept himself moving, allowed himself no pause, no thoughtful lingering—not that, really, the temptation was more than a brief, waking dream. He walked cocked forward, as if pitched against high wind, a largish, stout man in dark, tight trousers and a darker shirt, around his thick neck (if the night air was cool) an ascot tie, two fingers