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

Wind in his hair, morning sunlight gleaming in the swirls of fog and on patches of glass-smooth river in the valley below and to the left of him—here and there, rising through the fog toward visibility, a barn with high silos, a village of white houses, a neon motel sign precariously craning to the level of the Interstate—he felt himself changing as if magically from whatever he was on the mountain to Mickelsson the teacher, the colleague, the committeeman.

Not that he was much of a colleague, he would admit. After a year at this place, he knew hardly any of the people he taught with—five or six in philosophy, one or two in English, Jessica in sociology, perhaps a half-dozen others, more faces than names; but he was closer to these people, sad to say, than to any of the people he’d taught with in California or, before that, Ohio, not to mention those he’d met during his Fulbright year in Germany, none of whose names he remembered. (He saw his former friends from California occasionally at philosophy conferences, where they struck him as odd dressers and prematurely aged, full of crackpot West Coast opinions—thought as an effective physical impulse or “charge,” and so on. His friends from Ohio, Hiram College, he never saw anywhere.) As for other people he and his ex-wife had known, Mickelsson had put them, through no fault of theirs, almost wholly out of mind. The thought of Providence, with its beautiful old trees and dark-brick buildings, its classy, troubled students, its long, drunken parties and gloomy flirtations, above all its oceanscape, at one time so dear to Mickelsson and his children—the thought of Providence filled him with such a feeling of waste and hopelessness that he preferred to consider the whole place swallowed by the Atlantic.

But if strictly speaking he was a colleague to nobody, he knew better, instinctively, than to admit that fact too openly to himself. Sometimes after telephone conversations with his wife, whether the tone she took was haughty or cajoling, he sensed how precarious his hold was on the world. He must find something to live for—his work, his students—otherwise sure as day he would wake up some morning strapped down hand and foot, full of guilt and dim, dreamlike memories of himself in garish dress, solemnly bent to impassioned, tearful conversation with a mouse in a trap or the shattered remains of a dog beside the road, PHILOSOPHER CLAIMS DIRECT ENCOUNTER WITH BEING! It was a harmless lunacy. He was inclined to believe he was at his best when “not himself.” Nevertheless, any hint that he was slipping could make his fingers tremble. And so—as he’d drunkenly told Jessica the night he’d stayed late—by stubborn acts of will Mickelsson shaved in the morning, read his journals, soberly prepared classes. Let those things slide, as already he’d let his writing slide (a book on the ethics of genetic manipulation, several articles, a paper for the March convention of the A.P.A.—all very current and important, but nothing his heart was in), and he’d be doomed, subtly and irrevocably called into the shadowy world he felt always not far off, as close and dark and ingeniously patterned as the woods on the mountain above him. Closer. As close as the walls of whatever stark, inhospitable room he happened to be standing or sitting in in the old, allegedly spirit-ridden house.

And so, soberly, knowing what he was doing, Mickelsson acted the role of teacher, committeeman, jovial colleague. (His right hand left the steeringwheel, gesturing, trying to make things plain to the windshield.) It was in fact a character he had always enjoyed and could enjoy even now, with certain reservations, so long as he knew he could take it off, like his suitcoat and the annoyingly narrow tag, “Ethicist,” when he left for home. Mickelsson had always been a friendly man, or so he believed, but he was not in a mood, at this stage of his life, for socializing. He was indeed in a period of redefinition, reassessment, or perhaps, to be accurate, mourning.

Mickelsson frowned and slowed down a little. A hitch-hiker, illegal on the Interstate, held out a thumb to him; a tramp-faced man in a long brown coat. Mickelsson slowed more, then changed his mind and sped up again. As the Jeep passed him, the hitch-hiker slowly, as if ominously, shook his head.

Period of mourning, Mickelsson thought, and nodded, lightly tapping the steeringwheel with the heel of his fist.

Jessica had been seated on the couch across the coffeetable from him, leaning toward him, lightly frowning, her eyes darker than usual in the dimness of the room. She’d turned out all the lights but the entryway light, the light in the kitchen (throwing its bluish fluorescent shaft over the far wall and the tall, evil-looking African drum), and the light on the fern-stand just behind his chair. The couch she sat on floated, sectioning off one quarter of the room. Beyond her he could make out wide French doors, a vase of silk flowers, a painting. It had not seemed to him that night that she’d turned off lights to make their talk more romantic, though now sometimes he wondered if he’d misjudged—missed a chance. Feeble as it was, the light behind him made her gold chain and eyes—slanted a little, like an ancient Persian’s—gleam like whitecaps at twilight or coins found in childhood. He wondered if a woman as large as she was—perfectly proportioned, but goddess-size, nearly Mickelsson’s size—had trouble buying clothes. He drank slowly and carefully, pacing himself, taking no risks.

“Why do you say you’re a failure?” she’d asked. “What are you—fifty—forty-five?”

“I know it sounds like self-pity,” he said, “or too much gin.”

She dismissed it with a wave.

“Of course I’ve got very high standards,” he said. He opened his hands, then once more clasped them lightly between his knees, his feet square on the floor like a farmer’s. Her long, slim legs, the grace of her left hand draped over