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

purposely couched his in fact liberal Christian philosophy in language designed to make burgher Christians squeal. What Nietzsche had done to Christians, Mickelsson had done to the surds of Academia, and he’d reaped the same harvest: scorn and indignation. He could tell himself that his friendlier reviewers were right about him: if he was occasionally careless, at times drawn too far by his love of rhetoric and inclination to shock, he was nonetheless a better philosopher—bolder and more original—than a vast majority of the nit-picking dullards one encountered in the so-called discipline these days. Though his enemies were intent upon injury and insult, he could defend himself with his old football-field combativeness. Yet there was no denying that the attacks had surprised and wounded him.

He found himself staring at her downright angrily, as if it were she who’d scorned his book, and at once he changed his expression to what he recognized—too late—as an angry grin. He reached for his drink, discovered it to be empty, and stood up. Together they went to the kitchen, Mickelsson talking again, gesturing with more fury than he let into his voice, Jessica trailing, leaning on the door as he opened the gin, then the vermouth. When he’d put ice in his glass and reclosed the refrigerator door, he leaned on the kitchen counter, meaning to continue here, but Jessica—eating a cold hors d’oeuvre, chewing with her mouth open—moved back into the livingroom, and, hardly aware that the choice had been hers, he followed.

Well, after the initial jolt (Mickelsson continued, his voice and manner more reasonable now, his shrug mature), after the first bloody spray of polemics, he’d let it go, dismissing the gnats’ complaints against him, commending their tiny souls to God. Extravagantly praised in other quarters, sought after by well-paying popular magazines where few real philosophers had a chance to get a hearing, he had underestimated the extent to which, personally and professionally, he’d been undermined.

Jessica yawned, smiled and shook her head apologetically, then reached down with one hand to slip off her shoes. She brought her feet up onto the couch beside her and leaned back.

His book, he told her—not meeting her eyes now, aware that he was abusing a privilege, turning her interest into an excuse for letting out bottled-up anger that probably had nothing to do, in fact, with the reception, all those years ago, of his ethics book—his book, he said, had come out ten years before that annoying piece of foolishness, Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, with which his work was now carelessly linked. A tic pulled at his mouth, beginning a sneer. He raised his hand to cover it.

“I’m really not yawning because I’m bored,” Jessica apologized, fighting yet another yawn. “I haven’t been up this late since God knows when. Kenya, I think.” She glanced at him. He imagined her towering above a crowd of admiring Kenyans.

“I should let you get to bed,” he said, and swallowed a yawn himself. Just when he thought he had the yawn beaten, his mouth, of its own volition, opened wide, like a fish-mouth. “Whoo-ee!” he said, then clenched his teeth. They both laughed.

“I like being up this late,” Jessica said, “though I’m badly out of practice. It’s like being in college again.”

“Women do that too?” he asked. “Sit up all night talking philosophy?”

Her expression went sly, the eyes more noticeably slanted. “Not philosophy, usually.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so. Too smart for that.” He smiled one-sidedly and winked.

“That’s it,” she said. “So go on with what you were saying.”

“I can’t believe you consider it all that interesting,” he said. He leaned toward her, meaning to bully her a little.

“Not in the way you’d like.” She smiled back. “I’m interested in why you get so angry when you talk about ideas.”

He studied her, then shook his head. “Pure ego,” he said. “I hate it when I don’t get due praise.”

“Everybody does.” She shrugged.

He said, “It’s more than that, really. The sociobiologists make my skin crawl.”

“Brings out the old football-field combativeness,” she said. She mimicked his look and tone so well that he was thrown into confusion. He raised a knuckle to his mouth and looked at her. He’d known actresses, friends of Ellen’s, who could do that, nail every nuance of tone and gesture.

“Well,” he said, blushing, hastily recouping, “it’s not as bad as being linked with that crank Ayn Rand.”

“Surely no one links you with Ayn Rand!” Jessica said, and laughed.

An odd fact struck him, so that again he felt confused. Jessica’s legs were densely freckled—and so, he noticed now, were her arms and the upper part of her chest. The lower part, revealed by her V-neck, was tan, or bronzy, dotted only here and there. Her face, too, had only a few freckles—on the cheeks and nose. Yet her hair was almost black. … No, dark chestnut, silver-streaked. He’d spent hours with her—tonight and earlier, at other parties—yet he’d missed what any child would spot at once, that Jessica had the strangest skin in the world, unearthly but beautiful, as if she were a figure built up of precious metals and then transformed, imperfectly, into an ordinary mortal. Her freckles were buried level after level, like stars in the Milky Way: she was a thousand colors, like some dense impressionist painting. Strange! He tried to remember what they’d been talking about. She watched him as if trying to read his mind. At last it came to him.

“We’re closer than you might think, Ms. Rand and I,” he said. “It’s not all that strange. Nobody can be wrong all the time.” He leaned over his knees again. “In the ethics book I wrote, I described my approach as ‘survivalist.’ A grave tactical error, I know now.” He shook his head, glanced up at Jessica, then back at the pipe in his two hands. “I don’t know how much you know or care about Rand’s ideas. God knows there’s no reason you should. Anyway, both of us reject