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

“Oh, I want to be here, all right,” he said.

“Part of you. I know. Don’t think I haven’t been through the same, though with a death it’s—” She broke off.

Furtively, Mickelsson wiped his eyes, then gently lowered his left hand onto Jessica’s foot. He was startled to find it bare; he’d thought she had stockings on. The foot was cold, very smooth, the bones delicate. A tremble of desire—almost a shudder—came over him, and the ache at the root of his groin was now fierce. “I’m not sure what makes me feel guilty,” he said. “It’s the way I always felt with her.” He moved his fingertips to Jessica’s ankle and then a little beyond. With her other foot, firmly, she stopped him.

Ellen had not been a student of philosophy but “a theater person,” as she’d liked to say with a wry twist to her mouth. A literature student—comparative literature—who had moved, by the time she was in graduate school, entirely into drama. It was in graduate school that Mickelsson had met and married her. Since her special interests were Ionesco and Beckett, whom she took to be “dramatic philosophers“—he’d been unable to help making fun of that—her concerns and his had, in her opinion, overlapped. He told Jessica of his remembrance of how Ellen would read his papers in graduate school, her school-marm glasses low on her small, white nose, her sensuous, sharply defined lips compressed. They had lived, in those days, in one of those dreary university quonset huts, which Ellen had made brighter, more livable (though strange) by painting the plasterboard walls gray and gold and hanging framed sheets of crudely sketched costume designs by a girlfriend of hers (of whom Mickelsson had felt jealous) and a framed theater poster, also by a friend (of whom he’d also felt jealous), for Euripides’ Medea.

She had found somewhere, probably in Chicago where she’d studied as an undergraduate, a grotesque old voodoo-doll, a two-foot-tall monstrosity of vaguely Mexican design, which had come (she told friends) full of jelly-beans. “Jelly-beans?” the friends would say, glancing at Mickelsson, who would grin and look down. “Contraband. Jelly-beans are illegal in Haiti,” Ellen would say. Her eyes would widen dramatically and she would smile as though there were stagelights on her. He had loved, at first, her slightly crazed sense of humor, her native theatricality. Later, when he’d come to see how it imposed itself, how it refused all restriction, thrived on havoc—anything for effect, as if all the world really were a stage and one’s sole obligation this side of the grave were to keep the very chairs and drapes amused—and when he’d come to see, too, what black, bottomless depressions followed when the chairs and drapes remained stiffly unsmiling—he’d begun to find her theatricality less appealing. Not that he’d discouraged her. It was the only real talent she had, in his opinion. (He glanced at Jessica and caught her frowning, slightly evasive.) Ellen had refused to keep lists of any kind (even her class notes were a jumble), refused even to make a shopping list or save her grocery receipts so that he could look them over. Her dresser drawers had no system whatever, so far as he could tell, and no matter what he did—whine, shout, or tease—she had never voluntarily closed a closet door. Yet they’d adjusted, more or less. She would say, back in those happier days, removing her school-marm glasses and staring at the wall of the quonset, “That’s interesting, Mick! You remember that place in Enrico Quattro …” If he pointed out, gently, that her reading was wrong, indefensible, she would smile with a kind of eagerness, almost wildness, that should have warned him clearly of all that was to come. She never had what Mickelsson would call intellectual insights. Ideas, true or false (she hardly cared), were, if anything, suggestions for gestures, stagelighting, props. There she did have, he thought, a kind of genius. Heidegger would have loved her. The rift! The rift!

Ellen had taught part-time in the local public school, snatching graduate courses as she could and doing well in them, to Mickelsson’s surprise. (She never studied until the last minute and immediately after the exam forgot—maybe consciously demolished—everything she’d learned.) Mickelsson had been on fellowships, not so readily available to women in those days, and it had thus been Ellen who’d earned the money to pay their bills, though it was Mickelsson, of course, who’d had to sit down and add them up and write checks or apologies. He had disliked the arrangement, to say the least, and had sometimes started quarrels, never on the subject at the heart of his anger, his dependency. She didn’t want a husband, he sometimes told her, she wanted an accountant. “That’s the kind of thing men are good at,” she’d said, instantly close to tears. It was not just the damage to his male ego. He liked buying books, especially those fine, gray Oxford editions—books he looked forward almost hungrily to reading, at the time he bought them, but then, more often than not, was too busy to read. To Ellen, who held the purse-strings, Mickelsson’s habit of buying books, some of them in languages he hadn’t yet learned, seemed lunacy. (He smiled, self-mocking, as he told Jessica this; her returning smile let him know she understood those eager-young-philosopher feelings.) Ellen had preferred to use books from the library and save her money toward a trip “abroad“—it was Poland she had in mind (fantastic theater, she said)—or, later, when it was clear that, by the nature of his profession, they would never be world travellers, never have a “get-away apartment” in New York, preferred to spend her money on the kinds of things she liked, if in fact they must be holed up in this hell-hole wilderness—plants, a used Jaguar, furniture, a piano (though neither of them could play), and theater trips.

(“It sounds as if you were