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

He could happily have lived out his life in some attic room or country shack so long as the walls were lined with books and in all that really counted he could live like a king. But he was beginning to see that by his overhasty marriage to a shallow, childish woman who cared only about objects and empty sham (her extreme interest in theater now seemed to him pitifully significant and of course a little sick—all theater people were, he’d decided, sick), he had forever put that noble ideal out of reach. He hadn’t had the nerve to strike out directly, and Ellen, by some instinct too deep for cunning (it was only now, saying it to Jessica, that he understood this), Ellen had clung to her power while she could.

Once, still in graduate school, he’d broached with Ellen the subject of his getting a part-time job himself. As an undergraduate, he’d pointed out, he’d worked as a bank teller, a farm hand, a salesman of World Book Encyclopedias. Ellen’s reaction had been one of surprisingly heated indignation. She shook her fork at him—they were at supper at the time. “You have the potential to be one of the world’s great philosophers!” she’d said, leaning toward him. “Do you think I intend to allow you to throw all that away for a few measly dollars?”

He’d looked at her in surprise, his own fork poised halfway between his plate and his mouth. “Ellen, that’s ridiculous!” he’d said, and tentatively smiled. Her look was so intense, eyes widened, mouth open, head thrown far forward, he couldn’t tell whether to laugh or back off in fear.

“You do, Mick,” she said. “I know!”

For another instant he’d met her eyes, that stare so absolute it looked more like acting than like life. “But suppose I don’t,” he said. His voice went thin with nervousness, and abruptly he began to wave his fork, forgetting it still had spaghetti on it. “Suppose I turn out to be this perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary philosophy teacher at some college in Nebraska?”

“You won’t,” she said, almost a shout.

Now it was he who leaned forward, almost shouting. “I damn well could,” he said. “Such things happen. You’ve worked out our whole life like it’s a play, that’s what you’ve done! What if I’m miscast?” The instant the words came out, he’d wished them unsaid, because he’d seen that he was right: to Ellen the whole shebang was theater, with all the once-for-all-time deadly seriousness of theater; and he’d seen too—though he couldn’t have said in what way her expression changed—that she was suddenly realizing that it might be true, all she’d been taking for granted about him might be fantasy.

She lowered her fork to her spaghetti and turned it around and around, looking at her plate, winding the spaghetti but not raising it to her mouth.

“We have to face reality,” he said, speaking softly now.

She glanced up at him for a moment. “Fuck reality,” she said.

The rest of the night she’d hardly spoken to him. She sat in the wicker chair in what served as their livingroom, bent over a book, a pencil in her mouth like the bit of a bridle, her brow knitted, pretending to be deeply engrossed in her reading but seldom turning a page. The cat, Horace, lay curled up, sleeping against her feet. Mickelsson had been tempted to ask if she was writing a new life-drama for them, but he’d decided he’d better not. When he’d finished the dishes he’d hung around for a while, cleaning and recleaning the counter top, rinsing out the cat dish, straightening up the canned goods in their cupboard. At last, drifting nearer to where she sat, he’d said, “Well, I guess I better hit the books.”

“OK,” she said. “Go do it.”

He stood looking down at her, thinking—injured—that all he’d asked was the right to do a little part-time work, earn a little money he could spend as he pleased. Surely her little drama could accommodate that! But all right, he would withdraw the suggestion for the duration. “Look, Ellie,” he said, “I’m sorry—”

She looked up at him, blank, pretending she’d forgotten the whole thing, then pretended to remember and waved him away. “Forget it,” she said. “Go hit the books.” She smiled.

Perhaps that really had been the end of it. She’d never again mentioned her expectations for him. In the years that followed they’d moved more and more toward separate lives, he becoming stuffier (as he saw it now), increasingly self-controlled and bookish, Ellen increasingly taking on the free-spirit habits and dress, not to mention the neuroses and easy liberalism, of her theater friends. They met for meals and sometimes read the Sunday New York Times together (it was strange to think, now, what pleasure they’d gotten out of the Sunday New York Times—or mushroom soup, or limejuice—it was like trying to remember one’s original feelings about Dumbo, or Snow White). Occasionally they’d gone to parties together, where, as in other things, they went separate ways. She still read his papers, some of them anyway; and he, for his part, checked in from time to time on her theater activities. With all his heart he encouraged them. Intellectually, as he could not help telling her when she pressed for his opinion, she was hopeless. She seemed to understand that it was true.

(“Jesus,” Jessica said. Mickelsson thought about it, then abruptly rose and went out to the kitchen for more gin. This time Jessica waited on the couch. She was reclining, her head back on a cushion, when he came back and once more sat beside her. Outside, a chorus of birds now warbled and cheeped.)

No one could have been more pleased than Ellen when his work met with success, or more fiercely defensive when his work was, she thought, undervalued. But each of them had less and less sense of what the other was up to. The pattern