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

they’d developed in graduate school had continued throughout their life together: Mickelsson working long hours in his study or hurrying off to meetings at eight at night or seven in the morning, Ellen—full of energy, smiling like a model (though she was now somewhat heavier and wore her blond hair long and straight)—teaching junior college, keeping tabs on her theater groups, and dealing, in her reckless, unsystematic way, with the world, the house, the children. Thinking back, he could more or less understand what had happened between them. Her recklessness and indifference had forced him to compensate, taking on the manner of a stickler, a harper on detail, a gloomy bully. “Oh, Mick,” she would say when he suggested that perhaps they might plan their week’s meals (they were forever having to throw out rotten food), “you know I’m no good at things like that. Besides, I hate it, knowing that Wednesday I’ve got to eat hamburger, come hell or high water. Maybe we could get a pig!” (They were living in a faculty apartment at the time.) If he mentioned, rather coolly, her habit of allowing the children to go to bed in their clothes, or, worse, sleep wherever they happened to fall, like leaves—they often slept that way until Mickelsson found them and carried them to bed—she would answer with a sigh, waving away the smoke from her cigarette, hardly looking up from her magazine, “I know, they’re growing up just like animals.”

In California—San Francisco—she began to do, besides her teaching and occasional reviewing, a little directing, “very experimental“—actors who dressed like clowns or mimes or wore nothing at all (skinny or lumpy, misshapen bodies he found it painful to look at, so that at times he desperately longed for the cigarette that—ironically, considering what was happening on stage—he was not allowed); plays without scripts, frequently with no props but toilets. (Nietzsche on Zola: “the delight in stinking.”) It was all unspeakably boring, not to mention annoying, to Mickelsson, though he praised her for her work; all the more annoying for the fact that it took place in what had once been a church. He would have dismissed the whole business as insane, but apparently serious people took it seriously, among others a young man who never wore shoes but edited some famous university-based drama magazine, for which he invited Ellen to write articles, which she did. Mickelsson had for the most part kept out of the way, now and then raising an ironic eyebrow but in general reserving judgment. It was the early sixties; the world was coming apart at the seams. Whether the “new theater” was part of the worldwide collapse or part of the moral reconstruction he couldn’t make out. Possibly both, he’d thought. He’d read her articles, hoping to be enlightened—sometimes he helped her with the proofreading, as she helped him with his—but her writing had left him more puzzled than before. Either the articles were gibberish (as he suspected) or they required a background of knowledge he lacked. They were loaded with concern, a frantic social consciousness he was inclined to admire, though with misgivings. Every paragraph was filled with what someone like himself, if he didn’t know her, would call gutter arrogance and pseudo-Maoist cant. But he did know her, knew the honest ferocity of her devotion to the deprived, knew what strange creatures she proudly brought home with her to their ramshackle, bare-roomed Mission-district house. They would sit up, after Mickelsson went to bed, smoking pot and softly laughing, talking about “The Man.” (He’d thought at first they meant himself.)

Ellen, in the company of her theater friends, would be radiant, as if supercharged with electricity (like the Frankenstein monster, he’d secretly thought). She organized fund drives to help defend them from “the Establishment,” helped them organize non-Equity “companies,” all of which went bust within three months or disappeared at once, taking the money with them. Some of her friends were rumored to be rapists, even murderers. (If he showed horror or indignation, she was ashamed of him.) He remembered trying to talk one night with a man called “the Hammer,” from Los Angeles, or, as they all insisted on calling it, Movieville. He no longer remembered what they’d talked about, probably the revolution. He remembered only that the man wore an expensive three-piece suit and a wide, gray and green polkadot tie, and that whatever one asked him, he would sit for a long time, maybe twenty full seconds, meeting one’s eyes, and then would answer in one sentence alarmingly strange. Mickelsson had wondered guiltily—not too carefully hiding his irritation—whether the man was hostile, high on drugs, or just crazy. Was it possible that he was right, even brilliant—speaking not words but the very Grund des Wortes, or rather, underground? All the others, including Ellen, seemed to look up to him, though apparently what he did for a living was not open to discussion with outsiders.

That, an outsider, Mickelsson had certainly been. (Someone had once said to him casually, apparently meaning no offense: “Athletes are notoriously conservative, aren’t they? ‘Anything for the team,’ and so on?”) He had kept his distance, faintly suggesting his disapproval, no doubt, and sometimes, alone with Ellen, risking a scornful little joke. It was not a crowd in which Mickelsson could easily dominate, as he liked to do. He might be taller by a head than the rest of them, but neither his books nor his football days impressed them. In their presence he felt like, at best, a member of the Cattleman’s Association, or a small-time Republican politician. He served drinks (to the few of her friends who drank), found ashtrays for them—all with exaggerated courtesy—and retired as quickly as possible to his study. If they were planning to blow up a bank, he would rather not know.

It would have been easy to dismiss the whole thing as a conceivably useful craziness, a repugnant but necessary step in society’s evolution; but every now and then