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

for inspiration to the French (whom, one and all, Mickelsson with whole-hearted bigotry believed and frequently declared to have been back-stabbers, fakes, and perverts at least back to Caesar’s time)—Mickelsson was a great deal more sympathetic than formerly to her aims. Though aims and means were, in Mickelsson’s opinion, inseparable, for the sake of domestic tranquillity he kept quiet, insofar as he was able, about Ellen’s preferred means. That Ellen’s friends were awakening audiences to the crimes of the age seemed to him unlikely. If anything, he thought, her Thespian warriors were playing the part of Stalin’s “useful idiots,” not raising consciousness (as the slogan makers of a later decade would love to say, innocent of any suspicion that they were quoting Carl Jung) but stiffening the resistance of a decadent society, hurrying up the inevitable clash, plowing and fitting the ground for dragons’ teeth. He might have thought it was his duty to protest, had not the Establishment seemed, by its violence and wonderful stupidity, so eager to deserve every pint of the bloodshed that was coming. The scent of war was everywhere, not just in the San Francisco area. And so he had sat at the desk in his upstairs study overlooking the street, writing papers, preparing classes, listening with the back of his mind for trouble in the children’s bedrooms, and letting Nature take its course.

Ellen thrived on it. Sometimes, he would swear—though all talk of the occult was to him claptrap—she would get a kind of halo or glowing aura when she and her friends brought off (and escaped alive) a particularly offensive “production.” Sometimes none of them, Ellen and her friends, would sleep for days, plotting against audiences or reviewing their successes. Then, inevitably, the reverse swing of the pendulum would come, the crash, as they called it. She would lie in bed crying, clinging to him as, in his childhood, he or, later, his younger sister and cousins, non-swimmers, would cling to an inflated rubber tube at the swimming-hole. “Oh God,” she would wail. “Oh God, Mick, take care of me!” He would explain to her, holding her, what he thought was going on psychologically, how the psyche was never fooled by ethical simplifications: the more fiercely one lied, however noble the purpose, the more fiercely the genetically programmed sense of human decency struck back. He would stare up at the ceiling, stroking her hair, cradling her as he would a child, explaining, explaining. By the time he got it clear, so that she could not help but understand, she would be sleeping. Even if she’d fully understood what he told her—he believed even now that what he’d said was true—she forgot it all as soon as she was back with her friends, “those dumb sons of bitches,” as he too often described them. Her depressions, at first infrequent, then more and more common, became darker. Sometimes when he came home from a lecture or convention he would find that Ellen had been in bed for two days and nights, leaving the children to fend for themselves. “The kitchen,” he would tell her, quietly, sternly, “looks like a God damned municipal dump.” “But what am I supposed to do?” she would wail. “I’m so fucking depressed.” She saw an analyst twice a week, which made Mickelsson seethe. (Mostly the cost, he would now admit.) Everyone knew she saw an analyst twice a week. “Come the revolution,” Mickelsson said, “the first middle-class parasites to go will be the analysts.”

Then the decade had turned; they were now in Providence—after one year in Heidelberg, Germany—good for him and, sadly, good for her. San Francisco was dead. The Actors’ Workshop had moved to New York and promptly failed; the mime troupe was mostly in jail, or so he’d been told. She had begun to put up posters—in her study, in the kitchen—about women’s rights. He’d been largely in agreement with what the posters said, with one or two reservations, and they’d sometimes, like superior people, joked about it. He hadn’t understood that the complaint was personal. He did the dishes, some of the cooking, some of the house-cleaning. She’d never wanted to be in on the handling of the money, or so he’d thought; he’d given her an allowance. “Like a child,” she said once. “But, Jesus,” he said, injured and astounded, “Jesus Christ!” Full of doubts, because Ellen was inexperienced and impetuous, he’d given her control of their finances. It was a burden he was glad to be rid of, of course, though he worried. And even now he had not fully understood that she considered him an absolute, unreconstructible male chauvinist pig. Then came—though they’d somehow missed it in San Francisco, or so he believed (now he sometimes wondered)—liberated sex. She’d gone to conventions on contemporary drama and had “slept with people”—both women and men—as she was careful to report. (It had been happening for some time when she finally brought it out, both of them drunk, sitting happily in front of the fireplace.) His world reeled; then he began to do the same at philosophy conferences. On principle, he thought. Versuchen wir’s! (“It’s a fact,” he would sometimes tell male friends, when he was as blurry of eye as an ocean creature, “the most sexually ravenous beasts in the world are woman philosophers.” He would leer crazily—so he saw himself—like his strangely innocent football friends, long ago, when they talked about “beaver.”) Unlike Ellen, he was unable to bring himself to report his sins, even drunk. When they had fights about Ellen’s playing around—a phrase that, inexplicably, filled him with rage—it always seemed later that it was not her infidelity that brought on the fights, nor his guilt at his own unconfessed infidelity, but the gin they’d drunk. It had seemed not in the real world, as real human beings, that they attacked each other, but as brightly painted puppet-like creatures in an eerie projection, a dream-world where blows (they had often come to blows—Mickelsson