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

holding back, doing damage enough, Ellen laying in on him with everything she had, pitifully girlish, though sometimes he came out with a puffy face) had no force, whatever their violence, and words, whatever their viciousness, would prove hard to remember later. In the morning they would be careful of each other, as of people who’ve been wounded and will never again be whole. He understood only now, he believed, what had really been going on. They’d both been idealists. They’d been brought up, both of them, in families where fidelity was assumed, the marriage bond inviolable; and when they’d left that pattern, following the fashion of their friends and time (Ellen smiling, Mickelsson looking dangerously intense), enjoying the usual excitement of the chase and the cheap thrill of liberation, they’d become like lost children. Decency striking back. They’d become anxious. Soiled. (She too had known it. He remembered how one morning, after he’d fallen asleep dead drunk on the livingroom carpet, he’d awakened to find that she’d laid out tulips in a circle all around him.) Mickelsson’s greatest pleasure, toward the end of their marriage, had been lying in bed with her, holding her quietly in his arms as she slept. If dawn had never come, or the next night’s party, the next philosophy or drama convention, they would doubtless have lasted forever, like their parents.

“Is she happier without you?” Jessica asked.

“On the whole,” he said, then quickly raised his hand, palm out. “No pun intended! Purest accident!”

She shook her head, excusing it. “As my aunt Rose used to say, ‘God spare us.’ ” She tried to hide a yawn.

He put his hand back down onto Jessica’s foot. “Anyway, yes, she’s happier. I hope. Fine young buck to keep her company—another ‘theater person.’ I pay them handsomely to stay out of my hair.”

She studied his eyes, suspicious. “How handsomely?”

“Thousand a month,” he said. “Most months.”

“That’s crazy!”

He shrugged. “It’s all I can afford.”

A tuck came to the corner of her mouth, making the dimple show, and after she’d thought for a moment, she said, “You’re establishing a precedent, you know. When you get into court you’ll be stuck with it.”

He made his face worried. “You think I should’ve hit her with a hammer?”

She shook her head slowly and looked up at where the wall met the ceiling. “I think you should try to be more serious about all this.”

He squeezed her foot, then playfully ran his fingertips halfway to her knee. “First thing tomorrow,” he said. It came to him, all at once, that the room had grown light. The birds were singing like crazy. “Gee-whillikins,” he said, looking at his wristwatch, “it’s time for you to get up and jog!”

She laughed. “No chance! You want to sleep in the guest room?”

He checked her eyes. “There’s only one bed in the world I want to sleep in right now,” he said; when her face showed panic, he added quickly, though it was not what he’d meant to say—and perhaps, he would think later, not even what Jessica had wanted him to say—“and that’s at my apartment.”

“You won’t fall asleep driving there?” She frowned, eyelids partly lowered.

“How far is it? Half a mile?” He shrugged and leaned forward as if to get up, but he didn’t yet.

“You’ve been drinking, though. Are you sure you’re awake enough?”

“I’m terrific,” he said. “Listen, don’t see me to the door. Stay right here. Close your eyes. You need a blanket?”

She shook her head.

Now at last, reluctantly, he did rise. He moved toward the head of the couch, where he could look down at her face. Her pallor startled him. What if his keeping her up all night made her ill? Jews were a sickly people. Brilliant and good-hearted, but prone to allergies and infirmities. He pointed at the bridge of her nose as if his hand were a gun. “Close your eyes,” he said. “I’ll let myself out. The door locks automatically, doesn’t it?”

“Mmm,” she said. “To tell the truth, I really am fading.”

“Good. Sleep, then. You’re sure I can’t get you a blanket?”

She moved her head, just a little, from side to side on the couch cushion.

“You haven’t closed your eyes,” he said.

She smiled. Her eyelids fluttered, then lowered. She seemed asleep already.

He bent down, thinking of kissing her on the lips, then kissed her on the forehead. As he straightened up, he saw a shine on her cheek—the path of a tear. He stood as if frozen in a slight bow, startled, his hands clasped in front of him. After a moment he took his pipe from the coffeetable and hung it between his teeth, then crossed silently to the door and let himself out.

Mickelsson sighed, coming out of his dreams and memories, finding himself in Binghamton already, without any sense of how he’d gotten there. The shadow of the Jeep on the road beside him darted along too quickly, like something overtaking him. Traffic churned around him—pickup trucks, buses, hurrying cars—demanding his full attention as no doubt it had done for miles now, though his mind had been elsewhere. He hunted for his pipe, stuck it in his mouth mechanically, eyes on the road, and lit it. Monday. Plato and Aristotle at ten. Ruefully, he shook his head.

Now the campus opened out in front of him, an immense factory-complex of aluminum and brick. Possibly the ugliest campus in America. So he had thought when he’d first arrived, shuddering at his fall. He could not say that, with increasing familiarity, the campus had become more pleasing to the eye. But his heart calmed at sight of the place, exactly as—after his hours of classes and conferences—his heart would calm, late tonight, when he burrowed into the darkness of the Endless Mountains.

Plato and Aristotle at ten. A course for beginners.

Taught by Peter J. Mickelsson.

Incredible.

6

“But what was ‘Plato saying,’ really?” he inquired of his class, or rather, looking over them, one eyebrow lifted, inquired ironically of the empty blackboard at the back of the room.