Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

it seemed to him—could anyone imagine it was personal. No one, as he thought it must go without saying, could be more ignorant, more cowardly, more base than himself. Often he’d leave the victim of his attack in psychological shambles, and he wouldn’t even know it. Often, unfortunately, the victim was Joan. It began to emerge that the difference between them was serious, perhaps dangerous. He had none of her brilliance, none of her wit, but studying endlessly, with mind-crushing orderliness, reading some one poem again and again until every little nuance was clear to him (“The hourglass whispers to the lion’s paw” or “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”), or reading some one book over and over—Plato or Blake or Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus— until he was sure he understood every sentence in it, he developed a background of authority she couldn’t match or deal with. She had no wish to know the kinds of things he knew—certainly they didn’t make him a more lively conversationalist, it seemed to her—but all the same, she felt intimidated. Even about music—incredible irony!—he could make her feel stupid. She began to attack him more frequently—flash out at him, with her light, quick wit, some insult he would get only tomorrow in the shower. Why she’d attacked he would have no idea, as sometimes even she had no idea. He began to be occasionally impotent.

They had other problems. There were certain things that were obviously his responsibility, not hers (as Joan at that time understood the world)—responsibilities he refused to deal with: the car, things around the house that needed fixing. He was becoming more than ever before a drudge, moreover; he never wanted to go out, and when they did he frequently embarrassed her. Or friends would come over and he would sit smiling politely, witlessly, never saying a word, obviously not listening. It was even worse if he was feeling cheerful. He’d talk at endless length of things no one cared about, stories of famous chess players who’d gone mad, for instance. Half of them he made up. He’d still be holding forth, laughing loudly, fully persuaded he was the life of the party, when she finally gave up and went to bed. Sometimes she’d wake up, hours later, as it seemed, and she’d hear them all laughing in the livingroom, still there, as if the things he said really were of interest. She would be all at once terribly lonely, seeing with icy clarity that, for all her early promise, her supposed beauty, she was already, at twenty-three, a failure. Tears filled her eyes and she wished bitterly that she’d never grown up. Princess my ass, she said, and wept at the loss of her innocence.

Yet when she looked back at them later, they seemed to her good years even so, those years when they were making it. Martin got exactly the kinds of jobs he wanted—good schools, first Oberlin, then San Francisco State, where the pressure was not so great he’d be prevented from writing fiction, yet the quality was decent; and wherever they went, she taught, concertized, took an occasional course, began composing a little. (He too composed. He was unbelievably bad.) Their fourth year in California, she taught in what was known, inaccurately, as a ghetto school and won the California Teacher of the Year Award. Martin was proud and had a party for her—unspeakably embarrassing. He got obscenely drunk and read the citation and the whole Chronicle article aloud. It actually crossed her mind that she might leave him. But mostly it was better. They went to plays, met painters and sculptors she admired (Martin had never heard of them), met doctors and lawyers everyone had read about (Martin had never heard of them), and newspaper columnists, even movie stars (Martin had never heard of them). It was the life she was born for. They had, by this time, a large old house in pre-earthquake San Francisco, in the Mission District, and Martin was doing well. Reviewers said of him, “A brilliant new writer has arrived upon the scene.” Of her they wrote, “Few pianists now at work can match the articulation of Joan Frazier’s right hand,” and “her sheer joy in performance recalls technicians like Levin.” “Who’s Levin?” Martin asked. “Character in some old fable,” she snapped. Martin was, in short, the same old Martin, gloriously handsome, with tragic, soulful eyes—though not as tragic or soulful as he imagined, she sometimes irritably thought. At three in the morning, getting up and going into his study, she’d say, “Are you ever coming to bed, Martin?” He’d be sitting at his desk, the room full of pipe smoke, an untouched martini glinting like a diamond beside his typewriter. He’d turn his head, stare at her like an owl, or maybe like E. A. Poe’s ghost, jugged on visions, perhaps not even noticing that she was naked. The windows of his study were high, round-arched; they looked out across the city. “What you need is a black panther, like Lord Byron,” she said. “Pardon?” he said. “Oh, fuck yourself,” she said. From sheer misanthropic perversity he defended Lyndon Johnson and the Viet Nam war, argued in favor of capital punishment when all San Francisco was talking of Caryl Chessman, and in print described John Updike as “mentally disabled.” “Martin,” she said, “how can you think such things?” She spoke cautiously, like a welfare worker uneasy about prying. “The time has come,” he said, “for thinking the unthinkable!” Then, more like himself, “Come on now. They argue like maniacs, all on the same side. I try to give their pompous rant a little dignity.” “Dear Martin, you’re such a kind man,” she said. He bugged his eyes out and waved his arm like a Shakespearean actor. “A little less than kiss and more than cunt,” he said. “Oh Jesus,” she said, and rolled her eyes up, and closed the study door.

“How,” people asked her, “did he get to be such an old