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

curmudgeon so young?” She would laugh, though she was embarrassed, not so secretly, and they too would laugh. What Martin said at parties was of no importance, she might have told them, even to Martin. Halfway through the party he’d sometimes go up to his study and write or go play with the children, or if the party was at somebody else’s house, he’d drive home early, leaving Joan—without even telling her he was going—to get a ride with some friend. He was a pain in the ass. But on the other hand, antisocial as he might be—and now, when she got him to go out with her, often drunk as well—his huge, slow novels had a kind of gloomy beauty; they were better than most other people’s novels, it seemed to Joan. When he gave readings women students fell in love with him and asked her, breathlessly, what it was like to be married to such a man. “You have no idea,” she said, and flashed her wicked smile. When he gave readings—dressed like a silver-haired peacock (she and Martin were now in their thirties)—she too could gladly fall in love with him again, though she thought herself something of a fool for it. But she never really thought, in those days, about whether or not she loved him. When they were with people he liked, of whom there were fortunately two or three, like the poet Bill Dickey, he talked eagerly, happily, and it was a joy to be around him. The rest of the time—except now and then when his indifference to going places filled her with rage—she was too busy to pay much attention to how she felt.

Then quite suddenly, as it seemed to Joan, everything came apart. She found he’d been having, apparently for some time, an affair with a large, untalented, peasant-faced friend of hers. He’d written her a letter and forgotten to mail it. Joan stood by the diningroom table, the letter in her trembling hand. “She ‘understands’ you, I presume,” she said to him, wild with rage. He merely looked at her, cowardly, miserable, loathsome, but also superior, as usual; she was talking cheap clichés, revealing again her worthlessness. She grew wilder yet. “God damn you, Martin, defend yourself.”

He looked down at his glass, then turned away and went to stand by the window with no expression on his face at all, like a tired old man waiting for a bus. It was dark outside, raining. “Martin, what about the children?” she wailed. Evan was six, Mary four. Beautiful, bright children, Evan like Joan, outwardly at least, Mary like her father, and they both loved those children, as anyone could see, with all their hearts. “You bastard!” she said, “you ugly, slow-minded, unwashed, filthy, arrogant, selfish, neurotic, drunken bastard!” It built like a magnificent arpeggiate crescendo in Brahms, and at its peak, exactly as she burst into tears, she hurled a cut-glass candlestick from the table—it had cost them plenty, and it did not escape her, even as she threw, that in throwing something expensive she proved she was serious. Incredibly, he let it hit him, stood like some big, half-wit Frankenstein monster, as if mournfully asking to be killed, and, to her horror, the candlestick crashed into his face. Blood splashed out across his nose and forehead, and he turned like a stunned animal toward the kitchen. She ran after him, calling, “Martin!”

“Stay away from me,” he said, and looked at her. “I warn you.” His eyes were, she thought, insane.

She hesitated, frightened, saying, “Martin, it was an accident! I didn’t mean it! Please!”—still sick at heart because he no longer loved her—how obvious it was, how obvious it had been for months, she saw now—and with his hand over his face, blood rushing through his fingers, he walked out through the kitchen door into the darkness and rain. She ran to get her raincoat, still trying to decide what to do even as, awkwardly, she pulled the raincoat on, then ran after him. There was no sign of him now. She ran around the side of the house to the front. No sign of Martin on the street, either, only a few splashes of blood on the sidewalk, blurring in the rain. She called to him, then began to run, striking out blindly—she had no idea which way he’d go—toward the lights of the closed-down business section, the all-night Mexican restaurant, or toward the park—and that struck her, suddenly, as tragic. There had been a time when she could anticipate his every flicker of emotion. She stood on the shiny, steeply rising street, the lights of a car coming slowly toward her through the darkness of trees, the broad, empty lawns, and she screamed his name. The echo rang around her, clicked off brick and stone walls, concrete steps. After a moment a light went on, high above the street, and someone opened a window. A stranger came toward her, an old man, head tipped. “Martin,” she whispered in terror. The same instant, everything went white. The pain that hadn’t troubled her for more than a year was suddenly rising inside her, all around her, like an explosion, more intense than it had ever been before. The city went spinning, sucked away toward darkness, she heard a mumble of voices, then nothing.

Thirteen

Martin told her, sitting with his head tipped back, his eyes closed, beside her hospital bed, that he was leaving San Francisco. He’d taken a job in some unheard-of new university in the Missouri Ozarks. She wept, assuming he meant to go there with that woman. It was partly pride, she would admit later, when she was able to think about anything at all. Paul Brotsky would read to her, fondly and teasingly, years afterward, “The Leo tends to have too much false pride and may be boastful and snobbish. Since he always wants to be at the head of things, he must be made to realize that others