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

had gone, long ago, to those silly, tenderhearted musicals at the Muny. She remembered suddenly, and tears filled her eyes—useless to say it was stupid, sentimental: the human heart has no taste, no sense—

Springtime, Springtime, Maytime, Will you love me ever?

Dr. Krassner said softly, his hand on her wrist, “You need a pain shot, Joanie?”

She nodded. “Yes, please.” She was thinking, Buddy, kiss me. Tears ran down her cheeks.

When the doctor was gone she said, more to the room than to Martin, “What he’s telling us is, I’m dying.”

“Not exactly,” Martin said.

“No. No, of course. Not exactly.”

Fifteen

She learned to live with pain and the idea of a shortened life, though she didn’t exactly swear off all drugs, except at first. It helped that after the operation wound had healed she had—as Dr. Krassner had predicted she would—a long period when she was almost completely free of pain. Though she waited nervously, knowing it must come back—watching her insides with the blank expression of an Ozark hunter watching leaves in a woods—she would sometimes go for days at a time without remembering her condition. In spite of herself, she began to find herself hoping that the doctor had been presenting only the darkest picture possible, that in fact the adhesions were gone for good now, the whole thing was over. She was not therefore happy, though she had periods of such happiness that she was shocked and baffled when her troubles with Martin flared up again. A thousand times they were at the edge of divorce, and now there were magazines and women’s groups to make her feel stupid and guilty for so stubbornly clinging to him, or, rather, to their life. Often it seemed to her that for Martin she was dead already. He bought a huge old motorcycle and wrecked it the first week, grew his hair much longer, had passionate affairs one after another, and even when he tired of them or she somehow managed to bring them to an end—it usually meant some drunken scene and sometimes she and Martin would nearly kill each other—he’d go on writing to the women or phoning from his office, go on liking them as if they were dear and harmless old friends. He insisted, when she could make him say anything at all, that there was nothing wrong in it, insisted that she had no hold on him—love not freely given was not love, he said, but mere socially convenient slavery, and he refused to be socially convenient or anybody’s slave. They’d been married for nearly half their lives; they were neither of them the same people, he said, who’d taken those pious, wildly optimistic vows. “Martin,” she said, “don’t you remember us?” “Characters in some old fable,” he snapped. She tried to understand it, accept it. She had affairs herself, but it was never the same. She loved Martin, only Martin—perhaps it was, as people hinted, a sickness—and Martin accepted, approved of her affairs, even when they made him slightly jealous, because he had this theory about love, and he would rather die than abandon a perfectly good theory.

It was true that he’d changed radically. He’d never been her slave, whatever he might think—such was her opinion—but since they’d moved from San Francisco he’d done exactly as he pleased in everything, independent as some new Jesse James, or maybe Genghis Khan. It was he who bought the house they’d been renting, without consulting her. (He paid far too much money. Scornful of dickering, even when he knew he must lose by his scorn, he took the seller’s first offer.) He went through, in fact, a period of real insanity, as she learned when she finally got him to a psychiatrist. When they’d first moved from San Francisco, he was turning off his hearing, even his sight, at will, psychotically withdrawing from anything that “bored” him—that is, the doctor said, threatened him. Whenever they had parties he’d get so drunk he could hardly stand, and he’d go sleep in the barn, or reel crazily through the woods, singing or ranting Shakespeare, waving his arms, falling sometimes, bellowing at the stars:

“Yet know, my master, God omnipotent, Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf Armies of pestilence, And they shall strike Your children yet unborn and unbegot, That lift your vassal hands against my head And threat the glory of my precious crown…”

The children, at such times, were afraid of him. So was she, for that matter. Though he ranted against “mindless, self-pitying existentialists,” he’d developed a conviction that he was a Nietzschean superman. The kinds of rules she lived by, the kinds of rules her parents had always lived by, were moronic. They led to happiness, yes; a happiness of circling insects. All rules were moronic; all happiness was finally insect fodder. He threw away her psychiatric bills, threatened hunters with violence when they came onto his land, though the land wasn’t posted, parked his old Rambler where he damn well pleased. He no longer paid attention to traffic lights, merely looked, somewhat casually, to see if anyone was coming. But terrible as that period had been for them all, his psychiatrist claimed it was in a certain sense healthy. In his sickness as a child, he’d lost confidence utterly, fled from pain and conflict and from emotional attachments, leaned entirely on Joan, who seemed so competent, so willing to do the work—even the emotional work. Yet he’d always hated what seemed to him his weakness. And now suddenly, however crazily, he was choosing to run his life. She needn’t be surprised if he seized the reins fiercely, looking angrily over his shoulder, spoiling for a fight. He was determined—unconsciously, so to speak—to grow up.

Joan listened, squeezing her hands together, occasionally raising her Kleenex to dab at her eyes. The psychiatrist was fat, square-bearded. He looked like a cartoon of a psychiatrist. The way he leaned forward, studying her as if paternally, made it seem as if he thought it