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

was taken ill, Mary went at once to the headmistress and said, with great seriousness and—after six weeks in London—an English accent as impeccable as any English child’s, that her mother was an excellent music teacher, in fact she’d once won the California Teacher of the Year Award.

“Is that so, Mary,” the headmistress said, tilting forward with interest. She was a spiffy lady who wore slacks and bright chokers and fine old rings which suggested that her family was well off.

“California is one of our largest states, actually,” Mary said.

“That’s very impressive indeed, I must say,” said the headmistress.

That afternoon the incomparable Mr. Lyman, second in command on the music front—ha HAH!—in flamenco boots and black trousers so tight he could barely bend his knees, his hair silver-white, though he hadn’t yet reached forty, his fingers aflutter in a way that in America would instantly have pegged him a raving homosexual (he had, in fact, not the slightest inclination), arrived at their apartment with a huge bouquet: “I have come, my dear lady, to seduce you if I can. —Oh, excuse me. I take it you’re Mary’s father? —Ah, madam!” And away he flew toward the livingroom, and Martin Orrick, unshaven, papers in one hand, a bottle of Whitbread’s Ale in the other, gazed after him. “Mrs. Orrick, I presume?” Mr. Lyman said, and bowed grandly and handed her the flowers. “I have come, my dear lady, to seduce you if I can.” In short, she was hired to teach music.

Winter came, and snow. Evan rode the underground to Rutherford School in a tailcoat and top hat, practicing card tricks—in his vest, a magic wand. Mr. Pringle came, mornings, in his horse-drawn milk cart to leave milk in glass bottles. When Mary spoke American it sounded like a clever but distinctly English imitation. Martin, climbing in through an upstairs window when he was so drunk he could hardly have stood on solid ground, fell two storeys into a rock pile and broke his leg. Spring came. He walked with a cane. Joan was composing now, as well as teaching. String quartets for children; then, as she grew confident, music for older people. Martin sat writing in the sunlit kitchen, hour after hour, for all the world like some smooth-running, bleary-eyed, and shaggy machine. Sometimes he would turn and stare for a while at the grass and flowers or the dark mirror-surface of the Regents Park canal. Sometimes he’d go walking, late at night, and would stare, heavy-hearted as a caged bear in rut, at the girls on passing buses. For the first time in his life he attended a pornographic movie. It made him sad, merely. Joan would come in from her work sparkling, that long, red glistening hair electric, tits high, as if she were in a perpetual state of arousal, as perhaps she was. “Baby,” she would say, kissing his bewhiskered cheek as he sat at the typewriter, “come fuck me.” He would obey.

Paul Brotsky came to visit and stayed three months. She became still more beautiful, more terrifying. He—Martin—would stand, big-shouldered, long-haired, baggy-eyed, slightly fat, morosely watching as they went briskly down the sidewalk, Paul and Joan—and frequently Evan and Mary—on their way to Harrod’s to get groceries and flowers, and he’d be so filled with sorrow he could barely get his breath. Not jealousy, not the faintest flicker of that, or so he told himself. He loved Paul Brotsky very nearly as he loved the other three. But loss, the loss of his whole life. He remembered how, when they were young, when he was teaching at Oberlin, he’d looked at her as if from an enormous distance—as a ghost might have looked at her, incapable of making himself known to her—had studied, feature by feature, her beauty, and had wished in a kind of agony that he could buy her fine clothes, beautiful jewels before her beauty passed. Lying beside her, touching her breasts, the splendid hollows on each side just above her pubic hair—as fiery red as the hair above: he could not touch it, ever in his life, without seeing its miraculous color in his mind—moving his hand lower, closing his fingers on her crotch, magnificently firm and as square as a box, he had wanted to weep at the waste of such beauty, such nobility beyond his means. She slept on. She’d been concertizing then, flying in and out, making just enough money to pay for the plane trips but loving what she did, and getting good reviews. Except at parties, he almost never saw her when she wasn’t too tired to talk, or else asleep. He couldn’t write when she was practicing, so she practiced over at the music building—went there early in the morning, before he was awake—and if they met for lunch, there was nothing much to say. He had never been talkative, and her talk was anecdotal, and no anecdotes are formed in a concert pianist’s practice room. So he would lie beside her, touching her as she slept, and when she grew moist under his fingertips he would gently part her legs and make love to her, hungry and sorrowful, wondering if she was really asleep. Sometimes, sitting in a concert hall in some city near enough that he could go too, watching her play—her head thrown back as if defiantly, striking the keys with such controlled violence you’d have sworn it was a powerful man you were hearing (but her hair flowed down her back, dazzling, and the sheath she wore, metallic blue, split open to show the sweet cleavage between her breasts)—or her head lowered almost to the keys of the piano, tipped sideways, listening as if hungrily to pianissimo notes flying by like summer rain—he would feel, besides pride—oh, unspeakable pride!—a kind of horror at the thought that that woman was his wife. He had thought all that would change, once he himself grew famous. He imagined himself getting letters from adoring readers in