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

see sense, make him understand that she still loved him. She knew well enough that Sarah had the odds. Sarah was “reasonable,” “instinctively just,” he said. Oh yes. Terrific. “She can afford to be,” she snapped. “She’s not your wife.” But with every word she spoke, though it was all true, she knew she was burying her chances more deeply, because Sarah was, in Martin’s experience, gentle and reasonable; steadily, ploddingly, unfailingly. With her every attempt to save the marriage, Joan made the contrast between them, she knew, more obvious.

“She’s cunning, Martin,” she said. Then, trying to be fair, knowing his childish and unreasonable love of fairness at any cost, she added, “Maybe she doesn’t even know it herself, but she’s cunning: she’s after you, seducing you with talk and that horrible macrobiotic cooking, talking about only the things she knows you like—”

That, he could have told her, was not true. Sarah talked endlessly of health foods and exercises, which bored him to tears—though he was inclined to believe her theories about eating; at any rate, the nervous stomach that had plagued him all his life no longer troubled him when he stopped eating meat. Neither was it true, as Joan insisted, that he loved her because she was younger, prettier. She was only five years younger than Joan, and in everything she did she was as slow as an old woman. Sitting in her small house watching her cook, or watching her type one of his manuscripts, he was driven wild by the deliberateness with which she did everything, as if she expected life to go on forever. But he could put up with that. She was not, certainly, prettier than Joan; but her fundamental goodness and gentleness gave her a beauty Joan could not at that time match, in Martin’s eyes, and she commented on his fiction in a way no one had ever done before, naively treating his characters as actual people, urging him to see in them virtues he’d missed, persuading him to be kinder about their faults. She was uninterested in possessions—she owned practically nothing—but she had taste, an innate sense of what was solid and good, that Joan, in his opinion, lacked. She gave him a beautiful hundred-year-old clock, the most beautiful he’d ever seen. It made everything in his house seem to him trashy, quick and easy. He did not, of course, tell Joan where the clock had come from; but Joan had an infallible sense for these things. For all its beauty—lovingly fashioned; firm, heavy wood; antique, wavy glass—the clock lasted just three weeks. That she could destroy such a thing astounded him. It was more shocking than her hitting him on the head with a log. He remembered what he’d put out of his mind for years, that when they were first married she’d “remodeled” a beautiful old chest his parents had given them—had sawed off the legs and put on idiotic handles. He was surer than ever that he must leave her right after the trip to Spain, start his life all over. He told Sarah his intention, as he’d told Joan.

“If it happens, I’ll be a good wife,” Sarah said.

“It will,” he said firmly.

She kissed his hand. She wanted it to happen, wanted to believe him. But it was a fact that when he went on reading trips, it was Joan he took with him, and the children. Under her mask of serenity, she was annoyed, timidly suspicious. Because he was honest when he talked about Joan—honest about her humor, her fears, her talent—Sarah understood she wouldn’t get him without a fight, for all his protestation. She hesitated—characteristically. It would be enough, she told herself, if they could just be lovers. But lying on the pallet beside him, moonlight streaming in, she would study his sleeping face, puffy from too much drinking, and tough under her fingertips—like the face of anyone who drank too much milk, ate too much meat—but nevertheless a good face, well constructed, phrenologically the face of a man who would die old if he could learn moderation, learn to slow down, and she knew it would not be enough for her merely to be his lover. She wanted him as, so far as she could remember, she’d never wanted anything, and wanted children by him. “Yes, she will make me fight for you,” she said. He opened his eyes and she smiled. She hadn’t meant for him to overhear. But she saw that he was still asleep, even though he looked at her. “Well then,” she whispered, and her eyes slightly narrowed, “I will fight.”

She cooked for him, when he came to her, as she’d never cooked before. She’d been well trained, and at each new taste she introduced him to he would say, staring at his chopsticks, “That’s amazing!” She typed for him half the night, not very accurately, but working till her fingers ached and she could hardly see. She massaged him, taught him Do-in, convinced him that he was magnificent, drunk or sober, happy or sad, played him her tapes of gypsy music, sometimes played piano or guitar for him, and again and again, though when they’d first become lovers he’d occasionally been impotent, made love to him. She was an artist on the pallet; she could make anyone believe he was the world’s greatest lover. But she knew, also, how to talk to him, usually, or so she believed, and it was partly true. It was by talk, in fact, that she’d attracted him in the first place, when she was sitting in on one of his English classes. She talked mostly about the things he cared about. That was as it should be, in Sarah’s opinion. The whole idea of women’s liberation made her sad, made her laugh. She had been liberated all these years—in the sense, at least, that she’d gotten every job she’d ever cared about, had traveled as she pleased, had made money, had lived with men.