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

he’d all this time imagined. The Harvard professor was going to certify that the woman was, yes, dying, and then Kushi would demonstrate … He touched Sarah’s hand. “Let’s leave,” he said. She glanced at him and nodded.

They walked through snowy Boston streets, holding hands, looking into stores, admiring brightly lighted window displays—clothes, books, jewelry, paintings, furniture, television sets, things for which she had not the slightest desire. She owned, in all the world, a piano, one beautiful hand-made tablecloth, four books, a record-player and eleven records, a magnificent hundred-year-old Spanish guitar, two dishes, a cup, one spoon, one knife, enough clothes to fill her large leather suitcase, and one pair of chopsticks.

“Martin, there’s something I must tell you,” she said. He studied her face but could see nothing, except that she’d carefully arranged it. He remembered that she’d been a schoolteacher, because that was the way she was looking at him now, exactly: as if he were a child who’d done something very wrong, and though she was fond of him, and not angry, she must bring it to his attention.

“Are you sure this is the time?” he said, not knowing what it was she had to say but knowing most certainly that he didn’t want to hear it.

Her composure broke, her gaze flicked away from him, and she said, “Perhaps not.”

They walked on, with more purpose now, moving toward the trolley that would take them to Brookline and her house, her room, her pallet laid out on the wooden floor on a line that went exactly north and south.

I must tell him in the morning, she thought, and suddenly knew she wouldn’t, hoping against hope.

He returned to southern Missouri looking rested and well fucked and loaded down with bags of mysterious junk he insisted would be good for them. Joan said, not crying, looking bleak and abandoned, “She gives you something you need. I wish I knew what it was, I’d give you the same, and more, more than anyone could possibly give you.”

“It’s the health food,” he said, and his smugness, though it should have made her furious, made him handsome, sexy.

“I wish you could love me too,” she said.

“I do,” he said.

She flew to Detroit, and said to Dr. Behan, “I want you to help me change myself so that Martin will love me.”

“Is that all?” he said, and smiled.

“I’m serious,” she said. She told him about the fights—he’d heard at least something of that from Paul Brotsky—about how Martin, when he was drunk, became, as it seemed to her, a different man, how he called her awful things, hit her sometimes, or worse yet, stormed off in the middle of the night, sometimes in the car. What frightened her most of all was that some night, driving a hundred miles an hour and so drunk he couldn’t see, he would kill somebody. That, if he lived through it, would break his heart, drive him crazier than he was.

“You’re sure your perceptions of this aren’t a little distorted,” he said. He was silver-haired and lean, so good-looking one thought one might have seen him in some movie or on television. Paul had been right about him; she could tell already. She’d been to enough psychiatrists to know he was extraordinary. If he had any method, she would learn over the next few months, it was simply to listen carefully, catching the little lies—for instance, if you said “one” when you really meant “I”—and saying exactly what he believed, as an ordinary, decent human being, a committed physician. He would suggest often that her perceptions were distorted. Frequently she would have no idea, after a session with him, just what it was he’d said; but she began to move through the world as if Dr. Behan were watching her, began judging her behavior as he would judge it; and she felt herself changing, changing quickly.

“Maybe my perceptions are distorted, I don’t know. But I know he doesn’t care if he kills himself. It may be he’s secretly trying to kill himself, or it may only be he doesn’t think; but either way, I know for certain it doesn’t matter to him.”

“And you think he doesn’t love you—after all these years.”

“He’s told me he doesn’t. Often. He’s told me again and again the only reason he stays is the children, and … I believe him.”

Dr. Behan frowned, as if she’d done something slightly wrong that he would get back to. He said, “You really believe, Joan, that if you get rid of certain … faults”—he waved vaguely, as if thinking about her faults, then finished—“he’ll suddenly love you again as, you say, he used to?”

She nodded.

“Isn’t that a strange thing to believe?”

She nodded again, and her eyes filled with tears.

Behan winced, glanced down at her hands. At last he said, “Hmm. Well, perhaps it would help if you brought him with you next time, so I could speak to him, get a better idea. Will he come?”

“Oh, he’ll come,” she said. “He hates it, the way things are now.”

After the session she went with Paul to a Detroit Symphony concert, then home to his apartment, where they cooked a huge dinner and made love. As she was just drifting off to sleep something startled her awake—the pain, perhaps, though it seemed to her there had been something else, someone in the doorway, studying her—and she whispered urgently, “People can change, save themselves.”

Paul said, “I said that. You keep ripping off my best lines.”

Eighteen

Behan liked Martin immediately, and understood almost as soon as he saw them together what was wrong. She too, in fact, quite suddenly understood, though she had no idea what to do about it. Behan said, in his simple, physicianly way—exactly as he might have asked about an ulcer or a skin irritation—“you love Joan, Martin?”

“I feel … affection for her,” Martin said. “Sometimes when I’m lying beside her at night I feel a great, helpless tenderness, a wish that I could make her life better.