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

But … it’s difficult. She insists on dominating, absolutely controlling, and I feel like I’m suffocating. For instance—”

She leaned toward him, tears running down his face. “I don’t dominate. Somebody has to take charge. All you want to do is write. If you’d once try acting like a husband—” She broke off. Martin had gone into his icy shell, his arms hanging limp, fingertips trembling.

“That’s what I mean,” he said. There was a quaver in his voice, as if in a minute he would cry, but he wouldn’t, she knew; he would merely become more withdrawn, fall silent. “I say anything at all and she strikes out, or changes it, and I just back away, give up.”

“But why does it all have to be my fault?” she asked.

Behan had said nothing all this time, merely watched Martin and occasionally glanced at her in a way that made her feel left out, disapproved; but now he said a little sternly, “Joan, why do you insist on dominating this conversation?”

“I’m not, I only—”

“Yes you are,” he said. She felt spanked, like a child, and covered her face with her hands, crying harder. “Who’s idea was this,” she wanted to say. “Who was it that said in the first place that I was going to change, become a nicer person?” (Nothing is fair, Martin had once written; thank God you’re one of the winners, or, if you’re not, come out shooting.)

Martin said, “I gentle dogs sometimes—you know, dogs that have been mistreated and have turned vicious. I feel about Joan as I feel about some of them—affectionate but … she bites.”

“I see,” Behan said. Then, after a moment, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

“I don’t think so,” Martin said.

“You might mention your hatred of women,” she snapped.

“That’s true,” Martin said, without feeling, without any trace of embarrassment or hurt. “I wasn’t aware of it until recently, but I’ve been, all my life, afraid of women. Not my mother, my aunt Mary, maybe one or two others. But generally … That is, I fall in love, or something like love, but I’m afraid.”

Matter-of-factly Behan said, “It makes you impotent at times?”

“Until recently.”

Behan glanced at Joan, guessing something and deciding whether or not to pursue it. He decided not to and got up. “Well, good. That’s enough to get us started. Would you mind waiting outside while I talk a little more with Joan?”

By now Martin too was standing. “No, fine,” he said. They moved toward the door, Behan saying something she couldn’t quite catch. Not about them. The weather, maybe, or “How long are you planning to be in town?”

When Behan came back he said, “Don’t cry, Joan. It’s going to be easier than you think.”

They began on her slightly cruel humor. She was a fast learner, and within a week she had learned to keep silent, think twice, and she discovered a surprising thing about herself: she liked becoming, as she jokingly called it, “a nicer person.” Within a month she had learned not only to hold her tongue but even to reconsider, think again about the person who roused scorn in her. That was better yet, more mysterious and exciting. People she’d never really noticed before—people she’d dismissed, wiped out with a quick little thrust of wit—turned out to be interesting—not, heaven knows, that she wanted them to tea.

With her visits to Behan, something else changed, too. Martin and the children, alone while she was away, began playing instruments together. Evan was beginning to be quite good on the French horn and violin, Mary on the cello and Irish harp. “Why don’t they play instruments with me?” she asked Dr. Behan. “I’m the musician.”

“Maybe it’s not as much fun,” he said.

She decided to change that. It was the hardest change she was able to make. She’d never minded wrong notes when she was teaching school, had never minded inattention, disorganization, had not even minded, particularly, when in the middle of a piece one of the players wandered off into some other song, as if he’d forgotten that the others were there. But she minded terribly when her children played badly, and minded even more when Martin made, God help us, suggestions on interpretation. She would rather have been thrown into quicksand, would rather have been eaten by wolves, crawled over by spiders and snakes, than contend with their perpetually and individually changing beat, their forgetting of flats and sharps. She’d look over at Martin, nodding ferociously to keep him in rhythm, and she would think—because he was growing handsomer now, beginning, tentatively, to believe that something really had changed, perhaps finally—she would think, I love you, you son of a bitch, but how you ever held down an orchestra chair is more than I’ll ever know. She didn’t notice until suddenly it was an accomplished fact, that they were all getting better, and by leaps and bounds. She tried to write music for them to play together, but it was impossible, she was unable to concentrate. She also began a novel, because when the pain made her stay in bed all day she could at least, she thought, write; but that too proved impossible.

He tried to make her eat nothing but vegetables and fish, because the body can do wonders about curing itself if not pumped full of poisons. Man ist was man isst, he said. She knew whom he was quoting, and it filled her with panic and anger that he hadn’t yet forgotten. When the U.S. government offered him a chance to lecture for six weeks in Japan, he snapped it up. She couldn’t understand why, at first, since he hated to leave his writing for that long at a stretch; but when they got there she understood: Japanese food. She liked it, in fact—and would learn to cook all the famous Japanese delicacies—but the best thing she found in Japan was Kobe steak.

All their time in Japan they had only one fight, and even that was