Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

When he glanced down at her, she was smiling. Delicately, with two fingers, the pinkie raised as from a tea-cup, she unzipped his fly.

“I thought you said I could walk right through them and they’d never touch me.”

“They wouldn’t. At least I think they wouldn’t.” She lowered her gaze to her magazine, maybe taking note of what page she was on. One could have sworn she actually did not know she was reaching in, closing her hand on his stiffened penis. His heartbeat quickened.

“Who would?” he asked.

“How would I know? Do I look like a newspaper? All I know is it’s not good, you being here.”

“In this apartment?”

“No, that pahrt’s all right.” She smiled again. She had a chipped, blackened dogtooth, just noticeable when she forgot and smiled too widely. “What’s not good is when you leave and go back to that—house.”

“Is it the house I should be afraid of?”

It was the craziest conversation he’d ever been party to. His mind seemed wonderfully clear, but split in two.

Now she laid aside the magazine and stood up, opening her robe. “I don’t know what you should be afraid of. If I were you I’d be afraid of”—she met his eyes for an instant—”everything.” She pressed closer, one hand drawing his penis out of his pants.

It struck him that she wasn’t at all afraid herself. Surely the whole thing was some damned country joke. Her light blue robe—something like polyester, very prim, the kind of thing a good suburban wife would wear when driven from her husband’s bed by snoring—fell from her, and she rose on tiptoe, almost climbing up onto him. He bent his knees and lifted her in his arms. “Oof!” she cried, then laughed. He slipped in like magic. On the carpet at his feet, to the left of her chair, there were scattered records—Wings, Elton John, Stevie Wonder. She arched her back, leaning away from him, breasts rising.

“How much do I owe you?” he asked, breathing hard, still upright and wearing his trousers and shirt, plunged inside her, his two hands on her waist.

She moaned, shaking her head, closing her legs still more tightly around him. “I don’t know. Five hundred? How much can you afford?”

“Jesus, not five hundred!” No doubt his voice showed his fright.

“Make it a hundred then. Times are hard.”

“How about twenty-five?”

Her eyes rounded. “That’s really insulting!”

“Fifty?” A drop of sweat got in his eye.

“Ninety. You aware of how much time I let you have?”

“I can’t! Really! I’ve got terrible financial troubles—you’ve got no idea! Seventy-five?” He tried to blink the sweat away. No use. She too was sweating. He could hardly hold her.

“OK,” she whispered, and suddenly clamped herself like a fist around him, alarmingly strong. “OK! Oh, Jesus! Sold!”

Afterward, when he was zipped up again, hardly able to reconstruct how the whole thing had happened, sick with anxiety—and with guilt, too, since it was now clear to him that the girl was no more than a teen-ager—Mickelsson asked, handing her the check she’d finally agreed to accept from him: “Tell me something. Do you do that often? Upright like that?”

She laughed and held the check to the light. “How often does a poor country girl get seventy-five dahllers?”

His visitors were long gone when Mickelsson got home that night, or rather that morning; the sky was already beginning to lighten, and birds were singing in every bush and tree, like poor Mickelsson’s heart. It was not that he’d ceased to feel guilty. Intellectually he had no doubt that what he’d done was very wrong, inexcusable in fact, and no doubt that if there were in fact a God, He ought to be shot for creating a world where young women so sweet and essentially innocent could be turned into playthings of masculine pleasure. But when he climbed out of the Jeep, giving the troll-doll a playful little tap to make it swing, it was not solid ground but dewy air he stepped on. It had of course not escaped his attention that she’d outrageously tricked him: she’d as much as told him so herself. And it was not that he’d forgotten how much money seventy-five dollars was in his present straits, or how far it was beyond her usual fee—as she’d mischievously let him know. But the truth was, he liked the trick, liked its bold, teasing wantonness—liked it almost as much as he liked her sweaty, plump young body, or the way she’d somehow banished from his mind all fear of going limp, or her oral expertise, or her shyness when he’d come out of the bedroom and caught her with her glasses on. He liked the way she’d said “Depressed area,” luring him into her trap—no country bumpkin, she, with language like that; a reader, as he’d seen, of Cosmopolitan. Above all, perhaps, he liked the way she’d let her feeling for him slip out, her suggestion that harm might come to him here, and the faint hint that she’d be sorry if that were to happen. So Mickelsson, smiling to himself as he walked toward his house, went over in his mind every moment of the time he’d spent with the girl. Once again, he found, he was in a state of semi-erection.

Getting his keys out—letting his hand, inside his trouser pocket, rest longer than necessary against his partial erection—Mickelsson went suddenly still all over. The door, which he was sure he’d locked behind him as always, stood open. Fear crackled through him, and without thinking he stepped back at once behind the chimney, out of view. He listened for a long time, heart racing. It seemed to him he’d never heard the old house so still before. At last, slowly, stepping carefully on the flagstones, he moved back to the open door, then in. For a full three minutes he stood, hardly breathing, in the kitchen, listening with every nerve. It took another five minutes for him to move, freezing each time a