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

to make it a shopping mall and theater center. There were various possibilities—a grant from the Appalachian Regional Conference, help from hud, certain private philanthropists in Philadelphia. The small, bony, very businesslike woman who’d at once filled him in cocked her head at him, no doubt sizing him up for usefulness.

“Would you care to join us?” the chinless woman asked.

He wondered if she knew that he was seeing—or at any rate had once seen—the town prostitute. Improbable, he thought. They would not readily believe that such a thing existed in their fair city.

(Cruel and uncalled-for, he thought. They were good people. Not pious or self-righteous. They were honored that Peter Mickelsson, philosopher, should be their neighbor, fellow citizen. If they were to learn that he’d gone mad over a prostitute, they would not crackle with indignation; they would be sweetly distressed, dismayed.)

“I’m afraid not tonight,” he said. “Another time, perhaps?”

They all spoke at once, insisting that he be with them next time.

The man with the long nose said, “I didn’t actually read your book, but I hear it’s very good. God knows it’s needed! I’m a doctor myself.” He smiled meekly, his eyes fixed on Mickelsson’s forehead as if there were a ruby there. Perhaps there was. More veins popped every day.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” Mickelsson said. He laid down his tip beside his plate, one corner of the dollar bill peeking out. He would pick up his check at the counter.

“I’m so glad to meet you,” the woman who seemed to be their leader said, and took his hand again. “If you ever need anything—”

“Thank you,” he said. He bowed to the others, almost clicking his heels like one of Nietzsche’s Prussian officers. “Thank you!”

It crossed his mind—a wave of distress—that the woman meant it. If he should ever need anything, she would be there. They would all be there. It made him stoop a little, backing away from them, falsely smiling. One might say, if one were mad, “I’d love to stay longer, but there’s a teen-aged girl I must go fuck.” A shadow fell over him, almost a physical coldness. The chinless woman herself, down under those stylish, medium-expensive clothes, was no doubt beautiful. Ironically, Mickelsson’s infatuation made every woman in the world seem sexually attractive. Fool, fool! he thought. When the waitress hurried past him as he waited to pay his check at the counter, he managed to brush her thigh, so lightly she didn’t seem to notice, with the back of one hand.

Out on the street again, his right hand closed snugly around the silver lioness-head, Mickelsson found the sidewalk and pavement almost dry, here and there a large, dark, glassy puddle that sharply reflected the bluish-white neon of the Acme sign, the colors of the traffic light, the headlights and taillights of an occasional passing car or truck. The sky overhead was black and starless. He walked to his Jeep, intending to drive home, but then, standing in the street with his hand on the handle of the door, he frowned, second thoughts tugging at his coattail. The beep of an old car approaching on his side of the street startled him from his reverie, and he pressed closer to the Jeep, though in fact the car had plenty of room to pass. Right beside him the car slowed still more and beeped again, and, scowling into the dimness of the car’s interior, he made out, in silhouette, a big man leaning close to the steeringwheel, waving at him, and on the passenger side, nearer to Mickelsson, the ghostly image of a white-faced, smiling child. The taillights were halfway up the hill, bound for Lanesboro, before it came to him that the driver of the car was the man he’d bought the Jeep from, Lepatofsky. Belatedly, Mickelsson waved.

He decided to see if Donnie had come home while he was eating. He could see from here a faint light in her front window, suggesting that she might be there. Giving a decisive little tug to his hatbrim and glancing once, furtively, at the watchers on the bench, he turned from the Jeep and walked quickly to the entrance of her building, stepped inside, then paused for a moment, touching the tip of the cane to the floor but not leaning on it, the fingers of his right hand restlessly playing, closing and unclosing, on the cane-handle, his heart as weighty as some dead thing at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The lightbulb in the entrance-way had burned out; one looked up, as if from the bottom of a pit, at the dim glow of some bulb not visible at the top of the first steep rise of stairs. Except for the faint sound of television sets, the building was asleep. Though his mind had come to no decision, he began to climb the stairs. Like a thief, he kept close to the walls, where the treads of the stairs were less likely to cry out. At the third-floor landing, the floor below hers, he stopped again. Then, firmly setting his smile and removing his hat, carrying it in his left hand, he climbed the rest of the way to her landing and door.

Though he knocked and repeatedly called out to her, not too loudly, no answer came from the apartment. Once he thought he heard someone moving about inside, but he couldn’t be sure. Here, as at his own house, beams and boards creaked, futilely searching for a comfortable position. No light came out onto the threadbare carpet below her door. The longer he stood there, memorizing the grain in the door panels, the more sounds he became conscious of—refrigerator motors, fans, air-conditioners, TV voices and music, a regular clinking sound he couldn’t identify, the faraway mewing of a kitten.

At last he put his hat on, nodded to himself, and, closing his right hand on the worn-smooth railing, started back down to the street. When he stepped from the entrance-way, the bench people