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

narrow stripes; a kind of hunchbacked dandy. No doubt part of what was wrong with him, Mickelsson had decided some time ago, was that it took so much energy to keep up the opinion that it was the world out there that was misshapen. Not a generous thought, Mickelsson would admit. But Blassenheim was right, why be reasonable?

“Come in,” Mickelsson said, and, when Tillson had slipped through the door, not opening it farther, “sit down.”

“Thank you!” Tillson said. “I’ll only take a minute of your valuable time.” He bent his knees to sit, but then, with his rear end hovering over the chair, two fingers of each hand raising the material of his coal-black suitpants to protect what little remained of the crease, he caught sight of the huge pile of mail on Mickelsson’s desk and, eyes widening, cried, “Wow!” He was pointing now, looking at Mickelsson in disbelief.

“Saving it for a rainy day,” Mickelsson said.

“Gosh, Pete,” Tillson said, “don’t you feel that’s a little … unethical?” He flashed the grin again, slanty eyes glittering, like a fierce debater pretending he never shot to kill.

“No doubt,” Mickelsson said casually. “Was that what you wanted to talk about?”

After an instant Tillson seated himself, once again flashed his exaggerated smile, and said, “Not directly.” His tongue flicked out, wetting his lower lip. “I thought maybe we should have a chat about … Senior Personnel?” He tipped his head, letting his smile come in at an angle.

Mickelsson waited.

“You’ve been getting our notices?” He tapped the tips of his fingers together, eyebrows jerking, smile painfully stretched.

Mickelsson glanced at the pile on his desk. “I’m sure they’re here someplace.”

Tillson laughed thinly, as if gleefully, and nodded. “Yes, I know meetings are a nuisance. Personally, I hate them! But if we don’t all of us pull together on this—” He leaned far to one side, smiling hard, never blinking, his whole body wearing an expression so oddly devious that Mickelsson was abruptly reminded of what Edie Bryant had told him, that Tillson had a wife and a mistress who knew each other, were in fact good friends. It was all very open and twentieth-century except that, she said, Tillson and the mistress were forever sneaking in extra assignations, not telling the wife. “That’s ridiculous,” Mickelsson had said at once, sorry to have lent his ear to such talk. “Isn’t it?” Edie had laughed, innocently delighted.

The memory and Mickelsson’s sense of guilt made him suddenly blunt. “You keep scheduling the meetings on Fridays,” he said. “I don’t come in on Fridays.”

Tillson’s laugh might lead one to wonder if he were actually making an effort to appear insane, but he splashed his hands open and stretched them, palms up, toward Mickelsson, begging him to show a little sense. “It’s the only time the whole committee has free!” he said. “Gosh, I know it’s not ideal—”

“I’m not free on Fridays,” Mickelsson broke in. “Thursdays and Fridays are my days for research.”

“Research is important, I grant you,” Tillson said, “and believe me, we’d be nowhere if it weren’t for the reputation we get from people like yourself! On the other hand, these matters of hiring and firing, tenure and promotion—we need your in-put, Pete. Golly, leave such matters in the hands of the department’s weaker sisters, people like myself, ha ha—”

“I see your point, but I don’t come in on Fridays,” Mickelsson said. He put his arms on the chair-arms, as if to rise.

“Pete, you’re being rigid,” Tillson said sharply. He raised an index finger and shook it, fakely grinning. “You’re new to the department, and of course you’re a ‘famous man’ and all that, so we all like to give you the benefit of the doubt. But we have to work together—that’s civilization. I know you’re a man of principle, an idealist—” Accidentally but quite horribly, as if his face had gone completely out of control, he sneered.

Mickelsson looked hard at the man, confounded by the sudden conviction that Tillson hated him. It was no cause for alarm; Mickelsson had tenure and probably more clout, if it should come to that, than the chairman himself. Probably the discovery shouldn’t even have come as a surprise to him: professionally, Tillson was of the enemy camp, a “linguistic atomist“—so he pretentiously styled himself. No wonder if he minded Mickelsson’s success, such as it was, a success which must in any case seem to Tillson fraudulent, “a shrill pitch to the philosophical right,” as some metaphor-scrambling fool had once written of Mickelsson’s ethics book. And of course it was true too that Mickelsson had never pretended to feel friendly toward Tillson—had perhaps been, at times, barely civil. Nevertheless he was sickened for an instant by the realization that Tillson hated him. Not sickened for good reason; simply a cry of his genetic programming. Thanatos, vulnerability … a dreary business.

Now it came to Mickelsson that he was looking at the chairman—the black suit and too fashionable beard, the monstrous fake smile and piously tapping fingertips—with an expression of undisguised contempt. He had a choice to make: he could negotiate, take back that look of disgust, pour oil on troubled waters; or he could confirm the charge or, at any rate, innuendo—could admit to Tillson and himself at once that he did not care in the least what Geoffrey Tillson and all his kind, spawn of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, might think.

Though Mickelsson had by now made his face expressionless—might even have seemed to a casual observer to be studying Tillson with a friendly half-smile—the truth was that a peculiar coldness, clammy as cave-walls, had come over him, an indifference that finally had nothing much to do with the nervously leering little scholar. Along with the indifference came a feeling of power, invulnerability like a dead man’s. “Surely your feeling of righteousness is a little misplaced,” he said. He watched Tillson’s pink tongue dart across his lips again, silver eyebrows shooting up, then continued, “You know it takes me an hour to