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

her whole life, and if he left her, as again and again he threatened to do—even tried to do, running to some floozy, some graduate student or girl from the past or colleague’s wife—her whole life would be cancelled, made meaningless, would vanish in an instant without leaving a trace, the way the universe would do, he claimed, if Time should all at once be suspended. And so she would phone him at his floozy’s house, would cry, would even use the children as a weapon, and he would finally come back, hating her and making her hate herself, and the children would move numbly through the big, cold house, gentle and beautiful and unquestionably doomed if she couldn’t find some way to save them—save them all. Martin’s father, at the time of his worst unhappiness, had been suicidal, had fought against the urge with all his might and had barely won. Now Martin was the same. She had no idea when he stormed off late at night, drunk and furious and full of that senseless, terrible grief, whether or not she’d ever see him again. If he killed himself, the odds against Evan’s survival—hypersensitive and private as his father—were frightening. —And yet it wasn’t just that, wasn’t just concern about Evan and Mary or fear that her life would turn suddenly into waste, that made her fight to hang onto him. Once she had loved him more than anyone or anything, and though it seemed that the Martin she’d loved was dead, she knew it wasn’t true. Sometimes, reading his big, gloomy novels, she would recognize with a shock of mingled pain and pleasure the Martin she’d long ago settled on for life. And there was a time when, waiting for her baggage at Kennedy Airport, she’d seen him without at first recognizing him—she’d had no reason to expect him there—and she had thought, in the flash of time it took her to adjust, What a strange, nice-looking man! Even after she’d realized that it was Martin, the memory of that feeling persisted like the next day’s memory of a dream. For all the eccentricity of his hair and clothes—he was like a man who’d stepped out of a nineteenth-century American painting—he was a man you’d turn to if you needed help, a man inherently gentle and solicitous—to strangers, anyway—the kind who, even on the New York subway, would get up to give his seat to a lady, an old man, a child loaded down with packages.

“Martin, I order you to come to bed.”

He laughed, and his eyes were so crazy she was afraid to press him. More than once he’d thrown her across the room when she tried to control him.

“What’s happened to us?” she cried. “Look at us! For Christ’s sake, what’s happened?” Before she knew it would come over her, she was sobbing, and though she knew how he scorned her crying, convinced that it was one more trick, it was impossible to stop. When she loosened her grip on his arms he jerked back, and she instinctively covered her face, thinking he meant to hit her. But he was backing toward the door, fleeing again, though it was four in the morning and raining.

“Time,” he roared, “that’s what’s happened. Ghosts. Dead people.”

“Martin,” she wailed, “I didn’t do anything.”

He stood with his hand on the doorknob, the lighted swimming pool behind him, and she stood perfectly still, as if precariously balanced: perhaps, drunk as he was, he would come to his senses if she made no threatening move, waited him out as he himself would wait out some vicious dog he was gentling.

“You never do anything,” he said. He spoke as if she weren’t human, as if she were all the world’s evils squeezed together in an ugly imitation of human shape. “You do what the wind does, what falling bodies do. You plan ahead like a rattlesnake asleep on a rock.”

Her anger was rising, impossible to fight. They were good at that, at least, good at stabbing each other. “What did I do? What started this?” He was too drunk to know, she knew, and her seeming control would make him still more furious.

His hand turned on the doorknob. She took a step toward him and said in panic, “Who are you going to? I’ll kill her.”

It was a mistake. The door was open now, rain blowing in. An image came to her, more real than the room, Martin in bed with some woman—white legs, dark hair, the face hidden—and she rushed at him in rage, but he was gone, the door was closed, and she fell. “Bastard,” she said, weeping, beating the carpet with her fist. When she looked up, sometime later, her thirteen-year-old Evan was kneeling beside her, expressionless, patting her back.

Two

They first slept together, as they would both tell friends at parties later, when they were two—slept together in a drawer, in fact, when Joan’s parents (and her Uncle John Elmer and Aunt Cora) drove east to visit the New York State cousins and help wallpaper the huge old faded-brick house the Orricks lived in. The Orricks owned a small dairy farm a mile outside the little village of Elba and were thought of locally as “old family.” Exactly what this meant was never clear to her: her father’s line went back to before the American Revolution, though west of the Mississippi such qualities weren’t much valued. Like Joan’s parents when they started, the Orricks were, despite their big house, as poor as church mice, and, except for their eldest son, so they would remain, though they might have claimed, if it had occurred to them, to be failed aristocrats: the family, a hundred years before, had been considerably better off. But very little concerning their social position occurred to the Orricks, it must be said to their credit. Like most people of their general class in the western part of New York State, they liked Indians, disliked Italians, voted Republican, put