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

bitter divorce—very painful. I really love him.” His eyes flicked angrily away from Mickelsson’s. “I drive up and see him every two or three weeks.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” Mickelsson said.

Levinson shrugged, an exaggerated heave of the shoulders. “Fucking oil companies. Reagan as President, it’ll be a whole lot worse.”

“He hasn’t really got much chance, has he?” Mickelsson asked.

“Don’t kid yourself!” The sneer-tic grabbed fiercely this time. His eyes roved the room. “They should’ve been socialized twenty years ago. Oil companies. Well, what the hell, at least I’m working.” Now Mickelsson remembered who Levinson was: one of Jessica’s Marxist colleagues in sociology. He felt a brief impulse of coolness toward the man, then lost it. Levinson looked like a college freshman, but battered, permanently injured. His Jewish nose was so hooked it looked broken in the ring. “I had a dry spell for a while. Jesus, it drove me crazy.”

“I know how that feels,” Mickelsson said, raising his hand to the doorframe.

“Working on Nietzsche,” the young man said. “It’s something that might interest you. I’d be glad to let you see it, maybe get a few comments, when I get the thing in shape.”

“Ah?” Mickelsson said, both interested and reserved.

“I’ve been working on pain”—he sneered and smiled at once—“how to put it to work for you. Nietzsche was on to it as early as The Birth of Tragedy. Not really on to it yet, but on to it.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“The sublime as the artistic conquest of the horrible.”

Mickelsson nodded.

“You think you’d be willing to look at it?” The young man’s eyes settled on him only for an instant, then roved again.

“Sure I would,” Mickelsson said. “Of course!” It was a point at which he might easily take his leave, but he remained, for Levinson’s sake, not for his own. “I’ve never known exactly what I think about that particular doctrine,” he said. “Problem of ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ”

Levinson drew the pencil from behind his ear, as if unconsciously considering writing down some note on the lined white pad on the desk in front of him. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Oh, you know. The whole question of ‘sublimation.’ Freud’s kind, that’s easy; but Nietzsche’s, I’m not so sure.” It struck him that if he went any further he’d be there all afternoon. “Well, anyway,” he said, “good luck.”

“Thanks,” Levinson said. Then: “You mean you think it’s possible?”

Mickelsson smiled. “God knows I hope it’s possible.”

The young man thought about it, then said, lifting one eyebrow, “Good luck.”

Every spare minute he could find, all through October, he had worked on his would-be blockbuster book, the book he’d begun with such joy and confidence in the first radiance of his infatuation with Donnie Matthews, but which seemed to him now, like the costly, difficult affair itself, sometimes unbalanced, never really sensible, though at moments as glorious as the autumn weather, the sweet smell of change in Donnie’s hair and breath. At his worst moments he found the project, like the love affair, embarrassing, enslaving, and insipid.

When he was unable to write, he worked—sometimes far into the night—on the house. He had reason enough for gloom. His son was still missing; and it had been weeks since he’d sent money to his ex-wife and daughter, though he’d caught Ellen up on her house and car payments. When he glanced through his mail, usually without opening it, at least half of it consisted of letters from collection agencies. The Acme would no longer take checks from him—he’d bounced there repeatedly—and even Owen Thomas looked ill-used whenever Mickelsson got out his checkbook, though Thomas did still take his checks, accepted them almost graciously, all things considered, perhaps from kindheartedness or timidity, perhaps because of the large amount of business Mickelsson did at Owen’s store.

Winter would be trouble, when he had to pay for fuel oil, more wood, and the various extras that inevitably settled in with cold weather. The automatic transmission in the Jeep was behaving oddly, noisily clunking whenever he shifted into drive; some lawyer in Providence was threatening to sue him for fifteen hundred dollars, an old litigation fee Ellen had for some reason refused to pay three years ago; and Mickelsson was no closer than ever to paying off the I.R.S.—the fines and penalties mounted daily: fourteen thousand a year was about what they’d come to; so Finney claimed. He had, in short, reason enough to be discouraged. At times he angrily wished the whole thing done with, wished some supernal referee would blow a whistle and declare him out, bankrupt. But he was beginning to learn that financial ruin, like death, is not a moment but a process, a slow, merciless grinding down. Sometimes not even an expert could say, in a given case, that ruin has now come, or ruin, though close at hand, has not yet arrived. He sent away for, and obtained by means of lies, a Master Charge card, which meant that his checking account would be guaranteed up to three thousand dollars. He also received, in spite of his execrable credit, an American Express card. Ellen, as a separated woman, could get no credit at all. The news that this was so—news Mickelsson got through a joking phonecall from Finney—filled Mickelsson with righteous indignation, a sentiment Finney did not share. “Prods her ass one step closer to the courthouse, ole pal,” Finney said. “Look at it this way, ole pal ole sock: you didn’t make the world, so mafriend you’re Not Guilty. Whatever falls in your yard, put your fucking flag on it!” Though he had always despised Jake Finney’s worldview, and suspected that even Finney himself despised it—exactly the worldview of Martin Luther, but with no otherworldly alternative—he could not deny, in those moments when he allowed himself sober reflection, that he’d already adopted it in practice. His chief personal expense these days, greater even than the expense of his house, was a seventeen-year-old prostitute.

Sometimes late at night, especially when he was drunk, he thought about the money