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

he’d seen in the apartment of the fat man. Hardly knowing he was doing it, he would go through in his mind how one might run three hard steps from across the hallway and smash the tall door in, sometime when the fat man was down on the street, then rush over to the chest beside the fat man’s TV chair, gather up the money and be gone, all in less than a minute. He envisioned it so clearly it might have been a memory floating up out of the gumbo at the bottom of his mind. Then, realizing what he was thinking, half seriously toying with, he would shudder like a sick man and whisper, “Stupid!” or, sometimes, “Insane!” When he was in downtown Susquehanna he would catch himself gazing thoughtfully up and down the street, seeing if the fat man was out. He never was. Sometimes, going up the dark, narrow stairway to Donnie’s room, his coat collar turned up, his hat flat on his head like an Indian’s, he would pause, in spite of himself, at the landing on the fat man’s floor.

She no longer charged him seventy-five dollars a visit. She’d grown somewhat fond of him—or so he hoped, since his heart was slaughtered by just the rustle of her dress, the little joking pout she put on when he lost his erection, or the way that, making a face, she would cross her eyes. But she was, she insisted, a professional, and would not “put out” for less than twenty dollars, or spend the whole night with him for under sixty. (She would not accept checks.) Before Donnie, he’d never visited a prostitute, neither did he any longer know anyone who did, so he had no way of telling whether or not she was cheating him. She probably was, he supposed, but he was afraid to press. Once when he cautiously touched on his suspicion that the price was exorbitant, she said, “Why don’t you check with the police?” She knew him, all right! The thought that the police might burst in on them some evening or afternoon (which somehow seemed worse) made him sick with dread. When he was teaching classes, the approach of that thought would make everything he was saying fly at once from his mind. He would imagine dire headlines:UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR HELD FOR CONTRIBUTING TO DELINQUENCY OF MINOR. PHILOSOPHER CAUGHT WITH SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL. He would rack his brain, standing there empty-headed in front of his class, too sick at heart even to remember to take a Di-Gel. Sometimes he could do nothing to get his wits back but go over to the window and stand for a few minutes rubbing his forehead and staring out.

His fear of the police and his distress at how much his addiction was costing him were by no means the only griefs she gave him. He worried about disease. He thought of poor syphilitic Nietzsche, who in 1889 had run into a street to throw his arms around the neck of a horse as its master, like some brute from Dostoevski, was beating it to its knees, after which moment “the Antichrist” was never again sane—the best mind in Europe reduced in one instant of passionate sympathy (“I am not a man, I am dynamite”) to rubble, one at last with Jesus of Nazareth as Nietzsche had understood him—Jesus the “idiot.” No one went mad from syphilis anymore, of course, or so Mickelsson believed. Nonetheless, he knew that Donnie Matthews wasn’t careful, and some of the people with whom she dealt looked—to say the least—unhealthy. He worried as much about her as about himself and couldn’t help furtively checking up on her at times—rather frequently, in fact—finding reasons to loiter in front of Reddon’s Drugstore, as if waiting for a prescription, or chatting with Owen Thomas on the sidewalk in front of his hardware store, conveniently nearby. He couldn’t bring himself to go sit on her landing—she might get angry, and her anger was a terrible thing—but he knew by now all the people who lived in the other apartments and could pretty well tell who her customers were. (Sometimes he would say, unable to help himself, “You’re a hard worker, I’ll grant you that. Five this afternoon?” She would roll her eyes.) They were a ghastly company, Donnie Matthews’ clientele, not just filthy, scarred, pimply, but downright deformed. Get them all together in one room, it would look like a Fellini cast party.

“Mostly the good-looking people don’t need me,” she said with a little shrug when he mentioned it. “Everybody puts out, these days. You ain’t heard of the Pill? My people, they’re naturally the desperate ones. Love for the unloved.” She smirked. “I should get that printed on a card.”

“The Mother Seaton of the demi-monde,” he said.

Donnie looked uneasy, as she always did when he used unfamiliar expressions.

He said, “How can you do it, though? That one tonight. No bath for at least a year, I’ll bet, and a week’s growth of whiskers, and—”

She laughed. “I know. That fucking thing in his eye.”

He rolled toward her. “Well, how can you?”

“A person has to get ahead,” she said. “That’s the American Way.” She pursed her lips, looking at him. Gently, coyly, she poked his nose with one finger. The gesture filled him with an almost sickening, guilty desire. “You’re jealous,” she said.

“God knows!” Mickelsson said, and took her hand.

The house, in any case, was beginning to be beautiful, and he was thankful for its demands, since, to some extent at least, work on the house, besides toughening him up, kept him from making a fool of himself downtown. The newly painted and wallpapered rooms, though for the most part still empty of furniture, gave the place the brightness of a New England inn, even when the day outside was dark, as days in the Endless Mountains often were. He’d found junk light fixtures, which he’d patched and polished and fitted with clearglass bulbs. The brighter