Stillness & Shadows, John Gardner [the first e reader txt] 📗

cleavage. There’d be no doubt, of course—against all those painfully sweet memories he carried—that their Eden had gone awry; indeed, looking back, he would see that their marriage had been awry from the beginning. Perhaps she had a jealous streak, or a sullen streak, or a mean streak, something he’d noticed—if only he’d paid attention—the first day he’d met her. There’d be no doubt in his mind that it was mainly her fault; at any rate no doubt in the part of his mind where the light was on. For all his poetry, Ira Katz was no wiser than any other poor doltish male. It was a premise with all men, Craine had long since observed, that everyone ought to feel exactly as they did; to feel otherwise was to show oneself emotionally defective—infantile, or hysterical, or cloddishly insensitive. Most men were quick to assert this premise, and proud of it. Women, who worked from the same premise, confused things by hotly denying that that was how they worked. And so they’d fought the age-old fight, tiresomely the same, from the viewpoint of the gods, generation on generation. What each of them had loved, if it had ever been love—the central mystery of the other one’s being—they’d attacked with the cunning and (behind the loud skirmishing) deadly calm of professional murderers. Each convinced, of course, that he did it to save himself, not really to hurt the other—and, ironically, each one right. An old, old story. Ira Katz would have no real doubt that he’d been right to leave, in the end: she’d been killing him, he could tell himself, and very likely it was true. But ah, how terrible it must be for him now to look out at this peaceful scene, this green-golden Eden lost to him forever though he stands in the center of it! “This softness in the air,” he would think, “this is how it was the night I took her to that John Wayne movie.” Or, “The way the shadows are beginning to stretch out, that’s the way it was the night she gave me the surprise party, the night I passed my orals.” Ah, Eden, Craine thought, wincing and shaking his head without knowing it, terrible, terrible place! No man—or almost none—in Ira Katz’s position could keep it entirely secret from himself that in fact it was his fault. Poet. Squeezer, poisoner of emotion, himself the ancient enemy, sly old viper. Craine would bet anything you cared to bet that even now, in his misery, what Ira Katz was writing nights was poems about his former wife, or maybe—yes, more likely—his children. “Nobody learns a damn thing,” Craine muttered aloud, then, hearing himself, shut his mouth and swallowed. Restlessness, ambition, that was the enemy of marriage, always; that was Katz’s sin—perhaps the girl’s as well, he wasn’t sure. Sin or madness. Something Elaine had said darkened the edge of his mind, then broke in—“what I’ve learned in analysis.” Why it felt connected he wasn’t exactly sure: perhaps the way the campus, in the afternoon light, had made him think of Eden, or childhood, same thing … Yes, anality and all that, the child’s possessiveness, playing with his feces, feces symbolically transmuted into money, into time, great monuments, cities walling out Nature, Death … All very vague; he hadn’t thought about Freud in a long time, though he remembered he’d more or less believed it as he read, in fact had seemed to remember, though of course it was impossible, nobody really remembered that far back. He’d believed ever since he’d read those books—he no longer remembered exactly which ones—that everything men did, or men and women, perhaps (he’d have to think about that)— everything they did was a fraud and a delusion, a game played against Death on a rigged roulette wheel, Death playing for the house. Music, mathematics, Egypt’s cities of the dead (the brains of the corpses drained out through the nostrils and discarded as of no use), all the magnificent works of man were mere blind birds’ battering nights against the roof, bluffs against Death’s dull, invincible hand, a flailing of “sublimation.” It was all nothing, Chartres cathedral, UNIVAC, “the shadow of a dream,” as some old-time poet said. No doubt Ira Katz had read those same books. He’d refused to be persuaded, the drive to live forever too strong in him. So he’d sit up all night, intense, eyes glowing, exactly like the “hackers” Professor Weintraub had mentioned, at the computer center, and when his wife said, “Ira, aren’t you coming to bed?” he’d said, “Half an hour more,” lying, praying she’d fall asleep and never know if he stayed up far longer, as he intended to do, hunting for some rhythm that was the perfect music and matched perfectly the words for his sorrow or rage or sense of loss. He’d stayed up till dawn sometimes, or worked straight through, skipping a night, or maybe two nights in a row—at any rate he did that now, sometimes; no reason to doubt that he’d done it when he was married. His heart would tug from his chain-smoking, the veins in his wrists and hands would ache. He’d have to be crazy to think he was driving Death away, when obviously he was beckoning to him, waving both arms, yelling “Here! Over this way!” So all right, he was crazy: variant of the universal madness. Fooled himself by claiming he was capturing life, that is, emotion in its flow, translating time into eternity. And what was he doing? Making things up! Not reliving emotions and capturing them forever in the exact right words—no, making up scenes drawn partly from life and partly not, blending fact and fantasy till afterward he wouldn’t know which was which, murdering the past as it really was, tearing it down like a worthless machine for spare parts. Surely he must feel some guilt over that. He could hardly forget that his feeling for his wife