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

behind him, and raised her glass in what looked like a perfectly serious salute. Martin didn’t hear.

Bob Randolph, young poet in a fisherman’s hat, trudging by slowly, as if watching a stream, saluted with his new glass of bourbon and said, “Whole point of Moby Dick.” He laughed as if to himself, for some reason—or giggled, rather—though the comment was serious, apparently, and walked on, out of Martin’s range.

“Exactly!” Martin snapped, turning for a moment toward Bob, then back, blushing, glancing in embarrassment at his pipe. Then he said, “Third—” He hesitated, as if he’d lost his place, looked downright panicky, sipped his martini, then abruptly remembered. “Third—” He spoke still more fiercely now, trembling with emotion, for no reason she could guess. “There’s the fall out of Self—the fall we read of in Jean-Paul Sartre: fall into nothingness, alienation of the eye.” (Or perhaps he meant—she couldn’t tell—“the I.”)

The bearded, pink-faced student said, “Are there rituals to cure that?” and laughed loudly, like a bleating goat.

Joan Orrick was aware of something going by too fast for her drugged brain. For an instant she had an impression of herself as a child, schoolbooks in her arms, watching them in horror. “Buddy,” she would cry—Martin had been “Buddy” when the two of them were children—“what’s the matter with you?” She, Joan-grown-up, had no way to tell her, could hardly explain what had happened even for herself. And then the child’s eyes swung around to meet her own, as she’d known they would, accusing and terrible—a beautiful child with hair like cut copper—and the older Joan shrank back, cheeks stinging as they would if she’d been slapped, and her mind cried through time, I’m sorry!

Perhaps the pink-faced student said it twice, or perhaps time snagged and she heard it twice: “Are there rituals to cure that?”

Martin looked as if he was about to have a stroke. So did the student he was talking to.

Martin laughed exactly as the student had done but looked sick with distress. “I don’t know,” he said. “There may be no cure but Jesus’ mercy—‘He that loses himself shall find himself,’ or …” He shook his head, flashed a horrible grin, pushed back his long silver hair in fierce annoyance. “I don’t know. No one does. ‘Luck.’ ‘Amazing Grace’—whatever that is.” He laughed again, grimly, nodding. “That’s the price we pay for our sensible ‘ungoded sky.’ ” He glanced up at the ceiling as if in anger. One could hardly believe that a split second ago he’d been laughing. She remembered that Hart Crane—ungoded sky—had killed himself.

Though no time had lapsed, or so it seemed, the people in the room were suddenly not where they’d been standing an instant earlier, and it came to Joan Orrick that, sitting upright among the pillows on the waterbed couch, she had fainted. Martin stood exactly where he’d stood before, like a smoldering fixed star, but Steve—the pink-faced, bearded student—was gone, asleep in the bathtub, probably, and it was the pianist, Joe Liberto, the one she liked best, at least among the men, certainly the one she was most willing to trust—he’d helped her hunt for Martin one time, when it seemed almost certain he’d drowned himself in the Sikeston sewer—it was Joe Liberto that Martin was lecturing. She could stand guard no longer, whatever might come of her abandoning him. Where were you, Joe, she heard herself thinking, when I was ready to get married? And she heard herself answering, sadly, but also laughing at the absurdity: Not born. She would faint again soon, and though the fainting so frightened her that she could hardly bear to think of it, much less wonder what it meant, she would rather be in bed when it happened.

She felt for the edge of the waterbed couch, one hand on each side of her, and carefully rose to her feet. The girl, Cezaria, who’d come to sit beside her, looked up, smiling, perhaps slightly puzzled, and she returned the smile, trying to think what Cezaria was saying, then moved, carefully balanced, toward the music room door. As if floating or dreaming, she passed the grand piano, the lounging students in the darkened livingroom, and drifted over to the square, sharp-edged newel post at the foot of the stairs. She paused a moment, steadying herself for the climb.

She’d said nothing to Martin about the fainting. She was sick to death of being always sick, always in pain, always drugged, and though no one could reasonably blame her for it, she was ashamed and angry and afraid it would finally drive him from her. How could he help but believe it was one more trick meant to keep him in her power? That was what he constantly accused her of—not without reason, she told herself bitterly, not without reason. She’d quietly stopped driving—he’d never even noticed that for nearly a month now she’d regularly evaded the steering wheel (she was secretly enraged that he failed to notice)—and she’d managed even to avoid ever mentioning the light-headed feeling. What was the use of telling him? she’d asked herself, and the question had filled her eyes with tears. There was nothing any of them could do. No use going to doctors either. She’d finally resigned herself to that. All her complaints were beyond their skill.

“Have you ever had anything like this before?” the one in San Francisco had asked.

“It’s been happening for a long time,” she said. “Off and on, I mean. No one’s been able to figure out what’s wrong.”

“Hmm,” he’d said, and had pulled at his moustache with the tips of two fingers. “Well, whatever you had before, you’ve got it again.”

She was terrified all the time, day and night. She knew no psychology, but she knew it was important that all her dreams were nightmares. Yet she couldn’t tell Martin. When she jerked in her sleep, she let him believe it was muscle spasms. To tell him the truth would be to make him more helpless,