by John Gardner
They collaborated on musical comedies, which earned them money and praise, and Joan, who’d never before acted, played comic parts and was an immediate sensation. When he met her after the first night’s performance, Martin was smiling, looking straight at her—he rarely looked straight at anyone. “You were funny,” he said. “As a matter of fact, you were fantastic.” Hard as both of them were working, there were numerous other things they did just for fun. They played in various little Czech village bands, both of them switching from instrument to instrument, when Joan wasn’t conducting. They gave summer music and painting lessons and threw parties where Joan’s teaching friends and Martin’s student-writer friends played games, from charades to volleyball, and no one got drunk, no one slipped away with someone else’s wife—in short, they were happy.
Only twice during those graduate-school years did she suffer that mysterious, searing pain. At the university hospital the doctor said, “Mrs. Orrick, we simply can’t help you. There’s really nothing there.” She knew, as Martin did, though they weren’t quite able to believe it yet, that whatever the X-rays showed or didn’t show, he couldn’t have been more mistaken.
Twelve
Though he was cranky and odd, arrogant, even insubordinate—as an instructor in the sophomore poetry course, he threw out the course plan for one of his own making, which lost him his job—Martin did well in graduate school and was even well liked by his professors and fellow students. He had a curious, small-boy innocence that sometimes made Joan love him till she thought her heart would break and sometimes made her want to stove his head in. Everything, with Martin, was principle. He might attack some classmate or professor without mercy, but never for an instant—as it seemed to him—could anyone imagine it was personal. No one, as he thought it must go without saying, could be more ignorant, more cowardly, more base than himself. Often he’d leave the victim of his attack in psychological shambles, and he wouldn’t even know it. Often, unfortunately, the victim was Joan. It began to emerge that the difference between them was serious, perhaps dangerous. He had none of her brilliance, none of her wit, but studying endlessly, with mind-crushing orderliness, reading some one poem again and again until every little nuance was clear to him (“The hourglass whispers to the lion’s paw” or “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”), or reading some one book over and over—Plato or Blake or Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus— until he was sure he understood every sentence in it, he developed a background of authority she couldn’t match or deal with. She had no wish to know the kinds of things he knew—certainly they didn’t make him a more lively conversationalist, it seemed to her—but all the same, she felt intimidated. Even about music—incredible irony!—he could make her feel stupid. She began to attack him more frequently—flash out at him, with her light, quick wit, some insult he would get only tomorrow in the shower. Why she’d attacked he would have no idea, as sometimes even she had no idea. He began to be occasionally impotent.
They had other problems. There were certain things that were obviously his responsibility, not hers (as Joan at that time understood the world)—responsibilities he refused to deal with: the car, things around the house that needed fixing. He was becoming more than ever before a drudge, moreover; he never wanted to go out, and when they did he frequently embarrassed her. Or friends would come over and he would sit smiling politely, witlessly, never saying a word, obviously not listening. It was even worse if he was feeling cheerful. He’d talk at endless length of things no one cared about, stories of famous chess players who’d gone mad, for instance. Half of them he made up. He’d still be holding forth, laughing loudly, fully persuaded he was the life of the party, when she finally gave up and went to bed. Sometimes she’d wake up, hours later, as it seemed, and she’d hear them all laughing in the livingroom, still there, as if the things he said really were of interest. She would be all at once terribly lonely, seeing with icy clarity that, for all her early promise, her supposed beauty, she was already, at twenty-three, a failure. Tears filled her eyes and she wished bitterly that she’d never grown up. Princess my ass, she said, and wept at the loss of her innocence.
Yet when she looked back at them later, they seemed to her good years even so, those years when they were making it. Martin got exactly the kinds of jobs he wanted—good schools, first Oberlin, then San Francisco State, where the pressure was not so great he’d be prevented from writing fiction, yet the quality was decent; and wherever they went, she taught, concertized, took an occasional course, began composing a little. (He too composed. He was unbelievably bad.) Their fourth year in California, she taught in what was known, inaccurately, as a ghetto school and won the California Teacher of the Year Award. Martin was proud and had a party for her—unspeakably embarrassing. He got obscenely drunk and read the citation and the whole Chronicle article aloud. It actually crossed her mind that she might leave him. But mostly it was better. They went to plays, met painters and sculptors she admired (Martin had never heard of them), met doctors and lawyers everyone had read about (Martin had never heard of them), and newspaper columnists, even movie stars (Martin had never heard of them). It was the life she was born for. They had, by this time, a large old house in pre-earthquake San Francisco, in the Mission District, and Martin was doing well. Reviewers said of him, “A brilliant new writer has arrived upon the scene.” Of her they wrote, “Few pianists now at work can match the articulation of Joan Frazier’s right hand,” and “her sheer joy in performance recalls technicians like Levin.” “Who’s Levin?” Martin asked. “Character in some old fable,” she snapped. Martin was, in short, the same old Martin, gloriously handsome, with tragic, soulful eyes—though not as tragic or soulful as he imagined, she sometimes irritably thought. At three in the morning, getting up and going into his study, she’d say, “Are you ever coming to bed, Martin?” He’d be sitting at his desk, the room full of pipe smoke, an untouched martini glinting like a diamond beside his typewriter. He’d turn his head, stare at her like an owl, or maybe like E. A. Poe’s ghost, jugged on visions, perhaps not even noticing that she was naked. The windows of his study were high, round-arched; they looked out across the city. “What you need is a black panther, like Lord Byron,” she said. “Pardon?” he said. “Oh, fuck yourself,” she said. From sheer misanthropic perversity he defended Lyndon Johnson and the Viet Nam war, argued in favor of capital punishment when all San Francisco was talking of Caryl Chessman, and in print described John Updike as “mentally disabled.” “Martin,” she said, “how can you think such things?” She spoke cautiously, like a welfare worker uneasy about prying. “The time has come,” he said, “for thinking the unthinkable!” Then, more like himself, “Come on now. They argue like maniacs, all on the same side. I try to give their pompous rant a little dignity.” “Dear Martin, you’re such a kind man,” she said. He bugged his eyes out and waved his arm like a Shakespearean actor. “A little less than kiss and more than cunt,” he said. “Oh Jesus,” she said, and rolled her eyes up, and closed the study door.
“How,” people asked her, “did he get to be such an old curmudgeon so young?” She would laugh, though she was embarrassed, not so secretly, and they too would laugh. What Martin said at parties was of no importance, she might have told them, even to Martin. Halfway through the party he’d sometimes go up to his study and write or go play with the children, or if the party was at somebody else’s house, he’d drive home early, leaving Joan—without even telling her he was going—to get a ride with some friend. He was a pain in the ass. But on the other hand, antisocial as he might be—and now, when she got him to go out with her, often drunk as well—his huge, slow novels had a kind of gloomy beauty; they were better than most other people’s novels, it seemed to Joan. When he gave readings women students fell in love with him and asked her, breathlessly, what it was like to be married to such a man. “You have no idea,” she said, and flashed her wicked smile. When he gave readings—dressed like a silver-haired peacock (she and Martin were now in their thirties)—she too
could gladly fall in love with him again, though she thought herself something of a fool for it. But she never really thought, in those days, about whether or not she loved him. When they were with people he liked, of whom there were fortunately two or three, like the poet Bill Dickey, he talked eagerly, happily, and it was a joy to be around him. The rest of the time—except now and then when his indifference to going places filled her with rage—she was too busy to pay much attention to how she felt.
Then quite suddenly, as it seemed to Joan, everything came apart. She found he’d been having, apparently for some time, an affair with a large, untalented, peasant-faced friend of hers. He’d written her a letter and forgotten to mail it. Joan stood by the diningroom table, the letter in her trembling hand. “She ‘understands’ you, I presume,” she said to him, wild with rage. He merely looked at her, cowardly, miserable, loathsome, but also superior, as usual; she was talking cheap clichés, revealing again her worthlessness. She grew wilder yet. “God damn you, Martin, defend yourself.”
He looked down at his glass, then turned away and went to stand by the window with no expression on his face at all, like a tired old man waiting for a bus. It was dark outside, raining. “Martin, what about the children?” she wailed. Evan was six, Mary four. Beautiful, bright children, Evan like Joan, outwardly at least, Mary like her father, and they both loved those children, as anyone could see, with all their hearts. “You bastard!” she said, “you ugly, slow-minded, unwashed, filthy, arrogant, selfish, neurotic, drunken bastard!” It built like a magnificent arpeggiate crescendo in Brahms, and at its peak, exactly as she burst into tears, she hurled a cut-glass candlestick from the table—it had cost them plenty, and it did not escape her, even as she threw, that in throwing something expensive she proved she was serious. Incredibly, he let it hit him, stood like some big, half-wit Frankenstein monster, as if mournfully asking to be killed, and, to her horror, the candlestick crashed into his face. Blood splashed out across his nose and forehead, and he turned like a stunned animal toward the kitchen. She ran after him, calling, “Martin!”
“Stay away from me,” he said, and looked at her. “I warn you.” His eyes were, she thought, insane.
She hesitated, frightened, saying, “Martin, it was an accident! I didn’t mean it! Please!”—still sick at heart because he no longer loved her—how obvious it was, how obvious it had been for months, she saw now—and with his hand over his face, blood rushing through his fingers, he walked out through the kitchen door into the darkness and rain. She ran to get her raincoat, still trying to decide what to do even as, awkwardly, she pulled the raincoat on, then ran after him. There was no sign of him now. She ran around the side of the house to the front. No sign of Martin on the street, either, only a few splashes of blood on the sidewalk, blurring in the rain. She called to him, then began to run, striking out blindly—she had no idea which way he’d go—toward the lights of the closed-down business section, the all-night Mexican restaurant, or toward the park—and that struck her, suddenly, as tragic. There had been a time when she could anticipate his every flicker of emotion. She stood on the shiny, steeply rising street, the lights of a car coming slowly toward her through the darkness of trees, the broad, empty lawns, and she screamed his name. The echo rang around her, clicked off brick and stone walls, concrete steps. After a moment a light went on, high above the street, and someone opened a window. A stranger came toward her, an old man, head tipped. “Martin,” she whispered in terror. The same instant, everything went white. The pain that hadn’t troubled her for more than a year was suddenly rising inside her, all around her, like an explosion, more intense than it had ever been before. The city went spinning, sucked away toward darkness, she heard a mumble of voices, then nothing.
Thirteen
Martin told her, sitting with his head tipped back, his eyes closed, beside her hospital bed, that he was leaving San Francisco. He’d taken a job in some unheard-of new university in the Missouri Ozarks. She wept, assuming he meant to go there with that woman. It was partly pride, she would admit later, when she was able to think about anything at all. Paul Brotsky would read to her, fondly and teasingly, years afterward, “The Leo tends to have too much false pride and may be boastful and snobbish. Since he always wants to be at the head of things, he must be made to realize that others like to be leaders too.” Yes, all that was true. One of the things most horrible to her when she’d believed Martin was abandoning her was the shame, the unspeakable embarrassment she would feel in front of friends when it was known that she had been a “bad wife”—to say nothing of how she would feel before her parents. And it was no doubt true too that she had wanted too much “to be at the head of things.” That was always Martin’s chief complaint, that in everything she did she sought to dominate him—and it was his chief defense for having fallen in love with Neva, the big, slow-moving, guitar-playing friend who’d betrayed her. Neva accepted, demanded nothing, or so it seemed to Martin, and perhaps it was true. (At every thought of Neva, her mind winced back, enraged. Some people were born to accept, demand nothing, she thought brutally. Some people were born without rights. Joan Frazier was not one of them.) —But if pride was part of what she’d felt that day in the hospital, it was only part. Though the day was bright outside the hospital window, the white and cream-colored buildings glittering like cubes of sugar, falling away toward the heart of the city, the bay beyond, nothing was light or beautiful inside her: she was full of pain and sorrow as loud inside her head as a waterfall, and it was as if all the people and places and things she’d ever loved were being crushed, ground to bits in that churning, falling torrent of pain. She was haunted by memories, one after another—they came over her in a great clattering confusion when she slept—images of sorrow and failure that she’d misunderstood. She remembered with a sudden and terrible vividness Jacqui Duggers’ three hundred pairs of shoes, brave colors, brave hopes, and the way Jacqui’s eyes lit up with eagerness when she spoke—in her defiant white apartment there in dingy St. Louis—of Paris. She remembered angry-eyed, black-bearded Uncle Zack, his broad, lean back turned squarely on the world, his shotgun cracked over his hard, skinny arm—“kin to vipers,” his own sister, Lulu Frazier, called him. And then into her mind came the image of her father, and the sound of his voice, and her anger and despair were baffled, driven back, leaving only her sorrow and confusion. She’d seen him cry rarely—once when, before they were married, she’d thought she was pregnant. He would cry again now. She couldn’t stand it.
Martin said, “I can take the children east with me if that’s what you want. Whatever.”
She leaned up on her elbows, turning on him wildly. “To live with that whore? Not on your life, Martin Orrick. I’ll see you dead first!”
He looked at her as if puzzled, his face slightly tensed, like that of a man forced to look at a wound. “There’s not gonna be anybody with me,” he said. “I’m going back alone.”
Her mind fumbled with it, still full of pain but at the same time rising with foolish eagerness toward a hope too humiliating for her to admit just yet. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you—get rid of all three of us. You could grow a little pot on the back forty and fill your whole tarpaper shack with teenage pussy.”
He said nothing. She closed her eyes, crying again. Every morning she left at seven for the school where she taught, to give the kids extra lessons, lay out the day’s work, grade papers she hadn’t gotten to, and fill out reports or repair broken instruments, and often she wouldn’t get home at night until well after six. It was Martin who got the children up, dressed them, fed them breakfast, typed or read with them playing on the floor beside him. (“The heart of a Cancer,” Paul Brotsky would read in the new room, years later, “may be painfully divided between his family and the sea. They are wonderful providers and can turn a cave into a paradise, but they also like employment with shipping lines and sea travel.”) It was Martin who, as the children grew older, took them every day to nursery school—walked with t
hem down to the trolley-line M car and rode, one arm around each of them, through the long spooky tunnel—and at the nursery school played with them for half an hour (the other parent helpers were women with frosted hair) until it was time to walk the half mile to the college and meet his classes, talk with students. And it was Martin who had time to take them on excursions—to the Pacific, to the zoo, to Chinatown. So she knew, really, that it was not the three of them he meant to be rid of. She opened her eyes and said abruptly, looking at the ceiling:
“Can we go with you?”
He said nothing. She was afraid to see what his expression was, but when he got up from his chair and moved toward the door, she did look, ready to strike out. But he was shrugging, standing half turned away, as if undecided between two lives. As if wearily, ultimately indifferent, he said, “Of course.” The circles under his eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them, and he looked as if he hadn’t had a bath in a month. She would be amazed, later, that she’d failed to see, that moment, the truth, that he was sick—“had troubles,” as her mother would say, apologizing for him, perhaps for everyone, the whole universe to the last scorpion “good at heart.” But plain as his sickness was, she hadn’t seen it. Even when she said softly, “You’re crazy, Martin,” it never for an instant crossed her mind that what she said was true.