Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  The children picked up, too, Martin’s freakish love of violent Midwestern weather. When tornadoes came—first a blanket of terrible, swiftly moving clouds and then, in the lightning-filled distance a funnel, pitch-black and swaying, rushing toward them—she was so terrified she could hardly move, but Martin would stand at a thudding, rattling window or even out on the windswept, rain-drenched lawn and would watch in awe and a kind of crazy joy. If he would condescend to go down with them into the storm cellar, he would stand near the foot of the stone steps listening, and as the roar came nearer, the boom-boom-boom of colliding, warring mountains and skies, his mingled excitement and welcome fear would make his eyes demonic. “Listen to it!” he would say, and the children, one on each side of him, would take his hands, thrilled and terrified, and would stand, knees bent, as if prepared to run for the darkest corner of the storm cellar, their white faces peering up the stairway at the crack of greenish light. She remembered that her peculiar uncle Zack used to stand—so people said—on the listing porch of his shanty in the woods and fire his shotgun at cyclones when they came near. And she remembered that once when someone spoke of it, her Grandma Hughes—her mother’s mother, who’d lived with them a while when Joan was four—had said, making everything strangely clear: “He likes cyclones.” (Grandma Hughes was tiny and wore floor-length skirts and a Mother Hubbard bonnet. Joan’s father had cut her toenails with hedge clippers. She rarely spoke and made very little sound when she walked. She got up early and worked steadily all day long, endlessly circling with her dust mop or broom, or patching at whatever little chores she could find to do. Sometimes she would suddenly smile.) And now, watching Martin, Joan happened to remember that her Grandpa Frazier, too, for all his gentleness and playfulness, had loved storms. How strange and complicated everything was—as if everything in the universe was secretly connected, tending toward some meaning too large for human beings but sure, just the same, and final, and perhaps serene. Then the cyclone was past, leaving nothing but a wide, sweet stillness, and she felt that in a moment something would come clear to her. Martin held out his arm to her. He said, “May I escort you back into the world, madam?” She smiled. The children were smiling too. Had she imagined all those fights? Imagined the drunkenness, the fear of her that showed in his eyes, or hatred? “Wah, mah goodness,” she said, “yo so kind, suh!” They waltzed toward the stairs.

  One afternoon, almost by accident, Dr. Crouse, their general practitioner in Sikeston, made a discovery. If an X-ray was taken when she was standing up, it was strikingly different from one taken when she was lying down. He ordered an exploratory operation at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, by a Dr. Saul Krassner—“not much of a bedside manner, I’m told, but he’s one of the best in the business,” their Sikeston doctor said—and what he’d suspected proved true: she was a mutant, her internal organs weren’t anchored to her body walls, and, partly because of that, she had a malrotated colon. All that could cause discomfort, but it wasn’t the reason for the mysterious pain. She was one of those fairly rare people who grow adhesions, Dr. Krassner explained—delicate flesh tubers that begin in inflamed tissue—after a fall or an operation, for instance—and grope out through the darkness of the body—potato sprouts—tentacles of an octopus—thousands of little strands, completely invisible to the X-ray camera, feeling their way like timid snakes through the maze of her workings, closing around bone or intestine or liver, wrapping around the tiny electric switches of her nerves, locking her pain signals into the “on” position, so that from her knees to her shoulders she was one great howl of pain. When she was unusually tense, or went through a period of unusual exertion, the adhesions, like her muscles, tightened, closed like a fist. It had all begun, apparently, when as a child she’d had her appendix out—it was around the scar on her abdomen that the adhesion growth was thickest—but she’d suffered, since then, many falls, many blows. There were signs of those flesh weeds everywhere, groping through her body.

  “What can be done about it?” Martin said. He sat absolutely still, pale.

  “Well,” the doctor said, rubbing his hands, “periodic operation can keep tearing ’em out, or tearing a lot of ’em out, that is—”

  “And starting up more—?”

  “That’s the hooker, of course.” Dr. Krassner shook his head, one brief, hard jerk, as if marvelling at nature’s destructive cunning.

  Joan and Martin waited.

  “It’s something we have to live with,” the doctor said. “No use lying to ourselves, it’s a losing battle in the long run, but at least you get a good, long run. It’s not like being told you’ve got inoperable cancer. People can live years and years with this thing. But it hurts a lot, of course. Aye, there’s the rub. Makes life no bed of roses. We have to try to learn to ignore it, that’s all.”

  Martin stood up, went over to the window. “We,” he said acidly. He couldn’t see, as she did, the doctor’s look. He was a man of maybe fifty, very tired, for all his false heartiness. He was not personally to blame for the world’s illnesses, though that moment he seemed, despite the bluster, willing to accept at least part of it. He took her hand and squeezed it a little roughly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Orrick.”

  She nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

  He said, “The reason I say we have to learn to ignore it is there’s really no hope of getting rid of that pain, anyway not all of it. Kind of doses that would take, the drugs would get you quicker’n the other thing. You grasp my meaning?”

  She nodded, just perceptibly, the faintest possible stirring of her head against the pillow.

  “You’ll be feeling, by the way, a whole lot less pain for a while now—that is, after you’ve mended from the cutting—the operation. You may have—who knows? We never know about these things. Everybody’s different. Takes all kinds, they say.” He flashed his grin, then glanced over at Martin, who was staring out the window. Forest Park lay below them, where she and Martin and their families had gone, long ago, to those silly, tenderhearted musicals at the Muny. She remembered suddenly, and tears filled her eyes—useless to say it was stupid, sentimental: the human heart has no taste, no sense—

  Springtime, Springtime, Maytime,

  Will you love me ever?

  Dr. Krassner said softly, his hand on her wrist, “You need a pain shot, Joanie?”

  She nodded. “Yes, please.” She was thinking, Buddy, kiss me. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  When the doctor was gone she said, more to the room than to Martin, “What he’s telling us is, I’m dying.”

  “Not exactly,” Martin said.

  “No. No, of course. Not exactly.”

  Fifteen

  She learned to live with pain and the idea of a shortened life, though she didn’t exactly swear off all drugs, except at first. It helped that after the operation wound had healed she had—as Dr. Krassner had predicted she would—a long period when she was almost completely free of pain. Though she waited nervously, knowing it must come back—watching her insides with the blank expression of an Ozark hunter watching leaves in a woods—she would sometimes go for days at a time without remembering her condition. In spite of herself, she began to find herself hoping that the doctor had been presenting only the darkest picture possible, that in fact the adhesions were gone for good now, the whole thing was over. She was not therefore happy, though she had periods of such happiness that she was shocked and baffled when her troubles with Martin flared up again. A thousand times they were at the edge of divorce, and now there were magazines and women’s groups to make her feel stupid and guilty for so stubbornly clinging to him, or, rather, to their life. Often it seemed to her that for Martin she was dead already. He bought a huge old motorcycle and wrecked it the first week, grew his hair much longer, had passionate affairs one after another, and even when he tired of them or she somehow managed to bring them to an end—it usually meant some drunken scene and sometimes she and Martin would nearly kill each other—he’d go on writing to the women or phoning
from his office, go on liking them as if they were dear and harmless old friends. He insisted, when she could make him say anything at all, that there was nothing wrong in it, insisted that she had no hold on him—love not freely given was not love, he said, but mere socially convenient slavery, and he refused to be socially convenient or anybody’s slave. They’d been married for nearly half their lives; they were neither of them the same people, he said, who’d taken those pious, wildly optimistic vows. “Martin,” she said, “don’t you remember us?” “Characters in some old fable,” he snapped. She tried to understand it, accept it. She had affairs herself, but it was never the same. She loved Martin, only Martin—perhaps it was, as people hinted, a sickness—and Martin accepted, approved of her affairs, even when they made him slightly jealous, because he had this theory about love, and he would rather die than abandon a perfectly good theory.

  It was true that he’d changed radically. He’d never been her slave, whatever he might think—such was her opinion—but since they’d moved from San Francisco he’d done exactly as he pleased in everything, independent as some new Jesse James, or maybe Genghis Khan. It was he who bought the house they’d been renting, without consulting her. (He paid far too much money. Scornful of dickering, even when he knew he must lose by his scorn, he took the seller’s first offer.) He went through, in fact, a period of real insanity, as she learned when she finally got him to a psychiatrist. When they’d first moved from San Francisco, he was turning off his hearing, even his sight, at will, psychotically withdrawing from anything that “bored” him—that is, the doctor said, threatened him. Whenever they had parties he’d get so drunk he could hardly stand, and he’d go sleep in the barn, or reel crazily through the woods, singing or ranting Shakespeare, waving his arms, falling sometimes, bellowing at the stars:

  “Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,

  Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf

  Armies of pestilence, And they shall strike

  Your children yet unborn and unbegot,

  That lift your vassal hands against my head

  And threat the glory of my precious crown…”

  The children, at such times, were afraid of him. So was she, for that matter. Though he ranted against “mindless, self-pitying existentialists,” he’d developed a conviction that he was a Nietzschean superman. The kinds of rules she lived by, the kinds of rules her parents had always lived by, were moronic. They led to happiness, yes; a happiness of circling insects. All rules were moronic; all happiness was finally insect fodder. He threw away her psychiatric bills, threatened hunters with violence when they came onto his land, though the land wasn’t posted, parked his old Rambler where he damn well pleased. He no longer paid attention to traffic lights, merely looked, somewhat casually, to see if anyone was coming. But terrible as that period had been for them all, his psychiatrist claimed it was in a certain sense healthy. In his sickness as a child, he’d lost confidence utterly, fled from pain and conflict and from emotional attachments, leaned entirely on Joan, who seemed so competent, so willing to do the work—even the emotional work. Yet he’d always hated what seemed to him his weakness. And now suddenly, however crazily, he was choosing to run his life. She needn’t be surprised if he seized the reins fiercely, looking angrily over his shoulder, spoiling for a fight. He was determined—unconsciously, so to speak—to grow up.

  Joan listened, squeezing her hands together, occasionally raising her Kleenex to dab at her eyes. The psychiatrist was fat, square-bearded. He looked like a cartoon of a psychiatrist. The way he leaned forward, studying her as if paternally, made it seem as if he thought it had been all her fault. For some reason, God knew why, she’d worn a suit to this meeting with Martin’s doctor, and had pinned her hair up in back. She felt now for all the world like his mother, some domineering bitch a man would have every reason to resist. She thought of telling the psychiatrist she didn’t always look like this, there were people who thought she was Goddamned beautiful. In a dress with a plunging neckline, with her hair falling free …She started to say it, and then for some crazy reason changed it in the middle. “I don’t always look like this, Dr. Bern. Sometimes I look really horrible.” Silence, exile, cunning, Martin had said once, quoting something. It came to her that that was what she too was up to, just now. Why? But she had no time to think.

  He took off his glasses, leaned further toward her. His vest had a stain of some kind on it. Food perhaps. She hated him. “My dear,” he said, “this has all been unbelievably painful for you.” He reached toward her. There was hair on the back of his short, fat hand. “Let me ask you just one question. Is it worth it?”

  She started, realizing what side he was on. “He’s my husband,” she whispered. No doubt her hatred showed. “I’m his wife. Nobody understands that anymore. It’s crazy.”

  He patted her hand. He’d been hated before. It was nothing to him. “You are a very brave woman,” he said. “Make no mistake.” Then, drawing his hand back, he told her more about Martin’s rebellion. He spoke not to her but to his glasses now. Small, steel-rimmed glasses. Fashionable. Martin’s wish to grow up, face life squarely at last, admit his weaknesses but also assert his rights as a man—a decision encouraged, undoubtedly, by his success as a writer—was the reason he’d moved, abruptly, ferociously, to the barbaric Midwest he’d always loved—whatever the consequences for her and for the children. “You see,” Dr. Bern said, “he is a fanatic about truth. A problem of his Christian upbringing.” His decision, not quite conscious, to confront life head-on was the reason he was writing more darkly now—and, it might as well be granted, writing more beautifully, letting his pain in—than he’d ever done before. The wish to be himself, grow up, face the truth, was the reason why, when other women showed the slightest interest, he fell violently in love with them, or imagined he did.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” Dr. Bern said, glancing up.

  “I understand you think I should divorce him,” she said.

  He smiled and shook his head. “Not at all, Mrs. Orrick. I am saying he has no sense of you. None whatever. To your husband you are a symbol of evil and repression. He may grow out of this, though the odds are not good. He may well become an artist of some stature, and he may become a healthy and confident man, but his attitude toward you—not to put too fine a point on it—” He paused, considered, put his glasses on. “You are an exceedingly beautiful woman, Mrs. Orrick, and, I understand, a very talented one. The risk to you personally, in this whole affair—”