by John Gardner
Except for quirky theories about diet, she had no code, no beliefs, or at any rate none she had words for. She’d lived comfortably for a year in Arizona with a professional thief, a good poet, she believed (Martin Orrick, when he saw the poetry, agreed and wanted to promote the man, but Sarah claimed she had no idea where he might be by now: it was not in her nature to keep track of such things), and she’d studied and later taught Tibetan sexual exercises which aimed at spiritual transcendence. Like all her rare and beautiful kind, she wore large hats, long purple or wine-colored dresses and curious-looking shoes, as if her beauty were a secret to be carefully guarded. She spoke very little, never without carefully rehearsing what she would say, and never unkindly, even when she was angry. She watched people as a child does, and soon knew all there was to know about them, none of which she minded. If she had faults—or such was Martin Orrick’s opinion—most of them were faults of style. Having lived so much of her life with untouchables, God’s children in India, gypsies in Spain, Mexicans, American Indians and blacks, her laugh was too loud for polite society. And in her thirty-five years she’d found nothing yet to give absolute commitment to. Martin Orrick might have changed that. She loved him as she’d never loved anyone before, but unfortunately—as she at last saw, more clearly than he did—he loved his wife. She lay weeping in his arms, unable to tell him yet what made her cry, because he wasn’t yet ready to understand that it was Joan, always, only Joan that he loved. And in the morning she got up and washed her face and, mentally, changed her life.
She still had not told him when he visited her in Boston, where she was taking, partly out of idle curiosity, partly from a romantic wish to believe, a course on the raising of the dead. The class took place in a large upstairs room in downtown Boston, and she could see, slyly watching him, that he had assumed from the first instant that the students were all insane. Some sat stiff-backed on their Japanese mats, spines absolutely straight, so that the power of Ky could come rushing down into them from the universe. (“Sit up straight, Martin,” she would sometimes tell him, “think of your poor miserable electrical system.”) Others lay sprawled out, fat and splotched, with lifeless, frizzled hair—she knew them and was fond of them and could have explained so that even Martin would forgive them: they came to this place because they were incurably sick, or lost, or hungry for religion, and those who came out of loss or hunger would almost certainly be helped, and those who came because medical science had given up on them would either get better, half by accident, or would die. (“Martin, Martin, be gentle,” she would say, subtly controlling his every move, and would kiss his fingers, “they don’t hate you, they aren’t even looking at you.”) Still others leaned miserably against the wall, unwashed and hairy, big tall pimply-faced boys who were always angry and trembling at the edge of tears. They needed to be made love to, needed their cocks sucked, needed to be told, hour after hour, how strong they were, what beautiful, mysterious eyes they had. There was no irony, no cruelty in Sarah Fenton’s thoughts. That was what they needed, and if she could have found girls for them, she would have done so.
Martin studied her, affectionate and curious, and observed that her hint of a smile was smug, as if she was proud of these people, these specimens, whatever he might think. He looked at the people in the room again, then back at her. She touched his knee with her gentle, emaciated hand. Then the teacher arrived, one Michio Kushi, and greeted his strange class without seeing it. They all prayed, silent, sometimes clapping their hands smartly. The lecture on the raising of the dead began.
Martin watched and listened in awe and not unfriendly disbelief, his thick, dark meat-eater fingers laid on Sarah Fenton’s translucent hand. It was insane but also fascinating, this sober-minded talk of raising the dead. Crazy as he might be, the man was no charlatan. He demonstrated the breathing, ten thousand years old, he mildly claimed, that would suck down the powers of the universe, and spoke of how first one must revive the brain.
“Blain die first, you understand?” If a man had been dead for as much as fifteen minutes, his mind, when you brought him back to life, would be like a child’s. But between fifteen minutes and fourteen hours—the maximum—there would be very little difference. “Next we must levive the pancleas.” Next the heart. In his black suit, black hair, thick plastic-rimmed glasses he looked like a Japanese monk. After every important pronouncement he bowed. He spoke of yin and yang, the earth’s rotation, the cycles of the moon, spoke of sodium and potassium, the powerful electrical charge in the earth—the reason people sometimes come back to life in the grave. He spoke at length, thoughtfully and carefully, of the moral considerations involved in the raising of the dead—how it was a sin against nature to raise a man who had not died by mistake, to raise a man who must die again tomorrow or next week. He demonstrated the orthodox modern method of starting up the heart by pounding violently on the victim’s chest, spoke of the orthodox revival of the heart by electric shock, and showed— strange—a badly taken photograph of an old Chinese painting of a corpse being struck in the chest by a physician. As Martin listened, expressionless—not tempted to laugh: crank or not, Kushi was a holyman—he was aware all the time that she was watching him out of the corner of her eye, from the ambush of her long, dark lashes. At the end of the session—it closed with a prayer—she whispered in his ear, “But he’s a good man, mmm?”
Immediately afterward, there was a session advertised as “The Cure of Cancer.” She wanted him to hurry back to the fine old dark house and make love to her, but he wanted to attend. “You goon,” she said lovingly, “I’m not signed up for that. It costs twenty-five dollars for six weeks, and the way this place works, one session costs the same as the whole lot.”
“I’ve got twenty-five dollars,” he said.
“OK,” she said, and smiled and shrugged. “I’ll wait for you.”
“No,” he said, coming out of his trance, “I’ve got fifty dollars. You stay too. I’m a rich and famous novelist.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, and raised his hand to her lips, then lowered it, and with the fingertips stroked her own breast. He remembered with a shock how it had been with Joan, when they were kids. He remembered the next instant that fifty dollars was more than she spent, living in her macrobiotic commune, in a month.
Kushi had left the room. Though the class was supposed to begin at once, he was gone for half an hour. Outside the high, bare, round-arched windows, the sky was red. It would soon be dark. Martin’s seat was numb. He hadn’t sat cross-legged since God knew when, and the class in the raising of the dead had taken two full hours. It was surprising, in fact, that he felt as well as he did. The leg he’d broken, that time he fell in London, was throbbing slightly, but it wasn’t really painful. Nevertheless, he decided to give up his dignity and sprawl. If fat, teenaged girls could do it, and bearded freaks, why not the great Martin Orrick? What would Joan think, he wondered, if she could see him here? But his mind flinched away from it in something like fright. She would say, standing in the eight-foot-high doorway, her face alive, as theirs were not, her attire immaculate, her eyes as bright as jewels, whereas theirs were dusty—except Sarah’s, he thought: Joan would have liked Sarah, in some other world, some other time—a world and time that would never come, now—Joan would say, standing in the eight-foot-high doorway, “Have we time to exterminate these people, Paul? What time’s the concert?”
He sprawled on his side, and gently, shamelessly, Sarah snuggled up beside him. How simple and reasonable it seemed. I love you, Sarah, he thought with all his heart. —But at dinner, in the big, dark-beamed house, when someone had asked Sarah to pass the God-knows-what, he’d nudged her out of her trance saying, “Joan, would you pass the …” She hadn’t seemed to notice that he’d called her Joan, though surely it was impossible to miss a thing like that. If she did notice, she instantly forgave him, as she forgave everything. But it preyed on him a little, that slip of the tongue. He and Joan had been married more than half their live
s, their habits were like rock; yet even that wasn’t what struck him, troubled him. Calling Sarah Joan, he’d said it with affection, and the feeling that had slipped out for an instant from the darkness of his mind or, maybe, heart—the absolute identity of his feelings for Joan and Sarah, and the reminder of Joan’s priority—shook him. The more he thought of it, the more suspicious it looked that Sarah had not blinked an eye—had expected it and didn’t mind. He had dimly planned, ever since the Spanish trip—without quite daring to think about it—that one day, like some character in an Updike novel, he would muster up his courage and break with his family, sometime when Joan was strong enough to take it, and would settle for the rest of his life with Sarah. It dawned on him now that it might never happen, and not, as he’d imagined, because he was afraid.
Kushi arrived, bowing and apologetic, blushing like Joan’s father, though his skin was dark. He had with him a man who claimed to be a Harvard medical professor, and a woman with, he said, metastasized cancer. It was no doubt true: she was wasted and gray. With a little start, Martin came awake: it was all not as innocent as he’d all this time imagined. The Harvard professor was going to certify that the woman was, yes, dying, and then Kushi would demonstrate … He touched Sarah’s hand. “Let’s leave,” he said. She glanced at him and nodded.
They walked through snowy Boston streets, holding hands, looking into stores, admiring brightly lighted window displays—clothes, books, jewelry, paintings, furniture, television sets, things for which she had not the slightest desire. She owned, in all the world, a piano, one beautiful hand-made tablecloth, four books, a record-player and eleven records, a magnificent hundred-year-old Spanish guitar, two dishes, a cup, one spoon, one knife, enough clothes to fill her large leather suitcase, and one pair of chopsticks.
“Martin, there’s something I must tell you,” she said. He studied her face but could see nothing, except that she’d carefully arranged it. He remembered that she’d been a schoolteacher, because that was the way she was looking at him now, exactly: as if he were a child who’d done something very wrong, and though she was fond of him, and not angry, she must bring it to his attention.
“Are you sure this is the time?” he said, not knowing what it was she had to say but knowing most certainly that he didn’t want to hear it.
Her composure broke, her gaze flicked away from him, and she said, “Perhaps not.”
They walked on, with more purpose now, moving toward the trolley that would take them to Brookline and her house, her room, her pallet laid out on the wooden floor on a line that went exactly north and south.
I must tell him in the morning, she thought, and suddenly knew she wouldn’t, hoping against hope.
He returned to southern Missouri looking rested and well fucked and loaded down with bags of mysterious junk he insisted would be good for them. Joan said, not crying, looking bleak and abandoned, “She gives you something you need. I wish I knew what it was, I’d give you the same, and more, more than anyone could possibly give you.”
“It’s the health food,” he said, and his smugness, though it should have made her furious, made him handsome, sexy.
“I wish you could love me too,” she said.
“I do,” he said.
She flew to Detroit, and said to Dr. Behan, “I want you to help me change myself so that Martin will love me.”
“Is that all?” he said, and smiled.
“I’m serious,” she said. She told him about the fights—he’d heard at least something of that from Paul Brotsky—about how Martin, when he was drunk, became, as it seemed to her, a different man, how he called her awful things, hit her sometimes, or worse yet, stormed off in the middle of the night, sometimes in the car. What frightened her most of all was that some night, driving a hundred miles an hour and so drunk he couldn’t see, he would kill somebody. That, if he lived through it, would break his heart, drive him crazier than he was.
“You’re sure your perceptions of this aren’t a little distorted,” he said. He was silver-haired and lean, so good-looking one thought one might have seen him in some movie or on television. Paul had been right about him; she could tell already. She’d been to enough psychiatrists to know he was extraordinary. If he had any method, she would learn over the next few months, it was simply to listen carefully, catching the little lies—for instance, if you said “one” when you really meant “I”—and saying exactly what he believed, as an ordinary, decent human being, a committed physician. He would suggest often that her perceptions were distorted. Frequently she would have no idea, after a session with him, just what it was he’d said; but she began to move through the world as if Dr. Behan were watching her, began judging her behavior as he would judge it; and she felt herself changing, changing quickly.
“Maybe my perceptions are distorted, I don’t know. But I know he doesn’t care if he kills himself. It may be he’s secretly trying to kill himself, or it may only be he doesn’t think; but either way, I know for certain it doesn’t matter to him.”
“And you think he doesn’t love you—after all these years.”
“He’s told me he doesn’t. Often. He’s told me again and again the only reason he stays is the children, and … I believe him.”
Dr. Behan frowned, as if she’d done something slightly wrong that he would get back to. He said, “You really believe, Joan, that if you get rid of certain … faults”—he waved vaguely, as if thinking about her faults, then finished—“he’ll suddenly love you again as, you say, he used to?”
She nodded.
“Isn’t that a strange thing to believe?”
She nodded again, and her eyes filled with tears.
Behan winced, glanced down at her hands. At last he said, “Hmm. Well, perhaps it would help if you brought him with you next time, so I could speak to him, get a better idea. Will he come?”
“Oh, he’ll come,” she said. “He hates it, the way things are now.”
After the session she went with Paul to a Detroit Symphony concert, then home to his apartment, where they cooked a huge dinner and made love. As she was just drifting off to sleep something startled her awake—the pain, perhaps, though it seemed to her there had been something else, someone in the doorway, studying her—and she whispered urgently, “People can change, save themselves.”
Paul said, “I said that. You keep ripping off my best lines.”
Eighteen
Behan liked Martin immediately, and understood almost as soon as he saw them together what was wrong. She too, in fact, quite suddenly understood, though she had no idea what to do about it. Behan said, in his simple, physicianly way—exactly as he might have asked about an ulcer or a skin irritation—“you love Joan, Martin?”
“I feel … affection for her,” Martin said. “Sometimes when I’m lying beside her at night I feel a great, helpless tenderness, a wish that I could make her life better. But … it’s difficult. She insists on dominating, absolutely controlling, and I feel like I’m suffocating. For instance—”
She leaned toward him, tears running down his face. “I don’t dominate. Somebody has to take charge. All you want to do is write. If you’d once try acting like a husband—” She broke off. Martin had gone into his icy shell, his arms hanging limp, fingertips trembling.
“That’s what I mean,” he said. There was a quaver in his voice, as if in a minute he would cry, but he wouldn’t, she knew; he would merely become more withdrawn, fall silent. “I say anything at all and she strikes out, or changes it, and I just back away, give up.”
“But why does it all have to be my fault?” she asked.
Behan had said nothing all this time, merely watched Martin and occasionally glanced at her in a way that made her feel left out, disapproved; but now he said a little sternly, “Joan, why do you insist on dominating this conversation?”
“I’m not, I only—”
“Yes you are,” he said. She felt spanked, like a child, and covered her face with her hands, crying har
der. “Who’s idea was this,” she wanted to say. “Who was it that said in the first place that I was going to change, become a nicer person?” (Nothing is fair, Martin had once written; thank God you’re one of the winners, or, if you’re not, come out shooting.)
Martin said, “I gentle dogs sometimes—you know, dogs that have been mistreated and have turned vicious. I feel about Joan as I feel about some of them—affectionate but … she bites.”
“I see,” Behan said. Then, after a moment, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”
“I don’t think so,” Martin said.
“You might mention your hatred of women,” she snapped.
“That’s true,” Martin said, without feeling, without any trace of embarrassment or hurt. “I wasn’t aware of it until recently, but I’ve been, all my life, afraid of women. Not my mother, my aunt Mary, maybe one or two others. But generally … That is, I fall in love, or something like love, but I’m afraid.”