Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  Matter-of-factly Behan said, “It makes you impotent at times?”

  “Until recently.”

  Behan glanced at Joan, guessing something and deciding whether or not to pursue it. He decided not to and got up. “Well, good. That’s enough to get us started. Would you mind waiting outside while I talk a little more with Joan?”

  By now Martin too was standing. “No, fine,” he said. They moved toward the door, Behan saying something she couldn’t quite catch. Not about them. The weather, maybe, or “How long are you planning to be in town?”

  When Behan came back he said, “Don’t cry, Joan. It’s going to be easier than you think.”

  They began on her slightly cruel humor. She was a fast learner, and within a week she had learned to keep silent, think twice, and she discovered a surprising thing about herself: she liked becoming, as she jokingly called it, “a nicer person.” Within a month she had learned not only to hold her tongue but even to reconsider, think again about the person who roused scorn in her. That was better yet, more mysterious and exciting. People she’d never really noticed before—people she’d dismissed, wiped out with a quick little thrust of wit—turned out to be interesting—not, heaven knows, that she wanted them to tea.

  With her visits to Behan, something else changed, too. Martin and the children, alone while she was away, began playing instruments together. Evan was beginning to be quite good on the French horn and violin, Mary on the cello and Irish harp. “Why don’t they play instruments with me?” she asked Dr. Behan. “I’m the musician.”

  “Maybe it’s not as much fun,” he said.

  She decided to change that. It was the hardest change she was able to make. She’d never minded wrong notes when she was teaching school, had never minded inattention, disorganization, had not even minded, particularly, when in the middle of a piece one of the players wandered off into some other song, as if he’d forgotten that the others were there. But she minded terribly when her children played badly, and minded even more when Martin made, God help us, suggestions on interpretation. She would rather have been thrown into quicksand, would rather have been eaten by wolves, crawled over by spiders and snakes, than contend with their perpetually and individually changing beat, their forgetting of flats and sharps. She’d look over at Martin, nodding ferociously to keep him in rhythm, and she would think—because he was growing handsomer now, beginning, tentatively, to believe that something really had changed, perhaps finally—she would think, I love you, you son of a bitch, but how you ever held down an orchestra chair is more than I’ll ever know. She didn’t notice until suddenly it was an accomplished fact, that they were all getting better, and by leaps and bounds. She tried to write music for them to play together, but it was impossible, she was unable to concentrate. She also began a novel, because when the pain made her stay in bed all day she could at least, she thought, write; but that too proved impossible.

  He tried to make her eat nothing but vegetables and fish, because the body can do wonders about curing itself if not pumped full of poisons. Man ist was man isst, he said. She knew whom he was quoting, and it filled her with panic and anger that he hadn’t yet forgotten. When the U.S. government offered him a chance to lecture for six weeks in Japan, he snapped it up. She couldn’t understand why, at first, since he hated to leave his writing for that long at a stretch; but when they got there she understood: Japanese food. She liked it, in fact—and would learn to cook all the famous Japanese delicacies—but the best thing she found in Japan was Kobe steak.

  All their time in Japan they had only one fight, and even that was brief and trivial, a matter of her jealousy. Though it hurt her to think of Sarah, she no longer hated her, if she ever really had. As she would understand more and more clearly as time went on, Sarah had worked a miracle in Martin: had made him sexually well, as probably no one but a stranger could have done. It hadn’t been pure charity, of course. What she’d done, as Joan finally got Martin to describe it, was exactly what the California sexual therapists were supposed to do for impotent, self-hating and woman-hating men. She’d done it so exactly in order, stage by stage, if one could believe what one read about sexual therapy in magazines, that Joan Orrick couldn’t help but suspect that Sarah Fenton had worked by plan, putting him through a program. When she got him to read the article, Martin looked thoughtful and said nothing. It was important to him, of course, that Sarah should have loved him, not merely helped him. But if he had doubts there, he was a fool. Nevertheless, they never spoke of Sarah now, Martin because he had quietly abandoned his promise to her and was ashamed of himself, Joan for another reason.

  It was a rainy summer night, dark as pitch except for the lights of the Mercedes and the yellow light in the windows of Sarah’s small house. As the car drove up, Sarah came out onto the porch, smiling, imagining it was Martin. But when Joan got out in her glistening black raincoat and made a dash to the shelter where Sarah stood, Sarah’s face went suddenly pale and showed a brief struggle between fright and a decision to be brave. At the top of the porch steps Joan stopped, put her hand on the railing as if tentatively, shyly, and with the other hand pushed back the rain hat. “Hello, Sarah,” she said. Her voice was friendly, and though she herself was surprised, it was not a tone she had to fight for.

  “Hello, Joan.” Sarah stood perfectly still, distant, her thin hands folded in front of her, arms straight.

  Joan took a step nearer, gave a slight laugh and said—foolishly, as she thought the instant she said it—“It’s raining.”

  Sarah said nothing, merely looked at her, solemn.

  Joan looked away, feeling somehow as if she, not Sarah, was in the wrong. But no one was really in the wrong, she knew; or anyway so she’d told herself, again and again, before she’d started out. Sarah knew only what Martin said, that she, Joan, did not love him, and if what he said were true, Sarah might be right to try to take him from her, even at the expense of … She shook her hair out, wiped the rain from her face. “Can we talk, Sarah?”

  Sarah thought about it, then nodded and glided in her long, faded robe toward the door. She opened it, still without speaking, and Joan went in. The room smelled of cooking oil, incense, and kerosene; Sarah used lanterns. There was no furniture, only flat Japanese pillows and one low table. Sarah came in, closed the door softly, and after a moment they both sat down. At last Sarah asked, “What did you wish to say, Joan?” Her words sounded carefully planned, rehearsed. Her expression was impossible to read. Guarded, perhaps beaten, withdrawing.

  Joan tried to think, listening to the rain, then brought out without plan, “You love Martin, and you think I don’t, but you’re wrong.” Her eyes filled with tears; she ignored them. To keep from crying she made herself cold, efficient, and she continued: “You’ve made him love you. I don’t blame you for that, but I do love him, so you’re wrong to try to take him from me. He loves you partly because you’re so fair, so reasonable. If that’s true—

  “Why should I believe you?” Sarah said quietly. It dawned on Joan only now that Sarah was scared to death of her.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” she said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  In panic, she tried to think what Sarah had asked, then abruptly remembered. “But you do believe me. Look at me.”

  Sarah did, then looked down. “Very well, perhaps I do. Nevertheless—”

  Joan said, “Martin and I grew up together. We’ve been married more than half our lives. We’re like the same person. That’s the truth, Sarah. Though it’s also true that … something’s gone wrong. I can’t please him, I frighten him. But I’m trying to change. I am changing. There are things I have to save—not just myself, not even just myself and Martin and the children. There are things—” Before she knew she would do it, she found herself telling about their parents, their friends in San Francisco, Uncle George’s books.

  Suddenly, like an actress—but it was real enough—Sarah turned away. “Please, don’t do that.”<
br />
  Joan kept still, watching her. Though Sarah’s face was as expressionless as ever, tears ran down her cheeks. She sat motionless, as if hoping to ward off attack. At last Joan said, “There are things you do for him that I don’t know about. If I knew what they were, you couldn’t compete, you wouldn’t have a prayer.”

  Sarah laughed, a sort of groan.

  “Tell me what they are,” Joan said.

  “Why should I? What about how I feel?”

  Joan Orrick closed her eyes a moment, concentrating. She had the feeling she sometimes had with Evan, playing checkers: there was a way to win if she could just stay wide awake, not let her mind wander for even part of a second. “He loves you because you’re fair, honest.” She spoke quickly, softly. “If I knew exactly what you do together—what I do that’s wrong, without knowing I’m doing it—”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “You’re asking me to tell you—”

  She refused to be distracted. “It would be fair then, wouldn’t it. If there are things you know, that I haven’t learned, and you keep them secret, and if after that he marries you because you’re fair and honest—in other words because you’ve tricked him—” Relief flooded in, exactly as when she managed to set up the winning move in checkers, and she watched like a spectator, enjoying the beauty of the move as poor Sarah squirmed. She could be sorry for Sarah if she let herself, could even ruin the move for compassion’s sake; but she resisted the temptation. Let Sarah sacrifice. Somebody had to lose.

  Sarah stood up, retreated toward the window. “Joan, this is crazy. Please, I’d like you to go.”

  “I want you to tell me everything you do.” She saw that in a moment Sarah would be crying, and she was tempted more strongly than before toward compassion, but again she held firm, thinking, You’re beaten, Sarah. I know why he loves you, but somebody has to lose.

  “I can’t tell you. It would hurt you. I know you, Joan. I know you better than you think.”

  “Yes. It will hurt me. But we have no choice.”

  Sarah swept her hair back and pretended to gaze out the window at the rain. “I can’t tell you. But you’ve won. I’ll stop seeing him.”

  Joan stood up, moved toward her, then paused, six feet away. “It’s not enough, Sarah. There’s someone else like you, somewhere.”

  There was a long silence. At last, crying, Sarah nodded.

  It had not been by Sarah’s techniques that she had won him, or if it had been, Joan Orrick would be the last to admit it; but she knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how to keep from hurting him, how to show the love that had made her cling to their life.

  “Am I becoming a better person?” she would say. He would look at her, shaking his head as if in wonder, and she was happy. She began to feel confident. She was never afraid of him now, and not often afraid for him. For no reason that she could exactly explain, he no longer drank, or, rather, drank only now and then, at a party, and even if he got himself so drunk he couldn’t walk, he never turned on her—never in icy rage called her “catshit,” or stormed off to walk or gallop like a maniac on his horse or, worst of all, drive crazily off through the mountains. When he was roaring drunk, he did impersonations of famous men, and often, as in the past—but more joyfully than in the past, it seemed to her—he and Paul Brotsky did famous conversations, for instance between Czerny and Beethoven, or Shakespeare and Marlowe, or Wilbur and Orville Wright:

  “It won’t fly, Wilbur.”

  “It’ll fly. Now just get in the fuckin airplane.”

  “No. My shoe’s untied.”

  “Never mind your shoe’s untied, get in the airplane!”

  “I think we should’ve made it of aluminum.”

  “Aluminum’s not even invented yet. Just get in the—”

  “Wilbur, I’ve got an idea.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s invent aluminum.”

  “Orville, you Goddamn clown, we spent two thousand dollars and nine years of work and—”

  “Wilbur?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You fly it. I’m too young.”

  Even Evan and Mary began to grow confident, began, that is, to believe that the changes were permanent. “Daddy’s different,” Mary said one night, and had a cautious look much like Martin’s.

  “How?” she said, knowing, wondering if Mary would dare say it.

  “His eyes crinkle. His mouth never smiles, but—”

  “We’re all of us different, honey,” she said.

  She refused to think about the fact that her insides were changing too. Sometimes, when the pain was really bad, so that all she could do, despite the drugs, was lie in bed and cry—Martin would come and lie beside her and hold her, telling her he was sorry, wishing there was anything at all he could do—she would be frightened, so frightened that she’d begin to sweat, though she refused to think what frightened her. (“Have you noticed, Mr. Mixiedough, that the world is becoming increasingly dim?”) When she slept, she had nightmares: Sarah came with word that Paul Brotsky was dead, and when Joan went sobbing to find Martin and tell him, he was gone, no one had been in his study for what looked like years—his leather chair was rotten, there were cobwebs on the typewriter. She called out in terror to Evan and Mary. The house was empty, silent except for the ticking of a clock. Even the dogs were gone, had left no trace. When she looked out at the mountains, gray, unstirring in the winter rain, she knew her family was not there either. The clock ticked on. “Martin!” she would scream, and would wake up shaking violently, and he would be holding her, out of breath from running, telling her, “Joan, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

  Life is fleeting, he wrote, even the worst of life is fleeting.

  “Martin,” she whispered once, “it’s not all right.” And at the look that came over him, she knew she must not mention that again.

  Once Evan frightened her as badly as she’d ever managed to frighten herself. They were in a restaurant in Japan, at the New Japan Hotel, the four of them eating and laughing, a picture-book family no one would believe—and as Evan was telling some endless story, Martin smiling politely, looking past him with glazed eyes, waiting for it to finish—Evan suddenly stiffened and gave a faint cry of terror and reached toward Martin as he’d have done if the floor had suddenly dropped from under him. “Evan, what’s the matter?” Martin said, and caught him in his arms.

  “Daddy, I saw something!” Evan said, white.

  “What did you see? There’s nothing.”

  Evan was looking around the room as if lost, the way you look around a room when you wake up and don’t know where you are. “I saw something,” he said again. Mary, too, was looking around, afraid.

  “It’s all right,” Martin said, and held Evan tighter.

  “You were looking at me,” Evan said a little later, “as if I was dead, or invisible, and then—” But he couldn’t remember what happened next.

  She remembered her grandmother, and Martin’s uncle George, and she clenched her hands into fists to make the trembling stop. She remembered that Martin had said one time, “I’m as ruled from outside as any character in a book.” That’s not true! she thought—and it came as a revelation: I’ve proved it’s not true in my life. Paul had read to her from his astrology book: “The Leo child is daring, unflinching, and unafraid.” She said: “Are you aware, Martin, that I am daring, unflinching, and unafraid?”

  “I am indeed,” he said, and actually grinned, so that even Evan grinned and drew back, slightly embarrassed, out of his father’s arms.

  She remembered—guiltily, for some reason—that Paul had read of the Pisces—Sarah Fenton—“The Pisces child is a mystic and self-sacrificing seeker of harmony.” Anger flashed up in her for an instant, and she thought, I can run circles around her mysticism and harmony, remembered: “The Leo is proud and jealous.” Abruptly, with pleasure, she laughed. She was proud. She liked herself, and the whole world loved her, and they had better keep it up or by God there was going to be hell
to pay.

  Though brilliant, Joan Orrick was not a woman who often had ideas. She had one now. Perhaps Martin was determined by outside forces, like a character in a novel—perhaps Cancers and Pisces and Virgos like Paul Brotsky, even Capricorns like Evan and Mary—were determined and, because they were determined, needed the subtle, medicinal influences of all Time and Space to heal them, save them. Leos were free. Even though she never did concerts anymore, the metaphor for her life was the concert stage. These people she loved—these beautiful blond children rushing toward adulthood, and even Martin Orrick, famous novelist—were not her equals, though she couldn’t move a finger without them: they were her audience. For you, my loves, she thought, I wear this golden dress, these diamonds and rubies, flashing them up and down awesome chromatic scales. For love of you I resurrect the dead of Vienna, also St. Louis dancers, black-bearded hermits, crazy-eyed old women, the bullet-ridden bodies of no-’count drunken Frenchmen. Sit up straight and listen, and God damn you if you cough! This is a love song you’re hearing! No praise will be too great, but there will be, please, no applause. A silence will be sufficient, such a hush as would give the frail mystical Pisces a heart attack.

  Mary said, leaning toward her father, “Why is Mommy wearing that wicked grin?” (Wicked was one of the words she was using in her fiction lately.)

  “Wicked?” Joan said. “Your gentle, sweet mother? Wicked?”

  Nineteen

  One night, toward the finish of one of his tours, he did a reading at Bennington College in Vermont. It was a cheapie, as she called it. For readings, these days, he got a thousand dollars a night. But Bennington supported young writers, and Martin had a messianic passion for backing promising beginners, now that he had clout. He had several young writers he wanted Bennington to invite up for readings from New York. She went with him, as usual, and it was the usual great success. He read the kind of thing he was famous for, poetic and dark, a tragic piece that made human existence seem senseless and useless and, by virtue of its very waste, or perhaps by virtue of its redemption through art, worth clinging to. She remembered some critic’s having written of him once—and it was truer now than ever—that “his characters move terror-stricken, adrift in a universe grown wholly unfamiliar.” She remembered the words because she’d wondered at the time why people were always so impressed by such things—why they thought him a great artist when he made everything seem sad and hopeless. Yet it was beautiful writing, there was no doubt of that, and not shapeless, self-regarding like, say, Mahler when he tried something heavier than a song. All the same, it was a view of the world that Joan Orrick did not share. How incredible, she thought, that intelligent people should find misery and pain, even at one remove, in fiction, so attractive!