Mickelsson's Ghosts John Gardner (read 50 shades of grey .TXT) 📖

“Only things I read as an undergraduate,” he said, “and only gloomy things, of course. I guess I knew all along I’d eventually spin out. No doubt that’s the reason for my interest in Dada, some years ago—though I misinterpreted my motives. I thought it was civilization that was falling apart. ‘Wheeling and wheeling in the widening gyre—’ ”

“I hate poetry,” Jessie said. “Did I ever mention that?”

He looked at her, forgetting himself and smiling. “Nobody hates poetry! That’s like hating air, or chamberpots.”

“I do,” she said. “The only poem I ever memorized in my life is ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November’—that’s as much as I ever did learn of the thing. Even that I hated, especially the word hath.”

He leaned away from her for a better look at her face. Though as a matter of fact he liked poetry, not that he’d ever been terrific at understanding it, at least by Anguish Department standards, her revelation delighted and baffled him. It was as if a door had suddenly appeared in a familiar room, opening onto rooms he would never have guessed the existence of. “You’re kidding,” he said. “All those paintings in your house, the fancy record player, all the culture and class—” He twisted the words toward irony. “Admit it, you really like some poetry.”

“Absolutely not.” She spoke with surprising vehemence.

“You’re kidding,” he said again; but he felt his smile fading and couldn’t bring it back.

She withdrew her hand from his stomach. “I shouldn’t brag about it,” she said. “I guess I was badly educated, or there’s something wrong with me.” She made her eyes large and batted the lashes. “I’m a whiz at math, and I adore the novels of Jane Austen.”

He laughed and kissed her cheek, but he was astonished.

“You’re disappointed,” she said. She interlaced her fingers and turned her hands palms down, looking at them sadly.

“No, I’m interested,” he protested. “I’ve known people who say they hate poetry, but then they lean close to the jukebox and listen to words like ‘My gal took my heart and she stomped that sucker flat’—and then we’re on to ’em. But to really hate poetry, knowing what you’re talking about … No doubt you had some traumatizing childhood experience—some maniac in the woods who hung down from a tree and told you ‘Little Miss Muffet.’ ”

“Funny, aren’t you. You should be in pitchers.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s probably true that it was poisoned for me,” she said. “All those earnest, terribly cultural rabbis’ daughters with the boyish haircuts and the pretty black eyes, beating time up in front of the room with a pointer and sing-songing Blake’s ‘The Tyger.’ And then the recitation on stage, on Parents’ Day—little girls folding their dimpled little hands. I never would do it. Shit. They could’ve killed me, I absolutely wouldn’t. OK, buster, why are you smiling?”

“Smiling at the Jessie you used to be,” he said. “I like her.”

“You wouldn’t have. She was a blood-drinker.”

“I wish I’d known her. I feel cheated.”

She relented a little and put her hand over his. After a while she said, “What were you like?”

“A monster.”

“You were big for your age?”

“Mammoth—but not fat. I was scared to death of girls—as I would’ve been of you. That’s why I played football. I thought it all out, very philosophical even then. If I played football, even if I wasn’t very good, they would come to me.” He paused, then corrected himself, “That wasn’t all of it. I had a best friend, Punk Atcheson, who played on the team. And I had a certain amount of hostility in me. I liked slamming into people.”

“Why, Peter?”

He moved his left hand back and forth over hers, closed on his right. If he waited a long while before he answered, it wasn’t that he minded telling her; it was simply that he hadn’t looked back at those feelings for years, and it was surprising to discover that, now that she’d reminded him, they were all still there, ready to spring back into his heart, both the joy in violence and the guilt. The glow on the walls was steadier now, the flames in the stove giving way to red embers. “Our family was considered somewhat queer,” he said, then lowered his eyebrows. Again he corrected himself: “Maybe the truth is I thought my family was considered queer, because that’s the way I considered it.” He thought of telling her how ever since that business with Miss Minton there had been people, both children and adults, who were afraid of him. Instead he told her, “My father was a dairy farmer—wonderful man, no problem there—though as a matter of fact the psychiatrist I used to go to back in Providence wouldn’t buy even that: thought the old man only showed me his best side, with the result that I was stuck with an impossibly noble model. But he was wrong, the psychiatrist. It happens that my father really was noble. He was the most universally beloved man I’ve ever known.” He paused.

“Go on.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, he was a very good man, and I’m grateful to him for it. I’ve had friends, Jesuits, and one black Protestant friend, really a friend of Ellen’s—Geoffrey Stewart, the one I told you about. … It’s good, having a model of perfection. If you don’t measure up, then you don’t; but at least it’s there, it exists. All the words in the world—all the rules and prescriptions—they’re not worth sour apples compared to … When my father was dying, the whole countryside was there in his hospital room. He was supposed to have only three visitors at a time, but the hospital gave up. His room was so filled with flowers and plants you could hardly move, and every night my mother would take some of the flowers to other people’s rooms. The hospital was like a greenhouse, from one end to the other. We