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

“How did you feel?”

She shrugged. “I thought it was fabulous. What did I know?”

“And now?”

She lowered her eyes. “I like it.”

“I understand you’re still fabulous.”

She nodded.

Mickelsson gently patted her foot. As if to himself he said, “You worried me, the way you kept looking out the window. I thought you were seeing through my lies.”

“You were lying?”

“Not on purpose.”

She nodded again. “What I was really doing, I was thinking about how you looked sort of half sitting on the desk, half laying across it, up on one elbow. Some ways you’re so fussy, and yet there you’d sprawl. It sort of took back what you said.”

“The reclining Buddha.”

She grinned, glancing at him sideways. “I noticed how it bothered you that you were overweight. You look better now, but you know, people always get stouter when they’re middle-aged.”

He noticed that he was stroking her lower leg, not seductively but as if she were a child or a cat. He pressed down just a little harder, as if to erase what he’d done, then removed his hand. “I’ve got to get back home. You’re OK now, aren’t you?”

She shook her head.

“You’re not OK?”

“I guess,” she said.

He felt a sudden, urgent need to give instruction, though the dizziness was with him again. “Listen, don’t put up with anything you don’t want to,” he said. “Women do that too much. Men too. On the other hand, don’t be too hurt by betrayals, don’t be too final. …” He blushed. Rhetoric. “People hardly ever intend real harm,” he said. “They’re just weak and stupid, or attached to bad ideas, and then embarrassed and defensive. You see—” He broke off. He blushed more darkly than before and looked away. “Alan’s a good, generous boy,” he said. “It’s true that, like all of us, he’s prone to error. …”

“I’ll break his fucking neck,” she said.

She spoke so earnestly he had to smile, looking up at her face. “Might be a good idea,” he said after an instant. “Show him he’s important to you. Or maybe find somebody new, somebody who’s never betrayed anybody yet, and break his neck, let him know right off the bat how you feel. Start clean.”

“I should have done that to Alan the first time he spoke to me.”

Mickelsson feebly shook his head. “You have to realize—a famous singer, pretty in her way …”

“Ugly as a rat.”

“Well, yes … Spark of the divine, though.”

“You think so? Even rats?”

“Beware of tribal narrowness, my child.” He sadly raised his hand, palm out. “Reject speciesism!” He rose from the bedside as he spoke.

Brenda reached up with one finger and touched his raised hand. Her eyebrows, darker than her hair, went out from the bridge of her nose like hawk’s wings. “If my father were like you,” she said, “I’d be a saint.”

“You are a saint.”

She nodded. “True.”

“We’re still friends?” He moved toward the door.

She looked at him thoughtfully, then shrugged and smiled, meaning, Why not?

“Good-night, Brenda.”

She nodded again, then stopped smiling. “Shit,” she said. She closed her eyes.

9

He awakened briefly to a sound of clanking machinery and big engines; construction work on the road, he thought, then slept again. He found himself reasoning with a large, dark figure with its back turned, quite literally a mountain of a man, and robed in the darkest black imaginable, but no more frightening, once one got talking to him, than McPherson in Mickelsson’s graduate-school days. He’d done the right thing, Mickelsson insisted, not so much pleading his case as explaining—he’d done the right thing in gently separating his life from the life of Jessie Stark. She’d had sorrows enough; and so had he. He would not judge her—he was pleasantly conscious of his virtue in saying this, and he meant it sincerely—but the woman he’d seen on the couch with Tillson was not what the child-angel within him cried out for. Reality did not contain anywhere what his heart cried out for. He would therefore ask for nothing, and take nothing. Live in truce with the universe, here in his comfortable, dark mountains. When he thought of his children, or what his wife had been like once, or of the photograph of Jessie at twenty-five, he was of course a little grieved; but that would pass. He would not die, that was his decision; in a small way, he would let the world die. Resignation. How obvious the solution, now that he’d come to it; and how little philosophy it took, in fact. Not a solution at all, a problem outgrown. When the figure said nothing, he reached up a little timidly to tap its back and draw its attention. His hand touched not a form but an absence—chilly, damp air like the air in a cave.

“How can this be?” he cried, rushing up to a great, silent crowd of people who waited wearily, some sitting, some standing, among their suitcases and trunks. The clothes were old and drab, and the men had not shaved in days—nor had the women, for at least as long, combed their hair. Their bus or train or plane had apparently been delayed indefinitely. In the dream it did not seem odd at all that he should reach out to them, pleading for advice or, at least, agreement. He touched the powdery dry sleeve of a bearded old man’s coat, telling him his story. He’d finally shaken old Nietzsche’s satanic hold on him, he said, seeing the great philosopher only for what he was: not as the destroyer and absolute doubter he noisily, mockingly proclaimed himself, but as a man tortured by holiness, maddened by hypocrisy, stupidity, and cowardice, furious at Christianity for the destruction of all that was holy and good, sweet-tempered, noble, as he’d said himself in his famous parable of the madman who rushes into the village crying “Whither is God? I shall tell you: We have killed him—you and I!” (Nietzsche the misanthrope, yet passionate lover of humanity, who had said, “The men with whom we live