Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

once told Tom Garret jokingly—though he’d been drunk at the time, something had kept him from particularizing: her smile, the absurdly Playmate shapeliness of shoulders, breasts and hips, her apparent good-heartedness, the dangerous sharpness of her mind and the unabashed Jewish directness (she asked personal questions no one else would ask, as if nosiness were the highest of civilized virtues, and indeed so she made it seem)—if all those were real, then everything one thought one knew about reality must be scrapped.

At first, passing mention of Jessica Stark—Jessica Tauber, as she signed her articles—stirred Mickelsson to instant erection. Several times he’d drawn the blinds on his office windows and locked the door, and had thus brought the tendency of his reflections to conclusion. But little by little, through mental discipline, he’d been able to place her in the ordinary. She was in early-middle-age, thirty-five or so, he guessed; hence one could be sure, considering the shape she was in, that she was careful about exercise and diet. Every morning at the crack of dawn, someone had told him, she went jogging, three or four miles. Obviously something was wrong with anyone who gave that much care to appearance—or, for that matter, got up that early. Moreover, it was unthinkable that a woman so good-looking should be a first-class scholar. That was not cynicism but realism. All Nature uses only what it needs to thrive, and Jessica, with those murky gray eyes and outward-arching eyebrows, sensual mouth and perfect teeth (Mickelsson was morbidly fascinated by teeth), had no reason to develop deep talents of the heart and mind. At last it had come to him, one afternoon as he was standing in the mailroom staring unseeingly at a mimeographed letter, that Jessica Tauber Stark was a woman to be pitied. The revelation had cleansed him like a new idea; but so far his knowledge hadn’t helped him to meet her eyes, much less deal with her rabbinical wit. Only when Mickelsson hadn’t seen her for a while could he confidently deny that she frightened him. Her office (behind her now, the door still open) was dark with books and journals, far more crammed than his own—more books than anyone could possibly read, so it was fair to assume that she kept them for the power they lent, though also, to some extent, for reference. She edited a magazine, Historical Sociology, alleged to be somewhat right-wing (but it was one of her enemies who’d said that, one of the department’s child-faced Marxists: “Slightly to the right of Adolf Hitler” was in fact what he’d said) and she was supposed to be the first woman in her field to have done … something or other. It was all very vague in Mickelsson’s mind. Secretly he suspected that the whole discipline was a magic trick: snap your fingers and it would turn into a quivering white rabbit or an array of silk flags. Nevertheless, only a maniac would dare raise objections in the flame of that quick, tense smile. She seemed to be always in a hurry, at least when he met her in the hallway (at parties she relaxed somewhat, though even then there was something ready-to-spring about her, at once intensely engaged and wary), so when she stopped to talk with him, usually at his instigation, as now, he felt uncomfortable, dutifully saying whatever she seemed to expect till she dismissed him. She stood with her legs apart, braced, long and lean, her feet in engineer’s boots. In his mind her lines were unnaturally firm, for all their softness, like stones in a clear mountain lake.

“Yes, it’s really wonderful in Susquehanna,” he said. “Remote.” When she narrowed her dark-circled eyes, he added guiltily, “I need to get someplace quiet, get some work done. It’s like the nineteen forties there. You hardly hear a sound.”

“Good,” she said. “If that’s what you want.” Her smile flashed, vanished. Her right hand went furtively to push a lock of silver-streaked dark hair back from her ear. No doubt what he was doing was part of a dangerous national trend. He was suddenly conscious of his paunch, his rumpled trousers; conscious above all of the widowhood she seemed to carry just out of sight, like a dagger. Nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do, would serve.

“Can you afford it?” she asked. “I know things are cheaper down there—”

“No problem,” he said, and waved it away.

“With all your tax troubles, and all that money you pay your wife …” That was the least of what she’d wormed out of him, yawning behind her hand but leaning forward with interest, the night he’d stayed late after her party. They’d talked till nearly 6 a.m. He frowned now, suddenly startled by the notion that she was hinting at offering him money. At once he dismissed the idea and almost laughed.

She said, “People say there are rattlesnakes in Susquehanna.”

“I doubt it. It’s possible, I suppose.”

“It doesn’t bother you?” she asked. When she saw that he didn’t intend to tell the truth, she let her smile flash again, not at full voltage. “Well, good luck,” she said. She looked down the corridor, then thoughtfully back at his face, only for a moment. Abruptly—untruthfully, he thought—she said, “I’m sorry I can’t talk longer, Pete. Gotta run.” She reached back and closed her office door. She tried the knob, making sure the door had locked.

“Sure. I’m sorry if—”

“You’ll remember to bring me that book?”

“Book?” he asked.

She grinned like a woman ten years younger. “I knew you wouldn’t remember. Something by someone named Hare. We talked about it at Bryants’.”

“Oh, that!” He smiled, pretending to remember.

She shook her head, giving up on him, and, as Mickelsson stood flat-footed, she went past him, patting his arm. He turned heavily, watching her go, her free arm waving back to him without her turning. She walked quickly, in long, smooth strides. He thought again of what it might be like to be her lover—a thought that always