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

of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. He’d intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious. In any case, no such luck. He was strong; a weight-lifter, once (in his college days) a frequently written about football player, though no one any longer remembered that; but the ringed and cigarette-scarred table had proved too much for him. For days he’d had to walk with his right hand in his pocket, too sore to lift a pencil. At times like that Mickelsson wished his estranged wife—still living in style, back in Providence—dead. The rest of the time what he felt was not anger but a great, sodden depression.

He could see from one end of the apartment to the other—kitchen and diningroom at one end, livingroom at the other, sloping-roofed bedroom and entryway to one side—but he couldn’t see out. Though the apartment had windows at either end, they opened onto branches and lush green leaves of immense old maples, so close that, if he’d wanted, he could have poked through the screen to reach his arm out and pick a few clusters of winged pods. On windy nights the trees brushed the walls and roof above his head. Occasionally as he sat in just his undershorts and sandals, wiping sweat from his forehead, armpits, and back, slapping at flies, moths, Junebugs, or mosquitoes, his eyes would unfocus and drift up slowly from the print before him, and he would brood for a moment on the idea of renting a small, cheap place in the country, maybe getting himself a second-hand air-conditioner. He would sigh, take off his glasses, wipe sweat from his eyelids, and after a while return his attention to his book. Rarely did Mickelsson read anything he did not hate.

It would be pleasant, he thought, not to feel hemmed in by the so-called faculty ghetto: big, boxy houses of brick and wood, drably painted brown, green, yellow, or blue, about a fourth of them partly supported by shabby, tree-crowded apartments like his own—stained ceilings, lumpy cracked linoleum, threadbare rugs, furniture that looked as if, years ago, it had been left out in snow and rain. In the country, if he felt like walking late at night he could be fairly sure of meeting no one he knew, only deer, raccoons, porcupines, maybe owls; and if he felt like working he would not be always listening for an unwelcome too hearty knock. For an unpopular teacher, as he knew he was, Mickelsson got a surprising number of visits from students or young colleagues who just happened to be passing. Presumably it had to do with the fact that he was alone and could generally be counted on to be in—he rarely went to parties, no more than one or two a month—and also with the fact that, for a man of his circumstances, he had a well-stocked liquor cabinet. “We saw your light was on,” they would say, “so we said to ourselves …” smiling brightly, eagerly, as if afraid of spending a night out there alone, cold sober. Despite his irritation, he sympathized. “Come in, make yourselves at home,” he would say, so gloomy of eye it was somewhat surprising that they accepted, though they always did. They would sit chatting earnestly, emptily, for hours—sometimes of the heat, sometimes of politics, sometimes of trash they’d picked up at local auctions—taking refill after refill, helping themselves, drinking and laughing in his kitchen sometimes even after Mickelsson said his good-nights and went to bed.

He resented their coming up and guzzling his liquor, heavy as he was with financial responsibilities—hardly two nickels he could clink in his pocket; college expenses of his son and daughter, the heavy debts and expenses of his wife in Providence—and he resented even more his visitors’ invasion of the narrow space his life’s errors had left him, though it was true, he would admit, that he took some comfort from their proof that, contrary to what he’d always thought, misery was universal. All the same, with a house in the country he’d be spared such nuisances. He had work to do, all the more urgent for the fact that, of late, his creative juices had dried away to dust. And there would be obvious advantages to living some distance from where his hunchbacked, crazy-eyed department chairman was forever calling meetings, and every other night some fool was invited to read a paper on “Rationality1 and Rationality2” or “Whether,” and where Heidegger’s parlamblings on “Nothing” and “Not” and “the Nothing that Nothings” were the last supposedly respectable gasp of classical philosophy; where Ethics (Mickelsson’s specialty, more or less) was quickly and impatiently snorted away, superseded by the positivist fairytale of “value-free objectivity”; where, worst of all (to tell the bitter, banal truth; and what could be worse than that this, of all things, should be “worst of all”?), people whose names he’d forgotten or never known were forever inviting him—pressuring him to come—to cocktail parties, most of them in honor of people about to retire, of whom he’d never heard.

But the place in the country remained, for the moment, an idle dream. He had no time for house-hunting, and no energy. He labored on, struggling to read, think, and write—propping windows open, stirring the heavy, sticky air with a gray Monkey Ward’s electric fan, taking frequent showers and, when depression weighed on him, trying to sleep, sprawled naked, his legs and arms thrown wide, on top of his musty, Bounce-scented sheets. The table-lamp by which he worked, leaning on one fist—or stared at some wretched girlie mag, strangling the goose—was as warm as an oven and threw a dead yellow light aflicker with shadows of insects. (He rarely changed the flypapers—he disliked touching them—and he distrusted the chemistry of pest-strips.) The whole apartment reeked of