“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 resemble a field of ruins of the most precious sculptural designs, where everything shouts at us: ‘Come, help, perfect! … We yearn immeasurably to become whole!’ ”); Nietzsche the Lutheran minister’s son, hounded even on the highest mountains, where he regularly fled, by the ghost of the Reich-loving, good-German father of Protestantism, master musician and monstrous hate-monger (who had written: “What shall we Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews? … I will give you my faithful advice. First that one should set fire to their synagogues. … Then that one should also break down and destroy their houses. … That one should drive them out of the countryside!”)—Luther whose Christ had in the end turned Nietzsche into a self-styled Antichrist, though he was nothing of the kind: God’s dog, or at worst, a classically defective Christian, guilty of Pride, as Luther was tormented by Pride and more, finally even Sloth, rolling over for order, hierarchy, harmony, good German monk that, in the end, he was (but Nietzsche had, in his final great madness, debased himself, throwing himself down, to no avail, before Cosima Wagner, admitting at last, symbolically, however futilely, the necessity of what he’d dismissed from his system, amazing grace; whereas Luther remained to the end self-righteous and stiff-necked, for all his rhetorical self-abasement—remained, in Mickelsson’s grandfather’s phrase, a sinner besmutted beyond all washing but the Lord’s) … not that Mickelsson was blind to his own sins, mainly Wrath and Despair. … “What choice have I,” Mickelsson asked, “but the wisdom of the Orient: self-abnegation?” He said, leaning closer, “I will become one more piece of the world! No more ego! I’ll make furniture—good, solid, comfortable pieces. No more thought!” The nose of the man with whom he spoke began to move. It was not a nose, he noticed now, but a bird. When it began to beat its wings, he jerked awake.
Mid-day. He stared at the guest-bedroom ceiling, lying on his left side, remembering everything, then looked over at the door he would in a few more minutes go through, beginning his new, more narrowly circumscribed life. He listened for sounds downstairs. Nothing. He noticed that, new as it was, the paint
on the guest-bedroom door was cracking, and he felt a twinge of irritation. That was the kind of thing he must learn to put up with.
Yet he felt a strange uneasiness creeping up on him, as if there were something important he was supposed to do and had not done. Suddenly it came to him that the feeling was not free-floating guilt but fear, increasing by leaps and bounds. He held his breath and confirmed what a part of him had known for minutes now: he was not the only one breathing in the room. He rolled slowly away from the door onto his back, groping across the bed with his right hand until he came to ice-cold fingers—a hand that seized his tightly and hung on.
The next thing he knew he was standing in the hallway, clutching his head in his two hands, bent over from the pain of his heart’s pounding, whispering to himself, and the guest bedroom, behind him, was empty. Perhaps the old woman had simply vanished; perhaps she’d gotten up, a little after him, and had moved away out of his line of vision. He straightened up, breathing deeply, and at last, unable to think what else to do, he went back into the bedroom, looking around carefully, seized his clothes from the chair and his shoes from beside the bed and carried them downstairs to the kitchen, where he dressed.
He raised his face toward the kitchen ceiling, listening, once more holding his breath. Not a sound. For a long moment he stood scratching his head with both hands, trying to think; then abruptly he lowered his hands: there was nothing to think about. The old woman had finally noticed him; had turned her rage from the foolish old man to one more deserving of her stronger-than-the-grave indignation.
No danger, he thought. No ghost in the world has the power to move a wing of the most delicate moth off course.
Once again the clankings and groaning engine sounds penetrated to his consciousness. He looked out the kitchen door. Halfway up the mountain behind his house, just below the woods, two bulldozers were tearing a huge brown gouge across his field. Below the gouge, trucks and cars were parked. Fifteen or twenty men and women in dark, drab clothing stood watching the tractors or working with picks and shovels. When he opened the door and stepped out to see what the devil was going on, the whole thing vanished, the engine sounds abruptly breaking off. A small, dark bird sang on the ice-crusted telephone wire.
In the doorway between the kitchen and livingroom he stopped, staring in astonishment. His son had arrived. He lay asleep in his rumpled clothes on the couch in the destroyed, now cleaned-up livingroom. Carefully Mickelsson approached and touched him, to see if he was real, then sniffed his hair, as if the sense of smell might be more worthy of trust than touch. The boy was dressed in black, his face to the back cushions of the couch. He half awakened now and turned his head, opening his eyes. “Hi, Dad.” He smiled. Mickelsson burst into tears. “You’re home,” he said. “Are you all right?” For some reason, something in the boy’s expression, he pressed his ear to Mark’s chest. If the heart was beating, he couldn’t hear it. When Mickelsson raised his head to look at Mark’s face, the boy smiled and let his hand fall onto Mickelsson’s—the hand was warm—then closed his eyes and, perhaps without meaning to, drifted back into sleep. With his free hand Mickelsson patted Mark’s shoulder, or perhaps the cushion, or some pile of old clothes, maybe nothing at all.
Mark was still asleep at five o’clock that afternoon. Mickelsson moved restlessly, hardly making a sound except for a doglike whimpering of pleasure that he could have stopped at any moment, as a sick man can stop his moans. The ghosts or devils he’d thought he was rid of stood watching.
At seven o’clock that night, he realized that Mark was going to sleep for a long time. No doubt he’d been hitch-hiking for days; perhaps he had walked for miles. In Mark’s duffle-bag, Mickelsson found objects he did not think he himself could have placed there by imagination: three cakes of yeast, a cardboard box containing riceballs. Surely Mark was really there. Mickelsson took a bath, strenuously thinking. Even when he squinted, his bad eyelid did not move. Outside the bathroom door, he could hear the old woman pottering about, as if waiting for him. It came to him what he must do.
He brushed past her and went to his bedroom to stand peering like a mole into his closet. A musty, dead smell poured out of it. He found a gray, striped suit he hadn’t worn since his last convention, a French-cuffed shirt—he could find no cufflinks, but it would do, no one would notice—a Liberty tie, and in a plastic cleaner’s bag, his scarlet huntsman’s coat. He got an image of dead foxes, then banished it. If the coat had moth holes, she would not notice at first glance. He dressed, surprised at how easily the fly zipped clear to his slimmed-down waist. He slipped the scuffed belt through the loops and buckled it. He admired himself in the mirror, first head-on, then sideways. To tone down the redness of his face he patted a little plaster dust onto his skin like powder, then checked the mirror again. Much better. He darkened his eyebrows with a ballpoint pen, then extended his arms, smiling and bowing. “How do you do?” he said, and bowed. He tried it again. “How do you do?” Rifkin, behind his right shoulder, bared his teeth, disgusted. “You’re faking this, Mickelsson,” he said: “why?” Mickelsson drew out his pipe, stuck it jauntily in his mouth, pulled in his belly and threw out his chest and smiled as if for a snapshot. “Because I’m a coward,” he said. “Why do you think priests wear funny hats?”
Uncertainty flashed through him, but instantly he quashed it. His shoes were lumpy, farmerish, and he had no black shoepolish. But if he carried himself properly, who would notice?
He heard the pump switch on, down in the cellar, and thought of the furnace. He was almost out of wood for the stove, too. What if his son were frozen when he got back? Like a Congressman, an oil magnate, a blood-red UFO, an angel, he floated to the head of the stairs, tugged at his coat, then with ceremonial steps went down.
At the foot of the stairs the old man stood bent forward, clasping his hands, staring out through the glass in the door to the porch.
Mickelsson shook his head and waved both hands. “Go away, devil. How can I help you when I can’t help myself?”
The old man stared on, forlorn. Mickelsson went into the slain livingroom to get Jessie’s gloves in their box. Mark was still asleep, lying on his back now. His face was pale; the hair, carrot-red, fell around his features like a clown-wig. He stirred but did not waken when Mickelsson bent down and kissed his forehead.
In his study closet Mickelsson found an Irish fisherman’s cap with a feather in it, slightly mashed from careless storage, and at the coatrack in the hallway he drew on his black leather gloves and chose a cane, the silver-headed one. Then, with a nod to the figure at the sink—the old woman, heavy as a graveyard angel—he went out, softly floating, dismayed by the direction he must go to escape the fly-bottle.
The sky was full of stars. In the snow just short of the woods, six deer looked down at him. He saluted with his cane, like a general ordering the charge. All deer, bless their hearts, are virgins. He opened the Jeep door to put his cane in, slanting it along a fold in the thick black bear-rug where it would ride; then for a moment, eyes widened to miss nothing, he stood sniffing the breeze. It smelled sweet, and there was a rattling, roaring sound that he recognized after an instant as the waterfall. Thaw was upon them at last. Spring on its way. No applause! He raised both hands.
Carefully, trying not to damage his coat, Mickelsson climbed in, found his key—heaven was with him; it was the first his fingers touched—and switched on the ignition. The motor sputtered, coughed, then roared, jiggling the cab; the universal joint grumbled. No harm; happens on the best of planets. He pulled at his hatbrim and shoved in the clutch.
On the way to town he thought nothing, riding the world. He felt the old woman coming behind him, a blackness across the whole southern sky in the rear-view mirror.
To his surprise and horror, he found when he reached Jessie’s house that the place was all lit up; she was having a party. Darkness rose behind the house, as if he were still in the Endless Mountains. Though he stopped the Jeep at a little space of curb right
in front of her house—a space he might have thought, in another mood, had been miraculously saved for him—it seemed to him clear that he’d be a fool to go in. What fantasies one worked up, out there in the country! While he’d indulged himself, holed up like a woodchuck, far from human intercourse and its sweet travail, her life—their lives—had gone on, here in town, inevitably drifting apart from his, as irrevocably distancing as the endless drift of galaxies, and now, now that Mickelsson had found his bearings, he must acknowledge the truth, that it had taken him too long. All right, he thought. He looked down at the grand red coat and the black leather gloves, the knightly garb with which he’d meant to stun his Cosima, kingly suitor arriving in tarnished splendor to ask his lady’s hand. He looked down at the cane and the glossy black bear-rug to his right, grand tsarist cloak over the Jeep’s old battered plastic seats, broken springs.
He would sit for just a few seconds longer, looking in.
He became aware of the Jeep’s steady jiggling and the rumbling of the motor, the clouds of oily smoke pouring up from the rear end like special effects from a clown-car in the circus, and partly because of the waste of gas, partly because he was sure to be noticed if he left the thing running, he turned off the engine. The jiggling stopped and an impression of silence leaped up all around him. Only an impression, he realized at once, because now he was aware of the sounds of the party, crisp and clean, comforting as music in the streetlamp-haloed air. He could hear voices and the sound of the stereo no one was listening to—good old Haydn, or else Mozart (he could never get the difference)—and all around him, here outside, another sound, subtle yet surprisingly distinct, once it caught one’s attention: water moving gently in the gutter under his tires, occasional plump drops hitting the Jeep’s tin roof.
Beyond the lighted doorbell and the parted curtains, Jessie’s house was teeming with life. He could see shapes, undoubtedly people he knew, some of them anyway. It was a large party, probably allies. The moving silhouettes in the windows weighed on his heart. Sometimes on summer nights, in the big Wisconsin farmhouse, his mother and father had had parties like that—he could no longer guess what the occasion might have been; maybe family reunions. He and his cousins had looked in from the lawn, eager aliens, at the rooms full of grown-ups who moved back and forth beyond the curtains and drapes, eating and drinking, talking happily, their noise coming out into the huge, star-filled night, both loud and oddly distant, as if lost already in vanishing time. Ah, how he had loved them—those majestic grown-ups of his childhood, farm people gathered from far and wide, some of them not even names to him, but bright with life, luminous-faced Olsens, Johnsons, Ericksons, here and there a Schmidt or a Dupree. How he—and no doubt the cousins around him—had longed to be grown-up like them, making shy little jokes at the pretty young woman with braids wrapped tight as a glove around her head! And ah, how he loved these strangers too—these defenders of Jessie Stark—or potential defenders—against the powers of barbarism! “Sentimental, you may say,” he said to the heavy, breathing darkness around him, and brushed tears from his cheeks, “but perhaps you judge too quickly. These are all we can honestly call our own, these shitty human beings.” Granted, he should love the barbarians too—so reason demanded—since they too were human, and alive; and perhaps he did. However strong his feelings for Jessie, it was all still partly just war-games. Sitting like a stranger, looking in (God’s spy), he could hardly miss how much there was of play in all these antics—here a grand party of anticipated victory or mourned defeat, somewhere else (down in basements in another part of the city, he liked to think) the crazy-bearded Marxists (some of them, he corrected himself) planning further strategy, banging tables with their fists. All his kinsmen, or none.