Mickelsson's Ghosts (46 page)

While he was thinking this—concerned, really, about his own situation, and even that not quite consciously, his attention unfocused, only dimly aware of why the Mormons so bothered him in his present mood—a man adrift between yellow-lighted worlds like a dustcloud mindlessly wandering in space, toying with the possibility of collapsing into a planet—Mickelsson thought he heard a woman's voice say, angrily but desperately hiding her anger, “I'm not well, I guess,” and then another voice answering with a grunt. Surprised, Mickelsson turned his head, straining to pierce the room's dimness, but there was nothing; a dream-voice, some old memory. He shook his head as if to wake himself, then sucked in breath and stabbed hard into the plaster and lath, prying away a great hunk above the door into the livingroom. “Dad?” someone said, making Mickelsson jump. But no; another dream. As the wall-section fell he heard a clink such as coins might make, or old brass jewelry. He got down off the chair, stepping clumsily because his legs were overtired, and bent down to sort with his gloved hand through the trash on the floor. After a moment, he found something and raised it toward his goggles to study it more closely: an old-fashioned wooden cheesebox with a sliding top. He forced the top open; then, removing the glove from his right hand, still holding the box up close to his goggles, poked inside with two fingers. The box was full of keys.

Mickelsson carried the box into the livingroom, carefully closing the door of the dust-filled workroom behind him. Slipping off his goggles and mask, he bent by the lamp in the corner to inspect his find more closely. It was evident at a glance that whatever doors, gates, trunks, or boxes the keys had once opened, whatever treasures or keepsakes they had guarded—whatever hands had turned those keys or reached in for the keepsakes—had long since vanished from the earth.

That instant a crash came from the cellar, right under his feet. He strode to the cellar door, determined this time to catch the damn thing, whatever it might be. He opened the door, switched the light on, and thudded on wobbly legs down the steep, narrow steps, almost falling in his haste. He stopped at the bottom and looked carefully all around. Mouldy, crooked beams, the filthy oil furnace, shelves crammed with rusted, mouldering paint cans—all he had left from the mountains of junk that had lain here when he came … He could see no sign of an intruder. The shadows seemed to peer back at him, like children in hiding, but nothing moved. Was it possible, he wondered, that rattlesnakes could come into a cellar and, in its warmth, stay awake through the winter? Not likely. He would get a book from the library, try to find out. Probably it was rats. Carefully, step by step, he went back up to the kitchen, watching and listening all the way. In his gloved left hand he held an old rusted key, the teeth blurred away to nothing. He imagined he smelled freshly baked cake. Then the scent was gone.

4

Before the concert, Mickelsson and Jessica had drinks at her house. He could hardly tell what he felt as he pushed the lighted-up button that rang her doorbell—guilty, shoddy, angry at having been put in this position of fake respectability, at the same time miserably unworthy: she was a beautiful woman, he a laboriously cleaned-up derelict; for all he knew, he had the clap. Not that he'd noticed any sign yet. Matter of time.

But as soon as she opened the door and gave him her smile, at the same time taking a step back, saying “Hi! Come in!”—Mickelsson tipping his hat to her like a big friendly sheriff—his churning emotions settled; he felt safe. Her hair flowed around her shoulders, and her tanned and freckled skin was radiant. She wore a white blouse and string-tie and tweedy light brown trousers, part of a suit—the coat lay on the arm of the couch. She held her fingers apart as if she had wet nailpolish on them, though he could see none. The clear kind, perhaps. “I'm running late, as usual,” she said. “Do you want to fix us drinks? I'll just have sherry.” Before he could do more than mumble “Fine, OK—” she was off down the hallway, calling over her shoulder, “Still raining?”

“A little,” he said, opening the doors of the Swedish-modern cabinet where she kept her small store of liquor: Beefeater gin and the cheapest vermouth available, X-brand bourbon, one good Scotch, an assortment of circusy, undrinkable liqueurs, a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream that had probably been there for two, three years. He decided on straight gin for himself and took out the Harvey's for Jessica. He noticed that his cuff was ragged, almost fringe. “Could turn to snow,” he called, then rose, setting the bottles on top of the cabinet, and headed toward the kitchen for ice.

“You really think so?” she called back. “My shoes will be moosh. I suppose if I can find my what's-its …”

Mickelsson laughed, still morose but coming around, unable to help himself. “Boots?” he offered. “Galoshes?” He dropped three ice cubes into his glass, then returned to the livingroom. Just as he finished filling her sherry glass, Jessica reappeared and sat down in a wide brown overstuffed chair, slipping off her shoe so she could tuck her right foot under her left leg. When she reached up for the glass he held out to her, trying not to let her see his ragged cuff, it struck him that the lift of her arm was exactly like a ballet dancer's, yet natural, unconsidered. “What a day!” she said.

“Fights with the Marxists?” he asked, bending closer, looking down at her like a surgeon. He stole a peek at her bosom, then backed off, drink in hand, and lowered himself onto the couch. It had come to be a frequent topic with them, the Marxists in sociology—in Mickelsson's opinion the stupidest so-called professors he'd ever met (not counting Levinson, perhaps), though in fact he had no evidence except for what he'd seen of one or two of them at parties—that and his invariable experience of Marxists elsewhere, both alive and in print. In Jessica's view, or so she claimed, they were at worst no more than a nuisance, “sincere and earnest, whatever else,” she kept insisting, though once she slipped and referred to them as “like a squadron of mosquitoes in the bedroom.” When pressed she would admit that possibly someday they might prove a threat; she broke their solidarity. Not too serious a threat, presumably: except for the elderly chairman, she outpublished the pack of them, and in debate, if she chose to (she probably would not) she could whip their asses—Mickelsson's expression, or President Jimmy Carter's; anyway, not Jessica's.

“I'll tell you,” she said, “you should be grateful for a chairman as smart and good-hearted as Tillson!”

“And good-looking,” he said.

There was distance in her smile. “That's not exactly his fault, you know.”

He bowed, Oriental. “Dumb thing to say; most sorry.” He raised his glass. “Cheers!”

She touched his glass with hers. “And may the concert not be awful!”

They sipped ritually. He asked, “You think it might be?”

“Well, you saw the Swissons at the Blicksteins', how they hide behind each other. ‘After you, dear!' ‘After you, dear!' That kind of thing could get pretty embarrassing on stage, maybe a contest to see who can make less noise.”

He smiled, studying her. “Whose idea was this concert, anyway?”

“I guess I asked you,” she said. She raised her shoulders and arms dramatically. “Well, somebody had to do it.” She laughed.

“That's true,” he said, and nodded soberly. “You did the right thing.”

“Anyway, I'm sure it will be wonderful,” she said. “Aren't they supposed to be famous or something?”

“We're all supposed to be.” He shrugged sadly.

She laughed again, then raised her drink and sipped it.

He found himself bothered by the tone she was taking toward the Swissons. It was true that they weren't instantly charming, but if they were excellent musicians, as they were said to be … Something about her view of them struck him as unpleasantly—secular. Not just irreverent; something deeper, that he had no word for. Clinical. A tendency to look at human specimens—perceiving nothing wrong in it—under an unfairly revealing light. Yet that wasn't it either; she could be more just than he was—as she was, for instance, about Tillson. Were all women like that? Was it the case that men were all, like young Blassenheim, idealists—lovers of the Good, even when, like Mickelsson, they denied its existence, and therefore eager to give the benefit of the doubt, and made miserable by each inevitable lapse of flesh and brain—while women, for all their otherworldly attractiveness, were cold-blooded realists, indifferent to the rainbowed, celestial crypt, even at the noblest peaks of poetry or the loveliest moments in music planning out which hat to wear shopping? It was the opinion, he thought gloomily, of a male chauvinist pig.

It had been The Comedian, Ellen's friend, more than Ellen himself, who had made him aware of how strong that impulse was in him. “You really believe that, don't you,” the young man had said, smiling, far away. Mickelsson no longer recalled what his offense had been, but he remembered meeting the young man's brown eyes and understanding with a shock that he, Mickelsson, was indeed, as the young man implied, a kind of living fossil, wrong through and through. Mickelsson had drawn back into himself and the rest of the night had refused to come out. “Stop sulking,” Ellen had said when the others had gone home. She flashed her smile, as wide and impersonal as the smile of a model in a Sears catalogue, and later, at something like two in the morning, she and the young man had gone off somewhere. It seemed to Mickelsson now that he'd been sulking ever since.

“… like my husband,” Jessica was saying, slightly smiling, looking down. “What a bum.”

He awakened to the realization that, for all her smile, she was speaking carefully, controlling strong emotion, imagining Mickelsson to be listening with the interest and sympathy his expression seemed to show.
Less bum than I am,
he thought, fraudulently smiling on. He had a sudden sharp sense of the dead man he'd never known, a gentle personality adrift everywhere in the room, in the black leather chair, the tall African drums (he realized with a shock how absurd it was that all this time he'd felt superior to a man who knew trees, black African languages, the politics of ecology). … Jessica above all, touching her collarbone with the tips of two fingers, as if she were feeling a light pain there, was an expression of the dead man's taste.

“But of course he was always the soul of tact,” she said, turning her shadowed eyes on Mickelsson. “Saying exactly what you meant was uncivil. You can see where that put me. South Borneo.”

“You're tactful in the long run,” Mickelsson said. “Just trickier.”

She thought about it. “I hope that's true.”

Woefully, he thought of the big, battered Jeep truck waiting outside in the rain, the front license plate dangling from one screw, the right front mirror angling out—as it had been when he'd bought it—like a broken dodo's wing.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Shall we go or have another?”

He pursed his lips and lowered his eyebrows in a comic frown. It seemed to him conceivably an invitation to spend the evening, miss the concert. His eye fell on the stereo—futuristic, expensive, another tactful observation from beyond the grave. If she was as blunt as she claimed to be, he was a real dunderhead; the more he tried to figure out her signals, the more confused he became. He remembered how when he was moving his hand on her leg she'd stopped him, in no uncertain terms, with her foot. He looked at his watch. “I guess we'd better get going, if we're going,” he said.

He couldn't tell whether her smile was one of relief or just bafflement. He leaned forward, preparing to stand up.

“OK,” she said, still smiling indecipherably, “I'll get my coat.”

They rose together; he couldn't tell which of them had caused it, and even now he was toying in panic with the idea of staying. The idea of their future fell away like the corridor in one of those Texas super-motels he'd stayed in from time to time when attending conferences; but whether that was bad or good he couldn't tell. While she searched through the closet beside the front door, Mickelsson put on his own coat. At the far end of the hallway, the bedroom door was open, dim light falling over the bedspread of fringed yellow-gold. Her dead husband, watching solemnly from the edges of the room, would approve. “Be good to my wife,” he would say, as Mickelsson had said in his heart to the young man who was able to be not just lover but friend to
his
wife.
Ah, that this all too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, resolve itself. …
He cleared his throat.

Jessica slipped her gloved hand between Mickelsson's waist and elbow and gently laid the fingers on his arm. When they stepped outside, they saw that the rain had turned, as he'd thought it might, into softly falling snow. The Jeep, to Mickelsson, looked sullen and defensively self-righteous, as if thinking of the height to which the lady must lift her leg if she intended to get in. A dog stood on the sidewalk twenty feet away, looking up at them from something it had been sniffing. It lowered its head, apologetic, and moved off.

“What a beautiful night!” Jessica said, raising her face so the snow could fall on it.

Outside the Jean Casadesus Auditorium they saw everyone they knew, all dressed to the nines—the Bryants, Edith in a mink stole, Phil in the shabbily expensive attire of a British lord; the Garrets, Mabel in drab, funereal black, Tom in a black turtleneck sweater and a brown sport-coat, a prominent spot of blue paint on his otherwise impeccable French bell-bottoms; the Meyersons; the Blicksteins; several of his students. … Conversation roared like a sea around them. Suddenly, Tillson was at Mickelsson's elbow, bowing and grinning, speaking in the cracked voice of an adolescent: “Good to see ya, Pete! Gosh, Jessie! Good to see ya!” He grabbed her right hand in both of his. “Isn't this exciting?”