Mickelsson's Ghosts (57 page)

“I'm all right,” she said, looking up as if he'd broken her train of thought. “Don't let your eggs get cold. Anyway, I can't put a sweater over
this.”

“My sweaters are big,” he said, moving on toward the entry-hall where, if he wasn't mistaken, he'd left his old black sweater with holes in the elbows. He found it where he'd thought he would, and returned to the kitchen. “Hands up,” he said, as he'd said long ago to his children. “Hang on to the cuffs.”

She turned to look up at him, unpersuaded and inconvenienced, then obeyed. “Jesus, the
fuss
you make about things,” she said, then laughed, her last sounds muffled by the lowering sweater.

He allowed his fingertips to graze her breasts as they passed, and when her face popped out, he kissed her, then stood back to look. “It's definitely you!” he said, wagging both hands, limp-wristed.

“Who else?” she grouched, then looked down at herself. It might indeed have been someone else, a hobo who'd recently lost weight. She did not smile. “So anyway,” she said, “eat your eggs.” She pointed with her fork.

He hurried to his chair and sat down. He liked her in the ratty, baggy sweater. He smiled, watching as she laboriously rolled up the cuffs. “You'll admit, it's nice to be warm,” he said.

She said, wrinkling her nose, “It smells of turpentine.” He knew that instant that nothing of Buzzy's had ever smelled of anything if he could help it.

When he'd cleared away the dishes, piling them in the sink, and they were seated, each working on a third cup of coffee—the sun risen higher now, pouring into the kitchen from the entry-hall, making one bright place on the wall and floor, throwing the rest of the room into greater darkness—Jessie asked, breaking what had grown to an extended silence, “What did you make of Mr. Sprague's talk about flying?”

“Do you mean do I think he believed it?”

She shrugged, then waited.

“They have funny ways of joking, around here. It used to throw me, but I guess I'm catching on.” He added after a moment, “It's not like anyplace else I know of. I suppose if I were a sociologist—” When she glanced up at him, he moved his head as if nudging away objections. “All I mean is, everyplace has its own oddities, things that make people feel part of the group.”

“Nearly all human beings joke,” she said. “It's one of the defining characteristics.”

“I know.” He raised his cup, cautiously sipping. When he'd lowered the cup again, he said, “But it's something you especially notice in Susquehanna. Maybe it's a way of denying that the whole place is moribund. Anyway, it seems unusual how much joking goes on. At the check-out counter down at the market, at the post office, on the street … There's a farm, over by Gibson, where they have these strange-looking long-haired cows, they look like musk-oxen or something. One day when I was passing, the farmer was out with them, breaking open bales of hay, and I pulled over and asked him what kind they were. He looked at them, very thoughtful, pulling at his chin, you know; then he looked at me, as if puzzled that I didn't know, and he said—very serious—‘Them's mice.' I laughed, but not him. You'd be surprised how long it took him to admit they were Highland Something.”

“He must've liked your company,” she said.

“He
looked
like a smart, discriminating sort of man.”

She sat very still, gazing at her coffee, smiling. Only one tapping finger showed her restlessness. “It's funny, though. He sounded as if he meant it, about flying.”

“No doubt he's used it for years,” Mickelsson said. “In fact somebody else here mentioned to me once they've got a man in these parts who flies. Maybe Sprague's used that joke so long they've all come to believe it.”

“Pray he doesn't try taking off from the roof sometime.” The finger tapped on.

He put his hand over her hand to stop the barely audible drumming. “I wonder if I should have offered him the use of my car,” he said, and watched her face. “The blue one, I mean. It just sits there in the barn, doing no one any good—”

“Are you crazy? If he went over one of those … moraines or whatever they call them, those big bluffs up there—”

“That
would
be flying,” Mickelsson said with a grin, then at once put on charity. She was a sucker for Christian charity, he was beginning to see. She'd been hanging around with the bleeding-heart Marxists too long. He wondered what would happen if he pushed it a little. “It did cross my mind that he might hurt himself,” he said gravely. “Not that I'd care about the car …”

“I understand.” An instant after she spoke, she looked at him, suspicious. He smiled benevolently and signed the air with three limp fingers, like the Pope. “Jesus,” she whispered crossly, not even pretending to smile, and looked away. “You really are crazy,” she said.

He'd finished his coffee. She still had half a cup, too cold to drink. “Shall I put on another pot?” he asked, his voice bright, trying to pull her out of her mood.

She shook her head. “I hate coffee.”

He sighed.

Uncomfortable as he was feeling—all this formal informality, these complex games they both somehow kept losing—he minded nonetheless that it would soon be time for her to leave; minded it more with each small failure. He hunted for something to say that might keep her longer, but it was hard to concentrate. He found himself haunted by images of Donnie Matthews. It was of course true that he could drop his little nightlight just like that, put all that behind him, a sordid but ultimately trifling affair of the sort human beings, shitty beasts that they were, were prone to get mired in. But even as he thus consoled himself, he knew it was not as true as he might wish. He couldn't imagine himself telling Jessie about Donnie, nor could he imagine continuing this … whatever … with Jessie without confessing. Neither could he imagine—despite the brackish taste that came with the thought of Donnie, all those Di-Gels rising in armed revolt—that he could simply stop visiting Donnie's apartment, put behind him forever the thought of holding her slippery, pale waist in his two hands, screwing her upright like some animal he'd grabbed from the pen, his trousers around his feet, his sick heart slamming.

Remorse rose into his gorge. Jessica too he'd grabbed from the pen, if he admitted the truth. Or they'd grabbed each other. If she was sorry for him, and attracted, she was also repelled, at very least distrustful. He again slid his hand over the tabletop toward her, inviting her to take it. After a moment, she did. Her hand was surprisingly warm and soft. The old dog stirred.

“Do you teach today?” he asked.

Rising out of some dark thought of her own, she asked, “What's today? Tuesday?”

“If I haven't lost track.”

Looking sadly at their clasped hands, she said, “I don't go in on Tuesdays. But I have some editing I should do, work for the magazine. And there's a meeting I promised to drop in on tonight. …”

“It's nice to have you here,” Mickelsson said.

She thought about it, carefully not looking at him, then nodded. The next moment, changing her mind, she raised her shining, sea-gray eyes—was it tears that made them shine?—then abruptly looked down again. “I guess I should get dressed.”

“You could,” he said. “Or we could go back upstairs and, you know …” He pressed her hand.

She stood up with him, then moved into his arms. “OK,” she said, a smile bursting over her face. “I give in.”

They lay spent and at peace again in one another's arms, talking, much as he would talk with Donnie, early in the morning—except, of course, that it was not the same at all, so different that from time to time his jaw muscles would tense, and part of his mind would formally resolve to tell Jessica everything, get it out in the open, let her think whatever she might think. Once she caught him at it.

“What?” she asked. Her dark head was on the pillow, facing his.

“Mmm?” he said, fake innocent.

“What was going through your mind just then?”

“Childhood sorrows. Misery of old age.”

“Bullshit.”

He closed his eyes to avoid those two dark lie-detectors. “Nothing, really.”

She traced the side of his face with two fingers. He remembered that he needed a shave. She said, “What was that funny look? Tell the truth.”

“Secret,” he said at last. “I'll tell you sometime. I promise.”

“OK.” She seemed to let it go at that, but then, tracing the lines of his face again, she asked, “Somebody else?”

“Nothing like that.” He grinned, then leaned toward her to kiss her nose.

“You shouldn't let it bother you, Pete,” she said, and turned her face away from him to look up at the ceiling. “I'm not demanding.” Her expression was sombre. “Even if I were your wife, I wouldn't be demanding.” She smiled and briefly glanced at him, sad. “It's wrong for people to hurt each other—cause jealousy, things like that. But also, someday we'll be eighty—you know?—and we'll have nothing but the past.” She pouted a moment, narrowing her eyes. “I have to be kind to that eighty-year-old woman.”

Mickelsson pondered it, or tried to. “Does that mean ‘Never let a sexual opportunity slip'?” he asked. “I'm not sure what you're telling me.”

“People must do what they must,” she said, “and if what one must do would hurt someone, one must be sly.”

“It's a good enough theory,” he said. “Works well for parents, anyway. Personally—”

She put her finger over his lips. “It's not good to talk about it.” She studied his face as if figuring out the phrasing for her question. “Tell me more about Ellen,” she said.

He said nothing for a while, brooding on Jessie's theory; then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I don't know what to tell you. She was good-hearted, always giving people presents.” He frowned, staring up at the ceiling now, listening to the silence of the house, the snowy world beyond. “She would've made a good minister's wife in some small town in Indiana. Making up baskets of goodies for the poor, teaching knots to the Girl Scouts. I'll tell you a story.

“Once a friend of ours—man in the Philosophy Department with me—got hit by a bus when he was out one night, drunk. It just sort of nudged him, but it broke some bones and so on. He was famous for his drunks, and at the time of the accident everybody got suddenly righteous about it. Perhaps it was a Warning, a Blessing in Disguise, et cetera. No doubt they were right, but it was offensive. There he was lying in the hospital, one leg in traction, bunch of his ribs broken so he didn't dare laugh—a crazy, bright-eyed Irishman who no more intended to mend his ways than … He kept propositioning the nurses, wanted them to put up the screens and climb up on top of him. Some of them were tempted! You'd have to know him, of course: boyish, quick-witted … So there he was, horny and so dried out he was seeing the Devil. … One night at visiting time Ellen went to see him, with her front all swollen as if she were pregnant, and when she got into his room she stepped into the john and emerged with a big red lighted candle and a tray with a glass and a bottle of Jameson's on it, and potato chips and dip—” Mickelsson's eyes filled with tears. They had more to do with the saying of it than with the remembering.

“You miss her a lot,” Jessie said, her sincere look of sympathy as artful as his story.

“She was a nice girl,” he said, a whimper escaping with the words. “She married badly.”

“I imagine it was somewhat more complicated,” she said. Her glance told him that she could have said worse.

He turned his head away, sick unto death of bullshit, especially his own. “Well, anyway—”

For several minutes, neither of them spoke. Furtively, Mickelsson blotted his tears with two fingertips.

“Marriages are hard things,” Jessie said at last (somewhat ponderously, he thought) and breathed a sigh. “My husband, Buzzy, was a great believer in presents. When he went someplace without me, which happened at least every month or so, he'd always bring back something crazy—native beads, bone headdress, expensive gowns. He often bought clothes for me—in fact he'd hardly let me buy them for myself. Which was nice, in a way; flattering. But also it made me feel like one of those motorcycles they put more and more lights on. He loved me, I'm sure, but he could never find the balance. At parties he'd always be there near me, hovering around, earnestly listening to everything I said, as if he'd never heard it before. I suppose in a way I was grateful. But sometimes when he'd smile that fond, practiced smile at me, as if to say to all the people, ‘Oh, isn't she lovely! Isn't she brilliant,' I'd be tempted to push those crooked teeth in.” She grinned, then quickly made her face apologetic. She met Mickelsson's eyes.

“He was a good man,” she said solemnly. She put her hand on Mickelsson's chest, fingering the graying, curly hair. “He always wanted to be lord of his own house, though. A little like you, with Ellen. There was really nothing you could do about it. I'd fight him, argue with him, but it was impossible to get him to understand. He had a good trick. If I'd say one cross word—not to mention throw a dish at him—Buzzy would sulk for a week.” She smiled, meaning to lighten it, but her eyes showed the old irritation. “He used to do these
things
to me. He'd say, ‘Jessie, dear, call Dr. Brown for me, will you? Tell him I can't make my appointment this afternoon at two.' As if I were his secretary! Or, ‘Jessie, would you mind fixing dinner for three? I'm bringing old Dornsucker home.' I'd be up to my ears in work, you know—writing some article, or whatever. … I don't know how he ever got it in his head that in marrying a Ph.D. in sociology he'd bought himself a lifetime cook. I never gave in—at least not completely—but it was strictly one of those no-win situations. He was so sure he was right! Sometimes I'd show him articles in magazines—the fiercest feminist tracts I could find, things any normal wife would laugh at. He'd settle down in his black leather chair and put his horn-rimmed glasses on—he was never what you'd call a scholarly man, though he'd picked up somewhere an incredible amount of information about trees. … So anyway … he'd read the article very slowly and carefully, and when he'd finished he'd lay down the magazine and look at me, and after a while he'd say, ‘Ver-ry queer.' ‘But what do you
think?'
I'd say: ‘I mean, don't you think there might be something
to
it? The old where-there's-smoke-there's-fire principle?' Buzzy would shake his head, maybe pull at his collar, and after a minute he'd settle himself and nod and smile and say, ‘Ver-ry queer.' ” She sighed and slid her hand to Mickelsson's belly. “What the hell. We made a life of it. I loved him terribly, especially when other women fell in love with him—which they did like flies around a honey-pot. Opening up the fronts of their blouses and leaning close, to talk. He never seemed to notice. What a dummy he was! That was part of why I loved him.”