Mickelsson's Ghosts (62 page)

“I'm never late. I'm like clockwork.”

He could think of nothing to say, though he moved his hand on her arm, partly in the vague hope of comforting her.

She asked again, “What are we going to do?”

“I realize it's a stupid question,” he said, almost keeping the annoyance out of his voice, “but why do you say ‘we'?”

“You're the father,” she said. She spoke, it seemed to him, with crazy conviction, like one of Jessica's Marxists.

He asked, “Doesn't that seem to you a slightly strange thing to be sure of, all things considered?”

“But you are,” she said.

“Why me? Why not one of your Fellini freaks? Why not”—he snatched for a name. “Why not Tim?”

“Nobody'd believe that,” she said. “Tim's a fag.”

“That's ridiculous,” Mickelsson said, offended now. “He's got a wife and child!”

“OK, maybe he did it once. But Tim likes boys, everybody knows that. Boys and whips and Jesus knows what—anyway, he's never done it with me.”

“That may be or it may not be—” He lost his train of thought, trying to readjust his image of Tim. She was probably lying, but he was suddenly not sure. It flitted through his mind that the murdered man, Professor Warren, had been, according to Nugent, homosexual, and that Tim had known him. Some faint possibility that he didn't yet have words for made his skin crawl, and he wished his headache would let up for a minute, allow him to think. “I don't know about Tim,” he said, “but God knows there have been plenty of others.”

“That's not true,” she said. “I let you think that, because you seemed to enjoy it, but the truth is I never slept with anyone but you. I was a virgin. I swear to God.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, actually believing her for an instant; then he rolled his head from side to side on the pillow, wondering if all this could be a nightmare, in a minute he'd wake up. “That's easy to say,” he said, knowing the futility of saying it, but plunging on, “you don't believe in God.”

“Well, then I swear on my honor.” Abruptly, as if the whole thing had been a joke from the beginning, she laughed.

He got up on one elbow, pain soughing through his head. “What the hell are you saying?” he asked angrily. “What
is
all this?”

“I'm telling you I'm pregnant and you're the father and I want you to help me,” she said. No one would have guessed that a moment before she'd been laughing.

“And I'm telling you that's bullshit.”

“Maybe so, but I bet you'd really hate having to prove it in court.”

“Jesus,” he whispered, and let his head fall back on the pillow like a stone.

Her body was rigid, and she'd drawn away from him a little. “All you ever think about is yourself,” she said with surprising bitterness. “What am I
supposed
to do? A person has to take care of herself in this world. You say you ‘love' me. Ha! You think I believe that for a minute? You use me. I'm just meat!” In a moment she'd be crying, sobbing with self-pity. And maybe it was to some extent justified, in fact. How he wished his headache would quit.

“You're not just meat,” he said. “Don't say things like that.”

“Then give me the money for an abortion.”

After that, he was silent for so long that she again raised up on her elbow to look at him. He met her eyes, two bright glints in them, reflections of the pale snowy light beyond the window.

He said, “Do you want me to marry you?”

“Jesus,” she said, and turned her head away.

“Do you?” he asked. “I'll do it, if you want—if my damn divorce comes through. I can push harder, get it into court.”

Donnie shook her head, and he made out that there were tears on her cheeks. “I like you. OK? But you're old. I mean, I've got my whole
life
to live. I can't marry you. It would be stupid. You
know
it would. Your fucking
checks
bounce.”

“We could deal with that. I'll work it out.”

“No!” she said, and snapped her face at him, eyes widened. “Just give me the money for an abortion. Period.”

“I don't really like abortions,” he said. “Why can't I give you the money to have the kid and put it up for adoption—or raise it, if you want. I'd pay for that too.”

“No, no, no. It
hurts,
having a baby. Sometimes people actually die. I guess you're not aware of that.”

“They don't,” he said, angry but controlling himself, speaking almost gently to persuade her. “At least not often, these days.”

“Why should I chance it? You're crazy!
All
men are. If it was you, you'd run and get an abortion just like that. But since it's not you, it's just some dumb countrified whore—” Now the tears were streaming down her cheeks, though they seemed to have nothing to do with what she was saying.

“Listen, think about it,” he said.

“There's not that much time.”

“Just for a little while longer. I could send you away someplace, somewhere where they'd take good care of you, maybe one of those church places—”

“No! Why are you
doing
this to me?” Her voice broke, and now she began to sob, her hands covering her face. He understood, all at once, just how frightened she was, and that instant he almost relented, but when he opened his mouth to speak his voice refused, locked stubbornly in his throat.

“I'm sorry,” he said, trying to touch her, but she shrank away. His heart was all darkness, as if something had gotten into him. “Look, I know how you feel. But I can't do it. I just can't. I can't kill a baby.”

“A foetus,” she screamed, “it's just a foetus!” The scream sang through the apartment, shocking him to silence. She abandoned herself to sobbing. He lay perfectly still.

After his two nights with Jessie, his bout with Luther, and then that terrible night with Donnie, Mickelsson felt more anxious than ever, and therefore more than ever kept bullishly to his routines, including his refusal to deal with his mail. He did not resist when Jessie came to his office and asked if he were ready to let her help with the great, unstable mountain on his desk; he even threw himself into the work of helping her, summoning up for the moment the extraordinary powers of concentration he was known for, but only to avoid the questions in her eyes, only to avoid, insofar as it was possible, her touching him or drawing him out. That pile proved, as he'd expected it would, less alarming than the one at home had been: they found almost no bills, and the few that came to hand were of a kind easily dealt with—bills for magazine subscriptions, professional memberships, university traffic fines; nothing that had to be paid. He wrote, with her help, recommendations for former students he did or did not remember (some of the recommendation forms were far past the deadline and he could throw them away), wrote polite refusals to requests for articles and reviews, explained why he would not be able to give a speech to the parents of incoming freshmen on Exploration Day, and wrote brief, cool letters pointing out why he could not read and evaluate the books and articles sent to him, unsolicited, by aggressive philosophical strangers. When his desk was bare, they went for drinks at Firehouse Five, she pretending to feel triumph, as if his life were now all fixed—though from the moment she'd entered his office, he knew, she'd recognized that there was something wrong. He waited for her terrible Jewish nosiness and directness, but luck was with him: she closed her hand over his, patting it now and then, and she gave him searching glances sometimes between smiles, but for some reason she stayed off his case. His cheeks ached from smiling, and his mind wandered, dazed and full of dread, like a small child lost in the woods. Once, when he allowed himself a minor tirade against Ronald Reagan, calling the nation's new President “Herr” and allowing himself language he usually avoided, she said, slightly widening her eyes, pressing down more firmly on the back of his hand, “Peter, for heaven's sake take it easy!” She glanced around the restaurant. “I can't say I'm terribly fond of him myself, given his stand on abortion and so forth, but he's not worth breaking a bloodvessel over. I'm sure the republic will survive him.”

“He's a shit,” Mickelsson said emphatically, twisting his distress at the word
abortion
into anger. He was not shouting, but not lowering his voice either, which was no doubt why she glanced at the tables around theirs, good Middle Americans up to their usual tricks. He leaned toward her a little, speaking just loudly enough that the people around him could hear if they chose to, which he hoped they did. “All this budget-cutting crap! Can people really be so stupid they—”

“Pete,” she said, smiling harder, leaning in toward the candle. The waiter, passing with a tray of drinks on his shoulder, glanced at her. Perhaps his name was Pete. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

“Don't you think sometimes righteous indignation is a perfectly rational response?”

“Maybe so,” she said, and looked down. He blushed but stopped ranting. It was an interesting idea, the connection between rant and illness, and for a moment the philosopher in him paused to consider it. He thought of Martin Luther in his final psychosis, writing tracts in support of the slaughter of peasants who, inspired by Luther's own ideas, had risen in rebellion; then thought of the doctor's three unspeakable, potty-mouthed tracts against the Jews. He thought of Luther turning savagely against all his best friends, growing more and more obscene of speech, until his disciples, who did not blanch at “shitty” or “donkey fart” or even “Shit in your breeches and wipe your face with it,” would not write down the exact words he said.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, bringing her face closer to get his attention. In the glow from the red-globed candle on the table, Jessie's mouth, nose, and cheekbones were strikingly Semitic. He was reminded of an image he'd gazed at once for a long time in the British Museum, a face on a coin. Strange, he thought, that centuries of human life should be present in a living face.
Et mortuus vivit!

He said, “I was thinking of old Dr. Luther, if anything.” He turned his hand palm up under hers to return the pressure of her fingers. “You're right, of course. There's nothing in Reagan to hate. Fly in a fly-bottle. It's depressing.”

She laughed, though she understood that he was serious. “You should be
glad
we have no great demon to fight.” She turned her head to look for the waiter.

He frowned, then calmed his heart and let it go. He thought of Luther sitting bolt upright in bed, his room full of devils, filling the place with their terrible stench. Emissaries of the Pope, who was in turn an emissary. No doubt the learned doctor had been crazy all his life. But it was the Renaissance; no one had noticed. He remembered Luther's remark on the Nuremberg citizen Herr Osiander, who claimed not to believe in poltergeists: “Osiander always has to be different.”

“Idealism,” Mickelsson said. “That's the great demon.”

“We mustn't be sore losers,” Jessie said, and glanced at the people at the table nearest them, a middle-aged man with curly sideburns and a choleric look, beside him a thin young woman with a slash of white in her carefully puffed hair.

“Well, anyway,” he said, trying to put the evening back on track, if it ever had been, “we've got
my
affairs back in order.” He thought of Donnie, raving, crying out for all to hear,
“It's just a foetus!”

“That
is
good,” she said, her eyes searching his face again, and again her hand came over his. With her free hand she signalled for the waiter.

Only when they parted, back in the gray-lit university parking lot, did Jessie come close to admitting that she knew something was wrong. She studied his eyes, then in quick decision rose on her tiptoes, her hands on the back of his neck, and kissed him. “Don't worry,” she said, and smiled, searching his face. “It will all be all right. Give it time!” She kissed him again, lingeringly, then abruptly turned away, since there was nothing more she could do. Her coat flared out and she crossed with long strides into the circle of light from a goose-necked lamppost, then out into shadow again, to her car. How clean and fine her beauty was, he thought with a foundering heart. He registered, suddenly squinting into the darkness, that the night they'd made love he'd seen stretch-marks on Jessica's abdomen. He must pay more attention, he told himself. Break down these stinking prison walls.

For all that, he did not mend his ways. At home, he let his mail pile up as before; at his office, he stuffed it unsorted, unread, into his file cabinet, where Jessie would not see it. Rifkin would have been interested in that; not that Mickelsson needed a psychiatrist for help with the interpretation. The infant idealist in Mickelsson was holding out; it was nothing more than that. He wanted to be back with his wife and children, all of them ten years younger; wanted his father to come striding back from the grave, and his mother young and pretty again; wanted his promise as a philosopher to be all it had once been, or greater. He'd had, all his life, a dream about what life ought to be, and now, though all evidence was against the dream, he refused to renounce it. If not that life, he was saying in effect, then no life. He thought again of that ghastly phrase of Nietzsche's,
“This
is your eternal life.”

To avoid thinking he worked on Luther—if what he was doing could be called work. One by one he brought Luther's books from the university library and piled them on the floor by his desk, along with his grandfather's old tablets. His simultaneous hatred and admiration grew day by day. He began to know the doctor's stylistic tics as he knew his own—indeed, he began to see, to his horror, more and more similarities between his own personality and Luther's. Sometimes, brooding as he worked on the house or as he walked the streets of Susquehanna, doing errands, he felt as if the old fiend were right at his shoulder, listening in; and once, in a drizzling winter rain, just as he was coming out of the hardware store, he actually thought he saw old Dr. Martinus in the flesh. It was one of those curious mental tricks one dismisses as soon as one sees one's mistake, but for the second or two of its duration it struck terror into his heart. There he was, huge and slovenly, as in the contemporary descriptions and the one famous painting. He was dressed in black, as he'd been in life, his back turned to Mickelsson, the coarse hands folded behind his prodigious ass, and instead of coat and hat he wore a hooded sweater, exactly what one might expect of a former monk. Mickelsson froze in his tracks, knowing already that it wasn't really Luther, yet staring on, stupefied, some dim, ancient part of his mind unconvinced. Then the enormous creature turned, as if aware of someone behind him, and Mickelsson saw that it was the fat man from Donnie's apartment building. Mickelsson gave a quick, jerky bow, touching his hatbrim, and hurried down the street toward his car.