Mickelsson's Ghosts (51 page)

Poor Blassenheim! Poor Brenda!

Without wishing to, invaded, though he glared and shook his head against it, he thought of the Swissons, the Garrets, the Bryants, finally the Tillsons—saw them all in his mind's eye so sharply it was as if they were there in the room with him, gathered like visitors at a sickbed. As if hunting for something, or alerted to danger, he looked carefully from couple to couple, still moving his hand. The Swissons, shyly smiling exactly together—except that the woman's smile was less shy than the man's, as her handshake was stronger, and the man, hard as they played at their game, cared more in the end about music than the woman did; one could see it in the trouble-lines fencing in his eyes. He thought of driving his cock into Kate Swisson. The thinking part of his mind tick-ticked on.
Parts mixed unequally …
They were doomed; he knew it as surely as he knew his name.

The Garrets. He could form no definite opinion about the Garrets. Good people, certainly—ten adopted children; and Tom was always, in his mild, Southern way, a man of liberal concern. (Mabel he would take from behind, up the anus. He drove the vision out, disgusted.) Strange pair: Tom, genteel aristocrat turned into a liberal verging on radical and living up here in the land of deep snow, with ten young children of a variety of races, married to a secretive, maybe psychic Russian Jew. One could make a life, of course, of strange ingredients. Nevertheless, it was indeed very strange. He had a feeling Jessica, if she should choose to speak frankly, would make short work of them, or at any rate of their chances—though why he thought this he couldn't say. Of this much he was sure: when he was young he had believed, like Alan Blassenheim, in Truth, the great rock foundation of everything. It had seemed to him obvious that if one “behaved in accord with what one knew to be true”—an expression that had not then seemed puzzling to him—one would be safe, for all practical purposes invulnerable. But now he'd grown confused, like a once-carefree bob-calf come of age. The clearer his thought—the more rigorous his categorical distinctions—the more angry and confused he'd grown. It was as if he had stepped out of a room which for the time he'd been inside it he'd known to exist, and could now not find his way back to it—couldn't find it on any map, couldn't even find its theoretical justification, its chemical and mathematical possibility in so-called reality. He believed now in systems, an anarchy of truth-systems spinning like the components of independent molecules—believed in them intuitively, as he believed in root propositions—but he was no longer altogether comfortable with tables and chairs. Tom and Mabel Garret, old-name Southerner and immigrant's child … ten children of several races, whom they sat up with, perhaps sang Southern ballads to, or
Mottel der Operator,
perhaps read
The Wind in the Willows
and
Charlotte's Web …
They were good people, and he liked them, but at the center of their life lay something that troubled him. He'd run across a phrase somewhere, Darwin or one of his followers: “The blind daring of Nature's experiments …” (Beetle-browed Neanderthal marrying handsome Cro-Magnon, producing mules, dying out …)

He lost his train of thought. His eyelids were heavy. Perhaps he would sleep after all, except that his cock was huge now, still blindly hunting.

He mused with some twilit part of his brain on the arrangements of the Bryants and Tillsons. The Bryants had been married for thirty-one years, brutally mismatched as they seemed to be. (Edie had mentioned tonight at the Firehouse Five that their anniversary was coming up. “Three decades of holy deadlock and one year to spare,” she'd said. “Most marriages that last very long are three-legged stools.” The Swissons, holding hands, had looked interested for a moment.) Perhaps the truth was that the Bryants weren't as badly mismatched as they seemed—and seemed to believe themselves. Was Phil really so classy, she really (with her noble old blood-lines) so vulgar? He was a fine shabby dresser and good at quoting poets, especially Shakespeare; but then, who wouldn't be after twenty, thirty years of teaching Anguish? What he really cared about—what made his cheeks redden and his voice take on a quaver, what made him jab at the tabletop with a manicured index finger—was university scheduling, parking regulations, the careless policing of the faculty cafeteria. When his cheeks reddened, Edie would gently put her hand on his arm, not pausing to look at him, dropping not a word from the gently self-mocking monologue she was delivering to Jessica and the Swissons. Sometimes Bryant called her, as if ironically, with scorn, “my little chickadee.” It occurred to Mickelsson now for the first time that perhaps they loved each other. Phil the stunningly handsome young officer, Edie the dazzling Southern belle. Instantly the thought turned in on him and depressed him. He noticed that with the fingertips of his right hand he was feeling the pulse in his left wrist. He moved his right hand back to his crotch.

What the Tillsons felt for each other Mickelsson couldn't guess. She loved
him,
all right. (Now it was Ruth that he imagined coupling with. He imagined her crying out.) Ruth Tillson was the classic betrayed, still-doting wife. Every time Mickelsson had glanced at them, the poor big-bosomed, sad-eyed woman was clinging for dear life to her hunchbacked husband's arm. She never spoke, it seemed, if she weren't sure in advance that he'd agree. She'd spoken passionately only once all evening, leaning in toward the red-bowled candle at the center of the table as if almost forgetting that Tillson might be watching. The flame lit up her face and the cleavage between her fat peek-a-boo tits—brightening, dimming, intensifying the darkness of the tables, heavy beams, broad old staircase behind her. “Coffee and Coca-Cola,” she said, “will be the ruin of this country. It's everywhere, you know.” She pointed at Mickelsson's pipe. “Are you aware that tobacco is cured in
sugar?”
Then she drew back, touching her hand to her cleavage, calming herself. Mickelsson registered as a fact for possible future use that Geoffrey Tillson strongly disapproved of coffee, Coca-Cola, and tobacco. He wondered if Tillson's mistress had been at the concert tonight, somewhere in the shadows, smiling at her hunchbacked, silver-bearded lover and his pitiful wife, her dear friend. He wondered if she smoked, used sugar.

In a moment Mickelsson would be asleep, the erection hunting through the world on its own. The voices he'd been hearing were now distinctly dream-voices, though the words were still unintelligible, a mumble like wind on an abandoned beach; and the people he'd gone with to the Firehouse Five (he could feel himself falling back from them, easing himself out of the light from the red glass bowl on their table) were no longer entirely fitting in with the waking world's ways. Something he imagined Edie Bryant to be saying, when he brought himself awake enough to think about it, turned out to have to do with leaks in numbers, which in turn had something to do with his father's death. All at once, in this faintly unpleasant half-dream, he heard Jessica laughing. Evidently something had just cancelled every trace of unhappiness in her life. Perhaps her husband was alive after all, had never been dead; it had all been a casual bureaucratic mistake. He began to thrust, against his will, his heart quickening, and exploded inside his dream of her. That instant a door opened, and the sounds coming through made him think of sweet Mexican sunlight on clean white tile-and-stucco walls. Mickelsson concentrated, listening with every nerve and hair, but nothing would come clear. (“Wait here, please,” someone said.) He wiped the sheet on the cold wetness and tried to make out what he was thinking.

Then, in the hallway outside his bedroom, he heard breathing, then footsteps, the creak of floorboards. He jerked himself awake—fought his way up out of sleep as from drowning and opened his eyes, half sitting up. Even wide awake he felt disoriented, as if he'd come to himself in a different house. Somewhere downstairs a child was crying. The sound was real, unmistakable, though of course it was impossible that the house should have a crying child in it. He looked around, trying to think how he might prove to himself that he was or was not awake. The crying stopped.

The footsteps kept coming, slowly, not at all furtively, the ordinary footsteps of stiff and uncomfortable old age. It was surely not a dream. Just outside his door a hoarse, somewhat feeble voice asked crossly, “You in there?” A moment later, a bearded old man with red-webbed, milky, near-sighted eyes and no teeth except a few in the front poked his head in at the door. He did not look at Mickelsson or seem to recognize his existence, but peered into an almost empty corner of the room, the corner where Mickelsson had placed an antique hatrack he never used. After a moment, touching his beard and muttering something, as if he'd made a mistake, had caught himself in a moment of senility, the old man drew his head in and backed out of sight. Mickelsson listened for the sound of the old man's movement down the hall, but though he strained every nerve, he heard nothing more. At last he realized that, dream or vision, whatever it was, it was over. The old man, if he'd ever existed, had finished or abandoned his errand long ago.

6

By the time Peter Mickelsson reached his office the following morning, the snow had almost all melted. Except for frail icicles hanging from eaves and trees, they might have been back in September. Birds ran up and down on the wet, gray-brown lawn outside Mickelsson's window; more birds watched from the bare branches, now and then flying down by paths as determinedly straight as guy-wires to join the activity of the birds on the ground or drive a few timid ones treeward. Students walked around in sweaters or light coats unbuttoned down the front. The day warmed more and more.

He'd arrived earlier than he'd needed to, feeling lively for some reason—perhaps his near-accident on the road last night had somehow gotten the old juices flowing—and he decided to see if, in the forty-some minutes he had available before class, he could make a small dent in the great pile of unopened mail on his deck. Casually he began to sort through the envelopes, intending to deal first with whatever seemed most urgent. Thus he came upon the letter with the name
Bauer
in the upper left-hand corner, and a Florida address. This time he recognized the name at once as belonging not to some professor he'd forgotten but “the doc.” According to the postmark, the letter had come nearly two months ago. He opened it.

She was planning to be in Susquehanna in late October or early November, she wrote. She had business, a legal matter that he might perhaps have heard about—she believed there had been some mention of it in the papers—and it had occurred to her that she might perhaps drop in on him in case he'd run across any problems in connection with the house—questions she'd failed to anticipate, difficulties she, after fourteen years in Susquehanna, might be able to help him resolve. If he wanted her to visit, he should write to her sometime soon at her Florida address.

Mickelsson read the letter through again. It was hard to imagine what sorts of “problems in connection with the house” she had in mind. But on one score at least, the letter relieved him. He had not just imagined seeing her last night—almost scattering atoms of the doc and her car (himself and his own car as well) from Susquehanna to Montrose. Today, according to his desk calendar, was October 27th. It was apparent, then, that she really had been up at his house, or somewhere nearby, and had been frightened by something. Useless to try to puzzle out what could have frightened her, knowing as little as he did.

No sooner had he told himself that it was useless than he knew he was mistaken and reached for the phone. He finally got hold of Jessica not at her office but at her house.

“Jessica,” he said, “this is Peter Mickelsson.” He put his voice on
intense polite.
“I hope I'm not calling you too early?”

There was a pause, then she laughed. “Peter, what's the matter?”

“Nothing. I was just afraid I might have—” He thought about her question, imagining her look, then suddenly, throwing caution to the winds, asked, “Do I sound as bad as that?”

Again she laughed, this time thoughtfully. “First you tell me ‘This is Peter Mickelsson,' ” she said, “and then you ask me, at half past nine in the morning, if you're calling me too early. You know I get up with the sun.”

“I guess I forgot.” He glanced at his watch.

“So what
is
the matter?” she asked.

“It's really nothing,” he said, and got out his pipe, set it on top of the pile of mail, and began to hunt through his drawers and pockets for matches. “I just need to ask you a question you may possibly know the answer to. Also”—he paused, then again took a chance—“I need to tell you I had a wonderful time last night.”

“Thanks. I did too, mostly. What was the question?”

He stood up to open the file-cabinet drawers and look for matches there. “You remember mentioning that Dr. Bauer—the woman I bought my house from—was being sued for malpractice? Do you remember the name of the people suing her?”

Waiting for her answer, he momentarily forgot his hunt for matches.

She said, “I don't think I ever really noticed the name. I could find out, if it's important.”

“Could you try?” he asked, and, abruptly remembering, returned to his hunt.

Jessica asked, “Where are you—in your office? How long do you plan to be there?”

“Another thirty minutes, then I have class. When it's over—it runs for an hour—”

“I'll get back to you before that,” she said. “Bye.”

“Thanks, Jess,” he said. “I can't tell you how—”

She'd hung up.

Magically, matches appeared in his shirt pocket. He lit one and hurriedly raised it to his pipe.
Sugar,
he thought, and abruptly smiled. Crazy bastard! He thought of the big old-fashioned couch in Tillson's office, how sometimes when you went there Tillson would be lying on it with his shoes off, his hand on his forehead in the gesture of some nineteenth-century heroine. With his suitcoat off, his suspenders loose on his white shirt, gray bags under his eyes, so dark one might have imagined he had lupus, he looked like a doll that had been meant to be comic, one of those apple- or potato-people, but had somehow come off unfunny, obscurely depressing, Rumpelstiltskin not destroyed by his own anger but merely beaten, dwindling toward old age.