Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner Read Free Book Online Page A

I’m prepared—like they say, ‘Ahm protected.’ What the hell, you only live once, hey, pal? OK, I hear what you’re saying. All right! So good luck to ya for once, you poor bastard!” Even his voice was half elsewhere.
    â€œThanks. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it all right.”
    â€œ ‘What, me worry?’ ” He laughed. “Well, love ya, Professor. Anything else?”
    â€œThat’s it for now.”
    â€œFor now.” He laughed again. “OK, blood-brother, keep the wick clean, hey?”
    â€œI’ll do that.”
    It would have served no useful purpose to explain to Finney that he was far past keeping his wick clean, in whatever sense Finney might have meant it—though it was true that with the one woman who made his heart race Mickelsson was clean as a whistle.
    Jessica Stark said, in the hallway—her office was just a few doors down from his, and it was there, just as she was leaving, that he’d caught her—“It sounds great!” She was wearing jeans and a mannish shirt, and her face had that electric look it sometimes got, supercharged, thunder behind the eyes. He hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant—maybe something to do with the death of her husband, a year ago—but it alarmed him. Everything about her alarmed him. She was tall enough to play quarterback to Mickelsson’s fullback, and in some ways she was tough enough, he suspected. She was supposed to be a force to be reckoned with, in her field—so someone had told him, possibly his chairman, Tillson—and it was easy to believe. Mickelsson had thought a good deal about Jessica, carefully and futilely, as one thinks about Free Will and Determinism; in fact, after the first time he’d met her, he’d thought about nothing else for weeks. She was so beautiful it made him uncomfortable to be around her—but also, whenever they happened to meet, made him hang around longer than he should, and later mention her too often in conversation. If she was for real, he’d once told Tom Garret jokingly—though he’d been drunk at the time, something had kept him from particularizing: her smile, the absurdly Playmate shapeliness of shoulders, breasts and hips, her apparent good-heartedness, the dangerous sharpness of her mind and the unabashed Jewish directness (she asked personal questions no one else would ask, as if nosiness were the highest of civilized virtues, and indeed so she made it seem)—if all those were real, then everything one thought one knew about reality must be scrapped.
    At first, passing mention of Jessica Stark—Jessica Tauber, as she signed her articles—stirred Mickelsson to instant erection. Several times he’d drawn the blinds on his office windows and locked the door, and had thus brought the tendency of his reflections to conclusion. But little by little, through mental discipline, he’d been able to place her in the ordinary. She was in early-middle-age, thirty-five or so, he guessed; hence one could be sure, considering the shape she was in, that she was careful about exercise and diet. Every morning at the crack of dawn, someone had told him, she went jogging, three or four miles. Obviously something was wrong with anyone who gave that much care to appearance—or, for that matter, got up that early. Moreover, it was unthinkable that a woman so good-looking should be a first-class scholar. That was not cynicism but realism. All Nature uses only what it needs to thrive, and Jessica, with those murky gray eyes and outward-arching eyebrows, sensual mouth and perfect teeth (Mickelsson was morbidly fascinated by teeth), had no reason to develop deep talents of the heart and mind. At last it had come to him, one afternoon as he was standing in the mailroom staring unseeingly at a mimeographed letter, that Jessica Tauber Stark was a woman to be pitied. The revelation had cleansed him like a new