The Art of Living and Other Stories Read online

  In his hundreds of flights—maybe it was thousands—he’d never had once what he could honestly describe as a close call, and he’d come to believe that he probably never would have one; but he knew, as surely as a human being can know anything, that if he ever did, he probably wouldn’t be afraid. Like most people, he’d heard friends speak, from time to time, about their fear of dying, and the feeling was not one he scorned or despised; but the fact remained, he was not the kind of man who had it. “Well, you’re lucky,” Arline had said, refusing to believe him, getting for an instant the hard look that came when she believed she was somehow being criticized. “Yes, lucky,” he’d said thoughtfully. It was the single most notable fact about his life.

  Abruptly, the girl, Miss Curtis, broke in on his expansive praise of airlines. “We’re moving!” she exclaimed, darting her head past his shoulder in the direction of the window, no less surprised, it seemed, than she’d have been if they were sitting in a building.

  Nimram joined her in looking out, watching yellow lights pass, the taxiway scored by rain-wet blue-and-white beams thrown by lights farther out. Now on the loudspeaker an invisible stewardess began explaining the use of oxygen masks and the positions of the doors, while their own stewardess, with slightly parted lips and her eyes a little widened, pointed and gestured without a sound, like an Asian dancer. The girl beside him listened as if in despair, glum as a student who’s fallen hopelessly behind. Her hand on the armrest was more yellow than before.

  “Don’t worry,” Nimram said, “you’ll like it.”

  She was apparently too frightened to speak or turn her head.

  Now the engines wound up to full power, a sound that for no real reason reminded Nimram of the opening of Brahms’ First, and lights came on, surprisingly powerful, like a searchlight or the headlight of a railroad engine, smashing through the rain as if by violent will, flooding the runway below and ahead of the wing just behind him, and the plane began its quickly accelerating, furious run down the field for take-off. Like a grandfather, Nimram put his hand on the girl’s. “Look,” he said, showing his smile, tilting his head in the direction of the window, but she shook her head just perceptibly and shut her eyes tight. Again for an instant he was struck by the likeness, as remarkable now as it had been when he’d first seen her, and he tried to remember when Arline had squeezed her eyes shut in exactly that way. He could see her face vividly—they were outdoors somewhere, in summer, perhaps in England—but the background refused to fill in for him, remained just a sunlit, ferny green, and the memory tingling in the cellar of his mind dimmed out. The Brahms was still playing itself inside him, solemn and magnificent, aglow, like the lights of the city now fallen far beneath them, lurid in the rain. Now the plane was banking, yawing like a ship as it founders and slips over, the headlights rushing into churning spray, the unbelievably large black wing upended, suddenly white in a blast of clouded lightning, then black again, darker than before. As the plane righted itself, the pilot began speaking to the passengers again. Nimram, frowning his Beethoven frown, hardly noticed. The plane began to bounce, creaking like a carriage, still climbing to get above the weather.

  “Dear God,” the girl whispered.

  “It’s all right, it’s all all right,” Nimram said, and pressed her hand.

  Her name was Anne. She was, as he’d guessed, sixteen; from Chicago; and though she did not tell him what her disease was or directly mention that she was dying, she made her situation clear enough. “It’s incredible,” she said. “One of my grandmothers is ninety-two, the other one’s eighty-six. But I guess it doesn’t matter. If you’re chosen, you’re chosen.” A quick, embarrassed smile. “Are you in business or something?”

  “More or less,” he said. “You’re in school?”

  “High school,” she said.

  “You have boyfriends?”

  “No.”

  Nimram shook his head as if in wonderment and looked quickly toward the front of the plane for some distraction. “Ah,” he said, “here’s the stewardess with our drinks.”

  The girl smiled and nodded, though the stewardess was still two seats away. “We don’t seem to have gotten above the storm, do we.” She was looking past him, out the window at the towers of cloud lighting up, darkening, then lighting again. The plane was still jouncing, as if bumping things more solid than any possible air or cloud, maybe Plato’s airy beasts.

  “Things’ll settle down in a minute,” Nimram said.

  Innocently, the girl asked, “Are you religious or anything?”

  “Well, no—” He caught himself. “More or less,” he said.

  “You’re more or less in business and you’re more or less religious,” the girl said, and smiled as if she’d caught him. “Are you a gambler, then?”

  He laughed. “Is that what I look like?”

  She continued to smile, but studied him, looking mainly at his black-and-gray unruly hair. “Actually, I never saw one, that I know of. Except in movies.”

  Nimram mused. “I guess we’re pretty much all of us gamblers,” he said, and at once felt embarrassment at having come on like a philosopher or, worse, a poet.

  “I know,” she said without distress. “Winners and losers.”

  He shot her a look. If she was going to go on like this she was going to be trouble. Was she speaking so freely because they were strangers?—travellers who’d never meet again? He folded and unfolded his hands slowly, in a way that would have seemed to an observer not nervous but judicious; and, frowning more severely then he knew, his graying eyebrows low, Nimram thought about bringing out the work in his attaché case.

  Before he reached his decision, their stewardess was bending down toward them, helping the girl drop her tray into position. Nimram lowered his, then took the wineglass and bottle the stewardess held out. No sooner had he set down the glass than the plane hit what might have been a slanted stone wall in the middle of the sky and veered crazily upward, then laboriously steadied.

  “Oh my God, dear God, my God!” the girl whispered.

  “You are religious,” Nimram said, and smiled.

  She said nothing, but sat rigid, slightly cross at him, perhaps, steadying the glass on the napkin now soaked in Coke.

  The pilot came on again, casual, as if amused by their predicament. “Sorry we can’t give you a smoother ride, folks, but looks like Mother Nature’s in a real tizzy tonight. We’re taking the ship up to thirty-seven thousand, see if we can’t just outfox her.”

  “Is that safe?” the girl asked softly.

  He nodded and shrugged. “Safe as a ride in a rockingchair,” he said.

  They could feel the plane nosing up, climbing so sharply that for a moment even Nimram felt a touch of dismay. The bumping and creaking became less noticeable. Nimram took a deep breath and poured his wine.

  Slowly, carefully, the girl raised the Coke to her lips and took a small sip, then set it down again. “I hope it’s not like this in Chicago,” she said.

  “I’m sure it won’t be.” He toasted her with the wineglass—she seemed not to notice—then drew it to his mouth and drank.

  He couldn’t tell how long he’d slept or what, if anything, he’d dreamed. The girl slept beside him, fallen toward his shoulder, the cabin around them droning quietly, as if singing to itself, below them what might have been miles of darkness, as if the planet had silently fallen out from under them, tumbling toward God knew what. Here in the dimly lit cabin, Nimram felt serene. They’d be landing at O’Hare shortly—less than two hours. Arline would be waiting in the lounge, smiling eagerly, even more pleased than usual to see him, after three long days with her parents. He’d be no less glad to see her, of course; yet just now, though he knew that that moment was rushing toward him, he felt aloof from it, suspended above time’s wild drive like the note of a single flute above a poised and silent orchestra. For all he could tell, the plane itself might have been hanging motionless, as still as the pinprick stars overhead.

  The
cabin had grown chilly, and, carefully, making sure he didn’t wake her, Nimram raised the girl’s blanket toward her throat. She stirred, a muscle along her jaw twitching, but continued to sleep, her breathing deep and even. Across the aisle from them, an old woman opened her eyes and stared straight ahead, listening like someone who imagines she’s heard a burglar in the kitchen, then closed them again, indifferent.

  Thoughtfully, Nimram gazed at the sleeping girl. On her forehead, despite the cold, there were tiny beads of sweat. He considered brushing the hair back from her face—it looked as if it tickled—but with his hand already in the air he checked himself, then lowered the hand. She was young enough to be his daughter, he mused, pursing his lips. Thank God she wasn’t. Instantly, he hated it that he’d thought such a thing. She was some poor devil’s daughter. Then it dawned on Nimram that she was young enough, too, to be Arline’s daughter, from the time before Arline and he had met. Arline was thirty-nine, the girl sixteen. The faintest trace of a prickling came to his scalp, and he felt now a different kind of chill in the cabin, as if a cloud had passed between his soul and some invisible sun. “Don’t ask!” Arline would say when he drew her toward the subject of her life—that is, her love-life—before they knew each other. “I was wild,” she would say, laughing, “God!” and would touch his cheek with the back of her hand. The dark, infantile part of Nimram’s mind seized on that now with the same blind obstinance as it had earlier seized on the idea that the girl was Arline’s sister. Consciously, or with his brain’s left lobe, perhaps, he knew the idea was nonsense. Arline’s laugh had no abandoned child in it, only coy hints of old escapades—love-making on beaches or in the back seats of cars, drunken parties in the houses of friends when the parents were far away in Cleveland or Detroit, and then when she was older, affairs more serious and miserable. She had been married, briefly, to a man who had something to do with oil-rigs. About that he knew a fair amount, though with her Anglo-Saxon ideas of what was proper she hated to speak of it. In any case, the idea that the girl might be her daughter was groundless and absurd; if it remained, roaming in the dark of his mind, it remained against his will, like a rat in the basement, too canny to be poisoned or trapped. Even so, even after he’d rejected it utterly, he found that the groundless suspicion had subtly transmuted the way he saw the girl. He felt in his chest and at the pit of his stomach an echo of the anguish her parents must be feeling, a shadowy sorrow that, for all his notorious good fortune, made him feel helpless.

  Strange images began to molest Nimram’s thoughts, memories of no real significance, yet intense, like charged images in a dream. Memories, ideas … It was hard to say what they were. It was as if he had indeed, by a careless misstep, slipped out of time, as if the past and present had collapsed into one unbroken instant, so that he was both himself and himself at sixteen, the age of the girl asleep beside him.

  He was riding on a train, late at night, through Indiana, alone. The seats were once-red plush, old and stiff, discolored almost to black. There was a round black handle, like the handle on a gearshift, that one pulled to make the back recline. Toward the rear of the car an old man in black clothes was coughing horribly, hacking as if to throw up his lungs. The conductor, sitting in the car’s only light, his black cap pulled forward to the rim of his glasses, was laboriously writing something, muttering, from time to time—never looking up from his writing toward the cougher—“God damn you, die!” It was so vivid it made his scalp prickle, the musical thrumming of wheels on rails as distinct in Nimram’s mind as the drone of the airplane he sat in. The wheels and railjoints picked up the muttered words, transforming them to music, a witless, ever-lastingly repetitive jingle: God damn you, die! (click) God damn you, die! (click) …

  Sometimes he’d awakened in terror, he remembered, riding on the train, convinced that the train had fallen off the tracks and was hurtling through space; but when he looked out the window at the blur of dark trees and shrubs rushing by, the ragged fields gray as bones in the moonlight, he would be reassured—the train was going lickety-split, but all was well. Though it seemed only an instant ago, if not happening right now, it also seemed ages ago: he’d lived, since then, through innumerable train rides, bus rides, plane rides—lived through two marriages and into a third, lived through God knew how many playing jobs, conducting jobs, fund-raising benefits, deaths of friends. He’d lived through warplane formations over Brooklyn; explosions in the harbor, no comment in the papers; lived through the birth and rise of Israel, had conducted the Israel Philharmonic; lived through … but that was not the point. She was sixteen, her head hanging loose, free of the pillow, like a flower on a weak, bent stem. All that time, the time he’d already consumed too fast to notice he was losing it—it might have been centuries, so it felt to him now—was time the girl would never get.

  It wasn’t pity he felt, or even anger at the general injustice of things; it was bewilderment, a kind of shock that stilled the wits. If he were religious—he was, of course, but not in the common sense—he might have been furious at God’s mishandling of the universe, or at very least puzzled by the disparity between real and ideal. But none of that was what he felt. God had nothing to do with it, and the whole question of real and ideal was academic. Nimram felt only, looking at the girl—her skin off-color, her head unsupported yet untroubled by the awkwardness, tolerant as a corpse—Nimram felt only a profound embarrassment and helplessness: helplessly fortunate and therefore unfit, unworthy, his whole life light and unprofitable as a puff-ball, needless as ascending smoke. He hardly knew her, yet he felt now—knowing it was a he but knowing also that if the girl were really his daughter it would be true—that if Nature allowed it, Mother of tizzies and silences, he would change lives with the girl beside him in an instant.

  Suddenly the girl cried out sharply and opened her eyes.

  “Here now! It’s okay!” he said, and touched her shoulder.

  She shook her head, not quite awake, disoriented. “Oh!” she said, and blushed—a kind of thickening of the yellow-gray skin. “Oh, I’m sorry!” She flashed her panicky smile. “I was having a dream.”

  “Everything’s all right,” he said, “don’t worry now, everything’s fine.”

  “It’s really funny,” she said, shaking her head again, so hard the soft hair flew. She drew back from him and raised her hands to her eyes. “It was the strangest dream!” she said, and lowered her hands to look out the window, squinting a little, trying to recapture what she’d seen. He saw that his first impression had been mistaken; it had not, after all, been a nightmare. “I dreamed I was in a room, a kind of moldy old cellar where there were animals of some kind, and when I tried to open the door—” She broke off and glanced around to see if anyone was listening. No one was awake. She slid her eyes toward him, wanting to go on but unsure of herself. He bent his head, waiting with interest. Hesitantly, she said, “When I tried to open the door, the doorknob came off in my hands. I started scraping at the door with my fingers and, somehow—” She scowled, trying to remember. “I don’t know, somehow the door broke away and I discovered that behind the door, where the world outside should be, there was … there was this huge, like, parlor. Inside it there was every toy or doll I ever had that had been broken or lost, all in perfect condition.”

  “Interesting dream,” he said, looking at her forehead, not her eyes; then, feeling that something more was expected, “Dreams are strange things.”

  “I know.” She nodded, then quickly asked, “What time is it, do you know? How long before we get to Chicago?”

  “They’re two hours ahead of us. According to my watch—”

  Before he could finish, she broke in, “Yes, that’s right. I forgot.” A shudder went through her, and she asked, “Is it cold inhere?”

  “Freezing,” he said.

  “Thank God!” She looked past him, out the window, and abruptly brightened. “It’s gotten nice out—anyway, I don’t see any lightning.” She gave her head a jerk, tossing back t
he hair.

  “It’s behind us,” he said. “I see you’re not afraid anymore.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said, and smiled. “But it’s true, it’s not as bad as it was. All the same, I’m still praying.”

  “Good idea,” he said.

  She shot a quick look at him, then smiled uncertainly, staring straight ahead. “A lot of people don’t believe in praying and things,” she said. “They try to make you feel stupid for doing it, like when a boy wants to play the violin instead of trumpet or drums. In our orchestra at school the whole string section’s made up of girls except for one poor guy that plays viola.” She paused and glanced at him, then smiled. “It’s really funny how I never make sense when I talk to you.”

  “Sure you do.”

  She shrugged. “Anyway, some say there’s a God and some say there isn’t, and they’re both so positive you wouldn’t believe it. Personally, I’m not sure one way or the other, but when I’m scared I pray.”

  “It’s like the old joke,” he began.

  “Do you like music?” she asked. “Classical, I mean?”

  Nimram frowned. “Oh, sometimes.”

  “Who’s your favorite composer?”

  It struck him for the first time that perhaps his favorite composer was Machaut. “Beethoven?” he said.

  It was apparently the right answer. “Who’s your favorite conductor?”

  He pretended to think about it.

  “Mine’s Seiji Ozawa,” she said.

  Nimram nodded, lips pursed. “I hear he’s good.”

  She shook her head again to get the hair out of her eyes. “Oh well,” she said. Some thought had possessed her, making her face formal, pulling the lines all downward. She folded her hands and looked at them, then abruptly, with an effort, lifted her eyes to meet his. “I guess I told you a kind of lie,” she said.