The Art of Living and Other Stories Page 6

  She glanced at Martin—Buddy middle-aged. He stared past the steering wheel, professional, absentminded. They’d slipped from his thoughts already, those years, the Duggers. His hands on the wheel were soft, almost fat, though still strong. She looked at his face. “What are you thinking?” she said.

  Martin flicked his eyes open, half apologetic. “Nothing,” he said. “Something Athene tells Odysseus. Nothing.” He looked suddenly embarrassed.

  She glanced out the window again, then reached for her purse, opening it, fumbling for a pill.

  “Hurting again?”

  Her mouth tightened in annoyance at that “again.” “Just tired,” she said.

  “We should have taken a plane,” he said, and ducked to look up past the buildings.

  The sky was gray, luminous and still, like Lake Erie from one of those hushed, abandoned beaches. She thought of Jacqui Duggers.

  “There’s still a little coffee in the thermos,” Martin said.

  “Coffee?”

  “To help swallow the pill.”

  “Oh. No, it’s done.” His helplessness cheered her. “Odysseus,” she thought. Homer had been the subject of his lecture at Urbana. She smiled a little sadly. So he was wishing, as usual, that he might talk about himself. Not that he would do it; he had far too much taste. And she, for her part … She shook her head and smiled again.

  The whole left side of the building, as you entered from the street, was the Duggers’ apartment. It was the most beautiful apartment she’d ever seen, though not as original or even as spectacularly tasteful as she’d imagined at the time. She would see many like it in San Francisco, and far more elegant examples of white-on-white in London and Paris. Everything was white, the walls, the furniture, the chains holding up the chandeliers, the wooden shutters on the windows. Against all that white, the things they’d collected stood out in bold relief: paintings, presumably by friends, all very curious and impressive, at least to Joan—smudges, bright splashes of color, one canvas all white with little scratches of gray and bright blue; sculptures—a beautiful abstraction in dark wood, a ballet dancer made out of pieces of old wire, museum reproductions, a mobile of wood and stainless steel; books and records, shelves upon shelves of them. Their record-player was the largest she’d ever seen and had a speaker that stood separate from the rest. Once when Jacqui invited her in, to write Joan her check for her week’s work, Jacqui, leading the way to the kitchen, stopped suddenly, turned a ballerina’s step, and said, “Joanie, I must show you my shoes, no?” “I’d like to see them,” Joan said. Jacqui swept over to the side of the room, her small hand gracefully flying ahead of her, and pushed open a white sliding door. Joan stared. On tilted shelves that filled half the room’s wall, Jacqui had three hundred pairs of tiny shoes. She had all colors—gold and silver, yellow, red, green, some with long ties as bright as new ribbons, some with little bows, some black and plain as the inside of a pocket. “Where’d you get all these?” Joan said. Jacqui laughed. “Mostly Paris,” she said. She gave Joan a quick, appraising look, then laughed again. “Dahling, Paris you are going to love. There is a store, a department store, Au Printemps. When you go there, blow a kiss for Jacqui!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ah, ze French!”

  Years later, the first time Joan shopped at Au Printemps, she would remember that, and would do as she’d been told. And she would remember Jacqui too a few years later when, at Lambert Field in St. Louis, deplaning with her family from a European trip, she was approached by a news crew of very cool, very smart blacks from KSDF-TV, carrying camera and wind-baffled shotgun mike, who asked if she had any suggestions for improvement of the airport’s services. “Way-el,” she said thoughtfully, smiling prettily, batting her lashes and speaking in her sweetest Possum Hollow drawl. (Martin and the children had fled into the crowd.) She tapped her mouth with a bejewelled finger and gazed away down the baggage area, then said pertly, as if it were something she’d been thinking for a long, long time and rather hated to bring up, “Ah thank it would be nice if awl these people spoke French.” Her performance was included in that night’s local news. Her parents missed it, as was just as well. Relatives telephoned to report with pleasure that Joanie had been on television. No one mentioned that anything she’d said was peculiar.

  “I wonder if I’ll ever get to Paris,” she’d said that afternoon in Jacqui’s apartment.

  Jacqui had laughed like a young girl, though she was then over forty. “Keep playing the piano and don’t theenk twice,” Jacqui said. “If you don’t go to Paris, then Paris will have to come to you.”

  Where would they have gone, Joan wondered now, when the neighborhood had grown too dangerous to live in? Were they still alive? It came to her suddenly, for no apparent reason, that Pete Duggers had looked like the hero of her favorite childhood book, Mr. Mixiedough, in the story of the whole world’s slipping into darkness. It was a book she’d wanted for Evan and Mary, but there seemed to be no copies left anywhere; not even the book-search people from whom Martin got his rare old books could find a trace of it. Had it been the same, perhaps, with Pete and Jacqui Duggers—swallowed into blackness? She’d asked about him once at the Abbey, on Thirteenth Street in New York, when she’d gone—three times—to a show called The Hoofers, which had brought back all the great soft-shoe and tap men. On the sidewalk in front of the theater afterward, while she was waiting for Martin to come and pick her up, she’d talked with Bojangles Robinson and Sandman Sims—they’d shown her some steps and had laughed and clapped their hands, dancing one on each side of her—and she’d asked if either of them had ever heard of Pete Duggers.

  The Sandman rolled up his eyes and lifted off his hat as if to look inside it. “Duggers,” he’d said, searching through his memory.

  “You say the man worked out of San Looie?” Bojangles said.

  “I played piano for his wife,” Joan said. “She taught ballet.”

  “Duggers,” said the Sandman. “That surely does sound familiar.”

  “White man married to a ballet teacher,” Bojangles said, and ran his hand across his mouth. “Boy, that surely rings a bell, some way.”

  “Duggers,” said the Sandman, squinting at the lighted sky. “Duggers.”

  “He used to go faster and faster and then suddenly stand still,” she said. “He was a wonderful dancer.”

  “Duggers,” Bojangles echoed, thoughtful, staring at his shoes. “I know the man sure as I’m standing here. I got him right on the tip of my mind.”

  At the motel that night, sixty miles past St. Louis—it was a new Ramada Inn, as new as the concrete and dark-earth slash through what had lately been farmland—Joan sat up after Martin was asleep, unable to sleep herself, waiting for the Demerol to start working. On the mirror-smooth walnut formica desk lay Martin’s paper, “Homeric Justice and the Artful Lie.” Though he’d delivered it already, it was a maze of revisions. He’d been “working it over a bit,” as he said, before he’d at last given up in despair, as usual, kissed her on the cheek, and gone to bed. Eventually, no doubt, he’d include it in some book, or make it the plan of some story or novel. He was forever revising, like her stern-jawed, icy-eyed grandmother’s God—or like God up to a point. Joan Orrick thought for an instant—then efficiently blocked the thought—of the doctor in New York who had spoken to them, incredibly, of psychiatric help and “the power of prayer.” She slid Martin’s paper toward her with two fingers, glancing at the beginning. “In Attic Greek,” he’d written—and then came something in, presumably, Greek.

  She looked for perhaps half a minute at the writing, tortuous, cranky, as familiar as her own but more moving to her: it contained all their years—they’d been married at nineteen, had been married for more than half their fives—and she found herself thinking (she was not aware of why) of her grandmother Frazier’s sternly Southern Baptist attic: old Christian Heralds full of pictures of angels, stacked tight under cobwebbed rafters; small oak-leaved picture frames as moldy as old bread; a squat dea
l dresser with broken glass handles; tied-up bundles of music as brown-spackled and brittle as her grandmother’s hands; and on the attic’s far side, trunks of clothes—dusty black and what she thought of as Confederate gray. The old woman’s predictions had been terrible and sure, or so legend had it. Her brother, Joan Orrick’s great-uncle Frank, would stand on the porch of his cabin by the river when a tornado came roaring like a thousand trains, and would fire at the wind with a shotgun.

  The cabin was long gone, like her grandmother’s house, like her grandmother, like Martin’s beloved Homer. She touched the pulse in her throat with two fingers and looked at her watch. Normal, and yet she felt drained, weary. Not entirely an effect of the wine they’d had at dinner, though also it was not yet the drug. She slid away the paper, rose quietly, and moved past the wide, still bed where her husband lay sleeping, his broad, mole-specked back and shoulders uncovered, motionless as marble except for his breathing, exactly as he’d always slept, winter and summer. She was slightly surprised for an instant by his lighted gray hair. Outside, the parking lot was dusty with the still, cold light of lamps half hidden among maples the bulldozers had left. She looked hastily back into the clean, noncommittal room.

  When she’d crawled into bed with him, carefully not waking him, she lay for a time with her eyes open, eyes that might have seemed to a stranger, she knew, as cold and remote as her grandmother’s. As she drifted toward sleep it crossed her mind—her lips and ringless right hand on Martin’s arm—that sooner or later everyone, of course, knows the future.

  THE MUSIC LOVER

  Some years ago there lived in our city a man named Professor Alfred Klingman, who was a music lover. He was a professor of Germanic philology or something of the sort—or had been before his retirement—but he never spoke with anyone about his academic specialty, nor did anyone ever speak with him about anything but music or, occasionally, the weather. He’d lost his wife many years before this story begins and had lived alone in his dingy downtown apartment ever since, without pets, without plants, without even a clock to attend to. Except in the evenings, when he attended concerts, he never went out but sat all day listening to orchestral music on the radio, or, on Saturday afternoons, the opera. His solitary existence made him—as no doubt he’d have admitted himself, since he was by no means a fool—peculiar. One might have thought, to look at him, that he lived alone for fear of giving other creatures offense. Even in the presence of lapdogs, you might have thought, Professor Klingman would feel inferior. He walked with his shoulders drawn in and his raw, red face stuck out, anxiously smiling, timidly bowing to everyone he passed, even cats and, occasionally, lampposts.

  This story makes use of parts of Thomas Mann’s “Disillusionment,” all slightly altered.

  But every man who survives in this world has at least one area in which he escapes his perhaps otherwise miserable condition, and for Professor Klingman this area was music, his wife having been a piano teacher. Whenever there was a concert—which was nearly every night except in summertime, since our city had a famous school of music, a professional symphony, an amateur philharmonic orchestra, and innumerable choirs—Professor Klingman would dress himself nervously and meticulously in his old brown suit, his rather yellow white shirt, and black bow tie, and would pull on his long brown overcoat, fit his brown hat on his head, take up his cane, and, after inspecting himself for a moment in his mirror, exactly as an orchestra conductor might have done, or a featured soloist, he would hurry, his near-sighted, smiling face thrown forward, looking terrified and slightly insane, to the civic auditorium. As soon as he entered the hall he would look in panic at the clock above the ticket window and would check it against his gold pocketwatch. Though he was invariably some twenty minutes early, his look of furious anxiety would remain until he’d checked his coat and hat, climbed the wide red-carpeted stairs (helping himself with his crooked brown cane), and made his way to his accustomed seat in the front row of the balcony, right-hand side, the area his wife had found acoustically most pleasing. Then he would relax to a certain extent, sitting motionless except for a minuscule tremble, his pale eyes glittering and darting as the theater filled. He had bushy red eyebrows and a large, lumpy nose. His ears were extraordinarily large and as pink as flowers. In his nostrils and ears he had tufts of red hair (and in one ear a large gray hearing aid), and there was yellowish fuzz on the backs of his fingers. The hair on the top of his head was white.

  Sometimes before the orchestra came on he would push his program toward the person beside him and whisper timidly, pointing to some item, “Excuse me, what’s this? What’s this piece? Do you know it?” The question was abrupt, one might even say frantic, since Professor Klingman had lost, in the years since his good wife’s death, the technique of polite conversation. It was she, of course, who had done all their talking. One might not unnaturally have gotten the idea that, despite his smile, the professor fiercely disapproved of the item which was about to be performed (perhaps he imagined it immoral, or fascistic) and was merely checking to make sure the piece was what he thought it was before steeling himself and rising to cry out, in his piping voice, challenging and halting the performance. If, as sometimes happened, the person beside him was familiar with the piece and could hum a few bars, Professor Klingman would brighten, crying “Yes, yes! Thank you!” in a voice embarrassingly cracked by emotion. Strangers could not know that in former years, attending concerts with Mrs. Klingman, the professor had always been advised by his wife what tunes he was about to be favored with. No charitable person, observing his curious concert behavior, could doubt that Alfred Klingman’s feelings were deep and sincere, but he was, no question about it, something of a nuisance, even for an elderly person. Also people noticed that he was singularly uninformed about music, for a concert devotee. He could not identify by number and key any symphony but Beethoven’s Fifth, and even in that case he could never recall the key.

  On the other hand, no one could be more responsive to the anguished wellings and sweet palpitations of the music itself. When Mahler was played, or even the coolest, most objective of Bruckner, tears would run streaming down Professor Klingman’s nose, and sometimes he would sob audibly, so that everyone around him was made uncomfortable. At musical jokes he would sometimes guffaw, though how a man so ignorant could know that the musical jokes were jokes was hard to see. And even when the music was neither tragic nor comic, merely sang its way along, in a manner of speaking—one of Mozart’s less dramatic concertos, for instance—Professor Klingman could manage to disgruntle his neighbors. Sometimes he tapped his feet, sometimes he nodded (slightly out of time), and sometimes, especially to Kabalevsky or Liszt, he would thump his rolled-up program. People touched him on the shoulder, whispered politely but sternly in his ear. His contrition, at such times, was touching to see, but it lasted for only a few minutes. Charitable people ignored him and said, when the subject of his concert behavior came up, “Well, music is all the poor man has, you know,” or, “Well, he feels things deeply, you know; too bad more people don’t.” All our concert-hall ushers knew him, and the leader of the music school’s string quartet would always look up and smile if he was present. Not that he was loved universally, of course. Sometimes children who were not well brought up—and sometimes even college students—mimicked him cruelly, thumping their programs, bobbing their heads, and pretending to swallow back agonized sobs. To such mockery, of course, Professor Klingman was oblivious. From the first note to the last, even if the concert was abysmal, Professor Klingman was in heaven.

  One evening in late autumn, Professor Klingman attended a School of Music concert which was advertised as offering “three contemporary pieces.” He would never have attended had he any idea what he was in for. Professor Klingman, it should be mentioned, was by no means a man of conservative taste. He had disgraced himself by literally whooping his emotion at Janáček’s Slavonic mass and had once sat, enraptured and stunned, unable to applaud, at a performance of Bartók’s Conce
rto for Percussion, which he later remembered as Stravinsky’s greatest masterpiece. But this particular departure from musical tradition—this so-called “three contemporary pieces”—was a new and terrible experience for him. It opened with a cello concerto in which the soloist used not a bow but a saw, a fact Professor Klingman missed at first, because of his eyesight. By the end of the piece, which was distressing enough in any case, the cello had been sawed in two. The second piece featured two radios tuned to different stations and a violinist expressing his musical impressions of a life-sized photograph of an ape.

  Timid as Professor Klingman was in life’s more ordinary situations, he reacted to this music with the unselfconscious abandon that had made him mildly notorious among concert-goers in our city. He wrung his fingers, groaned, covered his eyes, and on one occasion cried out loudly, “Oh my God! My God!” On each side of him and behind him, embarrassed fellow sufferers labored to shush him—to no avail. He caught the pale hand of the lady beside him (Mrs. Phillips, the wife of Reverend Irving Phillips, who plays second clarinet in our philharmonic orchestra) and whispered, violently shaking, “Insane!”

  “Be still!” she whispered, cold as ice, though it was clear she was not in complete disagreement. She was tall and stately, with a pale blue face, a face almost exactly the color of her pearls. She was breathing like a person who is about to experience a heart attack—whether from anger at the musical outrage or from anger at the mad old man beside her, no one could say.

  Mrs. Phillips’ words had no effect on the professor, but a moment later he became aware, as one could see by the anxious craning of his neck and the darting of his eyes in their thick-lensed glasses, that he was surrounded by mimics, all wringing their fingers, twisting their faces into masks of agony, and moaning and groaning, driving their timider friends into shuddering lunes of demonic giggling. Professor Klingman clung to Mrs. Phillips’ hand, feeling sick at heart with shame and anger, and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting in silence for the intermission. He could not notice, in his misery—or perhaps did not notice because of his eyesight—that a man in the box to the left of the stage was watching all he did with a queer fascination, watching as a scientist might study an insect, never shifting his gaze for an instant toward the stage.