The Art of Living (3 page)

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 the 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.

He raised his eyebrows.

“I do have a boyfriend, actually.” Quickly, as if for fear that he might ask the young man's name, she said, “You know how when you meet someone you want to sound more interesting than you are? Well—” She looked back at her folded hands, and he could see her forcing herself up to it. “I do this tragic act.

He sat very still, nervously prepared to grin, waiting.

She mumbled something, and when he leaned toward her she raised her voice, still without looking at him, her voice barely audible even now, and said, “I'm what they call ‘terminal,' but, well, I mean, it doesn't
mean
anything, you know? It's sort of … The only time it makes me scared, or makes me cry, things like that, is when I say to myself in words, ‘I'm going to …'” He saw that it was true; if she finished the sentence she would cry. She breathed very shallowly and continued, “If the airplane crashed, it wouldn't make much difference as far as I'm concerned, just make it a little sooner, but just the same when we were taking off, with the lightning and everything …” Now she did, for an instant, look up at him. “I never make any sense.” Her eyes were full of tears.

“No,” he said, “you make sense enough.”

She was wringing her hands, smiling as if in chagrin, but smiling with pleasure too, the happiness lifting off as if defiantly above the deadweight of discomfort. “Anyway, I do have a boyfriend. He's the one that plays viola, actually. He's nice. I mean, he's wonderful. His name's Stephen.” She raised both hands to wipe the tears away. “I mean, it's really funny. My life's really wonderful.” She gave a laugh, then covered her face with both hands, her shoulders shaking.

He patted the side of her arm, saying nothing.

“The reason I wanted to tell you,” she said when she was able to speak, “is, you've really been nice. I didn't want to—”

“That's all right,” he said. “Look, that's how we all are.”

“I know,” she said, and suddenly laughed, crying. “That really is true, isn't it! It's just like my uncle Charley says. He lives with us. He's my mother's older brother. He says the most interesting thing about Noah's Ark is that all the animals on it were scared and stupid.”

Nimram laughed.

“He really is wonderful,” she said, “except that he coughs all the time. He's dying of emphysema, but mention that he ought to stop smoking his pipe, or mention that maybe he should go see a doctor, Uncle Charley goes right through the ceiling. It's really that spending money terrifies him, but he pretends it's doctors he hates. Just mention the word and he starts yelling ‘False prophets! Profiteers! Pill-pushers! Snake-handlers!' He can really get loud. My father says we should tie him out front for a watchdog.” She laughed again.

Nimram's ears popped. They were beginning the long descent. After a moment he said, “Actually, I haven't been strictly honest with you either. I'm not really in business.”

She looked at him, waiting with what seemed to him a curiously childish eagerness.

“I'm a symphony conductor.”

“Are you really?” she asked, lowering her eyebrows, studying him to see if he was lying. “What's your name?”

“Benjamin Nimram,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed, and the embarrassment was back. He could see her searching her memory. “I think I've heard of you,” she said.

“
Sic transit gloria mundi,
” he said, mock-morose.

She smiled and pushed her hair back. “I know what that means,” she said.

The no-smoking sign came on. In the distance the earth was adazzle with lights.

In the lounge at O'Hare he spotted his wife at once, motionless and smiling in the milling crowd—she hadn't yet seen him—her beret and coat dark red, almost black. He hurried toward her. Now she saw him and, breaking that stillness like the stillness of an old, old painting, raised her arm to wave, threw herself back into time, and came striding to meet him. He drew off and folded the dark glasses.