John Gardner - The Art of Living - And Other Stories

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 deal 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.

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.