John Gardner: The Art of Living: And Other Stories

“But dinner’s been—” she’d begun, drawing back from him, already of two minds.

“No no,” he’d said, tyrannical. “Go get dressed. We eat out.” Candlelight burning through the wine bottle, silverware shining like her dream of eternity, people across the room showing one by one and four by four their covert signs of having recognized the famous conductor, a thing they could speak of tomorrow and next week, next year, perhaps, buoy themselves up on in dreary times, the memory of that dinner miraculously blessed, as if God Himself had come to sit with them. The tuck of private amusement and sadness touched the corner of Nimram’s mouth.

He was not a man who had ever given thought to whether or not his opinions of himself and his effect on the world were inflated. He was a musician simply, or not so simply; an interpreter of Mahler and Bruckner, Sibelius and Nielsen — much as his wife Arline, buying him clothes, transforming his Beethoven frown to his now just as famous bright smile, brushing her lips across his cheek as he plunged (always hurrying) toward sleep, was the dutiful and faithful interpreter of Benjamin Nimram. His life was sufficient, a joy to him, in fact. One might have thought of it — and so Nimram himself thought of it, in certain rare moods — as one resounding success after another. He had conducted every major symphony in the world, had been granted by Toscanini’s daughters the privilege of studying their father’s scores, treasure-horde of the old man’s secrets; he could count among his closest friends some of the greatest musicians of his time. He had so often been called a genius by critics everywhere that he had come to take it for granted that he was indeed just that—“just that” in both senses, exactly that and merely that: a fortunate accident, a man supremely lucky. Had he been born with an ear just a little less exact, a personality more easily ruffled, dexterity less precise, or some physical weakness — a heart too feeble for the demands he made of it, or arthritis, the plague of so many conductors — he would still, no doubt, have been a symphony man, but his ambition would have been checked a little, his ideas of self-fulfillment scaled down. Whatever fate had dealt him he would have learned, no doubt, to put up with, guarding his chips. But Nimram had been dealt all high cards, and he knew it. He revelled in his fortune, sprawling when he sat, his big-boned fingers splayed wide on his belly like a man who’s just had dinner, his spirit as playful as a child’s for all the gray at his temples, all his middle-aged bulk and weight — packed muscle, all of it — a man too much enjoying himself to have time for scorn or for fretting over whether or not he was getting his due, which, anyway, he was. He was one of the elect. He sailed through the world like a white yacht jubilant with flags.

The rain fell steadily, figures and dark square tractors hurrying toward the belly of the plane and then away again, occasionally glowing under blooms of silent lightning, in the aisle behind him passengers still moving with the infinite patience of Tolstoy peasants toward their second-class seats. With a part of his mind he watched their reflections in the window and wondered idly how many of them, if any, had seen him conduct, seen anyone conduct, cared at all for the shimmering ghost he had staked his life on. None of them, so far as he could tell, had even noticed the Muzak leaking cheerfully, mindlessly, from the plane’s invisible speakers. It would be turned off when the plane was safely airborne, for which he was grateful, needless to say. Yet it was touching, in a way, that the airline should offer this feeble little gesture of reassurance— All will be well! Listen to the Muzak! All will be well! They scarcely heard it, these children of accident, old and young, setting out across the country in the middle of the night; yet perhaps it was true that they were comforted, lulled.

Now a voice said behind him, professionally kind, “There you are. There! Shall I take these? All right?”

When he turned, the stewardess was taking the metal crutches from the young woman — girl, rather — newly planted in the seat beside him.

“Thank you,” the girl was saying, reaching down to each side of her for the straps of her seatbelt.

“They’ll be right up in front,” the stewardess said, drawing the crutches toward her shoulder to clamp them in one arm. “If you need anything, you just sing. All right?”

“Thank you,” the girl said again, nodding, drawing up the straps now, studying the buckle. She nodded one more time, smiling suddenly, seeing how the buckle worked, and closed it. She glanced briefly at Nimram, then away again. She was perhaps sixteen.

He too looked away and, with his heart jumping, considered the image of her fixed in his mind. She was so much like his wife Arline — though of course much younger — that he was ready to believe her a lost sister. It was impossible, he knew; Arline’s people were not the kind who lost things, much less the kind who had secrets, except on Christmas morning. Yet for all his certainty, some stubborn, infantile part of his brain seized on the idea with both fists and refused to let go. Her hair, like Arline’s, was reddish brown, with an outer layer of yellow; hair so soft and fine it was like a brush of light. Their foreheads, noses, mouths, and chins were identical too, or so he’d thought at first. As he turned now, furtively checking, he saw that the girl’s nose was straighter than Arline’s — prettier, if anything — and more lightly freckled. For all that, the likeness grew stronger as he studied it.

She looked up, caught him watching her, smiled, and looked away. The blue of her eyes was much paler than the blue of Arline’s, and the difference so startled him that for a moment — shifting in his seat, clearing his throat, turning to look out at the rain again — he could hardly believe he’d thought the two faces similar. He watched the girl’s reflection, in the window eight inches from his face, as she reached toward the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her and drew out a magazine, or perhaps the plasticized safety card.

“I hope they know what they’re doing,” she said.

Her face, when he half turned to look, showed no sign of joking. Ordinarily, Nimram would have smiled and said nothing. For some reason he spoke. “This your first trip on an airplane?”

She nodded, smiling back, a smile so full of panic he almost laughed.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “the pilot’s in front. Anything happens, he gets it first. He’s very concerned about that.” Nimram winked.

The girl studied him as if lost in thought, the smile on her face still there but forgotten, and it seemed to him he knew what she was thinking. She was in no condition to pick up ironies. When he’d told her the pilot was “very concerned,” did he mean that the pilot was nervous? neurotic? beginning to slip? Did this big, expensive-looking man in the seat beside her know the pilot?

“Do you know the pilot?” she asked innocently, brightening up her smile.

“A joke,” he said. “Among people who fly airplanes it’s the oldest joke in the world. It means don’t worry.”

She turned away and looked down at the plasticized card. “It’s just, with the rain and everything,” she said softly, “what happens if a plane gets hit by lightning?”

“I doubt that it would do any harm,” he said, knowing it wasn’t true. The Vienna Quartet had been killed just a year ago when their plane had been knocked down by lightning. “Anyway, we won’t be going anywhere near where the lightning is. They have sophisticated weather charts, radar … anyway, most of the time we’ll be high above it all. You live here in Los Angeles?”