John Gardner: The Art of Living: And Other Stories

The girl glanced at him, smiling vaguely. She hadn’t heard. The Captain had broken in on the Muzak to tell them his name and the usual trivia, their projected altitude, flight time, weather, the airline’s friendly advice about seatbelts. Nimram examined the girl’s arm and hand on the armrest, then looked at his own and frowned. She had something wrong with her. He remembered that she’d come on with crutches, and glanced again at her face. Like her hand, it was slightly off-color, slightly puffy. Some blood disease, perhaps.

Now the stewardess was leaning down toward them, talking to both of them as if she thought they were together. Nimram studied the sharp, dark red sheen of her hair, metallic ox-blood. Her face, in comparison with the girl’s, was shockingly healthy. She addressed them by their names, “Mr. Nimram, Miss Curtis,” a trifle that brought the melancholy tuck to Nimram’s mouth, he could hardly have told you why himself — something about civility and human vulnerability, a commercially tainted civility, no doubt (he could see her quickly scanning the first-class passenger list, as per instruction, memorizing names), but civility nonetheless, the familiar old defiance of night and thunder: when they plunged into the Pacific, on the way out for the turn, or snapped off a wing on the horn of some mountain, or exploded in the air or burst into shrapnel and flame on the Mojave, they would die by name: “Mr. Nimram. Miss Curtis.” Or anyway so it would be for the people in first class. “When we’re airborne,” the stewardess was saying, “we’ll be serving complimentary drinks….” As she named them off, Miss Curtis sat frowning with concentration, as panicky as ever. She ordered a Coke; Nimram ordered wine. The stewardess smiled as if delighted and moved away.

Neither of them noticed when the plane began to move. The girl had asked him if he flew on airplanes often, and he’d launched a full and elaborate answer — New York, Paris, Rome, Tokyo … He beamed, gesturing as he spoke, as if flying were the greatest of his pleasures. Nothing could be farther from the truth, in fact; flying bored and annoyed him, not that he was afraid — Nimram was afraid of almost nothing, at any rate nothing he’d experienced so far, and he’d be forty-nine in June. Or rather, to be precise, he was afraid of nothing that could happen to himself, only of things that threatened others. Once he’d been hit on the Los Angeles expressway, when Arline was with him. Her head had been thrown against the dashboard and she’d been knocked unconscious. Nimram, dragging her from the car, cursing the police, who were nowhere to be seen, and shouting at the idiot by-standers, had found himself shaking like a leaf. Sometimes, lying in bed with his arm around her as she slept, Nimram, listening to the silence of the house, the very faint whine of trucks on the highway two miles away, would feel almost crushed by the weight of his fear for her, heaven bearing down on their roof like the base of a graveyard monument — though nothing was wrong, she was well, ten years younger than he was and strong as a horse from all the tennis and swimming.

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.