John Gardner - The Art of Living - And Other Stories

I know now, looking back, that the food was more or less ordinary, at least by big-city standards. But our town, in those days, had only twenty thousand people, give or take a few thousand, depending on the weather and conditions on the lake, and so it didn’t really seem to us pretentious or deep-down stupid when Arnold began to describe himself as “an artist.” For one thing, it came on him gradually, so that none of us really noticed, except in passing. And for another, Arnold had a bookish way of speaking — he read a lot, as I’ve said; not just cookbooks but anything that fell into his hands. Any kind of print that came in front of his steel-rimmed spectacles he would read — license plates, the numbers on wallpaper seams — and a lot of times with a person like that, especially if the Beatles or the Jefferson Airplane are wailing in the background, you don’t really notice when what the person is saying has gotten odder. Anyway, the “we” I’m talking about now is the Scavengers gang, motorcycle hoods, or so we liked to think, really just a bunch of greaser kids in second-hand black jackets, fighting pimples, hanging around, waiting to get drafted and shot at. We weren’t exactly unaware that that was how it stood with us. Some of the kids in our town enlisted, ran out and joined up as quick as they could with the United States Marines; others went to college and tried to get out of it. We were the poor stupid animals in between: too smart to enlist, too dumb to run and hide in the revolution. “A pox on all your houses!” was our motto, or would have been if the phrase were one we’d ever heard. Our bikes bore no peace signs, no American flags, no LSD rainbows, Nazi swastikas or iron crosses. Their only symbolism was their dull black paint. For Romantic despair, invisibility. We drove third- or fourth-hand Harleys, mostly old flatheads with the pipes opened up — drove them or, more often, pushed them. Nonetheless Kings of the Road we were, with muscular grins. For the most part, whatever our anarchist dreams, we had to be good honest laboring citizens to keep our hogs rolling.

Usually it was sometime in the early afternoon that we’d drop in to rap with old Arnold. “Hey, let’s go rap with old Arnold,” one of us would say, maybe Tony Petrillo, making a kind of joke of it. The last thing anyone in the gang would have admitted was that it was actually interesting to hear Arnold talk. So far as I remember, nobody even admitted that it was interesting to sit in the terrible proximity of old Dellapicallo’s granddaughter Angelina. In the early afternoon Arnold the cook had nothing much to do. He’d have a pot or two simmering, things he’d go back into the kitchen to check on, from time to time; but at that time of day there was nothing urgent, nothing Ellis couldn’t have handled fine if Arnold had temporarily dropped dead. So Arnold would settle himself at one of the dark, round tables near the bar (the restaurant was separate) where Joe Dellapicallo, the owner’s son, was bartender and where sometimes, if we were lucky, Joe’s daughter Angelina worked as waitress. Arnold drank sherry; he’d pick up the glass with just his thumb and first finger and let the others sort of float. He allowed himself only one large glass all afternoon, though it was said that after work, when he went home, around midnight, he often got smashed, reading books and sipping whiskey while his wife and three daughters snored. It was dark in the bar, blurry with TV noise and the music of the juke that was fixed so it never shut off. We’d get ourselves draught beers and go to his table, turn the chairs around, and sit.

“Hey, Arnold.”

“ ’Lo, boys.” He spoke with what he no doubt intended to seem dignified reserve, voice from the mountaintop, like Lyndon Baines Johnson when he talked on TV about controlled response; but Arnold’s voice never quite made it. He was fat and pink, the steel-rimmed glasses on his nose slightly steamy, the eyes behind them tiny and light blue, and even here, where it was dark and cool, his forehead and throat always glistened with a thin wash of sweat. The smell that came off him, if you sat downwind, was awesome. His hair was light reddish-brown, partly gray, and cut short, old-time army-style but with longish golden sideburns, which made him an anomaly at Dellapicallo’s, where just about everybody — at least until the dinner crowd arrived — was Italian. I too was, to some extent, exceptional: half-Irish.

“How’s the stock market?” one of us would say, maybe Benny Russo; years later he’d become a computer expert. Or maybe one of us would say, “Hey, what’s the secret of happiness, Arnold?” That would be Lenny the Shadow. He was into sensation — mired in it, I guess. In Viet Nam, he’d learn about drugs, and he’d be wasted from an overdose at twenty. It didn’t much matter what you said, it would get Arnold Deller rolling. Whatever we asked him, he always assumed we were more or less serious. Hippy sincerity was in, in those days, at least in certain circles, and that was more or less the tone we took, with just sufficient ironic edge that nobody could really pin us down, prove we actually existed.

“Ha, you punklets,” Arnold would say, just lifting the corners of his mouth and eyebrows, as if drawing his head back in disdain were too much work; but it wasn’t unfriendly. He knew us. Everybody knew us. Most of the people in town even liked us, I learned years later, though they hated the damn noise. “Listen, kid,” he said the afternoon this story begins. His eyes were narrowed more than usual and his voice was edgy. “Listen, kid, you’re talking to an artist, see? What does an artist know about a thing like that? You know what’s the matter with the world today? People are always asking the wrong people the big important questions. Like a football player, they want him to tell ’em about politics. Or a famous minister like Billy Graham, they want him to predict who’ll win the Super Bowl.” He shook his head, as if the whole thing depressed him more than words could say. “You kids had any brains, you’d ask me what to do with oregano. Educate yourself, learn a good honest trade, or, rather, art.” He smiled, big-chinned. His chin was like a big pink softball with two or three whiskers. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Better to ask me these grandiose questions than ask somebody thinks he knows the answers.” He looked over at Joe at the bar, as if that was who he meant.

Joe went on as always, wiping things with his cloth — bar-top, faucets, ashtrays, anything he couldn’t remember having wiped just a minute ago. The television was on above him, the latest news of who’d killed who, demonstrations, riots, helicopters hovering over Viet Nam or Berkeley, it was all the same. Lot of shouting, bearded commies, bearded Green Berets, one with a piece of Scotch tape on his glasses. It was hard to believe that outside the restaurant the sun was shining and dogs lay asleep on the sidewalk.

Joe never looked at the television. He had his own wars, undeclared, like the big one; mainly with Angelina. He had quick, nervous hands like a card player’s, and his black hair was slicked back so smooth you might have thought it was paint. Like Arnold, he was resisting the longer-locks look. Sometimes when his eye accidentally fell on my hair, which hung pretty far down my back in those days, his face would freeze out and for a minute or two it would look like he’d given up breathing. Of those who admired my ambling indifference to the world’s imperatives, Joe Dellapicallo, Angelina’s father, was not one. Sometimes today he would suddenly grin a little crossly, like a man hearing voices, but he was careful never to let on that he was hearing Arnold’s voice, or ours.

Then the front door opened, letting in a blast of light, and Angelina came in. School had let out. She was a senior. Joe glanced up and noticed, that was all. He was always like that, so cool he was ice. You’d have thought he hated her or didn’t know her, but if anybody’d touched her on one of those beautiful brown bare-naked legs he’d’ve been out from behind that bar like a shot, and for the man with the traveling fingers it would have been Doomsday. I thought a lot about that, usually lying on my back with my hands behind my head, in my bed at my parents’ house at night. It was supposed to be the age of the sexual revolution, love for free, just ask — it was in all the magazines, and sometimes I was sure it was happening all around me, every party I didn’t get to, every lighted-up farmhouse. It probably was, in fact, even in our town — people painting flowers on one another’s bodies, giving gang-bang massages, one eye cocked over toward the instruction book; but it wasn’t happening where I was or, apparently, where Angelina was. I was fairly sure of that. I had a habit, to tell the truth, of checking up on her nights. I’d idle past her house, sort of coasting, almost silent, to see if the light in her room was on, and if it wasn’t, and I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her downstairs, I’d tool around checking out parties from a distance. Once for something like an hour and a half, I followed a car she was riding in, I thought — hanging back with my lights out, keeping down the noise — but when they finally got up their nerve and pulled under some trees down by the lake, and I zoomed in and zapped the headlights on, all three of them at once, on high-beam, the terrified face that looked out at me wasn’t Angelina’s; some girl with blond hair. I beeped and waved, let ’em know I was a friendly. Suffice it to say that, between her father’s watchfulness and mine, Angelina could hardly move a finger.