The Art of Living (2 page)

“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?”

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.

Innocently, the girl asked, “Are you religious or anything?”

“Well, no—” He caught himself. “More or less,” he said.

“You're more or less in business and you're more or less religious,” the girl said, and smiled as if she'd caught him. “Are you a gambler, then?”

He laughed. “Is that what I look like?”

She continued to smile, but studied him, looking mainly at his black-and-gray unruly hair. “Actually, I never saw one, that I know of. Except in movies.”

Nimram mused. “I guess we're pretty much all of us gamblers,” he said, and at once felt embarrassment at having come on like a philosopher or, worse, a poet.

“I know,” she said without distress. “Winners and losers.”

He shot her a look. If she was going to go on like this she was going to be trouble. Was she speaking so freely because they were strangers?—travellers who'd never meet again? He folded and unfolded his hands slowly, in a way that would have seemed to an observer not nervous but judicious; and, frowning more severely then he knew, his graying eyebrows low, Nimram thought about bringing out the work in his attaché case.

Before he reached his decision, their stewardess was bending down toward them, helping the girl drop her tray into position. Nimram lowered his, then took the wineglass and bottle the stewardess held out. No sooner had he set down the glass than the plane hit what might have been a slanted stone wall in the middle of the sky and veered crazily upward, then laboriously steadied.

“Oh my God, dear God, my God!” the girl whispered.

“You
are
religious,” Nimram said, and smiled.

She said nothing, but sat rigid, slightly cross at him, perhaps, steadying the glass on the napkin now soaked in Coke.

The pilot came on again, casual, as if amused by their predicament. “Sorry we can't give you a smoother ride, folks, but looks like Mother Nature's in a real tizzy tonight. We're taking the ship up to thirty-seven thousand, see if we can't just outfox her.”

“Is that safe?” the girl asked softly.

He nodded and shrugged. “Safe as a ride in a rockingchair,” he said.

They could feel the plane nosing up, climbing so sharply that for a moment even Nimram felt a touch of dismay. The bumping and creaking became less noticeable. Nimram took a deep breath and poured his wine.

Slowly, carefully, the girl raised the Coke to her lips and took a small sip, then set it down again. “I hope it's not like this in Chicago,” she said.

“I'm sure it won't be.” He toasted her with the wineglass—she seemed not to notice—then drew it to his mouth and drank.

He couldn't tell how long he'd slept or what, if anything, he'd dreamed. The girl slept beside him, fallen toward his shoulder, the cabin around them droning quietly, as if singing to itself, below them what might have been miles of darkness, as if the planet had silently fallen out from under them, tumbling toward God knew what. Here in the dimly lit cabin, Nimram felt serene. They'd be landing at O'Hare shortly—less than two hours. Arline would be waiting in the lounge, smiling eagerly, even more pleased than usual to see him, after three long days with her parents. He'd be no less glad to see her, of course; yet just now, though he knew that that moment was rushing toward him, he felt aloof from it, suspended above time's wild drive like the note of a single flute above a poised and silent orchestra. For all he could tell, the plane itself might have been hanging motionless, as still as the pinprick stars overhead.