Free The Art of Living by John Gardner Page A

night’s local news. Her parents missed it, as was just as well. Relatives telephoned to report with pleasure that Joanie had been on television. No one mentioned that anything she’d said was peculiar.
    â€œI wonder if I’ll ever get to Paris,” she’d said that afternoon in Jacqui’s apartment.
    Jacqui had laughed like a young girl, though she was then over forty. “Keep playing the piano and don’t theenk twice,” Jacqui said. “If you don’t go to Paris, then Paris will have to come to you.”
    Where would they have gone, Joan wondered now, when the neighborhood had grown too dangerous to live in? Were they still alive? It came to her suddenly, for no apparent reason, that Pete Duggers had looked like the hero of her favorite childhood book, Mr. Mixiedough, in the story of the whole world’s slipping into darkness. It was a book she’d wanted for Evan and Mary, but there seemed to be no copies left anywhere; not even the book-search people from whom Martin got his rare old books could find a trace of it. Had it been the same, perhaps, with Pete and Jacqui Duggers—swallowed into blackness? She’d asked about him once at the Abbey, on Thirteenth Street in New York, when she’d gone—three times—to a show called The Hoofers , which had brought back all the great soft-shoe and tap men. On the sidewalk in front of the theater afterward, while she was waiting for Martin to come and pick her up, she’d talked with Bojangles Robinson and Sandman Sims—they’d shown her some steps and had laughed and clapped their hands, dancing one on each side of her—and she’d asked if either of them had ever heard of Pete Duggers.
    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.
    â€œYou say the man worked out of San Looie?” Bojangles said.
    â€œI played piano for his wife,” Joan said. “She taught ballet.”
    â€œDuggers,” said the Sandman. “That surely does sound familiar.”
    â€œWhite man married to a ballet teacher,” Bojangles said, and ran his hand across his mouth. “Boy, that surely rings a bell, some way.”
    â€œDuggers,” said the Sandman, squinting at the lighted sky. “Duggers.”
    â€œHe used to go faster and faster and then suddenly stand still,” she said. “He was a wonderful dancer.”
    â€œDuggers,” 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: