Free The Art of Living by John Gardner Page B

it contained all their years—they’d been married at nineteen, had been married for more than half their fives—and she found herself thinking (she was not aware of why) of her grandmother Frazier’s sternly Southern Baptist attic: old Christian Heralds full of pictures of angels, stacked tight under cobwebbed rafters; small oak-leaved picture frames as moldy as old bread; a squat deal dresser with broken glass handles; tied-up bundles of music as brown-spackled and brittle as her grandmother’s hands; and on the attic’s far side, trunks of clothes—dusty black and what she thought of as Confederate gray. The old woman’s predictions had been terrible and sure, or so legend had it. Her brother, Joan Orrick’s great-uncle Frank, would stand on the porch of his cabin by the river when a tornado came roaring like a thousand trains, and would fire at the wind with a shotgun.
    The cabin was long gone, like her grandmother’s house, like her grandmother, like Martin’s beloved Homer. She touched the pulse in her throat with two fingers and looked at her watch. Normal, and yet she felt drained, weary. Not entirely an effect of the wine they’d had at dinner, though also it was not yet the drug. She slid away the paper, rose quietly, and moved past the wide, still bed where her husband lay sleeping, his broad, mole-specked back and shoulders uncovered, motionless as marble except for his breathing, exactly as he’d always slept, winter and summer. She was slightly surprised for an instant by his lighted gray hair. Outside, the parking lot was dusty with the still, cold light of lamps half hidden among maples the bulldozers had left. She looked hastily back into the clean, noncommittal room.
    When she’d crawled into bed with him, carefully not waking him, she lay for a time with her eyes open, eyes that might have seemed to a stranger, she knew, as cold and remote as her grandmother’s. As she drifted toward sleep it crossed her mind—her lips and ringless right hand on Martin’s arm—that sooner or later everyone, of course, knows the future.

THE MUSIC LOVER
    Some years ago there lived in our city a man named Professor Alfred Klingman, who was a music lover. He was a professor of Germanic philology or something of the sort—or had been before his retirement—but he never spoke with anyone about his academic specialty, nor did anyone ever speak with him about anything but music or, occasionally, the weather. He’d lost his wife many years before this story begins and had lived alone in his dingy downtown apartment ever since, without pets, without plants, without even a clock to attend to. Except in the evenings, when he attended concerts, he never went out but sat all day listening to orchestral music on the radio, or, on Saturday afternoons, the opera. His solitary existence made him—as no doubt he’d have admitted himself, since he was by no means a fool—peculiar. One might have thought, to look at him, that he lived alone for fear of giving other creatures offense. Even in the presence of lapdogs, you might have thought, Professor Klingman would feel inferior. He walked with his shoulders drawn in and his raw, red face stuck out, anxiously smiling, timidly bowing to everyone he passed, even cats and, occasionally, lampposts.
    This story makes use of parts of Thomas Mann’s “Disillusionment,” all slightly altered.
    But every man who survives in this world has at least one area in which he escapes his perhaps otherwise miserable condition, and for Professor Klingman this area was music, his wife having been a piano teacher. Whenever there was a concert—which was nearly every night except in summertime, since our city had a famous school of music, a professional symphony, an amateur philharmonic orchestra, and innumerable choirs—Professor Klingman would dress himself nervously and meticulously in his old brown