The Art of Living

by John Gardner

  At last (incredibly, from Alfred Klingman’s point of view) the intermission did arrive, the houselights came up, and he was able to scramble, or, rather, stagger, to the aisle and up it, toward the exit sign, pushing through the crowd in a way quite unlike him, apologizing right and left to faces he probably could not see, since he was weeping. He somehow reached the cloakroom and retrieved his hat and coat, then pushed toward the street door. There, however, he found he could go no further because of the violent pounding of his heart. He leaned on the wall, wide-eyed, pink-nosed, clutching his chest as if aware that if he did not calm himself, this excruciating night might be his last.

  “Monstrous!” he whispered over and over, probably more loudly than he knew. “Monstrous! Blasphemous!”

  Then, as men will do in such desperate situations, Professor Klingman tried to reason with himself. “Yet what harm, after all?” he said loudly, his red-lidded eyes squeezed tight shut. “No doubt an inexpensive, even worthless cello. A harmless little joke. What harm in that?” But his heart, it seems, was thudding more violently now than ever, and, judging from his face, some sorrow vast and plangent as the sea was threatening to drown him. He opened his eyes as would a drunken man to steady himself by the solid lines of furniture and vistas of neatly patterned carpet.

  A small, anxious crowd had gathered around him, largely composed of people he knew, fellow regulars, though apparently he couldn’t focus any faces. And now one of the crowd moved forward, extending his hands toward him.

  “You’ve had a shock, my good man,” the stranger said kindly, taking hold of the professor’s trembling hands. “Come with me, I beg you. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Professor Klingman accepted—being, of course, in no position to resist, though not a drinking man. Little did he know what man he was putting his trust in. Slowly—to the crowd’s considerable relief—the two men went through the foyer, the professor leaning on the younger man’s arm. They entered the lounge, where the younger man guided Alfred Klingman to a table by the window looking out on a river and park. The night was tranquil, dark except for an occasional streetlamp. On the grounds of the park, which were safer in those days, one could see, here and there, pairs of lovers walking, and over by the golfcourse a woman with a dog. The younger man brought drinks of some kind, then took a chair opposite Alfred Klingman’s and sat watching him fixedly, much as he had watched from the box to the left of the stage.

  Gradually the professor regained his composure.

  “The music disturbed you deeply, I see,” the stranger said.

  “I’m afraid so,” Professor Klingman confessed. “I’m afraid I behaved like a dreadful old fool.” He made an effort to smile, but blushed instead, a slow blush, remarkable on a man so old, that rose to his hatbrim. “A harmless little joke, harmless little trick on the audience—” He broke off abruptly. His eyes filled with tears which he made no effort to explain, if, indeed, he knew their explanation. He removed his thick-lensed glasses and wiped them on his handkerchief.

  The younger man continued to study him. He was a thin, sallow person of thirty-five or forty, dressed in a black suit with a black waistcoat and black bow tie. His forehead was high and queerly narrow, like the forehead of a horse, and his eyes, which blinked continually, were unnaturally bright and alert, like a chicken’s.

  “Perhaps the music was not a joke,” the young man said, and smiled in a way that might have been malicious.

  Professor Klingman merely looked at him and raised his right hand to his hearing aid.

  “Perhaps you alone, in all that fat, complacent audience, understood tonight’s music,” the young man said.

  “Yes, perhaps,” the professor said tentatively, slowly lowering his hand. He cautiously waited for things to become clearer.

  “Let me explain myself,” the young man said. He leaned forward, vaguely aggressive, still rapidly blinking, placing his strikingly long white fingers on each side of his glass. “I grew up in a clergyman’s family, in a very small town not many miles from here. There reigned in our home a punctilious cleanliness and a pathetic, bookish optimism. We breathed an atmosphere of dusty pulpit rhetoric—large words for good and evil which I have learned to hate, since perhaps they are to blame for all our human sufferings.”

  Professor Klingman touched his chin, considering.

  “For me,” the young man hurriedly continued, “life consisted entirely of those grandiose words, since I knew nothing more of it than the infinite, insubstantial emotions they called up in me. From people I expected divine virtue or hair-raising wickedness; from experience either ravishing loveliness or consummate horror. I was full of avidity for all that existed, and full of a passionate, tormented yearning for True Reality, whatever form it might take, intoxicating bliss, undreamt-of anguish.

  “I remember my first disillusionment. There was a fire one night in my parents’ house. It spread insidiously until the whole first floor was in flames, and soon the stairs would be on fire. It was I who discovered it. I went rushing through the house shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’ I know what emotion underlay those cries, though at the time it may not have come fully alive to my consciousness. ‘So this,’ I thought, ‘is a fire. This is what it’s like to have a house on fire. Is this all there is to it?’

  “Heaven knows, it was serious enough. The whole house burned down; only with difficulty was the family saved, and I myself got some nasty burns. It would be wrong to say that my fancy could have painted anything much worse than the actual burning of my parents’ house. Yet some vague, formless idea of an event that was even more frightful must have existed somewhere within me, by comparison with which the reality seemed flat. This fire was the first great event in my life.

  “I need not go on to recount all my various disappointments in detail. Suffice it to say that I zealously fed my magnificent expectations of life with the matter of a thousand books. Ah, how I have learned to hate them, those poets who chalk up grand words on all the walls of life—because they had no power to write them on the sky with penpoints dipped in Vesuvius! I came to think every large word a lie and a mockery.

  “Ecstatic poets have said that speech is poor: ‘Ah, how poor are words!’ they bleat. But no, sir! Speech is rich, extravagantly rich compared with the poverty of actual life. Pain has its limits—physical pain in unconsciousness, mental pain in torpor. The same is true of joy. Our human need for communication has found itself a way to create sounds which lie beyond these limits.

  “Is the fault mine? Is it down my spine alone that certain words can run so as to awaken intuitions of sensations which do not exist?”

  There was no question now of the malevolence in the young man’s smile. But old Alfred Klingman, who’d spent a lifetime teaching the young and outraged, watched him with a look that seemed more bafflement than horror. He may have felt even a touch of admiration for the man’s rhetoric.

  The young man said, leaning even nearer: “But you, my friend, as a music lover, must understand that the disappointment I’ve thus far delimited is nothing by comparison with the disappointment I have yet to describe. The moment my father first saw me in the crib, with these fingers that reach out like tentacles, he cried out, ‘A pianist! The Dear Lord has sent us a pianist!’ I could reach a full octave at the age of seven. And I was rhythmically talented, and had perfect pitch. I amuse acquaintances by telling them the frequencies of pistol shots, car crashes, screams for help. The point is this: what are a poet’s lying words to the rich and the secret intimations of a piano chord, a great pipe organ, an orchestra, a voice? I’ve searched the globe for some firm reality that could give me even the shadow of a hint that our musical intuitions are not madness. I’ve stood before the greatest works of sculpture, and I’ve thought, ‘Yes, it’s beautiful. Is that all there is?’ I’ve looked up from Zermatt at the Matterhorn and thought, ‘very like the postcards.’ I watched a friend die. It was just as I’d expected.”

  The young man smiled as if consciously labor
ing to make his smile ferocious. “That is why I compose as I do, my dear music lover.”

  Professor Klingman said, “You, then, are the composer of—” He said it almost casually, as if merely checking an earlier conclusion.

  “I am,” the young man said fiercely, and waited.

  Perhaps as much as a minute passed. At last Professor Klingman took off his glasses to wipe them again. He did this slowly and carefully, his fingers trembling. He hooked the glasses back over his ears, folded his handkerchief, then changed his mind, unfolded it, and blew his nose. He noticed that he still had his hat on, and removed it, carefully setting it down on the table. “I’m flattered that you should tell me all this,” he said softly, tentatively.

  The young man waited. He seemed to be growing more angry by the minute.

  Professor Klingman sat nodding slowly and thoughtfully, nervously smiling. Finally he said, as if he had no idea what else to say, “My wife was a pianist.”

  He began then, slowly and patiently, to explain what she had meant to him, though of course his feeling was impossible to put into words.

  TRUMPETER

  Queen Louisa’s dog, Trumpeter, was nobody’s fool, which is one of the reasons he kept mostly out of sight, taking care of himself, harmlessly chasing a rabbit now and then, soaking up the sun in the cemetery—where no one ever went—one eye half open, on the watch for trespassers, sometimes wandering through the alleys of the village, peeking in through windows when the sun had set, observing how shopkeepers counted up their money unaware of the servants who peered from every curtain and hungrily eyed those stacked silver coins, and then again sometimes pausing by old shanties where cutpurses met, filling the night with their blasphemous obscenities, and where there were smells, everywhere, of bile and perspiration and unwholesome drink, still other times trotting to the foul black wharf, where old merchant ships bumped against the waterlogged planks and young sailors snored and whistled in the arms of drunken maidens and sometimes a pirate slipped silent as a reptile from fog-wisp to fog-wisp, wetly smiling, carrying his parrot and rum. Sharp ears lifted, burning eyes narrowed into needle-thin slits, Trumpeter would listen to whatever unrighteousness came drifting his way, and then he would lift his leg, leave his warning, and move on.

  Trumpeter knew, as no one else did, all that was afoot in the kingdom of mad Queen Louisa. Not that he took undue pride in this. It was his nature, as a dog, to keep track of things, to be a jealous guardian, eternally alert. Even when, unbeknownst to them all, he lay in a corner of Queen Louisa’s room, or slept with his head on his paws behind the stove, or bared his fangs to keep the cat on his toes—for the cat was an old one and weary of mice—Trumpeter’s mind was on one subject: the welfare of the kingdom. This was, so to speak, what he was paid for. Not that Trumpeter could really be called paid. But Trumpeter was no haggler, never one to stand on ceremony. It is true, he would admit, that the people of the castle almost never spoke to him and, once they’d grown used to him, hardly looked up when he went gliding like an angel of death through the room; but sometimes when he rubbed against Queen Louisa’s shoulder she would give him a brief, absentminded pat, and on rare occasions, for no discernible reason, she’d say, “Sit, Trumpeter,” or, “Down—for the love of God, boy!” or, “Outside!” As for the others, they paid to Trumpeter no attention whatsoever, merely obeyed him as they obeyed the King or Queen, without thought or hesitation. When he stood by the door, they opened it. When he stood by the cupboard, they filled his dish. When he barked, they went over furtively and peeked out the window.

  He was nobody’s fool, but he had, it is true, his limitations, and the chief of them was this: ponder as he might—and ponder he did, hour on hour and year on year, his black head lowered into the carpet’s scents, his eyes rolled up—he could never penetrate the reason (for presumably there was some reason) for the curious behavior of Queen Louisa and her court. It was said, and Trumpeter in his way understood, that at times Queen Louisa, to rest her mind, would transform herself suddenly into a large greenish toad. This habit was notorious, reported far and wide; everyone who knew her had seen the thing happen quite frequently. Everyone, that is, except Trumpeter. It was not, in his opinion, a case of the Emperor’s Clothes. Trumpeter was no innocent: man’s ways are not dog’s, he knew. He had seen the whole court sit erect for hours, dead silent except for an occasional whisper, an occasional cough, listening to people on a bright raised platform howl. He, when he tentatively joined them, had been kicked and sent outside. On that same raised platform he’d seen a man in black creep up cunningly on another, a dagger in his hand, and when he, Trumpeter, had hurtled to the rescue, he’d been beaten and seized by five knights and had been chained behind the buttery.

  The oddities of man were inexhaustible, and this change that came over the Queen—a change Trumpeter could not see except by the reaction of the others—was merely one of them. He had learned to accept, simply to watch and consider, stretched out half hidden behind the curtains or under the table, offering no comment. One moment the court would be walking toward the chapel all in solemn array, bearing high white candles, Queen Louisa at their head in her long sky-blue gown, her red hair gleaming, her expression sweet and sad—they all had sad expressions as they moved toward the chapel, and their bodies were rigid, as if ritually so, slightly trembling with each step—and the next they’d all be leaping, or darting their tongues out—even King Gregor, with a pained expression, his black beard bristling—and the princesses and princes would suddenly begin croaking, ludicrously grinning, and their eyes would bug out. Trumpeter would let out a sigh and shift his position slightly, and when Queen Louisa came down like an avalanche inches from his nose, he would thump his tail once, courteous, showing her he’d noticed. “Goo-boo!” she’d say. This was not, strictly speaking, his name, or the right time of day, but he accepted it.

  Whatever the reason for this strange behavior on the part of the Queen and, after her, the court, it was a peaceful kingdom, no one could deny it. King Gregor and King John, who for years had been at war, were now, because of the general confusion, the best of friends, squatting on some garden path arm in arm, or, in another mood, debating at the tops of their voices, jabbing their fingers at the writing in a book. “Saintly, my ass!” King John once yelled. (Trumpeter had no trouble understanding words. It was merely sentences that befuddled him.) “Saintly, my ass! Do you wash your peasants’ feet on Maundy Thursday?” King Gregor’s eyes widened. “God forbid!” he said.

  If all this was strange, there were other things still stranger. No one seemed to remember anymore, except for Trumpeter, that the Princess had gone away. Not the Princess called Muriel, whom the Queen had discovered and declared to be her own dear long-lost child, and not the numerous princesses and princes she’d found later and joyfully recognized and brought to the castle, Djubkin and Dobremish, Pretty Polly, and the rest. For all these, Trumpeter had no hostile feelings; and he understood—dimly, yet clearly enough—that in making them her children, as perhaps they were indeed, since the life of a dog is but a heartbeat, so to speak, in the long span of man, the Queen had brought happiness to a kingdom that had suffered, before that, grave troubles—peasants against royalty, “madness against madness,” as the minstrel said: an obscure saying; but Trumpeter, in his heart, understood it.

  He remembered, nonetheless, that another princess had lived here once in the days before Queen Louisa was mad—she had vanished one morning like dew into the blind blue air. Her hair was yellow. He would lie beside the fireplace, an old slipper in his mouth—he was not always, in those days, wide awake—and he would feel a certain pressure bearing down on his shoulder, and when he opened his eyes and turned his head, there the Princess would be, her hair falling over him, her cheek on the flatness between his shoulder and back, using him as a pillow, and he would moan and she would mimic him, harmlessly mocking.

  This was no flickering memory but steady as the floor.

  Whether or not he unde
rstood the details, he understood the importance of a kingdom at peace. Vrokror, that terrible grudge-bearing fiend, had no supporters now. The words with which Queen Louisa had undone him—“All error,” she’d said, “begins with soreheads”—were now common slogan in King Gregor’s realm. It was part of a verse for skipping rope to. Trumpeter, travelling far and wide, had seen the extent to which Vrokror had been undone. Vrokror was a monk again, as he’d been in the first place, but a monk in absolute and terrible isolation: he saw nothing sentient—certainly not God—but lived all alone on the top of a mountain, eating tundra plants.

  All was well, all was well. Travelling through alleys, Trumpeter saw that the servants were afraid of their masters and would do them no harm, hunger as they might for those coins stacked like pillars in the palace. Watching the cutpurses, studying every smile, he saw that they were miserable, whatever their pretenses. There are never, of course, enough purses to go around. And Trumpeter saw that the merchants all cheated fellow merchants, and the pirates all stole from them, and no one was distressed; they were used to it. Trumpeter began to feel a strange discomfiture.

  “Bad dog,” she’d say, this real Princess whom only Trumpeter remembered, and she’d shake her finger ferociously, and he would duck his head. But it was a pleasure, he would admit, that attention she gave him; and he partly understood—sometimes fully understood—that she did it for the absolute absurdity of the thing. Here was he, four, five, six times her weight, with jaws that could cut through the thighbones of a steer; and here was she, who with a word could lay him flatlings.