The Art of Living Read Free

lightning?”
    â€œI 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