The Art of Living (34 page)

Joe went on as always, wiping things with his cloth—bar-top, faucets, ashtrays, anything he couldn't remember having wiped just a minute ago. The television was on above him, the latest news of who'd killed who, demonstrations, riots, helicopters hovering over Viet Nam or Berkeley, it was all the same. Lot of shouting, bearded commies, bearded Green Berets, one with a piece of Scotch tape on his glasses. It was hard to believe that outside the restaurant the sun was shining and dogs lay asleep on the sidewalk.

Joe never looked at the television. He had his own wars, undeclared, like the big one; mainly with Angelina. He had quick, nervous hands like a card player's, and his black hair was slicked back so smooth you might have thought it was paint. Like Arnold, he was resisting the longer-locks look. Sometimes when his eye accidentally fell on my hair, which hung pretty far down my back in those days, his face would freeze out and for a minute or two it would look like he'd given up breathing. Of those who admired my ambling indifference to the world's imperatives, Joe Dellapicallo, Angelina's father, was not one. Sometimes today he would suddenly grin a little crossly, like a man hearing voices, but he was careful never to let on that he was hearing Arnold's voice, or ours.

Then the front door opened, letting in a blast of light, and Angelina came in. School had let out. She was a senior. Joe glanced up and noticed, that was all. He was always like that, so cool he was ice. You'd have thought he hated her or didn't know her, but if anybody'd touched her on one of those beautiful brown bare-naked legs he'd've been out from behind that bar like a shot, and for the man with the traveling fingers it would have been Doomsday. I thought a lot about that, usually lying on my back with my hands behind my head, in my bed at my parents' house at night. It was supposed to be the age of the sexual revolution, love for free, just ask—it was in all the magazines, and sometimes I was sure it was happening all around me, every party I didn't get to, every lighted-up farmhouse. It probably was, in fact, even in our town—people painting flowers on one another's bodies, giving gang-bang massages, one eye cocked over toward the instruction book; but it wasn't happening where I was or, apparently, where Angelina was. I was fairly sure of that. I had a habit, to tell the truth, of checking up on her nights. I'd idle past her house, sort of coasting, almost silent, to see if the light in her room was on, and if it wasn't, and I couldn't catch a glimpse of her downstairs, I'd tool around checking out parties from a distance. Once for something like an hour and a half, I followed a car she was riding in, I thought—hanging back with my lights out, keeping down the noise—but when they finally got up their nerve and pulled under some trees down by the lake, and I zoomed in and zapped the headlights on, all three of them at once, on high-beam, the terrified face that looked out at me wasn't Angelina's; some girl with blond hair. I beeped and waved, let 'em know I was a friendly. Suffice it to say that, between her father's watchfulness and mine, Angelina could hardly move a finger.

She came in walking fast, long-legged, sailing, her expression intense, as if expecting a fight and hoping this once she might get out of it. “Hi, Pop,” she said, chewing gum, not meeting his eyes, pulling her coat off. She had her outfit on, black with white around the collar and the hem of the skirt. She wore these push-up bras, and the collar was as low as the skirt was high. She couldn't be blamed for it, that was what waitresses wore in such places; but when she came to your table she liked to lean way over and make you nervous, and that I did blame her for, a little—as did her father, watching—not that I wanted her to stop. It didn't mean a thing, though, or meant the opposite from what it said. I'd figured out long since that in her heart of hearts she was a nun, maybe a physicist. I guess the real truth is, Angelina hardly knew what she wanted herself. She was a straight-A student, a virgin, a tease—church-scared, father-scared; the usual business. In the days of
Playboys
right out in the livingroom, she might as well have been back in Calabria, winking at goatherds, warning them back with a knife.

“Hi, Arnold,” she'd always say, smiling. Not a word to us.

He would smile back, blissful, squeezing his eyes shut. “Hi, Angelina.” It was obscene. But he'd known her since she was zero, of course. He had uncle's rights.

She would say, jabbing out at us with the filthy wet rag she wiped the table with and maybe tossing a quick look at her father, “You guys should pay rent. You ever try walking around outside in the sunshine?” Big smile, eyes like dark jade. I used to wonder if it ever occurred to her that one of these days, for all her glory, she'd have to marry one of us and have babies and get fat. I took it for granted that that was how it would end. Who could have believed, in a town like ours, that a little more than a year from then, Angelina would be trying to close down Cornell University, shouting angry slogans in doggerel verse, and firing windy, ranting letters at me—“Dear Finnegan”—in some Asian swamp?

As soon as she'd left us, Arnold would wipe his forehead and start up again, folding his pink hands on the tabletop, smiling like a pink-faced priest in the direction of Angelina.

This day he said, “You wonder why she's so attracted to me, right? Maturity, boys. Maybe I can give you some pointers.” He tapped the tips of his fingers together.

“Hey, Mr. Deller,
do
that,” Lenny Cervone said, holding his hands out to Arnold and wiggling the fingers as if to lure out words. Lenny—Lenny the Shadow—was the toughest of us, at least he looked it. Even right after he shaved, before he stopped doing that, he had five-o'clock shadow. We all leered and waited.

Arnold smiled and stretched his chin. “Your trouble is,” he said, “you just circle. That's for goldfish. No offense! Listen, the world's in chaos, right?” He leaned forward over his elbows, eyebrows lowered, wincing a little, as if thinking hard made his head ache. “War, revolution, students rioting, police rioting, drugs and promiscuity … Let me tell you something: it will pass. Nobody believes that, nobody thinks about afterward—hell no!—but let me tell you,
it will pass!
After the world-wide glorious high there's going to be a crash like the world never dreamed of. Things will be changed, even here, in a backwater hick-town like this one, but whatever the world's like afterward, we're gonna be stuck with ourselves again—ourselves! It's a gloomy prospect. A person could go crazy!” He smiled and pushed out his chin in the direction of Tony Petrillo. “It's easy to throw yourself at grand ideals, and it's also easy to cut out, call everything nonsense. It's even natural, right now: the world's in the middle of a big noisy party; but eventually the party will be over, you mark my words. All this wild scrambling, all this floundering and screaming, people killing each other, making love in the street—one of these days you'll wake up and it's gonna be quiet out. Maybe a few storm-troopers or black-suited businessmen keeping order. But quiet, everywhere. Nothing moving. People will be stuck with themselves again.” He drew back and wiped his mouth. His hands were shaking, though he grinned and tried to hide it. “It's no good, this backing off from things. Don't worry, I know what you're up to, you guys. I know what everybody's up to.” He looked over at Joe. “You think I'm not tempted to back off, just throw up my hands and say the hell with it? But it's no good, leads straight into craziness. The thing a person's gotta have—a human being—is some kind of center to his life, some one thing he's good at that other people need from him, like, for instance, shoemaking. I mean something ordinary but at the same time holy, if you know what I mean. Very special. Something
ritual
—like, better yet, cooking!” He stretched back his lips—no doubt he meant it for a smile—and closed his eyes.

It made us all uneasy, the way he'd plunged straight into it, no fooling around, no glancing back. Then Lenny the Shadow snapped his fingers and said, “That's it! Pass me the stove!”

We all pretended it was funnier than it was, hitting each other on the shoulders lightly, saying “Hoo!” and “Shit!” (Sometimes it was a lot of work, just hanging around.) Angelina glanced at us from her barstool, letting us know we were deep-down boring. Joe went on mechanically wiping things, one small muscle in his jaw working. Only the cook showed any mercy. He looked away from Lenny and, without raising the heel of his hand from the tabletop, pointed at Benny the Butcher—that was what we called him, nobody remembers why. He had a bushy long black beard, Indian headband, little gold-rimmed glasses.

“You smile,” the cook said, mostly for rhetoric, since Benny the Butcher was always smiling, his look faintly rueful, staring at the table or the wall or the floor, slightly moving his head as if slowly and thoughtfully saying “No.” He had something a little bit wrong with his eyes. “You smile,” Arnold said, “but you'll see, believe me! People can get the idea life's just instinct, no trick to it. But we're not animals, that's our great virtue and our terrible dilemma.” He raised one finger, solemn, a kind of ironic apology for the super-fancy talk. “We've got to think things out, understand our human nature, figure out how to become what we are.”

“
Plan a head,
” Tony Petrillo broke in. “Plan a head!” He smacked his right fist into his left hand, almost missing though he was watching so hard his eyes crossed. Nobody paid any attention to him. Nothing Tony ever said made any sense. He claimed he'd gone crazy from watching Walter Cronkite. He always tried to get the channel turned before Cronkite said, “That's the way it is.” Tony was gangly-armed, swing-headed, clumsy. He was so out of it that one time when we stopped for a redlight he forgot to put his feet down and tipped over, damn near caught the bike on fire. His ambition in life was to run a skull-crusher in some big city. It was a scary idea. Actually he ended up working in a V.A. hospital.

“What are we?” Arnold said, moving his hands across the tabletop, palms up, toward me. I was always the one that paid the closest attention and made the fewest jokes. I don't brag about it. I was just never very funny. “Big super-apes with enormous brains,” Arnold said. He suddenly looked angry, as if it were the fault of the Scavengers gang that people were just apes. “Enormous brains relatively speaking, I mean,” he said. “Half-wit morons compared to whales, but never mind. Big brains relatively—anyway big enough that they've tuned out the body, if you know what I mean. What animals know by instinct has a hard time getting through to us, except for the really big instincts, the ones that knock your block off. So what are we? What can we deduce about, to coin a phrase, the Art of Living?” His lips shook.

Angelina was half sitting, half leaning on the barstool, one leg bent at the knee, as in a movie-ad, mocking by her very existence the enormous human brain. It came to me that she was listening, as interested as any of the rest of us, though she pretended not to be, and then it came to me that Arnold Deller knew it. I wondered if her father did.

The cook started counting things off on his fingers, never looking for as much as a second at Angelina. He sat mounded forward over the table, leaning on his elbows, urgent. “We're social animals. We're no good if we don't run in packs, like you guys. Take one of you alone—even Benny the Butcher here—why a half-starved alleycat could knock him over! But it's not only that. Even when we pretend to be otherwise—like you, Finnegan.” He pointed at me and closed one eye, very grim, lips trembling. “Even if we pretend it's otherwise, we
like
to run in packs. We get lonely. We want something to love and protect.” He wagged his head toward Angelina and winked, not humorously, as he no doubt intended it, but somehow horribly, the way a severed head might wink. I shot a glance at her father, then another one at Arnold, startled. He raised his hand, palm out, all innocence. “Okay,” he said, “so,
one
, we're social animals. We gotta live with that. It's one of those big instincts you can't get away from—comes of having babies that can't fend for themselves. Parents gotta stick with 'em enough to take care of 'em, so little by little, through the centuries, as Mr. Darwin says—you should get somebody to read him to you, Finnegan—ha ha! ha ha!—little by little through the centuries human beings got more and more loving until now, the way we are, it's almost like a sickness, all that anguish of love—but cheer up, it's even worse with whales. Okay, so where was I? Okay.” Suddenly, like a fist closing, his face closed into a frown.

Benny the Butcher looked at me, suspecting something, then went back to looking at the table and shaking his head. There was nothing I could tell him. I wasn't sure what was happening myself. The cook was always a little crazy, a little rhetorical and preachy, but something was going on that wasn't quite usual, that was clear. The room was building up a charge, as if it were the furniture, the dark red walls that had slipped toward not-quite-sane. I felt restless, in need of space and air, but also I wanted Arnold Deller to keep talking. Even if he was making some kind of play for Angelina—it was a weird idea, but it crossed my mind—I had a feeling the talk was in some strange way getting at something. Angelina sat aloof, poised like a bird on a wire. Her father stood with his back to her, only his arms moving, mechanically washing glasses.

“Okay,” Arnold said, “but what else we know is,
two
, we got a
war
instinct, also on account of the baby.” He aimed a finger at me like a gun. “Any animal can fight—duck, wolf, bear—but human beings are serious about it. You ever wonder about that? It's all on account of those babies, that's what I figure. Ordinary mating fight, usually sooner or later one of the males will back off, except horses. Horses are nuts. But human babies, that changes things. You gotta protect the nest till the baby can walk and talk, learn to make fire, hunt and cook. That takes a long time. Ten years? Twelve? It's no good just knocking off an enemy now and then. You gotta clean out that forest, make the whole place safe. So the baby that survives is the one with the parents that are the best at holding grudges, the ones that are
implacable.
” He looked at Lenny the Shadow, who had his mouth open, ready to break in. “Look it up, kid,” Arnold said. “Ask your priest.”