The Art of Living by John Gardner Page A

and spirit is more solid than stone. The sound was not so much loud as large, too large for a hundred French horns, it seemed. He began to play now not single notes but, to Jack’s astonishment, chords—two notes at a time, then three. He began to play runs. As if charged with life independent of the man, the horn sound fluttered and flew crazily, like an enormous trapped hawk hunting frantically for escape. It flew to the bottom of the lower register, the foundation concert F, and crashed below it, and on down and down, as if the horn in Yegudkin’s hands had no bottom, then suddenly changed its mind and flew upward in a split-second run to the horn’s top E, dropped back to the middle and then ran once more, more fiercely at the E, and this time burst through it and fluttered, manic, in the trumpet range, then lightly dropped back into its own home range and, abruptly, in the middle of a note, stopped. The room still rang, shimmered like a vision.
    â€œGood horn,” said Yegudkin, and held the horn toward the graduate student, who sat, hands clamped on his knees, as if in a daze.
    Jack Hawthorne stared at the instrument suspended in space and at his teacher’s hairy hands. Before stopping to think, he said, “You think I’ll ever play like that?”
    Yegudkin laughed loudly, his black eyes widening, and it seemed that he grew larger, beatific and demonic at once, like the music; overwhelming. “Play like me? ” he exclaimed.
    Jack blinked, startled by the bluntness of the thing, the terrible lack of malice, and the truth of it. His face tingled and his legs went weak, as if the life were rushing out of them. He longed to be away from there, far away, safe. Perhaps Yegudkin sensed it. He turned gruff, sending away the graduate student, then finishing up the lesson. He said nothing, today, of the stupidity of mankind. When the lesson was over he saw Jack to the door and bid him goodbye with a brief half-smile that was perhaps not for Jack at all but for the creature on the bench. “Next Saturday?” he said, as if there might be some doubt.
    Jack nodded, blushing.
    At the door opening on the street he began to breathe more easily, though he was weeping. He set down the horn case to brush away his tears. The sidewalk was crowded—dazed-looking Saturday-morning shoppers herding along irritably, meekly, through painfully bright light. Again he brushed tears away. He’d been late for his bus. Then the crowd opened for him and, with the horn cradled under his right arm, his music under his left, he plunged in, starting home.

STILLNESS
    It would be a strange thing, Joan Orrick often thought, to have second sight, as her grandmother Frazier was supposed to have had. It occurred to her, for instance, one day when she was forty, when Martin stopped the car to wait for a light at the corner of Olive Street and Grand, in St. Louis. They were just passing through. Martin had delivered a paper at Urbana, and now they were heading for Norman, Oklahoma, where he was to serve on the jury for something called the Newstadt-Books Abroad Prize. “What is it?” she’d asked when first the invitation to Oklahoma had come. “Actually,” he’d said, and had put on his pompous look, then changed his mind, “God knows.” “Maybe we should drive through St. Louis,” she’d said. He’d agreed at once, generous and expansive as he always was when preparing a lecture he thought impressive. She’d been less impressed than she’d pretended, but that was in the past now. And when they’d left Highway 70 and nosed past the arch into the city, she wasn’t much impressed by St. Louis either. Beyond the stadium, the scrubbed, unconvincing show of government buildings, the husk of the grand old railroad station where she’d met him all those birthdays and Christmases—the years before he’d gotten his motorcycle—everything was