The Art of Living

by John Gardner

  “Oh?” I said.

  She turned around more now, and looked not at me but at my boots. “It has to be completely black—the dog. It has to be killed just a minute before it’s cooked. And—”

  I said, “Is that why he was yelling at me?”

  “He was yelling at my father.” She avoided my eyes, then relented, and when she saw that I was waiting, hoping she’d see fit to explain, she said, “I guess he was yelling about a lot of things, not just that my father didn’t want him to cook it at the restaurant. We had this big fight last night, my father and I. About school and … things.”

  “Boys?” I asked.

  “Boys! What boys do I ever see?”

  But I was on to her. “Oh, I guess there are those that hang around. Too love-sick to go out in the sunshine.”

  She studied me, guarded. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you.”

  “Nah. Not at all, really.” Again I picked up the rag to wipe my hands. “So he was yelling at your father. Defending you?”

  Her expression was exactly that of someone suddenly catching on to a new game, figuring out all at once how to play it. “I guess you’d have to say he was yelling at the whole world. I mean, Death and everything. By pure chance he found this recipe—I mean, I guess it was chance—and it was something Rinehart had eaten over there.…”

  “So now he wants to cook it. At the restaurant. A dog.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, well,” I said.

  She waited, watching me. I folded the rag and tossed it over on the workbench, then switched off the trouble-light, unplugged it, and began to loop the cord.

  At last I said, “So what is it you want me to do?”

  For the first time all night, she looked straight and steady into my eyes, cranking up the nerve to say what she’d come to say. “Get him the dog, Finnegan.” She paused. “Please.”

  I laughed.

  She looked astonished, then furious. I realized only later that probably a lot of what she was feeling that instant was embarrassment, even shame. She knew as well as I did what a thing it was she was asking of me. If I’d been smart I would’ve been indignant at her thinking I’d do it. But I just laughed. Her eyes widened, then narrowed again, and she started toward me—from the back door she had to get past me to leave. Though I was still laughing, I reached out and grabbed her arm. She tried to shake free, jerking away hard, half turning, about to swing at me, but I held on and suddenly I saw her change her mind. She stopped struggling. Her face was still angry, but the quiet elbow was a dead giveaway. My mother was right. Arnold Deller believed it too, I knew now. That was why in his crazy way he’d played matchmaker, though for his own purposes. It made me laugh harder, remembering his talk about Chinese cooking, how it brought people together.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Look, anybody’d laugh. It’s like those fairytales, you know? Where the princess gives her lover this quest—‘Go kill the dragon!’ or, ’Find me the magic golden duck!’ ”

  Her eyes flashed. “What do you mean, lover?”

  “I just mean it’s like that,” I said.

  “If you get any ideas—”

  “No ideas!” I let go of her arm and raised both hands in surrender. “So what you want is, I’m to go rip off some kid’s black dog.”

  “Of course not! Jesus, Finnegan, what’s the matter with you? But we do need a black dog from somewhere, somehow.” Her face was tipped up toward mine, the scent of her endangering my heart. She looked troubled, as if she had still worse to say, then said it. “It has to be completely black. And we need it tonight.”

  “Tonight! Hey, listen!”

  “I promised Arnold. Look, he can’t cook it at home,Finnegan—he hasn’t got the right kinds of pots and pans and things, or the right kind of stove, whatever.” There were suddenly tears in her eyes. “He has to cook it at the restaurant. You understand that.”

  “I don’t understand why he’s got to cook a goddamn dog at all.”

  “Well, he does,” she said. I don’t think she knew until this minute, when she said it, how firmly she believed it.

  I backed away a little, not giving up exactly but trying to come at it more from the side. “Your father says it’s okay, if we can get the thing tonight?”

  “He didn’t say anything. He doesn’t think we can do it.”

  I thought about that we. I also had questions of a philosophical nature. Arnold Deller had claimed to us, this afternoon, that the artist was the great servant of humanity, even that the artist was some kind of model for humanity, someone whose process could teach people the process of a higher art, the to-coin-a-phrase Art of Living. Now, for his alleged art, his childish faith in life’s unstainable goodness, his chopped-off-ear innocence—really for his fanatical artist’s ego, his cook’s dementia—I was supposed to steal some dog.

  “Dogs,” I said, “are practically human.”

  “Not to the Chinese.”

  Reasoning with her, I saw, was useless. “Angelina,” I asked, “what’s all this to you? How come you’re helping him?”

  “My grandfather made a promise,” she said. “Arnold can cook anything he wants.”

  “That’s not the reason.”

  “My father has no right,” she said.

  “Ah!” I said. “Ah so!”

  “That’s Japanese,” she snapped, “not Chinese.”

  “Same thing,” I said.

  “Finnegan,” she said, “you are so stupid.”

  The scorn was partly faked, that old Calabrian play; but it was sufficiently real that I knew I wasn’t being fair to her. It wasn’t only to oppose her father’s power that Angelina was doing this. Maybe it had to do with Rinehart, how he’d carried her around on his shoulders when she was five and he was nine; had to do with Arnold Deller’s immense, exasperating sorrow.

  “Angelina,” I said, “it’s wrong. It’s unbalanced.”

  She considered it, then shook her head. “No, it’s not,” she said. “Not wrong, anyway.”

  I rubbed my nose with my index finger. “Well,” I said, “maybe I’ll see if I can round up the gang.”

  So we went out. First we phoned dog pounds for forty miles around—Benny the Butcher had this trick he could do with payphones—but everyplace was closed. Then, though we all had our doubts and misgivings, we cruised, watching for, for instance, black Labs. You’d think, if you weren’t looking for one, that practically everybody’s got one, but not so. Each of us knew, somewhere far or near, some friend who had a black Lab, or a black poodle, something. But when it comes right down to it, it’s hard to steal a dog from a friend. Then we found one: a black something-or-other playing in a yard with a kid. We sat looking through the wire-mesh fence—it was one of those big places down by the lake, people that come up for the summer from New York City—and Tony Petrillo said the first flat-out uncrazy thing I’d ever heard him say. “Let’s not do it. Let’s just break into a pet store.”

  So we did.

  It was a little after midnight when we vroomed up with the dog, a medium-sized all black one of indeterminate breed—there’d been no sign on the cage, and none of us knew. We packed it in a heavy cardboard box we’d poked air-holes in and roped it to the rack on Benny the Butcher’s back fender. Tony got bit, also Lenny the Shadow, but nothing bad; anyway, we made it. Arnold was waiting, actually expecting us. So was Angelina. Arnold was crazy-serious, bent over, rubbing his fat hands and muttering what was probably little pieces of the recipe he was afraid he might forget. He had the book open over on the worktable, right under the light. When we carried the dog into the kitchen from the alley, Joe came in from the bar and stood watching us, the muscle on his jaw moving like a guitar string. Arnold ignored him, petting the dog, feeding him, talking fast to Ellis, telling him what he needed, getting everything ready, exactly according to the book. Ellis moved around with his head ducked, not making a sound, walking very fast, as if he thought somebody might jump out from behind a refrigerator
and shoot him. Then Joe turned on his heel and left us, and after a second Angelina followed. We just hung around, trying to stay out of the way, watching, probably feeling a little sick—all but Tony Petrillo, who hunted around through the refrigerators and worktables, whistling, and fixed himself a ham-and-cheese sandwich. When Angelina came back she told us her father had phoned her grandfather.

  “Whattya think,” Lenny the Shadow said. “You think ole Arnold’s really gonna do it? Kill the doggy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe now that he’s beginning to be friends with it—”

  “He’ll do it,” Benny the Butcher said. His head drifted thoughtfully from side to side.

  Arnold killed the dog. It was something. I could hardly believe it. Angelina, watching, reached out without thinking and touched my arm. “I’m gonna puke,” Lenny said, and left the room.

  Maybe it was because he felt guilty that Arnold began to chatter. He’d poured himself whiskey, I noticed. “People live too easy, that’s the trouble with the world,” he said. He wiped the bloody knife again and again on his apron. “They watch the stupid TV, they read the stupid Reader’s Digest and the stupid best-sellers, they eat trucker tomatoes that got no taste and no color, no value in the world except they’re easy to ship, they go to work, go home again, just like cows to the milking—” He picked out another knife, a long one with a blade eight inches wide, raised it, and brought it down once—very hard, WHUMP!—and the dog’s head fell off, blood splashing. Angelina’s hands flew to her white, white face. He raised the knife again, his left hand quickly shifting the body. Sweat soaked his T-shirt and ran down over the dragon on his arm. He shouted past his shoulder, “They go to their churches where all they ever do is sit still with their knees together, they even got people they pay to sing hymns for ’em, and then Monday they go to the dentist who makes them a sculpture of their teeth, with a fine big wooden stand and a fine gold plate with their very own name on it, and they hand him a credit card—not money, never a sack of new potatoes—and the dentist makes them as pretty as Joan Baez—” WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!

  Blood was spattered everywhere, all over the floor and on his apron and T-shirt, even on the side of his nose. The dog’s head looked up at me with the tongue hanging out through the big, still teeth, an expression of absolute disbelief. Nobody looked away, Angelina or the rest of us, except for Lenny, who was gone. The horror was too solidly there to look away from. You can look away from someone squishing a bug, or something sick in a movie, but not this—blood, hair, teeth, and that slaughter-house smell that blanked out even the sweat smell of Arnold the cook. All you could do was, like Arnold, drink, not that I mean to suggest he wasn’t facing it. As a matter of fact he was revelling in it, bug-eyed as a Satanist, the blue-and-red dragon on his big pink bicep dancing.

  He said, sweat streaming down his face, sweat and maybe tears, his whole face awash, the useless, wet glasses up on his forehead, “Everything’s easy, easy as pie!—TV dinners of chicken that never in its life felt the ground under its toes, instant potatoes, lettuce that’s been put in some stuff to make it fresh till the day of the Antichrist—and what’s the result? All humanity begins to be like sheep. That’s right! They baby themselves till they don’t care about themselves. They accept first little things like trucker tomatoes and eternal lettuce, then they begin to accept no-good houses, and cars made of plastic, engineered to kill, then it’s Pentagon budgets in the multi-multi-billions and commercial nukes built on earthquake faults, not to mention your snap-of-the-finger divorces—why stay married if it’s trouble, right? To all of which I say—”

  He sucked in breath and threw the dog, now gutted and hairless except for the tip of the tail, into boiling water, then turned quickly and started shaking sauces into a pan. Ellis was cutting fruit and pouring strange lumpy things out of cans, his face perfectly solemn, black hair falling over it. His apron came almost to the floor, falling all around him like a skirt.

  “Arnold,” I broke in, “you’re crazy!” I shouted it at him as if all at once the realization had made me furious. It wasn’t really that. I was thinking of Rinehart. It had suddenly come back to me how when he’d sat down to that dinner of Chinese black dog he’d felt one with centuries and centuries of dead Asians, people that would probably have slit his throat on sight and put the pages of his Bible inside their shoes to keep their feet warm and at the same time tromp on the writings of the infidel; and now Arnold too had to be one with all those thousands and thousands of dead Asians, so he could be one with his son; and it was all pure bullshit: Rinehart was dead, and soon we’d all be, two years or seventy, though the programmed anguish would go on and on for centuries, like a heatwave around the planet, until at last the sun went out, or some scheme from the Pentagon knocked it out, and there would be no more babies, no more sorrow or misuse of the gift of life, just a big, dark, wheeling stone. It was pity that made me yell, pity for the innocent tables and chairs that would be left, afterward, and couldn’t so much as move an inch unless human beings helped them.

  “Not crazy,” he shouted, turning on me, red-faced and wide-eyed, brandishing a bottle with Chinese writing on it, shaking it at me like it was blackish holy water.

  “You’re a child molester,” I shouted back.

  “What?” he said, surprised.

  “Well, something like that,” I said. “I forget the word. You corrupted Angelina and you corrupted us—made us perfectly good citizens steal a dog and kill it for somebody to eat, which is practically cannibalism, and yet on you babble about people accepting things, not caring about themselves, not daring to stand up!”

  Arnold held out his hands, pleading for a little justice, a little common sense. “You think I condone your lawless acts?” he asked. “But at least you had a reason. You actually felt something.” He glanced at Angelina, then quickly away again. He picked up a pair of tong-like things. “You felt whatever it was that made you do it, and you felt something when you did it, I’ll bet. Felt something. Right? For a minute you existed! How do you feel about the packaged, drugged-up meat at your supermarket, or airplanes dropping bombs from so high up they don’t know there’s people down there—they never have to see it—or the Japanese and Russians out murdering the kings of the sea? Do you feel anything at all about such matters, my hot Irish friend? Not likely! Most people don’t. If you can’t feel anything about things near at hand, how can you feel for things more distant and abstract? Ponder it! Ponder it!”

  “You’re nuts,” Lenny the Shadow said. It was the first I knew that he’d come back. “You shouldda been a man-eating tiger.”

  “More like he shouldda been napalm,” Benny the Butcher said. “Fssssss.!”

  “Not nuts!” Arnold yelled, whirling and pointing at Lenny with the tongs. “Similar but different! I got centuries of tradition controlling my craziness. I got ideals, I got standards!”

  He didn’t seem to notice that the old man, Frank, the owner, was in the doorway, shrunken, morose, leaning hard on two canes. The bags under his eyes were like toadskin. The eyes, above the bags and under the gray eyebrows, were filmy. Joe stood a little behind him, in the shadows.

  Arnold was raving, “I’m an artist, you understand that? What’s an artist? How’s he different from an ordinary nut? An artist is a man who makes a covenant with tradition. Not just dreams, grand hopes and abstractions—no, hell no—a covenant with something that’s there, pots and paintings, recipes: the specific that makes things indefinite come alive—assuming you don’t get lost in ’em, the specifics, I mean. Salt, for instance. A man can get lost in the idea of salt—too much, too little, what the ancients thought of it, whether you should shake it with the left hand or the right—No! That’s not art! Dead art! Cancel!” He gasped, jumped in again, swinging his left arm in front of him as if driving back hordes. “The artist’s contract is, come hell or high water he won’t go cheap, he’ll never quit trying for the best. Maybe he fails, maybe he sells out and hates himself.
You know it can happen just like you know you can stop loving your wife, but all the same you make the promise. Otherwise you have to go with ordinary craziness, which is disgusting.” He spit. Forgot himself and spit right on the floor.

  Then he turned with a flourish, reached into the pot two-handed with the tongs, and raised up the dog to look at it. He was bent forward like a wrestler, his expression fierce, arm and shoulder muscles swollen. Whether he was pleased or disappointed we couldn’t tell. He swung around and held the carcass toward us, high, dripping pink water—raised it and held it up like some old-time sacrifice the gods were supposed to come sniff.

  In the doorway old Frank Dellapicallo said, gravel-voiced, black as doom, “If you cooked that thing you better serve it, mister.”

  Arnold swung his head around to look at him. Automatically he lowered the dog into the pot. “What’s that?”

  “You heard me,” Frank growled. “If that’s your chef’s special, you better find customers to feed it to.”

  “I’ll eat it, don’t worry,” Arnold said.

  “Not you,” Frank said. “People. Otherwise”—he jerked one cane toward the hallway behind him—“out!”

  Joe came into the light now, arms folded, white sleeves sharply outlined over the black of his vest. He was grinning. You couldn’t really blame him, even though Arnold had been more or less a friend. There were blood marks all over the floor, though not as bad as earlier. Ellis had mopped some of it up. Angelina was leaning forward, stretching out her arms toward the old man, whining at him, “Gram-pa …”