Noah's Turn by Ken Finkleman Page B

a work of art. But while he believed in a spiritual need to experience art, art is not life; it is something very different from life and if it weren’t different from life it wouldn’t be art.
Belle de Jour
belongs on the screen, not in my apartment, he told himself.
    â€œWhat are you thinking?” Andrea asked him.
    Christ, he hadn’t heard that question in bed after sex since university, and he realized that whatever Andrea’s struggle was, it certainly wasn’t a heavyweight fight like his. He remembered how his father often quoted Thor-eau’s line, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and how this was Andrea. This was what his father had feared most in his own life, and his only salvation was his unwavering devotion to Noah’s mother. When she died and he died of a heart attack just ten months later, his death was no surprise to Noah.
    â€œI’m not thinking anything in particular,” Noah replied.
    â€œI’m thinking about why I’m here,” she said in an unexpressive tone, as if she were laying the foundation for something bigger to come.
    â€œMaybe this conversation shouldn’t go there,” he said. “What I mean is, this works because we don’t go there.”
    She didn’t say anything more for two or three minutes. Then she said she’d better go.

    Noah put on his only suit, which was now beginning to feel like his dedicated funeral attire, since funerals were, of late, the main occasion for it. He left his apartment to walk the forty minutes it would take to get to the McEwen funeral. He tried to enjoy the mild spring air and not think of the pure madness of his situation, attending the funeral of the man he had killed. This was another act he would have to perform as the “new Noah.” The role required an outward sincerity and an inward deceit. Or was it the other way around? He would treat it like the time he went to a cousin’s wedding on acid and all his relatives turned into people out of a Dickens novel, which included Mrs. Havershamand her cobweb-covered wedding cake. On the inside reality had completely collapsed, but on the outside, as he heard later, he was quite sociable and funny.
    He passed a panhandler sitting cross-legged next to the curb with a dirty paper coffee cup held out. Noah gave him five dollars because he felt that any less from someone in a suit would look cheap.
    â€œThat’ll get you into heaven,” the panhandler yelled after him as he kept walking. But Noah didn’t give panhandlers money to get to heaven; he did it because of who they were. Not because they needed it but because they deserved it. For him the panhandler could only be who he or she was. Why be a panhandler when you’re really something else—when, for example, you’re secretly a person of means? It was the people who played their roles who he resented and hated. The hypocrites who cultivated professional lives and reputations, which they believed defined them, when, in fact, many of them were more than capable of deceit, theft and perhaps murder. Noah wasn’t a religious person, so heaven wasn’t on his agenda and neither was morality. His social concern was the face and the real person behind it, and almost everywhere he looked he saw fraudulence. The frauds he hated most were the successful frauds, becausetheir success made him jealous and he hated most of all his own jealousy.
    There was no morality, he thought; there was only the struggle to be truthful.

    Noah arrived at the church and signed a guest book, which had a space beside each name for short comments about the deceased. No matter how macabre his situation, he couldn’t help but think how funny it would be to write, “He didn’t die easily. I virtually had to hack his head off.” He signed his name and next to it wrote, “A tragic loss, a remarkable man.”
    Noah took a seat and nodded to a few