by James Salter
A strange, snakelike creature of elegant lines lay adorned in flowers.
“What kind of pen did you do it with?” he said.
“A sensational pen. Look. I bought it.”
He was examining it.
“You can use different points,” she explained.
“It’s a wonderful eel.”
“For centuries, Viri,” she said, “no one knew anything about them. They were an absolute mystery. Aristotle wrote that they had no sex, no eggs, no semen. He said they rose, already grown, from out of the sea. For thousands of years people believed that.”
“But don’t they lay eggs?”
“I’m going to tell you all that,” she promised. “Today, all day, I was drawing this eel. Do you like the flowers?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“You’re much better than I am, yours will be fantastic. Besides, you’re right, the eel is a male thing, but women understand it, too. It fascinates them.”
“I’ve heard that,” he murmured.
“Listen …”
He was empty, at peace. The darkened windows made the room seem bright. He had come in from the sea, from a thrilling voyage. He had straightened his clothes, brushed his hair. He was filled with secrets, deceptions that had made him whole.
“The eel is a fish,” she read, “of the order Apode. It is brown and olive, its sides are yellow, its belly pale. The male lives in harbors and rivers. The female lives far from the sea. The life of the eel was always a mystery. No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went.”
“This is a book,” he said.
“A book or a story. Just for us. I love the descriptions. They live in fresh water,” she continued, “but once in their life, and once only, they go to the sea. They make the trip together, male and female. They never return.”
“This is accurate, of course.”
“The eel comes from an egg. Afterwards it is a larva. They float on the ocean current, not a quarter of an inch long, transparent. They feed on algae. After a year or longer they finally reach the shore. Here they develop into true young eels, and here, at the river mouths, the females leave the males and travel upstream. Eels feed on everything: dead fish and animals, crayfish, shrimp. They hide in the mud by day and eat at night. In the winter they hibernate.”
She sipped her drink and went on. “The female lives like this for years, in ponds and streams, and then, one day in autumn, she stops and eats nothing more. Her color changes to black or nearly black, her nose becomes sharper, her eyes large. Moving at night, resting by day, sometimes crossing meadows and fields, she travels downstream to the sea.”
“And the male?”
“She meets the male who has spent all his life near the river mouth, and together, by hundreds of thousands, they return to the place where they were born, the sea of weeds, the Sargasso Sea. At depths of uncounted feet they mate and die.”
“Nedra, it sounds like Wagner.”
“There are common eels, pike eels, snake eels, sharp-tailed eels, every kind of eel. They are born in the sea, they live in fresh water and they go to the sea to spawn and die. Doesn’t it move you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know how to end it.”
“Perhaps with a beautiful drawing.”
“Oh, there’ll be drawings on every page,” she said.
“I want it filled with drawings.”
His eyes felt tired.
“I want it to be on pale, gray paper,” she said. “Here, draw one.”
The children were coming downstairs.
“An eel?” he said.
“Here are a lot of pictures of them.”
“Are they allowed to see what I’m doing?”
“No,” she said. “No, it should be a surprise.”
They ate in a Chinese restaurant that was crowded on weekends but this night rather empty. The menus were worn and coming apart at the fold. He had two vodkas and showed his children how to use chopsticks. The dishes were set on the table and uncovered: shrimp and peas, braised chicken, rice. Two lives are perfectly natural, he thought, as he picked up a water chestnut. Two lives are essential. Meanwhile he was talking about China: legends of emperors, the stone pleasure boats in Peiping. Nedra seemed watchful, quiet. He suddenly grew cautious and became almost silent, afraid of betraying himself. There was something he had overlooked, he tried to imagine what it was, something she had noticed by chance. The guilt of the inexperienced, like a false illness, bathed him. He tried to remain calm, realistic.
“Would you like some dessert?” he asked.
He called the waiter, who wore a name tag on his jacket.
“Kenneth?” Viri said in surprise.
“Kennif,” the Chinese confirmed.
“Ah, yes. Kenneth, what is there for dessert? Do you have fortune cookies?”
“Oh yes, sah.”
“Kumquats?”
“No kumquat,” Kenneth said.
“No kumquat?”
“Jerro,” he said appeasingly.
“Just the cookies, then,” Viri said.
In clean pajamas he lay in bed waiting. His shoes were in the closet, his clothes put away. The coolness of the pillow beneath his head, the sense of weariness and well-being that filled him, he examined these things as if they were forewarnings. He lay resigned and cautious, ready for the blow.
Nedra took her place beside him. He lay there silent; he could not close his eyes. Her presence was the final pledge of sanctity and order, like those great commanders who were the last to sleep. The house was quiet, the windows dark, his daughters were in their beds. On Nedra’s finger, somewhere near him, was a gold band of marriage, an ink-stained finger possibly, a finger that he longed to stroke, that he had not the nerve to touch.
They lay beside one another in the dark. In a drawer of the writing table, buried in back, was a letter composed of phrases clipped from magazines and papers, a pasted letter of love with jokes and passionate suggestions, a famous letter sent from Georgia before they were married when Viri was in the army, aching, alone. There were bees nesting in the greenhouse, erosion along the river shore. On a child’s bureau, in a box with four small legs, were necklaces, rings, a starfish hard as wood. A house as rich as an aquarium, filled with the rhythm of sleep, limbs without strength, partly open mouths.
Nedra was awake. She suddenly rose on one elbow.
“What is that ungodly smell?” she said. “Hadji? Is that you?”
He was lying beneath the bed.
“Get out of there,” she cried.
He would not move. She continued to command. At last, ears flat, he came forth.
“Viri,” she sighed. “Open the window.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Your damned dog.”
10
MARCEL-MAAS LIVED IN AN UNFINISHED stone barn, much of it built with his own hands. He was a painter. He had a gallery that showed his work, but he was largely unknown. His daughter was seventeen. His wife—people found her strange—was in the last years of her youth. She was like a beautiful dinner left out overnight. She was sumptuous, but the guests were gone. Her cheeks had begun to quiver when she walked.
A thick beard, wartiness of nose, corduroy jacket, long silences: that was Marcel-Maas. His effort was all on canvas now; the window frames of the barn were flaking, the inside walls were stained. He repaired nothing, not even a leak; he seldom went out, he never drove a car. He hated travel, he said.
His wife was a mare alone in a field. She was waiting for madness, grazing her life away. She went to the city, to Bloomingdale’s, the gynecologist, to art supply stores. Sometimes she would see a movie in the afternoon.
“Travel is nonsense,” he announced. “The only thing you see is what’s already inside you.”
He was in his carpet slippers. His black hair lay loose on his head.
“I can’t agree, somehow,” Viri said.
“The ones who could gain something from tr
avel, who have sensitivity, they have no need to travel.”
“That’s like saying those who could benefit from education have no need to be educated,” Viri said.
Marcel-Maas was silent. “You’re too literal,” he said finally.
“I love to travel,” his wife remarked.
Silence. Marcel-Maas ignored her. She was standing at the window, looking out at the day, drinking a glass of red wine. “Robert is the only one I’ve ever heard of who doesn’t like to,” she said. She continued to look out the window.
“Where have you ever traveled?” he said.
“That’s a good question, isn’t it?”
“You’re talking about something you don’t know anything about. You’ve read about it. You hear about these doctors and their wives who go to Europe. Bank clerks go to Europe. What is there in Europe?”
“What are you talking about?” she said. Their daughter appeared in the doorway. She had lean arms, a lean body, small breasts. Her eyes were a riveting blue. “Hello, Kate,” Viri said.
She was engaged in biting her thumbnail. Her feet were bare.
“I’ll tell you what Europe has,” her father continued, “the detritus of failed civilizations. Night clubs. Fleas.”
“Fleas?”
“Jivan’s here,” Kate said.
Nora Marcel-Maas pressed her face to the glass to see out. “Where?”
“He just drove up.”
They heard the front door open. “Hello,” a voice called.
“In here!” Marcel-Maas shouted.
They heard him come down the hall. The kitchen was the warmest room in the barn; the upper floors were not even heated.
Jivan was short. He was thin, like the boys one sees loitering in plazas of Mexico and countries further south. He was one of those boys, but with manners, with newly bought clothes.
“Hello,” he said, entering. “Hello, Kate. You’ve gotten so beautiful. Let me see. Turn around.” She did so without hesitation. He took her hand and kissed it like a bunch of flowers. “Robert, your daughter is fantastic. She has the heart of a courtesan.”
“Don’t worry. She’s getting married.”
“I thought it was just a trial,” Jivan complained. “Isn’t it?”
“More or less,” she said.
“Viri,” Jivan said, “I saw your car. That’s what made me stop. How are you?”
“Are you driving your motorcycle?” Viri asked.
“Would you like another lesson?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That was nothing, that little accident.”
“I’d like to try again,” Viri said, “but my side still hurts.” Jivan accepted some wine. His hands were small, the nails well cared for, his face smooth, like a child’s.
“Where have you been, in the city?” Marcel-Maas asked.
“Where’s Nora?”
“She was here a minute ago.”
“Yes, I just came back,” Jivan said. “I spent last night there. I went to a sort of reception … a Lebanese thing. It was late, so I stayed. They’re very strange, American women,” he said. He sat down and smiled politely. With him one was in cafés and drab restaurants warmed by the murmur of talk. He smiled again. His teeth were strong. He slept with a knife at the head of his bed.
“You know, I met this woman,” he said. “She was the ex-wife of an ambassador or someone, blond, in her thirties. After the party we were near the place where I was going to stay. There was a bar, and I asked her, very matter-of-factly, if she’d like to stop there for a drink. You can’t imagine what she said. She said, ‘I can’t. I have the curse.’ ”
“Haven’t you had enough of them?” Marcel-Maas said.
“Enough? Can one have enough?”
“They’re all like lukoum to you.”
“Locoum,” Jivan corrected. “Rahat locoum. That’s Turkish delight,” he translated. “Very fattening. Robert likes the sound of it. Someday I’ll bring you some rahat locoum. Then you’ll see what it is.”
“I know what it is,” Marcel-Maas said. “I’ve had plenty of it.”
“Not the real rahat.”
“Real.”
Jivan was his friend, Marcel-Maas used to say. He had no other friends, not even his wife. He was going to divorce her anyway. She was neurotic. An artist should live with an uncomplicated woman, a woman like Bonnard’s who would pose in only her shoes. The rest of it would follow. By the rest of it, he meant a hot lunch every day, without which he could not work. He sat down to the table like an Irish laborer, hands stained, head down, potatoes, meat, thick slices of bread. He was silent, he had no jokes in him, he was waiting for things to resolve themselves while he ate, to form into something unexpected and interesting like the coat of fine bubbles on one’s leg in the bath.
“So where’s your mother, Kate?” he said. “Where’d she disappear to?”
Kate shrugged. She had the languor of a delivery boy, of someone who could not be hurt. She had lived through unheated bedrooms, unpaid bills, her father’s abandoning them, his returns, beautiful birds he had carved out of applewood and painted and placed on her bed. He had spent a lot of time with her when she was a child. She remembered some of it. She had lived in the waves of color he had chosen, irradiated by them as by the sun. She had seen his torn sketchbooks on the floor with footprints across their pages, she had found him sprawled drunk in her room, his face on the thick spruce boards. She could never betray him; it was unthinkable. He asked nothing of her. All these years he had been beaten, as if in a street fight, before her eyes. He did not complain. He talked about painting sometimes, about pruning the trees. There was in him the saintliness of a man who never looked in the mirror, whose thoughts were dazzling but illiterate, whose dreams were immense. Every penny he had ever made he had given to them, and they had spent it.
Her boyfriend in California was a painter. They smoked, with music filling the air, for days at a time. They stayed out late, they slept half the day. Her father had taught her nothing, but the fabric of his life was the only one that felt good to her; she wore it as she wore his old shoes sometimes, his feet were very small.
“Well, where is she?” he asked. “You can’t get rid of her when you work. Then when you want her, she leaves. Why don’t you go and tell her Jivan is here?”
“Oh, she knows,” Kate replied.
11
JIVAN LOVED CHILDREN. THEY showed him their games, they knew he would learn to play them quickly. He did not descend to it; he became a child. He had time for it. He embodied the simple virtues of a life lived alone. He had time for everything—for cooking, for plants.
He lived in an empty store that had once been a pharmacy. A long, serene room in front, the windows curtained with bamboo and dense with plants. At night one could just barely see in. It looked like a restaurant, the last patrons lingering. A racing bicycle hung on the wall. A white Alsatian put his nose silently, without barking, to the glass of the door.
He had birds in a cage and a gray parrot that spread its wings.
“Perruchio,” he would say, “do the angel.”
Nothing.
“The angel, the angel,” he said. “Fa l’angelone.”
Like a cat stretching its claws the parrot would slowly fan out its wings and feathers. Its head turned in profile to one, black, heartless eye.
“Why is he named Perruchio?” Danny asked. As she tried to approach him, he moved sideways a step at a time.
“That was his name when I got him,” Jivan said.
He played twenty questions. His education had been the simplest possible: books. He read no fiction, only journals, letters, the lives of the great.
“All right,” he said. “Are you ready? I have one.”
“A man,” Danny said.
“Yes.”
“Living.”
“No.”
A pause while they abandoned hope of its being easy.
“Did he have a beard?”
The
ir questions were always oblique.
“Yes, a beard.”
“Lincoln!” they cried.
“No.”
“Did he have a big family?”
“Yes, big.”
“Napoleon!”
“No, not Napoleon.”
“How many questions is that?”
“I don’t know—four, five,” he said.
He brought them gifts, boxes in which expensive soap had come, miniature playing cards, Greek beads. He appeared for dinner in the October dusk, his feet crushing the cool gravel, a bottle of wine in his hand. Autumn was coming; it was in the air.
Hadji was lying on his side in the shadow of a shrub, the dark leaves touching him.
“Hello, Hadji. How are you?” He stopped to talk as if to a person. There was a faint movement near the dog’s rump, a beat of the missing tail. “What are you, having a rest?”
He entered the house confident but correct, like a relative who knows his place. He respected Viri’s knowledge, his background, the people he knew. He had dressed carefully, in the gray pants one finds in chain department stores, an ascot, a white shirt.
“Hello, Franca,” he said. He kissed her naturally. “Hello, Dan.” He smiled as he extended his hand to Viri.
“Let me take the wine,” Viri offered. He examined the label. “Mirassou. I don’t know it.”
“A friend of mine in California told me about it,” Jivan said. “He has a restaurant. You know how the Lebanese are; when they come to a place, the first thing they do is find a good restaurant, and then they always go there, they don’t go anywhere else. That’s how I know him. I used to eat there. When I was in California, I was there every night.”
“We’re having lamb for dinner.”
“It should be very good with lamb.”
“Would you like a San Raphael?” Nedra asked.
“That would be nice,” he said. He sat down. “Well,” he said to Danny, “what have you been doing?” He was less at ease with them when their father was present.
“I want to show you something I’m making,” she said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a forest.”