by James Salter
“What kind of forest?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, taking his hand.
“No,” Viri said. “Bring it here.”
They were almost the same size, the two men, the same age. Jivan had less assurance. They sat like the owner of a great house and his gardener. The one waited for the other to introduce a subject, to permit him to speak.
“It’s getting cold,” Viri remarked.
“Yes, the leaves are beginning to turn,” Jivan agreed.
“It won’t be long. I like the winter,” Viri said. “I like the sense of its closing in on you.”
“How is Perruchio?” Franca asked.
“I’m teaching him to hang upside down.”
“How do you do that?”
“Like a bat,” Jivan added.
“I’d like to see that.”
“Well, when he learns.”
Nedra brought his drink.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Would you like more ice?”
“No, this is fine.”
She was easily kind, Nedra, easily or not at all. Jivan sipped the drink. He wiped the bottom of the glass before setting it down. He owned a moving and storage company, quite small. His truck was immaculate. The quilts were piled neatly, the fenders undented.
At noon, twice a week, sometimes more, she lay in his bed in the quiet room in back. On the table near her head were two empty glasses, her bracelets, her rings. She wore nothing; her hands were naked, her wrists.
“I love the taste of this,” she said.
“Yes,” Jivan said. “It’s funny, no one else serves it.”
“It’s our favorite.”
Noon, the sun beyond the ceiling, the doors closed tight. She was lost, she was weeping. He was doing it in the same, steady rhythm, like a monologue, like the creaking of oars. Her cries were unending, her breasts hard. She was flinging out the sounds of a mare, a dog, a woman fleeing for her life. Her hair was spilled about her. He did not alter his pace.
“Viri, light the fire, would you?”
“Let me do it,” Jivan offered.
“I think there’s some kindling in the basket,” Viri said.
She saw him far above her. Her hands were clutching the sheets. In three, four, five vast strokes that rang along the great meridians of her body, he came in one huge splash, like a tumbler of water. They lay in silence. For a long time he remained without moving, as on a horse in the autumn, holding to her, exhausted, dreaming. They were together in a deep, limb-heavy sleep, sprawled in it. Her nipples were larger, more soft, as if she were pregnant.
The fire took hold, crackling, curling between the heavy pieces of wood, Jivan kneeling before it. Franca watched. She said nothing. She knew already, as a cat knows, as any beast; it was beating in her blood. Of course, she was still a child; her glances were brief, inconsequential. She had no power, only the buds of it, the vacancy where it would appear. She had already learned what it meant to say his name, artlessly pausing. Her mother was fond of him, she knew that, and she felt a warmth in him, not like her father’s but less familiar, less bland. Even when he was doing something with Danny, as he was now, looking at the miniature landscape she had made of pine twigs and stones, his attention and thoughts were not far off, she was sure of it.
Nedra woke slowly to dreamlike, feathery touches. She struggled to come to the surface, to regain herself. It took half an hour. The afternoon sun was on the curtains, the voice of the day had changed. He held up an arm as if to the light. She held hers beside it. They stared at these arms with a vague, mutual interest.
“Your hand is smaller.”
It moved closer to his, as if for comparison.
“You have better fingers,” he said. They were pale, long, the bone within them showing. “Mine are square.”
“Mine are square, too,” she said.
“Mine are squarer.”
Lunch, brandy, coffee. She loved the isolation, one side on a rising street, of this store that had been abandoned. She was filled with a sense of peace, of accomplishment. She had received goodness, now she radiated it, like a stone warmed for bed in the evening. She left by the side door. The ancient trees had burst the sidewalk, enormous trees, their trunks scarred like reptiles. Only a few leaves had fallen. It was still mild, the last hour of summer.
He was slight, Jivan, inconsequential. He was devoted to those American emblems of drab middle class, shoes, pastel sweaters, knit ties. She drove his car when her own was broken down. He scolded her for her carelessness with it, the papers it was strewn with, the dents that appeared in the side. She smiled at him, she apologized. She did as she pleased.
His ambition was to be a man of property. He had the cunning for it. He owned the storefront in which he lived, he was buying a house on ten acres near New City. He accumulated quietly, patiently, like a woman.
“I’m interested in your house,” Nedra said.
“Yes, where is it, exactly?” Viri asked.
It was nothing, Jivan said, a very small house, but the land was nice. It was really a studio more than a house. There was a brook, though, with a ruined stone bridge.
They were eating dinner. They drank the Mirassou. Franca had half a glass. Her face seemed exceptionally wise in the soft light, her features indestructible.
“It’s in your blood to have property, isn’t it?” Nedra said.
“I think it’s how you’re brought up. But, in the blood … there could be something there, too. You know, I remember my father,” he said. “He told me, ‘Jivan, I want you to promise me three things.’ I was just a little boy, and he said, ‘Jivan, first of all, promise me you will never gamble. Never.’ I mean, I was seven, eight years old. And he was saying, never gamble. ‘If you must gamble,’ he said, ‘do it with the king of gamblers. You can find him in the streets, he is naked, he’s lost everything, even his clothes.’
“ ‘Secondly’—I was still picturing this king, this beggar, but my father went on, ‘Secondly, never visit whores.’ Excuse me, Franca. I was eight years old, I didn’t know what we were even talking about. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘now promise me. If you do visit them, go only in the morning; that’s when they have no paint, no powder, you can see what they are really like, do you understand?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, Father.’ ‘Good,’ he said, ‘and the third thing, now listen: always paint a house before you sell it.’ ”
He was dark, he was filled with stories like the serpent in myths; each white tooth contained a story and each story a hundred others, they were all within him, intertwined, sleeping. The stranger, flashing with legends, he cannot be overcome. Once they have escaped him, these hymns, these jokes, these lies join with air, they are breathed, they cannot be filtered out. He is like the prow of a ship cutting through seas of sleep. Silence is mysterious, but stories fill us like the sun. They are like fragments in which reflections lie like broken pieces; collect them and a greater shape begins to form, the story of stories appears.
“My father is dead,” Jivan said, “but my mother is still alive. She’s a wonderful woman, my mother. She knows everything. She has a house, a little garden, not far from the sea. Every morning she drinks a glass of wine. She’s never left her town. She’s like … who was it, Diogenes. In that little town with its trees in the square she’s as happy as we are in the heart of the greatest city.”
“Diogenes?” Viri said.
“Yes, isn’t he the one that lived in the barrel?”
Two
1
IN THE MORNING THE LIGHT came in silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, infinite, the moist earth beneath—one could taste this earth, its richness, its density, bathe in the air like a stream. Not a sound. The rind of the cheese had dried like bread. The glasses held the stale aroma of vanished wine.
In the empty dining room hung the expulsion from Eden, a painting filled with beasts and a forest like Rousseau’s from which two figures were emerging, the man still proud, the wom
an no less so. She was graceful, only half in shame; she was irreverent, her flesh gleamed. Even in the early light which deprived the marvelous serpent of his colors, the trees of their fruit, she was recognizable, at least to the painting’s owner, her legs, the boldness of her body hair, its very life. It was Kaya.
He had noticed it only by chance. He had been drawn one day to its lambence, unthinking, as one is drawn to the worn spot on a relic, to a white face in a crowd. He had discovered it as if in confirmation, as if objects were proving his life.
On another wall was the famous photograph of Louis Sullivan in Mississippi, taken at Ocean Springs, his summer home. In white shirt and pants, a white cap, with a mustache and beard, he looked like a river captain or novelist. A large nose, delicate fingers, leaning almost daintily, posing, against a tree.
He could not be Sullivan, he could not be Gaudí. Well, perhaps Gaudí, who lived to that old age which is sainthood, an ascetic old age, frail, slight, wandering the streets of Barcelona, unknown to its many inhabitants. In the end he was struck by a streetcar and left unattended. In the bareness and odor of the charity ward amid the children and poor relations a single eccentric life was ending, a life that was more clamorous than the sea, an everlasting life, a life which was easy to abandon since it was only a husk; it had already metamorphosed, escaped into buildings, cathedrals, legend.
Morning. The earliest light. The sky is pale above the trees, pure, more mysterious than ever, a sky to dizzy the fedayeen, to end the astronomer’s night. In it, dim as coins on a beach, fading, shine two last stars.
Autumn morning. The horses in nearby fields are standing motionless. The pony already has a heavier coat; it seems too soon. Her eye is dark and large, the lashes scanty. Walking close, one hears the steady sound of grass being eaten, the peace of the earth being milled.
His dreams are illicit; in them he sees a forbidden woman, encounters her in crowds with other men. In the next moment they are alone. She is loving, complaisant. Everything is incredibly real: the bed, the way she is arranged …
He wakes to find his wife lying on her stomach, the children on top of her, one on her back, the other on her buttocks. They are sleeping on her, clinging, head to foot. Their presence absolves him, slowly he grows content. This world, its birds in their feathers, its sunlight … reason, at least for the moment. It consoles him. He is warm, potent, filled with impregnable joy.
What passes between them, this couple, in the endless hours of consort? What finds its way, what flows? Their bedroom was spacious, with a view of the river and waist-high windows, double-opening, the glass cut in diamonds, uneven, bowed outward, distorted as if by heat; here and there a sliver was missing, a lozenge escaped from its soft rim of lead. The walls were a faded turquoise, a curious color he no longer disliked. Beyond French doors was a white sunroom, white as linen, where, feet upward, on a wicker couch their dog was asleep.
Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less—at least it was the preparation for one—and it was an illustration of life for their children. They had never expressed this to one another, but they were agreed upon it, and these two versions were entwined somehow so that one being hidden, the other was revealed. They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachievable but in the sense of the pure.
Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.
There is no happiness like this happiness: quiet mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead. They lived a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven, in which the misfortune of one, a failure, illness, would stagger them all. It was like a garment, this life. Its beauty was outside, its warmth within.
* * *
For Franca’s birthday there was a marvelous tablecloth Nedra had made, a jungle of flowers she had cut out of paper and then glued flat, piece by piece, the richest ferns and greens imaginable. She also made invitations, games, hats. There were chef’s hats, opera hats, blue and gold conductor’s hats with names painted on them. Over the table hung a great papier-mâché frog filled with gifts and chocolate coins. Viri played the piano for musical chairs, scrupulously careful not to look at the nervous marchers. Leslie Dahlander was there, Dana Paum whose father was an actor. There were nine little girls in all, no boys.
A cake with orange icing. Nedra had even made ice cream pungent with vanilla, so thick it stretched like taffy. The house was like a theater; there was the performance, in fact, of Punch and Judy to end the day, Viri and Jivan kneeling behind the stage, the script strewn between them, the limp forms of puppets arranged according to their appearance. The children sat on couches, screaming and clapping. They knew it by heart. In the midst of them was Franca. On this day of her birth she seemed more beautiful than ever before. Her face was filled with happiness, her white teeth shone. Viri had a glimpse of her through an opening at the edge of the stage. Her hands were in her lap. She sat attentive, hanging on every word.
“Where is the baby?”
“Why, didn’t you catch him?”
“Catch him? What have you done?”
“Why, I threw him out the window, I thought you might be passing by.”
Shouts of glee. Franca, radiant, was taller than the girls around her. She was clearly their star.
The automobiles turned slowly into the drive to pick up exhausted guests, the lights in the windows came on, a haze filled the evening. Hadji lay exhausted among the debris. At last there was quiet.
“Some of them are nice children,” Nedra admitted. “I’m very fond of Dana. But isn’t it strange—do you suppose it’s because they’re ours—Franca and Danny are different. They have something very special I don’t know how to describe.”
“Jivan misread half the lines.”
“Oh, the puppet show was marvelous.”
“He stepped on Scaramouch—by mistake, of course.”
“Which one is Scaramouch?”
“He’s the one who says, I’ll make you pay for my head, sir.”
“Oh, too bad.”
“I can fix it,” Viri conceded.
The room was silent, littered with bits of paper. The events of the day had already a kind of luminous outline. The frog, like a shipment of damaged goods, lay in pieces on the table, destroyed by countless blows.
She would make dinner after a while. They would dine together, something light: a boiled potato, cold meat, the remains of a bottle of wine. Their daughters would sit numbly, the dark of fatigue beneath their eyes. Nedra would take a bath. Like those who have given everything—performers, athletic champions—they would sink into that apathy which only completion yields.
2
“ARE YOU HAPPY, VIRI?” SHE asked.
They were in traffic, driving across town at five in the afternoon. The great mechanical river of which they were part moved slowly at the intersections and then more freely on the long transverse blocks. Nedra was doing her nails. At each red light, without a word, she handed him the bottle and painted one nail.
Was he happy? The question was so ingenuous, so mild. There were things he dreamed of doing that he feared he never would. He often weighed his life. And yet, he was young still, the years stretched before him like endless plains.
Was he happy? He accepted the open bottle. She carefully dipped the brush, absorbed in her acts. Her instinct, he knew, was sharp. She had the even teeth of a sex that nips thread in two, teeth that cut as cleanly as a razor. All her power seemed concentrated in her ease, her questioning glance. He cleared his throat.
“Yes, I suppose I’m happy.”
Silence. The traffic ahead had b
egun to move. She took the bottle to allow him to drive.
“But isn’t it a stupid idea?” she asked. “If you really think about it?”
“Happiness?”
“Do you know what Krishnamurti says? Consciously or unconsciously, we are all completely selfish, and as long as we get what we want, we believe everything is all right.”
“Getting what we want … but is that happiness?”
“I don’t know. I know that not getting what you want is certainly unhappiness.”
“I’d have to think about that,” he said. “Never getting what you want, that could be unhappiness, but as long as there’s a chance of getting it …”
They had only to reach Tenth Avenue and the street would be empty, open, as on a weekend; they would be free, speeding onto the highway, rushing north. The gray, exhausted crowds were trudging past newsstands, key shops, banks. They were slumped at tables in the Automat, eating in silence. There were one-legged pigeons, battered cars, the darkened windows of endless apartments, and above it all an autumn sky, smooth as a dome.
“It’s difficult to think about,” she said. “Especially when he says that thought can never bring you to truth.”
“What can? That’s the real question.”
“Thought is always changing. It’s like a stream, it moves around things, it’s shifting. Thought is disorder, he says.”
“But what is the alternative?”
“That’s very complicated,” she agreed. “It’s a different way of seeing things. Do you ever feel you would like to find a new way of living?”
“It depends what you mean by a new way. Yes, sometimes I do.”
It was the day Monica died, the little girl with one leg. The surgeons had not removed enough, there was no way to do it. She had begun to have pain again, invisible, as if it had all been for nothing. That pain was the knell. After it came fever and headaches. She swelled everywhere. She went into a coma. It took weeks, of course. Finally—it was in the evening, Viri was bringing in wood, bits of bark stuck to his sleeves, his arms filled, he was making a bank of cut ends, a parapet that would last through the winter when she died. Her father was still at work. Her mother was sitting there in a folding chair, and her child ceased to breathe. In an instant she was gone. She was lighter suddenly, much lighter, she lay with a kind of terrifying insignificance. Everything had left her—the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something. They pass, dissolve, are scattered like dust.