by James Salter
The days had lost their warmth. Sometimes at noon, as if in farewell, there was an hour or two like summer, swiftly gone. On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments. In the distant fields, seas of dank earth far from towns, there were still tomatoes clinging to the vines. At first glance it seemed only a few, but they were hidden, sheltered; that was how they had survived.
Nedra had a basket full of them. Viri had two. The weight was astonishing. They were like wet clothes; they were heavy as oranges. A family of gleaners, their faces dirty, their hands dark with the stain of this last moist earth. It was a field near New City; the farmer was their friend.
“Pick the small ones,” Viri told his daughters.
Their baskets were filled as well. They were putting the little ones in their pockets, those that were partly green. They moved down the endless rows, straying back and forth, tiring, learning to stoop, to work, to feel the naked fruit in their hands. They cried out to each other, sometimes they sat on the ground.
At last they reached the end. “Papa, we have so many!”
“Let me see.”
They stood near the car, tomatoes piled around them, the dirt still clinging, the air turned chill. Nedra looked like a woman who had once been rich. She held her hands away from her. Her hair had come loose.
“What are we going to do with all these fucking tomatoes?” she laughed. Her marvelous laugh, in the fall, at the edge of the fields.
“Come on, Hadji,” she called, “you filthy beast.” His nose was caked with earth. “What a day you’ve had,” she said.
Their fingernails were black, their shoes encrusted. They put the tomatoes in the unheated entry to the kitchen as Jivan drove up in the dusk.
3
“THERE ARE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT marriage. I love the familiarity of it,” Nedra said. “It’s like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it. You’re hardly even aware of it any more. I suppose I’m very conventional,” she decided.
“In some ways …”
“If you asked people what they wanted, what would most of them say? I know what I’d say: money. I’d like a lot of money. That’s the one thing I never have enough of.”
Jivan said nothing.
“I’m not materialistic, you know that. Well, I am, I suppose; I like clothes and food, I don’t like the bus or depressing places, but money is very nice. I should have married someone with money. Viri will never have any. Never. You know, it’s terrible to be tied to someone who can’t possibly give you what you want. I mean, the simplest thing. We really aren’t meant to live together. And yet, you know, I look at him making puppets for them, they sit there with their heads close to his, absolutely absorbed by it.”
“I know.”
“He’s doing the entire Elephant’s Child.”
“Yes.”
“The Kola-Kola bird, the crocodile, everything. You know, he is talented. He says, ‘Franca …’ and she says, ‘Yes, Papa.’ I can’t explain it.”
“Franca is very beautiful.”
“This terrible dependency on others, this need to love.”
“It isn’t terrible.”
“Oh, yes, because at the same time there is the stupidity of this kind of life, the boredom, the arguments.”
He was placing a pillow. She raised herself without a word.
“With the milk goes the cow,” he said. “With the cow goes the milk.”
“The cow.”
“You understand that.”
“If you want milk you must accept a cow, a barn, fields, all that.”
“That’s it,” he said.
He was moving unhurriedly, like a man setting a table plate by plate. There are times when one is important and others when one almost does not exist. She felt him kneel. She could not see him. Her eyes were closed, her face pressed to the sheet. “Karezza.”
He was solemn, unhearing. “All right,” he said.
He was slow, intent, like an illiterate trying to write. He was unaware of her; he was beginning the act as if it were a cure. The slowness, the deliberation struck her down like blows.
“Yes,” he murmured. His hands were on her shoulders, on the swell of her buttocks with a force that made her helpless. The weight, the presumption of it was overwhelming. Her moans began to rise.
“Yes,” he said, “cry out.”
There was no movement, none at all except for a slow distending to which she reacted as if to pain. She was rolling, sobbing. Her shouts were muffled. He did nothing, then more of it and more.
Afterwards it was as if they had run for miles. They lay near each other, they could not speak. An empty day, the gulls on the river, blue and reflecting blue like layers of mica.
“When you do it,” she said, “I sometimes have the feeling I’m going so far I won’t be able to come back. I feel as if I’m …” she suddenly rose partway. “What’s that?”
The door was rattling. He listened. “It’s the cats.”
Her head fell to the bed again.
“What do they want?”
“They want to come in,” he said. “It’s their one ambition.”
The noise at the door continued.
“Let them in.”
“Not now,” he said.
She lay like a woman sleeping. Her back was bare, her arms above her head, her hair loose. He touched this back as if it were something purchased, as if he had discovered it for the first time.
She could never be without him, she had told him that. There were times she hated him because he was free in a way she was not; he had no children, no wife.
“You’re not going to get married, are you?” she said.
“Well, of course I think about it.”
“It’s not necessary for you. You already have the fruit of marriage.”
“The fruit. The fruit is something else.”
“You have plenty of time,” she insisted. “I’m stupid. I’ve told you the thing I’m most afraid of.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“I can’t help it. It’s something I can’t do anything about. I depend on you.”
“Our lives are always in someone else’s hands.”
Her car was parked outside. It was afternoon, winter, the trees were bare. Her children were in class, writing in large letters, making silver and green maps of the states.
Viri came home in the darkness, headlights blazing his approach, illuminating the trees, the house, and ending like dying stars.
The door closed behind him. He came in from the evening air, cool and whitened, as if from the sea. His hair was even washed out of place. He had come from drawings, discussions with clients. He was tired, a little awry.
“Hello, Viri,” she said.
A fire was burning. His children were laying out forks.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked.
“Yes.” He kissed his daughters as each went by. He ate a small, green olive bitter as tea.
She prepared it. She liked her life this evening, he could tell. She was filled with contentment. It was on her mouth, in the shading of the corners.
“Franca,” she said, “here, open the wine.”
The radio was playing. The candles on the table were lit. The first nights of winter with their tidelike cold. From afar the house seems a ship, dark, unmoving, every window filled with light.
4
ROBERT CHAPTELLE WAS THIRTY. His hair was thinning, his lips an unnatural red. Beneath his eyes lay the faint blue of illness, asthma among other things, the asthma of Proust. An intellectual face, the bone gleaming in it. He was a friend of Eve’s. He had met her at a dinner during which he mainly sat alone. She tried to talk to him; he had an accent.
“You’re French.”
“How could you guess?” he said.
“How long have you been here?”
He shrugged. “Yes, it’s time to go,” he agreed.
“I mean how long have you been in America?”
“The same,” he said.
He was self-indulgent, a failure. He had not abandoned failure; it was his address, his street, his one comfort. His life was one of intimacy and betrayal. Of himself he wrote: extravagant, false. He was impractical, moody, a deviate. He suffered and loved like a woman; he remembered the weather and the menu in restaurants, hours that were like a broken necklace in a drawer. He kept everything, he announced, he kept it here, tapping his chest.
Chaptelle was a name that had originally been Russian. His mother had come to Paris in the twenties, during the civil war. He had met Beckett, Barrault, he had met everyone. There is a kind of self-esteem which forces walls of ice. This is not to say he wasn’t remembered; his intensity, his dark eyes ringed with shadows, the confidence he carried within him like a tumor—these were not easily forgotten.
They talked about writers: Dinesen, Borges, Simone de Beauvoir.
“She is a dreary woman,” he said. “Sartre, now Sartre has esprit.”
“Do you know Sartre?”
“We have coffee in the same café,” Chaptelle said. “My wife, my ex-wife, knows him better. She works in a bookshop.”
“You’ve been married.”
“We are very good friends,” he said.
“What’s her name?” Eve asked.
“Her name? Paule.”
They had spent their marriage trip in all the little towns Colette had gone to in the years she was dancing in revues. They traveled like brother and sister. It was an hommage.
“Do you know what it is to be really intimate, to feel safe with someone who will never betray you, will never force you to act unlike yourself? That was what we had.”
“But it didn’t last,” Eve said.
“There were other problems.”
When Nedra met him, he was calm; he seemed bored. She noticed that his cuffs were dirty, his hands clean; she recognized him immediately. He was a Jew; she knew it the moment she saw him. They shared a secret. He was like her husband; in fact he seemed to be the man Viri was hiding, the negative image that had somehow escaped.
He drank a demitasse of coffee into which he stirred two spoons of sugar. He was an unmarried son come home in the morning, the son who has lost everything. He sniffed. He had nothing to say. He was as empty as one who has committed a crime of passion. He was his own corpse. One could see in him both the murderer and the half-nude woman crumpled on the floor.
“Your husband’s an architect,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
He sniffed again. He touched his face with the napkin. He had forgotten Eve, that was obvious; one had only to look at them to see that.
“Is he talented?”
“Very,” Nedra said. “You’re a writer.”
“I’m a playwright.”
“Forgive me for not knowing, but have any of your plays been put on?”
“Put on? Produced, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Not yet,” said Chaptelle calmly. It was his brevity which convinced one, his disdain. “Could I borrow one of your cigarettes?”
The desperation of certain people is such that even in inactivity, even in sleep, we understand that their lives are being spent. They are saving nothing for later. They have no need to save. Every hour is a kind of degradation, an attempt to throw away all.
He crushed the cigarette out after one or two puffs. “I’m writing plays, but not for the stage, not for the present stage,” he said. “Do you know who Laurent Terzieff is? I’m writing a play for Laurent Terzieff. He’s the greatest new actor to appear in twenty years.”
“Terzieff …”
“I go to his rehearsals, no one knows I am there. I sit in the back row or over to the side. So far I have yet to detect a single failing in him, a single flaw.”
He was eager to talk. For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there. He questioned her knowledge of the theater. He told her who the great writers were, he named the unknown masterpieces of the time.
* * *
“Viri,” she said, “I’ve met the most marvelous man.”
“Yes? Who?”
“You don’t know him,” she said. “He’s a writer. He’s French.”
“French …”
An evening a week giving work as an excuse, sometimes twice a week, whenever he could, he stayed late in town. Slowly his life was being divided. It was true he seemed the same, precisely the same, but that is often all one sees. Collapse is hidden, it must reach a certain stage before it breaks the surface, the pillars begin to yield, façades pour down. His infatuation with Kaya was like a wound. He wanted to look at it every minute, to touch it. He wanted to speak to her, to fall on his knees before her, embrace her legs.
He sat by the fire. Two cast-iron Hessians held the burning logs, the glow of coals at their feet. Nedra was curled in a chair.
“Viri,” she said, “you must read this book. When I’m finished, I’m going to give it to you.”
A book with the edge of its pages dyed mauve, the title in worn letters. She began to read aloud to him, the wood erupting softly in the fireplace like shots.
“What is it called?” he said finally.
“Earthly Paradise.”
He felt weak. The words made him helpless; they seemed to describe the images that overwhelmed him, the silence of the borrowed apartment in which she slept, the width of the bed, her pure, lazy limbs.
In the morning he went early. The sun was white and glancing, the river pale. He drove in long, smooth curvings, straight-aways, the fever of expectation making him blind. The great bridge gleamed in the morning light; beyond it lay the city, wide as the sea, its trains and markets, its newspapers, trees. He was composing lines, speaking to her, whispering into her ear, I love you as I love the earth, white buildings, photographs, noons … I adore you, he said. Cars drifted alongside him. He looked at his face in the rear-view mirror; yes, it was good, it was worthy.
He began to be silent. The city streets were bare. They gave evidence in their stillness and desolation of the night that had passed, they confessed to it like a weary face. He began to be uneasy. It was like an anteroom that led to a place where something terrible had happened; he could smell it as beasts smell the killing house. Suddenly he became frightened. He would find the apartment empty. It was as if he had caught sight of her shoe outside a building; he could not bear to imagine more.
A white, winter morning. The street was cold. He unlocked the front door and ran up the stairs. At her apartment, not knowing why, he knocked lightly.
“Kaya?”
Nothing. He knocked again, softly, repeatedly. Suddenly, like a blow, he understood. It was true; she had spent the night elsewhere.
“Kaya.”
He unlocked the door and opened it. It stopped abruptly against the night chain.
“Who is it?” she said.
He had a glimpse of her, nothing more. “Viri.” There was a silence. “Open the door,” he said.
“No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s here.”
For a moment he could not think what to do. It was early morning. He was ill, he was dying. The walls, the carpets were drinking his life.
“Kaya,” he pleaded.
“I can’t.”
He was staggered because he was innocent. Everything was the same, everything in the world was still in its place, and yet he could not recognize it, his existence had vanished. Her nakedness, late dinners, her voice on the phone—he was left with these, like scraps she had left behind. He started down the stairs. I am dying, he thought. I have no strength.
He sat in the car. I must see him, he decided, I must see who he is. A postal truck went down the street. People were going to work. He was too near the door. There was a place to park further on. He started the ca
r and drove to it.
Suddenly someone came out, a round-faced man with an attaché case, wearing a loden coat. No, Viri thought, impossible. The next moment there were two more emerging—was it going to be a comedy?—and then, still another. He was fifty; he looked like a lawyer.
He sat in the office unable to think. His draftsmen were arriving. Are you all right, they asked. Yes. Their wide, flat tables were already spilling sunlight. They hung up their coats. It seemed that the white telephones, the chrome and leather chairs, the sharpened pencils, had lost their significance; they were like objects in a store that has closed. His gaze passed over them in ringing silence, a silence that could not be penetrated though he spoke in it, nodded, heard conversation.
At ten she came in. “Please, I can’t talk,” she said.
She wore a slim, ribbed sweater the color of shipping cartons; her face was white. As she walked through the room he was conscious of her legs, the sound of her heels on the floor, the bones of her wrists. He could not look at her, everything about her he had known, had access to, was fading.
He left before noon for a meeting. He called her as soon as he was outside. Pages were torn from the directory in the phone booth. The door would not close.
“Kaya,” he said. “Please. What do you mean, you can’t talk?”
She seemed helpless.
“I need you,” he said. “I can’t do anything without you. Oh, God,” he breathed. His eyes were filling with tears. He could not tell her what he felt. He was like a fugitive. “Oh, God, I know this girl …”
“Stop.”
“I’ve gone to prison for her, my ribs are showing. I’ve given up my life …”