by James Salter
The brightness of Asia Minor filled the room when she opened the door. There was a silver-legged table that bore, like a catalog, perfect unused objects: art books, sculpture, pebbles, bowls of beads. On the walls were paintings. It was she who had been responsible for the decoration; her touch was everywhere. The chairs were filled with cushions of beautiful colors—lemon, magenta, tan.
Jivan came forward. He was polite. “Nedra,” he greeted her, extending his arms.
“What a beautiful day.”
“How is your family?”
“All well.”
There was a man in a business suit sitting quietly whom she had not noticed.
“This is André Orlosky,” Jivan said.
A pale face and prominent jawbones. He wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses, also a vest. There was a strange disharmony between his person and his clothes, as if he had dressed for a photograph or borrowed a suit. An impassive face, the face of a fanatic.
“André is a poet.”
“I just gave a ride to a poet,” Nedra said.
She had seen a white-haired man loping along the road. “Where are you going,” she had asked, slowing down. He told her. It was about a mile further on. He was gardening there. And why was he running? He lived in Nanuet; he’d run from there.
“He was old, but he had a wonderful face, all tanned.”
“And very strong legs.”
“Really, he was interesting. He came from California. He recited one of his poems for me. It was about the astronauts. It wasn’t very good,” she admitted.
Jivan brought her a glass of wine.
“It was his courage I admired,” Nedra said. She smiled that stunning, wide smile. She looked at André. “Do you know what I mean?”
“How have you been?” Jivan asked.
“We’re going to Europe,” she announced.
“When?” he said, a little weakly.
“We’re going to Paris, next spring, I hope.”
“Next spring.”
“We’re going to rent a car and then drive everywhere. I want to see it all.”
“How long will you stay?”
“At least three weeks. I want to go to Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel. After all, this is the first time.”
“But Viri has been there.”
“So he says.”
“André knows Europe.”
“Is that right?”
“I went to school there,” André said. He had to clear his throat.
“Oh, yes? Where?”
“Near Geneva.”
“It’s funny,” Jivan said, “I don’t have any desire to go to Europe. I’d like to go and see my mother, but for me this is the land of marvels. Whatever there is in Europe, there’s more here.”
“But you’ve been there,” Nedra pointed out.
“You’ll see.”
She sipped her wine. Jivan had laid out an elaborate cold meal. He was serving as they talked. “Europe …” he continued.
“No more,” she said.
“No meat?”
“No more about Europe. I don’t want you to spoil it.” She opened her napkin and accepted a plate. “I love lunch,” she said. “It’s so good to have it with friends.”
“That’s true,” André said.
“People suspect you for it, though.”
He made a vague motion with his head.
“Do you live in the city?” she asked.
“Yes.”
In the city and alone. That was very interesting to her, she said, the idea of living alone. What was it like?
“Luxurious,” he said.
“You get used to it,” Jivan added.
“It depends so much on who you ask, doesn’t it?” she said. “If you don’t have a woman you must have some other passion,” Jivan said. “One or the other.”
“But not both,” André muttered.
He said little and said it mildly, almost indifferently. He ate very little. Instead he smoked a cigarette and drank the wine. The aroma of tobacco in the sunlit room was faint and delicious. Jivan brought out small dishes of candied grapes sent to him by his mother, and beside them placed tiny silver spoons. He poured coffee. The cigarette of the poet blued the air.
“What have you written?” Nedra asked.
“These bbones in bbed.” He spelt it out.
“Is that a poem?”
“It’s a poem and a book.”
She sipped the coffee. “I’d love to read it,” she said. She liked the way he was dressed, like a businessman. The small cup in her hand, the clearness of her voice, the white of her clothing—it was she who was central to the room, her movements, her smiles. Beneath their brilliance women have a power as stars have gravity. In the bottom of her cup lay the warm, rich silt.
“More coffee?” Jivan asked. “Please.”
He poured the black liquid as he had so many times, Turkish, dense, it made no sound. “You know, in all my time in America,” he said, “I count it as one long day, I’ve never been able to like the coffee. And friends. I’ve made very few friends.”
“You’ve made a lot of them.”
“No. I know everyone, but that’s not a friend. A friend is someone you can really talk to—cry with, if necessary. I’ve made very few. One.”
“More than that.”
“No.”
“Well,” Nedra said, “I think you find them as you need them.”
“You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.”
He was like a seller who has lost a deal. There was something resigned in him; his appearance was the same, his gestures, but somehow the energy had gone. Beside him, thoughtful, like a divinity student, a vaulter, she could not characterize him, she would have liked to stare at him and memorize his face, sat a man of—she tried to guess—thirty-two, thirty-four? Their glances met briefly. She was beautiful, she knew it, her neck, her wide mouth, she felt it as one feels strength. She had been swimming aimlessly, resigned to vanishing in the sea, and suddenly she was at a sunlit meal, the light occasionally gleaming on his glasses.
When she left, Jivan walked with her outside.
“It was like the lunches we used to have,” she said.
“Yes. Somewhat.”
“I like your friend.”
“Nedra, I must see you.”
“Well, wasn’t this very pleasant?”
“I miss you terribly.”
She looked at him. His eyes were black, uncertain. She kissed his cheek.
She drove through the autumn sunlight. The horses she passed were at peace, straying, bathed by a day more brilliant than any of the year. The trees were calm, sentient. The sky seemed endlessly deep, teeming with light.
She sat in the white chair reading. Abandoned cities far up the Amazon, cities with opera houses, great European vessels beached in the green. She imagined herself traveling there, a guest at the old hotels. She walked in the early morning when the streets were cool, her heels struck the pavement like the clap of hands. The city was gray and silver, the river dark. At mirrors which had never seen her face she sat before dinner, preparing herself. There were automobiles without tires running on the railroad tracks, mosaic sidewalks, whores like Eve at twenty in the dim cafés. She flew to Brazil as light flies, as the words of a song go to the heart. She was wearing the white dress she had worn to lunch, she had taken off her shoes. The winter of the year was coming, the winter of her life. There it was summer. One crossed an invisible line and everything was reversed. The sun poured down, her arms were tanned. She was a woman from a far country, already part legend, unknown.
She was lost in the fantasies spreading before her; they flooded her with contentment. At four o’clock, muted, like an intermission bell at a concert, the phone rang. She rose to answer it.
“Nedra?”
She recognized the voice instantly. “Yes.”
“This is André Orlosky.”
6
THE SUN APPEARS, WITHOUT BODY, without heat, its color is pale, serene. The water lies as if dead. The moorings are dark on its surface, the pennants hang limp. The river is English, cool as silver. On the lawn is a body. It is Mark, asleep. He has arrived before daylight, down from New Haven, and lies beneath their window, a collection of long ax-handle limbs within his clothes.
Nedra, risen early, watches him from above. He is sleeping peacefully, she admires this simple act. Her thoughts pour down on him, she imagines him stirring beneath them, becoming animate, his eyes opening slowly, seeing her own. He is young, graceful, filled with abrupt ideas. The seminal overwhelms him, makes him drive long distances, search everywhere. To see him at rest is, for a moment, to be able to weigh and examine him, otherwise he is unapproachable, he runs, laughs, vanishes behind the face of youth.
She lay on the floor and began her exercises: first a profound relaxing, arms, shoulders, knees. She had found a yogi, Vinhara, in the city. She went to him four times a week. He was bald with a long, greasy fringe of black hair. He moved about in flowing clothes. His voice was confident, commanding. “Water purify de body,” he said. “Truth purify de mind.”
He was dark. His nose was broad and pitted, his hands enormous, his ears hairy as a cat’s. Wisdom purify de intellect, meditation purify de soul.
His apartment smelled of incense. The kitchen was filled with dirty pans. He slept on a mattress on the floor. In one corner was a dented dressmaker’s dummy which he sometimes struck with a stick. “Practice,” he explained.
For an hour, feeling warmer, more supple, feeling the parts of her body become manifest as if they were pointed out on a chart, she submitted herself to him. Then, tender, awakened, she walked the few blocks to André’s apartment. He was waiting for her; he knew almost to the minute when she would be there.
“I sometimes think,” she told him, “that if you lived on the West Side, I wouldn’t be doing this.”
“The West Side?”
“Not just there. Anywhere else.”
He had three rooms, clean, carefully furnished, everything in its place. The music was playing: Petrouchka, Mahler. The blinds were already drawn.
To her husband she was understanding, even affectionate, though they slept as if there were an agreement between them; not so much as a foot ever touched. There was an agreement, it was marriage.
“We must speak of it like a dead person,” she told him.
All about them in the morning, entering at every window, in the very air, was the autumn light. The hard yellow apples were on the table, the sections of the newspaper.
“Nedra, it’s obviously not dead.”
“Would you like some toast?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“It is,” she said.
Mark was coming through the door. He had been up in Franca’s room; he had washed his hands, his sleeves were rolled. They sat talking of the weather, of the first, faint yellows which were now in the woods. No leaves had fallen yet. It was dry underfoot. The earth was still warm.
“You don’t have a chill from sleeping out there?” Viri asked.
“No.”
“Well, I often take a nap near that spot,” Viri admitted.
“In the daytime.”
“The grass is beautiful,” Mark said.
Nedra brought them toast and butter, figs, tea. She sat down. “It’s like a burned photograph,” she said calmly. “Some portions of it are there. The main part is gone forever.”
Viri smiled slightly. He did not reply.
“We’re talking about marriage,” she said to Mark.
“Marriage …”
“Do you ever think about it?”
He hesitated. “Yes,” he said finally.
“Probably not very much,” she said. “But once you’re married, you’ll find you think about it a great deal.”
“Good morning, Papa,” Franca said. She was still a little sleepy as she sat down beside them. They welcomed her; she was doelike, warm, her smile said everything, she sat there comfortably. Her life was her own, but it was deeply entwined with these other lives: her gnomelike father’s, with her mother’s brilliant smile. She was like a young tree demure in the sunlight, in a clearing, graceful and alone, but the moss on the earth around, the stones, buried roots, the distant groves, the forest—all of these had their influence and spoke to her still.
On the counter was a glass bowl green as the sea, filled with bleached shells like scraps from the summer. Three photographs, each of a different female eye, were pinned one above the other to the wall. Keys hung in an old gilt frame. There were drawings of birds, beautiful onyx eggs, a framed post card from Gaudí to a man named Francisco Aron.
They were talking about the day ahead as if they had only happiness in common. This gentle hour, this comfortable room, this death. For everything, in fact, every plate and object, utensil, bowl, illustrated what did not exist; they were fragments borne forward from the past, shards of a vanished whole.
We live untruth amid evidence of untruth. How does it accumulate, how does it occur? When Viri mentioned André, whose presence was just beginning to be felt, who did not yet leave telephone messages or sit at their table, Nedra calmly replied that she found him interesting.
They were alone in the kitchen. Autumn filled the air.
“Just how interesting?”
“Oh, Viri, you know.”
“As interesting as Jivan?”
“No,” she said. “To be honest, no.”
“I wish I didn’t find it so disturbing.”
“It’s not that important,” she said.
“These things … I’m sure you realize these things, done openly …”
“Yes?”
“… can have a profound effect upon children.”
“Well, I’ve thought about that,” she admitted.
“You certainly haven’t done anything about it.”
“I’ve done quite a lot.”
“Is that meant to be funny?” he cried. He got up abruptly, his face white, and went into the next room. She could hear him dialing the telephone.
“Viri,” she said through the doorway, “but isn’t it better to be someone who follows her true life and is happy and generous, than an embittered woman who is loyal? Isn’t that so?”
He did not answer.
“Viri?”
“What?” he said. “I’m afraid it makes me ill.”
“It all evens out in the end, really.”
“Does it?”
“It doesn’t make that much difference,” she said.
7
DANNY FELL BY CHANCE, AS A BIRD to a cat.
It was winter. She was with a friend. They met Juan Prisant on the street near the Filmore. He wore a rough white sweater, nothing more. It was cold. The teeth in his bearded mouth were perfect; they were like the soft hands that betray fleeing aristocrats. He was twenty-three. From the first instant she was ready to forget her studies, her dog, her home. He paid no attention to her in that tribute which the stricken have learned to expect. She was too young, she knew, too middle-class; she was not interesting enough for him. She was wearing a coat she hated. She stared at the sidewalk and from time to time dared a glance to reaffirm a face that dazed her with its power. No matter what she did, she could not seem to remember it, she could not stare at it long, like the sun. He radiated an energy which terrified her and drove all other thoughts from her mind.
“Who is that?” she asked afterwards.
“A friend of a friend.”
“What does he do?” Her questions were helpless, she was ashamed of them.
He lived on Fulton Street. At the first chance she leafed feverishly through the telephone book: there was his name. Her heart was jumping wildly, she could not believe her luck. He was no closer, but she had not lost him, she knew where he was.
Love must wait; it must break one’s bones. She did not see him, she could not imagine any coincidence by which it would happen. F
inally—there was no other way—on a pretext she called. His voice was puzzled, cold.
“We met near the Filmore,” she said awkwardly.
“Oh, yeah. You have a purple coat.”
She rushed to denounce it. She wondered, she was going to be in his neighborhood that day, could she …
“Yeah, all right.”
She had never known a happier moment in her life.
They met at a place on the corner, a long, ancient room such as once existed everywhere in the city, its tile floor worn down, the bar deserted. There was now a kitchen in back. The air smelled of soup. He was sitting at a table.
“Still the same coat,” he said.
She nodded. The hateful coat.
“You want anything?” he asked. “Some soup?”
No. She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.
“So what do you do? You work?” he asked.
“I’m going to school.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Come on.”
An afternoon in winter, bright and cold. They crossed a wide street, almost a square, with gulls standing in the middle of it. There were gulls on roof peaks white from droppings.
They were walking fast and then running. She tried to keep up. They were passing the dirty fronts of commercial shops, cutting through open lots where he found the timbers for his work, running, he was pulling her across the rubble. The ground was strewn with bricks; she stumbled and fell. The heel of her shoe was broken.
“It’s nothing,” she said. She held the broken piece in her hand.
He ran on, reaching back for her. She hobbled after him. He took her into an entrance filled with broken glass; the doors were empty, a ruined mattress was lying there, bottles beside it. Limping, she climbed the stairs.
He lived in a huge room, a warehouse, the windows filthy, the floor splintered wood. Someone else was already there, standing near the stove.
She looked around her. In the darkness where the light could not penetrate there were partly assembled structures. It was like a shipyard; there were hammers, shavings of wood on the floor. The bed was mounted on four columns, high up, close to the fleurs-de-lis stamped in the metal ceiling. There were sketches tacked to the wall, announcements, photographs.