by James Salter
He had the bill brought to him and signed it in a scrawled, illegible hand. “Carlo,” he called.
“Yes, Mr. Pall.”
“Carlo,” he rose to his feet, “will you arrange for Mrs.… Berland,” he finally remembered, “to be taken to Davos.” He turned to her. “We’ll meet tomorrow on top,” he said, “for lunch. I’m too drunk at the moment to entertain you further.”
His eye fell on the glass of brandy. He drank it down as if it were medicine. It seemed to revive him, a sudden, false wave of composure came over him.
“Nedra, good night,” he said very clearly and left the room in a firm, deeply preoccupied walk, as if rehearsing. He fell on the entrance steps.
“Shall I call you a taxi?” the headwaiter asked her.
“In a few minutes,” she said.
She felt confident, a kind of pagan happiness. She was an elegant being again, alone, admired. She had a drink at the bar with friends of his. She was to meet many others. It was the opening of the triumph to which her bare room in the Bellevue entitled her, as a schoolroom entitles one to dazzling encounters, to nights of love.
3
FRANCA WORKED AT A PUBLISHER’S, it was a summer job. She answered the telephone and said, “Miss Habeeb’s office.”
She typed and took messages. People came to see her—that is to say, employees, boys in the mail room, young editors passing by. She was the girl for whom, in a sense, the whole house suddenly existed. She was twenty. She had long, dark hair which she parted in the middle and, as is sometimes the case with breath-taking women, certain faintly male characteristics. How often one is stunned by a girl who runs swiftly, a back slim as a farmboy’s or a boyish arm. In her case it was straight, dark brows and hands like her mother’s—long, useful, pale. Her face was clear, one could almost say radiant. She was not like the others. She smiled, she made friends, in the evening she disappeared. The sacred is always remote.
Outside the streets were burning, the air heavy as planks. A city without a tree, without a green fountain, even the rivers were invisible from within it, even the sky. She found it thrilling, its crowds, its voices, the heads that turned as she passed. She talked to the writers who came to the office and brought them tea. Nile was one of these.
He was wearing the clothes of a man released from prison—of two men, in fact, since nothing matched. His shirt was from a surplus store, his tie was loose. He had the confidence, the cracked lips of someone determined to live without money. He was a man who would fail any interview.
“How did you get this job?” he asked. He had picked up a book and was turning the pages.
“How? Well, I just applied.”
“You applied,” he said. “Funny, when I apply …” His voice trailed off. “They usually ask you a lot of questions. Did you have to go through that?”
“No.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m sure you can answer all the questions.”
“It isn’t that easy,” he said. “I mean, you never know what they’re driving at. They ask you, Do you like music? What kind of music? Well, I like Beethoven, Mozart. Beethoven, uh huh. Mozart. And what about reading, do you like to read? What books do you read? Shakespeare. Ah, he says, Shakespeare. So he writes down—you can’t see it, the cover of the folder is up: Talks only about dead people.” He turned the pages as if looking for something. “You’ve heard about the cannibal?”
“No.”
“He said to his mother: I don’t like missionaries. She said: Darling, then just eat your vegetables.” He turned more pages. “Is this one of your books? I mean, did you publish it?”
She looked to see.
“It’s meaningless,” he continued. “Listen, this is a conversation I had with a friend; this is not a joke. We were talking about a couple who’d had a baby. He said: What are they naming it? I said: Carson. Carson, he said, is it a boy or a girl? A boy, I told him. So, he said, that’s interesting, so they named the kid Carson … Well, I told you it’s not a joke. It’s just a … What do you suppose is going on?” he interrupted himself. “I’m filled with this great urge to talk to you.”
He was clever, he was helpless. At that time they were publishing his stories in the Transatlantic Review. He was the son of a woman who worked as a psychologist and who had been divorced since he was three. She had no illusions about her son: the thing he was most afraid of was succeeding, but one would have to know him very well to understand that. The impression he gave was of weakness, a voluntary weakness like certain vague illnesses. But after a time these illnesses cry out to be legitimatized, they insist on being treated as a natural condition, they become one with their host.
He knew everything; his knowledge was vast. He was like the irreverent student who passes any examination. His eyes were dark, the muddy brown of a Negro. His cuffs were soiled. Many of his sentences began with a proper noun.
“Gödel was at Princeton,” he said. “He was walking down the hall one day, apparently deep in thought, when a student passed and said: ‘Good morning, Dr. Gödel.’ Gödel looked up suddenly and said: ‘Gödel! That’s it!’ ”
During their first meal together as he questioned her leisurely, he learned of her house in the country. “Ah,” he said. “I knew it. I knew you had a house like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I imagined it. It’s a large house, yes? Where is it? Is it near the river?”
“Yes.”
“Quite near,” he guessed.
“Quite.”
“As near, in fact, as one would expect such a house to be.”
“Yes,” she said. “Just that near.”
He was elated. “There are trees.”
“Bird-thronged,” she said.
“This is meaningless,” he exclaimed.
“Why?”
“Your life,” he said. “Because there is no pain in it. After all, what is life without a little sorrow now and then? Will you show it to me?” he asked. “Will you take me there?”
She thought of her house. Suddenly, though she had grown up living inside it and knew it in every weather, she longed to go back as one longs to hold a certain book again though knowing every phrase, as one longs for music or friends. In her life, which had become more fortuitous, brushed by other lives like kelp in the ocean, in the city which was the great, inexplicable star toward which her suburb with its roofs and quiet days had always faced—suddenly this well-loved house reentered her thoughts through the words of a stranger. Like ancient churchyards in the heart of commerce, it was suddenly inextirpable.
There had been many changes. Her mother had gone. The house existed without her as clothes exist, photographs, misplaced rings. It was part of these memories, it contained them, gave them breath.
“Yes, I’ll take you,” she said.
Nile drove. The sun whitened his face. She was able to examine him in profile as he looked ahead.
“Are we on the right road?” he asked.
“Yes.”
His skin was pale. His uncombed hair was splitting at the ends. It was also thinning, which pleased her somehow, as if he had been ill and she would see him regain his strength.
A half-mile from the house she was suddenly shocked to see the land dug out. They were erecting apartments, the shape of a huge foundation was clear, the yellow construction machines lay abandoned in late afternoon.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“What?”
“Look what they’re doing.”
The trees, the few old houses had been swept away, there was only bare, ruined earth. She almost wept. Somehow it could never have happened when Nedra was there—not that she would have prevented it, but her departure, in a sense, was the knell. Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
The shadow of change lay across everything. Her first view of the house from a place on the road she knew well—the chimneys above the trees, the line of the roof—brought a feeling of sadness as if i
t were doomed. It seemed empty, it seemed still. The rabbits that fled before Hadji—had they really been fleeing, they veered so rapidly, they leapt, they vanished into air—all gone.
They parked in the driveway. It was after five. No one was there. Nile stood looking at the house, the trees, the terraced lawn. “This is where you grew up?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder,” he said.
They walked to the pony shed; bits of straw were still scattered there. They sat in the conservatory with its gravel floor. The sun was setting fire to the glass. She went to get some wine.
“How did you ever manage to rise above all this?” he asked. “I don’t know.”
“It’s a mystery. What a life you’ve had. It’s so superior. I mean, I could mention a dozen things, but it’s manifest.” He spoke sincerely. His breath was a little bad.
“Laurence lived here,” she said.
“Laurence …”
“A rabbit.”
The sunlight fell like cymbals through the flats of glass. In the still air, a faint aroma of wine. The distant memory of the rabbit—his blackness, his long, rodent’s teeth—seemed to come upon her like a flush.
“Have you ever known any rabbits?” she asked.
“Periodically,” he said. “There seems to be no pattern. I worked in a laboratory once. There was this big, Belgian hare, her name was Judy. Could she bite!”
“Yes, they do that.”
“I had to wear my overcoat.”
“Laurence used to bite.”
“Everything does,” he said. “What became of Laurence?”
“He died. It was in the winter. It was very sad. You know how it is when animals are sick, you want so much to do something for them. We put him in a bed of straw and covered him, but in the morning he was gone.”
“He ran away?”
“He was in a corner, sort of fallen over. His eyes were open, but he was already stiff; it was as if he were made of wire. We buried him in the garden. He was bigger than we thought, we kept having to make a bigger hole. His fur was still warm. I threw the dirt on him with my bare hands. I cried, we were both crying, and I said, Oh, God, accept him, Thy rabbit …”
She had wept in the garden, in the cold. They had found a smooth gray stone and started to carve it, but it was never finished; it was there still, hidden in weeds. LAU …
“Your sister—what’s her name again?”
“She’s changed her name.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, her name is Danny, but she’s changed it to Karen.”
“Karen?”
“It’s a long story. She’s with someone who thinks that should be her name.”
“I see.”
“Well …” Franca shrugged. “That’s not the only thing. That’s minor. She pierced her ears for him.”
“I see.”
“Whatever he says …”
Nile nodded as if he understood. He was dazzled by this glimpse of immolation, the acts of this sister stunned him. He could not imagine them, he was bewildered, as if by light. The more powerful the need to know, the more difficult to ask. He wanted to say something. In rooms above his head, hallways, by curtained windows, these girls had passed their adolescence. Questions about it drenched him; whatever he knew was useless compared to this.
“I see,” he murmured.
4
DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist’s wax, the organ has been gutted.
Viri did not have the spirit to do anything about it. He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older. Alma still came three times a week to clean and dust. He left her forty dollars in an envelope each Friday, but seldom saw her. It was as if something terrible—blindness or the loss of a limb, something without recourse—had happened. No amount of sympathy could overcome it, no distraction make it fade.
At the theater one night he saw a revival of Ibsen’s The Master Builder. The ceiling lights faded, the stage poured forth its spell. It was like an accusation. Suddenly his life, an architect’s life as in the play, seemed exposed. He was ashamed at his smallness, his grayness, his resignation. When on the stage, Solness first talked to his mistress and bookkeeper, when he first whispered to her, Viri felt the blood leave his face, felt people staring as if he had given an involuntary cry.
When Solness, in that first scene alone with her at last, called her fiercely and she answered, frightened, ‘Yes?’ When he said, ‘Come here!’ And she came. He said, ‘Closer!’ And she obeyed, asking, ‘What do you want of me?’ Viri was devastated; his heart shattered, for a moment it gave way.
And when Solness said—all of this at the beginning before there was a chance to be prepared for it, there was no way to have been prepared—‘I can’t be without you, do you understand? I’ve got to have you close to me every day.’ And, trembling, she moaned, ‘Oh, God! God!’ And sank down murmuring how good he was to her, how unbelievably good. Her name—he could not believe it—lay printed in his lap: Kaja.
That was only the beginning. As it went on, as Viri sat through acts he slowly lost his power to resist, the play became that thing most dangerous of all: an unforgettable example, unforgettable and false. Caught by its strength, by phrases that pierced him like arrows, by a story the end of which was already written, the lines stored in the actors’ brains in the exact order in which they were to come forth—and yet he could never dare to try and imagine them—he was like a child, a young boy overhearing behind a door a voice he was not meant to hear, a statement that would crush him for life.
He looked at the other faces, those at an angle in front of him, faces uplifted, lit by the performance. He was so completely helpless, so unable to answer, to argue, to even imagine a world that did not move subject to the energy he saw before him, that it seemed he was free; he could listen, observe, it needed no effort. He traveled endlessly, a hundred times farther than the play, he lived his own life backwards and forwards, he lived their lives, he entered into fantasy with women sitting three rows away.
Afterwards, with everyone leaving, he stood at the entrance, intelligent, composed, as the audience vanished rapidly, fading into the night. It seemed that truth was swimming by in all these people with destinations, these men and women wed to each other, bound up in tedium and ordinary trials. He had always been one of them, though he denied it; now he was one no longer.
He walked along streets half empty, lit by the neon of Chinese restaurants, the doors of cheap hotels. He was thinking of his wife, of where she was. He was not yet free of her, of her approval, her whims. Suddenly, twenty paces ahead of him, he saw his father. For a moment he could not believe it. They were walking in the same direction. He looked more closely: the gait, the shape of the head, yes, they were unmistakable. Reality fell away in slabs, in great segments reaching toward the center. An old man walking along, his mouth a little open, his eye watery and slow. They were coming to a corner, Viri would see him plainly, his heart began to race, he did not want to, he was afraid. It was as if a coffin lid were about to be opened and a man more ill than ever brought forth, the lines black at the corners of his mouth, breath reeking of cigars. He would need medicine and care. He’s going to ask me for money, Viri thought desperately. He would have that gray cast to his cheeks, that sadness of old men who have not shaved. Embraces of those who have already parted, unbearable agonies repeated. For God’s sake, Papa, he thought. His mind, loosened by the heart cries of Ibsen, was alive but powerless, like an oyster cut from the shell. Come home, he thought, come home and die!
He stared at the stranger beneath the streetlight, a man with a face marked by the city, unhealthy, dark with greed. For a moment they were like men in a railway station, alone on the platform. They examined each other coldly and turned away. He stood on the corner as the old man w
alked on, glancing back once, suspicious. He looked nothing like Isaac Berland. The empty storefronts devoured him, the roaring buses, the night.
It was late when he reached the house. Hadji was barking in the kitchen, he was so old it sounded like a saw.
The house had changed; he had a sudden sensation of it at the door. He knew this house, it was as if someone were hiding in it, an intruder pressed flat against the wall—no, his imagination was overstimulated. As he went from room to room—his dog losing interest meanwhile and lying down, he himself calm, resigned, accepting the peril—he gradually recognized it was empty.
“Nedra!” he began calling. “Nedra!” He ran as he shouted, frantically, as if there were an urgent telephone call. “Nedra!”
He was trembling, undone. He turned on the lights as he ran, and in the hallway unexpectedly came across his sleepy daughter who mumbled in confusion, “What is it, Papa? What’s wrong?”
“Oh, God,” he cried.
In the kitchen she made him tea. She was barefoot in her robe, her face still thick with sleep. The face, he noticed as he sat gratefully at the table, a bit foolish, a bit ashamed, was not as fine as Franca’s. It was more human, not so mysterious; it might have belonged to a serving girl or a young nurse. And without make-up it seemed even more truthful, more revealing, like the palm of a hand. He sat in the kitchen and his daughter made him tea. This simple act that was like love, in which no insincerity could ever be concealed, touched him deeply. In bewilderment he realized it was like some worn piece of furniture in a refuge, it might be nothing to someone else but in these poor times it was everything, it was all he had.
She sat with him. In her womanly gestures, her movements, her clear, direct glances, he constantly saw her mother.
“How was the play?” she asked.
“Apparently it was quite powerful,” he said. “It turned me into some kind of maniac, running around the house and baying for your mother.”
“Yes, it was strange. For a moment, when I woke, I thought she must be here.”