Light Years

by James Salter

He drank his tea. He heard the clack of his dog’s old nails on the floor. Hadji sat at his feet, looking up, hungry like all the aged. His dog that had run in the breathless snow, stronglegged, young, his ears back, his keen glances, his pure smell. A life that passed in an instant.

  He looked at his daughter. In the way that a gambler who has lost can easily imagine himself again in possession of his money, thinking how false, how undeserved was the process that took it from him, so he sometimes found himself unwilling to believe what had happened, or certain that his marriage would somehow be found again. So much of it was still in existence.

  “How is the missus?” Captain Bonner would ask. He gathered junk up and down the road. Half the time he didn’t recognize Viri. Was the question malicious or only dull-witted? Stained, brown suitcoat, a stocking cap, a face old as Punch’s, a yellow face, teeth long gone, smiling as he thinks of something, is it food, women? He was carrying a door down the road; he leapt in front of the car as Viri drove toward him, waving, demanding a ride.

  “I’m going to town,” he announced. He could not get the door into the car. He struggled. “I’ll put it on the roof,” he said. “I can hold it with my hand.”

  The skin on his hands was blue, paper-thin, on his dried cheeks a stubble. His shoes were like dirty slippers, the toes curled up.

  “Nice weather,” he said. He smelled of wine. Then, after a pause, that casual question about Nedra.

  “She’s fine,” Viri answered, “thank you.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen her around.”

  “She’s in Europe.”

  “Europe,” the old man said.

  “Ah. Lot of nice places there.”

  Viri was watching the door, which overhung the windshield. “Have you been there?” he asked distractedly.

  “No. No, not me,” Bonner said. “I’ve seen enough right here.” There was a pause. “Too much,” he added.

  “What do you mean, too much?”

  The old man nodded. He smiled vaguely at nothing, at the white sunshine before them. “It’s a dream,” he said.

  The house still smelled of her potpourri, the garden lay neglected. In a drawer of a desk that the sun fell on were children’s notebooks from school in years past. Franca, her handwriting so obedient, so neat, had saved every one.

  The feast was ended. Like the story he had read to them so many times, of the poor couple who were given three wishes and wasted them, he had not wanted enough. He saw that clearly. When all was said, he had wanted one thing, it was far too small: he had wanted them to grow up in the happiest of homes.

  5

  ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.

  He went to dinner at the Daros’. There were people there he did not know. “How do you do?” they said. Handsome people, quite at ease. The woman wore an emerald floor-length dress with a gold necklace and bracelets of gold mesh. Her name was Candis. Her husband was an art director. He worked on films; he designed the jackets of books.

  “Viri, what would you like to drink?” Peter asked.

  “Do you know what I think—I haven’t had one for a long time …”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “I think I’d like a martini,” Viri said.

  He drank one, icy cold, in a gleaming glass. It was like a change in the weather. The pitcher held another, potent, clear.

  “How do you make them so cold?” he asked.

  “Well, you happen to have commanded the drink which is, in my opinion, the one true test. You have to have the right ingredients—and also you keep the gin in the freezer.”

  “Ah.”

  “I once was going to do an article on the ten greatest bars in the world. I did a lot of research. It just about ruined my health.”

  “Which is the greatest?” the art director asked.

  “I don’t think you can pick one. It’s really more a question of which of them is nearest at hand. I mean, there’s an hour in the day when one’s tongue begins to depend, when nothing will avail except to have a drink, and to be close to one of these establishments at that time is like Mohamet’s paradise.”

  “I don’t believe you’d find any liquor there,” Candis said, “not in a Moslem paradise.”

  “Right,” Peter said. “Which would rule it out for me.”

  “But women in abundance,” the husband said.

  “I think,” Peter began, “that by the time I am being conducted into paradise …” He had risen to go into the kitchen, it was he who cooked the dinners “… my connection with women will be entirely historical.”

  “Never, darling,” Catherine corrected, entering.

  “Or imaginary,” he said.

  “You will never lose your interest in women,” she said. “Hello, Viri. How are you? My, you look well.”

  “My interest perhaps not, but my ability, I’m afraid …”

  “Eternal,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking in there,” he murmured, “but I’m moved by your confidence in me.”

  “I think women know these things, don’t you?” she asked.

  “They are sometimes in a position to,” Viri said.

  During the laughter his glance caught that of Candis. She had a long nose, an intelligent face. Her eyes were very white and clear.

  “Viri, we’ve missed you,” Catherine said.

  Another couple arrived. Viri found himself talking freely. He was describing an evening at the theater.

  “I’m the one in our family who loves the theater,” Candis said. “One of the first plays I ever saw—there’s a wonderful story about this—was The Petrified Forest.”

  “Oh, you’re not that old,” Viri said. He felt immensely warm and at ease.

  “I was fourteen at the time.”

  “It was written before you were born,” he said.

  “Well, perhaps it was a revival. Anyway—”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Twenty-eight …”

  “When I came home afterwards, they said, ‘How did you like it?’ And I reported it was a very funny play. For example, there was a line in it when he says to the girl, ‘How about a roll in the hay?’ And the audience laughed, I said, because of course there’s no hay in the desert.”

  The richness, the comfort of this apartment in an unfashionable neighborhood. It was in an old building, an apartment lovely as a park, like a beautiful volume found among the stacks in a secondhand bookstore.

  Peter knew history, he knew painting and wines, the second and third Bordeaux growths that were as fine as a first. He knew a small town that was better than Beaune, he knew vineyards by name. He stood in the narrow kitchen, fresh vegetables and plates on every surface, and amid the clutter chopped parsley with a huge knife.

  “In our next house,” he told Viri, “I’m going to have a kitchen big enough to maneuver in, a kitchen like yours.” He was wearing an apron over his suit. As he prepared the dinner he called out periodically, demanding of his wife where something was or whether she had bought it. “I want a kitchen big enough to give a dinner in—or for that matter, even sleep in. You know, I’m slowly going out of business. It’s not that I’m failing—in fact, just the opposite—but the trouble is the supply of good prints is drying up. I just can’t find them to sell, or if I do find them, I have to pay so much there’s no possibility of profit. I mean, if I sell a Vuillard, I can’t get another. You used to be able to go to Europe, but not any more. Their prices are higher than ours. There are plenty of buyers, but there’s nothing to sell them.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Spend more time in the kitchen. I really want only two things …”

  “Which are?”

  “I want a real kitchen,” he said, “and I want to die under the stars.”

  The guests were deep in talk, the curtains drawn, the wine open on the long buffet. Peter was looking for the anchovies. “T
hey’re in a small, thin can,” he muttered. “Thin but impregnable. Former battleship builders design them.” He had been in the navy. “If the battleships had just been half as strong—ah, here they are.”

  “What are you going to do with anchovies?”

  “I am going to try and open them,” he said.

  The excellent smells, the disorder which was beautiful, the open pages of a cookbook written by Toulouse-Lautrec, a book filled with the dinners and outings of a lifetime—all these were creating in Viri the warmth of a night of love. There are hours when one literally drinks life.

  He found himself beside Catherine. “This fellow you’ve just met …” she whispered.

  “Which one?” The remark seemed very funny to him, he could not help laughing.

  “… in the brown suit,” she was saying.

  “The brown suit.” He leaned close to listen to her revelation. His eye, meanwhile, was on the subject of it, a heavy man with eyeglasses. “Tremendously brown,” he murmured. “What’s his name again?”

  “Derek Berns.”

  “Right,” Viri cried.

  Berns glanced at them, as if aware. His face was smooth with somewhat large features, like a child who will be ugly, and he held his cigarette between his first and second fingers at its very tip.

  “He’s a colleague of Peter’s, he has a marvelous gallery,” Catherine said. “He’s very close to one of the Matisse family. He gets all their things.”

  Viri tried to talk to him later. By that time he had forgotten both his name and that of Matisse, but was afraid of nothing. He had some difficulty in pronouncing, which he overcame by forming carefully all consonants. In the middle of the conversation, he suddenly remembered the name and immediately used it: Kenneth. Berns did not correct him.

  His attention was drawn back to Candis. She was sitting near him and was talking about the first thing men look at in a woman. Someone said it was the hands and feet.

  “Not quite,” she said.

  Together they found themselves going through the phonograph records.

  “Is there any Neil Young?” she asked. “I don’t know. Look at this.”

  “Oh, God.”

  It was a record of Maurice Chevalier. They put it on. “Now there’s a life,” Viri said. “Menilmontant, Mistinguett …”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thirties. Both wars. He used to say that until he was fifty he lived from the waist down, and after fifty, from the waist up. I wish I could speak French.”

  “Well, you can, can’t you?”

  “Oh, just enough to understand these songs.”

  There was a pause. “He’s singing in English,” she said.

  How enormously funny this was he could not explain. He tried, but could not make it clear.

  “Have you ever seen him?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You’ve never seen him?”

  “No, never.”

  “Wait,” Viri said. “Wait here.”

  He was gone for five minutes. When he came into the room again he was wearing a straw hat of Peter’s, and before the astonished eyes of everyone, with passionate movements, in a hoarse, imitative voice, he did the whole of “Valentine,” shrugging, stumbling, forgetting the words, and before dinner was ever served, had staggered through the kitchen to pass out, face down, on a bed in the maid’s room.

  “Who is that pathetic man?” they asked.

  He called Europe the next morning. It was afternoon there. Her voice was husky, as if she’d been asleep, “Hello.”

  “Hello, Nedra.”

  “Hello, Viri,” she said.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve talked to you, I just felt like calling.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was at Peter and Catherine’s last night. He’s really a marvelous man. Of course they asked about you.”

  “How are they?”

  “Well, you know, their life is very curious. Their affection for each other isn’t very great, and yet they’re devoted.” He paused. “I suppose we were something like that.”

  “Well, everybody is.”

  “How have you been?”

  “Oh, not bad. And you?”

  “I’ve often been tempted, really innumerable times, to fly over.”

  “Well, Viri, I mean, the idea is lovely, it would be good seeing you, but it wouldn’t … Well, you know, we’re past that.”

  “It’s hard to keep reminding myself.”

  “It is, I suppose.”

  She answered his pleas with wisdom, it always stunned him. He wanted to cling to her to hear what she would say.

  “You know, you’re going to be forty-four in a couple of weeks,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry to miss your birthday.”

  “Forty-four,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to look it.”

  “The easy part is over.”

  “It was easy?”

  “We’re entering the underground river,” she said. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “It’s ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help.”

  “Are you reading Alma Mahler again?”

  “No.” Her voice was even and knowing.

  The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs.

  “What makes you say that courage won’t help?”

  “Courage, wisdom, none of it.”

  “Nedra …”

  “Yes.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, really. Nedra, you know, I always … I’m here.”

  “Viri, I’m fine.”

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  She laughed. Happiness. She meant to be free.

  6

  IT WAS MARINA TROY WHOM NEDRA was drawn to when she came back at last. She even stayed with them for a while. The saint of the theater at that time was Philip Kasine. His plays were not announced, the news of them was passed by word of mouth, one had to search, to find them like a voodoo ceremony or a cockfight. The man himself was inaccessible. He had a thin nose, bony as a finger, a city accent, emanations of myth. He would not talk on the telephone. A sense of self so great that it was taken for selflessness, the two had merged. He was a source of energy rather than an individual. He obeyed the laws of Newton, of the greatest of suns.

  The night they went to his theater it was in an old dance hall. The audience had to wait in line for an hour on the stairs. Kasine did not appear, though someone said later he had been the man sweeping the stage while everyone was being seated. At last there was an announcement; the performance that evening was named. Silence. An actor walked out. He had the face of someone not to be trusted, a man who has tried everything, whose hunger is great enough to kill. His movements had the intensity of a maniac’s, but above all Nedra was struck by his eyes. She recognized their power, their derision; they belonged to someone who was her brother, the self she envied but had never been able to create.

  “Who is that?” she whispered.

  “Richard Brom.”

  “He’s extraordinary.”

  “Do you want to meet him?”

  She did not understand the play, but it did not disappoint her. Whatever its meaning—it was all repetition, anger, cries—she was won by it, she wanted to see it again. When the lights came up and the audience clapped, she rose almost without realizing it, applauding with her hands held high. In her unashamedness, her fervor, she was clearly a convert.

  Backstage was like a grocery that stays open all night. The lights were ancient and fluorescent; a number of badly dressed people who seemed to have no connection with the acting company were wandering back and forth. Brom was not there.

  “Come to the party,” someone said.

 
; They drove in a cab. The dark streets jolted by. “Did you like it?” Marina asked.

  “It’s so overpowering. Not the play, but the performances. They don’t seem to be acting—at least, that’s not the word for it.”

  “Yes, it’s some kind of slow-motion madness.”

  “There’s a fantastic power in the way they seem to just turn themselves inside out. I was simply overcome. Does one man teach this?”

  “He has a place in Vermont that was given to him,” Marina said. “Everyone goes there, they work, they discuss. Everything is done together.”

  “But is he the teacher?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s everything.”

  They rode in a creaking elevator. Other people were already there. Among them was Brom. He was dressed in ordinary clothes.

  “Your performance,” Nedra said, “was the greatest I’ve ever seen.”

  His dark eyes stared at her. He merely nodded, still lifeless, still spent. She did not know what he thought or felt. Like all great performers, he stood in a kind of unconcealed exhaustion, like a bird that has flown too far. There was nothing to reply.

  She was given a drink. Everyone was friendly. They laughed, they talked softly, they were the most congruous people she had ever seen, they accepted her. She listened to stories of Kasine. His gifts were prodigious. He was an extraordinary teacher; he knew instinctively where the difficulty was, like a healer.

  “I went to him every day for two months at the same hour. We talked, that was all. I learned everything.”

  “What did you talk about?” Nedra asked.

  “Well, it’s not that simple.”

  “Of course not. But, for example …”

  “He always asked me the same thing: What did you do today?”

  They were content in a way she envied but could not fathom. It was like meeting the members of an orthodox family, all of them different but firmly joined.

  “I would like to study with him,” she said. She made no apologies, no conditions.

  He had once taught an actress how to speak in only four hours. “What do you mean, to speak?”

  “To use her voice. To make people listen.”

  She wanted to meet him. She looked around like St. Joan; she wondered if he might be hiding among them.