by James Salter
“You must come to Vermont,” they said.
The hours passed without her noticing. Standing near the window later she realized the night was gone. The fragment of city below was silent and gray. She looked up. The roof of the sky was blue, a blue that was descending, as she watched, to earth. The trees in the street unfolded their leaves. As if in sympathy the lights in the room were turned off. Now it was clearly dawn. Outside were a few birds, the only sounds of nature; beyond that, stillness. She was not tired. She would have liked to stay. Her hands were cool and unused as she pressed in farewell the hands of those near her. She slept; she had never slept so well.
Ten or twelve pupils a year, that was all he took. They lived together, worked together. She wanted to be one of them, to shed all diversion, to study one thing and one thing only.
“Do you think it matters that I’m not an actress?”
“You are,” Marina told her.
“They have such strength, all of them. Such naturalness. It’s as if you’re seeing life for the first time. Come with me,” Nedra urged.
“I’d like to. I can’t.”
“Gerald would let you.”
“No, he wouldn’t.”
She asked Eve. They sat in a booth at dinner, long menus in their hands. “Do you think it’s foolish?”
“Everyone I know wants to study with him.”
“Really?”
“Did Marina introduce you?”
“Well, I haven’t met him,” Nedra said.
Eve seemed worn, resigned. Arnaud had gone. He had never been the same, anyway. Whether it was physical or not, no one knew. She was thinking of remarrying her husband.
“Are you serious?” Nedra asked.
“We’ve talked a lot about it. Perhaps we should try it again. We do have a lot in common.” Nedra did not reply.
“He’s gone on a diet,” Eve said. “He looks quite well.”
“It wasn’t his weight that caused trouble.”
“He’s just showing that he wants to change. You don’t think it’s a good idea?”
“I don’t know. It just seems …”
“What?”
“That you’ve been through so much.”
“To be going back to the beginning, you mean?”
“It seems like giving up.”
“What can you do?”
“Let’s have some wine,” Nedra said. She drove to Vermont for an interview. She was nervous. There were fifteen or twenty others. They waited on benches near the barn. Kasine was receiving applicants in the kitchen. Sometimes half an hour would pass before the door would open, sometimes longer.
She waited through the afternoon and into evening. No one brought them food or anything to drink. They sat in silence. It became dark. It was April; it grew cold. Finally it came her turn. She felt weary. Her legs were stiff. She entered the house through a screen door.
Kasine was sitting at a bare table in dark glasses. He wore a chalky, black suit. She saw him in the village the next day in the same worn suit, a brief case in his hand like an accountant or lecturer. At the end of the table, impassive, sat Richard Brom. During the whole interview he said nothing.
She told them she’d had no experience. She told the truth: that somehow, without knowing, she had been preparing herself. Physically she was supple, strong. She had no responsibilities, no needs, she was free to devote herself completely. She had been reading St. Augustine …
“Who?”
“The Confessions,” she said.
“Yes, go on.”
There was the passage about our backs being turned to the light and our eyes seeing things lit by the light but not the light itself. That was what had overwhelmed her: the things lit by the light. She turned to look at Brom who sat immobile, as if not listening, as if in dreams.
“How old are you?” Kasine asked. He was looking at his hands clasped together on the table.
“Forty-three,” she said.
There was silence, as after a final question, the one that will linger. She felt a moment of helplessness, of anger.
“But that means nothing,” she assured them.
“We are a theater company,” Kasine said simply. If they accepted a young actress, he explained, she would of course grow older …
Yes, yes, she wanted to interrupt. She knew what would follow.
“I think for the present,” he said, “you should study elsewhere and see what happens. Perhaps it will make clearer whether or not there is a possibility for you here.”
This was the man who had written that just as the greatest saints had first been the greatest sinners, so his actors came from the most hopeless, the most desecrated and unlikely material he could find. But it was all the same—a woman asking for a passport, a work permit, anything; no matter what she said, she was no longer young.
“Age is not a true measure,” she said. “Surely nothing is so arbitrary here. I have more to learn, yes, but at the same time I know more.”
“It’s unfortunate,” Kasine said.
They were immune to her. She could not see the eyes of the man with whom she was speaking, she hardly dared glance at the other. She had shown them everything, her honesty, her devotion, it was not enough.
“Thank you for coming here,” he said.
There were four or five people still waiting. She tried to reveal nothing as she walked past them. She was like a woman leaving a cathedral, descending the steps, unapproachable, her face grave.
At midnight there was a knock on her door. A man was standing there holding something forth. It was Brom.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Come in.”
The room was cold. It was a novice’s room, bare floor, a small lamp. He did not smile, but neither was he distant. The range of possibilities of his mouth alone seemed infinite, but laid aside.
“Are you finished?” she asked.
“Not quite.”
She had washed her face. It was naked, the lines about her mouth and eyes were faint but eternal. She was a woman who had read, dined in restaurants, a woman to whom nothing need be explained.
He was a man of one talent, he had no minor interests, no flaws. He was like an illiterate, a martyr; there was no possibility for him either to the left or right. The severity of his life, its spareness, could be writ in an epitaph, a single line.
The land beyond the window, the trees, the dark hills were in moonlight. The moon itself was too large, too white. He had a chest like a runner’s, flat as boards. His arteries were thick, like a horse that has galloped. She was later to search them for scars. His fingers were strong.
It was as if they were aboard ship: some old, island steamer, clean and uncomfortable, the doors to the cabins thin. They were the only passengers.
“I think you’re discouraged,” he said. “Don’t be. You will find the way. You’ll find your new life.”
“I feel I’m just beginning to swim,” she said.
“I think you know how very well.”
“I’m just finding the river.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s only a question of having water.”
That was the first passus. A little later she added, “Except that now I want to fly.”
In the morning he gave her a small silver object from around his neck. It was a primitive fish, smooth as a dime. He allowed it no history. It was a kind of pass-safe; it would see her home.
She was living in a studio that Marina kept. It was down among trucks and littered streets. A couple with a child lived on the floor above her, she heard them arguing.
She bought a bedspread that was tan and rose, incense, dried flowers. There were books by the bed, a collection of magnifying glasses, a clock. Her daughters called her every day. She complained of nothing. She was filled with strength.
She wore the glinting fish and that alone beneath her dress when Brom came. Sometimes they had dinner late, after he had performed. He ate only lea
n meat then and salad, he drank wine, afterwards a bit of fruit. Scriabin was playing, Purcell. When he slept beside her, he was silent, still. His power did not leave him, it lay coiled. He was not muscular, but he was strong, like rope. They made love slowly. He was motionless, only an invisible flexing, faint as the gills of a fish. Her knees began to jerk. Moans came from her lips. Fifteen minutes, twenty, she was staggering, crying, he held her tightly, her arms against her sides, and began to roll a little one way and the other in a slow, meaningless annunciation. She was jerking like a slaughtered beast, the great, unstinted strokes had started, long, unending, like the felling of a tree. His hand was across her mouth as she tried to cry out, he was reeling, he fell as if shot from a foot away, abrupt, inexplicable.
An exhausted sleep from which she could not wake, a drunkard’s sleep. The night air poured over them. From the avenue came the sound of trucks.
A breakfast of chocolate and oranges. Reading, falling again into sleep. He said very little. They were deep in contentment; it was full, beyond words. It was like a day of rain.
Sometimes she went to see him perform. She sat in the audience, hidden among them, feasting on the sight of him, nourished by everything that existed between them and was unknown. She went to be able to watch him endlessly, to hoard, to steal his face, his mouth, the power of his thighs. Satisfied at last, she went to have a drink with Eve or dessert and coffee at the Troys’; they did not ask where she had been, they introduced her, she was more welcome than their guests, she was stunning, drunk with life, provocation written all over her. She was a woman both husband and wife liked to see, she excited them, they could talk in her presence, things that would have been unmentioned became easy, and at the same time the sweep of her life assured them somehow of the virtue of their own. She was living on more than she had, it was evident in her face, her every gesture; she would spend it all. They were devoted to her as one is devoted to the idea of life drunk in gulps. Her fall would confirm their good sense, their reason.
“Your life,” Marina told her, “is the only real one I know.” Nedra said nothing.
“I’m sorry now that I didn’t go with you.”
“Well, I wasn’t accepted.”
“I know, but you’re one of them.”
The theater was nomadic. One week it was in a rehearsal hall, the next in the ballroom of some rundown hotel. His performances were never the same, whether beneath the lights or during quiet days. They met in cafés. She wore oval, steel-rimmed glasses.
“What are those for?” he asked.
“Very small print.”
“No, you have perfect eyes. I can tell from the color, the clearness.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Of course it does,” he said. “Everything speaks through the body. The way someone moves, how they look at you—from that you can tell worlds if you know what to look for. Everything is visible.”
“Nothing is.”
Their legs were touching beneath the table. “Especially that,” he added.
“These are the real hours,” she said.
The afternoon is fading. She shows him photographs of her family, Franca, forgotten days.
“This is your daughter?”
“Incredibly.”
Later he brings forth, without a word, a picture of his own. It’s a clipping of a Van Dongen painting of Picasso’s mistress, the famous Fernande. She is naked, displayed like a tapestry. The resemblance to Nedra is startling.
“Where did you find it?”
“I’ve had it for a long time,” he said. “Even if you cannot marry, you must have some idea of a wife. So I’ve carried her around. She’s very convenient.”
Nedra felt a spurt of jealousy.
“I don’t believe in marriage, and I have no time for it,” he said. “It’s a concept from another age, another way of living. If you do what you really should do, you will have what you want.”
“That’s true.”
“The Bhagavad-Gita,” he said.
In the evening at the hour when, across small gardens, one can see people gathered in lighted rooms, she lies, her legs each pointing to a corner of the bed, her arms spread wide. From the street comes the faint sound of horns. Her eyes are closed; she is caught like a marvelous beast. Her moans, her cries excite him beyond anything. It takes a long time. Afterwards she lies naked, unmoving. She kisses his fingers. They are bathed in silence, in the long, swimming afterdream. She knows quite well—she is absolutely convinced—these are her last days. She will never find them again.
7
DANNY’S WEDDING TOOK PLACE AT the house of a friend. It was in the country, near Ossining, a wedding somehow old-fashioned despite its youth and informality. The day was warm. It was like Sundays in small villages. Her mother and father were there, of course, her sister, her lover, Juan. She was marrying his brother.
Theo Prisant was taller than Juan, younger, not as well-formed. He was still in school, his last year of law. Before he had ever met her he had heard his brother talk … the daughter of an architect, nineteen, she was fantastic in bed. An incandescent fragment was struck off in some sort of darkness. A longing and envy flooded through his veins.
“What do you mean, fantastic? What’s so fantastic about her?”
“She’s incredible.”
He was eager to meet her, half afraid. When he saw her for the first time, it was as if her clothes fell away before his eyes. He grew dizzy. He hardly dared show interest; he was ashamed of his knowledge. It was a knowledge which doomed him, singing in his ears from the first moment, whispering to his blood.
Their first time together they went to the Metropolitan, up the steps of which her father had once run. It was afternoon, lingering, serene. In the great guarded halls he could hardly look at her though she was at his side. He was aching to talk, to be able to speak to her as if nothing were at stake. He was conscious only of her limbs, her hair, the things he knew she had done. She seemed beautiful and calm. Everything reflected her, everything suggested love: the torsos, the clean, marble limbs, the roll of muscle that encircled the hips of a Greek boy. He was standing a bit behind her. He saw her gaze pass over the shoulders, the stomach, pause at the genitals and scribed, curling hair. It was as if she were scorning him. They walked on; his mouth was dry, he could not even make a joke. She cared nothing about him, he could feel it.
And now in a suit and a straw hat, the kind farmers wear, a dandelion in his buttonhole, he stood, possessor at last of the woman his brother had found, had prepared for him, brought to him unknowing. His face was young, his hands brown from the sun. He had met Viri a number of times but hardly knew him, and Nedra only once. He was waiting for them to arrive.
They were late. They parked where the road had broken and washed away—there were already eight or ten cars—and walked up a small stone path to the house together. It was a house shaded by huge trees. There were glasses gleaming on a buffet table inside, fruit, flowers, cake. The sunlight poured through large windows. Several cats strolled past their feet.
“I’m glad to see you,” Theo told them.
“We’re glad to see you.”
“What a lovely house,” Nedra said.
“Come and meet our host.”
She found her daughters upstairs. They wept together, they wept and smiled. They wiped the tears from Danny’s face that were running in straight lines down to her mouth. When Viri appeared hesitantly at the door, she began to cry all over again.
“What are you crying for?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Me too.”
A vast, brilliant day, the trees sighing, the rooms a bit warm. The ceremony was brief, a cat was rubbing against Viri’s leg. The wedding march was played as the bridal couple entered the reception room. In that moment as he saw his daughter in sun-struck white, near now to another, departing, already gone, he felt a sudden pang of bitterness and loss, as if he had somehow been proved a failure, as if his
whole life could be dismissed in a word.
They drank red wine and opened the presents. They turned to Viri for a toast.
“Theo and Danny,” he began. He raised his glass and looked at it. “Come what may, you are entering the true happiness, the greatest that one ever knows.”
They all drank. There was a telegram from Chicago, MAY YOUR LIFE BE STREWN WITH FLOWERS NOW AND FOREVER. SEND PHOTOGRAPHS, ARNAUD. They talked about him; perhaps he knew they would. They told adoring stories. These stories had become his true existence, he was like a character in a play one imitates and admires. He could not fail or disappear. He was like a marvelous guest who leaves early, the memory of him lingering, made stronger by being cut off at just the right moment.
The marriage car departed, abruptly it seemed, suddenly there were waves, farewell cries, it was starting down the road, a Labrador running beside it.
“Well, there they go,” someone said.
“Yes,” Viri agreed.
Far off the black dog was running in the dust of the car, running and falling behind. Finally he abandoned the chase and stood in the road alone at the edge of some trees.
That was spring. Franca spent that summer with her mother at the sea. They had a small house faded by the weather on the edge of potato fields. Parked in front was the car, an English Morris they’d bought from the garage man, its paint gone to chalk in the sun. There was a garden, a bathroom in which water came, crippled, from the faucets, a view of the vanishing dunes.
They had long lunches. They drove to the sea. They read Proust. In the house they went barelegged and without shoes, their limbs tan, their eyes the same gray, their lips smooth and pale. The calm days, companionship, the sun leached all care from them, left them content. One passed them in the morning. They were in the garden, a beautiful woman watering flowers, her daughter standing near her holding along her forearm and stroking slowly a long white cat. Or the house when they were gone: the windows silent, brief bathing suits spread on the woodbox, the robins with their dark heads and weathered bodies hurrying across the lawn.
There was a wooden table outside at which they sat in the sun. Small yellow bees were eating the cheese rinds. Nedra’s palms lay flat on the smooth, hot boards. It was the beginning of August. The sea was singing. Above it was borne a silver mist risen that morning in which, in the empty hours just after lunch, a few children shouted and played.