by James Salter
They visited Peter and Catherine. Dinner beneath the great trees. Afterwards they sat and talked of Viri. Nedra had partly unbuttoned her dress and was rubbing her stomach. It aided digestion, she said. Overhead, the airliners crossed in darkness with a faint, lingering sound, their lights passing among the stars.
“I had lunch with him last month,” she said. “He’s a little tired from … you know, life. It hasn’t been easy for him, I don’t know exactly why.”
“Oh, I think there’s quite a simple reason,” Peter said.
“One is so often wrong …”
“Yes, but you and Viri—any two people when they separate, it’s like splitting a log. The pieces aren’t even. One of them contains the core.”
“Viri has his work.”
“But it’s you who’s carried off the sacred part. You can live and be happy; he can’t.”
“He’s really better now,” Franca said.
“We haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“He’s much better,” she assured them.
“He’s still living in the house?” Catherine asked.
“Oh, yes.”
They had talked about food and old friends, Europe, shops in town, the sea. Like a businessman who keeps important matters till the end, Peter asked, “What about you, Nedra?”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve had such a good dinner, and I have such a comfortable bed …”
“Yes …”
“I’m thinking. I suppose I’m not used to giving an answer to that kind of question, especially to someone who will understand me.” She paused. “How do I seem?”
“Peter,” Catherine explained, “Nedra doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“The fact is,” Peter said, “I don’t want to disappoint you, but you seem wonderful; you seem the same as ever.”
“The same as ever … No. We’re none of us the same. We’re moving on. The story continues, but we’re no longer the main characters. And then … I had a strange vision a few days ago. The end isn’t like those woodcuts of a skeleton in a black cloak. The end is a fat Jewish man in a Cadillac, one of those men smoking a cigar, you see him every day. The car is new, the windows are rolled up. He has nothing to say, he’s too busy. You go with him. That’s all. Into the dark. Why am I talking so much?” she asked. “It’s the brandy. We must go.”
During the days, though, she was utterly at peace. Her life was like a single, well-spent hour. Its secret was her lack of remorse, of self-pity. She felt herself purified. The days were cut from a quarry that would never be emptied. Into them there came books, errands, the seashore, occasional pieces of mail. She read them slowly and carefully, sitting in the sunshine, as if they were newspapers from abroad.
“I feel very sorry for her,” Catherine said.
“Sorry? Why sorry?”
“She’s an unhappy woman.”
“She’s happier than ever, Catherine.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, because she doesn’t depend on a man, she doesn’t depend on anybody.”
“I don’t know what you mean by depend. She’s always had one.”
“Well, that’s not depending, is it?”
“She’s a woman bound to be unhappy.”
“Isn’t it funny?” Peter said. “I feel just the opposite.”
“You don’t know that much about women.”
“I saw her arranging flowers the other day.”
“Arranging flowers?”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing, except that I don’t think she’s unhappy.”
“Peter, I don’t know anything about what you may have seen, but a woman who leaves her home is bound to be unhappy, now, isn’t she?”
“Well, Nora Helmer left home.”
“I’m talking about real life.”
“So am I.”
“What you’re saying simply doesn’t make sense.”
“Catherine, you know perfectly well that in great works of art there is a truth that transcends mere facts.”
“If you’re talking about Nora … you mean Ibsen’s Nora?”
“Yes.”
“One doesn’t know what happened to her. You can form your own conclusions. Isn’t that so?”
“I like what Nedra represents,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
“I don’t mean that. You know exactly what I mean.”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“Damn it!” he shouted.
“What?”
“I’m talking about something else, don’t you understand? A certain courage, a kind of life.”
“I think it’s something you imagine.”
“A woman’s realm.”
“Why this sudden interest in women?”
“It’s not sudden.”
“It seems to be.”
“Men’s lives bore me,” he said.
8
PETER DARO HAD ONCE, AS A YOUNG man, lived in the Hotel Alsace in Paris where Oscar Wilde had died. In the very room, in fact; he had slept in the very bed. All that had disappeared.
He was a man of habit and a single comic expression: his mouth turned steeply down in mock dismay. It served all purposes, confusion, disbelief. He came from the city by train on Friday evenings, the axles creaking on the worn, disintegrating cars. Voices at the stations as they stopped in the mist, the exuberance and crudeness as policemen, steamfitters got off at their towns. Then the long, jolting ride through the flatlands, the fields at last appearing, restaurants he recognized, shops. Catherine sat waiting in the car; they drove home beneath the heavy, summer trees.
Their house was open, barnlike, unprotected. Its awkwardness was appealing, like a traveler stranded without money. The dirt road widened before it to form an island in which there was a cemetery of leaning stones, names that had faded, men drowned at sea. The car turned in to a drive of smooth pebbles. The lights were on inside, fires burning in the grates, the pale retrievers barking.
A creature of habit and, yes, eccentricity. He cooked the dinner, his children playing in their rooms upstairs. His wife was in the front room talking to Nedra. The platforms of the small stations were empty now, darkness was falling, the little houses everywhere were alight.
He moved about confidently; fresh scallops and cold, white Graves. He knew how to make things—a drink, a fire, dinner, what kind of stove to have. From his house one looked out on long, empty fields in which gulls sometimes stood.
His great love was fishing. He had fished in Ireland, the Restigouche, he had fished the Frying Pan and the Esopus. “That’s where I won Catherine,” he recalled. “A miraculous day. We went down to the river and she sat on the bank and read while I fished. Finally she said, ‘I’m hungry.’ And exactly at that moment, as if on cue, I pulled out two beautiful trout.
“But the best fishing story I know,” he said, “happened to a friend of mine who lives in France. His father-in-law has a big country house with a pond, and in this pond lived a huge pike. Very cunning fish, very old. The gardener had been after him for years, he had sworn his death. One day Dix was fishing there, he had nothing serious in mind, and he just cast out and accidently hooked the pike in the tail. Unusual, but it sometimes happens. Enormous struggle. The pike was three feet long. Dix was fighting and shouting for help. The gardener ran to the house and came racing back with a shotgun, and before they could do anything to stop him, was blazing away at the pike. There was blood all over, great confusion. The fish was stunned but alive. They put it in a bathtub where it was floating around, wounded. That night it died. There was some question of exactly how it died because there was evidence of stabbing, but anyway there was nothing to do, they froze it in a block of water—this happened in winter—and later it was sent to Paris to make a fish soup for an important dinner the father-in-law was giving. Dix was there, everyone, including the Minister of Education, who took a bite of
fish and reached up to his mouth in bewilderment to take out pieces of buckshot. The father-in-law looked at Dix, who … what could he say? He just shrugged.
“Women don’t like fishing,” he decided, “do they?”
“Of course we do, darling,” his wife said.
“They don’t like to get up early in the morning. Actually, neither do I.”
He liked brandy, crystal glasses, vermouth cassis at the Century. His life was solid, well-made, perhaps not happy but comfortable; there were feasts of comfort like nights in sleeping-trains with their clean sheets and cities floating in the dark. The first anachronisms were appearing in his clothes, the first blotches of age on the back of his hands. There was seldom music in his house. Books and conversation, reminiscences. He wore blue-checked shirts, faded from many launderings. English shoes a little out of style. In his face a marvelous alertness, in the iris of one eye a small dark key like a holy stain. He had traveled, he had dined, he discussed hotels with the affection one usually reserves for women or beasts. He knew exactly in which museum a painting was hung. His French was a rickety structure based on a vocabulary of food and drink. He spoke it grandly.
The hours passed quickly. The mist was forming, the brandy gone.
“My God,” Nedra said, “what time is it?”
Peter looked at his wrist watch. After a moment of consideration, he answered, “One o’clock.”
“I’ve had too much brandy,” she said. “I can’t drink it any more.”
“Well, it’s all gone.”
“It goes to my legs.”
Silence. He nodded in agreement. “Nedra …” he said finally. “What?”
“It’s not doing them any harm,” he said.
A last image of him standing in the lighted doorway, the fog obliterating all else, the house, even the windows, the dogs crowding behind him.
“Let me drive you home,” he suddenly decided. “The fog is awful. You can get your car in the morning.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“I know the roads,” he said. He was earnest, his speech slurred. “Damn it, dogs! Wait a minute!” he shouted. “You shouldn’t drive alone,” he decreed.
They got only as far as the end of the driveway where he hit a post.
“I was right. You’d never have made it,” he said.
That fall, in November, his legs began to swell. It was something inexplicable. It affected his knees and ankles. He went to the hospital, they made tests, they did everything but nothing helped, until finally, as if by itself, the fluid disappeared and in its wake, like a mortal drought, a terrible change began. His legs began to stiffen and grow hard.
The doctors now knew what it was.
“It’s the gout,” he told people calmly, lying in bed. “I’ve always had it. It flares up every now and then.”
It was richness of living, he said, the fate of Sun Kings. He was in pain, though one could not see it. This pain would grow greater. It would spread. The skin and subcutaneous tissue would harden. He was turning to wood.
“What is it?” their friends asked Catherine.
It was innominate.
“We don’t know,” she would say.
9
NEDRA DID NOT SEE HIM UNTIL THE spring. It was a Sunday. When she rang the bell, Catherine came to the door.
“He’ll be glad to see you,” she said.
“How is he?”
“Not any better,” Catherine said. “He’s in the next room.”
“Shall I go in?”
“Yes, go in. We’re having drinks.”
She could hear voices. Through the doorway she could see a fat-cheeked man she did not recognize. As she entered the room and came closer she suddenly realized that this swollen face was Peter’s. She had not even known him! In six months what a giant step he had taken toward death. His eyes were deeper, his nose seemed small. Even his hair—could he be wearing a wig?
“Hello, Peter,” she said.
He turned and looked at her blankly like some dissolute stranger propped in a chair. She could have wept. “How are you?”
“Nedra,” he finally said. “Well, considering everything, not bad.”
Beneath the sleeves of his coat lay the wasted arms of a paralytic. His body had hardened everywhere, it was like the lid of a chest, he could barely move.
“Feel it,” he told her. He made her touch his leg. Her heart grew faint. It was a statue’s leg, the limb of a tree. The flesh that enclosed him had become a box. Within it, like a prisoner, was the man.
“This is Sally and Brook Alexis,” he said.
A young, red-haired woman. Her husband was thin, folded like a mantis in nondescript clothes. Their children were playing with the Daros’ in the back of the apartment.
The conversation was innocuous. Other people came, a cousin of Peter’s and an old woman who had a glass eye. She was the Baroness Krinsky.
“The doctors,” she said, “my dear, the doctors know nothing. When I was a child I was sick and they took me to the doctor. I was terribly sick. I had a fever, my tongue was black. Well, he said, it’s one of two things: either you have been eating a lot of blackberry jam or it’s cholera. Of course it was neither.”
Nedra found the chance to talk to Catherine alone. “But what is it?” she asked.
“Scleroderma.”
“I’ve never heard of it. Is it only the arms and legs?”
“No, it can spread. It can go anywhere.”
“What can they do for it?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid,” Catherine said.
“Surely there are medicines.”
“Well, they’re trying cortisone, but look at his face. Really, there’s nothing. They all say the same thing: they can promise nothing.”
“Is he in pain?”
“Almost constantly.”
“You poor woman.”
“Oh, not me. Poor man. He wakes up three or four times a night. He never really sleeps.”
“Catherine!” he was calling. “Can you open some champagne?”
“Of course,” she replied. She went to get it. “What have you been doing?” the cousin was asking.
“Thinking,” Peter said.
“Things in general?”
“I’ve been thinking of what my last words will be,” he said. “Do you know the death of Voltaire?”
He was interrupted by Catherine returning with a tray and glasses. She opened the bottle and began to pour.
“No,” Peter said as soon as he had tasted it, “something’s wrong.”
“What?”
“This isn’t the good champagne.”
“Yes it is, darling.”
“It’s not.”
“Darling,” she protested, “it’s what we always drink.”
It was in a silver bucket. She withdrew it to show him the label.
“Why does it taste so strange?” He turned to the Baroness. “How does it seem to you?”
“Quite good.”
“I see. Don’t tell me my sense of taste is going. That would be serious.” He smiled at Nedra, a strange, imitation figure, florid and corrupt.
His voice was the only thing unchanged, his voice and his character, but the structure that held them was dissolving. All the old and interconnected knowledge—architecture joined to zoology and Persian myth, recipes for hare, the acquaintance with painters, museums, inland rivers dark with trout—all would vanish when the great inner chambers failed, when in one final hour the rooms of his life dropped away like a building being wrecked. His body had turned against him; the harmony that once reigned within it had disappeared.
“The great specialists for this are in England,” he said. “Dr. Bywaters. What’s the other man’s name, Catherine? In Westminster Hospital. I forget. I thought of going to England, but why undertake such a long trip when I know the answer? The time to go to England was when you and Viri went. We should have done that, I really regret that we didn’t. I love England.”
“Brown’s,” he said. “I was having tea there one day. You know how rigorous their afternoon tea is—the fires burning in the fireplaces, cakes. Well, at the next table there was an Englishwoman and her son. He was in his forties and she was one of those county women who ride until they’re eighty. They’d been to a matinée, and for an hour they sat there discussing the play they’d seen, it was The Cherry Orchard. Of course I was listening, and in that hour they exchanged about four sentences. It was a wonderful conversation. She started by saying, after a long silence, ‘Quite a good play.’ Nothing for about fifteen minutes. Finally he said, ‘Um, yes, it was.’ Long, long pause. Then she said, ‘Those marvelous silences …’ About ten minutes more passed. ‘Yes, quite effective,’ he said. ‘So typical of the Slave temperament,’ she said. You know, the English have an absolutely unbending attitude toward pronunciation. Slave, that’s exactly the way she said it.” He fell silent, as if having said something he regretted.
“I’d love to go back to England,” Nedra said.
“Oh, yes. Well, you will.” His voice trailed off.
At the end his wife led him from the room. Small, shuffling steps, as if bearing what remained of his existence.
“He was so pleased to see you,” Catherine said at the door.
We cannot imagine these diseases, they are called idiopathic, spontaneous in origin, but we know instinctively there must be something more, some invisible weakness they are exploiting. It is impossible to think they fall at random, it is unbearable to think it.
Nedra reached the street. She was uneasy, as if the air she had been breathing, the glass from which she drank, had been contaminated. What do we really know of all this, she thought? She had touched his leg. Her throat seemed a bit sore. She must watch herself to see if there were any unusual signs. Foolish, she thought, unworthy. After all, his children lived in the same apartment, his wife slept in the same room. She passed cluttered drugstores in the rear of which pharmacists worked. Cosmetics, medicines, asthma inhalers—she saw her image reflected among them, the sacred objects which could heal, bring happiness. And somewhere above them all, perhaps sleeping now or lying in what passed for sleep, was the victim for whom all cures and benefices were in vain.