by James Salter
Is illness an accident, or is it a kind of choice, the way love is a choice—hidden, involuntary, but sure as a fingerprint? Do we die of some kind of volition, even if it cannot be understood?
“Come and see him again,” Catherine had said.
A month later he was worse, back in the hospital. His family had given up hope; they were waiting for the end. It was already hot. Death in the summer, in a haggard city from which everyone wanted to flee, death without meaning, without air.
He lingered six weeks. He was too strong to die.
The doctor came as part of his routine. “Well, how are you today?” he asked.
“They say I’m fine,” Peter managed.
“But what do you say?”
“I can’t be against the whole world, can I?”
The doctor felt his abdomen, his legs. “Are you very uncomfortable?”
“No.”
“But it hurts?”
“It hurts like hell.”
“You’re a tough fellow, Peter.”
“Yes.”
He wanted to leave the hospital and go to his ocean house. His life was now a series of small incidents; it had lost all scope. He had one ambition, he said, one goal. He could hardly move, he could not bend his arms or legs, the joints were swollen like Tutunkhamen’s. He had sworn to walk to the sea.
“Darling, you will,” his wife said.
“I mean it,” he told her.
“I know you do.”
He turned his face to the wall.
In September he was driven to Amagansett. There is no more beautiful time there. The days pour down their warmth, in the morning the smell of fall. The house was a summer house; in the winter it was always closed. The walls were thin. It was like going to sea in a fragile boat; the first cold, the first storms would end it.
He lay in bed upstairs. The room faced east to the broad Atlantic. Under his windows, on the lawn, in her white uniform a nurse was taking the sun.
There were many arguments now; every hour of the day brought its quarrel. Beneath these difficulties lay deeper grievances. He accused his wife of wanting to leave him, of giving him up for dead.
“She’s been magnificent,” he confessed to Nedra, “an angel, there are very few women who could have done it, but now she wants to go, she wants to go to the city for a few days and rest—now, when I need her. And a few days … I know what that means. How is Viri?”
He hardly listened to the answer. He was reading biographies, there were three or four on the table beside him—Tolstoy, Cocteau, George Sand.
“How is Franca?” he asked. “How is Danny?”
He told her stories of his family, things he had never mentioned before, the first wife to whom he still occasionally wrote, his sister, his plans for the winter.
They had dinner in his room. His friend John Veroet, with whom he often fished, had cooked it. They ate on rose-colored cloth. Gleaming glasses, stiff napkins, a wood fire burning, the chill of evening at the windows. Peter lay in bed with his hair combed, his shirt open at the neck. A beautiful dinner, festive, perverse, like a New Year’s dinner in St. Moritz where the host had, unhappily, broken a leg.
He ate nothing himself. For almost a week he had been unable to eat; it would not go down. Only a bit of yogurt, some tea. Propped up on pillows, he talked to them. “What are the good plays, John?” he asked.
Veroet was eating the new peas mixed with mushrooms that he had made himself. He was a heavy man with a bitter tongue. He wrote on the theater. He owned a small house. His wife and his mistress were friends.
“There aren’t any,” he said finally.
“Oh, come now. Surely there’s something good.”
“Good? Well, what do you mean by good? There are all sorts of terrible plays people think are good. My God, it’s an absolute disgrace. Every year they publish the plays of people like John Whiting, Bullins, Leonard Melfi—plays that absolutely nobody went to see, that the critics unanimously condemned, it’s criminal to put them between hard covers, but they do it and people begin to call them masterpieces, modern classics. The next thing you know, they’re being performed in repertory at the University of Montana or someplace, or adapted for television.” He spoke to the plate. He seldom looked at anyone directly.
“John, you’re always saying the same thing,” his wife said.
“Keep out of it,” he told her.
“The plays you like, nobody goes to see either,” she said. “People went to see Marat-Sade, didn’t they?”
“You didn’t like that.”
“I didn’t like it, but I didn’t dislike it.” He drank some wine. His upper lip was damp.
Had he heard of Richard Brom, Nedra asked.
“Brom?”
“What do you think of him?” she said.
“Well, I have nothing much against him. I’ve never seen him.”
“I think he’s the most astonishing actor of our time.”
“You’re lucky. Most of the time you go to see his plays and end up on some street of used furniture stores and dry cleaners, all closed. We’re all interested in the invisible, but in his case it’s carried a little far.”
“He believes in a committed audience.”
“By all means, by all means,” Veroet cried. “He’s tired of the old audience, and I’m tired of being part of it. But there’s really no such thing as unseen theater, that’s contrary to the whole idea. Eventually it must come out into the light. If it doesn’t, it’s not theater, it’s something else, it’s just recited lives.”
“Who is this man?” Peter asked.
Nedra began to describe him. She told about his performances, the strength in his body, the inexhaustible energy. Veroet had toppled over sideways and was asleep on the window seat. “He always does that,” his wife explained.
“John, wake up, listen to this,” Peter was calling. “No wonder you never find anything interesting in the theater. Wake up, John! Nedra, don’t mind him, he’s hopeless, go on …”
The Veroets drove her home. It was past eleven. What did they think, she asked.
“About Peter?”
“Yes.”
“He could live a month,” Veroet said. “Or he could live five years. There’s a woman in Sag Harbor who’s had it as long as I can remember—not as bad, of course. It depends if it attacks a vital organ. He was feeling very well tonight.”
“He was marvelous.”
“It was like old times,” Veroet said.
Peter Daro never walked to the sea. He died in November. At his funeral, in the coffin, was a face colored with cosmetics, like an invincible old woman or some kind of clown.
Five
1
WHERE DOES IT GO, SHE thought, where has it gone?
She was struck by the distances of life, by all that was lost in them. She could not even remember—she kept no journal—what she had said to Jivan the day of their first lunch together. She remembered only the sunlight that made her amorous, the certainty she felt, the emptiness of the restaurant as they talked. All the rest had eroded, it existed no more.
Things she had known imperishably—images, smells, the way in which he put on his clothes, the profane acts which had staggered her—all of them were fading now, becoming false. She seldom wrote letters, she kept almost none.
“You think it’s there, but it isn’t. You can’t even remember feelings,” she said to Eve. “Try to remember Neil and how you felt about him.”
“It’s hard to believe, but I was crazy about him.”
“Yes, you can say that, but you can’t feel it. Can you even remember what he looked like?”
“Only from photographs.”
“The strange thing is, after a while you don’t even believe them.”
“Everything has changed so.”
“I always just assumed the important things would stay somehow,” Nedra said. “But they don’t.”
“I remember my wedding,” Eve said.
“I
don’t think so.”
“Oh, yes. My mother was there.”
“What did she say to you?”
“She just kept saying, ‘My poor baby.’ ”
“I was seventeen the first time I came to New York.” She had never told this to Eve. “It was with a forty-year-old man. He was a concert pianist, he’d passed through Altoona. When he wrote to invite me, there was a rose in the letter. We stayed at his house in Long Island. He lived with his mother, and he came to my room late at night. You know, I don’t even remember his face.”
It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one’s back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children—she must not reveal it to them.
She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thrilled her. I am beyond it and I will not sink.
This submission, this triumph made her stronger. It was as if finally, after having passed through inferior stages, her life had found a form worthy of it. Artificiality was gone, together with foolish hopes and expectations. There were times when she was happier than she had ever been, and it seemed that this happiness was not bestowed on her but was something she had herself achieved, had searched for, not knowing its form, had given up everything lesser—even things that were irreplaceable—to gain.
Her life was her own. It was no longer there to be taken by anyone.
2
WHEN VIRI SOLD THE HOUSE, SHE was startled. It was something she assumed would never happen, for which she was unprepared. She was disturbed by the act. It was either sickness or great strength on Viri’s part; she did not know which she feared most. There were many things there that belonged to her, she had never bothered to take them, she was always free to. Now, when she suddenly saw them about to vanish, it did not matter. She told her daughters to take what they liked; the rest she would attend to.
Viri was going away, they told her.
“Where?”
“His desk is covered with travel folders. He has some of them marked.”
She called him. “I was so sorry to hear about the house.”
“It was falling apart,” he said. “Not really, but I couldn’t take care of it. It’s a whole life, you know?”
“I know.”
“I got a hundred and ten thousand for it.”
“That much?”
“Half is yours. Less the mortgage and all that.”
“I think you got a very good price. It isn’t worth that. I’m sure they didn’t look in the cellar.”
“It’s not the cellar, it’s the roof.”
“Yes, the roof. But in another way, it’s worth much more than a hundred and ten thousand.”
“Not really.”
“Viri, I’m very pleased with the price. It’s just … well, we can’t sell it again, can we?”
He sailed on the France in the noisy, sad afternoon. Nedra came to see him off, like a sister, an old friend. There was a huge crowd, a crowd that would stand at the end of the pier finally, jammed together, waving, a crowd of the twenties, of revolutions in Mexico, threats of war.
They sat in the cabin with a bottle of champagne. “Would you like to see the bathroom?” he said. “It’s very nice.”
“How long will you stay, Viri?” she asked as they examined the fixtures, the details that had been designed for rough sea.
“I’m not sure.”
“A year?”
“Oh, yes. At least a year.”
Franca came at last. “What traffic!” she said.
“Would you like some champagne?”
“Please. I had to get out of the taxi three blocks away.”
Viri took them on a tour. Glasses in hand, he showed them the salons, the dining room, the empty theater. The stairways were crowded, the passages redolent with Gauloise smoke.
“All these people aren’t going?” Franca asked.
“They’re either going or someone they know is.”
“It’s incredible.”
“It’s completely booked,” he said.
The announcements had begun for passengers to go ashore. They made their way toward the gangplank. He kissed his daughter and embraced her, and Nedra as well. “Goodbye, Viri,” she said.
They stood on the pier. They could see him at the rail on the deck where they had parted, his face very white and small. He waved; they waved back. The ship was enormous, there were passengers at every level, the vastness of its black, stained side overwhelmed them. It was like waving farewell to a library, a hotel. At last it began to move. “Goodbye,” they called out. “Goodbye.” The great moans of the whistle were flooding the air.
At dinner that night, Nedra found herself thinking of things that had gone with the house—or rather, despite herself, they were somehow washed up to her like traces of a wreck far out at sea. Nevertheless, much remained. She and her daughter sat now in a house—it was really just some rooms—left over from the one that was gone. They drank wine, they told stories. All that was missing was a fire.
Viri dined at the second sitting. He had a drink at the bar, where people entered with cries of greeting to the bartender. In the corridor were women of fifty, dressed for dinner, their cheeks rouged. Two of them sat near him. While one talked, the other ate long, triangular bread and butter pieces, two bites to each. He read the menu and a poem of Verlaine’s on the back. The consommé arrived. It was nine-thirty. He was sailing to Europe. Beneath him as he lifted his spoon, fish were gliding black as ice in a midnight sea. The keel crossed over them like a comb of thunder.
Franca had become an editor. She had manuscripts to think about now, to coax into being. She worked in a cubicle that was piled with new books, pictures, clippings, distractions of every sort. She went to meetings, lunches. In the spring she was going to Greece. She was serene, her smile was winning, she did not know the way to happiness but she knew she would arrive there.
“Are you still seeing Nile?” Nedra asked.
“Poor Nile,” Franca said.
Nedra was smoking a cigar, it provided a dash of authority, of strength. She turned on music, as a man might do for a woman, and drew her feet beneath her on the couch.
“This afternoon, on the boat, I was thinking how backward it all was. We should have been seeing you off,” she said.
“I’m going to fly.”
“You must go further than I did,” Nedra said. “You know that.”
“Further?”
“With your life. You must become free.”
She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her own case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.
3
NEDRA’S APARTMENT WAS NEAR the Metropolitan. It was on street level, an annex to a building. It had only two rooms, but there was a garden, more than that, a wall entirely of windows like a greenhouse. The garden had died; it was dry, the vines were brittle, the stone urns empty. But the sun fell into it all day long, and within, behind the bank of glass, she had many plants, protected, cared for. They bathed in the light; they gave off a richness and calm. The door to the garden, like that of a house in France, was of painted iron with glass in its upper half. There was a fireplace in her bedroom and a narrow, decaying bath. At a small table, in the mornings, barefoot, alone, she sat, and set her imagination free. The silence, the sunlight enclosed her. She began—not seriously she told herself—she was too proud to risk early failure
—to write a few stories for children. Viri had been wonderful at making them up. Often she thought of him as would the widow of a famous man; she saw him again drinking tea in the morning, smoking a little awkwardly, his slightly bad breath, his thinning hair only adding to the memory. He was so dependent, so foolish. In a time of hardship or upheaval he would have quickly vanished, but he had been fortunate, he had found himself always in sheltered times, the years had been calm. She saw him with his small hands, his blue-striped shirt, his ineffectiveness, his vagaries. When it came to stories, though, he was like a man who knew railroad schedules, he was exact, assured. He would begin in wonderful, faintly witty sentences. His stories were light but not frivolous; they had a strange clarity, they were like a part of the ocean where one could see the bottom.
She saw herself in the mirror. The light was mild. A mole near her jaw had darkened. The lines in her face were tentative no longer. There was no question, she looked older, the age of one who is admired but not loved. She had made the pilgrimage through vanity, the pages of magazines, through envy itself to a vaster, more tranquil world. Like a traveler, there was much she could tell, there was much that could never be told.
Young women liked to talk to her, to be in her presence. They were able to confess to her. She was at ease. There was one who worked with Franca, Mati, whose husband had left her, who acted as if she had already drowned herself. One afternoon Nedra showed her how to paint her eyes. In an hour, just as Kasine was said to have changed an actress, she transformed a plain, defeated face into a kind of Nefertiti able to smile.
She could see the lives of such young women clearly, things invisible to them or hidden. And one day there came to her a Japanese girl, small-boned, mysterious, a girl born in St. Louis but indelibly foreign, completely of another place. It was like watching an exotic animal that eats in its own way, that has its own stride. Her name was Nichi. She came often, sometimes she stayed for two or three days. Her s’s were soft, with an Oriental secrecy. She was graceful, like a cat, she could walk on plates without making a sound. She had lived with a doctor for five years.