by James Salter
“Flux. What is that, Chinese word? Anyway, here’s my poem: ‘Bolshoi, Oh, boy.’ ”
“Referring to what?”
“Are you kidding? She’s flaunting them every minute.”
“What’s Byron’s poem?” Bowman said. “I don’t know it.”
“It’s said to be the shortest poem in the English language, but mine is actually shorter. ‘Caro Lamb, God damn.’ ”
“Is she the one he married?”
“No, she was married. She was a countess. If I knew a countess or two, I’d be a better person. Especially if she were leaning a little towards beauty, the countess, I mean. In fact she doesn’t even have to be a countess. That’s a word that invites vulgarization, doesn’t it? In high school I had a girlfriend—of course we never did anything—named Ava. Anyway a beautiful name. She also had a body. I wonder where she is now, now that we’re grown up. I should get her address somehow unless she’s married, ghastly thought. On the other hand, not too ghastly if you think about it a certain way.”
“Where did you go to high school?”
“The last year I went to boarding school near Charlottesville. We ate our meals together in the dining hall. The headmaster used to light dollar bills to show the proper attitude toward money. He ate a hard-boiled egg every single morning, shell and all. I never quite got around to that although I was always hungry. Starving. I was probably there because of Ava and what they were afraid might happen. My folks didn’t believe in sex.”
“What parents do?”
They were sitting in the middle of the crowded bar. The doors to the street were open, and the noise of the train, a loud crashing like a wave, drowned out what they were saying from time to time.
“You know the one about the Hungarian count?” Eddins said. “Anyway, there was this count, and his wife said to him one day that their son was growing up and wasn’t it time he learned about the birds and the bees? All right, the count said, so he took him for a walk. They went down to a stream and stood on a bridge looking down at peasant girls washing clothes. The count said, your mother wants me to talk to you about the birds and the bees, what they do. Yes, father, the son said. Well, you see the girls down there? Yes, father. You remember a few days ago when we came here, what we did with them? Yes, father. Well, that’s what the birds and the bees do.”
He was stylish, Eddins, wearing a pale summer suit, slightly wrinkled, though it was a little late in the year for it. At the same time he managed a carelessness about his person, the pockets of his jacket were filled with various things, his hair needed cutting in back. He spent more than he could afford for his clothes, the British American House was his favorite.
“You know, back home there was a girl in the neighborhood, good-looking girl, who was a little retarded …”
“Retarded,” Bowman said.
“I don’t know what was wrong, a little slow.”
“Don’t tell me anything criminal now.”
“You’re such a gentleman,” Eddins said. “You’re the type they used to have.”
“Have where?”
“Everywhere. My father would have liked you. If I had your looks …”
“Yes, what?”
“I’d cut a swath through this town.”
Bowman was feeling the drinks himself. Among the brilliant bottles in the mirror behind the bar he could see himself, jacket and tie, New York evening, people around him, faces. He looked clean, composed, somehow blended together with the naval officer he had been. He remembered the days clearly though they had already become only a shadow in his life. Days at sea. Mr. Bowman! Yes, sir! The pride he would never lose.
In the doorway then, just coming in, was the girl Eddins had tried to describe, with a boxer’s face, flat-cheeked with a somewhat wide nose. He could see the upper half of her in the mirror as she passed, she was with her boyfriend or husband, wearing a light dress with orange flowers. She stood out, but Eddins hadn’t seen her, he was talking to someone else. It didn’t matter, the city was filled with such women, not exactly filled but you saw them at night.
Eddins had turned and caught sight of her.
“Oh, lord,” he said, “I knew it. There’s the girl I’d like to make love to.”
“You don’t even know her.”
“I don’t want to know her, I want to fuck her.”
“What a romantic you are.”
At work, though, he was a choir boy and even seemed or tried to seem unaware of Gretchen. He handed Bowman a folded sheet of paper, somewhat offhandedly, and glanced away. It was another poem, typed in the middle of the page:
In the Plaza Hotel, to his sorrow,
Said the love of his life, Gretchen caro,
It may be infra dig,
But, my God, you are big,
Could we possibly wait till tomorrow?
“Shouldn’t that be cara?” Bowman said.
“What do you mean?”
“The feminine.”
“Here,” Eddins said, “give it back, I don’t want it falling into the wrong hands.”
3
VIVIAN
St. Patrick’s Day was sunny and unusually mild, men were in shirtsleeves and from the appearance of things work was ending at noon. The bars were full. Coming into one of them from out of the sunlight, Bowman, his eyes blinded, could barely make out the faces along the bar but found a place to stand near the back where they were all shouting and calling to one another. The bartender brought his drink and he took it and looked around. There were men and women drinking, young women mostly, two of them—he never forgot this moment—standing near him to his right, one dark-haired with dark brows and, when he could see her better, a faint down along her jawbone. The other was blond with a bare, shining forehead and wide-set eyes, instantly compelling, even in some way coarse. He was so struck by her face that it was difficult to look at her, she stood out so—on the other hand he could not keep himself from doing it. He was almost fearful of looking.
He raised his glass towards them.
“Happy St. Patrick’s,” he managed to say.
“Can’t hear you,” one of them cried.
He tried to introduce himself. The place was too noisy. It was like a raging party they were in the middle of.
“What’s your name?” he called.
“Vivian,” the blond girl said.
He stepped closer. Louise was the dark-haired one. She already had a secondary role, but Bowman, trying not to be too direct, included her.
“Do you live around here?” he said.
Louise answered. She lived on Fifty-Third Street. Vivian lived in Virginia.
“Virginia?” Bowman said, stupidly he felt, as if it were China.
“I live in Washington,” Vivian said.
He could not keep his eyes from her. Her face was as if, somehow, it was not completely finished, with smouldering features, a mouth not eager to smile, a riveting face that God had stamped with the simple answer to life. In profile she was even more beautiful.
When they asked what he did—the noise had quieted a little—he replied he was an editor.
“An editor?”
“Yes.”
“Of what? Magazines?”
“Books,” he said. “I work at Braden and Baum.”
They had never heard of it.
“I was thinking of going to Clarke’s,” he said, “but there was all this noise in here, and I just came in to see what was going on. I’ll have to go back to work. What … what are you doing later?”
They were going to a movie.
“Want to come?” Louise said.
He suddenly liked, even loved her.
“I can’t. Can I meet you later? I’ll meet you back here.”
“What time?”
“After work. Any time.”
They agreed to meet at six.
All afternoon he was almost giddy and found it hard to keep his mind on things. Time moved with a terrible slowness, but at a quarter to six, walking
quickly, almost running, he went back. He was a few minutes early, they were not there. He waited impatiently until six-fifteen, then six-thirty. They never appeared. With a sickening feeling he realized what he had done—he had let them go without asking for a telephone number or address, Fifty-Third Street was all he knew and he would never see them, her, again. Hating his ineptness, he stayed for nearly an hour, towards the end striking up a conversation with the man next to him so that if by chance they did finally come, he would not seem foolish and doglike standing there.
What was it, he wondered, that had betrayed him and made them decide not to come back? Had they been approached by someone else after he left? He was miserable. He felt the terrible emptiness of men who are ruined, who see everything collapse in a single day.
He went to work in the morning still feeling anguish. He could not talk about it to Eddins. It was in him like a deep splinter together with a sense of failure. Gretchen was at her desk. Eddins smelled of talcum or cologne, something suspicious. Bowman sat silently reading when Baum came in.
“How are you this morning?” Baum said easily, the usual overture when he had nothing particular in mind.
They talked for a bit and had just finished when Gretchen came over.
“There’s someone on the phone for you.”
Bowman picked up his phone and said, somewhat curtly,
“Hello.”
It was her. He felt a moment of insane happiness. She was apologizing. They had come back at six the night before but hadn’t been able to find the bar, they couldn’t remember the street.
“Yes, of course,” Bowman said. “I’m so sorry, but that’s all right.”
“We even went to Clarke’s,” she said. “I remembered you said that.”
“I’m so glad you called.”
“I just wanted you to know. That we tried to come back and meet you.”
“No, no, that’s all right, that’s fine. Look, give me your address, will you?”
“In Washington?”
“Yes, anywhere.”
She gave it and Louise’s as well. She was going back to Washington that afternoon, she said.
“Do you … what time is the train? Do you have time for lunch?”
Not really. The train was at one.
“That’s too bad. Maybe another time,” he said foolishly.
“Well, bye,” she said after a pause.
“Good-bye,” he somehow agreed.
But he had her address, he looked at it after hanging up. It was precious beyond words. He didn’t know her last name.
In the great vault of Penn Station with the light in wide blocks coming down through the glass and onto the crowd that was always waiting, Bowman made his way. He was nervous but then caught sight of her standing unaware.
“Vivian!”
She looked around and then saw him.
“Oh. It’s you. What a surprise. What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to say good-bye,” he said and added, “I brought you a book I thought you might like.”
Vivian had had books as a child, she and her sister, children’s books, they had even fought over them. She had read Nancy Drew and some others, but to be honest, she said, she didn’t read that much. Forever Amber. Her skin was luminous.
“Well, thank you.”
“It’s one of ours,” he said.
She read the title. It was very sweet of him. It was not something she would ever expect or that boys she knew would do or even grown-ups. She was twenty years old but not yet ready to think of herself as a woman, probably because she was still largely supported by her father and because of her devotion to him. She had gone to junior college and gotten a job. The women she knew were known for their style, their riding ability, and their husbands. Also their nerve. She had an aunt who had been robbed in her home at gunpoint by two black men and had said to them cooly, “We’ve been too good to you people.”
The Virginia of Vivian Amussen was Anglo, privileged, and inbred. It was made up of rolling, wooded country, beautiful country, rich at heart, with low stone walls and narrow roads that had preserved it. The old houses were stone and often one room deep so the windows on both sides could be opened and allow a breeze to come through in the very hot summers. Originally the land had been given in royal grants, huge tracts, before the Revolution and put to farming, tobacco first and then dairy. In the 1920s or ’30s, Paul Mellon, who liked to hunt, came and bought great amounts of land and friends joined him and bought places for themselves. It became a country for horses and hunts, the hounds baying in disorder as they ran, while after them, from around the trees, came the galloping horses and their riders jumping stone walls and ditches, uphill and down, slowing a little in places, galloping again.
It was a place of order and style, the Kingdom, from Middleburg to Upperville, a place and life apart, much of it intensely beautiful, the broad fields soft in the rain or gentle and bright in the sun. In the spring were the races, the Gold Cup in May, over the steeplechase hills, the crowd distractedly watching from the rows of parked cars with food and drink laid out. In the fall were the hunts that went on into the winter until February when the ground was hard and the streams frozen. Everyone had dogs. If you had named a hound, he or she was yours when no longer needed for the hunt, in fact the dog would be dumped at your door.
The fine houses belonged to the rich and to doctors, and the estates—farms, as they were called—retained their old names. People knew one another, those they did not know they regarded with suspicion. They were white, Protestant, with an unstated tolerance for a few Catholics. In the houses the furniture was English and often antique, passed down through the family. It was horses and golf: you made your best friends in sport.
By the straight, two-lane blacktop road it was less than an hour’s drive to Washington and the downtown section where Vivian worked. Her job was more or less a formality, she was a receptionist in a title office, and on weekends she went home, to the races or thoroughbred sales or hunts through the countryside. The hunts were like clubs, to belong to the best one, the one she and her father were members of, you had to own at least fifty acres. The master of that hunt was a judge, John Stump, a figure out of Dickens, stout and choleric, with an incurable fondness for women that had once led him to attempt suicide upon being rejected by a woman he loved. He threw himself from a window in passion but landed in some bushes. He had been married three times, each time, it was observed, to a woman with bigger breasts. The divorces were because of his drinking, which befitted his image as a squire, but as master of the hunt he was resolute and demanded perfect etiquette, one time halting the field when they’d done something wrong and giving them a ferocious dressing down until someone spoke out,
“Look, I didn’t get up at six o’clock to listen to a lecture.”
“Dismount!” Stump cried. “Dismount at once and return to the stables!”
Later he apologized.
Judge Stump was a friend of Vivian’s father, George Amussen, who had manners and was always polite but also particular regarding those he might call a friend. The judge was his lawyer and Anna Wayne, the judge’s first wife, who was narrow-chested but a very fine rider, had for a time before her marriage gone with Amussen, and it was generally believed that she accepted the judge when she was convinced that Amussen would not marry her.
Judge Stump pursued women, but George Amussen did not—they pursued him. He was elegant and reserved and also much admired for having done well buying and selling property in Washington and in the country. Even-tempered and patient, he had seen, earlier than others, how Washington was changing and over the years had bought, sometimes in partnerships, apartment buildings in the northwest part of the city and an office building on Wisconsin Avenue. He was discreet about what he owned and refrained from talking about it. He drove an ordinary car and dressed casually, without ostentation, usually in a sport jacket and well-made pants, and a suit when it was called for.
He had fai
r hair into which the gray blended and an easy walk that seemed to embody strength and even a kind of principle, to stand for things as they should be. A gentleman and a figure of country clubs, he knew all the black waiters by name and they knew him. At Christmas every year he gave them a double tip.
Washington was a southern city, lethargic and not really that big. It had atrocious weather, damp and cold in the winter and in the summers fiercely hot, the heat of the Delta. It had its institutions apart from the government, the old, favored hotels including the Wardman, familiarly called the riding academy because of the many mistresses who were kept there; the Riggs Bank, which was the bank of choice; the established downtown department stores. Howard Breen, who was the owner of the insurance agency where George Amussen in principle worked, one day would inherit the many properties his father had amassed, including the finest apartment building in town, where the old man, in a fedora and with a spittoon near his foot, often sat in the lobby watching things with lizard eyes. Only the right sort of people were allowed as tenants and even they were treated with indifference. If, as was not often the case, he nodded slightly to one of them as they came or went, that was considered cordial. The apartments, however, were large with handsome fireplaces and high ceilings, and the employees, taking their cue from the owner, were mute to the point of insolence.
The war changed it all. The hordes of military and naval personnel, government employees, young women who were drawn to the city by the demand for secretaries—in two or three years the sleepy, provincial town was gone. In some respects it clung to its ways, but the old days were vanishing. Vivian had come of age during that time. Though she appeared at the club in shorts that were in her father’s opinion a little too brief and wore high heels too soon, her notions were really all from the world she had been a girl in.
Bowman wrote to her and almost to his disbelief she wrote back. Her letters were friendly and open. She came to New York several times that spring and early summer, staying with Louise and even sharing the bed with her, laughing, in pajamas. She had not yet told her father about her boyfriend. The ones she had in Washington worked at State or in the trust department at Riggs and were in many ways replicas of their parents. She did not think of herself as a replica. She was daring, in fact, taking the train up to see a man she had met in a bar, whose background she did not know but who seemed to have depth and originality. They went to Luchow’s, where the waiter said guten Abend and Bowman talked to him for a moment in German.