All That Is

by James Salter

  After a while, except for Liz and Travis who were playing cards, they had all gone to bed. The snow went on falling though sometime in the early hours it stopped and stars appeared in the black sky. Also it became even colder.

  In the morning through windows that were half-covered with frost the great white expanse of fields could be seen, not a footprint on them, not a flaw. The whiteness reached into the distance, into the sky. Two of the dogs had gotten outside and were flying over the snow, throwing up a white trail like comets as they ran.

  One by one they all came down to breakfast in the dining room. Liz and Dare were among the last. Bowman and Vivian were just finishing. Amussen was still at the table.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Good morning.” Liz’s voice was a little hoarse. “Look at the snow,” she said.

  “It finally stopped. That was a real storm. Don’t know if the roads will be open. Good morning,” he said to Dare as she took a seat.

  “Morning.” It was almost a whisper.

  “Your daddy already called,” Willa told her as she brought coffee.

  They sat eating bacon and eggs. Travis joined them. Peter was the only one who didn’t appear.

  A terrible thing had happened during the night. After everyone had gone to bed and it was finally quiet, Peter, who had waited as long as he could, stepped out into the hall in his pants and undershirt, carefully closing the door behind him. The light was subdued. All was silent. Quietly he walked to Dare’s room and put his face close to the doorjamb. He whispered her name.

  “Dare.”

  He waited and whispered again, more intently.

  “Dare!”

  He was afraid she was asleep. He called again and then, overcoming his fear, knocked lightly.

  “Dare.”

  He stood there, despite himself.

  “I just want to talk to you,” he was going say.

  He knocked again. Just as he finished, his heart leapt as the door opened slightly and revealed George Amussen, who said in a low, authoritative voice,

  “Go on to bed.”

  Liz all morning had been on the phone deciding whether or not to go to California. She wanted to go to Santa Anita and was asking about the weather there and if her horse would be running. Finally she decided.

  “We’re going.”

  “You’re sure, Bun?”

  “Yes.”

  Eddie watched it all without comment. Later he said,

  “He won’t be around for long. She’ll marry someone else.”

  It would not be Aly Khan, who had been divorced and was planning to marry a French model when he was killed in a car crash. Liz read it in the paper. She had never really stopped thinking about being married to him. It was always a fond dream. They would be in Neuilly in the morning, watching the horses train, the early mist still in the trees. He’d be in Levi’s and a jacket and they would walk back together to have breakfast at the house. She’d be the wife of a prince and converted to Islam. But Aly was dead, Ted had gone on to marry someone else, and her second husband had moved to New Jersey. Still she had lots of friends, some made one way, some another, and she rode.

  Vivian had liked Christmas and being home. Liz, she could see, took to Philip, and even her father, who was in an amiable mood that morning, seemed to accept him more. They all said good-bye, Amussen said good-bye to Liz and then to Dare, whose boyfriend wasn’t feeling well, rubbing a bit of egg from the side of her mouth as they talked briefly. He did it with his napkin in a fatherly way.

  “Is Liz Bohannon really your father’s cousin?” Bowman asked afterwards.

  “They just call each other cousin, I don’t know why,” Vivian said.

  The world was still white as they drove back to Washington, snow rushing across the road like smoke. Currently twenty-two degrees in downtown Washington, the radio said. The highway was disappearing in bursts of wind. The fur was up around Vivian’s face in the cold, the smooth miles passing soundlessly beneath. Good-bye to Virginia and the fields and strange feeling of isolation. He was taking Vivian home—in fact that was not what he was doing but it was what gave him the sensation of happiness.

  7

  THE PRIESTESS

  Eddins had found a house in Piermont, a small factory town up the Hudson, quiet and parochial, even neglected, about thirty minutes from the city. The traffic going in was never heavy. Trucks were not allowed on the parkway, just cars usually with a single occupant. It was a plain white house with soiled asbestos shingles on a street that sloped down to the paper mill and the river. There was a downstairs room and kitchen and on the second floor two bedrooms and a bath with old fixtures. There was a narrow strip of exhausted lawn and a garden. The front step, just off the street, was made of two large, irregular stones laid flat. The street went steeply downhill, almost directly to the liquor store that was owned by the ex-mayor, who still knew everything that was going on in town.

  He had recognized the house as soon as he saw it. It was a house like those he had grown up among, small southern houses, not those of doctors or lawyers or even of his father, who had a seed business. Eddins had loved his father, too old for the war but went in anyway, coming home on leave in 1943 in his khakis with crossed rifles on the collar, imperishable image. Men came home that way in the south, in uniform, it was a heritage. This was in Ovid, South Carolina—Oh-vid, as they pronounced it—oyster shell driveways and tin advertising signs, churches, whiskey bottles in brown paper sacks, and white-skinned girls with wavy hair who worked in stores and offices, you were born to marry one. It was in his blood, hard-imprinted there like the bottle caps and bits of foil trampled into the flat, fairground earth. There was also the gift of talk, the history of everything, told and retold, until you knew it all, the families and names. They sat on shaded porches in the afternoon or evening and talked in slow, intriguing voices of things that had happened and to whom. Time, in his memory, went at a different rate in those years, largely unmoving as you walked everywhere or if it was a good ways, sometimes drove. Just past town was the river, not wide, and flowing slowly, almost unnoticeably, but flowing, faint streaks of foam lying on it undisturbed, the water rusted and cold. On either bank as far as one could see, nothing: trees, river bank, a stray dog trotting on the road alongside. In the parts yard, half-fenced, the bodies of wrecked cars and, further along the road, one that had been driven one night straight into a tree, the hollowed doors hanging open, the engine gone.

  He had come from that and it was now behind him, but it still existed, like the impression on a sheet of paper beneath the one you are writing on. He retained the deep things, a sense of family, respect, and also a kind of honor in the end. His mother’s most valued possession had been an old dining table carved out of fiddleback mahogany that had been in her family since the 1700s. He also remembered the coast and the excitement of the road that led to it, though it was a long way away. They’d gone there when he was a boy, in the summer. The low sea islands, the great stretches of marsh grass, the beaches, and boats cocked as if to dry. The thing that appealed to him most about the house in Piermont was that it was like houses near the ocean. From it, he could look down at the vast river, wide and unmoving like slate, and at other times alive and dancing with light.

  One night at a party he met a girl named Dena, tall, loose-limbed, with dark eyes and a space between her front teeth. She was from Texas and divorced, she told him, although that was not strictly true, from a man she described as a famed poet, Vernon Beseler, also from Texas—Eddins had never heard of him—who’d actually published poems, she said, and was friends with other poets. Intense but quick to laugh, she spoke with a drawl in a voice filled with life. She had a child, a little boy, who was staying at her parents’ at the moment. His name was Leon, she said, and gave a little shrug, as if to say she hadn’t chosen it. What is there about a woman who had fallen in love and gotten married and now stands before you in almost foolish friendliness, as a supplicant really, in high
heels, alone and without a man? She was innocent, Eddins saw, in the real sense of the word. Also droll. She had a piece of scotch tape across her forehead when he came to pick her up the first time, she had put it there to prevent wrinkles and forgotten to take it off.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  She reached up.

  “Oh, my God,” she said in embarrassment and confusion.

  She told him about herself, stories of her life. She liked to sing, she said, she’d been in the choir. You weren’t allowed to wear lipstick in school, but in the choir you could wear it and even some makeup. What happened to their faces? the townspeople used to ask.

  She’d gone to Vassar.

  “You went to Vassar? Where is Vassar?”

  “It’s in Poughkeepsie.”

  “What made you pick Vassar?” he said.

  “Actually, I’m supposed to be smart. Not supposed to be,” she said, “I actually am.”

  She loved Vassar, she said, it was like an English park, the old brick buildings, the tall trees. They used to live as if it belonged to them, they came to class in their pajamas. For dinner though, you had to wear white gloves and pearls. There was a girl named Beth Ann Rigsby. She wouldn’t wear them, nobody could make her do anything. They wouldn’t let her go to dinner. You must wear your white gloves and pearls, they told her. So she came down in her pearls and white gloves and nothing else. Eddins was enthralled. He gazed at her.

  “Are you looking at my teeth?” she said.

  “Your teeth? No.”

  “Are they too big? The dentist says I have a fabulous bite.”

  “You’ve got wonderful teeth. What were you like as a kid?” he said.

  “Oh, I was a good kid. I got good marks in school. I had this thing, I was mad about Egypt. I told everyone I was an Egyptian, my mother was furious. I had a sign on my door that said You Are Entering Egypt. You want to hear some Egyptian words?”

  “Sure.”

  “Alabaster,” she said. “Oasis.”

  “Cairo,” he said.

  “I suppose. They had the first great queen of history and the most famous, Nefertiti. When you died, your heart was weighed against a feather symbolizing truth, and if you passed judgment you took up eternal existence.”

  She loved that he was listening to her.

  “The pharaoh was a god,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “When he died …”

  “When God died?”

  “It was just his way of leaving to join the other gods,” she said as if consoling him.

  In September they went to Piermont for the day and ate lunch in the little, faded garden. The sun was still warm. She was wearing blue shorts and high heels. Her legs were bare and her heels had chafed spots on them. They talked and laughed. She wanted to be liked. Later they came into the kitchen and drank some wine. Eddins was sitting sideways to the table. Without a word she knelt in front of him and began, a little awkwardly because she was nearsighted, to unfasten his clothing. The zipper of his pants melted, tooth by tooth. She was a little nervous, but it was almost as she had pictured it, the Apis bull. Smooth and just swelling his cock almost fell into her mouth and gaining confidence she began. It was the act of a believer. She had never done it before, not with her husband, not with anyone. This was what it was like, to do things you had never done before, only imagined. The light was soft, late in the day. It just sort of flopped right out, she later wrote in her diary. He must of been thinking about it. It was ready. It was just so natural. Once, with her son, Leon, when he was a year and a half old, she had tied a piece of white string around his genitals, not to mean anything, just to set them off, they were so perfect. She had wanted to confess that, to tell someone, and to do this was like confessing, like telling Neil. It was like a boot just slipped onto a full calf and she went on doing it, gaining assurance, her mouth making only a faint sound. She did it as well as she could, she wanted it not to end, but then it was too late for that. She could tell from the movement he was making and then the cries and the great unexpected, it seemed a huge amount—she nearly choked. For a moment she was proud of her nerve. He was still in her mouth. She did not move. After a long time, she sat back.

  Eddins didn’t speak or move. She was afraid to look at him, of having done the wrong thing. But she had wanted to. It had been because of her ka, the life force. Follow thy desire, they said, as long as thou shalt live, there is no coming back. She stood up and went to the sink to wash her face. There were brown rust stains under the faucets. She finished and walked into the living room and sat in a chair. Through the window, in the sunlight, she saw a white butterfly flying up and down in pure, ecstatic moves. After a few moments Eddins came and sat on the couch.

  “Don’t sit over there,” he said quietly.

  “All right. Then you didn’t mind?”

  “Mind?”

  “In Egypt I would be your slave.”

  “Jesus, Dena.”

  He wanted to say something but couldn’t decide what it would be.

  “At the swimming meets …” she said.

  “What swimming meets?”

  “The swimming meets at school. The boys all wore these little, silky trunks and you could see some of them … were hard. They couldn’t help it. It made me think of that.”

  “The little boys?”

  “Not just them.”

  “I wish I were all of them and you were looking at me.”

  She knew he understood it all. She could feel the goddess in herself rising.

  “No, I didn’t mind,” he said.

  “I’ve never done it before.”

  “I believe you.”

  He realized she had misunderstood.

  “I mean it was perfect, but I believe you.”

  “I felt you were the one. Was it really good?”

  In response he kissed her, slowly, full on the lips.

  She was afraid of saying something foolish. She looked down at her hands, then at him, then down again. She felt embarrassed but not that much.

  “I should probably marry you,” she said. She added, “I am married, though.”

  For more than a month before her son came to live with her again—he had been with his grandparents in Texas until she and Vernon supposedly worked things out—she and Eddins lived on Olympus. They lay head to foot, for him it was like lying with a beautiful column of marble, a column that could quench desire. Her mound was fragrant, warm with a kind of invisible sun. The bold, Assyrian parts of him were brushing her lips, stifling her moans. Afterwards they slept like thieves. The sun was bathing the side of the house, the cold air of fall seeped beneath the windows.

  They came home late, she on his arm, long-legged and unsteady, head down as she walked, as if from drinking. In bed he lay spent, like a soldier at the end of leave, and she was riding him like a horse, her hair blinding her. He loved everything, her small navel, her loose dark hair, her feet with their long, naked toes in the morning. Her buttocks were glorious, it was like being in a bakery, and when she cried out it was like a dying woman, one that had crawled to a shrine.

  “When you fuck me,” she said, “I get the feeling that I’m going so far I’ll go right through, I won’t be able to come back. I feel like my head’s going to give up, like I’m going crazy.”

  With Leon in the house they couldn’t behave that way, but even going shopping with her, it was just the two of them then, Dena in a jacket and jeans leaning across the counter to see something, the worn blue fabric drawn across her seat tight as a glove.

  At five, Leon was wearing glasses. He was not a boy who would be good at sports, but he had spirit. The resentment and hostility towards a strange man in his mother’s bedroom and life he showed only briefly by being reserved. He knew instinctively who Eddins was and what he meant, but he liked him and was in need of a father. Also a friend.

  “Look,” he said by way of showing him his room, “here is where I keep books. This is my favorite boo
k, this is about football. And in this book here, you can learn everything, you can learn about stars and what is the deepest hole in the sea, and about thunderstorms and how to stop them. This is my best book. And this!” he cried, “this is a story I wrote. All by myself, you can read it later. And this! This is about soldiers.”

  He picked up another.

  “Do you know that where your belly button is you were attached when you were in your momma’s … what is it again? Where women have hair down there … you know …”

  Eddins hesitated, but Leon went on unconcerned.

  “They tie a knot in it. They cut it off and it hurts. They tie a knot and stuff it inside you, really!”

  He looked up through his glasses to see if he was believed.

  He showed Eddins games in the yard, making up the rules as they went along.

  “There!” he cried as he kicked the ball. “If it hits there, it’s a goal! I have one point!”

  “If it goes where?”

  “There!” he cried, kicking it to another spot. “Play fair.”

  “Oh, all right,” Leon said but soon wanted to show Eddins something else.

  Vernon Beseler was living another life near Tompkins Square with a woman poet named Marian. Only infrequently did he see his son. He was destined to be a father who would never disappear because of the way he did. One day he called and asked Dena to meet him, he was thinking of heading back to Texas and wanted to see her before he left.