by James Salter
She had gone to visit her parents. It was October, he was alone. The clouds that night were a dark blue, a blue such as one seldom sees covering a hidden moon, and he thought, as he often did, of nights at sea or waiting to sail.
He was content to be alone. He’d made himself some dinner and sat afterwards reading with a glass at his elbow, just as he had sat in the little living room on Tenth Street, Vivian gone to bed and he sitting reading. Time was limitless, mornings, nights, all of life ahead.
He often thought about death but usually in pity for an animal or fish or seeing the dying grass in the fall or the monarch butterflies clinging to milkweed and feeding for the great funeral flight. Were they aware of it somehow, the strength it would take, the heroic strength? He thought about death, but he had never been able to imagine it, the unbeing while all else still existed. The idea of passing from this world to another, the next, was too fantastic to believe. Or that the soul would rise in a way unknown to join the infinite kingdom of God. There you would meet again all those you had once known as well as those you had never known, the countless dead in numbers forever increasing but never as great as the infinite. The only ones missing would be those who believed there was nothing afterwards, as his mother had said. There would be no such thing as time—time passed in an hour, like the time from the moment one fell asleep. There would be only joy.
Whatever you believed would happen was what happened, Beatrice said. She would go to some beautiful place. Rochester, she’d said, as a joke. He had always seen it as the dark river and the long lines of those waiting for the boatman, waiting in resignation and the patience that eternity required, stripped of all but a single, last possession, a ring, a photograph, or letter that represented everything dearest and forever left behind that they somehow hoped, it being so small, they would be able to take with them. He had such a letter, from Enid. The days I spent with you were the greatest days of my life …
What if there should be no river but only the endless lines of unknown people, people absolutely without hope, as there had been in the war? He would be made to join them, to wait forever. He wondered then, as he often did, how much of life remained for him. He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived. He would be going where they all had gone and—it was difficult to believe—all he had known would go with him, the war, Mr. Kindrigen and the butler pouring coffee, London those first days, the lunch with Christine, her gorgeous body like a separate entity, names, houses, the sea, all he had known and things he had never known but were there nevertheless, things of his time, all the years, the great liners with their invincible glamour readying to sail, the band playing as they were backed away, the green water widening, the Matsonia leaving Honolulu, the Bremen departing, the Aquitania, Île de France, and the small boats streaming, following behind. The first voice he ever knew, his mother’s, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child. He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home—the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned.
He had been weeding in the garden that afternoon and looked down to see, beneath his tennis shorts, a pair of legs that seemed to belong to an older man. He mustn’t, he realized, be going around the house in shorts like this when Ann was there, probably not even in the cotton kimono that barely came to the knee or in an undershirt. He had to be careful about such things. He always came out and went back in a suit. He’d come in the one from Tripler & Co., a midnight blue with a thin pinstripe.
It was the suit he wore to his aunt’s funeral in Summit. He went with Ann—he had asked her to come with him. The funeral was at ten in the morning. It was brief, and they left soon after. They had come on the early train. Crossing the marshlands in the first bluish light, New York in the distance looked like a foreign city, someplace where you could live and be happy. On the way he told her about his aunt, Dorothy, his mother’s sister, and his wonderful uncle, Frank. He described their restaurant, Fiori, with its red plush and couples who dropped in for dinner on their way home from work and others coming in later, not expecting to be seen. It had been years since it existed, but it seemed very real to him that morning, as if they could drive there for dinner and sit with a drink listening to Rigoletto, and the waitress would bring them steaks, slightly charred with a small pat of butter melting on top. He wanted to take her there for the first time.
His mind moved elsewhere, to the great funerary city with its palazzos and quiet canals, the lions that were its feared insignia.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about Venice. I’m not sure Wells was right about the best time to go there. January is so damned cold. I have a feeling it would be better to go before then. So what, if there’re some crowds. I can ask him about hotels.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes. Let’s go in November. We’ll have a great time.”
A Note About the Author
James Salter is the author of numerous books, including the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; the collections Dusk and Other Stories, which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Last Night, which won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award; and Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days, written with Kay Salter. He lives in New York and Colorado.
Other titles by James Salter available in eBook format
Burning the Days • 978-0-307-78171-0
Dusk and Other Stories • 978-1-58836-958-1
Last Night • 978-0-307-42656-7
Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days • 978-0-307-49644-7
Light Years • 978-0-307-78172-7
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
ALSO BY JAMES SALTER
FICTION
Last Night
Dusk and Other Stories
Solo Faces
Light Years
A Sport and a Pastime
Cassada (previously published as The Arm of Flesh)
The Hunters
NONFICTION
Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days (with Kay Salter)
There and Then
Gods of Tin
Burning the Days