Don't Save Anything

by James Salter

  “What’s so hard about cooking asparagus?”

  “The sauce,” she said airily.

  She was a senior at Radcliffe. Her father was a lawyer. She had a brother who was at Duke. She’d come to the Vineyard to get away from Boston and also her boyfriend, Gordon. He was an investment banker and avid sailor. Also a model. “You can see what an identity crisis he has.”

  He called her all the time. “He called me tonight, in fact. He’s still in love with me. He wants me to marry him. I’m not about to marry him, he’s much too old. He’s thirty-nine.” She pushed back her hair and went on. “He’s great, but he always takes things a little too far you know? He goes just a little past where he should. He has one drink too many, he wants to go to just one more place, he looks at some other woman just a little too long . . .

  “I remember he gave this big party, I mean all his friends. I wasn’t nervous, men never make me nervous. I felt totally secure. It was my house, I was totally at ease. I was wearing this great dress cut down to here. Believe me, they noticed.” Her breast touched one’s arm as she talked. That was the thing, her body belonged to both of you, as if you were teammates, parts of it brushing you from time to time. “Everybody was there and of course he had to invite his ex-girlfriend Sharon. You can imagine why. Anyway, it got late and there were four of us sitting there, Gordon and me and Sharon and her date, and it was like a contest who was going to go to bed first? Finally Sharon’s date left and there were just the three of us. The two of them were whispering and finally Gordon said, ‘Look, Alix, why don’t you go up and go to bed? I’m going to talk to Sharon for a while; she has some problems she wants to talk about.’

  “So I went up and took off my clothes and put on a real sexy nightgown. After a while I went to the head of the stairs and called. I waited until he came to the bottom of the stairs and could see me, you know, and I said, ‘Don’t forget to put out the cat, will you?’

  “He was great but you had to watch him all the time.”

  The thing that aristocrats have is the sum of their breeding, going back for centuries, so that what might be called random behavior is minimal in them. You can learn how, let us say, to put on a pair of gloves so that you can fool almost anybody, but how is one to learn acts that are wholly unrehearsed? It can’t be done; you have to have the code, passed down through countless unions.

  So it is with women. The millennia have created them and certain things are known to them instinctively, by reflex, as it were.

  A woman, as the Russian proverb goes, is a complete civilization. Men may aspire to this but generally things come to them more slowly. Think of it as two long lines, one male and one female, placed side by side according to the degree of being civilized. The males will be opposite females much younger. In short, at the same age they are less far along. Their manners are unsettled and their speech artless. They may be kept for drinking at a future date but they require aging.

  This is something women are always concerned with, the maturing, or let us say the perfection, of men. It should come as no surprise that in certain cases they may choose a wine that is ready to enjoy rather than one that must be laid down for five or ten years.

  Men, on the other hand, are in the opposite position. As the Abbe de Brantome noted in his gallant tales, there is wood like ash and young elm that burns quite green and quickly, and there are others that will burn only with terrible difficulty. So it is, he observed, with girls and women: “Some, as soon as they are nicely green, mere saplings, ignite easily and burn so briskly that one would think they had imbibed love’s heat and whorishness while still in their mothers’ wombs,” to such a point, he added, that they do not even wait until maturity to begin lovemaking. They are the tinder to which men supply the match. The French, expert in this as in other things, have a rule of thumb regarding the proper difference in age for couples: the woman’s age should be one half that of the man’s plus seven years. At first this yields nothing remarkable—a boy of twenty and a sweetheart seventeen—but it becomes a man of thirty and a woman twenty-two, a man of forty and a woman twenty-seven. The real intent may be to assure there can be children, but the formula has an appeal of its own.

  I have never become cynical about them, Raymond Chandler wrote, “never ceased to respect them, never for a moment failed to realize that they face hazards in life which a man does not face, and therefore should be given a special tenderness and consideration.” Though Chandler is a handful of generations back and died before the last of the statues in the temple were smashed, his words strike a chord. Women have a harder duty in this world. They have been given their beauty in recompense. Beauty in its brevity.

  Isn’t this the message of so many things, the ballet for instance, with its perfect grace? The dedication and labor of the dancers rewards them with an aura. Pliant and slender, they were made to be adored, but one cannot really—not ever—know them, for they are not what they seem—when the lights go down their reality disappears. As dancers and women they belong to that order which is the greatest of all, of things truly unpossessable.

  Out on the field in the cold sunshine the soccer teams are playing, girls in shorts and numbered white shirts, shrill shouting and coltish legs. On the sidelines you have a chance to talk to your daughter’s roommate for the first time. Her name is Avril. Long blond hair, fine brows. On her radiant jaw the light picks up a faint youthful down. She wears jeans and boots with high heels although she’s already quite tall. She hasn’t gone out for the team, she hasn’t really gotten into anything, she admits. She hates the school, she suddenly says, looking out at the field, they have such senseless, stupid rules. It’s something about a weekend and signing back in, but she doesn’t really explain, she is already running awkwardly onto the field, the game is over and a loose huddle of sixteen-year-olds are shouting, “Ice-cold beer, makes you want to cheer! Ice-cold gin, makes you want to sin! Ice-cold duck . . .”

  If it were not for the idiotic rules, and perhaps in spite of rules, Avril, not a day older, might be imagined in the etchings of Picasso’s Vollard Suite, idyllic drawings with an irresistible purity of line. The bearded sculptor, his forehead barely creased, relaxes with his naked young model in bed or on a couch, fulfilled by her but not ardent, distracted in fact, in a kind of vague equilibrium with the joys of this earth—to paraphrase Kazantzakis—women, art, ideas. It is a depiction of immortality and the spareness of the furnishings essential for it.

  Picasso’s life itself might serve as an illustration. He is that sculptor, of course, and a large portion of his work is of one or another of the women in his life, all of whom were younger. Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was his mistress and bore him a child, was seventeen when they met; he was forty-six. Françoise Gilot was twenty-one and Picasso was over sixty. The first, fatal interviews. Why not? He was rich, both in money and—more seductive—fame, probably the richest painter who ever lived. His pictures, masculine, frank, would be a logical target of feminism were it not for their greatness. Picasso, in fact, stands in the path of new ideas and relationships. The order he represents and is inseparable from is as archaic as the gender pronouns in the Bible. Why, for instance, didn’t he paint women his own age? Why didn’t Leonardo, why didn’t Gauguin or Matisse? After all, there are women who cannot easily be imitated, who come down in the morning with a sly smile and ease, hair loose, face purified by sleep, needing coffee and talk. They have been in hotels, houses, countries, and risen from many forgotten nights; not all of them are interested in money or weary of men.

  The floor bare, music blaring. Aerobics. The class is in three ranks, an ordinary class, salesgirls, housewives, the man who works in the auto parts store: common clay. Amid them, one long-nosed girl with a strong back, shapely legs: the sole swan. She’s wearing white shorts, a green tank top over a white T-shirt. There’s a slight tense sinew up where her legs join, the apex. Kick, kick, kick, higher, higher. Her movements are yout
hful, ecstatic, hands thrown out loosely as her leg sweeps free, fine hair leaping. From time to time she looks back and smiles at a dumpy woman behind her, her mother. During the last half of the class she rolls her T-shirt sleeves above the shoulder like an Oklahoma boy and looks down admiringly at her slender arms. What joy there is in her! The girlfriend by her side is of a separate species.

  In the sit-ups she struggles, can’t do them, and finally gives up and lies helpless, lanky calves flat on the floor. One wants to seize and embrace her, the life, the aimless perfection! Her name is scribbled on the roster beneath her mother’s: Chris.

  This glimpse of the divine standing dampened in the entry to an empty gym, skin glowing, pulse still a fraction high returning slowly to normal and making one think of the dreamlike descent from other heights. Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae, the poet says: I feel again a spark of that ancient flame. You cannot take your eyes from her. It will be such a long time before she becomes her mother, perhaps never.

  In Thailand mistresses are an accepted part of the society, often a mark of riches. They are called small wives and their children bear no stigma, any more than those of French kings. But this is not Thailand and Chris and her retinue have walked out the door. It was fantasy, though others are not: high heels, black stockings, tight little skirt, a young woman and all the pleasure she brings. I have had two friends, both Yale men as it happens, who told me that they had never deceived their wives. I know a famous movie director, often married, who says the same thing. From time to time I think about this, especially since one of the Yale men also claimed he had never once in his life told a lie—of course, in his case an important motive had been removed. I am not praising faithlessness—that is too dangerous—only reflecting that these men seem less interesting, like those who don’t drink. Certain faults, if you can call them that, make men intriguing, just as certain flaws make a more beautiful face. In any case, rules are only rules. We live in society but also in zoology. We will never escape that, and if we do, hope of salvation is gone.

  There are complications, however, and the uncertainty of what to do about them. In the office, for instance. The end of the day, streets dark with people. The girl who works on the floor below. She comes in out of the cold with a smile, face flushed, and in the intimacy of the crowded bar says, “Hello, darling,” and without a pause, “I love you. I’m so glad I met you.” Her smooth skin, her legs, her apartment with its cat. The exhilaration, the thrilling nights without care. On the one side there exists a perfectly decent domestic life. On the other, the forbidden and inexpressibly sweet. The real temptation is not pleasure but the idea of capturing it, of abandoning everything and starting again.

  There are advantages in being a man. In Lysistrata, with its sexual boycott more severe than any since, the women are credited with all the determination and most of the intelligence, but as the heroine herself says, when a soldier returns from the war, even though he has white hair he can quickly find a wife. With women it is different, she declares, women have but one summer.

  I heard this same observation made by a European woman I know whose second husband had died. She was past the age of childbearing and though she had lost none of her charm, a woman of fifty, unlike a man, was used up, she commented, whereas a man that age could go out and begin again. It was perhaps unfair, but that was the way it was. I don’t mean to heavy-handedly connect Aristophanes to a restaurant in Basel but merely to note the obvious at each end of a two-thousand-year span.

  So he marries, not the wife of his youth, then, but someone who comes along later, the stunning ex-student or assistant or even the daughter of a friend. She is a potent object, this new wife, the dreams she excites in others, the envy, the unexpected things she can say, none of them familiar, none of the wearisome stories about house and children. The cities they will conquer together, the journeys, the sacred mornings! The glory of walking in with a young woman—power over her may wane, but the power of her, never. She is a pardon, a second chance. This time there is everything: happiness, reason, money enough. The years, not treating them equally, roll by. In the end the inevitable happens and he, unfortunately grown old, one day falters and drops in the traces. He dies. There are the photos on the piano, all in handsome frames, which the two ravishing children still in school identify: Daddy and Mommy before they got married, Daddy in his uniform—don’t know where that was, the four of us at the lake, Daddy before he got sick . . .

  There remains of the vanished father and the memories surrounding him something romantic, even exalted. Things that are gone acquire this patina, people, decades, cars. His white suit will always be white, his lined face kind and unaging. He will never become cranky, wear pants with baggy seats, or in any way diminish their love for him. And widowhood, for her, is not uncomfortable. There is the house, money, the children, and something she always had little of, time to spend by herself. It’s a welcome thing and there are always friends.

  She is still undeniably young, the house is a wonderful one, would she—this is a funny question—would she rather have married a younger man? the interviewer asks.

  The shadow of something like reflection crosses her face and she shakes her head. “But I wouldn’t mind one now,” she says.

  Esquire

  March 1992

  Karyl and Me

  We first met—that’s not the right word, I first became aware of her spectacular existence—at a seminar on film in Aspen in the late 1960s. She was sitting in an upper row, stunning face with high cheekbones, dark hair, rapt expression, and I was more aware of her than of anything of supposed importance that was being said. I didn’t know who she was or anything about her, and it’s been so long now that I don’t remember how it happened that we first spoke or how I learned everything.

  Her name was Karyl Roosevelt. She’d been married and divorced twice, the second time to a grandson of one of our greatest presidents, FDR, and she had four children. All this by the time she was barely thirty. She told intriguing stories about herself, some, at the beginning, not entirely true. She’d had intercourse with her second husband only eight times during their marriage, she said, and had gotten pregnant after three of them. She’d been born, she claimed, in Leadville, Colorado, and had an aunt who’d fallen in love, on a trip to Italy, with one of Mussolini’s aides. It ended unhappily and the aunt tried to commit suicide by drowning herself. The creek, however, was only two feet deep.

  What I didn’t realize immediately was that her stories were the stirring of something hidden and unsuspected: literary talent. It turned out she was a born writer, but more of that later.

  My real friends have always been men. I don’t know how it could be otherwise. I went to boys’ schools, was in the army, then married. My preference is for men—in a certain sense I never encountered a woman in the same life as mine.

  The question is, what constitutes friendship? Some is nothing more than companionship, some is only a practical matter, some just lengthy acquaintance. Friendship is more than knowledge and intimacy. It belongs to the order of things that cannot be weighed, like sorrow, honor, and hope. It is a form of love. It lies in the heart. You can name certain of the essentials: trust, a shared view of the world, admiration, understanding, and something I value, a sense of humor. All of these are a part of it but none of them define it.

  It all began with Karyl when she took the job of typing my manuscripts, I think for a dollar a page. She was a good typist and, at first, coolly efficient, but then she began to offer a comment or two. I learned that she liked to read. It was not just a quick dip into reading to make herself more interesting, she was avid. Still rarer was her taste; she knew what was good and why. I don’t know at what point in her life this power to discriminate came into being. I somehow could not picture the ravishing high school girl she must have been, already focusing her life on men, as a serious reader. Somewhere along the way, however, what was latent emerged
. I like to think it changed her life or at least prepared her for the second and third acts. Beauty is a great accomplishment, but knowledge—or should I broaden it and say culture—is at least as seductive.

  We became friends in part I think because we did not become more. Is the other more? In the short term, yes, of course. In the long term, yes also, providing there is something additional. It was this additional we shared.

  We have been friends for nearly thirty years. She has almost always been in someone’s arms, not promiscuously but reliably. It’s a quality I like. I recall an evening in our kitchen with the dishes. There we were amiably, Karyl, my wife, and I. A friend who had dropped by was curious. “What’s Karyl doing here?” he took me aside to ask.

  “She’s living with us,” I said for no real reason. I wanted to see his reaction.

  “You must be out of your mind,” he whispered.

  She was always tremendously attractive, but youth at last made its exit. She moved to Chicago and for a time, for a novel almost, worked for Saul Bellow. Then she moved to New York. Our lives—this was in the 1980s—became even more closely entwined. She reviewed books. She was social secretary to a woman on Fifth Avenue. She worked for the ASPCA. Her stories were irresistible. The man who came in and said, “You got any snakes?” He wanted a real good one.

  “A good one?”

  “I wants to make a wallet,” he said.

  I called her there once and the phone rang for a long time. Finally it was picked up and someone went to get her. “They must have been killing cats,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “They were killing the best dogs in the place.”

  It may not have been true but it was typical of her stoicism and contempt for what the world had become. She more or less believed, as Kazantzakis wrote, that nobility, harmony, balance, the sweetness of life, happiness, are all virtues and graces which we must have the courage to bid goodbye. They belonged to another age.