by James Salter
The glory of France is outside of Paris, in the countryside, the centuries lying dark in the cathedrals, the timeless rivers, the impossible turns of the road through small villages in one of which is Isabel’s house the likes of which you have seen many times. It’s nothing, a blank facade on a street of them, four or five plain windows, traditional lace curtains hanging in the lower ones, an old door with some glass panels. Within is a small vestibule and another pair of doors, a low-ceilinged entry hall and a narrow staircase ascending to things unknown. Then, walking forward, abruptly, you enter another world. Two long rooms end to end with large windows looking out over a garden to the sea, and not just the sea but vineyards, farms and houses, the most serene landscape imaginable. A kind of vertigo comes over one, a dizziness as if seeing paradise. There is even a path that leads down to the beach, about a twenty-minute walk. It is the celebrated beach of St. Tropez, unbroken for miles. “When we bought the house, there was no one here,” says Isabel. “The town was empty and poor. Next door there were stables, no, what do you call them, the place where they keep hay.”
The house, in fact, had been a hotel. There is a photograph of it in the kitchen which, come to think of it, is the engine room of a small hotel, long and narrow with a great iron range and zinc counters. Colette used to stay here—her name is in the register and with it were some of her letters. The faint impression of a hotel remains but what was once dark and probably mean has been made elegant and dedicated to purity and light.
Lunch is classic, gigot and green beans, preceded by a crab and avocado salad, and with the main course, roast potatoes. The grownups are drinking wine at one end of the table and the children are at the other, talking and eating with forks too big for their hands. One of them is my son, born in Paris and now back in France on a visit—the first of many, I hope. He’s three years old. The remark is made that the sweetest thing about them at this age is the way they love their mothers.
“They all love their mothers.”
“Ah, non!” Isabel cries. Not her husband. His only memories of his mother are of the perfume she wore and the soft touch of her gloved hand on his cheek when she came home in the evening. “The love you receive as a child,” Isabel says, “is like a bank—you give it to others later.”
A tingle of anticipation goes through me as when the horses begin to line up in the starting gate. I feel we may be approaching one of the three taboo subjects and am eager to hear it talked about in the French way, perhaps in the way that the actress friend of Isabel’s with the high cheekbones and great eyes that have stunned audience after audience would do it, an actress who lives nearby but who is at the moment on vacation and doesn’t want to do anything, such as come to lunch and talk about love. I would give anything to hear her on the subject, and you might too, but we somehow end up instead talking about the sex life, more or less, of Isabel’s father who is eighty-four and has just remarried. She’s very unhappy about it. Her mother—his first wife—had died not that long ago.
“How long?”
“Four years.”
“And it’s the unseemly haste?”
“No, no not that,” Isabel says, “but this wife is his age. What is the sense of that? He should have married someone young—that would be rigolo, at least.”
The French like the word rigolo, which means funny or comic. Something or someone is tres rigolo. The groundskeeper of a friend of mine who has a large place in the Dordogne fell out of a boat in the middle of a pond—he was almost certainly not sober—and the owner fell in trying to rescue him. The groundskeeper liked to tell the story. He described the owner as tres rigolo.
We had some friends in another part of France, not far from Bergerac—Paul and Monique. A cosmopolitan couple, he was a former builder around Paris and she’d gone to college in California. Paul does a lot of the cooking—in my experience, all of it—and the meals are not tentative: roasts, baked fish, vegetable dishes of the region, handsome desserts, and he sits down at the table with the aplomb and apparent anticipation of a man in a new restaurant. One Sunday when we were there, the guests also included a French psychiatrist and his wife who lived in the vicinity. His wife had the sort of looks that roused my hopes. She could have stepped out of the pages of Laclos, poised, knowing, with, I understood immediately, the capacity to be entertained—there was a trace of being half amused already in her expression. They were telling a story about a merchant in town who had sold wine to the psychiatrist for years without having an inkling of his profession. It was surprising, the wine merchant said, he had no idea the man was a doctor.
“Why?” Paul had asked. “Would you have any hesitation in going to him if you were, say, very depressed?”
“I think the wife could cure me more quickly,” the wine merchant replied.
Everyone laughed, including the psychiatrist. I was now following the conversation with avid interest, even accepting without wondering about it a further story of the wine merchant who’d had a smile found in a cask of his wine—I thought they said smile (sourire)—actually it was a mouse in the wine (souris). As far as I could tell, however, nothing further in the nature of sex or politics presented itself.
Later, in Gascony, we met a couple who lived in a château, and at a dinner in what could easily have been a wing of the Metropolitan, I sat next to the hostess who I immediately wished I’d met when I was twenty years younger although this would have made her about seven or eight. She was good-looking and vivacious and from the first moment we were talking animatedly and I was telling her everything I knew. Part of her charm lay in making me overlook the difference in our ages and I was trying to recall what Victor Hugo had said to a young woman to justify a physical attraction—they had in common being close to heaven, he because of his age and she because of her beauty, something like that. One thing the hostess said that I liked was that she had been trying to take up painting again. She had painted when she was younger and now she missed it. At the moment, she said, she was painting the ceiling.
Although there was someone seated on the other side of her who shared her attention, I was certain that her fascination was with me. We had begun to talk about her attempts to have children and the complete failure of them. It was probably more clinical than intimate but I felt it might fall under the heading of sex when unexpectedly, something else began to fall. Hornets from high above—the first dropped down a guest’s collar at the next table, causing him to dance about in a kind of inexplicable pantomime. Then others began to fall. The hornets were apparently sleeping up in the molding and the heat of the candles or possibly of the conversations that I could not hear had stirred them, not enough to fly but to stagger forth and then lose their grip, dropping like fruit. This effectively broke up the party.
There were times they came to us, when we could say chez nous. The conversation was at our own table, though technically, it was still French.
For some reason, at one point we decided to expose Monique and Paul to authentic American cuisine, in this case, chili. There was, however, difficulty in obtaining one of the ingredients. In neither of the two small supermarchés was there any chili powder. Now, I have absolute confidence in my chili, which I’ve made countless times and which a friend born in Galveston and a cook himself has pronounced exceptional, but it seemed foolhardy to try and make it without the powder. We finally located a can in a specialty shop twenty-five miles away. It did not inspire confidence. It had been made in China and was being sold under an English label. Also, it was of unknown potency, as was the cayenne.
The lunch was served outside on a summer day, in a graveled courtyard, beneath the shade of a huge tree. Paul and Monique were there and a younger couple, Robert and Agnes, who it developed had only gotten to bed at five that morning after a housewarming at a friend’s, a crémaillere, as they called it.
There was salad first, then the chili. It was a slight variation of the true chili, I explained,
which was ordinarily made with beef and pork chunks rather than ground beef, but apart from that it was genuine. I said this with a casual air, knowing that we were sitting down to a more powerful dish than usual—the Chinese powder had proved to be of exceptional strength. “You know, there are contests in Texas every year to judge the world’s champion chili,” I said to divert attention. “Sort of a Super Bowl of chili.”
“The bowl is super?” Agnes said.
“No. Super Bowl.”
She had taken a taste. There was a pause. “How is it?” I asked.
“It clears the voice,” she managed to say after a moment. Then, somewhat unconvincingly, “It’s wonderful.”
Her husband was tasting it. I could see him wince as he swallowed.
“Is it too hot?” I inquired offhandedly.
Fortunately Monique, who’d had it before in America, liked it. “It’s supposed to be no good unless it makes you sweat,” I said. “What’s the word for sweat?”
“Respirer.”
“Oui,” Robert breathed. I thought he said something to his wife about a ruade, which is a kick from a horse. After lunch they were supposed to attend a first communion.
“The chili will help us sing,” Agnes conceded.
To keep them from having the wrong impression, I explained that a key ingredient, the powder, had been hard to obtain and then had proven to be not what we normally employed. “There are some things that simply don’t exist in France, you can’t get them.”
“What?” Monique demanded.
“Peanut butter, for one,” I said.
“I hate it,” she said. “What else?”
“Baking soda.”
“You can get baking soda!”
“It’s not in the supermarché.”
“Of course not. You can get it at the pharmacie.”
“What, with a prescription?”
“No, no. You ask for bicarbonate de soude.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
“What is that used for?” Agnes asked.
“Cooking vegetables,” Monique said dismissively.
We never got around to sex. Their mouths must have been burning too much. The closest we came was a story of Paul and Monique’s trip to Peru. They were on a train between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. There were two trains, Monique said, one for tourists and another, slower one that made many stops which was the one they took.
“A woman got aboard with a lot of baggage—really just cartons and boxes of every description—a large woman wearing four or five skirts. When she was finally installed she took up a whole row of seats. The conductor came for the tickets. She had none, she said. Why not, he wanted to know? I don’t pay, she told him. You have to pay, he said. No, she said.
‘When they were building this railroad, I slept with every man who worked on it. I paid already,’ she said, ‘I don’t have to pay again.’”
I would have liked to call this letter The Woman from Cuzco, but I decided it would give the wrong idea about the candor of conversation at French tables.
European Travel and Life
Spring 1990
Once and Future Queen
There is a restaurant in Paris on Boulevard Montparnasse that has been there since the 1920s, the decade of myth, the decade of Josephine Baker, Picasso, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Stravinsky, so many others. The restaurant is called La Coupole and there one saw and still sees le tout Paris, which translated roughly means “everyone.” A certain kind of everyone, that is, the kind that writes or is written about.
La Coupole is very big and has always stayed open late. Marvelous faces, some with reputations attached, others hoping to achieve them, were there at all hours, framed by the worn red material of the banquettes, eating, drinking, and deep in conversations one could not hear or even imagine. Over it all was the haze of talk and the faint aroma of Gauloise cigarettes. You might see a dozen people you knew, you might see no one. Below was a dance hall—I don’t recall ever going down to it but it lent its presence.
A few years ago the restaurant changed hands. The new owner gave it a minor facelift and much needed refurbishing. The walls were freshly painted, the banquettes recovered, the inconvenient bar relocated. The room is still huge, the service impeccable, and the prices are not much higher. There are still crowds at night and all the animation one could desire, but something is different: the place has been perfected and in the process has become a kind of replica of itself, wonderful as long as you have never seen the original.
The queen of American ski towns, Aspen, is a bit like that. At its heart, Coupole-like, is the old Hotel Jerome, the exterior looking the same as ever but, with the exception of the lobby and bar, completely done over and raised to a luxurious level. In the former Jerome the rooms were homely and the plumbing questionable and one used to be able to rent Parlor A or B, the best in the hotel, for parties. The price was about $30. The windows, then as now, looked out toward Aspen Mountain and over the glittering town which in memory was always white with snow. In those days the Jerome bar was the chief gathering place. You could ski to it right down the streets from the bottom of the mountain, and from the closing of the lifts until past midnight everyone was there or had been. One beautiful woman—the town then held only a recognized handful of them—was said to have picked up a different man there to take home every night.
No conventions or groups came to Aspen then, nothing larger than a family or two unless it was the gathering of business executives that came every other week to seminars at the Aspen Institute. Skiing was not still in its infancy but certainly in its careless youth, the days when one stuck skis in the snow at the bottom of the lift before it opened to mark a place in line and then went off to breakfast, days before double black diamonds though the runs were the same.
As a boy, a true city boy in days when one traveled by rail and the great coast-to-coast meteors had a barbershop and chefs who prepared real food, I never heard of skiing. I first encountered it in Europe about ten years after the war. It was winter and Europe was still poor but the sheets in the hotels were crisp and freshly laundered. Perhaps it was this first experience that somehow made winter and cold essential factors.
I like to ski in snowstorms and on icy days. I like snow-laden boughs and a silence that seems like that of the North. It’s true one sees them skiing by on spring days in bikinis and shorts and going up in snowmobiles to steep, remote bowls in May and June—I have gone up myself after the lifts have closed for the season, climbing on mountain skis for hours and coming down, the snow wetter and wetter, in much shorter time, but to me this all seems somehow larky. For me the real days of skiing begin when summer is long gone.
There is something called the true life which I cannot describe and which perhaps varies as one sees it from different angles and at different times. At one point it is travel, at another a certain woman, at another a house somewhere with a view you will worship till you die. It is a life apart from money and to the side of ambition, a life lived in one way or another for beauty. It does not last indefinitely, but the survivors are usually not poorer for it. There was a woman in Aspen who one day confronted an old, conservative judge on the street and told him, “I’ve been married five times, I’ve run whorehouses, I’ve been all over the world. I’m not like you. I’ve lived.” Perhaps that cannot be classified precisely as the true life, but something in the boast is the same.
There was a true life in the mountains around Aspen—the girl who lived year-round in a teepee up past Lenado with a white horse in the meadow and her little child, others who had cabins or old houses, new-age people never to be old. There was a true life and though diminishing it exists still, the sky dark with autumn, the wind beginning to blow, the homeless bees wandering around the shacks being insulated, alighting desperately on clothing, a dry flower, a bit of sage. Winter is coming. There will be no survivors.<
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Skiing all day, with someone you like, riding up together, drinking the light. Runs at the top of which you could murmur And gentlemen in England, now abed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap . . .
Billy Kidd once listed his favorites in the West, the hardest ones. Many were only names to me, though not Elevator Shaft or the Ridge of Bell, which are both in Aspen, or White Out in Steamboat Springs, or Prima in Vail. He left out, I don’t know why, the long ones in Telluride—Spiral Staircase and the Plunge, at the top of which, late in the day, the local desperadoes, male and female, gather for the last descent. In the ski shop at the bottom one day I overheard a girl talking about Spider Sabich and his being shot to death in Aspen the day before. We listened to the evening news as one does in wartime. It was true.
Sabich was admirable, both in character and appearance. I never skied with him, of course—he was a professional champion, the first real one—but I saw him occasionally on friendly terms. He was killed in a lovers’ quarrel, a crime of passion, and missed the second half of what would have been an enviable life. It was impossible to imagine him as ex-anything, a has-been—he was too confident and personable for that.
So, winter with its snow, the ground all white. In the house across the street a woman in a bathrobe opens the balcony doors, brushes some snow from the railing, and looks toward the mountain before stepping back into the warmth of the room. It’s barely eight o’clock, there is time for coffee, to dress. The bed will go unmade. She will carry her skis to the gondola, the entire world of fresh snow above. Nothing is more thrilling than a talented girl skiing—boldness, grace, speed.