by James Salter
It was that way the morning they came and told her Privet had been hurt. The foreman was waiting in the pasture. “Her leg’s broken,” he said.
“How did it happen?”
He didn’t know. “It looks like she got kicked,” he guessed.
The horse was lying under a tree. She knelt and stroked its boardlike nose. The large eyes seemed to be looking elsewhere. The vet would be driving up from Catherine Store trailing a plume of dust, but it turned out to be a long time before he came. He parked a little way off and walked over. Afterward he said what she had known he would say, they were going to have to put her down.
She lay remembering that. The day had ended. Lights were appearing in parts of distant houses. The six o’clock news was on. Far below she could see the hayfield of Piñones and much closer, a hundred yards off, a truck. It belonged to someone trying to build a house down there. It was up on blocks, it didn’t run. There were other houses within a mile or so. On the other side of the ridge the metal roof, hidden in trees, of old man Vaughn who had once owned all of this and now could hardly walk. Further west the beautiful tan adobe Bill Millinger built before he went broke or whatever it was. He had wonderful taste. The house had the peeled log ceilings of the Southwest, Navajo rugs, and fireplaces in every room. Wide views of the mountains through windows of tinted glass. Anyone who knew enough to build a house like that knew everything.
She had given the famous dinner for him, unforgettable night. The clouds had been blowing off the top of Sopris all day, then came the snow. They talked in front of the fire. There were wine bottles crowded on the mantel and everyone in good clothes. Outside the snow poured down. She was wearing silk pants and her hair was loose. In the end she stood with him near the doorway to the kitchen. She was filled with warmth and a little drunk, was he?
He was watching her finger on the edge of his jacket lapel. Her heart thudded. “You’re not going to make me spend the night alone?” she asked.
He had blond hair and small ears close to his head. “Oh …” he began.
“What?”
“Don’t you know? I’m the other way.”
Which way, she insisted. It was such a waste. The roads were almost closed, the house lost in snow. She began to plead—she couldn’t help it—and then became angry. The silk pants, the furniture, she hated it all.
In the morning his car was outside. She found him in the kitchen making breakfast. He’d slept on the couch, combed his longish hair with his fingers. On his cheeks was a blond stubble. “Sleep well, darling?” he asked.
Sometimes it was the other way around—in Saratoga in the bar where the idol was the tall Englishman who had made so much money at the sales. Did she live there? he asked. When you were close his eyes looked watery but in that English voice which was so pure, “It’s marvelous to come to a place and see someone like you,” he said.
She hadn’t really decided whether to stay or leave and she had a drink with him. He smoked a cigarette.
“You haven’t heard about those?” she said.
“No, what about them?”
“They’ll give thee cancer.”
“Thee?”
“It’s what the Quakers say.”
“Are you really a Quaker?”
“Oh, back a ways.”
He had her by the elbow. “Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to fuck thee,” he said.
She bent her arm to remove it.
“I mean it,” he said. “Tonight.”
“Some other time,” she told him.
“I don’t have another time. My wife’s coming tomorrow, I only have tonight.”
“That’s too bad. I have every night.”
She hadn’t forgotten him, though she’d forgotten his name. His shirt had elegant blue stripes. “Oh, damn you,” she suddenly cried. It was the horse. He hadn’t gone. He was over by the fence. She began to call him, “Here, boy. Come here,” she begged. He wouldn’t move.
She didn’t know what to do. Five minutes had passed, perhaps longer. Oh, God, she said, oh, Lord, oh God our Father. She could see the long stretch of road that came up from the highway, the unpaved surface very pale. Someone would come up that road and not turn off. The disastrous road. She had been driving it that day with her husband. There was something he had been meaning to tell her, Henry said, his head tilted back at a funny angle. He was making a change in his life. Her heart took a skip. He was breaking off with Mara, he said.
There was a silence.
Finally she said, “With who?”
He realized his mistake. “The girl who … in the architect’s office. She’s the draftsman.”
“What do you mean, breaking it off?” It was hard for her to speak. She was looking at him as one would look at a fugitive.
“You knew about that, didn’t you? I was sure you knew. Anyway it’s over. I wanted to tell you. I wanted to put it all behind us.”
“Stop the car,” she said. “Don’t say any more, stop here.”
He drove alongside her trying to explain but she was picking up the biggest stones she could find and throwing them at the car. Then she cut unsteadily across the fields, the sage bushes scratching her legs.
When she heard him drive up after midnight she jumped from bed and shouted from the window, “No, no! Go away!”
“What I never understood is why no one told me,” she used to say. “They were supposed to be my friends.”
Some failed, some divorced, some got shot in trailers like Doug Portis who had the excavation business and was seeing the policeman’s wife. Some like her husband moved to Santa Barbara and became the extra man at dinner parties.
It was growing dark. Help me, someone, help me, she kept repeating. Someone would come, they had to. She tried not to be afraid. She thought of her father who could explain life in one sentence, “They knock you down and you get up. That’s what it’s all about.” He recognized only one virtue. He would hear what had happened, that she merely lay there. She had to try to get home, even if she went only a little way, even a few yards.
Pushing with her palms she managed to drag herself, calling the horse as she did. Perhaps she could grab a stirrup if he came. She tried to find him. In the last of the light she saw the fading cottonwoods but the rest had disappeared. The fence posts were gone. The meadows had drifted away.
She tried to play a game, she wasn’t lying near the ditch, she was in another place, in all the places, on Eleventh Street in that first apartment above the big skylight of the restaurant, the morning in Sausalito with the maid knocking on the door and Henry trying to call in Spanish, not now, not now! And postcards on the marble of the dresser and things they’d bought. Outside the hotel in Haiti the cabdrivers were leaning on their cars and calling out in soft voices, Hey, blanc, you like to go to a nice beach? Ibo beach? They wanted thirty dollars for the day, they said, which meant the price was probably about five. Go ahead, give it to him, she said. She could be there so easily, or in her own bed reading on a stormy day with the rain gusting against the window and the dogs near her feet. On the desk were photographs: horses, and her jumping, and one of her father at lunch outside when he was thirty, at Burning Tree. She had called him one day—she was getting married, she said. Married, he said, to whom? A man named Henry Vare, she said, who is wearing a beautiful suit, she wanted to add, and has wonderful wide hands. Tomorrow, she said.
“Tomorrow?” He sounded farther away. “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”
“Absolutely.”
“God bless you,” he said.
That summer was the one they came here—it was where Henry had been living—and bought the place past the Macraes’. All year they fixed up the house and Henry started his landscaping business. They had their own world. Up through the fields in nothing but shorts, the earth warm under their feet, skin flecked with dirt from swimming in the ditch where the water was chilly and deep, like two sun-bleached children but far better, the screen door slamming,
things on the kitchen table, catalogues, knives, new everything. Autumn with its brilliant blue skies and the first storms coming up from the west.
It was dark now, everywhere except up by the ridge. There were all the things she had meant to do, to go East again, to visit certain friends, to live a year by the sea. She could not believe it was over, that she was going to be left here on the ground.
Suddenly she started to call for help, wildly, the cords standing out in her neck. In the darkness the horse raised his head. She kept shouting. She already knew it was a thing she would pay for, she was loosing the demonic. At last she stopped. She could hear the pounding of her heart and beyond that something else. Oh, God, she began to beg. Lying there she heard the first solemn drumbeats, terrible and slow.
Whatever it was, however bad, I’m going to do it as my father would, she thought. Hurriedly she tried to imagine him and as she was doing it a length of something went through her, something iron. In one unbelievable instant she realized the power of it, where it would take her, what it meant.
Her face was wet and she was shivering. Now it was here. Now you must do it, she realized. She knew there was a God, she hoped it. She shut her eyes. When she opened them it had begun, so utterly unforeseen and with such speed. She saw something dark moving along the fence line. It was her pony, the one her father had given her long ago, her black pony going home, across the broad fields, across the grassland. Wait, wait for me!
She began to scream.
Lights were jerking up and down along the ditch. It was a pickup coming over the uneven ground, the man who was sometimes building the lone house and a high school girl named Fern who worked at the golf course. They had the windows up and, turning, their lights swept close to the horse but they didn’t see him. They saw him later, coming back in silence, the big handsome face in the darkness looking at them dumbly.
“He’s saddled,” Fern said in surprise.
He was standing calmly. That was how they found her. They put her in the back—she was limp, there was dirt in her ears—and drove into Glenwood at eighty miles an hour, not even stopping to call ahead.
That wasn’t the right thing, as someone said later. It would have been better if they had gone the other way, about three miles up the road to Bob Lamb’s. He was the vet but he might have done something. Whatever you said, he was the best doctor around.
They would have pulled in with the headlights blooming on the white farmhouse as happened so many nights. Everyone knew Bob Lamb. There were a hundred dogs, his own among them, buried in back of the barn.
AMERICAN EXPRESS
It’s hard now to think of all the places and nights, Nicola’s like a railway car, deep and gleaming, the crowd at the Un, Deux, Trois, Billy’s. Unknown brilliant faces jammed at the bar. The dark, dramatic eye that blazes for a moment and disappears.
In those days they were living in apartments with funny furniture and on Sundays sleeping until noon. They were in the last rank of the armies of law. Clever junior partners were above them, partners, associates, men in fine suits who had lunch at the Four Seasons. Frank’s father went there three or four times a week, or else to the Century Club or the Union where there were men even older than he. Half of the members can’t urinate, he used to say, and the other half can’t stop.
Alan, on the other hand, was from Cleveland where his father was well known, if not detested. No defendant was too guilty, no case too clear-cut. Once in another part of the state he was defending a murderer, a black man. He knew what the jury was thinking, he knew what he looked like to them. He stood up slowly. It could be they had heard certain things, he began. They may have heard, for instance, that he was a big-time lawyer from the city. They may have heard that he wore three-hundred-dollar suits, that he drove a Cadillac and smoked expensive cigars. He was walking along as if looking for something on the floor. They may have heard that he was Jewish.
He stopped and looked up. Well, he was from the city, he said. He wore three-hundred-dollar suits, he drove a Cadillac, smoked big cigars, and he was Jewish. “Now that we have that settled, let’s talk about this case.”
Lawyers and sons of lawyers. Days of youth. In the morning in stale darkness the subways shrieked.
“Have you noticed the new girl at the reception desk?”
“What about her?” Frank asked.
They were surrounded by noise like the launch of a rocket.
“She’s hot,” Alan confided.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
“Intuition.”
“Intuition?” Frank said.
“What’s wrong?”
“That doesn’t count.”
Which was what made them inseparable, the hours of work, the lyric, the dreams. As it happened, they never knew the girl at the reception desk with her nearsightedness and wild, full hair. They knew various others, they knew Julie, they knew Catherine, they knew Ames. The best, for nearly two years, was Brenda who had somehow managed to graduate from Marymount and had a walk-through apartment on West Fourth. In a smooth, thin, silver frame was the photograph of her father with his two daughters at the Plaza, Brenda, thirteen, with an odd little smile.
“I wish I’d known you then,” Frank told her.
Brenda said, “I bet you do.”
It was her voice he liked, the city voice, scornful and warm. They were two of a kind, she liked to say, and in a way it was true. They drank in her favorite places where the owner played the piano and everyone seemed to know her. Still, she counted on him. The city has its incomparable moments—rolling along the wall of the apartment, kissing, bumping like stones. Five in the afternoon, the vanishing light. “No,” she was commanding. “No, no, no.”
He was kissing her throat. “What are you going to do with that beautiful struma of yours?”
“You won’t take me to dinner,” she said.
“Sure I will.”
“Beautiful what?”
She was like a huge dog, leaping from his arms.
“Come here,” he coaxed.
She went into the bathroom and began combing her hair. “Which restaurant are we going to?” she called.
She would give herself but it was mostly unpredictable. She would do anything her mother hadn’t done and would live as her mother lived, in the same kind of apartment, in the same soft chairs. Christmas and the envelopes for the doormen, the snow sweeping past the awning, her children coming home from school. She adored her father. She went on a trip to Hawaii with him and sent back postcards, two or three scorching lines in a large, scrawled hand.
It was summer.
“Anybody here?” Frank called.
He rapped on the door which was ajar. He was carrying his jacket, it was hot.
“All right,” he said in a loud voice, “come out with your hands over your head. Alan, cover the back.”
The party, it seemed, was over. He pushed the door open. There was one lamp on, the room was dark.
“Hey, Bren, are we too late?” he called. She appeared mysteriously in the doorway, bare legged but in heels. “We’d have come earlier but we were working. We couldn’t get out of the office. Where is everybody? Where’s all the food? Hey, Alan, we’re late. There’s no food, nothing.”
She was leaning against the doorway.
“We tried to get down here,” Alan said. “We couldn’t get a cab.”
Frank had fallen onto the couch. “Bren, don’t be mad,” he said. “We were working, that’s the truth. I should have called. Can you put some music on or something? Is there anything to drink?”
“There’s about that much vodka,” she finally said.
“Any ice?”
“About two cubes.” She pushed off the wall without much enthusiasm. He watched her walk into the kitchen and heard the refrigerator door open.
“So, what do you think, Alan?” he said. “What are you going to do?”
“Me?”
“Where’s Louise?” Frank called.
“Asleep,” Brenda said.
“Did she really go home?”
“She goes to work in the morning.”
“So does Alan.”
Brenda came out of the kitchen with the drinks.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” he said. He was looking in the glass. “Was it a good party?” He stirred the contents with one finger. “This is the ice?”
“Jane Harrah got fired,” Brenda said.
“That’s too bad. Who is she?”
“She does big campaigns. Ross wants me to take her place.”
“Great.”
“I’m not sure if I want to,” she said lazily.
“Why not?”
“She was sleeping with him.”
“And she got fired?”
“Doesn’t say much for him, does it?”
“It doesn’t say much for her.”
“That’s just like a man. God.”
“What does she look like? Does she look like Louise?”
The smile of the thirteen-year-old came across Brenda’s face. “No one looks like Louise,” she said. Her voice squeezed the name whose legs Alan dreamed of. “Jane has these thin lips.”
“Is that all?”
“Thin-lipped women are always cold.”
“Let me see yours,” he said.
“Burn up.”
“Yours aren’t thin. Alan, these aren’t thin, are they? Hey, Brenda, don’t cover them up.”
“Where were you? You weren’t really working.”
He’d pulled down her hand. “Come on, let them be natural,” he said. “They’re not thin, they’re nice. I just never noticed them before.” He leaned back. “Alan, how’re you doing? You getting sleepy?”
“I was thinking. How much the city has changed,” Alan said. “In five years?”
“I’ve been here almost six years.”
“Sure, it’s changing. They’re coming down, we’re going up.”
Alan was thinking of the vanished Louise who had left him only a jolting ride home through the endless streets. “I know.”