Burning the Days

by James Salter

  The athletes had girlfriends, usually back in the small towns they had come from. We had girlfriends ourselves or, rather, knew girls. Some attended the sister school, Lincoln, some were their friends, a loose coterie of New York girls, well-off for the most part, closely watched over by their parents. They lived in the Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties, some more distant, one beauty in a building with an iron fence in the West Sixties. At school dances in the city on Saturday night a portion of them were likely to appear, and there were parties on Park Avenue with fruit punch in the dining room, the rug rolled back, and parents out of sight in a distant bedroom or at a movie.

  The ennui of those parties, the schoolboy sophistication and dancing in darkened rooms. There were no passionate moments or slamming of doors. We did not have love affairs at that age. There were no notes from fifteen-year-olds that said, I love you. I will give you anything. Such notes as there were were teasing or clever. As boys we dreamed of the prescription quantum vis, “as much as you please,” but there was never that. Nor were there many real couples. It was all too formalized and familiar.

  I carry within me, however, the memories of those girls, the last of a breed, their freshness and animation, their refusal to be lured. I pass the buildings where they lived, where they live, those who went away, who married, the one who didn’t, the one who went insane.

  Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck. Foppish and unathletic, he was the object of ridicule behind his back and was probably aware of it—he followed Cocteau’s dictum, whatever you are criticized for, intensify it. Bony-wristed, he floated through schoolboy theatrical productions, a long-nosed, fruity Hamlet, and fifteen years later, having abandoned a try at painting, he was director of an underground theater, metamorphosed into a visionary bringing a vivid and disturbing play, The Connection, to the stage. The theater was makeshift, up a narrow flight of stairs. I was astonished by the coolness of a play about drugs and failed to recognize its foresight, but it shone like a diamond. I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the old terms.

  With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was The Town and the City. I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.

  In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident—a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm—into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak. I remembered sitting in the classroom while a favorite teacher tried to kindle our interest in the haiku and its seventeen syllables, but the essence of it, large things evoked by small, was beyond us.

  Richard Wooster was the teacher’s name. He was young and had a wide, unnerving smile. Kerouac did not know him nor did Wooster, I think, know the swaggering Lowell boy. Among the teachers, Mr. Wooster was the one to whom I felt closest. When he went into the navy during the war he wrote to me as if to an equal. In the life after, I went to see him when I had published a novel. He was married by then and had four or five children. He was gray but still smiling. We sat in the living room of the large, disorderly house he no doubt had dreamed of. I meant him to see that his faith in me had been confirmed, but I am not sure what he saw—his smile was one of not quite remembering. His children had replaced me and life now crowded in. As if the school years had been a vine and something cut them and they fell.

  ——

  My first duck I tasted in the dining room of a silvery apartment off Fifth Avenue. Across from me, aware of nothing remarkable, sat my friend. At the head of the table was his stepfather, Jonas Reiner, a large, humorous man who owned underwear factories, and at the far end my friend’s blonde mother, Ethel.

  Of the mothers of friends, she was the most glamorous. She had the most aplomb and style. She was the daughter of a doctor who, when October 1929 came, called and asked, “Are you broke?”—she was twenty-five years old, married to her first husband, with two small children. She had five thousand dollars to her name and her bill at Bergdorf’s was four thousand eight hundred. “Yes,” she said, “are you?”

  “Um, but I’ve been broke before and I hope to be broke again,” her father told her.

  She was a regal figure to me, affected but smiling, her ash-blonde hair heaped on her head, the silk of her dresses whispering. I never saw her in the kitchen—there was a cook—or with a vacuum cleaner in her hand or even changing a shoe, legs crossed, slipping it off and putting on another. Perhaps there were weekend mornings when, in a peignoir with fur cuffs she might scramble eggs to put on a breakfast tray and carry down the hallway to her husband. She suggested the sumptuous.

  Her son, Wink, was my friend. As young boys, groups of us used to gamble in his room, playing cards. He sometimes brought out five- or ten-dollar gold pieces to prove that he was good for any run of bad luck. I had never seen a gold piece or known they existed. They were prophetic. In time, he became a stockbroker and had a seat on the exchange. Money rolled in. He had a beautiful, extravagant wife and a house in Westchester. That was after the war. We were, strengthened by roots that reached far back, close friends. I was at his wedding and later, godfather to his first child. The money I had in the 1950s he doubled and tripled for me, and I felt myself rising with him, though in a smaller way.

  In years that followed there came the life of men, evenings in uptown bars, confiding everything. I knew about his wife, his brother-in-law, his partners. We went to football games and to Mexico together. The welterweight championship of Mexico was being fought in a huge, ramshackle arena somewhere on the outskirts of Mexico City. We were in the second row with a woman we had met, a blonde who said she was the girlfriend of an ex—Chicago Bears football player. Had he lost a leg or been stricken with cancer? I don’t seem to recall. I do see the vast, surrounding sea of blackest hair, all of it male. There was not another woman in the place and, a little drunk, the one we were with shone like a beacon. The naked calves of the fighters danced level with our eyes and blood flew from cut faces in what seemed to be sheets. From the balcony, beer was being thrown and lighted newspapers. It was round five or six. The chaos was mounting.

  “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. We were packed close. The empty aisle rose towards the rear between banks of men. “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said again. “Who’ll come with me?”

  Neither of us stirred. I watched as she made her way alone up the aisle, on high heels, her hips speaking clearly, it seemed, beneath the dress. She was the emblem of it all. Row by row every face turned to watch. I was sure we were not going to see her again.

  We walked the dark streets afterwards, however, looking for a cab with her, few lights anywhere and unseen dogs barking.

  At the cockfights we were drinking tequila and licking salt from the back of our hands. Wink had given up looking at the roosters as they were carried proudly around. He read the odds instead, written on pieces of board men bore through the darkness. He held out bunches of money, which they took nodding. It was pesos, it didn’t matter. The cabs were in pesos, the hotel, the wide boulevards skimming past. We were breathing the Latin air, drunk on altitude. The city was a galaxy. The girls came into the room and lined up, smiling. Their teeth were mostly bad. One was Cuban. I had never been to Cuba. We went there, the palms, her bare room with shutters, the pale streets at dawn.

  Perhaps it all still exists. I have never been back. We drove to Cuernavaca, then to the sea. The beach was shadowed by the first great hotels. White-legged we walked alo
ng it. There was a slender brown woman in a black bikini; she could have been Mexican but was not. We sat and talked. She was a friend of the English playwright John Osborne and had a gold cigarette case with a persuasive inscription engraved in his own hand.

  She may have had some of his money, as well, or perhaps someone else’s. She had bought a motorboat for the Mexican boy with whom she was living, so he could have a water-skiing business. We went to remote inlets in it and ate in beach shacks where there were only three or four plates but from somewhere were produced icy bottles of beer. We met in the evenings as well. The Mexican boy was always silent.

  I caught sight of her several times afterwards in New York, once in the Veau d’Or with the cigarette case on the table near her plate. She appeared very urban and expensive, a long way from barefoot life. That period was ended. I wanted to know more about her, about Osborne and the past, but all of that she declined to reveal.

  My friendship with Wink seemed indestructible and my attachment to his mother grew. It became love, not the love felt for my own mother but something grown-up and apart. It would be truer to say I returned her love, the warmth had first come from her.

  During the war she lived in New York, where I often saw her while my own family was in Washington. Later she moved to an estate in Ossining. I forget the sequence of divorce from her husband and his becoming ill, but he grew gaunt and died. In Ossining she came in from the sunlight with a garden trowel in one gloved hand. There was a swimming pool, a sunken living room, a dog. Had I read Tales of the South Pacific, which had just been published, she asked? I must, she said. The war was over. We’d driven up to Ossining in a new car, perhaps Wink’s. His mother had had difficulty in forming his tastes and was turning her efforts towards me.

  She also had a nephew, her admired sister’s son, Peter, who grew up more or less alongside us, plump and deceivable. His mother hoped he would go into medicine, but he had another ambition. After college he confessed it to Ethel: he wanted to have a gallery, he dreamed of art. She took him to dinner at the house of a famous dealer she knew, where Peter sat silently as the impossibilities of his choice were explained to him in detail, the near certainty of his not succeeding, and the sure disappointment of his mother. At the end he summoned his courage to say, “I’m not Dorothy’s son, I’m Ethel’s. I have the right to fail,” he added.

  There was a moment’s silence and the dealer said, “I’ll sponsor you.”

  I had two prints, a yellow Chagall marked hors commerce, and a Picasso bought from Peter when his gallery, in a town house off Fifth, with pure white walls, was thriving. I longed for a Matisse but hadn’t the money.

  ——

  In the summer of 1941 my father, who had been a lieutenant more than twenty years before, was called back into the army as a major. He was stationed in Atlanta in the Office of Engineers. I forget from which field we took off but I had my first airplane flight in a great silver ship with a tailwheel, going down to visit him. We toured munitions factories along the Tennessee River, near Huntsville, and the Coosa River, in Alabama. On a narrow wooden bridge in the country somewhere, a mule lay on its side—it had been pulling a wagon that was hit by an army truck and had a broken leg. It lay there patiently, as patiently as it had lived its life, a worn, gray animal waiting for the lean-faced man who had gone to fetch a gun.

  My alluring image of war had been mainly formed by a book we had with a gray cloth cover on which the title was printed in dignified black letters and which had a dedication so stirring that I knew it by heart: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the archtestament, with its stark ordeal, of the First World War. I was unprepared to see real acts, even as part of an obscure overture.

  There was a shot. The sound stood apart. I was sickened by it, as if by the impact of a plummeting body. The mule lay there, without existence, with no name. After a few minutes we were able to drive on.

  My father, though he wore the insignia of a major, did not seem authentic. Perhaps it was because he was not in command of men, something he was probably ill suited for. In a matter of months he was transferred to Washington, and for three years my mother lived there while he was eventually sent on, to India and England. For some of these years no one knew what the outcome of the war would be, and printed orders to go overseas and join this unit or that, carrying with them the weight of the unknown, were of greatest importance. Some might be death warrants, though usually not for staff officers.

  He became a colonel and began to imagine he might go higher, but that turned out to be the good fortune, as he saw it, of lesser men. He had the admiration, even love of subordinates but it is those above who are important.

  The war ruined him. When it was over he was never able to fit in again. Everything had changed, he said. The vice presidents of banks were no longer able to turn pieces of property over to you to work on, and there were no old widows who owned hotels and wanted the sale of them arranged. He went to work for large companies in New York and Chicago but things never were right. It was the grandiose that attracted him. He was operatic. He lived on praise and its stimulus and performed best, only performed, when the full rays were shining on him.

  The bald-headed friend and builder, Secoles was his name, had urged my mother to get a divorce and marry him. My father was a nice guy, he confided, but he would never amount to anything. He, Secoles, would.

  It was a prophecy my father never heard, but gradually—it was also bad luck, two or three big hands, so to speak, that he failed to win; promises that were broken—his belief in himself faltered. He was given to grand predictions. “Mr. Brady, I believe in destiny. I told you we’d build a town together down here and, by God, we will.” To make it ring true takes aplomb, and slowly that drained away. Money went with it. Contrary to the advice of Mr. Micawber, it seems to me that those in life who spend freely are better for it, and those who are tightfisted are worse. There is at least one exception: my father.

  In the fall of 1957 the bank called his loan on some airline bonds. He had bought them at 120—they were at 62. He’d lost seventy thousand dollars in the market. He had nothing left. He’d have to give up the apartment, he said, he couldn’t pay the rent. He had a close friend, a successful lawyer with a Phi Beta Kappa key and confident tone. “Could you tell him what your situation is and ask for help?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’d have nothing more to do with me.”

  He was lucky, my father said, not to own a gun. If he had, he’d shoot himself.

  Finally, ashamed to be seen, he would lie in bed for hours, unable to summon the energy to go to work. His expensive shoes, all polished, were lined up in the closet, his many suits. The contents of his pockets were on top of the bureau beside his exhausted checkbook, his gold wristwatch, money, a few cigars. His hair was white, his jawline slack. He was finished.

  Herman Melville’s father, his import business having failed, became a bankrupt. He gave up the struggle, became mentally ill and died. Melville was thirteen years old. I was thirty-one when my father performed the same unforgettable act. He was like a spent horse. We tried to urge him on. He was just lying down for half an hour, he said. We sat in the living room, my mother and I, crushed by finality while he lay in bed in the city he had meant to triumph in, in the afternoon, traffic blaring in the street, the tall buildings shining their dead windows, gulls sitting on the water.

  I remember that during those days he said two things in sad summation: “They’ll never forget me” and “I’m dead.” Both were true.

  Soon he was in the hospital. As a final blow, two days before he died the buyer of an apartment complex the sale of which he had negotiated was killed flying in to New York to sign the contract.

  This happened at La Guardia Airport. The icy waters—it was January—covered everything.

  ——

  Decades, ages, later I wake at night with a strange feeling in my chest on the fateful side—can i
t be my heart? It is a feeling I have had before, a commonplace feeling, like a cramped muscle, which will probably go away as it always has, except this is four in the morning and my thoughts somehow turn to my father. We could not encourage him, we could not make him go on. It was cruel to keep trying. He wanted it to end. “In this world there are few enough people who ever care what becomes of you,” he said. My mother long after said that the marriage had been wrong, that she had known it early but had been without the courage to act. She remained loyal to the end.

  I think of the hopeless visits to psychiatrists, the shock treatments and aimless drives in the country to somehow get away. I think of him walking along the street, preoccupied, the pale wake of cigar smoke following, the blind strolls while his mind sorted through impossibilities, over and over.

  ——

  Ethel Reiner, in her forties, decided upon the theater. She had a brief, exciting apprenticeship under a veteran producer named Saint Subber and then set out to produce on her own. After a few voyages in shallow water, as it were, she boldly took command of a ship of the line in the form of a huge musical production of Candide with Leonard Bernstein as its composer and the book, as it is curiously called, by another formidable figure, Lillian Hellman, with whom it was inevitable she would clash.

  Candide was a triumph and a catastrophe, in that order. Its out-of-town tryouts, before it came to New York, were dazzling. To bring it to perfection there were final little changes, and something unidentifiable went wrong. The spring had been wound one turn too many. There was the party at Sardi’s, a transistor radio pressed to someone’s ear to hear the eleven-thirty flash report. It was disastrous, and the millions that had been invested were lost.

  In her apartment that night the distraught producer had hysterics and some months later—the humiliation was too great—she retreated to England, temporarily, until the time was right to return.

  She had lost confidence and whatever reputation she had built up, but not her style. At the crowded reception following her son’s second marriage she was regal in black and as eye-catching as the seductive Dutch girl, an airline stewardess, who was the bride. “My dear,” Ethel said to her, not unkindly, “I’ll probably see very little of you during this life, but tell me”—she was holding a small velvet box that contained a pair of diamond earrings, each one a single brilliant stone the size of a tooth—“are your ears pierced?” The earrings were her gift. To her credit, the untested daughter-in-law the following day wrote a note of appreciation which read, in its entirety, Dear Ethel, Thank you for the earrings. Barbara.