Burning the Days

by James Salter

  Apart from this misty and alluring nonsense there were the little farming communities, the military posts, the expensive homes out by Diamond Head and up in the hills, the outer islands, and the sea. The Navy and the Army still possessed some of their wartime prestige. The brass still mingled with society, which was beginning to fluff its feathers again after chaotic years.

  Sometimes, when visiting Los Angeles, in the vast, mild nights, I feel the flavor of it again—dancing under the palms, drinks on the lanai, boxing matches, idleness, summer clothes.

  ——

  It was in Honolulu that I fell hopelessly in love with another woman. She had a wide mouth and good-looking legs. She’d been a page at the Ak-Sar-Ben Ball when she was six years old, dressed in a white satin tunic, long white stockings, and a fez with ostrich plumes—there was a photograph of it, the costume oddly provocative, in her living room. She told me she’d been brought up by nursemaids, girls straight off the Nebraska farm who were addressed as “mademoiselle.”

  We were attracted to one another instantly. We ridiculed one another and adored one another. She was high-spirited and careless. People always told her they liked the way she talked. She used words like “heavenly,” “intense,” “lechers,” and “god-awful.” Years later she would quit a job by smiling sweetly and saying to the boss, “I’ll bet I can make you say ‘shit,’ Mr. Conover.” She was a year older than I was, but at that age it made no difference. She was also married. Her husband was a captain in the Air Force. He was to be my best friend.

  We had been in the same company at West Point, Leland and I—that wasn’t his name. He was a couple of classes ahead of me, which is to say worlds. Lighthearted and not very studious, he was slender with black hair and white skin. He’d been raised in the army—his father was a general—and they’d lived in Hawaii before the war. One of his sisters who had died just before her wedding was buried there, in fact. At the funeral they had played island songs—calling to the wanderer to return …

  Like a minister’s son, Leland was somewhat indifferent to the gospel. Undistinguished at West Point, a mere cadet sergeant who didn’t bother to polish his shoes and joined formations with an occasional ballet leap, he had the insouciance of an heir. I knew little about him then, even in the manner that underlings know things, and nothing at all of his fiancée until the frantic June afternoon he graduated and left. On the floor of the basement, unintentionally abandoned, were strewn the intimate love letters she had written, now being read by everyone, passed from hand to hand.

  He went into the Air Force, was assigned to attack bombers, A-20s, and was shot down somewhere over Europe and made a prisoner of war. By the time I saw him again he was a staff officer in a headquarters at Hickam Field, had a set of quarters, a son who had been born while he was in prison camp, and a beautiful wife. I had been at Hickam a few short months when I ran into Leland. Did I play golf? he wanted to know. I began to with him. He was a wonderful companion on the golf course, graceful and good-natured. Instead of a kind of reunion it was as if we were meeting for the first time and taking immediately to each other. I understood only later that he had more or less been looking for me, a friend to divert him from difficulties that beneath the surface existed at home.

  Their house was just behind the headquarters where he worked—small, company grade, a bit of lawn, the bedrooms upstairs. I entered for the first time one Saturday morning and there she was, young, greenish gaze, slightly mocking air. There was a vague mention of breakfast. I asked if there were any eggs.

  “Eggs?” she said as if the word were completely novel.

  “Poached eggs?” I asked. Which was what they served at the club. From the first moment we were nipping at each other. She gave me a look almost of unexpected admiration. There were no eggs, she said. We ate cold cereal. Paula didn’t like to cook, Leland explained to me later. Nor did she like air bases—she loathed them. Going to the commissary was a horror. She looked down on military life, made fun of the army wives who didn’t have her sophistication or style—“they,” she called one in particular—and was too clever for bridge. In short, dangerous.

  I loved her looks. I liked to talk to her, be in her presence. The situation was perfect. I didn’t have to be nervous about it—she was there. And from the beginning I felt she was attracted to me. I began to see them all the time. I don’t remember the first physical contact. It was probably at a dance. When we stood up she floated immediately into my arms and her body touched mine with complete familiarity. I finally screwed up my courage enough to tell her, at least discreetly, of my real feelings. If I had met her first I would have married her, I said.

  “Funny,” she said, “because I’m a little in love with you, too. I was going to tell you tonight.”

  Before long we were leaving movies early and going off to the warrant officers’ club, where no one knew us, to drink and talk. Leland was on duty in the headquarters. When we came out she stopped just past the door and said, “Will you do me a favor?”

  “Yes. What?”

  She raised her face. “Will you kiss me?”

  Leland was too prosaic for her. I knew it and she told it to me. Suddenly I was painfully aware of the meaning of possession. The unseen privileges of the marriage bed, the intimacies of dressing and undressing, clothes in the same closet, a woman brushing her hair, putting on stockings—these were performances I tried not to think of. I had felt this once before but not so strongly. There had been one married couple among us in Salt Lake City when we lived for a month in a hotel there. She was blonde and unhurried and you could smell her perfume. After dinner in the hotel or a nearby restaurant she and her husband would go up to their room and in the morning, sometimes, come down for breakfast.

  There was a poem of Scott Fitzgerald’s that we wallowed in:

  In the fall of sixteen

  In the cool of the afternoon

  I met Helena

  Under a white moon—

  It was our poem, Paula’s and mine. We shared a taste for books and sentimental lines. Leland shrugged at it. He didn’t have that particular weakness. He was rather like an English aristocrat, a man of decency, little sensitivity, and certain prejudices. The things he knew he knew very well, and they were social things: on which side the guest of honor sat at dinner, how to carve a roast, tie a dress tie, which shoes were best, which clubs. When Paula and I fell in love he overlooked it, for her happiness and to keep her, I suppose, and probably because he was sure of me. He himself was not the sort of man to be unfaithful or to find distraction in affairs, and besides there was little opportunity—he didn’t have a job in which he traveled much, and post life was intimate; anything seen was quickly known, especially if repeated. He was completely uxorious—his marriage was his life just as his uniform was, his golf shoes, his good name. The overwhelming attraction between his wife and friend would eventually die down, he had to believe that. Meanwhile we lived as three, or nearly, the house charged with a force I did my best to appear unaware of, and more than once he carried her upstairs as she waved wistfully to me over his shoulder.

  We had dinner, we went to places in town, to the club. It had to be obvious. At a party in Kahala she sat by me, talked to me, and smiled so tellingly at me I was sure that everyone knew what was happening. She pressed against me and, as if no one could see it, squeezed my hand.

  “I dreamed of you last night,” she said to me. “Wildly. I feel particularly close. Oddly enough,” she added, “I dream of you all the time.”

  Meanwhile at bingo games Leland sat sulkily throwing beans at her across the table.

  “You’re getting into my dress, Leland.”

  He, doggedly: “Isn’t that where I’m supposed to be?”

  And she and I would dance and whisper our deepest confessions. She hadn’t slept with him for three months, she told me, it was a crisis anyhow. “I dread nightfall,” she said.

  “Paula is in love with you,” a mutual friend told me. I didn’t kn
ow what to do. I loved her passionately and I knew I would never find a woman like her again.

  She could divorce him, but it would not be that easy. Divorce was a rarity in the society in which we lived. Besides, we were trusted. Afterwards, where would we go? A general’s wife told her a story about a well-known officer. He was stationed on the same post with a married woman named Eleanor Farrow. Her husband had to leave on a trip for two months and asked him as a friend to drop by and cheer his wife up while he was gone. The upshot was that when the husband returned, his wife asked him for a divorce. Farrow finally agreed, but with a condition: that she never see her little daughter again. She gave in and married the other officer. Of course, the general’s wife continued pointedly, they weren’t accepted in Hawaii after that and had to leave. After some years the wife died. Their son, who became a famous officer himself, used to say that his mother had died of a broken heart because she could never see her first child.

  That was another thing, Paula’s son. He was well over a year old and they were having difficulties with him—something was wrong. He would not learn to talk or behave. It turned out that he was deaf—he had lost his hearing before birth as a result of Paula having German measles early in her pregnancy. There was also a heart defect. He would need more and more care, although we hardly thought of that—we were dealing only with today and tomorrow. I was not yet twenty-two. I had spent four years in a prep school, three more in military school. In the words of the epigram, I was magnificently unprepared for life.

  “You know, you’re really stupid,” another officer’s wife said to me.

  We were driving back from a party. I had been her escort—her husband, a classmate of Leland’s, was away. She’d been drinking. She was tall, in her lustrous twenties, the neck of her evening dress cut low.

  “You don’t understand anything, do you?” she said.

  “Some things,” I said warily.

  “No, you don’t.”

  Her hand was on my leg. Paula and Leland were in the back seat. This woman was the wife of their friend, and I didn’t know what she would say, I was afraid it was going to be some terrible, drunken truth. I could feel her looking at me as I drove.

  “How is it you’re so stupid? I thought you were supposed to be smart.” I realized Paula was watching, amused. I caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror. The woman had moved closer. Her head was in my lap. “You’re not very smart. You don’t even know what I’m saying,” she mumbled.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, then?”

  It wasn’t the right time, I said. The time? The right time, I said. She gave a moan of impatience. “Have it your own way,” she said, “I don’t care. Have it any way you want to”—she raised her head partway—“but for God’s sake, have it!”

  I felt like a fool. I was made fun of afterwards but I didn’t mind.

  It was the same thing later with a navy nurse from Pearl Harbor—she was a lieutenant commander; I went with her to prove how mature I was, and then with the daughter of a coast artillery colonel to show some sense of propriety. The colonel’s daughter was blonde and lively. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had just come out, and she liked to call herself “Fred C. Dobbs.” One night we went to Trader Vic’s and then for a midnight swim at one of the little beaches past Waikiki. We lay down in innocence for a few minutes in the darkness beneath the palms, and suddenly someone was shaking me and shining a light in my eyes—it was the morning sun.

  I drove her home just before going to work. Half an hour later the telephone rang; her father wanted to see me. I went over at the end of the day. She met me outside and told me what had happened—they had taken her to a doctor for an examination.

  “And?”

  “Of course, I’m all right,” she said with relief.

  A doctor. I couldn’t believe it. She shrugged. She had long blonde hair and pretty shoulders. We hadn’t even been swimming in the nude.

  All these things I told to Paula. I was going out partly to entertain her and also I didn’t want to seem too tame. I was in a troop carrier squadron and I had another, in fact a primary, life. We flew to Hilo every day and Kauai twice a week, and there were irregular trips to Australia, Japan, or one of the dots of islands in the south, usually with double crews. Distances were greater then. Setting off for Sydney or New Caledonia meant being gone for a week. Flying hours were what was sought, either on routine flights or the long ones, when it came in large, sedentary servings. There were very few crashes. With native boys we walked at night in the knee-high surf of distant islands, the sea warm and pulling, hunting for lobsters, reaching down to grab them with gloved hands. That is what one remembers, the rain, the solitude, the dampness, and of course the longing, stepping outside the ramshackle buildings late at night wondering what they were doing elsewhere, in Honolulu or at home.

  ——

  As the tide receded there had come back from the farthest reaches the last of the men who had gone out in wartime, some of whom landed in Hawaii.

  From Shanghai, with a small “v” in his front teeth and a defiant jaw, came a nonrated major whom I first met playing cards. His name was something like O’Mara. He was in his mid-thirties and had the jaunty style of a bootlegger, gray already streaking his wavy black hair. He became the figure one finds in European books, my tutor. He flicked his cards across the table with a snap and smoked a cigar in the center of his mouth, holding it with two fingers above and a thumb below. In these as in other things, I imitated him. I was a choirboy to him, someone from a privileged neighborhood, and he set about showing me, without formal instruction, the way to act and talk.

  How little one knows or cares about the background of idols. He knew military matters much better than I did, regulations and articles of war—he had been an adjutant and his expertise was irrefutable. In Shanghai he had won a large amount of money, twenty-five thousand dollars they said, then worth ten times what it is now. He did not dispute the figure. He had brand-new golf clubs, a camel’s-hair coat, and a Cadillac convertible. What I admired more than all this, however, was the impression he gave of a man who could face any odds.

  We went often to town. He was going with the young wife of a navy pilot who was away in Kwajalein on extended duty. She was going to divorce him. She and O’Mara were going to have children, lots of them. “Five or six,” he agreed, moving his hand upwards in stages to show their height. Off they would drive in the soft, tropical night. She lived in quarters somewhere, Kaneohe probably, with the unfamiliar cream-colored car parked outside until first light of day.

  Things run in cycles, and I did not know, and perhaps neither did he, that he had already gone through the best of his luck. In the nipa huts behind the officers’ club he drew losing hands and would disdainfully scoop up his cards and flip them over, face down. He had a wife in Philadelphia from whom he was estranged, someone he had mistakenly married in youth, before the great days. I heard occasional vague remarks; I don’t think I ever knew her name or saw a photograph. We were smoking Bankers and Brokers, skipping the club dances, and meeting every evening after work, sometimes not emerging from the huts before morning, having played all night.

  The joy of meeting him, of seeing him walk unconcerned down the path—he was like the owner of a racing stable, in precarious shape, as it turned out, who had come up from nothing, and for a time I more or less wore his silks. Not officially, of course—I had a future. I was a lieutenant and he a major but my rank had weight. I was a regular. I had become a general’s aide. Through me he touched inner circles and legitimacy. He liked to hear stories about West Point, the visit of the president of Brazil, the saber accidentally left stuck in the ground after the parade had passed.

  When not with him I would hurry to the quarters where Leland and Paula lived. Off we would go to the Hale Kalani, the Ala Wai Club, Gibson’s, or Elmer Lee’s. Leland knew Elmer Lee from before the war, he used to surf with him. Elmer Lee would come to the table.

 
“How’s your umalima, Elmer?” Leland asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know.” Leland put his elbow on the table and pretended to arm-wrestle.

  “Oh, no. I got to learn the language all over. I thought it was something else.”

  The nightclubs and restaurants, The Willows, and La Hula Rumba. Chun Hoon’s. More than once Leland was passed out in the car.

  The current was pulling faster and faster. Nothing is as intense as unconsummated love. She was married to the wrong man. He was decent, loyal, understanding, though he would never really understand her. He was also finally jealous. When he returned quivering like a bull, she supposed, from one particular trip, she would have to calm him by being “very wifely and submissive.” The words made me tremble.

  She had been so young when she married. It had been a kind of accident. She was then and would become an independent woman who drank, liked people with money, was scornful, and could charm anyone she chose to. You are the one, she said, why hadn’t she met me? Why hadn’t I met her? It would have been so easy, I wrote,

  Could have been,

  For every place you were

  He came to later,

  You could trace his footsteps

  To the same

  Hop, hotel, or football game …

  “Read it again,” she said to me.