Burning the Days

by James Salter

  There were wonderful things in that book, things that I am unable to write or even imagine again. That they were wonderful was not my doing—I merely took the trouble to put them down. They were like the secret notebook of the chasseur at Maxim’s, without ego or discretion, and the novel woven around them (A Sport and a Pastime) owed them everything. The leather-seated car I drove is gone; the house of Lazan and his wife, where we went for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, I know is off towards Langres somewhere but I doubt I would be able to find it again; the elegant couple in Paris have divorced; the young girl, the essential element—of course, she cannot change; that is the whole point—went to America and became what you might expect. Ironically, the portrait I made of her she never read.

  Much has faded but not the incomparable taste of France, given then so I would always remember it. I know that taste, the yellow headlights flowing along the road at night, the towns by a river, the misty mornings, the thoughts of everything that happened there, the notes that confirmed it and made it imperishable.

  ——

  In the blue twilight, lightning descends to the dim Texas plains. I can hear it crackling on the radio. The sky is filled with storms, a huge line of them. I am barely on top at forty-two thousand feet; they boil beneath me, shot with lightning like a kind of X ray, heaving the airplane around. Down there is Frederick, Oklahoma, where we were stationed for a while just after the war. There were shining new planes in rows but no one to maintain them. The bare wooden barracks in which we sat idle grew cold as autumn advanced.

  By now it is dark. The radio compass is erratic. I believe I have Tyler but can’t be sure. A bit later I try Baton Rouge—nothing. The fuel is just at fifteen hundred pounds. I call for New Orleans destination weather: scattered and ten miles’ visibility, they reply, but beneath me it is overcast despite the report. Then, not more than five minutes out, the clouds begin to break, there are lights.

  Years when I crossed the country alone, like some replica Philip Nolan, in thousand-mile legs. Taking off from Wright-Patterson in a tremendous rainstorm, unable to even see the end of the runway or the trees. Taking off from McGuire in another downpour—Ritchings with an umbrella walking me out to the ship—taking off at Mobile, taking off at March and Forbes. Taking off at Tyndall, the earth like dust on a mirror, a long, unmoving line of smoke—from the paper mill, was it?—running south as far as eye could see. Going out early in the morning, hands still numb, the magical silence of the runways, the whole pale scene. Heading for the Gulf under its blue haze, counties and parishes intent and unaware though I know their lives in vast detail, Brookley shining like a coin in the light off Mobile Bay.

  Sometimes, because of the light, in the visor there is the moist dark of one’s own eye, bigger than a movie poster. Sometimes there is the sun directly ahead making it impossible to read the instruments. The earth below is shadowed. There are mythic serpents of water, lakes, rivers smooth as marble. Empty sky, the rumbling aircraft, the radio overflowing with voices and sounds. Above the yellow horizon, near the vanishing sun, suddenly, a dot. Behind it a faint line, a contrail. By some forgotten reflex I am stunned awake, as in days past when we watched intently, when the body filled with excitement to see it: the enemy!

  There were airfields everywhere, left over from the war, relic fields the names of which I knew from stories, Wendover, Pocatello. Leaving them and climbing out, over the alkali, the thin trace of roads, railroad tracks, dust. Not a city, not even a house.

  Snow on the distant hills, which are slowly sinking as I rise, all else brown. The West. From here it is endless, land that goes on forever. Down there it is the sky that has no end.

  One night as I was calling for a letdown near St. Louis, the city jewel-like and clear, a voice in the darkness asked, “Flatfoot Red, is that you?” Flatfoot, our call sign from Bitburg, and Red, the color of the lead flight.

  “Yes,” I said. “Who’s that?”

  En route you seldom saw other fighters and almost never recognized a voice.

  “Ed White.”

  The pleasure, the thrill, in fact, the sort that comes from a lingering glance across a room, a knowing nod, or a pair of fingers touched briefly to the brow. We were able to exchange only a few words—How are you? Where are you headed? I looked for him in the blackness, the moving star that would be his plane, but the heavens were littered with stars, the earth strewn with lights. He was on his way to somewhere, the heights, I was sure. I was going in to land.

  “See you,” he said.

  Who could know it would be otherwise and he was one whom I would never see again? We had flown on the acrobatic team together, he the right wing, Whitlow the left, Tracy in the slot.

  After his death his widow remarried. Not many years later, she herself died, apparently a suicide. The waters had closed over them both.

  I often thought of White and that hail across the darkness I took as a last meeting. I thought of him as I watched a parade in the city one day. It was November, Armistice Day, but there was the heat and fullness of late summer. The dirt was blowing in the streets. I was part of New York myself by then, returned to it. They came along Fifth Avenue, the ranks of the American Legion, the police and high-school bands, teenage girls dressed in blazers, ten-year-old colonels wearing sunglasses, fat men, limpers. The drums went by. The sidewalks were crowded with people. Rows of silver trumpets passed. Then the flags. The crowd watched. Not a hat was lifted, not a hand stirred.

  ——

  Once at a dinner party I was asked by a woman what on earth I had ever seen in military life. I couldn’t answer her, of course. I couldn’t summon it all, the distant places, the comradeship, the idealism, the youth. I couldn’t tell about flying over the islands long ago, seeing them rise in the blue distance wreathed in legend, the ring of white surf around them. Or the cities, Shanghai and Tokyo, Amsterdam and Venice, gunnery camps in North Africa and forgotten colonies of Rome along the shore.

  I couldn’t describe that, or what it was like waiting to take off on missions in Korea, armed, nervous, singing songs to yourself, or the electric jolt that went through you when the MIGs came up. I couldn’t tell about Mahurin being shot down and not a soul seeing him go, or George Davis, or deArmont, who used to jump up on a table in the club and recite “Gunga Din”—the drunken pilots thought he was making it up.

  I couldn’t tell her about brilliant group commanders or flying with men who later became famous, the days and days of boredom and moments of pure ecstasy, of walking out to the parked planes in the early morning or coming in at dusk when the wind had died to make the last landing of the day and the mobile control officer giving two quick clicks of the mike to confirm: grease job. To fly with the thirty-year-old veterans and finally earn the right to lead yourself, flights, squadrons, a few times the entire group. The great days of youth when you are mispronouncing foreign words and trading dreams.

  We came in from the flight line at Giebelstadt or Cazaux, weary, faces marked, unknown, and went into town to drink. Money meant nothing and in a way neither did fame. I couldn’t tell any of that or of the roads along the sea in Honolulu, the dances, the last drinks at the bar, or who Harry Thyng was, or Kasler, or the captain’s wife.

  II

  FORGOTTEN KINGS

  IN MY HAND is a blue square of paper, the blue of Gauloises, and slowly I unfold it once more. I feel the excitement still. The creases have acquired a memory, opening, they reveal the invitation:

  Can you meet me for a drink Relais

  Hotel Plaza Athénée Saturday

  evening seven P.M.?

  It is signed simply, Shaw.

  November, the darkness coming on early, or perhaps December, late in the fall and the year, 1961. The city, as I thought of it, was like a splendid photograph, every wide avenue, every street. I had never met a writer of distinction. My agent, who was Irwin Shaw’s agent also, had given him my name, and I was driving to Paris to meet him, coming in from the chill provinces by
way of the thrilling diagonal that ran on the map from Chaumont, up through Troyes, to the very heart.

  I had a large, elegant secondhand car, blue also, the shade of uniforms of the fleet, steering wheel on the wrong side, four speeds forward and four in reverse as well, small ignition key like those to a safe-deposit box or clock. The engine purred, the boulevards blazed with light. I drank the very air, I was entering Paris.

  Crossing a vast intersection crowded with traffic I suddenly jammed on the brakes and managed to stop in the act of barely kissing—there was no sensation attached—the gleaming rear fender of the car ahead, a brand-new, as it happened, Citroën. The owner kept on shouting in a French more rapid than any I had ever heard, cars were blowing their horns and inching around us, we were trying to find an invisible dent in the shining black finish. At length police arrived and finally dismissed the case. Half an hour had passed. I arrived at the Plaza Athénée sick with despair. It was nearer to 8 than 7. I had missed the appointment. The doorman—the car was frequently saluted by them in those days—allowed me to park in front, and empty-hearted I went into the Relais. The first thing I saw was a solidly built man standing at the bar in an open trench coat, a copy of Le Monde stuffed in one pocket. I recognized him instantly. “That’s all right,” he said as I stumbled through an apology, “what are you drinking?” It was quintessentially him.

  Time with its broad thumb has blurred nothing. He was forty-eight that year and already late for a dinner he was going to on Avenue Foch. He gave me the address—come afterwards for coffee, he said. A few minutes later, paying the bill, he left. Thus I discovered that Paris. There were worlds above, I learned, but there are also worlds below. I found Avenue Foch—the name itself has only a faint resonance now, the century is ending and into its crypt all such things will vanish, marshals of France as well as unknown poilus—and I also found the île St.-Louis, rue de Grenelle, Place St.-Sulpice, and apartments and restaurants as well as other towns and regions, not always in France, because of him. He was my unknowing Virgil, brief in his descriptions, irrefutable, fond of drink. Years later I heard him give some advice: never be in awe of anyone. He was not in awe of Europe. He tossed his coat on her couch.

  That first night was for me like the ball that Emma Bovary never forgot. There were fourteen in the dinner party including a young Peruvian actress in a black silk dress cut astonishingly low. An older man took her aside to say, “I don’t know who you came with but you’re not going home with him. That’s definite.” They were telling stories of theater, films, the maharajah of producers who refused to allow the woman he was escorting to use the ladies’ room in a fashionable hotel. He rented a suite instead. She went in, came out, and he paid the bill, fifty pounds.

  “The new Trubetskoy,” someone observed.

  We drove down the Champs. The air was filled with the bite of autumn, it was tingling. The sea, endless and black, was falling against the coasts. I had met screenwriters, owners of restaurants, joueurs.

  ——

  I had been to Paris a number of times. On my first trip to Europe we drove there, three of us: Farris, me, and the club officer from Wiesbaden whose car it was. We started early in the morning, the roads empty, and sometime after noon entered the outlying neighborhoods, gray and unknown. We went straight to the Littré Hotel, which the military had appropriated and from the windows of which there was nothing to be seen but the bleakness of buildings forty feet away across the street. It was a winter day. Later we drove up to Montmartre to change some money on the black market.

  I had a poor impression of Paris which not even the Champs-Elysées, wide as a carrier deck and with only occasional cars, was able to improve. Paris seemed a dark, somewhat dishonored city that had managed to survive the war. The monuments and stone façades were black, but it was grime, not the smoke of disaster, that had stained them. The French had collapsed in the first round and given up the capital intact, an act which was practical if unheroic.

  I spoke some French, the residuum of schooldays. The discipline of studying things you did not want to learn had not fallen out of favor, and my own education was stamped by this. We read episodes of Wind, Sand, and Stars with the index finger of illiterates. The notion of a person, place, or thing being masculine or feminine seemed to have no purpose, and the possibility that one would ever use French, unlikely. It was merely another hurdle.

  I don’t know where we went that night or what we drank, but the real Paris appeared near dawn, in the faint light, with an image like Mahomet’s paradise: driving through the streets with six girls and the top down, some of them sitting on it or beside us, two on our laps. It was like riding banked in flowers. Montmartre was grainy in the early light in which everything, every deformity and cheap enterprise, every grubby restaurant and shop, was pure.

  There is the Paris of Catherine de Médicis at the Tuileries, as Hugo wrote; of Henry I at the Hôtel-de-Ville, of Louis XIV at Invalides, Louis XVI at the Panthéon, and Napoleon I at the Place Vendôme, but there is also the Paris of those who did not rule, the poets and vagabonds, and it was the Paris of Henry Miller we were in; I had not read him but I had presupposed him, carnal, crazed, at odds with everything and the next moment embracing it, in worn-out corduroy, tieless, walking home through the streets. This Paris where you woke bruised after tremendous nights—indelible nights, your pockets empty, the last bills scattered on the floor, the memories scattered too. We went upstairs with three girls apiece and the club officer napped in the car.

  Paris. Early morning. Its cool breath astonishingly fresh. Its elegance and ancient streets, its always staggering price. The sound of early traffic. The sky blemishless and wide. Somewhere in the gallery of love where the pictures stir one beyond speaking—the light, the divinity, the absolute poise, where in rumpled beds at morning, in hushed voices, life is presented to you—somewhere in here for me there is a frame of Farris, an utterly intimate glimpse, his naked arm fallen from the side of the bed like Marat’s. He was like a god, or, if not, with a grace God sometimes bestows, the gift to every stag and hare but not to many humans. Then it begins to quiver, this image and indistinct place, the happiness is unquenchable and worth anything, someone whispers, coaxing, someone is laughing, there are cars in the street, the sound of water running in the room. It was all a game, the one I had been seeking. An hour later the streets reclaimed us, the night was past.

  Near the Gare St.-Lazare, Babel had once seen, late at night, a tall, beautiful woman in a faded evening dress waiting for clients. She was just like Hélène Bezukhov, wasn’t she? he said to his companion. She might easily have been cast as the refined figure in War and Peace though her price was the same as all the rest. The first night, Paris was like that to me; it reminded me of something finer. In 1950 it was not weary of us. We were still handsome and admired; they smiled and turned on the street. The rooms were chill but they had proportion and there was more than a hint of another life, free of familiar inhibitions, a sacred life, this great museum and pleasure garden evolved for you alone.

  ——

  In the empty morning a decade later I was lying in bed in my hotel, inexpensive and drab, behind the Place Vendôme. Startling me, the telephone rang with a jarring sound. It was Irwin Shaw. What was I doing, he asked, did I have any plans? “Come for lunch,” he said.

  I was overwhelmed. It was so natural, unimagined and longed for. They were living on Place Lamartine. The building number, like the number that pours chips into your hands on a winning night, I of course remember still, 2 bis.

  There were just three of us, he, his wife, Marian, and me. The lunch was served by a uniformed maid in a latticed dining room which seems, as I think of it, to be pale green. We sat amid the silence of the 16th, the conservative, wealthy arrondissement of Paris, and leisurely had an omelette, salad, and for dessert, ananas givré—fresh pineapple ices in a hollowed-out half of the fruit. There was the ease and implication of French life, unseen gatherings all about us, flirtations,
gossip about money. It was the end of the fifties, the years of the Sulzbergers, Matthiessens, Plimpton, Teddy White. A family lunch, and I was already seeing him as a kind of father—my own was gone—a father like Dumas or an ex–boxing champion, something in him extravagant, never to be taken away.

  ——

  Max Wilkinson, the agent we shared, was a remarkable man also, though his name will not be found among those of the era. A Southerner, a born storyteller and dandy, just a country boy, as he was fond of saying, and his recitation included a number of obscure places: Tupelo, Mississippi; Jackson; perhaps a murmured New Orleans. The old Southern townsman was in him, unhurried and conspiratorial. His voice was easy and hinted of the unreliable. He remembered wearing his father’s straw hat when Dempsey fought the Frenchman—Carpentier—and the summary of rounds came up one by one in the telegraph-office window in Courthouse Square.

  “The first time I met Irwin,” he said, “he came into the Collier’s office with a story on some yellow paper, the kind that newspapermen wrote on, a lovely story about a wife who wanted to go back to Kansas City. He had—he never changed much—a sweet face. We didn’t take the story,” he added, “which was a shame.”

  It was a sweet face. It was often reddened, but it had no malice in it. It was a man’s face, established, well-shaven, with a nose that was too large. Behind it, you understood at once, was no one devious. Even years later, when the veins in his cheeks began to burst, there was something boyish about him. Candor, even bluntness, was his style. Of self-pity he had almost none. If he ever cried, and I doubt it, he cried by himself. In public his lip never trembled, even when honors which he might have deserved passed him by.

  There are men who seem to have seized the trunk of life, and he was one of them. It might not be for everyone, the great, scarring thing you could not get your arms around, but it was there for him. You ate well with him and, of course, drank. In a restaurant he would order first, to set the pace, so to speak, and immediately order wine. His method was simple: he worked nearly every day and avoided angst in the evenings. I knew him in Paris, Neuilly, at Fouquet’s, the Hôtel des Bergues in Geneva on the quay, in Cap d’Antibes, Southampton, and Klosters. He was always absolutely the same. I can see him at the Delmonico in a room that had the expensive feeling of a stateroom, good clothes and things of every kind strewn about which the steward would see to, the phone ringing with invitations for the evening. “Call me back at about five-thirty,” he would say, “and I’ll have a better idea.” By then he would know all the possibilities.