by James Salter
The lone and perhaps foolish figure whose fate it was to believe in something with all his being—something stirs in me as I listen, something dusty and forgotten, struggling to its feet. Halberstam is manly-looking with big hands and a strong, resonant voice. I feel I know him and also Vann.
“But he was killed, wasn’t he?” I say.
“He died in a helicopter crash.”
We leave the table. Cognac and coffee in the living room. A fire of small, city logs is burning in the fireplace. The hostess and Helen Frankenthaler are lying together on the sofa, feline and content, beneath a quilt. My mind is still on the conversation at dinner, which has somehow removed me from the present. It has opened a gap like the narrow band of water that appears, in the first moments of departure, between the ship and the dock, designating two worlds. The uniform of the dead lieutenant colonel seems to lie there, ghostly, on the floor, my own size.
Dinners on Shelter Island at Max Wilkinson’s, first at his house and later, when it was sold, in the little house that belonged to his new wife. She was repetitive and scolding. “Oh, Max,” she said at the table, “you are so stupid! You talk and talk and talk and talk.”
There was silence. He had been summoning up the image of his old partner’s wife, in Arizona in the thirties when he first saw her, Helen Doughty, in a white linen dress. She was so beautiful, he said.
Finally he answered his wife. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I suppose so.”
Dinners in Europe. A small restaurant, perfect, well lit. The feeling of attentive service, fresh white cloth. The face before me, Buddha-like and wide, is an older woman’s. She is the widow of a man who was still older. He was her second husband, she was in her late thirties when she met him, he had already broken up with his wife. “I didn’t steal him from her but she hated me.”
There were two children. “I didn’t want to be their mother, after all. They were always welcome, but she was the mother. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘come. If we are friends, good. If not, then we are not.’ ”
The European lucidity and understanding. “It’s more difficult for a woman,” she says. The wine bottle has become empty and another unobtrusively appears. “A man can always, at fifty or sixty, start a new life, but a woman is used up. It’s not fair, but that’s the way life is.”
There is something very appealing about her, the lack of sentimentality, the frankness. She had an earlier marriage and a child, she reveals. He died, she says simply. A brain tumor. He was two. I calculate quickly, sometime just after the war. “He was only two,” she says again. That is the extent of self-pity. “He was absolutely normal and then it began. He would fall and hit his elbow, for instance, and cry holding his head—it hurt him there.”
One cannot say she is a stronger woman because of it, she was always such a woman. She has gone through the most difficult thing of all. She speaks three languages, perhaps four, and if she dreams of marrying again does not bother to confess it. Not surprisingly, the ex-wife and stepchildren are very close to her now. The ex-wife lives in Lugano. “She always comes to see me. She likes me to come there.”
I think of her and of Jonathan Swift’s mistress, Stella, a symbol of Europe, justly admired, as the stone that covers her says, for many virtues as well as for great natural and acquired perfection. One thing stands out: I have never heard her complain.
Drunken dinners, parties, really, where the food is ignored and they are jammed at the bar. At midnight the music is pounding; in the street the thin sleet of winter drives down. For some reason I think of the Village, where Pat Kenny lived when we were fifteen. Her parents were gone for the weekend, or at least the night. I did not know how to begin. We sat on the couch. She was pleasant. There was a copy of Robert Briffault’s Europa, a thick novel of the 1930s, in the bookcase. “Have you read this?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
She knew nothing of the passage that had electrified me, the gown torn from the back of the sumptuous woman who had cheated at cards and her hands quickly tied to a ring above her head. I did not know how to connect this to the two of us; it did not illustrate what was intended but it shared something. I wanted to see her wrenched from the vague, infuriating conversation we were having. I saw only the victim beneath her clothes, I wanted it revealed.
——
The years have their closure. Many of the people upon whom I had based characters passed from sight. It was only in part an accident. They had been consumed, my interest had waned. There were exceptions. The girl of A Sport and a Pastime I was always curious to see again, what had become of her, the details of her life, the closet in which her dresses hung, the drawer with her folded things, the bottles of perfume, shoes. I wanted again to lie there watching her prepare as if she were alone in the room, before the performance, as it were, putting on makeup, slipping into heels. She would be twenty-eight, thirty, completely changed. In fact she was married and living in Los Angeles. There were children. It was very like the book.
I had met her at Kennedy when she first arrived in America. She came through the crowd, innocent in her beauty, filled with joy. She was eighteen. Counts had coveted her. I met her also in dreams. I went through someone’s empty room and knocked at her door. “Yes, come in,” she said without asking who it was; I sensed she was expecting someone else. She looked up. Everything about her. I pulled up her dress in a single motion. The incredible nakedness. Laughing, she pushed it back down. In the dream I had lost the photograph of her, I didn’t have an address. “You say you adore, but I think it’s something else you like,” she said. She was curled up, wearing nothing. At the end of a crowded road under gray clouds my ship was preparing to sail. There was traffic, the imminence of departure. My heart was sick.
Nedra, the stylish woman of Light Years, I sometimes saw again, usually in the city, the last time in the house she now lived in alone—true to the book, she and her husband had eventually divorced. I loved her, her frankness and charm, the extravagance and devotion to her children. I never tired of seeing her and listening to her talk. She smoked, drank, laughed raucously. There was no caution in her.
Her old lover, one of them, sat with us that last night. Nedra had aged. The years had seized and shaken her as a cat shakes a mouse. Her jawline was no longer pure and there were small pouches beneath her eyes. Her nose had gotten larger. Her still-long hair had traces of gray. In her face, which I loved, was my own mortality. The lines at the corners of my mouth, which were more terrible than an illness—I jumped up to look each morning; they were there.
She was going to give him her father’s old tie pin, she said impulsively, it was the best thing her father had owned. “Do you still have the pearl cuff links?” she asked, pulling up the sleeve of his jacket. “No. They’re on the other shirt,” she guessed. He lived in a small house behind hers. I had no idea if they were still intimate—she was capable of every appearance of it without the thing itself.
Hers was a singular life. It had no achievements other than itself. It declared, in its own way, that there are things that matter and these are the things one must do. Life is energy, it proclaimed, life is desire. You are not meant to understand everything but to live and do certain things. Despite all I had written about her, there was more, and the carnal scenes, a minor element, I imagined entirely. It would have been gratifying to know if they were appropriate. Some things, however, she did not talk about.
She is gone, and the other wives, too, it seems, the ones men had; they are widowed or divorced, wise from intimacy, strong-voiced. The families, like old temple columns, are broken, never to be restored. When the world was young it seemed impossible. The unions were too firm, the comfort of an open, loving heart too great. I stood on deck one winter morning, coming back from Europe by boat, near to docking, the unawakened city in gray light. A family came to the rail nearby. They were German; they’d been in first class. The woman’s face was beautiful, that clarity, composure, and breeding that make one long for one more chanc
e at life. I felt a burning, terrible shame. Everything I valued was suddenly made worthless and I was plunged into confusion, trying to imagine what this marvelous woman said, how she argued, sat down at the table, slept, dressed. I could not picture a single detail of her life. I was like a desperate young boy, kept from, not even knowing that the test of elegance was close inspection, and that to her husband she was quite a different person than she was to me.
“Moritz!” she called to her child. He was as handsome, with a white hat made of crudely sewn leather and square earflaps. He was seven or eight, well-mannered. He came and stood by her, near her side. Suddenly the concept of virtue as strength was real.
I often came across her opposite, the heroine of all our books and films, still young, divorced. In a bar she was wearing a kind of toque made from a colorful scarf, tight jeans, a turtleneck shirt. How had she been, I asked.
“Hello! I’m fine. I’m settling down.”
Though she was still broke, as she said. She was the daughter of a writer I knew who had reversed the usual sequence—he had published some novels first and then came the list of other roles: restaurant owner, bandleader, policeman. His daughter had been working as a waitress; she had her father’s unorthodox spirit. She was going to get another job when her complexion cleared up, she said. “It’s hard being alone. Will you buy me a drink?”
In fact, she hadn’t been alone. She’d had a guy for a month, very straight, she explained, but nice, Notre Dame, all that. He left. “He said I was taking up too much of his time. I wanted him to move in, but he didn’t love my children enough. He said he did, but he didn’t. Well, you know, it’s difficult. I should take the time to write down twenty lines a day, shouldn’t I?” she asked.
Yes, like putting pennies in a jar, it would add up, be valuable some day, perhaps salvage her life.
That was some years ago. I don’t know what became of her.
There are certain houses near the river in secluded towns, their wooden fences weathered brown. Near the door in sunlight, stiff-legged, a white cat pulls itself up in an arc. Clothes on a half-hidden line drift in the light. It is here I imagine the wives, their children long grown, at peace with life and now drawn close to the essence of it, the soft rain flattening the water, trees thick with foliage bending to the wind, flowers beneath the kitchen window, quiet days. Men are important no longer, nor can they know such tranquillity, here in perfect exile, if it can be had that way, amid nature, in the world that was bequeathed to us.
——
At the end of the summer in 1980 we drove East. I had been living, toward the end divorced, in Colorado and after the death of my daughter decided, more or less, to go home. I was drawing a line beneath ten years. It was late August. In the morning the grass was cold and the topmost leaves of the trees had begun to yellow. I took my last walks along the river, which was teeming with light. I had a dog, a Welsh corgi named Sumo, white-footed and clever. I used to compliment him on his behavior, his ears. He would look away, yawn. We walked together. Mist rose from the brow of the bank, a solemn, ennobling mist. Not another soul.
We passed through Denver, where I used to go often—it was like an equatorial city, steaming, inert, we were dying of the heat—and went on to Red Cloud, the town in Nebraska where Willa Cather lived as a child. The Republic River, in which she once swam, was stagnant and dark. The sun was murderous. Mosquitoes light as ash drifted onto us as we sat.
In Ohio was a lesser shrine, Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. Bromfield had been a best-seller in the years before the war. In the beautiful old house we were the lone visitors and the attendant’s knowledge was limited to the names of movie stars who had been Bromfield’s guests decades before.
The long drive ended far out on Long Island. We rented a house near the sea. It was the beginning of off-season, the warm fall days. We could walk down the road to the beach; over a ragged dune the Atlantic lay, a collapsing line of surf. The bathers were in a group, men, children, and a sprinkling of young women gleaming like seals. The heavy waves rose, scattering them amid shrieks.
It was the season of bleached telephone poles and hordes of black sparrows perched on the wires. In the afternoon haze the sea burst white where bluefish were feeding. Inland were fields of rye. It was the country where I had written parts of books and where legends existed as they did in Tahiti and Key West—the blind caretaker who lived with his wife and knew all the houses, and some of their occupants, by feel. He went around and attended to whatever needed care, even in the dead of winter. He had fallen off a roof once. “Well, that happens,” he said.
I first knew the region when I came in the 1950s and was stationed at Westhampton. The airfield might have been in North Africa, it was that desolate and open to the sky. In the metal alert hangars at the end of the runway we slept in our flying suits with boots laced, ready to sprint for the ships when the klaxon blared into sound in the dead of night. Heading out over the black water in a sky without stars, talking in pilots’ shorthand with the radar station.
My wife and I had lived in an apartment near the bay. The town was quiet, like a failing country club. We were friends with the mayor, who was a doctor, and his good-looking wife. Their circle seemed sophisticated and a little bored. There was the feeling that there were lives ready to be capsized, a vague feeling of unseen fracture. It was exciting.
I saw my first Stanford White houses, and the ocean on every kind of day: frothing with huge waves in the distance; green and veined like marble; calm, with the waves far out and a slow, majestic sound. In the fall the geese flew over in long, wavering lines, sometimes breaking apart, drifting into wedges, great-hearted leaders at the apex.
If I look back and try to locate the center of my life it must be those days, I should probably say that decade. I had come through the early storms. I had a young wife. My idealism was at its height. I remember trying to write and being unable to—the atmosphere was wrong, the intimacy, the lack of solitude. Also, no one read. We were at the opposite pole from reading. Even at West Point there had been apostates, but not here. I had the seed within me but it was not yet time.
On the surface one might say I was thwarted, and perhaps that is true. Nevertheless I was happy then. I can only compare the feeling to being loved.
——
Now it is fall, a long time afterwards. The geese are dropping down to the ponds. The sea is huge, a storm coming. We had been swimming in it, exalted. Then drinks at Fox’s in his new house. Gloria Jones is there, her capped teeth and rich, vulgar voice, “Jamais de ma vie!” she cries, never in my life. “How did you two meet?” she asks, it is her quintessential question, “You met, how? Just like that, as they say?”
The then and now are intertwined, the dimming past and the present. Like an enduring disease there are the dreams. I am flying with someone, wide open, on the deck. The sky is cloudy, the flak terrifying. We are going at top speed, flashing past storage tanks, along a river on the way to the target. Suddenly ahead in the mist, steel bridges! Too late to pull up! We hit them! A great wave of heat sweeps over me. I have crossed—it is completely real—over into death.
I wake in the darkness and lie there. The aftertaste is not bitter. I know, just as in dreams, I will die, like every living thing, many of them more noble and important, trees, lakes, great fish that have lived for a hundred years. We live in the consciousness of a single self, but in nature there seems to be something else, the consciousness of many, of all, the herds and schools, the colonies and hives with myriads lacking in what we call ego but otherwise perfect, responsive only to instinct. Our own lives lack this harmony. We are each of us an eventual tragedy. Perhaps this is why I am in the country, to be close to the final companions. Perhaps it is only that winter is coming on.
One night in the darkness, outside, listening to the distant booming surf, “Isn’t it strange,” I say, “how you want different things at different times? Now all I want is a house by the sea. Hawaii was like this, still
empty then, still beautiful. We used to make love in the cane fields.”
“Who? Who did you do it with?”
“A naval officer’s wife, I remember. Her name was Sis Chandler.”
“Whew! That’s a hot name. She must have been something. Was she blonde?”
“No.”
In fact I could not recall what she looked like, but I remembered her and one or two things she said. It was her name that mattered, especially after so long a time. Pronouncing it had made me feel a long-vanished warmth towards her.
I have not forgotten those days, I have only Forgotten how simply they seemed to occur …
It was difficult to write. The heart for it was faint. It was useless, as in Chekhov’s crushing story, to try and tell someone of my child’s death. I could hardly bring myself to mention it. You must remember, but it was precisely that which was terrible. In reality I tried to forget her and what had happened.
In a jeweler’s window off Bond Street I had once seen an antique gold box about the size of a box of matches. It had a small drawer in which lay half a dozen ivory strips upon which riddles or questions were written in black enamel. Inserted in a slot they produced an answer in a narrow window on top of the box. Qui nous console—who consoles us—was one of the riddles. Le temps was the answer, a word which can mean either weather or time.
In the country there was both.
——
I woke on Christmas morning two or three years later. My father was born on this day. Eight decades back. Wearing a long fur coat I had bought secondhand in Southampton, I walked in the woods, the two of us did, the dog running ahead. At the weir the stream was frozen along the banks. In the light dusting of snow were the footprints of a wild duck.