by James Salter
“What?”
He doesn’t answer right away.
“You’re going to be pleased,” he assures me, stopping before the mirror to look at himself from one angle, then the other, his movements light as a bird’s. Mon vieux, he is singing to himself off key, vous êtes beau, vous êtes beau.
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me?” I ask him.
“Oh, in time,” he says, “in time.”
I watch him tie his shoes. He’s finished dressing. Now he inspects himself full-length.
“It’s snowing,” I say.
“Snowing!” He goes straight to the window. He can see it. “Ahh!”
“That pleases you?”
“Perfect,” he says. “It’s just perfect.”
We go off to the Foy.
Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can’t bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.
The Étoile d’Or. One lighted room along a cold street, the snow descending fitfully, the traffic thin. The waiter is a young boy in a soiled, white jacket. Only one other table occupied–by a man reading the newspaper–in this modest room, this room of a country house, almost empty in the flat of winter, the dark, icy hours. The three of us over the printed cloth, she quite nervous. It shows in her hands. Her ears are pierced, I notice. Through the tender flesh of the lobes cheap ornaments are hooked, and she touches them from time to time. She looks exactly as she looked in Dijon that night. The same dress. The same white arms. The waiter comes with three trays of oysters, deep, irregular shells within which the bodies lie, pure and glistening. For a moment she sits motionless as we begin to eat and only then begins herself, as if in respect or an unwillingness to appear hungry. The real reason is much simpler: she was watching us, she’d never eaten oysters before.
Anne-Marie Costallat, born October 8, 1944. I was beginning high school and masturbating twice a day, curling over it like a dead leaf, when she was born, in a bed of violets, as she says–all French mothers tell their children that. Dean tries to offer her some wine. Non, she says, merci. It isn’t good for her. Her cheeks are a little red from the cold, but the closer one gets the more marvelous-looking she is. Eighteen, I think! She seems even younger. It frightens me, of course. Eighteen, and a nigger for a lover. Right out of Jean Genet.
“How did you meet her!” I say. I realize my voice is strained. She’s excused herself. The W.C. is in the next room, past the bar.
“What do you think of her?” he says.
“She’s only a child.”
She ate like a dockhand, leaning over the plate and taking big forkfuls. She finished all the bread.
“Did you notice that?”
Of course. I remembered it forever.
“Food,” he says.
“Yes?”
“My big subject.”
She is returning. She sits down with a little smile.
By ten, the waiter has vanished. The restaurant is silent, and the chill of cheap hotels begins to surround us. She is speaking English, but it’s hard to understand and very funny. She smiles when we laugh, a tentative, friendly smile.
“Comment?” she asks.
She worked six months for the U. S. Army in Orléans. That’s where her English is from, although she’s forgotten a lot. Then she worked in a hotel in Troyes. (I’ve never seen this place. I can only imagine it–a small, commercial hotel, quite modern. Roland is the son of the owner. He and his friends all have cars. They have parties, and there’s a big, empty house that belongs to one of them where they can take the girls…) This summer she will get a job in La Baule. Where is that, Dean wants to know. Brittany, I tell him. It’s on the coast. She nods. I’m not sure she understands much of what we’re saying. Dean puts his jacket over her shoulders. It’s become very chilly in the room.
We drive her home. Place du Carrouge. The building she lives in is dark. Her room is over an alley where some Corsicans have a fruit business. The tissues from lemons, pears, the oranges of Spain, blow fitfully along the pavement. They have an old truck, lofty and battered, which is always parked close to the store. It’s a section of town I have somehow never seen, one of those quiet backwaters of a few houses and streets that don’t run very far. I sit in the car while Dean takes her to the door, but first she comes to the window on my side. I hurriedly roll it down.
“Bon soir,” she says politely.
He leaves her at the door, and up to her room she goes like any good child, a room on the top floor, probably, under the roof, like a sparrow. This room–a squad of inspectors could never find it–in a narrow building. This room I am never to visit. From the first, when I asked him about it, he said nothing. There wasn’t much to describe, it was a room. The meagerness of that reply told it all.
He was afraid of what I might ask him. He was almost ready to lie–it’s easy enough to tell. I used to lie constantly. Now I’ve stopped. With Dean, I never spoke anything but the truth, right from the beginning. Partly, I suppose, I was afraid he might find me out, but more important, lies suddenly seemed useless. It was even more than that, they gave me no comfort. I felt, with him– it’s difficult to explain–that he could not be challenged by lies. He had already proved he cared nothing for them. That was the whole point of his life.
She stoops with the match, inserts it, and the heater softly explodes. A blue flame rushes across the jets, then burns with a steady sound. There’s no other light in the room but this, which reflects from the floor. She stands up again. She drops the burnt match on the table and begins to arrange clothing on the grill of the heater, pajamas, spreading them out so they can be warmed. Dean helps her a bit. The silk, if it’s that, is quite cold. And there, back from the Vox opposite the Citroen garage, its glass doors now closed, they stand in the roaring dark. In a fond, almost brotherly gesture, he puts his arms around her. They hardly know one another. She accepts it without a word, without a movement, and they wait in a pure silence, the faint sweetness of gas in the air. After a while she turns the pajamas over. Her back is towards him. In a single move she pulls off her sweater and then, reaching behind herself in that elbow-awkward way, unfastens her brassiere. Slowly he turns her around.
She leaves his kisses finally to stand against the wall, arms at her sides.
“Jeanne d’Arc,” she says. The tremulous blue plays across her. Her features seem resigned.
He takes her by the arms. She turns her face to the light. He is her executioner, she says. The word thrills him. His knees tremble.
He puts her to bed in her warm pajamas. She is innocent, he decides. She smiles softly, the calm of a long convalescence in her face. Finally he turns to go, but at the door her voice stops him. Yes? Turn out the light, she says. He does. Like Lucifer, he creates darkness and he descends.
[9]
I SEE MYSELF AS an agent provocateur or as a double agent, first on one side–that of truth–and then on the other, but between these, in the reversals, the sudden defections, one can easily forget allegiance entirely and feel only the deep, the profound joy of being beyond all codes, of being completely independent, criminal is the word. Like any agent, of course, I cannot divulge my sources. I can merely say that some things I saw myself, some I discovered, for after all, the mutilation, the delay of as little as a single word can reveal the existence of something worthy to be hidden, a
nd I became obsessed with discovery, like the great detectives. I read every scrap of paper. I noted every detail. Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and some dreamed, and I can no longer differentiate between them. But my dreams are as important as anything I acquired by stealth. More important, because they are the intuitive in its purest state. Without them, facts are no more than a kind of debris, unstrung, like beads. The dreams are as true and manifest as the iron fences of France flashing black in the rain. More true, perhaps. They are the skeleton of all reality.
I am the pursuer. The essence of that is I am the one who knows while Dean does not, but still it is far from even. To begin with, no matter what I do, I can never uncover everything. That alone is enough to make him triumph. I can never anticipate; it is he who moves first. I am only the servant of life. He is an inhabitant. And above all, I cannot confront him, I cannot even imagine such a thing. The reason is simple: I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love. That is the source of his power.
She was waiting for him at six. It was already dark, and they drove through the thrilling streets, past shops that were open late, their windows alight. She goes up to get her things, including her little radio, and they drive to St. Léger, a small factory town, her town. Her house is by the canal. There they park and Dean waits for her in the car. A fine rain is falling. Men are still walking home from work, whistling, along the dark street. He cannot see them. Their voices arrive unexpectedly, like those in a church. He sits quietly. He listens to them cough, go by, and then gets out to walk along the bank of the canal. Bicycles pass. Some girls or women, he cannot tell, stop to look at the car. They are trying to see inside–he can make out the tableau by streetlight–their bicycles held upright in one hand, the metal of the hood glistening with points of rain. The rest of it, the long elegant line, is lost to shadow. Suddenly they turn towards the house where the door has just opened. Fluorescent light spills out and the murmur of voices. He hurries to meet her at the car.
She’s told her mother everything, she announces as they drive off.
“Everything?” he says.
“Oui.”
They drive for a while in silence, coming to the main road.
“Eh, what did she say, your mother?” he asks.
“Est-il prudent.”
“What?”
She shrugs. She doesn’t know how to explain it.
“Prudent,” she repeats.
In Troyes they stop at her old hotel to ask if she has any mail. He can see her through the glass doors. They hand something to her, a single letter which, as she comes out, she puts in her handbag without reading.
They have dinner in the Brasserie Lorraine. An old dachshund, his paws turned white, sits by the bar. Sometimes he wanders among the tables or goes to the door and barks to go out. A waiter opens it for him. When he comes in again, he lies down with moans. Hesitations. At the end, a sigh. One can hear him breathing.
In every respect a wonderful dinner. She is talkative and happy. The food seems spread around her like vegetables to a roast. She is simply the living portion of the meal, and she smiles at his appetite which embraces her with glances.
Outside, in the small place, cars are parked in a center triangle. The night is hung with the thinnest of rains. They sit in silence, waiting for the check. Finally it arrives, the last obstacle is removed. From here it is straight-away, a long flight down the road to Paris, headlights cast ahead, the engine thrumming. Dean drives in cool excitement, in the electric hush of tires. He has a hard-on half the time and wonders if there will be any trouble registering in the hotel. If it had been me–and sometimes I am so drenched with images that I think it was–but if it had been, I would have had no confidence, none at all. I would have been exhausted, wrung by disbelief, going ahead only out of a sort of curiosity, to discover exactly where it would all vanish. I would have thought: God will not permit it.
The rain passes. There are scattered clouds with the moon behind them. The sky is brighter than the land. Annie is sleeping, curled up in the leather seat. He wakes her as they enter Paris. They drive along the river through light traffic and then down Rue de Rivoli, her favorite. She watches the passage of the long, immaculate arcades like a tourist. Then she takes out a mirror to inspect her face.
There is no difficulty. A porter takes them upstairs and along the corridors, the carpet creaking beneath their feet. He has the key in his hand. They come to the door. He inserts it. They wait behind him. The lock rattles. At last the room is revealed. It is classical and large. The objects within it, their arrangement, the colors all seem as if they have been together a long time, assembled by use. There is nothing recent or frivolous. A huge bed at which Dean quickly glances. Windows admitting streetlight. Mirrors. Chairs. A large bathroom in which the heat seems on.
He goes down to park the car. Finding a place is difficult. He cruises along the narrow streets. He doesn’t want to just leave it in a driveway. When he comes back, she is combing her hair. Except for a pair of the cheap, black panties one finds on the counters in Monoprix, she is naked. She smiles at him, a little stiffly, a little uncertain.
The water is running. In the bathroom he turns her around admiringly. She is very complaisant with all her clothes off. She moves readily to his touch. She’s quite beautiful. Slim. A bit of dark hair between her legs. They stand beneath the shower. He nestles himself flat in the meeting of her buttocks. An excruciating douche. He feels unable to move, but he begins to soap her breasts which glisten like seals beneath the flow of water. He scrubs her back. Between the shoulder blades the skin is broken out in small, red points. He goes over them with the cloth. It’s good for them, he tells her. Aureate light is reflected from the ceiling. He has a hard-on he is sure will never disappear.
He has wrapped her in an enormous towel, soft as a robe, and carried her to the bed. They lie across it diagonally, and he begins to draw the towel apart with care, to remove it as if it were a bandage. Her flesh appears, still smelling a little of soap. His hands float onto her. The sum of small acts begins to unite them, the pure calculus of love. He feels himself enter. Her last breath–it is almost a sigh–leaves her. Her white throat appears.
When it is over she falls asleep without a word. Dean lies beside her. The real France, he is thinking. The real France. He is lost in it, in the smell of the very sheets. The next morning they do it again. Grey light, it’s very early. Her breath is bad.
I cannot follow them through the city that day, through the December streets, avenues as bitter as the steppes. They have only a little money, I know that. They shop all afternoon and buy nothing. Then, tired of walking, they return to the hotel. Dean has to go on an errand–he needs a part for the car, he explains. Actually it’s a visit to the Vendôme where his father is staying. He needs money.
“Money? My boy, certain large banks excepted, that is the single great need common to us all.”
He’s a drama critic. He has a fine, sable beard, carefully trimmed. His clothes are always beautiful. He is wearing a blue, batiste shirt that seems not to touch him anywhere except at the neck and wrists which he is buttoning, a shirt that encircles him with an elegant slimness.
“Money,” he says. “Of course. I share that need. Listen, are you coming to dinner with us?”
He is dressing to go out with friends. They’re all very clever. Long, amusing stories, usually irreverent. The women are as witty as the men. Saturday evening. The small cups are refilled with coffee. The Gauloise smoke ascends.
On the chair there are phonograph records. On the desk, fresh books. On the bureau, three leather watch-bands bought that day in Hermés. His father shoots his cuffs with a slight, habitual gesture and turns to the mirror. The room is filled with the scent of his lotion, Zizanie, which comes in cool aluminum bottles. Only his luggage seems worn.
“Jacquette is going to be there, you haven’t met him. And Yeli Ezoum.” He unrolls names like a splendid carpet.
“I ca
n’t tonight,” Dean says.
“What is it, a girl? Let me see you. You look a little drawn.”
“There isn’t any girl.”
“We’re going to the Vert Bocage.”
Dean is silent. Desperation is making him weak.
“Now, Phillip,” his father says, “come on. This is really like climbing a ladder. Let’s go up one rung at a time. First, why can’t you join us for dinner?”
“Please. I can’t.”
“I see.”
“I really need to borrow some money.” It seems too abrupt.
“Oh, that’s about four or five rungs farther up.”
“Seriously…”
“Call me tomorrow,” his father says, “and we’ll have lunch.”
“Tomorrow…”
“All right?”
“But I need it now,” Dean pleads. He is praying.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“That’s too late,” he says stubbornly.
“Oh, come now,” his father makes it seem foolish. He is brushing the sleeves of his jacket. “Don’t become so absolutely tedious. Here,” and from his wallet he takes out three hundred francs.
“Now, why is it you can’t come to dinner?”
For a moment Dean thinks crazily of bringing her along. Her clothes are so cheap though. The leather of her shoes is cracked. It would be awful. They would greet her with indulgent smiles, ask little questions.
“I really can’t,” he says.
When he gets back, finally, he finds her asleep. He lifts the edge of the covers. She is naked. He pulls off his shoes and undresses. He lies down beside her, and she rolls into his arms. Seven in the evening. The noise from the streets drifts upwards. The soft hours of early night. He reaches for the pack of préservatifs on the telephone stand, but she takes hold of his wrist.
“You don’t need to,” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He is overwhelmed. As his prick goes into her, he discovers the world. He knows the source of numbers, the path of the stars. Music pouring over them from somewhere, ah, from her white plastic radio. She’s put a hand towel beneath her, and it becomes bloody. He finds it later. He packs it secretly when they leave.