by James Salter
On Sunday they walk the bridges and sometime in the early afternoon, leave town.
That night he tells me about it, not everything, of course. I’m so happy to see him, to have him confiding in me, that I miss a lot. He’s worn out from the drive. In the street, dark as a ship’s hull, the car is parked. The engine is still warm. Beneath the chilled body there’s a faint cracking, as of joints. In the house we sit shivering. The walls are like steel. We go down to the Foy for some hot tea and cognac. By this time he’s talking of other things–where to eat cheaply–I don’t remember. I am hardly listening. I hear only enough to keep track of what he’s saying while my real thoughts circle around us like hungry dogs.
[10]
WHAT HAD HAPPENED? THEY had gone off and made love. That isn’t so rare. One must expect to encounter it. It’s nothing but a sweet accident, perhaps just the end of illusion. In a sense one can say it’s harmless, but why, then, beneath everything does one feel so apart? Isolated. Murderous, even.
In a way I could calmly expect that from this point they would begin, having discovered all there was so soon, to lose interest in each other, to grow cold, but these acts are sometimes merely an introduction–in the great, carnal duets I think they must often be–and I search for the exact ciphers which serve to open it all as if for a safe combination. I rearrange events and make up phrases to reveal how the first innocence changed into long Sunday mornings, the bells filling the air, pillows jammed under her belly, her marvelous behind high in the daylight. Dean slowly inserts himself, deep as a sword wound.
I prefer not to think about it, I turn away, but it’s impossible to control these dreams. The forbidden ones are incandescent–they burn through resolutions like cloth. I cannot stop them even if I want to. I cannot make them vanish. They are brighter than the day that surrounds me. I am weary from it. I have become a somnambulist. My own life suddenly seems nothing, an old costume, a collection of rags, and I walk, I breathe to the rhythm of his which is stronger than mine. The world is all changed. The scabs of reality are picked away and beneath them, though I try not to see, are visions which cause me to tremble.
In her room they are warming their hands at the heater. She’s tired. Her work that day was hard. He undresses her, a little awkwardly, for she is still far from being his–one can imagine her still refusing–and puts her to bed. Above the thick quilt her face shines like a child’s. He stands looking at her, filled with contentment. They say nothing. He adjusts the covers, which are somewhat soiled, smooths them down. Then hurriedly, as an afterthought, he takes off his clothes and slips in beside her. An act which threatens us all. The town is silent around them. On the milk-white faces of the clock the hands, in unison, jerk to new positions. The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass and bells mark the hours, the quarters, the halves. With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull. They remain close for a long time, still without talking. It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love.
I hear him come in. I am reading. I appear to be. Henry the Fourth is beautifying Paris, building the Place Royale, the Pont-Neuf. I keep going over the same lines again and again. I can tell what has happened, but I cannot bring myself to say anything. Nothing. I am possessed of nothing but phrases as heavy as logs.
[11]
IT IS ALL IN fragments, like the half of a paper napkin–for a time in the top drawer of his bureau–on which they both had written words. There are two columns, and I can see they were added to alternately, like a game. His is on the left. It begins with Croix de Fer. Opposite, in her hand: Les Martiens. He writes Les Escaliers. She writes Le Select. They are naming a hotel, the one they will have together someday. Dean can get the money, he says–his father knows everybody. His father has rich friends. The list continues:
Pharaoh Napoléon
Les Copains L’Aigle Noir
Le Pyramide Quatre Saisons
Coco Moderne
and the bottom is missing, like a letter torn apart on the wet street.
It is in Nancy, in the hotel on the square. A bright December afternoon. In the center of everything, the statue of Stanislas, traces of old snow at his feet, his green arm pointing to the barren park. They are ushered into the silence of a room on the side. She is happy. It is the weekend. They have wandered along the street in the great, plain-faced crowd, and she has seen a leather suit that costs 130 francs which she imagines he may buy for her. She was wearing a black fur hat. Every eye followed when she walked.
The radio is playing. They undress in the winter daylight. Dean is a little embarrassed at his condition. His prick gets hard whenever he looks at her. He can’t help it. His chief desire is to raise her on it, exultant, to run her up into the sunshine, into the starlight where she can see the world. They begin to dance a little, naked, in the early darkness, the music thin and foreign, their feet bare on the rug. Then they make love, she astride him, in the favorite manner of the Roman poets, as he informs her. He lies gazing up at her, his hands encircling her ankles. The rich smell of her falls over him. At the bottom of it all, his eyes lingering there, the mute triangle in which he is implanted.
“Do you think you will remember me in five years?” she asks him at dinner.
He tries to smile, but it’s dry. He is empty, with no desire to talk about love.
“You will go,” she says. “You are the type.”
“No.”
“Si,” she insists calmly.
By now they know something of each other. There is a fund they can draw on together. The encounter begins to have an essence of its own which neither can define but which nourishes them both, and happily, in the single unselfish ritual of love, they contribute to it all they can. Nor does it matter how much either takes away. It is a limitless body. It can never be exhausted but only, although one never believes this, forgot.
They are served a dish piled high with écrevisses, salty, pale. The tiny legs crack like dry wood under their teeth. The hidden juices spurt. She wants to know what they are called. Dean isn’t sure. Crayfish, he says.
“Crayfish?”
“I think so,” he says.
She invents a story: The Prince of Crayfish. Dean listens, licking his fingers while she unfolds, as if to a child, a tale filled with mysteries.
Deep down, where it is only darkness, the prince of crayfish was born. It was very difficult. It took a long time because his feet kept getting tangled up with his mother’s, but finally he was swimming, a little weakly, by her side. From all over the sea important fish came to bring him presents: necklaces of coral, little monies to eat, seaweed to lie on, green and black…
He is watching her mouth, her clever eyes. Her teeth are a bad color and not well cared for. One can see that when she smiles, but he is only watching the phrases, he hardly notices.
When he was six months old, he said to his mother: I am going up to see the world. Ah, she was very sad. She cried. She didn’t want, but then she said: God be with you, my dear son. Be brave and honest and no hurt will…
“Befall you,” Dean supplies, as if in a dream.
“Befall you,” she says, the word funny in her mouth. “No hurt will befall you.”
“Go on,” he says.
“Do you like it?”
“Oh, yes.”
From waters so deep he had to swim for three days before it even began to grow light, he makes his way to the surface …
An odyssey which ends–Dean is shocked–in disaster, in a great, frothing kettle where the prince is scalded to death, still brave, still honest… She shrugs over the soup at the abruptness of it all. Dean sits silent. He is drained of
all invention and also aware, for the first time, that she is fully able to speak, to create images strong enough to alter his life.
They return to the hotel at ten. The corridors are empty. Shoes are set outside each room. The catch of the door makes a little click as it closes and with that sound, Dean suddenly awakes. He turns the bolt. They are safe. The city is his. No one in it is more powerful. Hushed in sleep it lies, white specks of frost on its windows, steeped in the cold. No one is more blessed, more demonic.
In the bathroom she stands naked before the thin mirror. Dean appears behind her. His hands, all reverence at first, like those of men reprieved, move to possess her. Tenderly he weighs her breasts.
“I would look very well in that suit,” she reflects.
With no resonance, he says, “Oui.”
“This one grew first,” she says.
“Is that true?” Dean says inanely.
“He was always bigger. Oui.”
He becomes attentive to the smaller.
“Poor baby,” he murmurs.
Above the basin on a glass shelf: her bottles. Biodop, one of them reads. Her stockings lie crumpled on the floor. Over the radio: Nights of Spain. The suit, he remembers, had a belt which was a gleaming, leather thong.
They have turned off the light. In the room there is a huge armoire, a wicker basket, chairs. A metal tree on which garments can be hung. The ceiling is very high. In its center–one’s eyes must become accustomed to the dark–a grotesque fixture. The hours pass. She is pinioned on the bed, her arms trapped beneath her, her legs forced wide. Her eyes are closed. The radio is playing Sucu Sucu. The world has stopped. Oceans still as photographs. Galaxies floating down. Her cunt tastes sweet as fruit.
Morning. She lies face down, warm still from sleep. Her arms are up on either side of her head, the elbows bent. Dean is on top of her, encircling, in the early light, and they are fucking like weight lifters. He pauses at last. He leans over to admire her, she does not see him. Hair covers her cheek. Her skin seems very white. He kisses her side and then, without force, as one stirs a favorite mare, begins again. She comes to life with a soft, exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.
Her narrow, cool back commanding the breakfast. The waiter who brings it does not even glance towards the bed. When he is gone she jumps up and, still naked, prepares the trays. In the noiseless light she opens the croissants, diligent as a maid, spreads them evenly with butter, arranges them back on the plates. Her flesh shines. It draws him. He moves to stay near her, like a child, hoping she will smile at him, give him a taste. He feels like jumping around, making noise, she is so occupied, so serene. She opens the confiture. Put some here, he wants to say. Grab her around the waist. Dance. He kisses her elbow. She glances at him and smiles.
Place Stanislas on a still Sunday morning. Windows through which the silence of Nancy pours, borne by the pure light. It is in this city that she was born, in one melancholy autumn of the war. Her father had already left home to live with his mistress. Her mother was alone. A cold winter that year, a snowy winter, hard as stone, ice gleaming in the sunshine along the roofs. A winter which somehow formed her though she could not speak as much as a single word.
The remains of breakfast lie littered about like a feast from the night before. Across the street is the opera, touches of gold on the balcony railing, posters invisible below. Lucie de Lammermoor will be here, dark letters printed on violet. La Vie Bohème. They have gone back to bed and lie almost enclosed in a second sleep, the radio weak, her fingers lightly, the skin draws tight beneath them, tracing his balls.
In the bathroom he watches her putting up her hair. Her arms are raised. In the hollows there is a shadow of growth, short and soft, and to this belongs a damp, oniony odor which he loves. When she is in the tub, he begins to scrub her back. She complains. It’s too hard.
He runs his fingertips lightly over the skin.
“It looks better,” he says.
She does not reply. She is bent forward slightly in the thin, comforting steam, her arms along the white rim. Beneath them, faintly commonplace, her breasts are visible, as if he might see them any time he liked, as if they were ordinary as knees. The palest nipples–he can barely see one. He kneels there beside the tub. She begins to wash her legs.
Simple moments of immodesty, an immodesty which finishes desire, one often hears, in a great and abiding city. I have visited and read a good deal about Nancy. The capital of Lorraine. A model of eighteenth-century planning. Its harmonious squares, its elegant houses are typically French and appropriate to so rich a region, but its glory it owes to a Pole, Stanislas Leszczynski, who was given the duchies of Lorraine and Bar by his son-in-law, Louis XV, and who ruled from Nancy which he devoted himself to embellishing. An ancient city. The old quarter has never been altered. A city of rich merchants, strategic, key to the lands along the border. In front of its very walls… But how flat this all seems, how hopeless, like a cheap backdrop shaking as the actors walk.
[12]
SUNDAY MORNINGS. GLOVED HANDS touching, they drive along the empty boulevard. Schools are closed. The iron gates are locked in front of those long, damp alleys smelling of pee. A watery sunshine, blenched by skies which refuse to warm, falls on the blocks and corners. Unexpectedly, like a band of survivors, there is a crowd, all decently dressed, just leaving church. They squint as they come out into the light. They leave the steps, walk along, stop at the baker’s for bread. From there they scatter, the warm loaves under their arms. Dean is a little bored. It’s an effort to speak French. He’s weary of it, and English is no better, hers is so uneven. Her mistakes begin to be irritating, and besides, she seems disposed to talk only of banal things: shoes, her work at the office. When she is silent, he glances at her and smiles. She doesn’t respond. She senses it, he thinks. Suddenly, he feels transparent. The eyes that return his somewhat mechanical glance are the eyes of a knowing child, and all the evasions, poses, devices become foolish. The windshield has faint streaks of blue like air. As he looks through, at the road ahead, he is conscious of her calm appraisal. She understands effortlessly. Life is all quite clear to her. She is one with it. She moves in it like a fish, never wondering if it has a bottom, shores, worlds above it…
Worlds below. Those provincial Sundays I walked along the streets on the way perhaps to lunch with the Jobs, encountering as I went, even inventing myself, those small epiphanies of which the town is comprised. The clink of spoons as they dine, unseen, behind the shutters of the girls’ school. The graveled courts, the gardens of Autun. I stood near the window as I dressed, steeped in aching thoughts and hoping for the appearance, even for a moment emerging from her door, of Claude Picquet. Icicles fall from the roof, broken free by sunlight, and flash past the window. She never comes out. The street remains still. As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move. Despite it all, I could have been happy, a quiet happiness to be sure, but happy nonetheless. I could have found it very pleasant to walk into town if the weather were nice–things like that. It is knowledge that poisons us, events one would hesitate to imagine.
Winter days remarkable only for their calm… I go down to the Café Français and sit with my back to the mirrors watching them play cards. I have beautiful shots of this, many reflected in the glass. The camera was in my lap, sometimes behind a newspaper. The click of the shutter was softer than a match strike. The waitress pretending not to see. People come in the door, which is right on the corner. One wall is all windows on the square. The light is flooding but mild. The voices are low. I spread out the newspaper and begin to read. Occasionally I make some notes.
Of course, there’s Paris. I stand waiting on the quai in the icy dark. The clock shines white as the moon. The early train is an adventure, rocking along as dawn comes, rushing through villages of the dead. I take a seat at the end of the car. All the compartments look stuffy, thick with the odors of sleep. It’s after nine when we pull in
to Nevers. There’s a clatter of doors. Bursts of cold air from outside. A handsome girl boards wearing a checkered coat. Her father is there to see her off, I watch him through the windows. He is waiting rather diffidently for the train to begin moving and then, as it does, he shows a last, hurried affection. She has the scars of some skin disease on her cheeks, otherwise an intelligent face. And she has good legs and hands. Her father looked quite distinguished.
After we are moving she comes out of her compartment and enters the cabinet-toilette, just behind me. She passes very close in a red silk suit. She has a nice figure. A long time passes. I begin to be uneasy. I don’t know why. I begin to become aware of myself sitting innocently at the end of the passage. Silence, except for the train. Finally I hear paper tearing. The sound alarms me. We are passing dead engines. Farther down the car, two men are standing, one in the thick, blue uniform of the French Air Force. More paper tearing. They’re paying no attention to me, absolutely none, but suddenly I’m afraid. I have a moment of agonizing premonition. She’s going to do something terrible, burst out, wipe shit on my face, abuse me, screaming things I know I won’t be able to understand. I am about to stand up and move when there are explosions of air as we pass more engines. The sound is terrifying.
And then the great, blackened terminal in Paris, that filthy cathedral, stale and exhausted, through which one passes into grey, commercial streets. I walk outside to find a cab, falling wearily into the back seat although it’s only a little past noon. I am thinking of Cristina who later, as we drive to dinner, will begin to tell me about Isabel’s husband who comes to her now for advice. They’re very friendly. They drive around town talking while he offhandedly points to various buildings he owns.