A Sport and a Pastime

by James Salter

  Dean has begun tutoring three times a week. It came about rather unexpectedly, although the idea must have been flickering in Madame Job’s mind for some time. When she asked me about it, what my opinion would be, I was taken by surprise. I had no chance to adjust myself.

  “A tutor?” I said. “Of what?”

  “But English, naturally.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know. I suppose if he were interested he might be able to.”

  “Comme il est gentil,” she pleaded. She was thin as a ferret.

  “You can always try it.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Oh, yes. Why not?”

  She tried to hide her pleasure. It annoyed me.

  He is completely the young student for her, brilliant and clean. Her children adore him. He fashions a set of those cards with a picture on one side and the word on the back. His drawings are very clever, of course. The automobile is his, the one outside, except even longer and slightly uneven. The chicken looks like Claude Picquet.

  His life assumes a nineteenth-century air. He rises at eight or eight-thirty and has coffee. Then he reads the morning paper to strengthen his vocabulary. The headlines are underscored these days, the front pages filled with fragments of that terrible divorce, Algeria, which is in its final agony. Many French still cling to the possibility of triumph, the dominance of will. La guerre est la domaine de la force morale. They are like widows, dispossessed tenants, martyrs, maniacs. In the last frenzy, desperate schemes appear. The violence becomes grotesque. Citizens, some with decorations in their lapels, are machine-gunned in the streets. The assassins are practically children. They are sickened by their act. They sit on the curbstone and weep.

  In the evenings he’s home before midnight. He almost never spends the night with her. Her bed is very small, and then, I think he prefers to be able to leave. Besides, they have the weekends in every old hotel, shutters drawn, door bolted from the inside.

  He is elated with his first pay from giving lessons, they go to Avallon. Napoleon has stayed in the hotel there. It breathes of his glory. In the hallways there are prints of the campaigns, Rivoli, Jena, the Mamelukes. The girl at the reception desk has a gold tooth which shines when she smiles.

  They sit in the dining room quietly inspecting the menu, prices first. She has changed upstairs, and beneath her suit she has nothing on. Dean knows this. As he reads, his thoughts keep returning to it. Her body, portions of it, seem to become luminous in his mind. Everything he touches or looks at, the fork, the tablecloth, somehow, by their homeliness, their silence, seem to celebrate that flesh which only a single layer of cloth conceals, does not even conceal, proclaims. She eats a large meal. She even drinks a little wine. Dean gazes at her through his empty glass. A brilliant, irregular world appears. The chandeliers glitter like stars. Her face swims away, crowned in soft hair.

  “We make movies tonight,” she says.

  In confusion he tries to think what that might mean. She sits across the table, smiling at him. Their napkins lie crumpled to the side.

  Could she, I have often wondered over the empty plates in restaurants, in cafés where only the waiters remain, by any rearrangement of events, by any accident could she, I dream, have become mine? … I look in the mirror. Thinning hair. A face marked by lines, cuts they are, almost, that define my expressions. Strong arms. I’m making all of this up. The eyes of a clever and lazy man, a passionate man…

  She removes her jacket. Those splendid breasts illuminate the room. She steps out of her skirt, and one hungers for nothing but her, that complaisant her which is so ready to yield. It was by glances, exhausted glances across a nightclub that I discovered her, and I confirmed her only in silence, in stealth, and now all of it is clapped around my consciousness like a ring of iron. Those sovereign breasts, freed of cloth. She loves to be naked. She swims in the light. She is drenched with it.

  Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gestures, and my thoughts begin to tumble. I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life.

  Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible? Why, whenever I am idle, sometimes even before, in the midst of doing something, do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts.

  Silence. I listen to it, the silence of that room which leaves me faint. Those calm phrases to which she knows so well how to respond as barefoot now, unhurried, she crosses to him in the dark.

  I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone.

  “There was a lot,” she says.

  She glistens with it. The inside of her thighs is wet.

  “How long does it take to make again?” she asks.

  Dean tries to think. He is remembering biology.

  “Two or three days,” he guesses.

  “Non, non!” she cries. That is not what she meant.

  She begins to make him hard again. In a few minutes he rolls her over and puts it in as if the intermission were ended. This time she is wild. The great bed begins creaking. Her breath becomes short. Dean has to brace his hands on the wall. He hooks his knees outside her legs and drives himself deeper.

  “Oh,” she breathes, “that’s the best.”

  When he comes, it downs them both. They crumble like sand. He returns from the bathroom and picks up the covers from the floor. She has not moved. She lies just where she has fallen.

  They always drive somewhere the following day. They rise late and plan a journey. These are the first mild weekends. It’s good to be outside. They put their things in the car: her small plastic suitcase, the radio, a copy of Elle. She gets in and slams the door.

  “Do you have to do that?” he says.

  “Sorry.”

  “One of these times it’s going to come right off the damn car.”

  “I am sorry,” she repeats.

  “It’s all right,” he says and really, he is content. Her period started that morning. Everything is fine.

  They leave town through a long corridor of trees. The country opens to receive them. Squares of warm sunlight drift across their laps. The rich murmur of the engine flows beneath them. They talk about her friends, Danielle, whose parents own the grocery. And Dominique, who went to live six months with a German family. She liked it very much. Better than France. Anne-Marie would like to go there herself. What about Italy? Oh, yes, of course, Italy. Perhaps they can go to Italy together, she suddenly suggests. In the summer. They could drive.

  “Sure,” he says. It’s all vague and far off.

  After a while she begins to move about on the seat.

  “Oh, Phillip,” she says, “my Tampax is not good. You must stop in Saulieu.”

  “All right.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Not very,” he says.

  She gives a faint hiss of dismay. It’s really just like her. He admires that. Sometimes she will go into the woods to pee.

  [18]

  SLOWLY THE LIGHT CHANGES, day by day, reflected from countless old surfaces of the town. A new quality appears in it, an intensity that means death for the
season. The winter months have grown weary. They are ready to be over-thrown. In the streets one can sense the imminence of this. The skies have grown bright, have freshened. The past is melting like ice.

  Dean sits waiting while she makes herself up. It’s still fairly light outside. People are strolling after work, happy to have days that end before darkness. He looks through a cheap magazine while she makes the last touches. Her face is close to the mirror.

  “You know, you shouldn’t read this junk,” he says, leafing through it.

  She turns to see. Then she continues with the mirror.

  “It’s just stories,” she says.

  “They’re terrible. What do you see in them?”

  She shrugs. He tosses it aside.

  “I should read more books,” she says, as if to her reflection.

  “That’s right, you should.”

  “I like Montherlant,” she says. “And Proust.”

  “You haven’t read Proust.”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “Really?”

  Turning, she asks,

  “How do you find me?”

  “Too much lipstick,” he says.

  She turns her head this way and that before the mirror, considering herself.

  “I find it good,” she says.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Si,” she insists. Nevertheless she wipes a little from the corners.

  Dean sits on the bed, his head leaning back against the wall. He looks around the room. Everything seems ordinary, everything seems poor. Sometimes he is depressed by her imperfections. They should not be important, perhaps, but they often become so real, so ready to take control of her, these plain qualities hidden by the brilliance of a language and life the taste of which he has only just begun to grasp. He waits for her to put on her coat. She avoids his eyes. In silence they descend to the street. He is waiting for her to say something.

  “We go to the shops?”

  Dean doesn’t reply. He merely stares at her.

  “Come,” she insists.

  It’s chilly at this hour, the end of the day. Her cheeks are reddened, like an urchin’s. The tiny slits in her earlobes seem a mark of low caste. They walk towards the center of town. She has linked her arm in his. He seems not to notice. He has turned into lead.

  “Tu es fâché avec moi?” she asks.

  He shrugs. They walk along cheerlessly. Her face has the helplessness of someone who is no longer believed in.

  “Phillip, tu es fâché?” she repeats.

  “No.”

  There are only women in the shop, mothers and daughters, wives. The owner moves among the flutter of merchandise. She is waiting on two or three customers at once. She reaches for boxes on various shelves and lays them open on the counter. Dean is uncomfortable. He stands against the wall like a shadow. He has a pose of disinterest, but although they glance at him upon entering, nobody seems to pay him any attention.

  “Phillip,” she calls.

  He looks up for an instant, uncertain. She had gone to the back.

  “Phillip,” she calls again, “viens.”

  She beckons from one of the booths.

  He starts back. One of the shoppers looks up at him. He feels awkward, as if the process of movement had suddenly asserted all its complexity and everything had to be commanded. He walks as if made of wood. The curtain is pulled aside. There in the company of a large mirror she stands, naked to the waist.

  “You must help me,” she says calmly.

  She slips her arms into a brassiere and presents her back to him to have it fastened. He does it without a word, with the detachment of a servant, but as he watches her in the mirror regarding herself, turning slightly, then hunching her shoulders together to take it off again, he begins to have an erection.

  “You must help me choose,” she says. A pause. “Phillip.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must help me.”

  He is watching her. Her nakedness compels him. No matter what he does, he cannot commit it to memory. It seems to be given to him in a series of revelations that are like flashes. She makes her breasts comfortable in another garment which he fastens.

  “Do you like it?” she asks.

  “I like the other more,” he says. His first words. She gives not the slightest hint of triumph.

  “This?”

  “Yes.”

  She strips to try it on again.

  “Yes,” she agrees. “This one is the best.”

  She raises her arms to allow him to feel it. After a few minutes she removes the brassiere and watches in the mirror as his touch makes her nipples hard. Someone begins walking towards the rear of the shop, and Dean starts to move away, but she tightens her arms against her sides to imprison him. They hear the curtain of the other booth being pulled aside for a young girl and her mother. In the mirror Dean discovers a smile.

  They go off to dinner near the gare. The sky is unnaturally bright. In the last of day a great storm assembles. The air is alive. Across a heaven of terrifying, of Toledo blue, huge clouds are moving, dark as the sea. People begin to vanish. The open spaces of town, the promenades, the squares, become thrilling in their emptiness. A cat hesitates, then hurries across the street.

  They eat with the rain coming straight down, smoking across the pavements. Dean is excited. His whole mood has changed. Great bands of water move through the darkened air and beat on the cloth of his car.

  “Isn’t that beautiful?” he cries.

  He is hunched over the table, looking out.

  “Tiens,” she says, “are you happy now, seal? There is water.”

  He nods, ashamed of how he has been, which seems childish. The storm is the first of spring. It turns one’s thoughts ahead. Her freckles–she does not know the word–will come back, she says. Not everywhere, just here, she circles her eyes and nose.

  “Ah,” he says. “You’ll be like a raccoon.”

  “A what?”

  “A raccoon. A raccoon,” he says. “Don’t you know what that is? It’s an animal.”

  “Oh, yes?” she says blankly.

  Suddenly he bursts into laughter. He cannot contain it. He tries to tell her: c’est très joli, but he can’t say it, and she begins laughing, too. He starts to draw one for her on a scrap of paper. First the feet, but they are absurd. He collapses in laughter.

  “It’s a rat,” she says.

  “No, it’s not.”

  However, he cannot keep it from becoming that. Its ears. Even its tail. The nose grows very pointed.

  “It’s a rat,” she says.

  They need only glance at each other to start laughing again.

  In the room she tries on her new things. She slips off her clothes and puts on the pants and bra she’s just bought. Then she poses for him, laughs, and falls onto the bed. They lie together in the calm darkness. He places her hand on his prick. Her cool fingers hesitate a moment and then begin to comprehend it. She is more obedient than before. He is more devoted. The bath of anger has left them happier. It’s like a pruning. Afterwards they seem less encumbered–they move towards the very light.

  A long time passes. Her head rests on his chest. She begins to kiss his stomach. The gravity of her movement betrays her. Suddenly he is certain of what she is about to do. He draws her up and presses kisses on her mouth. He can already feel it fitting over him. She moves down again. Her body is curled between his legs. Tenderly she explores him. Finally she begins. Dean touches her cheeks. He traces his finger around her mouth, outlining it. She stops as if for breath, then starts again, accepting more of it. He thrusts a little. He feels himself come. Great, clenching bursts. She doesn’t move. She draws back slightly. Finally she relinquishes him altogether. A solemn moment somehow occurs. She spreads part of the sperm on his belly with her index finger while she watches the last, reflexive spasms. Then she goes to the sink. Dean hears the water running. Was it bad, he asks. She spits out some water and says something in French. He
doesn’t understand.

  “What?”

  She is silent.

  “What is it like?” he asks.

  She returns to the bed. She doesn’t know. Strange, is all she will say. Strong. It’s her first time.

  [19]

  ONE AFTERNOON VISITING THE source of the Marne, or perhaps it’s at Azay-le-Rideau, nothing is certain, they stroll in the mild sunlight and talk of the ways to love, the sweet variety.

  “What are they?” she wants to know.

  Dean begins casually, arranging as he does a bouquet of alternatives to conceal the one he really desires. He has said it a hundred times to himself, rehearsing, but still his heart skips. She listens impassively. They walk slowly, looking at the ground. They seem, from afar, like schoolmates discussing, perhaps, an exam.

  “It must hurt,” she says.

  “No,” he says. Then, very naturally, “if it does, we stop.

  “We can try it,” he adds.

  There is no reply, but she seems to agree. Yes. Sometime. He feels a moment of dizziness, as if he has run from a theft. He begins to explain it further, to fashion a derivation, to make it rare, common, whatever seems right. She understands only a little of what he is saying. Dean is talking deliriously. Finally he recognizes it and forces himself to stop. They have come to the car. He opens the door for her and then walks around to the driver’s side. He gets in himself, becomes busy with the keys. Why, she asks, has he waited so long to tell her about this. He cannot think of what to answer.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “All in good time.”

  “Comment?”

  She’s very matter of fact. He shakes his head–nothing. She looks at him, and he feels nervous. She has thrown him into despair.

  Then, in that great car that exists for me in dreams, like the Flying Dutchman, like Roland’s horn, that ghosts along the empty roads of France, its headlights faded, its elegance a little shabby; in that blue Delage with doors that open backwards, knees touching, deep in the seats they drive towards home. The villages are fading, the rivers turning dark. She undoes his clothing and brings forth his prick, erect, pale as a heron in the dusk, both of them looking ahead at the road like any couple. Her fingers form a ring which she gently slips onto it and then causes, cool, to descend. Her slim fingers. She turns to see what she is doing. Dean sits like a chauffeur. He is barely breathing.