by James Salter
“I like your profil,” she says. “How do you say that?”
“Profile.” His voice seems lost.
“I like your profile. No, I love your profile. Like is nothing.”
She is in a good mood. She is very playful. As they enter her building she becomes the secretary. They are going to dictate some letters. Oh, yes? She lives alone, she admits, turning on the stairs. Is that so, the boss says. Oui. In the room they undress independently, like Russians sharing a train compartment. Then they turn face to face.
“Ah,” she murmurs.
“What?”
“It’s a big machine à écrire.”
She is so wet by the time he has the pillows under her gleaming stomach that he goes right into her in one long, delicious move. They begin slowly. When he is close to coming he pulls his prick out and lets it cool. Then he starts again, guiding it with one hand, feeding it in like line. She begins to roll her hips, to cry out. It’s like ministering to a lunatic. Finally he takes it out again. As he waits, tranquil, deliberate, his eye keeps falling on lubricants–her face cream, bottles in the armoire. They distract him. Their presence seems frightening, like evidence. They begin once more and this time do not stop until she cries out and he feels himself come in long, trembling runs, the head of his prick touching bone, it seems. They lie exhausted, side by side, as if just having beached a great boat.
“It was the best ever,” she says finally. “The best.”
He is staring upwards in the dark.
“Phillip?”
“Yes,” he says.
“What a machine, eh?” she says. “Was it always so good?”
“I don’t think so.”
She touches him. He is still quite large.
“I think it’s bigger,” she says.
“A little, perhaps.”
“We must type more letters,” she says.
The night is not cold. It is quiet, piercingly clear. Across the dark roofs, crowded close, the spires of town rise, illuminated, steeped in terrestrial light.
[20]
THESE SLOW DAYS WITH their misty beginnings, the fields all cool and quiet, the great viaduct still. Everything is white, everything empty, everything except the earth itself which seems to have awakened. There is an odor in the air that means France still lives. As the morning continues, the mist disappears. Slowly now, the shape of things is revealed. Roofs emerge. The tops of trees. Finally the sun. I am making an extraordinary record of this town. I am discovering it, bringing it to light. There are photographs of the house alone, nothing but that, the surfaces of furniture, the broad doors, reflections in mirrors, that are the most compelling I have ever made. It almost seems the work of a sick man, work of great patience and simplicity. It has a radiance, a tubercular calm. The children playing by the fountains will become old men, but nothing of this will have changed. There are periods when I am certain of that. My work begins to seem huge. I will be able to enclose myself in it, to have people introduce me.
Near the edge of town there are sheep, a large flock, and two black dogs, lean and endlessly circling, that move it along. They seem to be carving the flock. They curve in behind and mould it. I never hear them bark, but the bleats carry faintly across the still air. Near the front, one old ram limps along. The sun is warm now. The sheep move in a current, like a stream–the edges cling, the center continually flows. The pattern is always changing. Segments seem to break away and vanish farther on. Eddies appear. The sheep hesitate and clog. Some lambs have already been born, and they hurry along behind their mothers. Then, quite mysteriously, the entire flock stops. Slowly it begins to spread. The animals graze outwards. The dogs linger. It’s at this moment I see the shepherd in a dark, tattered coat. He walks along quietly, an old man who has watched over them since daylight when the mist hid them all. Probably he has slept in his clothes. The lambs look very young. They have long legs. They hurry to keep up with the fat, indifferent ewes.
It’s still too early in the year for Claude to go down to the river and swim before work. She always goes on her bicycle. She has no car. Perhaps when she is married again…because I have heard she is about to become engaged to a student from Bourges. He’s younger than she is. Some say twenty-two. I visualize him sitting between the voluptuous mother and that wise, level-eyed child. Perhaps he doesn’t recognize the dangers. Or maybe they have their own appeal for him. In any case, it’s generally agreed Madame Picquet is very fortunate to have this suitor. A little shrug after that. It’s quite plain how it was done.
I see things now in a different light. In a way, I’m quite relieved to hear about it. There’s a good reason why I’ve never been able to fulfill my longings–she’s been in love with someone else the whole time. He came to visit practically every weekend. So really, I would have been unsuccessful anyway. It’s comforting to realize that. And a student, well, one doesn’t mind envying a student. It’s much better than a jeweler, say, or the owner of a bar. Eventually I discover his name: Gerard.
These calm mornings. Anne-Marie crossing the Place du Carrouge. It’s very small. There’s a grocery, a little café, a fish store. She walks to work, her heels echoing on the pavement like shot, still a bit of warmth from the bed clinging to her, her flesh warm still and unwary, her mouth sullen. Dean is still asleep. His clothes are strewn about. The shutters are closed. He never dreams. He’s like a dead musician, like a spent runner. He hasn’t the strength to dream, or rather, his dreams take place while he is awake and they are marvelous for at least one quality: he has the power to prolong them.
Duration is everything. One knows that instinctively. It hangs over the two of them like an unpronounced sentence. It lies in their bed. All of Anne-Marie’s joy proceeds from the hope that they are only beginning, that before them is marriage and farewell to Autun, while like the negative from which her dreams are printed, he perceives the opposite. For Dean, every hour is piercing because it is closer to the end. I’m not sure he is conscious of it. Can he really sense his own destiny? Perhaps–I cannot tell.
Tuesday night. A sandwich at the Foy. Dean’s throat is sore, and she has a little cough. She’s tired. It’s been a difficult day, and she wants to go to bed early.
“Good,” he agrees.
“But not alone.”
“I’m tired, too.”
“No.”
“Come on,” he says. “We’ll see.”
“No!” she insists.
They walk through the long, melancholy passage off rue de la Terrasse. On the ground floor are little shops, apartments above. There’s a glass roof with laundry hanging beneath it. In daylight one can see the sky. It’s like a ruined palazzo. Their shoes scuff on the tiles. Through the far end, the trees of the place can be seen.
He is chilly and feels weak. He lies in the bed hugging himself and trying to get warm as he watches her undress. Her small navel appears, a bead of a navel and a belly flat and smacking as a flounder. She glances at herself in the mirror, over her shoulder. She likes her behind. It’s not shaped like a drop of oil, she says, which one sees all the time, but rather like two pommes. Dean is indifferent.
“I don’t have anything,” he warns as she slips in beside him.
“You don’t need it.”
“It’s safe?”
“Oui,” she says. “Huit jours avant, huit jours après.”
He is silent. The formula is from her mother. He counts to himself.
“It’s over eight days.”
“No.”
“Yes, it is,” he says.
“No.”
Mechanical love. Senseless love. She is dry, and that makes it worse. Afterwards she tells him she knew exactly how it would be. First he says that he doesn’t feel well. Dean listens unhappily. Then, she says, he suggests they go home, but not together. Finally he wants to know whether it’s safe or not.
“I know you perfectly,” she says.
“Do you?”
“Perfectly. Yes.”
&
nbsp; He doesn’t answer. He recognizes himself.
“Poor Phillip, I want to hurt you.”
“You’re not hurting me,” he says.
“Yes. I want to.”
He is watching her in the dark.
“I want you to remember,” she says.
He says nothing.
“Could you ever imagine me not?”
“Pardon?”
“Do you think I won’t?”
She shrugs.
There is an interlude. They lie near each other like two sick children, exhausted. The last light has gone. After a while she sits up and puts on her panties. Then she unlocks the door. The light from the hall shows her clearly.
“Hey,” Dean says, “what are you doing? You can’t go like that.”
“Nobody is here,” she says.
“Put something on.”
She looks down at herself for a moment.
“There are people next door,” he says.
“Nobody sees.”
She slips out as she is, barefoot, her breasts bare.
“Come here!” he whispers. “Put something on!”
He can hear her enter the malodorous little compartment at the end of the hallway and afterwards, faintly, her cough. When she comes back, she slips off her panties again before getting into bed.
“I’m cold,” she says.
Her feet are dirty, he thinks.
“Is it true the women in the United States have something to keep them safe all month long?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“They don’t have it in France,” she says. She is caressing him.
“They have a number of things.”
“I love it when it’s soft and small,” she says. She feels his thighs. “I love your body.”
Her hand returns to his prick which is swelling with blood.
“Allo,” she says.
Far off the trains are switching and being assembled. The cars come together with great, metal claps.
“I believe I know him better than you do,” she says.
“Yes?”
“I have felt him more.”
“Have you ever thought of going to America?” Dean asks. He is working his prick into her slowly.
Silence.
“Annie…”
“Yes.”
“Have you?”
“Yes,” she admits. “Sometimes…”
They begin an Olympian act as the freights slam together in the distance. She leaves herself completely. She moves and cries out like a woman of forty with her lover for the last time. Afterwards she lies strewn across him.
“You are bread and salt,” he tells her.
“Oh, Phillip,” she says. They are lost in the darkness.
“Oui…”
She does not continue. Finally, in a soft voice,
“You are good for me.”
The last bells are sounding. The pigeons sleep. In a moonlight like milk, beneath the worn façades, the Delage is parked close to a few Renaults and an old, boxlike Citroen. Yes, Dean thinks, America. They will live in a studio downtown with a small garden, a terrace perhaps, and a few good friends.
[21]
PALE END OF DAY and the station empty. In the cafés the lights are not yet on. Dean sits outside at one of the iron tables. Along the tree-lined street which comes down from the square, small, almost alone, Anne-Marie descends. She turns the corner. One can almost hear her footsteps. The pigeons hurry away from her, uncertain where to go, cross back, flutter and finally burst upwards on creaking wings. When they are gone the quiet returns, the quiet of a hospital.
It is curious how I have begun to discern patterns, motifs that somehow had no significance for me at the time. As I view once more the many fragments of this encounter, as I touch them, turn them around, I find myself subject to sudden, illuminated moments. Meeting at the station, for instance. I had never really considered that. But then I remember that Dean, having left college the first time, spent six months in travel, driving to Mexico and then on to California, the legendary coast. And I think of the very symbol of his existence which continually appears and reappears to me, emerging from behind the trees in the dusk, its lights floating out, its dark shape fleeing along the road, that great, spectral car which haunts the villages, its tires worn, the chrome on its wheels beginning to speckle with rust. Journeys and intimations of journeys–I see now that he has always kept himself close to the life that flows, is transient, borne away. And I see his whole appearance differently. He is joined to the brevity of things. He has apprehended at least one great law.
She comes along the sidewalk to join him, a cheap, metallic blouse over her slacks. She looks like a tramp. Dean adores her. She says something as she sits down, a vanished word, and he nods. And now the waiter appears in a soiled, white coat.
Around the Champ de Mars a green Oldsmobile is turning, black soldiers inside. They are wearing sunglasses. My blood jumps. I can see them as they go by, very slowly, not talking, taking it all in. They are going to recognize me, suddenly I’m certain of it. I can’t look at them. The negro lover who has been seeking her for months has finally arrived. The car is going to stop across the street from the café and three men step out, lazily slamming the doors. The fourth remains in the back seat. My mind is racing. Is it him? Is he the one to whom she will be delivered? Dean is pushing someone. There’s a scuffle among the chairs.
Of course, it never happens. I have invented it all, their vengeance, their slow, deliberate walk. Instead, they drive slowly around the square, turning, turning. I become calm as I see them stop near the direction signs, read, and then head off on the road to Dijon.
The darkness has come down, and they walk in its fragrance. They reach her street. In the fruit store the lights are still on. The Corsicans are drinking. They’re in their undershirts, passing a bottle of wine back and forth as they sit half-buried among the crates. The floor is covered with newspapers. One can hear them laughing. A cat slips out the door.
“They’re very nice,” Anne-Marie says. “I pass them on the stairs. They always stand aside.”
They’re all sons, dark, the short hair curling out of their shirts.
“I find them good-looking,” she says.
She opens the door to her room. The key rattles. Dean is nervous. In his clothing he conceals, like an assassin, a small tube of lubricant–he would be frightened to have it seen. Still, it exists, cool as a surgical instrument. His answers are vague.
“I love the smell of the fruit,” she says.
She has opened the shutters. The room is darker than the night outside. Dean stands close behind her. She is quite naked. Air as cool as water washes over them.
“Can you smell it?” she asks.
“Yes.”
They lie in bed. The minutes seem somehow suspended. He feels she is waiting. He is afraid to recognize the moment.
“Do you want it that way?” he says. His voice sounds unfinished.
She was expecting it. She hesitates.
“Ne me fait pas mal.”
She watches in silence as he lays a thin coating on his prick. The strength seems to have left her. She behaves as if she has been condemned. He lowers himself carefully onto her back. He is determined to perform the most gentle act, but he doesn’t know exactly where to enter. He tries to find it.
“Plus haut,” she whispers.
His arms are trembling. Suddenly he feels her flesh give way and then, deliciously, the muscle close about him. He tries not to press against anything, to go in straight. She is breathing quickly, and as he withdraws on the first stroke he can feel her jerking with pleasure. It’s the short movements she likes. She thrusts herself against him. Moans escape her. Dean comes–it’s like a hemorrhage–and afterwards she clasps him tightly. He can feel faint annular twitches. He lies perfectly still until these final agonies, these quenching hugs which draw the last semen from him, subside. Then he withdraws. There is a tight, failing embrace of the he
ad, then that, too, is gone. They have parted.
“Did you like it?” he asks.
“Beaucoup.”
[22]
A FEAST OF LOVE is beginning. Everything that has gone before is only a sort of introduction. Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A Satanic happiness follows. They are off to Besançon on the weekend, filled with feathers, floating in pure joy. The spring road flies beneath them. She likes to talk about it. Tell me what you want, she says. I want to please you.
“I like it when you do,” he says.
“No,” she insists, “tell me.”
They walk in the park, submerged in a coolness like old walls. The benches are empty. They are alone. At this hour of evening the sun is gone. The sky, as if summoning itself for the last time, is a piercing, a pale blue, so clear it frightens. It seems that every sound has fled.
They walk without speaking, hip against hip. He feels an utter, a complete happiness. The dark fragrance of the trees washes down on them. Their shoes are dusty. The last light fails.
In the dining room they sit across the table from each other. The hotel is spacious and in need of small repairs. Dean is filled with a sense of certainty. It’s all familiar. He feels he has been here many times before. This is a returning. If he asks her to go upstairs after the soup, she will put her napkin on the table without hesitation. His eyes examine her face. She smiles.
The owners of the hotel, she points out, are probably pieds-noirs, Algerians. Dean looks around. The two young men behind the cashier’s desk are very dark. Maybe juifs, she adds.
“They don’t look it.”
“You can tell,” she says.
In the room she seems thoughtful. She takes her things off slowly.
“How is it that you are not married?” she asks.
Dean is protean. He is aware of his muscles, his teeth. Life seems to have saturated him, and yet he feels quite calm.