by James Salter
In the morning light enters through the thin curtains. She has hold of his prick. She kisses it sweetly to start the day. It is hers now, she says.
[31]
DAYS OF MARRIAGE. They live in connubial bliss above the sea. The room is small, but there is a balcony and beneath it the water breaking softly. The hotel is more than they can afford.
Morning. Her hair streamed across the pillow, the covers drawn up to her chin. Outside, the cries of seabirds float in the still air. Mon mari, she calls him. He smiles.
In the dining room they sit near a family with two sons. The mother is strict with them–they are fifteen years old, sixteen, it’s hard to say. They’re allowed a little wine, that’s all. Most of the time they sit stiffly while the parents talk. She would like a son, Anne-Marie says. The room is filled with the sound of forks, the smell of bread. A son.
Dean is glancing at the family.
“What will his name be?” she says.
“I don’t know. What?”
She wants him to guess.
“Jean-Pierre.”
“No.”
“Maurice? Robert? Not Phillipe?”
“No.”
“I give up.”
“Dmitri,” she says.
He makes a gesture with his hands.
“You faked me out,” he says.
“What?”
“You fooled me.”
“He will be educated in America until he is eighteen,” she says. “Your father was great [she will tell him], but sometimes a little boring.”
“A little boring?”
“Oui.”
“You mean me?”
She nods.
“It’s my son?”
Her reply is soft,
“Of course.”
The young boys are watching them, their uncertain glances settling for a moment and then bolting away. Anne-Marie is clever, she can feel their eyes. She knows exactly when to look up and send them scurrying.
Days of marriage by the sea. They walk far out on the rocks, the hotels, the curve of beach passing from view as they turn the point. They come to a large, flat block around which the sea boils, sucking and running, welling up in the faults. She removes the top of her suit and lies down, first on her stomach, twenty minutes later on her back. The sun’s silence seems to overcome the noise of water. Dean’s skin is a kind that turns dark quickly. His lips crack a little, but his eyes are white, his teeth. His face takes on a hardwood brilliance. His limbs seem stronger. Beneath his trunks is a white like fresh bandages. His buttocks are like the inside of an apple.
“You are lovely,” she says.
They are making love afterwards, burned a little, their flesh tasting of salt. The room seems still, like a school after hours. On the bidet, she farts, a tiny, delicious sound. She is embarrassed.
“Pardon,” she says.
Silence. Dean’s eyes are closed. He says nothing. She wonders if he has fallen asleep. She glances around the partition. Dean lies very still, but he cannot prevent a smile. She gets in bed again and covers up. She feels a little sick, she tells him. Her period is coming.
“Good,” he says.
They sit through elaborate meals, soup, fish, meat, dessert, fruit, wine, in the long room, always in daylight, with its gallery of windows beyond which the sea lies silent, the many tables. At night they sleep like birds in a nest. Rain beats against the windows. Dean gets up to close them and finds nothing–it’s only the sea.
At the casino there’s dancing and second-rate films. They haven’t the money to gamble. Anyway, she’s too young. It’s on her identity papers. They sit in the empty salon of the hotel. In the evening darkness, it’s like a great, abandoned liner. Anne-Marie takes all the small cards out of the deck. She’s going to teach him a game. He tries to listen to the explanation. His face feels tight, like dried paper. His eyes move distractedly from one thing to another. He yawns. He can see the wide, carpeted stairway and the people slowly ascending. The family comes in, from the cinema probably, and goes up, the boys looking dejected, absolutely spiritless. The light is dim. After a while his eyes begin to ache from staring at the numbers on the cards. The symbols are ugly. The black of the spades seems to be running. The hearts have turned blue. With the sad insistence of a tent flapping, the edge of the sea curls on the shore, curls and falls. As he listens, the sound seems to swell, to become broader, to overwhelm everything.
Along the dim corridor they walk, the floor groaning under their feet. There is no music from the closed doors, no voices. The sheets are damp. Nights of marriage. Dean is worried about the salt air ruining the chrome of the car. He should have coated it with something. There’s no garage–it’s parked behind the hotel, covered with moisture. In the morning the sun dries it off.
They stay six days, talking to no one, walking the steep, piney roads to the upper town, passing large, family villas, dark and silent, arranged on the hillside to face the sea. The grounds of these houses are beautiful, hidden by dense trees.
They are like invalids. Their hours are long and uneventful. They eat three times a day. In the mornings, on the way to the W.C. the hall is lined with breakfast trays, napkins soiled, rolls broken, abandoned outside the doors. The patients have already gone out, walking slowly in the sunlight. Years of marriage. After breakfast it is quite a long time until lunch, and after lunch, the whole afternoon… On the beach in front of the hotel the cries of children rise shrill as birds’. Anne-Marie walks naked around the room. Her bare feet make no noise. Her tampon has a bit of white string which hangs, curled a little, between her legs. Her breasts are pale, but not white. It is only her loins which are emblazoned so brilliantly it seems like a garment.
In the early morning, elated just to be putting their things in the car again–Dean lowers the top, the interior brims with sunlight–they leave.
[32]
AT NIGHT THEY COME to a strange, démodé town, like a great sanitarium: Bagnoles. France is dotted with aging spas, their days of elegance long past, the damp hotels no longer filled, the voices vanished, the ceremonies of an idle life. They enter on curving roads, past the silent lake. The buildings all seem empty. It’s like a great estate, the master of which has disappeared. Still, it’s kept open, it continues an existence exactly as if he were there. It’s like an old letter, a suite in which an heiress has died.
Graceful as a bird they circle in the dusk, passing the worn façades: the Gayot, Terrasse, Castel, Bois Joli. The shops are closed. The trees have turned black. Not a soul on the dim streets, not a sound except that of the car. The casino is bleak and forbidding, its green chairs abandoned, its curtains drawn. The silence of woods at evening, of still waters, is everywhere. After the second rime around, Dean stops.
“It’s depressing,” he says. He reaches for the book. “We can go on to Alençon. How big is that?”
She looks it up.
“Vingt-sept mille.”
“How about hotels?”
“There’s not much.”
“Not a single decent one?”
“There’s a hospital for the insane.”
“Let me see.”
He tries to read. The light is almost gone.
“Well, we could go on to Paris,” he says. “It’s about three hours.”
She shrugs.
“Comme tu veux,” she says.
He begins to turn the pages.
“But can we eat here?” she says.
“Hm?” He’s still reading. “All right. We’ll decide afterwards.”
It’s a long meal. There’s only one waiter in the restaurant. He’s like a veteran of Fort Douaumont. For him, everything ended long ago. He disappears into the kitchen for ten minutes and then comes out with the bread. There’s a door that opens to the street and another into the hotel. In the end this is the one they take. It’s too late to go on. The lobby is dark. The keys, hung on a varnished honeycomb of wood, are almost all in place. They walk up carpeted stairs–there is
no sound–to what can only be called a chamber. Walls of a cream that has turned to ocher, heavy wine drapes. In the ceiling fixture the bulbs are clear glass. It is threatening, this room. The air is stale.
Dean opens the balcony doors. Silence. Across the black lake the casino is alight now, the one ornament in a darkness hung like curtains. No one seems to go in or out. The placards announce films, concerts, to the empty street.
They walk around for a while. There is the scent of a killing boredom in the air. One can recognize it, like mould. The prospect of a few hours is enough to seem terrifying. They buy tickets for the movie. The cashier detaches them from a large roll. There are a few people already inside–that’s something, at least. They are saved. They sit quietly, waiting for the lights to dim. Nobody even whispers. Finally it begins. The screen becomes luminous. Music, voices, images born on the shifting pales of light.
On the way back to the hotel they discover that a few shops have opened late, and they pause at the window of an antiquaire. It’s like a museum. Not a single client. Among the gilded pieces they suddenly see the white of a face, the owner, a woman, pale as a mourner.
It is only after the door to the room closes and he turns the key that Dean feels anything other than death. Even so, there is something artificial and dense about the furnishings, the inadequate light. The doors to the balcony have been shut. Through the glass he can see that a flexible, wooden blind has been drawn completely down. The covers of the bed have been folded back to reveal a clinical white. She is talking about the film. He hears nothing. He merely watches, intrigued by the smallest movement she makes, fascinated by the shape of her calf.
She stands naked, her legs together, brushing her teeth before the sink. Dean is watching her carefully. From where he sits, he reaches out and touches her. There is no authority in the gesture. It is an act of reassurance–he is fixing reality. She puts the toothbrush down. She doesn’t like to look closely at her teeth. She dries the corners of her mouth with the towel and then applies some cream. Her eyes meet his for a moment in the mirror. She is not certain what he is thinking or what he is about to do. But he’s not prepared to talk, that’s obvious to her.
She lies in bed with her eyes open, waiting. Dean undresses. He moves about the room, glancing at her from time to time. Finally he smiles. She does not return it. She has prepared herself for an obedience that cannot be so easily released. Her face is solemn, almost rebellious. He opens the balcony doors but doesn’t raise the blind. He turns out the light. In the bed she moves to his side immediately, as if released by the darkness. Her hands, those thin hands, swim down his body. Dean lies motionless. His silence, his stillness please her. They define her existence. She must conquer them. Of course, it is only a game. He is merely waiting, adorned in a sort of cruelty which excites her and which she must beg him, without speaking a word, to forget. His heart is beating faster. He feels his prick grow an inch or more beneath her touch. The vaseline is chilly as she applies it with great care. Dean is breathing like a runner before a race. He is thinking of the waiters in the casino, the audience at the cinema, the dark hotels as she lies on her stomach and with the ease of sitting down at a well-laid table, but no more than that, he introduces himself. They lie on their sides. He tries not to move. There are only the little, invisible twitches, like a nibbling of fish. In the midst of them he falls asleep. Then she does, too, and like this, together, they pass the night. The final night of the journey.
[33]
THEY ARRIVE HOME ON Sunday evening, weary from traffic. The roads are crowded. For half an hour Dean has been dogging the pale of his headlights which now, in the narrow streets, begin to show bright. It’s like driving under water. A green twilight gleams far above. He turns the last corner. The great, battered truck of the Corsicans is parked among the strewn wrappings, the marvelous rotting odors. As he pulls in, the headlights reflect on the glass of the darkened store. He switches them off, then the motor. They sit for a moment. A great joy, a sense of completion comes over him. They gather all her things, and he carries them upstairs. He’s anxious to leave her. He’s tired of having to be with her all the time.
I find him lying on the bed in blue canvas shoes. His hands are folded behind his head. The radio is playing. It feels good to be back, he tells me. It really does.
He looks black as an Egyptian. When he smiles his teeth seem to leap out of his sunburned face. We swim in a faint aroma, a bouquet of music as he talks.
“Well, where did you go?”
“Everywhere,” he says. “Angers. Orléans. Perros-Guirec. We really drove.”
“Was it nice?”
“It’s a beautiful country,” he says quietly. He begins to tell me about it, the sea with its rocks, the old hotel. He describes the Loire, the haunted evening in Bagnoles. He is talking almost compulsively. All the details come forth, descriptions, feelings, smells. He falls silent, gathers things, goes on. Somehow I have the impression that he is laying it all before me, the essence of this glorious life he has spent in France. He is setting the past in order. There are certain things which should be confessed, and he knows I am interested. Nothing he says is exceptional, but I recognize the events. I understand everything we are not saying.
“How’s Anne-Marie?”
“She’s as tan as I am. You ought to see her,” he says. “She looks great.”
“You’re the color of teak.”
“We had beautiful weather,” he says. “Almost every day. And we ate. We sat at the table like an old French couple, you know, just eating. And we made love every night. But the sun, you really can’t believe what good sun we had.”
He pulls his shirt out to show me the line. He grins. He is invincible. It’s like a game of chess in which his pieces continually overpower me, but we have long ceased to contest.
He begins to wander around the room while he talks. His clothing is scattered everywhere. He goes into the bathroom and discovers some lotion which he slowly rubs into his face, especially around his mouth. He lies down again. That lean face, dark as a farm boy’s. It has an edge to it. The bones seem able to cut right through me. He gets up again and begins to look through his suitcase. There’s an apple among his clothes. He offers me half.
“No, thanks. Didn’t you eat?”
“No. Just lunch.”
He lies supine, the pillow doubled beneath his neck. I listen to the moist explosion of his teeth in the hard flesh.
“I’m too tired to eat,” he says.
“Come on. I haven’t had anything.”
“I’m really not hungry,” he says.
He picks around the core, getting the last flecks with little incisions of his teeth. When he finishes, he lays it on a magazine. He stares at the ceiling.
“I may be leaving,” he says.
An enormous silence which I am finally obliged to break.
“Oh, really?”
“I think so.”
“Where will you be going?”
“America,” he says. “Home.”
“I see. Alone?”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “I mean, I’m coming back.”
“I see.”
I can’t think of what to say.
“Well…” I begin.
“You know, I just have to go home for a while. I don’t have any money. I’ve been hanging on ever since last fall, and I can’t any more. You get to the point where you just can’t. So I have to go back and…” he sighs, “…talk to my father. Well, more than that. I have to organize myself a little. I’ve even been thinking about going back to school.”
“Back to Yale?”
“Oh, I couldn’t get back in. Some smaller college. NYU maybe.”
“Smaller?”
“Well, I didn’t mean it that way,” he says. “I really haven’t thought about where.”
“No.”
Then, as if commenting, he allows himself the briefest of laughs.
“The only thing is,” he says, “uh, I’m a
little short of money.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t have quite enough for the ticket.” He pauses. “So, I was wondering…”
“How much would it be?” I ask.
“I’d leave you the car, you know, if anything happened …”
“The car? But it’s not your car,”
“Yes, it is,” he says.
“I thought it belonged to some friend.”
“No, no, he gave it to me. I can even get a letter from him if I have to.”
I know it’s not true. He’s simply out of money, like a gambler, and he must be supplied. I hurriedly try to think of a phrase to help me refuse him, but I can’t. If I were to deny him … anyway, it wouldn’t make that much difference. He would go on. Besides, I cannot make such a decision. He isn’t subject to judgments of mine–and I have the money.
“I need about three hundred dollars,” he says.
“Three hundred.”
“Can you let me have that much? I mean, against the Delage, of course.”
“Well… Yes, I guess so.”
“Oh,” he says, his head falls back, “listen, you’re a great guy.”
Yes, and I find myself believing it even though I am helping prepare his escape. The act is somehow criminal. It is something I will be ashamed of later. I am only exchanging his disgust for my own.
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I honestly don’t. Not long. Maybe a month or so, I’m not sure.”
“Well, if you really go back to school…”
“That’s right, it would be much longer. Of course, that’s only a possibility.”
“…you wouldn’t be back.”
“Oh, don’t worry. If that happens, I’ll send you the money. I mean, I can get it easily enough. Even if I had to take it out of tuition or something. It wouldn’t make any difference.”