Light Years

by James Salter

  In the woman who overwhelms us there must be nothing familiar. Faye was telling a story about Arnaud buying an airplane; it wouldn’t fly, she said, wasn’t that typical? It was parked near a pond. The girl on the couch had risen and was talking to someone. Viri tried not to stare. He was helpless at gatherings like this where the conversation was rapid and cynical, the encounters remote as at dancing class. He found refuge, usually, with someone grotesque, out of competition. He resisted handsome faces, he had learned not to look at them, but she was that unknown creature to whom he was dazedly vulnerable, slim, with full breasts as if she were burdened by them. Even her thumbs were bony.

  He could not keep sight of her. He could not, even for a moment, imagine her life. If she had turned to him, he would have been speechless or worse, saying inane things he instantly regretted, illustrating for her a certain kind of pathetic, ordinary man fit only to be what he was: a commuter, the head of a family. But that’s not what I am, he wanted to say, that’s not what I am at all. Anyway, she was gone. She was someone’s girl friend, obviously; a girl like that was never alone.

  “Where have you been?” Nedra asked.

  They drank; they ate dinner with plates on their knees. A waiter was serving champagne. Someone was playing the piano, barely audible over the din. Gerald deBeque was sitting with a Japanese girl. His wife, who had a splitting headache, began to tell people it was time to go to the film.

  They went down in a crowded elevator and walked three blocks to the theater in shattering cold, walked and half ran, stood in the entrance waiting for deBeque to arrive and instruct the manager to let them in. Several people had managed to get in anyway.

  “Come on, Viri,” Nedra complained, “tell him that we’re from the party.”

  “Everybody’s standing around waiting.”

  “Oh balls, the waiting.”

  She was talking to the manager herself when at last deBeque appeared. “Gerald, your film’s half over,” she said.

  “Let them in,” he called to the manager. “Everybody can go in.”

  Viri hung back. He touched deBeque on the elbow.

  “Gerald …” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “The girl standing by the sign, the sort of thin girl …”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s wearing a leather coat.”

  “Yes, with a belt.”

  “Who is she? Do you know?” he said casually.

  “She came with George Clutha. Her name is Kaya something … I forget.”

  “Kaya …”

  “He tells me she’s better than she looks.”

  They were calling him; they were already partway down the aisle.

  “She’s looking for a job,” deBeque remembered.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “Viri.” He would not let him go. “You can do better than that.”

  “It’s just that I thought I’d met her somewhere.”

  Arnaud was standing at their seats, beckoning to him. It was a small theater, once respectable. They kept their coats on.

  “I was trying to find out a little about the film,” Viri said. “It’s about a young woman’s sexual awakening.”

  “I might have known,” Nedra said.

  Arnaud yawned. “Gerald probably stars in it.”

  The lights stayed on for a long time. There began to be whistles and claps. Viri looked back, as if to see if anyone else were entering. He seemed calm and at ease. He was doomed as a dog that chases cars.

  “I have a feeling I’m going to go to sleep even before it begins,” Arnaud murmured.

  Finally it grew dark and the film started. The many shots of a young girl with her blouse open loitering along roads and through fields or working in the kitchen in this improbable attire were not enough to rivet the viewers.

  “This isn’t very interesting,” Nedra whispered.

  Arnaud was asleep. Viri sat silent, made unhappy by the vague connection between the heroine and the girl who sat hidden somewhere in the bored, coughing audience. If only out of the corner of his eye he could see her a row or two ahead. He wanted to stare at her unnoticed. There are faces that subjugate one, that are turned away from with a feeling like that of giving up breath itself. In the morning I will have forgotten it, he thought; in the morning everything is different, things are real.

  There was a crowd waiting on the street as they went out, people who had come for the first public screening at midnight. Arnaud had his coat turned up like an opera star or gambler.

  “The book was better,” he commented as he passed through them.

  “Oh, yeah? What book?”

  “Save your money,” he said.

  They came home after midnight, the long, flowing drive in darkness, snow on the edge of the road. The sitter had crumpled on the couch; she was soft-faced and bewildered as Viri took her home.

  They went to bed in the large, cool room, their clothes scattered, the window admitting just a blade of icy air.

  “Gerald deBeque is a dissolute man,” Nedra said. “And that movie was absolutely awful. There wasn’t anybody there I was interested in. Still, I had a good time. Isn’t that strange?”

  He did not answer. He was asleep.

  7

  IT WAS A DAY OF COLD SUNLIGHT, the day on which, six years before, his parents had died. He sat at his desk. His two draftsmen were at work, the flats of their tables before them. The room was silent, that was what set him thinking; it was suddenly calm. His father and mother were lying beneath the earth, brown as the relics of saints, their funeral clothes rotting. He was thirty-two, alone in the world. Dreams and work.

  Have I said he was a man of minor talent? He was born after one war and before another—in 1928, in fact, a year of crisis, a year on the path of the century. He was born in disregard of the times, like everyone; the hospital is there no longer, the doctor retired, gone south.

  He believed in greatness. He believed in it as if it were a virtue, as if it could be his own. He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered, that would rise one day to the light. He was clear-eyed and exact about the value of other people’s work. Toward his own he maintained a mild respect. In his faith, at the heart of his illusions, was the structure that would appear in photographs of his time, the famous building he had created and that nothing—no criticism, no envy, not even demolition—could alter.

  He spoke of it to no one, of course, except Nedra. It grew more and more invisible year by year. It vanished from his conversation, though not from his life. It would be there always, until the last, like a great ship rotting in the ways.

  He was well-liked. He would have preferred being hated. I am too mild, he said.

  “It’s your way,” Nedra told him, “you must use it.”

  He respected her ideas. Yes, he thought, I must go on. I must make one building, even if it’s small, that everyone will notice. Then a bigger one. I must ascend by steps.

  A perfect day begins in death, in the semblance of death, in deep surrender. The body is soft, the soul has gone forth, all strength, even breath. There is no power for good or evil, the luminous surface of another world is near, enfolding, the branches of the trees tremble outside. Morning, he wakes slowly, as if touched by sun across the legs. He is alone. There is the smell of coffee. The tan coat of his dog drinks the burning light.

  For the day to unfold it must in its blueness, its immensity hide the conspiracy he lived on, hide but enclose it, invisible, like stars in the daytime sky.

  He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming. He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge. The Sagrada Familia was as familiar to
him as a barn to a farmer, the “new towns” of France and England, cathedrals, voussoirs, cornices, quoins. He knew the life of Alberti, of Christopher Wren. He knew that Sullivan was the son of a dancing master, Breuer a doctor in Hungary. But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

  There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams … one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea. We had children, he thought; we can never be childless. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives …

  He was not himself somehow. The faint sound of the radio playing near the draftsmen’s tables was a strange distraction. He could not think, he was vague, adrift.

  Arnaud came by in the late afternoon. He sat with his coat belted. He looked like a vintner, a man who owns land.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was just thinking,” Viri murmured.

  “I had lunch today at the Toque.”

  “Was it good?”

  “I’m getting so fat,” Arnaud moaned. “Lunch is not a meal; it’s a profession. It takes your whole life. I had lunch with a very nice girl. You don’t know her.”

  “Who?”

  “She was so … everything she said was so unexpected. She went to school in a convent. The mattresses were made of straw.”

  “Is that unexpected?”

  “You know, there’s a kind of education, a kind of upbringing which is ruinous, and yet if you survive it, it’s the best thing in the world. It’s like having been a heroin addict or a thief. We try to save too many people, that’s the trouble. You save them, but what have you got?”

  “Tell me more of what she said.”

  “It wasn’t only what she said. She ate, that was the thing I liked about her, she ate as much as I did. We were like two peasants striking a bargain. Bread, fish, wine, everything. I began looking at her as something that was going to be served next. And she’s one of these girls who fill their clothes completely. She was—you know how they make those veal and ham pies in England?—she was en croûte. And the most interesting thing: she’s lame.”

  “Lame?”

  “She can’t walk very well. She limps. You don’t find that often. A lame woman … Louise de La Vallière was lame. Louise de Vilmorin, too. She had tuberculosis of the hip.”

  “Did she?”

  “I think so. Something else very nice is a woman with slightly crossed eyes.”

  “Crossed eyes?”

  “Just a little. And teeth. Bad teeth.”

  “You like all three?”

  “No, no, of course not,” Arnaud said. “Not in the same woman. You can’t have everything.”

  There was something hidden in his expression, the smile of someone who should not reveal it. “It’s terrible,” he sighed.

  “What?”

  “I can’t do this to Eve. I can’t be unfaithful for a …”

  “A bad leg.”

  “It just isn’t right,” Arnaud said. “I mean, she cooks meals for me. She has a wonderful sense of humor.”

  “And her teeth aren’t that good.”

  “They’re passable. They’re not really bad.”

  He shifted in the chair slightly, and found a new position. His clothing was somewhat tight on him.

  “It’s so easy to be distracted,” he said. “Eve is good for me.”

  “She loves you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you?”

  “Me?” He looked about as if for something to involve him. “I love everyone. It’s your daughters I love, Viri. I’m serious.”

  “Well, it’s reciprocated.”

  “I’m jealous of them. I’m jealous of your life. It’s a sensible life. It’s harmonious, that’s what I’m trying to say, and most important, it’s intimately connected with the future because of your children. I mean, I’m sure you realize it, but what moment that gives to each day.”

  “Why don’t you have children?”

  “Yes. Well, first, I would say, I need a wife. And unfortunately, you also have the wife I like. Nedra doesn’t have a sister, does she?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad. I’d like to marry her sister. It would really be an act of adultery.” There was no insult in his voice. “No, you’re very fortunate,” he said. “But you know that. Well, if anything should happen …”

  Viri smiled.

  “No, I mean it. If anything happened to you … your wife, your children, I would take care of them. I would continue your love.”

  “I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”

  “Well, you never know,” Arnaud said cheerfully.

  “Listen,” Viri said, “why don’t you come out this weekend and have dinner?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “You and Eve.”

  “I forgot something,” Arnaud said suddenly. He was searching in his pocket. “I have a present for Franca. I bought it at Azuma, it’s a frog ring.”

  “Why don’t you give it to her?”

  “No, take it with you. I want her to have it tonight.”

  “I’ll tell her it’s from you.”

  “Tell her it’s from Yassir Rashid, the king of the desert. Tell her if she is ever in danger to show it and she will be safe in the heart of the tribes.”

  “Listen, Yassir, what would you think of a little Scotch before you disappear?”

  “There are three things in the desert which cannot be hidden,” Arnaud said. “A camel, smoke and … you know something? We see too many movies.”

  “On the rocks?” Viri asked.

  “They kill the imagination. You’ve heard of blind storytellers. It’s in darkness that myths are born. The cinema can’t do that. Did I tell you about the girl I took to lunch? She was really okay. You know, in a sense it’s that way with her. She can never dance. That’s why the real grace, the real music is in her.”

  Evening had appeared. The light was gone. The street outside trembled with buses, with enormous, fleeing cars. Along the river was stretched an endless procession which Viri would join. He would move with it, his legs weary though he had not walked, his neck aching slightly, borne alone homeward, listening to the endlessly repeated news.

  8

  NEDRA ROSE LATE IN SUMMER AND winter, whenever she could. Her real self lay in bed until nine, stirred, stretched, breathed the new air. Long sleepers are usually nonconformists; they are pensive and somewhat withdrawn. Her hair was rich and clung to her. She bound it in various styles. She bathed it, she wore it damp. One thinks of the ten, the twenty gleaming years of her ascendance. She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.

  Her hair smells of flowers. The day is calm. The sun is still forming, the river is spilling light.

  She has no friends, she says. Rae and Larry. Eve. It’s very difficult for her to make friends. She has no time for friendship, she is quickly disappointed. It is the shopkeepers who love her, the people on the street who see her passing, wrapped in herself, staring in the windows of bookstores at the beautiful, heavy volumes of painters, the Italian edition of Vogue.

  “Tell her how much we love her and miss her,” the men who have the litt
le shop for soap and perfumes near Bonwit’s cry. “Where is she? We don’t see her now that she lives in the country. Tell her to come by,” they say. They love her height, her elegance, her hazel eyes.

  She is interested in certain people. She admires certain lives. She is subtle, penetrating and sometimes mischievous, strongly inclined to love and not overdelicate in the ways that must be taken. All of this is written in her dream book. Of course she does not believe it, but it amuses her and parts of the book are very true. Eve, for instance, is exactly as described. It’s also quite close to Viri.

  One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love. Soon after they were married, perhaps an hour after, even Viri longed for this. His possession of her became sanctified; at the same time something in her changed. She became his closest relative. She committed herself to his interests and embarked on her own. The desperate, unbearable affection vanished, and in its place was a young woman of twenty condemned to live with him. He could not define it. She had escaped. Perhaps it was more; the mistake she knew she would have to make was made at last. Her face radiated knowledge. A colorless vein like a scar ran vertically down the center of her forehead. She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.

  In the summer they went to Amagansett. Wooden houses. Blue, blue days. Summer is the noontime of devoted families. It is the hour of silence when the only sound is sea birds. The shutters are closed, the voices quiet. Occasionally the ring of a fork.

  Pure, empty days. The sea is silver, rough as bark. Hadji has dug a hollow in which he lies, eyes narrowed, bits of sand stuck to his mouth. He always faces the sea. Franca has a black tank suit. Her limbs are shining and strong. She is afraid of the waves. Danny is more courageous. She goes out in the surf with her father; they scream and ride on their bellies. Franca joins them. The dog is barking on the shore.

  That whistle of the sea in the long afternoon, the great beds of brown foam, of kelp brought up by the storms, the mussels, the whitened boards. To the west it is steaming, a long, brilliant stretch as if in rain. In the dunes Franca has found the dry husk of a beetle. She brings it, quivering in her hand, to Viri. It has a kind of single horn.