by James Salter
Arnaud’s eyes were open. They were uninquisitive, calm, a signal that he was returning slowly. His face was soft, like a child’s. “For some reason, I am being urged to sleep,” he murmured. “Your house is so warm and good.”
“You may do anything you like,” Nedra said. “You should have anything you want.”
There was a silence. “You told me that once before,” he decided.
“And I’ve always practiced it.”
“Anything I want … you’ve practiced that?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m waking up,” he said.
He had not moved, but his eyes were alert. He was bearlike in his languor. One saw his innocence—that is to say, the innocence of great actors—as he came awake. “You’ve stopped playing, Kate,” he said.
She began again. She struck a few mournful chords, they fell slowly from her narrow fingers. In her thin girl’s voice, her head down, she began to sing. She sang on and on. She knew endless words, they were her true eloquence, the poems she believed in. The sheets, they were old, and the blankets were thin …
“My first boyfriend used to sing that,” Nedra said. “He took me for a weekend to his family’s summer house. It was after the season, they were all gone.”
“Who was that?” Viri said.
“He was older than I was,” she said. “He was twenty-five.”
“Who?”
“I had my first avocado there. I ate it, pit and all,” she said.
Three
1
AT SIXTEEN, FRANCA CHANGED. She began to fulfill her promise. As if in a day, the way leaves appear, she suddenly had the power of self-possession. She woke with it one morning, it was bestowed upon her. Her breasts were new, her feet a little large. Her face was calm and unfathomable.
They were close, mother and daughter. Nedra treated her like a woman. They talked a great deal.
The world was changing, Nedra told her. “I don’t mean changes in fashion,” she said. “Those aren’t really changes. I mean changes in the way one can live.”
“For instance.”
“I don’t think I know. You’ll feel it. You’ll understand far more than I do. The truth is, I’m rather ignorant, but I am able to feel what’s in the ground.”
There is warmth in families but not often companionship. She loved talking to Franca, and about her as well. She felt that this was the woman that she herself had become, in the sense that the present represents the past. She wanted to discover life through her, to savor it for the second time.
There was a party at Dana’s one evening during the holidays. Dana, whose face already had a curious dead expression, one almost of resentment, but after all, what can you expect, as Nedra said, the father a drunkard, the mother a fool. She was reading a book on Kandinsky that night, heavy, beautiful, the paper smooth. She had seen his exhibition at the Guggenheim, for the moment she was dazzled by him. In the silence of the evening, in that hour when all has been done, she opened it at last. He had come to painting late, she read; he was thirty-two at the time.
She called Eve. “I love this book,” she said.
“I thought it looked good.”
“I’ve just started reading it,” Nedra said. “At the beginning of the first war he was living in Munich, and he went back to Russia. He left behind the woman—she was a painter, too—that he’d been living with for ten years. He saw her again just once—imagine this—at an exhibition in 1927.”
The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates.
Franca came home at eleven. From the instant the door closed, she sensed something wrong. “What is it?” she asked.
“What is what?”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It was terrible.”
“How?”
Her daughter was suddenly crying.
“Franca, what is it?”
“Look at me,” she wept. She was wearing a suit with a little fur trim at the collar and hem of the skirt. “I look like some kind of doll you buy in a souvenir shop.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I was the first one to leave,” she said in desperation. “Everyone said, ‘Where are you going?’ ”
“You didn’t have to come home this early.”
“Yes, I did.”
Nedra was frightened. “What happened, was it the wrong kind of party?” she said.
“It was absolutely the right kind. I was wrong.”
“What was everyone else wearing?”
“You always insist on my being different,” Franca burst out. “I always wear different clothes, I can’t go here or I can’t go there. I don’t want any more of that. I want to be like everyone else!” The tears were streaming down her face. “I don’t want to be like you.”
In one stroke she had established her own world.
Nedra said nothing. She was stunned. It was the beginning, she suddenly knew, of something she had thought would never happen. She went to bed troubled, torn by the urge to go to her daughter’s room, and afraid, at the same time, of what would be said.
The next day it was all forgotten. Franca worked in the greenhouse. She painted. There was music in her room. Hadji lay on her bed, she was truly happy. It had passed.
* * *
A letter arrived from Robert Chaptelle, whose life had drifted downstream. It was difficult to remember him, his nervousness, his expensive tastes and impulses so like her own. He said nothing about the theater; it was all about some man who could save Europe.
… he is about five feet ten inches tall. He has the Kennedy appeal. His voice makes you tremble. It is an unforgettable voice. I have had the privilege of meeting him, hours in his company are minutes. His eyes! Finally I understand the nature of politics.
Celatient du prodige.
She read it only hurriedly. He would write again soon, he said in this final letter. He was traveling for his health, vanished into the remote towns of France from the insurance agency where for a time he had tried to work. Gone, passed into silence.
She thought more than once of the woman Kandinsky had left behind. There are stories that win by their brevity. She had written the name on her calendar, above where the pages are turned: Gabriele Munter.
2
HE EARNED MONEY, HE WAS LIKED by his clients, he could draw beautifully. Ruskin said a true architect must first be a sculptor or painter. He was nearly that, and so absent-minded, so absorbed in work, that he once poured birdseed into his tea by mistake. He was talkative, witty; his handwriting was like print.
They went to dinner with Michael Warner and his friend. Nedra was their favorite, they adored her.
“Your daughter is so beautiful.”
“I like her,” Nedra admitted. “I find her a good friend.”
“She’s so inviolable. What will she do?” Michael asked.
“I want her to travel,” Nedra said.
“But she’ll go to school?”
“Oh, yes. Sometimes, though, I think the only real education comes from a single person. It’s like being born—you receive everything from one perfect source.”
“Well, she has that in you, doesn’t she?” Michael said.
“Nedra, that’s a very dangerous notion, really,” Viri protested.
“A person whose life is so exceptional that it nourishes the life around it,” she went on.
“Theoretically that might be possible,” Viri said, “but a single r
elationship, basing everything on that, could be very dangerous. I mean, there is the chance of being imprinted with the ideas of a very strong individual, and even though they might be interesting ideas, they could be absolutely wrong for someone like Franca.”
“Marina traveled for three years with Darin Henze when he was touring all over the world. It was a fantastic experience.”
“Darin Henze?”
“The dancer.”
“What do you mean by ‘traveled’?”
“She was his mistress, of course. She was interested in his work. But it really doesn’t matter what he did, he could have been an anthropologist. Specific knowledge is not education. What I mean by education,” Nedra said, “is learning how to live and on what level. And you must learn that or everything else is useless.”
Night in the city. They were at the bar of El Faro, packed among people waiting for a table. The noise of a crowded restaurant beat around them. In the back they were dragging in crates of food while customers wreathed in tobacco smoke shouted over drinks.
“You never know what’s going to happen to people,” Michael was saying. “I have a friend,” he said, “she’s very funny, very generous. She could have been an actress.”
“Morgan,” Bill said.
“You must meet her sometime.”
Just then they were given a table. The waiter brought the menus.
“We’re having the paella, aren’t we?” Michael asked them. “Yes.” He ordered. “She lives on Fifth Avenue, just across from the Metropolitan. She got the apartment in their divorce. It’s a fabulous apartment …”
In the small room, in darkness to which one’s eyes must become accustomed, where even a face being searched for can be missed a few tables away, Viri suddenly saw someone. His heart staggered. It was Kaya Doutreau.
“One night she was coming home from the ballet …”
He was frightened; he was afraid she would see him. His wife was stunning, the company polished, and yet he was ashamed of his existence.
“… Swan Lake. Now say what you like, but there is my all-time favorite.”
“So beautiful,” Bill said.
“When she opened the door to the apartment she found her dog lying there …”
He did not hear, he was aware only of the clatter of utensils, of the sounds that underlay everything, as if listening to the mechanism which moved it all. It seemed terrible that he should be so stricken by her presence, by simple characteristics of which she was completely unaware—her ease, the way in which she sat, the weight of her breasts within the pale, ribbed shirt.
“Well, they don’t know. They think someone pushed poison under the door. It was just awful. She didn’t know what was wrong. She took him downstairs in her arms, he died in the taxi.”
“Viri, are you feeling well?” Nedra asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.” He smiled briefly. He had forgotten how to eat, it seemed, as if it were a ceremony he had only memorized. His attention was directed toward the plate. He tried not to see beyond the table.
“I mean, here is the most interesting, warm person imaginable. She would never hurt anyone. An apartment filled with books. People are insane.”
“It’s an awful story,” Nedra said.
“I hope I didn’t upset you.”
“It must be the season,” Bill said. “February is like that. The only time in my life I’ve really been sick was in February. I was in the hospital for six weeks. On the death list for two. This is marvelous paella.”
“What was wrong?”
“Oh, I had a bad infection. My family even bought a coffin for me. It wasn’t even big enough. They didn’t want to spend the money. They were going to bend my knees.” He laughed.
“Viri, are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
Throughout dinner he had glimpses of her. He could not evade them. She was alive; she was well. Suddenly she stood up. He felt a moment of utter panic, of physical fear. It was only that they were leaving. When she passed, making her way through the tables, he put his hand to his brow to conceal his face.
They drove home in a night that was cold and immensely clear. The blocks of apartments, great darkened hives, floated above them. In the distance the bridge was a line of light.
Across the river the road became empty. The moon was above it, the entire sky white. The car was filled with the faint aroma of tobacco, of perfume, like the compartment of a train. If one were standing in the darkness watching, they passed in an instant, the brilliant headlights pouring before them, a moment’s glimpse of them, no more. In the cold the sound vanishes, then even the distant red of tail lights is gone. Silence. Overhead perhaps the faint noise, brushing the stars, of a plane.
That same night Arnaud was near the Chelsea in the studio of a friend. When he left it was after midnight. He walked east. They had talked for hours, the kind of evening he liked best, intimate, rich talk that flows unending and of which one is never exhausted. He was a Dickensian man; he ate, he drank, he held up the tip of his little finger to show how big someone’s talent was, he swam in the teeming city. His overcoat collar was up. The sidewalks were empty, the stores dark behind their shutters of steel.
The traffic came up the avenue in isolated waves. The headlights of the cars rose and fell in ominous silence over the worn macadam. He looked for a taxi, but they drove with their signs reading OFF DUTY at this hour. The corner with its four bleak prospects was cold. He walked up the block. A cafeteria, the last lighted window, was closing. A wave of cars went by, most of them battered, driven by lone men, cars of the working class, every window up.
Around the corner, moving slowly, a motorcycle came. The rider was in black, plexiglass covered his face. A cab went by, Arnaud waved, it would not stop.
The cyclist had pulled to the curb a little way ahead, the engine was idling, he was looking down at his wheels. He had no face, only the curved, gleaming surface. Arnaud moved a few steps out in the street. He could see the lights of midtown, the great buildings. The cyclist had dismounted and was trying the doors of walk-ups, wrenching at the knobs. As he went from one to another he looked into empty stores, his hands pressed flat against the glass. Arnaud began to walk.
In the west Forties there were effeminate young men on street corners, still waiting. There were men slumped in doorways with filthy hands, their drunken faces scalded by the cold. The taxis that fled along the great avenues were falling apart, their fenders rattling, trash on the floor.
He began to hold his ears. He couldn’t walk from here; he lived on Sixty-eighth. He looked back toward the distant traffic, it seemed there were even fewer approaching cars. The tone of everything had changed, as when one listens too long to silence. His thoughts, which had been bundled about him like his coat, suddenly moved off, encompassed more: the dark, stained buildings, the cold legends of commerce written everywhere. He thought of going to the Chelsea; it was only three blocks away. Two men had turned the corner and were coming slowly toward him, one of them dancing a little from side to side, half-entering doorways.
“Hey, what time is it?” one of them asked. They were black.
“Twelve-thirty,” Arnaud said.
“Where’s your watch?”
Arnaud did not answer. They had stopped, the rhythm of their walking changed, they stood in his path.
“How you know the time with no watch? You unfriendly, man?”
Arnaud’s heart was beating faster. “Never unfriendly,” he said.
“You been to your girl friend? What’s wrong, you too big to talk?” Their faces were identical, gleaming. “Yeah, pretty big. Got a hundred-fifty-dollar overcoat, so you’re all right.”
Arnaud felt the strength, the ability to move draining from him, as if he were stepping onstage without an idea, without a line. A group of cars was coming, they were five or six blocks away. He began to talk; he was like an informer.
“Listen, I can’t stay, but I want to tell you something …”
“He can’t stay,” one of them said to the other.
“There was this deaf man …”
“What deaf man?”
The cars were coming closer. “He met a friend on the street …”
“Les see your watch. We played around enough.”
“I want to ask you one question,” Arnaud said quickly.
“Come on.”
“A question only you can answer …”
He suddenly turned toward the approaching cars and ran a few steps in their direction, calling and waving his arms. There were no taxis among them. They were dark, sealed vessels swerving to avoid him. He was struck by something that stung in the cold. He fell to one knee as if pushed.
He tried to stand. Whatever they were hitting him with sounded like a wet rag. It was the beginning of one thing, the end of another. He was staggering forth, like a flagellant, from the ease of uninjured life. He held his arms about his head, crying out, “For God’s sake!”
He stumbled, trying to grapple with the rain of grunting blows that was making him wet. He was trying to run. He was blinded, he could not see, lurching along the plank of legend, ridiculous to the end, calling out, his performance faltering in the icy cold, his legs crumbling.
On his knees in the street he offered them his money. They scattered the contents of his wallet as they left. His watch they did not even take. It was broken. It bore, like the instruments of a wrecked plane, the exact moment of disaster. He lay for more than an hour, the cars swerving past, never slowing.
Eve called in the morning. “Oh, God,” she moaned.
“What’s wrong?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” Nedra said. Outside the window in sunlight her dog was walking on the frozen ground.
