by James Salter
“I didn’t know you spoke German.”
“Well, until recently it wasn’t a great thing to do,” Bowman said.
He had taken German at Harvard, he explained, because it was the language of science.
“At the time I thought I wanted to be a scientist. I went back and forth between a number of things. I thought for a while I might teach. I still have a certain yearning for teaching. Then I decided to be a journalist, but I wasn’t able to get a job as one. I heard about a job as a reader then. It was pure luck or maybe destiny. What do you think of the idea of destiny?”
“Hadn’t thought about it,” she said casually.
He liked talking to her and the occasional smile that made her forehead shine. She was wearing a sleeveless dress and the roundness of her small shoulders gleamed. Her little finger was curled and held apart as she ate a bite of bread. Gestures, facial expressions, way of dressing—these were the revealing things. He was imagining places where they might go together, where no one knew them and he would have her to himself for days on end, though he was uncertain of how it might happen.
“New York’s a wonderful place, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes. I like coming here.”
“How do you know Louise?”
“We were in boarding school, in the same class. The first thing she ever said to me was a dirty joke, well, not exactly dirty but, you know.”
He told her about the time that the letters ES on the big sign above the Essex House had gone out and there it was, forty stories up, shining in the night. He went no further. He didn’t want to seem coarse.
At the end of the evening at the front door he was prepared to say good night but she acted as if he were not there, unlocking the door and saying nothing. Louise was gone for the weekend to visit her parents. Vivian was nervous though she did not want to show it. He went upstairs with her.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.
“Yes, that would be … No,” he said, “not really.”
They sat for a few moments in silence and then she simply leaned forward and kissed him. The kiss was light but ardent.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
She did not take everything off—shoes, stockings, and skirt, that was all. She was not prepared for more. They kissed and whispered. As she slid from her white panties, a white that seemed sacred, he barely breathed. The fineness of her, the blondish fleece. He could not believe they were doing this.
“I don’t … have anything,” he whispered.
There was no answer.
He was inexperienced but it was natural and overwhelming. Also too quick, he couldn’t help it. He felt embarrassed. Her face was close to his.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t stop it.”
She said nothing, she had almost no way to judge it.
She went into the bathroom and Bowman lay back in awe at what had happened and feeling intoxicated by a world that had suddenly opened wide to the greatest pleasure, pleasure beyond knowing. He knew of the joy that might lie ahead.
Vivian was thinking along less heady lines. There was the chance of her becoming pg though she had, in truth, only an inexact idea of how likely that was. At school there had been a lot of talk, but it was only talk and vague. Still, there were stories of girls who got that way the first time. It would be just her luck, she thought. Of course, it hadn’t been entirely the first time.
“You make me think of a pony,” he said lovingly.
“A pony? Why?”
“You’re just beautiful. And free.”
“I don’t see how that’s like a pony,” she said. “Besides, ponies bite. Mine did.”
She nestled against him and he tried to think along her lines. Whatever might happen, they had done it. He felt only exaltation.
They spent the night together when he came to Washington that month and drove to the country the next day to have lunch with her father. He had a four-hundred-acre farm called Gallops, mostly given over to grazing. The main house was fieldstone and sat on top of a rise. Vivian showed him around, the grounds and first floor, as if introducing him to it and, in a way, to her. The house was lightly furnished in a manner that was indifferent to style. Behind a couch in the living room Bowman noticed, as in seventeenth-century palaces, were some dried dog turds.
Lunch was served by a black maid towards whom Amussen behaved with complete familiarity. Her name was Mattie and the main course came in on a silver tray.
“Vivian says you work in publishing,” Amussen said.
“Yes, sir. I’m an editor.”
“I see.”
“It’s a small house,” Bowman went on, “but with quite a good literary reputation.”
Amussen, picking at something near his incisor with his little finger, said,
“What do you mean by literary?”
“Well, books of quality, essentially. Books that might have a long life. Of course, that’s the top end. We publish other books, to make money or try to.”
“Can we have some coffee, Mattie?” Amussen said to the maid. “Would you like some coffee, Mr. Bowman?”
“Thank you.”
“Viv, you?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
The brief conversation about publishing had been without resonance. It was of no more interest than if they had been talking about the weather. Bowman had noticed only popular titles in the bookcase in the living room, Books of the Month with jackets that looked pristine. There were a few others, dark and leather-bound, the kind that are handed down though no one reads them, in a mahogany secretary, behind glass.
As they drank coffee, Bowman made a last attempt to cast himself favorably as an editor, but Amussen turned the subject to the navy, Bowman had been in the navy, was that right? There was a neighbor down the road, Royce Cromwell, who had gone to Annapolis and been in the same class as Charlie McVay, the captain of the Indianapolis. Bowman hadn’t run into him in the navy, by any chance?
“No, I don’t think so. I was only a junior officer. Was he in the Pacific?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there was a big Atlantic fleet, too, for the convoys, the invasion, and all that. Hundreds of ships.”
“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
Almost without effort he had made Bowman feel as if he were prying. The lunch had been one of those meals when the sound of a knife or fork on a plate or a glass being set down only marks the silence.
Outside, as they walked to the car, Bowman saw something moving slowly with undulant curves into the ivy bed along the driveway.
“There’s a snake, I think.”
“Where?”
“There. Just going into the ivy.”
“Damn it,” Vivian said, “that’s just where the dogs like to sleep. Was it big?”
It had not been a small snake, it was thick as a hose.
“Pretty good-sized,” Bowman said.
Vivian, looking around, found a rake and began furiously running the handle of it back and forth through the ivy. The snake was gone, however.
“What was it? Was it a rattler?”
“I don’t know. It was big. Do they have rattlesnakes around here?”
“They sure do.”
“You’d better come out of there.”
She was not afraid. She ran the handle through the dark, shiny leaves a final time.
“Damned thing,” she said.
She went to tell her father. Bowman stood looking at the thick ivy, watching for any movement. She had stepped right into it.
Driving back that day, Bowman felt they were leaving a place where not even his language was understood. He was about to say it, but Vivian commented,
“Don’t mind Daddy,” she said. “He’s like that sometimes. It wasn’t you.”
“I don’t think I made a very good impression.”
“Oh, you should see him with Bryan, my sister’s husband. Daddy calls him Whyan, why in hell did she p
ick him? Can’t even ride, he says.”
“You aren’t making me feel much better. I can sail,” he added. “Can your father sail?”
“He’s sailed to the Bahamas.”
She seemed ready to defend him, and Bowman felt he should not go further. She sat looking out of the window on her side, somewhat removed, but in her leather skirt, hair pulled back, face wide, with a thin gold chain looped around her neck, she was the image of desirability. She turned back towards him.
“It’s like that,” she commented. “You sort of have to go through the mud room first.”
“Is your mother anything like that?”
“My mother? No.”
“What’s she like?”
“She’s a drunk,” Vivian said. “That’s the reason they got divorced.”
“Where does she live? In Middleburg?”
“No, she has an apartment in Washington near Dupont Circle. You’ll meet her.”
Her mother had been beautiful but you couldn’t tell it now, Vivian added. She started in the morning with vodka and rarely got dressed until afternoon.
“Daddy really raised us. We’re his two girls. He had to protect us.”
They drove for a while in silence and near Centerville somewhere he glanced over and saw that she was asleep. Her head had fallen softly to the side and her lips were slightly parted. Sensual thoughts came to him. Her smooth-stockinged legs, for some reason he thought of them separately—their length and shape. He realized how deeply in love he was. She had it in her power to bestow immense happiness.
When they said good-bye at the station he felt that something definitive had passed between them. He possessed, despite the uncertainty, assurance, an assurance that would never fall away.
4
AS ONE
Freely, as they sat or ate or walked he shared with her his thoughts and ideas about life, history, and art. He told her everything. He knew she didn’t think about these things, but she understood and could learn. He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter. Why would it occur? When you love you see a future according to your dreams.
In Summit, where he wanted his mother to meet Vivian, to see and approve of her, he took her first to a diner across from City Hall that had been there for years. It had actually been a railroad car with windows all along the side facing the avenue. Inside, the floor was tile and the ceiling pale wood that curved down into the wall. A counter where customers sat—there were always one or two—ran the length of the place. It was more crowded in the morning; the railroad station, the Morris and Essex line that went to the city, was just down the street. The tracks were low and out of sight. At night the lights of the diner were the only lights along the street. You entered by a door opposite the counter and there was another door at one end.
It was here that Hemingway placed his story “The Killers,” Bowman said.
“Right here, in this diner. The counter, everything. Do you know the story? It’s marvelous. Fabulously written. If you never read another word of his, you’d know right away what a great writer he is. It’s in the evening. Nobody’s in the place, there are no customers, it’s empty, and two men in tight black overcoats come in and sit down at the counter. They look at the menu and order, and one of them says to the counterman, This is some town, what’s the name of this place? And the counterman, who’s frightened of course, says, Summit. It’s right there in the story, Summit, and when the food comes they eat with their gloves on. They’re there to kill a Swede, they tell the counterman. They know the Swede always comes there. He’s an ex-fighter named Ole Andreson who double-crossed the mob somehow. One of them takes a sawed-off shotgun from beneath his coat and goes into the kitchen to hide and wait.”
“Did this actually happen?”
“No, no. He wrote it in Spain.”
“It’s just made up.”
“You don’t believe it’s made up, reading it. That’s what’s so incredible, you absolutely believe it.”
“And they kill him?”
“It’s better than that. They don’t kill him because he doesn’t show up, but he knows they’re after him, they’ll come again. He’s big, he was a boxer, but whatever he did, they’re going to kill him. He just lies in bed in the rooming house, looking at the wall.”
They began to read the menu.
“What are you going to have?” Vivian asked.
“I think I’ll have eggs with Taylor ham.”
“What’s Taylor ham?” she said.
“It’s a kind of ham they have around here. I’ve never really asked.”
“All right, I’ll have it, too.”
He liked being with her. He liked having her with him. There were only a few other people in the diner, but how colorless they seemed compared to her. They were all aware of her presence. It was impossible not to be.
“I’d like to meet Hemingway,” he said. “Go down to Cuba and meet him. Maybe we could go together.”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“You have to read him,” he said.
Beatrice had been eager to meet her and was also struck by her looks, though in a different way, the freshness and naked, animal statement. How much one knows from the first! She had bought flowers and set the table in the dining room where they seldom ate, usually using a table in the kitchen, one end of which was against the wall. The kitchen with shelves but no cabinets was the real heart of the house together with a sitting room where they often sat in front of the fireplace talking and having a drink. Now there was this girl with somewhat stiff manners. She was from Virginia, and Beatrice asked what part, Middleburg?
“We really live nearer to Upperville,” Vivian replied.
Upperville. It sounded rural and small. It was, in fact, small, there was one place to eat but no town water or sewage. Nothing had changed there for a hundred years and people there liked it that way whether they lived in an old house without heat or on a thousand acres. Upperville, in the county and beyond, was an exalted name, the emblem of a proud, parochial class of which Vivian was a member. There was no place to stay, you had to live there.
“It’s beautiful country,” Bowman said.
Beatrice said, “I’d love to see it. What does your family do there?”
“Farm,” Vivian said. “Well, my father farms some but also he puts his fields up for grazing.”
“It must be big.”
“It’s not terribly big, it’s about four hundred acres.”
“That’s so interesting. Apart from farming, what is there to do?”
“Daddy always says there’s lots to do. He means looking after the horses.”
“Horses.”
“Yes.”
It was not that she was difficult to talk to, but you immediately felt the limits. Vivian had gone to junior college, probably at the suggestion of her father to keep her out of mischief. She had a certain confidence, based on the things she absolutely knew and which had proved to be enough. Like all mothers though, Beatrice hoped for a girl like herself, with whom she could speak easily and whose view of life could almost perfectly be combined with her own. Among her pupils, over the years, she could think of girls who were like that, good students with natural charm that you admired and were drawn to, but there were also others not so easily understood and whose fate you were not meant to know.
“Didn’t Liz Bohannon come from Middleburg?” Beatrice asked, bringing up a name, a horse and society figure of the ’30s, always photographed with her husband aboard some ship sailing to Europe or in their box at Saratoga.
“Yes, she has a big place. She’s a friend of my father’s.”
“She’s still around?”
“Oh, very much around.”
There were a lot of stories about her, Vivian said. When they first bought their place, Longtree, that was the name then, she used to ride in from the hunt and let the dogs come right into t
he house. They’d jump up on the table and eat everything. After she got divorced, she calmed down a bit.
“Oh, you must know her, then?”
“Oh, yes.”
Vivian was eating somewhat carefully, not like a girl with a genuine appetite. The flowers, which Beatrice had moved to the side, were a lush backdrop for her, some young pagan goddess who had cast a spell over her son. Though it wasn’t entirely a spell, Beatrice had no way to measure how much in need of love he was and what forms that took—meanwhile he was absolutely certain of one thing, that he would never meet someone like Vivian again. He saw himself tumbled with her among the bedclothes and fragrance of married life, the meals and holidays of it, the shared rooms, the glimpses of her half-dressed, her blondness, the pale hair where her legs met, the sexual riches that would be there forever.
When he told his mother he hoped to marry her, Beatrice, though afraid it would prove nothing, protested how unalike the two of them were, how little they had in common. They had a great deal in common, Bowman a little defiantly said. What they had in common was more vital than similar interests—it was wordless understanding and accord.
What Beatrice did not say, but what she deeply felt was that Vivian had no soul, but to say it would be unforgivable. She merely sat silent. After a moment, she said,
“I hope you won’t rush into anything.”
In her heart she feared, she knew the things you cannot see when you are too young. She hoped that with a little time the infatuation would pass. She could only press his head against her in love and understanding.
“I only want you to be happy, truly happy.”
“I would be truly happy.”
“I mean in your deepest heart.”
“Yes, in my deepest.”
It was love, the furnace into which everything is dropped.
In New York at a restaurant called El Faro where the prices were low, in back, beneath the darkened walls, Vivian said, “Louise would love this. She’s mad about Spain.”
