by James Salter
“Do you want me to bring Leon?” she asked.
“How is Leon?”
“He’s fine.”
“No, don’t bring him,” Beseler said.
He asked her to meet him at the airport. Dena hardly recognized him, he seemed gaunt and distracted. Despite herself she wanted to help him. He was the rebel and poet she had fallen in love with, and so much of her life, she felt, belonged to him.
“This woman you’re living with, I don’t think she’s taking good care of you.”
“She doesn’t have to take care of me.”
“Well, somebody should.”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t look good,” Dena told him.
He ignored it.
“Are you writing?” she asked.
That was the sacred thing. He had always been its apostle. Everything would be forgiven because of it.
“No,” he said, “not at the moment. I may go and teach for a while.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure.”
He was silent. Then he said, “To be born a mole, ever think of that?”
“A mole?”
“To be born blind, with no eyes, eyes that are sealed. Everything is darkness. Living under the earth in narrow, cold passages, afraid of snakes, rats, anything that might be there, able to see. Seeking a mate, there underground, beyond all light.”
It was hard to look at him.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never thought of it. I was born with eyes.”
“Got to have mercy,” he said.
He was trying to light a cigarette with what seemed intense focus, putting it between his lips, then striking a match and applying it with great concentration, shaking it out and depositing it in an ashtray. He took the cigarette from his mouth with trembling fingers.
“It’s not from drinking,” he said.
“It isn’t?”
“I drink, but that’s not it. I’m just a little bit past the red line. Marian doesn’t drink. She’s a moonbather. She likes to undress and sit in the rays.”
“Where’s she doing that?”
“She can do it anywhere,” he said. “Vernon, why don’t we get a divorce?”
“Why would we get a divorce?”
“Because we’re not really married anymore.”
“We’ll always be married,” he said.
“I don’t think so. I mean I don’t think it makes sense.”
“They’ll be writing songs about us,” he said. “I could write a couple. How’s old Leon?”
“He’s a wonderful boy.”
“Yeah, I knew he would be.”
“What about our divorce?”
“Yeah,” Beseler said, smoking thoughtfully and saying nothing more.
Finally his flight was called.
“Well, I guess this is adios for a while,” he said.
He kissed her on the cheek. That was the last time she saw him. She was from Texas, though, where they were loyal, and in some disdainful way she remained loyal to him, to the boy who’d been her husband, carried her off, and whose destiny was to be a famous poet, maybe a singer. He had played the guitar and sung in a low voice to her.
A lawyer in Austin, hired by his family, took care of the divorce through some associate in New York. She was given child support of four hundred dollars a month—she’d asked for nothing for herself—and Eddins, in effect, had a son.
Great publishers were not always great readers, and good readers seldom made good publishers, but Bowman was somewhere in between. Often, in the city late at night when the sound of traffic had vanished, Bowman sat reading. Vivian had gone to bed. The only light was a standing lamp by his chair, near his elbow was a drink. He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
In the morning, Vivian asked what time he had come to bed.
“Twelve-thirty. About then.”
“What were you reading?”
“I was reading about Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeths.”
Vivian knew about St. Elizabeths. It was a synonym for lunacy in Washington.
“What’s he there for?”
“Probably because they didn’t know what else to do with him.”
“I mean, what did he do?”
“You know who he is?”
“I know enough,” she said.
“Well, he’s a towering poet. He was an expatriate.”
She didn’t feel like asking what that was.
“He made some broadcasts for the fascists in Italy,” Bowman explained. “They were addressed to America at the start of the war. He had obsessions about the evils of bank interest, Jews, the provincialism of America, and he talked about them in his broadcasts. He was at dinner in Rome one night and heard the news that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and he said, my God, I’m a ruined man.”
“He doesn’t sound that crazy,” Vivian said.
“Exactly.”
He wanted to go on talking about Ezra Pound and introduce the subject of the Cantos, perhaps reading one or two of the most brilliant of them to her, but Vivian’s mind was elsewhere. He was not too curious about where that might be. He thought back instead to a lunch a few days before with one of his writers who had been to school only through the seventh grade though he didn’t explain why. His mother had given him a library card and told him, go and read the books.
“The books. That’s what she said. She’d wanted to be a teacher but she had these children. She was a disappointed woman. She said, you come from decent, hardworking people. Serious people.”
Serious was a word that had haunted his life.
“She was trying to tell me something. Like all proud people, she didn’t want to say it directly. If you didn’t understand, that was too bad, but she wanted to pass this thing on. It was a heritage. We didn’t have a heritage, but she believed in it.”
His name was Keith Crowley. He was a slight man who looked to the side when he talked. Bowman liked him and liked his writing, but his novel didn’t sell, two or three thousand copies was all. He wrote two more, one of which Bowman published, and then dropped from sight.
8
LONDON
He woke in darkness to a fierce rattling. It was rain, the drops hammering against the window. He’d been born in a storm, he was always happy in them. Vivian was curled beside him, deep in sleep, and he lay listening to the sheets of rain. They were leaving for London that evening, he and Baum, and it rained throughout the day, a wet mist streaming from the great wheels of trucks alongside as they drove to the airport, the windshield wipers of the taxi going. Bowman’s expectations were anything but dampened. He was certain, he felt, to like England and the city he had dreamed of in college, the rich, imagined city with its legendary figures, its polished men and women out of Evelyn Waugh, the Virginias, the Catherines and Janes, narrow-minded, assured, only dimly aware of any life other than their own.
They sat beside one another on the plane, Baum calmly reading the newspaper as the engine noise swelled and they began to move, the takeoff with the plane trembling and the roar, water blurring the cabin windows. London, Bowman thought. It was early May.
In the morning there was England, green and unknown beneath broken clouds. They drove in from Heathrow in a cab making a sound like a sewing machine with the driver offering occasional comments in a language difficult to understand. Then there were the outskirts, drab and interminable, becoming at last streets at odd angles and buildings of Victorian brick. They turned onto a wide avenue, The Mall, with the dense green of a park alongside and black iron fence peeling past. At its end, far off, was a great pale arch. They were driving swiftly on the wrong side. Bowman was struck by the proud, outdated character of the city, its irregularity and singular names. The most important thing, its separation from the continent, was not yet
known to him.
Though it was more than fifteen years after the war, the ghost of it was still present. England had won the war—there was hardly a family, high or low, that had not been part of it—through the early disasters when the country had been unprepared, the far-off sinking of warships that were thought to be indestructible, symbols and pride of a nation, the absolute catastrophe of the army sent to France in 1940 to fight beside the French and then find itself encircled and trapped on the Channel beaches in the hopeless disorder of men without equipment or supplies, everything abandoned in the retreat, and only by last-minute effort and German forbearance be brought home in every boat that could be found, large or small, exhausted, beaten. And still the task remained, the seemingly endless struggle, the unimaginable scale of it, the desert war, the determination to save Suez, the reeling war in the air, great walls collapsing in darkness, entire cities on fire, calamitous news from the Far East, casualty lists, the readying for invasion, the battles without end …
And England had won. Its enemies stumbled through ruins, went hungry. What was left of their cities smelled of death and sewage, the women sold themselves for cigarettes, but it was England, like a battered fighter somehow left standing, that had paid too much. A decade later there was still food rationing and it was difficult to travel, currency could not be taken out of the country. The bells that had tolled the hour of victory were long silent. The ways of before the war were unrecoverable. Putting out a cigarette after lunch, a publisher had said calmly, “England is finished.”
They first stayed at the house of an editor and friend, Edina Dell, on one of the small enclaves that were called terraces, with a brick-walled garden and some trees outside the dining room, the bottommost room of the house. She was the daughter of a classics professor but seemed with her irregular teeth and offhanded manner to have come from a larger life, some great country house with paintings, worn furnishings, and known indiscretions. She had a daughter, Siri, the result of a ten-year marriage to a Sudanese. The daughter was a soft, seductive color, six or seven years old and filled with love for her mother, she often stood by her mother’s leg with her arm around it. She was a gazelle, her eyes dark brown with the purest whites.
The man with whom Edina was involved was a large, elegant figure, Aleksei Paros, who came from a distinguished Greek family and was perhaps married—he was vague on the matter, it was more complicated than it seemed. He was an encyclopedia salesman at this stage, but even in his shirtsleeves, walking around the house looking for cigarettes, he gave the impression of someone for whom life would work out. He was tall and overweight and could charm men as well as women with little effort. Edina was drawn to men like him. Her father had been this type and she had two illegitimate brothers.
Aleksei had been away, in Sicily, and had just come back by way of a London club the night before. He was known there, one of his habits was gambling. He liked to stroll about carrying his chips in one hand, stroking them unconsciously with his thumb. He had no system for gambling, he bet on instinct, some men seem to have a gift for it. Passing the chemin-de-fer table he might suddenly reach in and impulsively make a bet. It was a Mediterranean gesture, rich Egyptians did it. Except for his looks, Aleksei might have been one, a minor playboy or king.
He stood at the roulette table listening to the sound of the ivory ball as it circled, a long, decaying sound that ended in the fated clicking as it glanced off partitions between numbers and abruptly dropped into one. Vingt-deux, pair et noir. Twenty-two, the year he was born. Numbers sometimes repeated, but he did not have that feeling. There were some younger people at the table and a man in a worn suit keeping track of which numbers had come up on a card in his hand, then making a small bet on red or black. Faites vos jeux, the croupier was saying. A few more people arrived. Something invisible drew them to a particular table, something in the stale air. Faites vos jeux. A woman in an evening gown had pushed in, a younger woman, and people were standing sideways between the chairs. The baize cloth was thick with chips. As soon as someone bet, two more would follow. Rien ne va plus, the croupier was calling. The wheel was turning, now it was turning faster, and suddenly the ball shot out from an expert hand and began to circle fast in the opposite direction just beneath the rim, and at that moment, like someone jumping aboard as the ship pulled away, Aleksei placed fifty pounds on the six. The ball was making its beautiful circling sound one could listen to forever, a sound of immense possibilities, he stood to win eighteen hundred, and for five or six seconds that seemed much longer he waited calmly but intently, almost as if the guillotine blade were being raised, then the slowing and sinking of the orbit until the final instant when there was a steely hopping and the ball fell definitively into a number. It was not six. Like the practiced gambler he was, he showed no emotion or regret. He bet fifty pounds several times more and then moved to another table.
In the morning he sat in the garden with his coffee, the garden of reconciliation, as he called it. In his white shirt, at the round metal table he was like a wounded man on a hospital terrace. You could not be angry with him. He did not talk about the previous night but rather about Palermo, palla-irma, city with no signs.
“It’s absolutely true,” he said. “You can go anywhere and not a street is identified. Everything is in complete disrepair.”
He was straightening a cigarette taken from a crushed pack. Everything he did was in a way the act of a survivor and at the same time of someone who would survive. He seemed to have played the game already somehow.
“Filthy with crime, I imagine,” Edina said.
“Sicily? Yes, of course,” Aleksei conceded. “There’s some crime. But you don’t see it. Kidnapping. Stealing women—that’s why I didn’t want to take you.”
“For fear I’d be kidnapped?”
“Yes. We’ve already had our war over an abducted woman,” he said.
“What can you do?” she said helplessly to Baum.
“We’ll take a trip to America,” Aleksei promised, “get a car and drive across the country, go to St. Louis, Chicago, see the Great Plains.”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve been counting on it.”
She excused herself, in fact to do her yoga on the floor in her bedroom, to seek understanding, her arms and legs gently swimming in the quiet air, then later in the morning to read.
It was in London with its haughty shops on Jermyn and New Bond Street; the houses plaqued with the famous names of former occupants, Boswell, Browning, Mozart, Shelley, even Chaucer; the hidden luxury from imperial days with its guardians in the form of silver-trimmed doormen at the great hotels; the exclusive clubs; the bookshops, restaurants, and endless particular addresses on terraces, places, roads, courts, crescents, squares, avenues, rows, gardens, mansions, and mews; the many small, even shabby hotels with rooms without bath; the traffic; the secrets one would never know—in this London he formed his first idea of the geography of publishing, the network of people in various countries who knew one another, especially those who were interested in the same kind of books and possessed similar lists but, equally important, were friends, not intimate perhaps, but colleagues and rivals and through this and their common endeavors, friends.
They were, in the main, able and even superior men, some very principled, some less so. The most prominent or at least the most talked about British publisher was Bernard Wiberg, a stocky man in his late forties with an eighteenth-century face, not difficult to caricature, prominent nose and somewhat pointed chin together with arms that seemed a little short. He had been a German refugee and had come to England just before the war without a penny. In the first years he had shared a room, and his only extravagance was once a week having a coffee at the Dorchester surrounded by people having a meal that cost thirty shillings or more, one day he was determined to be among them.
He began by publishing books that were in the public domain, but doing them handsomely and marketing them with style. He had great success with racy me
moirs of women who made their way up, preferably from a young age, man by man in Regency London, and he published, ignoring general outrage, some books about the holocaust but from the other side, including a best-seller called Juliet of the Camps, based on various myths about a beautiful Jewish girl who for a time saved herself by working in a concentration camp brothel where a German officer fell in love with her. It was both an insult to the countless victims and a lie to the survivors. Wiberg took a lofty tone.
“History is the clothes in the closet,” he said. “Put them on and you will understand.”
He was referring in a way to his own life and his family, all of whom had perished in the terrifying nightmare that had been Eastern Europe. He had put that behind him. His fingernails were polished and his clothes expensive. He was fond of music and the opera. He was quoted as saying that his publishing house was based on the arrangement of a symphony orchestra: the bass fiddles and drums were in back, the foundation, so to speak, of major works, tapering forward to flutes, oboes, and clarinets, which were books of lesser weight but which made people happy and sold by the carload. His greater interest lay in the drums—he wanted to have Nobel winners inscribe books to him, to have a beautiful house and give parties.
He possessed the house, actually an apartment of two entire floors that overlooked Regent’s Park. It was luxurious, with high ceilings and walls enameled in deep, soothing colors and hung with drawings and pictures, one a large Bacon. The bookcases were filled with books, there was no noise from traffic or the street but instead patrician calm and a servant bringing tea.
Robert Baum and Wiberg had some innate understanding and over the years did a great deal of business together, each of them claiming the other had gotten the better of it.
Edina had a different view, not solely hers.
“There are wonderful German refugees named Jacob,” she agreed, “excellent doctors, bankers, drama critics. He’s not one of those. He came here and sought out the Achilles tendon, he took advantage of English Christian gentility. He did terrible things. The book about the Jewish girl who falls in love with the SS officer—you have to draw the line somewhere. And, of course, he climbed. He couldn’t get into society but he always hired girls from the best families. He gave them money. Well, that’s his real story. Robert knows my feelings.”
