by James Salter
He woke as the light was hitting the frail lace curtains. The bath restored him. She was still sleeping, not even breathing, it seemed. He looked at her in wonder. As he stood there, her hand came slowly out from the sheets and touched against him, then pushed the towel aside and closed gently around his cock. She lay gazing without a word. It had begun to swell. A small, transparent drop fell to her skin and she raised her wrist and licked it.
“I married the wrong man,” she said.
She lay face down and he knelt between her legs for what seemed a long time, then began to arrange them a little, unhurriedly, like setting up a tripod. In the early light she was without a flaw, her beautiful back, her hips’ roundness. She felt him slowly enter, she reached beneath, it was there, becoming part of her. The slow, profound rhythm began, hardly varying but as time passed somehow more and more intense. Outside, the street was completely silent, in adjoining rooms people were asleep. She began to cry out. He was trying to slow himself, to prevent it and make it go on, but she was trembling like a tree about to fall, her cries were leaking beneath the door.
They woke after nine with the sun full on one wall. She came back from the bathroom and got in bed again.
“Enid.”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something practical?”
“What do you mean?”
“I haven’t been using anything,” he said.
“Well, if anything should happen … if anything should happen, I’d say it was his.”
“When men are having affairs, do they still sleep with their wives?”
“I would think, yes, but not in this case. He hasn’t as much as touched me for a year. More than a year. I suppose you can tell.”
“That’s disappointing. I thought it was me.”
“It is you.”
Outside, the sun was pouring down. In the great cathedral the remains of Columbus in an elaborate coffin were held aloft by statues of the four kings, of Aragon, Castile, León, and Navarre, and in the treasury there was still gold and silver that had come from the New World.
Seville was the city of Don Juan, Andalusia, the city of love. Its poet was García Lorca, dark hair, dark brows, and a pointed face like a woman’s. He was homosexual and an angel of the re-awakening of Spain in the 1920s and ’30s, books and plays filled with a pure, fatal music, and poems rich in colors with fierce emotion and despairing love. He was born in a wealthy family, but his sympathies and love were for the poor, the men and women who worked all their lives in the burning fields. He grew to scorn the church that did little for them, a playwright and friend of the gypsies whose first love was music and who played the piano in his room upstairs in the house just outside town. His color was green and also silver, the color of water at night and of the immense fertile plains that it irrigated and made rich.
The fame of the poet, when it appears, is like no other, and this happened to Lorca. He was killed in 1936, at the very start of the civil war, arrested and executed by right-wing countrymen and buried in an unmarked grave he was made to dig for himself. His offense was everything he had written and stood for. The destruction of the finest is natural, it confirms them. And for death, as Lorca said, there is no consolation, which is one of the beauties of life.
Among the greatest of the poems was the dirge for the death of his friend, a bullfighter who had retired but then returned to the ring as an homage and tribute to his brother-in-law, the great Joselito. In a tight, embroidered suit, perhaps a bit too tight, he was performing in a provincial ring when a cry rose from the crowd. The sharp, curved horn of the bull had ripped like a knife through the fitted pants and the white flesh beneath.
Two days after being gored, lily flowers around the green groin, Ignacio Sánchez Mejias died in a hospital in Madrid where he had insisted on being taken. In deep liturgical sounds like the tolling of bells, the famous lament begins. A las cinco de la tarde, at five in the afternoon. The heat is still staggering. The doomed man, still in a ripped suit, is lying in the small infirmary.
At five in the afternoon.
The lines repeat themselves and roll on. A boy is bringing a white sheet, at five in the afternoon. The bed is a coffin on wheels, at five in the afternoon. From far off the gangrene is coming, at five in the afternoon. His wounds are burning like suns, at five in the afternoon, and the crowd is breaking the windows.
You lived, said Lorca, by dying and being remembered. Mejias’ death, in 1934, was like an apprenticeship for his own, prefigured but not yet known. The fierce storm that would tear the country apart was already gathering. The boy with the white sheet was coming, the bucket of quicklime was ready, and the smoothed-over dirt of the bull ring was already in shadows.
He read the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias aloud for the first time to a roomful of gypsies during Holy Week and slept that night in the huge white bed of a gypsy dancer, the solitary rose of your breath on my cheek.
They ate, that day, in a restaurant over a bar, with narrow stairs up which the waiters had to come with their trays. It was open to the air, there were no walls, only a roof of canvas. They were seated to one side, but to be with her was to be seen by everyone. The river, flowing slowly, was beneath them.
“What are almejas?”
“Where do you see that?”
“Here,” he said. “Almejas a la Casera.”
“No idea.”
They ordered fried whitings, little fish, and potatoes. Even through the canvas there was the warmth of the sun. All the tables were filled, one with a party of Germans who were laughing.
“That’s the Guadalquivir,” Bowman said, pointing down.
“The river.”
“I like names. You have a very nice name.”
“The notorious Mrs. Armour.”
“I also like putting my hands on you.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You do?”
“Mm.”
They went on to Granada. The sunbaked country floated past the window of the train, through his own reflection. There were hills, valleys, thousands upon thousands of olive trees. Enid was sleeping. Perhaps from a dream or something unknown there was a faint, childlike snore, once only. She had never seemed more serene.
In the distance, on a small hill near a village, was a white house surrounded by trees, a house he might live in with her, the bedroom above the silent garden, cool and green, doors to the balcony that overlooked it, mornings of love with the sun slanted across the floor. She would bathe with the door left open and at night they would drive to a city—he had no idea which one, one not far, they were all magical—and then back later in the deep, starry night.
At the same time, he was unsure of her, you would have to be, especially when she had been silent or withdrawn. He felt he was the object of her thoughts then, or worse, not even a part of them. She sometimes glanced at him briefly as if judging. He knew not to show fear but she sometimes made him uneasy with her composure. There were times when she left to go on an errand, to the pharmacy or the consulate—she never bothered to explain why she’d gone to the consulate—and he suddenly felt with a certainty that in fact she was really leaving, that he would go back to the hotel and her bags would be gone, the clerk at the desk would know nothing. He would run in the street looking for her, the blondness of her hair in the crowd.
The truth is, with some women you are never sure. They had traveled for ten days and he felt he knew her, in the room he knew her, at least most of the time, and also sitting at the chestnut-colored bar of the hotel, but you could not know someone else all of the time, their thoughts, about which it was useless to ask. She did not so much as acknowledge the existence of the handsome bartender, so intent was she on whatever she was thinking at the time. The bartender was used to being admired and stood almost disconsolately waiting a few steps away. She hated the thought of going back to London, Enid then said.
“Me, too,” Bowman said.
She was silent.
�
��Your husband,” he continued.
“Oh, partly my husband. Well, more than partly. I don’t want to leave here. Why don’t you move to London?”
He hadn’t expected it.
“Move to London,” he said. “Are you going to get a divorce?”
“I’d love to. I can’t at the moment.”
“Why is that?”
“Oh, there are two or three reasons. Money is one of them. He won’t give me any money.”
“Couldn’t you get it in court?”
“It’s exhausting to think of. The battle. The courts.”
“But you’d be free.”
“Free and alone.”
“You wouldn’t be alone.”
“Is that a promise?” she said.
They didn’t return to London together. He took the plane to New York from Madrid. As it happened, there was no one in the seat next to him and he sat looking out the window for a while and then sitting back with a feeling of relaxation and deep happiness. Spain was falling away beneath them. She had taken him there. He would remember for a long time. The high, wide steps of the great hotel, the Alfonso XIII, up which, as ascending to an altar, bankers and Nationalist generals had walked. The dirt paths in the Retiro, the ranks of white statues.
On the flyleaf of the book of Lorca poems he carefully wrote the names of the hotels, the Reina Victoria, Dauro, del Cardenal, Simón. They had slept in a bed with four pillows, lost in the whiteness of them. The word for naked in Spanish was desnudo. It was the same in any language, she remarked.
He ordered a drink. The announcements were finished and there was only the low, steady sound of the engines. He saw himself sitting there as if from the outside somehow, but he was also thinking about himself. He could see himself, all of himself, from his hand holding the glass right down to his feet. How lucky he was. He could see the leg of another passenger, a man in first class, a gray-suited leg. He felt superior to the man, whoever he was, to everyone. You smell like soap, she had said. He’d had a bath. You washed all the man-smell away. It’ll come back, he’d said. The suited leg made him think of New York, of the office. He thought of Gretchen with her stigma and how it somehow made her more desirable. He thought of the girl in Virginia that Christmas, Dare, who breathed a sexuality, she would be yours in a minute if you were the one … if you were the one. It had happened and he was, in Spain with a woman who had given him the feeling of utter supremacy. He had crossed some line. Her blond hair, her lean style. He saw himself now to be another kind of man, the kind he had hoped, fully a man, used to the wonder. Enid smoked cigarettes, she did it only now and again, and breathed out the rich fragrance slowly. The light in the Ritz made her beautiful. The sound of her high heels. There is no other, there will never be another.
Later in the fall he came back to the office after lunch. It was growing colder, the crowds in the street had wind-freshened faces. The sky was without color and the windows of buildings, as happened at ever earlier hours, were alight. The office seemed unusually quiet, had everyone gone out? It was eerily still. They were not gone, but they were listening to the news. A frightening thing had happened. The president had been shot in Dallas.
13
EDEN
In the small white house in Piermont, together with his wife and Leon, Eddins was living the life of a philosopher king. The house was still plainly furnished, two old wicker chairs with cushions were near the couch and there was a worn oriental rug. There were books, bamboo night tables in the bedroom, and a sense of harmony. They wanted for nothing. In the kitchen, which was also the dining room, was the table on which they ate and where Eddins often liked to sit reading with a cigarette burning in an amber holder and a feeling of the house around him, on his shoulders, as it were, his wife and Leon upstairs and sleeping and he, like Atlas, supporting it all.
Around the town they dressed casually, Eddins, as he said, in house-painter style, the locale seemed to call for it. He wore an overcoat, a scarf and suit jacket, sweatpants, and a fedora although he dressed up when he went into the city. He drove, usually alone, and always with a feeling of exhilaration when, crossing the George Washington Bridge, he saw the great skyline in the distance. At night, driving more freely and amid less traffic the farther he got from the city, he arrived home still humming a little with the energy of Manhattan.
For a long time they remained one of the new couples one always envies, a couple free of habit and familiarity, of history even, and at parties as they stood talking to people she would, unseen, hold his thumb. At night they would lie in bed listening to the stairs creak and watching television, hardly bothering to tell Leon to turn out his light. Night with the great river silent. Night with bits of rain. The entire house creaked in winter, and in the summer it felt like Bombay. Because of Leon, they could no longer sit, like William Blake and his wife, naked in the garden, but on the headboard of the bed she had printed a small sign that said Umda, a kind of Egyptian king or chief, and he wore only the bottoms of his pajamas.
In town and in the neighboring village, Grand View, they had made friends. At Sbordone’s one night they met a somewhat doleful-looking painter named Stanley Palm who looked like Dante in the painting of him seeing Beatrice for the first time and lived in a cinderblock house on the river with a small studio to the side of it. He was separated from his wife, Marian. They had been married for twelve years and had a nine-year-old daughter named Erica. Erica Palm, Eddins thought to himself. He liked the sound of it. Erica and Leon. It was unusual but very modern, the parents of both of them had been divorced or at least had come undone. In Palm’s case it was because his wife had gotten discouraged and given up on him: he was going nowhere. He had no gallery in New York, no reputation. He taught three days a week in the art department at City College, the rest of the time he worked in his studio on paintings that were sometimes all one color.
Palm didn’t have much luck with women though he hadn’t abandoned hope. Especially at bars he had no luck. In the city he stopped for a drink and to a woman who seemed to be by herself, ventured,
“Come alone?”
He could be sized up in a glance.
“No. My friend is getting me a drink,” she said.
Palm saw no one and finally asked,
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from the moon,” she said cooly.
“Ah. I’m from Saturn.”
“You look it.”
He’d been separated for more than a year. It was hard to understand things, he confessed to Eddins. There were painters doing very well who were not any better than he was. There were people for whom everything seemed easy. On impulse one night he called Marian.
“Hi, babe,”
“Stanley?”
“Yeah,” he said somewhat threateningly, “it’s Stanley.”
“I didn’t recognize your voice for a minute. You sound funny.”
“Do I?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No, I’m fine. What are you doing?” he asked more casually.
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you come over here?”
“Come over there?”
He decided to go ahead with it, in the spirit of the times.
“I feel like fucking you,” he said rather quickly.
“Oh, gosh,” she said.
“No, I mean it.”
She changed the subject, he’d clearly been drinking or listening to something.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’ve been thinking about us. Why don’t you be nice about it?”
“I have been nice.”
“I’m feeling really lonely.”
“It’s not loneliness.”
“What would you call it?”
“I can’t come over.”
“Why not? Why not be a good-hearted woman?”
“I have been. Lots of times.”
“That’s not helping me now,” h
e said.
“You’ll get over it.”
She talked to him a while longer. At the end she asked if he felt any better.
“No,” he said.
Then one day at the Village Hall, where he’d gone with some announcements of a show he was part of, there was a dark-haired girl in a tight sweater who seemed friendly. Her name was Judy, she was younger but they talked for a while and she was impressed that he was a painter. She had never met a painter before, she said. She gave him a ride back towards Piermont and along the way, as if in a trance, he reached over and slipped a hand inside her leather jacket, like a rock star, as she drove. She said nothing and became his girlfriend. Soon he told her about an idea he had which was to open a restaurant, the kind that was in New York that painters and musicians went to. It would be Italian and he had a name for it, Sironi’s, after a painter he admired.
“Sironi’s.”
“Yeah.”
Judy was enthusiastic. She would help with everything, she said, and be a partner. Palm saw a dream coming true, the kind of dream that seldom dies. Sironi’s would be in town somewhere, although there was also a possible location up on 9W. Judy was in favor of town, she didn’t like the idea of being away from everything, particularly late at night.
“Why do you want to be up there?” she said.
“Well, there’s an old place for rent there right next to a curve. Marian didn’t like the idea, either.”
“What does Marian have to do with it?” Judy said.
Stanley had known they were not going to get along and had even been uneasy about Judy spending nights with him. He had her park a little down the road.
“What’s wrong? You afraid someone will see me?”
“It’s not that. It’s Erica,” he said.
“Doesn’t Marian know you have a girlfriend? And what business is it of hers, anyway?”
“Marian doesn’t have anything to do with it, and it doesn’t matter what she thinks. I don’t give a damn what she thinks.”
