All That Is

by James Salter

  He felt the absence, not necessarily of marriage, but of a tangible center in life around which things could form and find a place. He realized what had brought it to mind, this house, Wells’, and the description of the captain’s house in Frederiksted. He imagined a house of his own, though only vaguely. For some reason he saw it in the fall. It was raining, rain was a blur on the windows and he had lit a fire against the chill.

  He took the time to look.

  “I’m interested in a small house with an exceptional room or two,” he told the agent.

  She was a tart woman who was a member of the board of the golf club nearby.

  “I don’t know what you mean by exceptional room,” she said.

  “Well, why don’t we begin by looking at something? Show me one or two of your favorites.”

  “What is the price range you’re interested in?”

  “Let’s say from two thousand dollars up,” Bowman said to annoy her.

  “I don’t have anything in that range,” she said. “Also, I really have a business to run.”

  “I know you do. Tell me, what can I buy a two-bedroom house for?”

  “It depends entirely on the house and the location. I would say, between sixty and two hundred thousand dollars, south of the highway.”

  “I don’t want a house in the trees, the woods. I’d like a house that’s well-situated and open to the light,” he said.

  It was hard to tell if she was sensitive to what he was saying or not. She showed him nothing of interest although at the end of an astrigent hour and a half, passing through some open fields bounded by trees, she slowed down near a driveway and said,

  “This is more expensive, but I thought I’d show it to you.”

  She was in fact showing her authority. They drove down a long straight road, not overly maintained, in the shadow of foliage overhead. It was almost sepulchral. The green was intense. Then it unexpectedly opened to a dark wooden house on a slight rise, a sort of Adirondack house built to the mountain gods, in the open but surrounded by a tall canopy of trees like a layer of clouds. It was a house named Crossways and had been designed by Stanford White, another of whose great houses, Flying Point, on the ocean, had burned.

  They went up wide wooden steps and into a serene interior with comfortable furnishings and devoid of haphazard light. The floors were polished but not shining. The windows were large and clear. The house was cruciform in shape with each arm looking down its own alley of trees to the fields. It had passed through the hands of several owners and its price was in millions.

  When they were in the car again, Bowman said,

  “That was worth it.”

  But he did not go to that agent again.

  He didn’t like women who looked down on you for whatever reason. Within limits, he liked the opposite. You rarely found all the qualities you sought. It was not something he spent time thinking about. He’d had various love affairs. As he became older, the women became older, too, and less inclined to foolish or carefree acts. But the city was teeming, the feminist movement had changed it. He was usually in a suit. He always wore one to work. On the escalator at Grand Central, a girl with a nice face, composed and brown, said to him,

  “Hello. Are you going where?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I was asking if you are going to near here,” she said.

  “I’m going to Forty-First Street,” Bowman said.

  “Ah. Do you have an office?”

  He couldn’t quite tell what she wanted.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I just thought we could exchange numbers and you could call.”

  “For what?” he said.

  “Business,” she said simply.

  Her raincoat, he noticed, was not entirely clean.

  “What kind of business?”

  “You can say.”

  She looked at him openly. She had an outsider’s dignity, a West African dignity, and also a touch of weariness.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “My name? Eunice.”

  He felt in his pocket for bills. He took one out and put it in her hand, a ten.

  “No,” she said, “you don’t have to.”

  “Take it, Eunice. It’s a down payment.”

  “No.”

  “I have to go,” he said and walked away.

  For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publishing house, Baum gave a party in a French restaurant. There was a large crowd, almost all of them people Bowman knew. On the far side of the room he caught sight of Gretchen, who had long since become an editor herself, at a paperback house. She was married and a mother. He made his way across to her to say hello.

  “It’s so nice to see you,” he said.

  She still had the quality that had allowed her to ignore the terrible blemishes although these were now gone. On her smooth forehead and cheeks were only some faint etched scars, barely noticeable.

  “How have you been?” he asked.

  “Very well,” she said. “And you?”

  “The same. You look wonderful. It’s been a long time. What is it, six years?”

  “More,” she said.

  “It doesn’t seem it. We miss you. Neil left, I guess you know that. He went to work for Delovet. He went over to the enemy.”

  “I know.”

  “You were a great distraction to him,” Bowman said. “You had a boyfriend, though.”

  “I didn’t have a boyfriend,” she said.

  “I thought you did.”

  “I was married.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Just briefly,” she said.

  “You seemed so innocent.”

  “I was innocent.”

  She was still innocent. Also, he hadn’t noticed it before, slightly shy.

  “I miss Neil,” he said. “I don’t see him very often these days.”

  “He sent me some poems,” she said. “Back then, I mean.”

  “I didn’t know that. He was smitten. There were some poems he didn’t send you.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, nothing terrible.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you liked me,” she said.

  “Me? I’m surprised to hear you say that. I liked you very much.”

  “Neil wasn’t the one I was interested in,” she said.

  In the same undramatic way, she went on, “You were the one. I didn’t have the nerve though.”

  He felt inept.

  “I was married.”

  “It didn’t matter,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t be telling me now. I don’t know, it’s too disorienting.”

  “Since I’m confessing it,” she said, “I might as well say nothing has changed.”

  It was said quite simply.

  “Why don’t you call me? I’d love to see you,” she said.

  She was looking directly at him. He didn’t know what to say. Just then her husband, who had been getting drinks at the bar, came back. The three of them talked together for a few minutes. Bowman had the feeling that they all knew. That evening he didn’t talk to her again.

  He saw her now, of course, in a different way. He was tempted to call her but felt it would not be right, from a moral viewpoint and something besides. They were not the people they had been. He admired her, however, the marred girl she had been, the poised woman she now was. She was the age when she could still be naked. He could be gone from the office for several hours in the afternoon, almost any afternoon, and so could she. It was not indiscretion, it was what was due her.

  You’re a fool, he told himself. He saw himself in the mirror in the morning. His hair was thinner now but his face, it seemed, was the same. He had come to the point where he was certain of his abilities, how to make writers want to be published by him, among others. He knew that some of the best writers began as journalists and sometimes ended as journalists when the passion faded. He knew also that he had the ability to turn people against him. Tha
t came with the rest of it. He could talk about books and writers and literature blooming in one country and then another, not through one great writer but always through a group of them, almost as though you had to have enough wood for a real fire, one or two big sticks were not enough. He went on about Russian writing, talking too much about Gogol, perhaps, and about the French and English. They had their great periods, Paris, London. Now it was undoubtedly New York.

  “Would the genius mind telling us his name?” a man across the table asked.

  He was involved, though not that closely, with certain poets, not as their editor, if editor was the correct word, since poems were essentially inviolable. Poetry was largely left to McCann, who had been hired more or less to replace Eddins. He was an easterner who walked with a cane. He’d had polio, both he and his roommate at Groton, the two of them had helped the stricken football captain from chapel and had come down with it. At the time, in the 1930s, there was an epidemic every fall—parents lived in terror of it. McCann was married to an English journalist who wrote for the Guardian and was often away on assignment.

  Poetry books sold few copies. Publishing them was a charitable act, Baum used to say, mainly to arouse McCann, although the books were an important ornament to the reputation of the house. Since few people read poetry after college, the struggle for prominence among poets was all the more fierce and the award of one of the important prizes or a secure academic position was often the result of intense self-promotion, flattery, and mutual agreements. There were perhaps poets in parochial cities living drab lives like Cavafy’s, but those Bowman knew were quite social and even urbane, well accustomed to the current in which they were swimming, brushing against one another as they went, a Yale Younger Poets to one, a Bollingen to the next, a Pulitzer.

  He was never able to find a house to buy. He rented one instead on a narrow road just past Bridgehampton that ended with a yellow Dead End sign at the beach. The only close neighbor was a man about his own age named Wille, who was friendly enough and parked his car on the grass near his kitchen door.

  Bowman came out on weekends beginning in late spring. There was an active life that began about then. He knew people and was invited to dinners. He bought several cases of good wine to be able to bring a couple of bottles to the hostess. The house was always unlocked. He liked to come on the train which had a bar car and seats that could be reserved. Sometimes he drove, not leaving the city after one in the afternoon in order to avoid the heaviest traffic or waiting until nine or ten o’clock when the road was emptier.

  It was knocked together and temporary compared to the rest of his life, but it was carefree and gave him the chance to know the area better and to make it more his own. When the right house finally appeared, he would be confident in buying it. He parked his car on the sandy lawn as Wille did and felt very much at home.

  16

  SUMMIT

  Beatrice had been having difficulties. In appearance she was practically unchanged, she looked just as she had for years, but she had become forgetful. She couldn’t remember her own telephone number at times or the names of certain people she knew very well. She knew their name and it would come to her afterwards, but it was embarrassing not to be able to say it.

  “I must be losing my mind,” she said. “Who was that, again?”

  “Mr. DePetris.”

  “Of course. What’s wrong with me?”

  Nothing, really. She was past seventy and in every respect in good health. Her son came to visit every other week. Only rarely did she go into the city anymore, she had everything she needed there in Summit, she said. She’d gone to New York many, many times, to see shows, to shop, but not in a long while.

  “It’s been years,” she said.

  “No, it hasn’t,” Bowman said. “We went to the museum, don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, of course,” she corrected herself.

  It was true. She remembered it then. She’d forgotten.

  Then she began having a little trouble with her balance. There were always flowers in the house, often yellow jonquils, and she dressed nicely, but walking through the dining room one afternoon, unexpectedly she fell. It felt as if the floor had shifted beneath her feet, she said. She hit her arm against the edge of the dining room table and opened a long gash. She went to the emergency room and as a matter of routine saw her regular doctor afterwards. He noticed that she was unblinking and that there was a slight, rhythmic tremor in her hand, signs of Parkinson’s disease.

  She didn’t know why her hand shook, she told her sister.

  “It shakes a little, but if I move it, it doesn’t. Do you see?”

  “Hold your hand out,” Dorothy said. “You’re right, there’s nothing.”

  But later in the kitchen Beatrice dropped a glass.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, “but here I am, can’t even hold a glass.”

  “It’s nothing,” Dorothy said. “Don’t move. I’ll sweep it up.”

  “No, Dorothy, let me. I’ll do it. It’s the second one I’ve broken this week.”

  She continued to have problems with her balance, she was no longer confident about it, and also she became a little stooped. Age doesn’t arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.

  In the end, however, it was not Parkinson’s, although for a long time the doctor believed it was. Beatrice had fallen twice more and was fumbling with the tasks of daily living. Finally, Dorothy came to live with her. The Fiori had been sold when Frank had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and had gone mad. He had also gone off with one of the waitresses. Dorothy described it as madness.

  “But he had a tumor?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Bowman saw his uncle as having had a premonition and wanting to open his long-folded wings, such as they were, a last time—he’d been in a hospital in Atlantic City and had left with a woman named Francile.

  “Have you heard from him?” Bowman asked.

  “No,” Dorothy said. “But, you know, he’s crazy.”

  In fact, they did not hear from him again.

  As time went on, Beatrice began, almost casually it seemed, to have hallucinations or pretend to. Especially in the evening she would see people who weren’t there and talk to them.

  “Who’re you talking to?” Dorothy asked.

  “Mr. Caruso,” Beatrice said.

  “Where is he?”

  “There. Isn’t that Mr. Caruso?”

  “I don’t see anyone. There’s no one there, Beatrice.”

  “That was him. He wouldn’t talk to me,” she explained.

  Caruso owned the wine and liquor store, or had. Dorothy was certain he’d retired.

  Beatrice also knew, although at first she did not say it, that she was not in her own house. Although she had lived in it for nearly fifty years, she was certain she had been taken someplace else. There began to be times when she didn’t recognize Dorothy or even her son. It turned out finally that she had something that resembled Parkinson’s and was often taken for it, a less well-known condition called Lewy body disease, the bodies being microscopic proteins that attacked nerve cells in the brain, some of the same cells affected in Parkinson’s. The diagnosis had taken a long time because the symptoms of the two diseases were similar. Hallucinations, however, were a distinction.

  The exact cause of Lewy body was not known. The symptoms gradually worsened. The end was inevitable.

  Beatrice was so often herself that it seemed the episodes were a lapse and might gradually disappear, but it turned out the opposite. Her essential person, however, was intact.

  “Dorothy,” she said one day, “do you remember when we lived at Irondequoit Bay? The old trunks that were in the attic, what was in them, I forget?”

  “Oh, my God, Beatrice, I don
’t know. A lot of stuff, clothes, old photographs.”

  “What became of all that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder. I have some keys to trunks, but I don’t know which ones.”

  “There are none.”

  “Where are they?” Beatrice asked.

  She had a recurring dream or perhaps thought about the trunks. She was sure there had been trunks. She could see them. Then she was not sure. They could have been something she imagined. It was her memory that she had the keys to but could not make fit. Nor could she make Dorothy see who had somehow come into the house. And there were the concerns of daily life. Where was the medicine that she was supposed to take?

  “Two times a day?” she asked again.

  “Yes, two.”

  “It’s hard to remember,” Beatrice complained.

  Bowman came by train, looking out at the haze of the Jersey meadows, marshes really. He had a deep memory of these meadows, they seemed a part of his blood like the lone gray silhouette of the Empire State Building on the horizon, floating as in a dream. He knew the route, beginning with the desolate rivers and inlets dark with the years. Like some ancient industrial skeleton, the Pulaski Skyway rose in the distance and looped across the waters. Nearer, in a rush, blank factories of brick with broken windows went past. Then there was Newark, the grim, lost city of Philip Roth, and churches with trees growing from the base of neglected spires. Endless quiet streets of houses, asylums, schools, all of an emptiness it seemed, intermixed with bland suburban happiness and wholesome names, Maplewood, Brick Church. The great, smooth golf courses with immaculate greens. He was of it, from it, and as he rode, unconnected to it.

  On the corner stood the diner where he had taken Vivian the first time. It was not even the diner that Hemingway wrote about, he now knew. That was in another place called Summit, near Chicago, but there had been other misconceptions at the time. He had been wrong about a number of things. He remembered, but only as a collection of certain incidents that were like photographs, what Vivian had been like. He didn’t remember her voice and only with wonder—partly with wonder—what had persuaded him that she was the girl he should marry.