All That Is

by James Salter

  “Is that all? I’ll take it,” he said airily.

  “No, but let me show it to you this weekend. You have to see it.”

  The pond could not be seen from the road. It was down below. There was a long dirt driveway that appeared to end between two ancient trees. It was a clear October morning. As they drove up, suddenly there was the house. He would never forget the first sight of it, the feeling of familiarity he immediately had though he’d had no idea of what to expect. It was a beautiful old house, like a farmhouse but in isolation near the pond. They entered through the kitchen door across a narrow porch. The kitchen itself was a large square room with open shelves and a pantry in what had been a closet. The main bedroom was downstairs. There were three small bedrooms above. The stairway banister, he noticed, was plain unfinished pine worn smooth by hands. The floorboards were wide and the windows also.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s a nice house.”

  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes, it’s really something special.”

  The walls and ceiling were in good condition. There were no leak stains or cracks. Two of the small bedrooms he thought could be combined.

  The view from upstairs was of two good-sized houses across the water, half-hidden in trees.

  “Does it have heat?” he said.

  “Yes. There’s a half basement with a furnace.”

  They walked outside and down to the pond where, not far out, the dim outline of a sunken rowboat could be seen.

  “There’s how much land, did you say?”

  “There’s all this. The property goes to the road. It’s a little over an acre.”

  “One twenty,” he said.

  “That’s all. That’s a very good price.”

  “Well, I think I’ll have to buy it.”

  “I’m so happy! I knew you’d want it.”

  “It’s going to be very nice living here. We could even get married.”

  “Yes, we could.”

  “Is that an acceptance?”

  “I would have to get a divorce.”

  “Why don’t we get married and get the divorce later?”

  “And we could live in jail,” she said. “That would be all right.”

  He bought the house, including some furnishings, for $120,000. He bought it in both their names, a country house that was ideal, big enough to have a guest or two occasionally, perfectly located, a house unto itself.

  The bank in Bridgehampton took a generous view of his assets and gave him a mortgage of $65,000. He had some difficulties coming up with the difference. He sold most of the stocks he owned and borrowed $8,000 on a line of credit.

  They closed the first week in December and moved in that very day carrying two upholstered chairs bought from an antiques—really, used furniture—dealer in Southampton. They were very happy. That night they lit a fire and made some supper. They drank a bottle of wine and while listening to music, part of another. A dreamed-of night, their first in the house. In bed she slipped the nightgown over her head and let it fall to the floor. She lay in his arms, it was like a wedding night. He took her arm and pressed his lips to the inside of her elbow in a long fervent kiss.

  Soon after came Christmas. Anet had gone to Athens to be with her father. The house as yet had little furniture, only a sofa, some chairs, two tables, and a bed. The windows had neither shades nor curtains, and it would have been stark to be there for the holidays, even with a tree. In the city, the streets were alive. It was Christmas in New York, crowds hurrying home in the early darkness, captains of the Salvation Army ringing their bells, St. Patrick’s, the brilliant theater of the great store windows, mansions of plenty, the prosperous-looking people. They were playing “Good King Wenceslas,” bartenders were wearing reindeer antlers—Christmas of the Western world, as in Berlin before the war, the deep green forests of Slovakia, Paris, Dickens’ London.

  There was a party at Baum’s. Bowman hadn’t been in the apartment for a long time. As he came in with Christine and a man in a white jacket took their coats, he thought back to having been there the first time with Vivian in her confident young naïveté.

  “Philip, it’s so good to see you,” Diana greeted him.

  “This is Christine Vassilaros,” he said.

  “Hello,” Diana said taking Christine’s hand in hers. “Please come in.”

  The room was crowded. Diana was paying special attention to Christine, no doubt having heard about her. Christine had a daughter, she learned, and asked,

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s sixteen.”

  “She must be a beauty,” Diana said with sincerity. “Our son, Julian, is in law school at Michigan. He refused to go to Harvard. It was elitist. I felt like killing him.”

  “Do you want a cigar?” Baum asked Bowman.

  “No, thanks.”

  “These are really fine. They’re Cuban. Take one, smoke it later. I’ve started smoking cigars. One a day. I like to sit and smoke one after dinner. A cigar should touch your lips exactly twenty-two times, anyway that’s what someone told me. Otherwise, as Cheever said, hick. Actually, he was talking about how to hold a cigar properly. I forget how that was.”

  “My one regret,” Diana said to Christine, “is that we didn’t have more children. I wish we had three or four.”

  “Four is a lot.”

  “The happiest days of my life were when Julian was a little boy. Nothing really compares with that. You’re fortunate,” she told Christine, “you can still have children. That’s the whole point of it, it really is. Now we’re free, more or less. We go to Italy. It’s beautiful, but then I think of the love of a little boy.”

  “I love Italy,” Baum said. “The people. You know, I call my Italian colleague and his secretary answers the phone—his assistant, I should say. Roberto! It’s wonderful to talk to you! You should be in Rome, it’s such a beautiful day, the sun is shining, you should be here! There’s nobody like them.”

  “Why do you call her his assistant?” Diana asked.

  “His secretary, then.”

  “They’re not all like that. She’s a bit of a songbird. Eduardo is nothing like that. You talk to him and he says, hello, I feel terrible, the world is a mess. He’s the publisher.”

  Other guests were coming in. Diana left to greet them. Baum stayed to talk on with Christine, he liked her looks. After the party, he asked his wife,

  “What did you think of Philip’s new girlfriend?”

  “Is she new?”

  “Well, not exactly new but certainly not old.”

  “No, she’s quite a bit younger.”

  “It’s made him a bit younger.”

  “Yes, that’s the general belief,” Diana said.

  That spring Beatrice Bowman died. She had been weak and disoriented for a long time. She thought her son was someone else, and his visits had long periods of silence when she seemed to at least be aware of his company while he sat near her and read. To the world she knew, to the few friends who had by then drifted away, to everyone except himself and Dorothy, it was no longer important that she live. What had been her life, the people she knew and the deep pool of memory and knowing, had vanished or dried up and fallen apart. Or so it seemed when she could think about it. She would not have wanted to go on, but she had not been able to prevent it. Outwardly she was still handsome if baffled, and the lines in her face were gentle. She had many times said a final good-bye.

  In contrast to her normal agitation, she died calmly. She simply did not wake one morning. Perhaps she had known something the night before, some not quite familiar sadness, a lessening of strength. Except for not breathing, one sleep was indistinguishable from the other.

  She left no instructions. Bowman agreed with Dorothy that she should be cremated, and together they went to the funeral home to arrange for it. They asked for the casket to be open, they both wanted to see her for a last time. In the silent room, there his mother lay. They had done
her hair and put some light cosmetic on her lips and cheek. He bent and kissed her brow. It seemed indecent. Some quality in her that he knew, not merely life, had been erased.

  She had never told him all she knew, nor could he remember all the days of childhood and things they had done together. She had given him his character, a part of it, the rest had formed itself somehow. He thought, with a kind of desperation, of things he would like to talk to her about or talk about once more. She had been a young woman in New York, newly married, and in the blazing summer morning had been blessed with a son.

  His stepmother, as it happened, died the same spring. He had never met her or either of the preceding ones. Someone sent him a clipping from a Houston paper. Vanessa Storrs Bowman was her name, she was seventy-three, a social figure. Examining the photo he read on until with a stab of something—it was not grief—he saw that his father had died two years earlier. He felt a strange jolt of time, as if he had been living a partly fraudulent life, and though in all the years he had never seen or heard from his father, some essential connection was now gone. Vanessa Storrs Bowman had two brothers and her father had been president of an oil company. The impression was of money, even wealth. He thought of his mother and the distant rich relative, cousin perhaps, whose mansion just off Fifth Avenue he remembered having been pointed out to him. Did he remember this or was it a dream, three or four dark granite stories, a green roof, and iron and glass doors? Perhaps it did not really exist. He had always expected to pass by it some day but never did.

  21

  AZUL

  The year he had the house, the spring of that year and the summer were the happiest time of his life although some of the earlier times he had forgotten. There hadn’t been the money to do much except buy a little furniture for the upstairs, but in the bareness, the simplicity, was ample room for happiness. There were the seasons, the trees, the grass that was a little too long sloping down to the water, the sun a mirror on the windows of the houses across from them.

  Summer mornings, the light of the world pouring in and the silence. It was a barefoot life, the cool of the night on the floorboards, the green trees if you stepped outside, the first faint cries of the birds. He arrived in a suit and didn’t put it on again until he went back to the city. The house couldn’t be locked—the catch on the kitchen door was misaligned. The sills were cracked by the weather and peeling, he’d scraped and filled some of them but hadn’t gotten around to the painting. Buying the house had meant a cash payment of more than fifty-five thousand dollars. He had managed to scrape it together. He had never been much concerned about money. He earned thirty-four thousand a year, and that didn’t include lunches and often dinners that were on the expense account. His apartment was rent-controlled, and he was paying less than half of what the rent should really be. Going to Europe twice a year was at no expense to himself, and occasionally that was true of other places, Chicago, Los Angeles. In almost every way his life was comfortable.

  Beatrice had left nothing, the long illness had used up everything she had. He expected to be his aunt Dorothy’s heir, but he had no idea of what that might amount to. Dorothy lived in a small apartment with the piano that Frank had liked to sit at in the afternoon and play the light, tinkling music she loved. She lived on a little income she had and Social Security. Every summer for a couple of weeks she visited Katrina Loes, a childhood friend who had a house in the Thousand Islands. She had never asked for anything—her needs were modest. If you ever need anything … Bowman had said. The answer was always, she didn’t.

  When Anet came back from school that summer, she had changed, although she was still loving towards her mother and even-tempered. She had felt the pull of common life, of others, a particular person perhaps, though she seemed not to have a boyfriend. She was conscious of being attractive. She was trying it out, not on Bowman. She was used to Bowman and called him Phil. She was not much in evidence through the summer, she was off with her friends, playing tennis or at one of their pools or endlessly, it seemed, talking.

  One hot afternoon, she was up in her room and they suddenly heard a terrifying scream. Christine ran to the stairs.

  “What is it? Anet!” she cried.

  Anet had rolled over on a wasp. The sting had awakened her. She was in pain and weeping. It had been so sharp and unexpected. Christine was trying to comfort her. Bowman came with a washcloth soaked in cold water.

  “You’ll be all right,” he promised. “Hold this on it. Where did it go?”

  “Where did what go?”

  “The bee.”

  “I don’t know,” Anet said, sobbing.

  “When they sting you, they lose their stinger. It tears loose. It has barbs on it. Don’t try and pull it out.”

  It had not been a bee though no one knew. Anet had been sleeping in shorts that were now half-pulled down.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said.

  “It hurts.”

  She was breathing in hitched, uneven breaths.

  “Do you see it?” she asked.

  As if they were campers, she pulled the waistband still lower, turning her head to look down at herself as she did. She was perfect except for a small area of redness.

  “It doesn’t look bad,” Bowman said with some understatement. “Now let’s see the other one,” he joked.

  “The other one is fine,” she said cooly.

  But he felt comfortable with her, treating her like a child, even his own child, and perhaps she felt it as well.

  Early one evening he sat outside smoking a cigarette and looking at the smooth surface of the pond that was absolutely still and across to the other houses where lights were already on and a car was slowly making its way, half-hidden by trees, to one of them. The sky was clear and a deepening blue. To the west he could see a bank of clouds filled with occasional blooms of light. There was no sound, it was too far off. Only the darkness of the clouds being eerily lit. Finally there came a first faint rumbling.

  Christine came out on the porch.

  “I thought I heard thunder.”

  “Yes. Look over there.”

  She sat down beside him.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.

  “Just once in a while,” he said. “I only smoke Gauloises, like the French movie stars, but you can’t get them here. This is just an ordinary cigarette.”

  “Oh, look at that,” she said.

  In the sky there had been a jagged line of intense white that went to the ground. After what seemed a long interval came a soft, muttering thunder.

  “There’s going to be a storm.”

  “I love storms. I can hear it.”

  “If you count the time you can tell how far away it is,” he said.

  “How do you do that?”

  “It’s about one mile for every five or six seconds between the lightning and the sound.”

  She waited until there was another flash of lightning and began to count.

  “What was that, about twelve seconds?”

  “Just about.”

  The thunder had been indistinct, it was hard to tell. There was now a clear bank of dark clouds, and the thunder became more threatening, like the roar of an enormous beast. The storm was coming closer, it seemed to be coming with greater speed. The sky was dark and lit by erratic flashes and voltage. A wind had risen. It smelled of rain.

  “Are we going to stay out here?” she said.

  “Just for a couple of minutes.”

  The great storm cloud, the front edge of it, was already moving over them. It was almost black and of immense size, like the side of a mountain. It seemed to cover the world. Lightning struck about half a mile away with a tremendous crackling and almost immediately it struck closer with an ear-splitting crash.

  “We’d better go in.”

  “Come with me,” she pleaded.

  “I’m coming.”

  They were barely inside when there was another great flash of lightning. The thunder seemed overhead
. From where she had been let out on the road, Anet came running towards the house and in by the kitchen door. She was frightened.

  “You should have stayed in the car!”

  It had become night. It was almost completely dark. They sat together in the living room and amid the thunder heard the first distinct sound of rain. Soon it was a torrent. It poured down. Suddenly the lights went out.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Are we all right here?” Anet cried.

  There was a loud, violent crack and the room went bright as lightning struck just outside. In that instant he could see the two of them, their arms around one another and their faces white.

  “No, no, it’s all right,” he said.

  “Can it come inside?” Anet cried.

  “No. It can’t.”

  From time to time as the rain fell he saw them in flashes that were less intense. Then almost abruptly the rain lessened. The thunder was further away. The earth seemed calmed. Finally Christine said,

  “Is it over?”

  “I think so.”

  “How long do you suppose the lights are going to be out?” Christine said.

  “We have some candles.”

  “Where?”

  “They’re in one of the kitchen drawers,” he said. “I’ll get them.”

  He found and lit one. In its faint light they sat shaken.

  “I was afraid it was going to hit the house,” Anet said. “What if it had hit the house?”

  “Do you mean, would the house catch fire? Probably. You weren’t frightened, were you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s all over. I was born during a big thunderstorm.”

  She was still unnerved.

  “Maybe you’re used to them,” she said.

  The thunder had become soft and distant.

  “Is this the only candle?” Christine said.

  “There’s just the stub of another one.”

  Outside it was now evening. After a while he went upstairs to see if the houses across the pond had any lights.

  “No,” he said coming down. “There’ll be lights in town. Let’s go in and get something to eat, and we’ll find out what’s going on.”