All That Is

by James Salter

  “Then what good is it?” she asked.

  “You cannot open it here,” he said.

  When the waiter came back with the bottle, she refused to take it.

  “I don’t want it,” she decided. “Do you have some paper to put it in?”

  “I’m sorry, madam.”

  “Well, I can’t walk in the street with it.”

  She stood looking at him. Then she handed him money, but he didn’t take it. The waiter did. She stuffed the remaining bills into her bag carelessly. They brought her the wrapped bottle, and she asked the man at the next table which way was it to Hartley’s?

  “To the left,” he said.

  “The left.”

  “Yes.”

  She said good night to the headwaiter. He nodded.

  “Good night.”

  Outside she turned to the right and a minute or so later passed by the window going in the other direction. She was seen in Hartley’s sitting, composed, smoking a cigarette. The wine was in a cooler beside the table.

  Wiberg was now Sir Bernard Wiberg though he looked like an Arab king—a thousand camels would be tethered at his grave. He’d been to Stockholm twice for the awarding of the Nobel Prize and had the distinction of having published the winners. He had, in fact, been a factor in their winning. He’d made sure their names were often mentioned, not too often and not too boldly for it was possible to upset the flow of opinion especially as it had to make its way through the panel of Swedish judges, but Wiberg could help make a writer distinguished—he had an instinct for these matters just as he did for publicity and promotion. Certain books could attract attention, certain writers at a particular time. Even excellence, he knew, had to be presold.

  Unlike other rich men he did not ask himself if he was truly that much better than a down-at-the-heels man he passed on the street. He had perhaps a deeply buried fear of losing all his money, but it was nothing like the fear a woman has. He smoked Cohiba cigars and sometimes got a box of them to Baum in New York. He watched his weight. His wife was there to remind him not to eat a number of things he was fondest of. She would sometimes say, when he pleaded, oh, all right, but just a very small piece. At a large dinner, catching sight of him about to eat something forbidden, she would merely wag her finger discreetly. She was in charge of all domestic matters. Any of her husband’s desires, he communicated through her. The house in the country was something she had encouraged him to buy although he didn’t care for the country. She wanted a small house near Deauville, but he didn’t like France. He liked Claridge’s, being among his equals, talking to young women from time to time. He liked sitting in the study across from the Bacon, which, as it happened, his wife disliked.

  It was done by a disturbed person, she said.

  “He’s not as disturbed as you think,” Wiberg said. “Quite the opposite. I think of him as being essentially free, if you can call someone who is a slave to his desires free.”

  “What are the desires?”

  “Drink. Sadistic lovers. It’s not only the desires. The colors are so gorgeous. The black, the flesh color, the purple. You can almost hear some frightening music or silence.”

  “I especially don’t like the teeth.”

  They had been to a show of Bacon portraits.

  “Or the way he turns faces into awful custards,” she said.

  Catarina was still very handsome although she had not performed in some years. Her figure was good, she still possessed a waist, and her throat was smooth. She looked much younger than she was. She still called him her cochon and he was interesting to her except when talking at length about himself. His taste for Bacon was inexplicable. He also owned a Corot, many prints, and a painting by Braque.

  Wiberg had never met Bacon, he had only read about him, the disorderly life, the years in Morocco with young men quite cheap. In Bacon there was a sheen of awful sanctimony. There was love and disgust of the flesh and staggering dissolution. There was all that had happened in the world during one’s life. Bacon also had the gift of language. He had gotten it in Irish kitchens and drawing rooms and in the stables where, as a boy, he’d been had by the grooms. His eloquence came from his father’s coldness and disapproval and the great freedom of finding his own life in Berlin with its vices and Paris, of course. He belonged to the netherworld with its bitchy language, gossip, and betrayals. He had never concealed himself or tried to conform to any idea of artist, which allowed him to become a greater one. His lovers had drunk or drugged themselves to death, and amid the rubbish of it all, the taste for fine clothes and disdain of what others were tied to, his idleness and obsessions had spattered the walls and set him free. He never painted over on a canvas. It was always once and for all.

  There was a superb biography waiting to be written, Wiberg felt, but only after Bacon died. Bacon had been born in 1909, eleven years before Wiberg. It would be a matter of luck.

  As it happened, Enid Armour knew Bacon. She mentioned it one night at a dinner and Wiberg was immediately interested. She had met him at least twice in the club in Soho he always went to. Henrietta Moraes had introduced her. What was he like? Wiberg asked.

  “He was friendly. We got along quite well. I was in hopes he might like to do a portrait of me and make me famous. I know you have that painting of his.”

  “I should have bought more,” Wiberg confessed.

  She was not looking well these days, he thought. She looked a little worn. He saw her only on occasion now, always socially, but still it was a surprise that she’d met Francis Bacon even though she was in that sort of crowd. She was still by herself as far as he knew. She had several times in the past suggested that he might find some position for her—she could do publicity perhaps, but he knew it would be the wrong thing to employ her. Catarina would know of it, and he didn’t want to defend having hired her. Her glamour, anyway, seemed a little fatigued. There were women who were always interesting even after the waning of their attractiveness, however, and he had always liked Enid’s frankness. She was not self-pitying.

  “I’m afraid I’ve passed the peak. You can only rely, I mean really rely, on your looks for so long,” she said dejectedly.

  “We all have the same problem,” he said.

  Was he joking?

  “You’ll always be handsome,” she said.

  “Less and less, I’m afraid.”

  “As long as you have your money,” she said.

  She’d been in a scene in some restaurant, he’d heard.

  “Yes,” she admitted wearily.

  “Who were you with?”

  “No one.”

  “No one?”

  “I was just having dinner by myself.”

  She had become less careful with herself, she knew. She had drunk far too much that evening and spent a lot of money. She didn’t care to remember it. She had gone on to some place where there was a woman sitting with her dog on the banquette. She’d reached over to stroke it.

  “What a lovely dog. What’s its name?”

  She didn’t remember what the woman had said.

  “I had a magnificent dog,” she said. “He was a racing dog. A champion, the most beautiful dog. Have you ever seen them run? They literally fly. The most beautiful thing, really, and so gentle, that’s what’s amazing. So really gentle and brave.” She knew she was becoming maudlin. “You can’t help but love them. It was at a time when I had no cares.”

  25

  IL CANTINORI

  Bowman was a friend of the Baums’ though he and Robert Baum were never strong personal friends. Aside from occasional parties they rarely saw one another in the evening, but they were having dinner one night at a restaurant that was one of Baum’s favorites, Il Cantinori, in the large room that was like someone’s own dining room but filled with white tablecloths and flowers and on a quiet street. The service was good—Baum was well known there, of course—and the food excellent. He and Diana had just been to Italy. It was always difficult, she said, to come home. She adore
d Italy. Apart from everything else, it was one of the few places where one’s hopes for the future could be restored. Beautiful, unspoiled fields and hills. Great houses that families had lived in for five hundred years. It was deeply consoling. Also the general sweetness of the people. She had wanted to go to the post office and asked for directions from a man standing outside a shop. He was explaining it to her when a passerby stopped to say that was not the best way and described another. The men began arguing back and forth until finally the passerby said, Signora, per piacere, viene, and began leading her down a series of small streets and across a square to an imposing building, like a national bank, where she could buy some stamps.

  “Where else in the world would they do that?” she said.

  Over the years, Diana had become an influential figure and a woman of principled opinion, often feared. She was a serious person. Fashionable and chic were for her words of criticism, even contempt. What she wanted was your politics and your opinions, if any, about books. She went to movies because she enjoyed them, but she did not take them seriously. The theater was a different matter. She was not beautiful—she never had been and it was no longer of importance—but she had an enviable face, even to the slight darkness beneath her eyes, and a well-defined position.

  She was fiercely loyal and expected loyalty in return. A journalist she knew who was a friend had written a long piece on Robert Baum, interviewed in his office and over several lunches. Baum could be jaunty. His house, on its own and together with one or two others, represented at least half of American literature. There was really no one above him. He had changed little over the years although he was wearing more expensive clothes and sometimes a felt hat. He could be charming and casually say, oh, fuck them or him as readily as any agent. He took care of his writers but was not, in private, always reverent about them. The article had quoted him referring to “major writers” and “major frauds.” Also “major, major writers.” Diana had found it embarrassing. At a reception she bumped into the journalist, who asked, “You’re not angry with me?”

  “No, just indifferent,” Diana said.

  She was never evasive. She had a slight New York accent, but she was not New York as only people from elsewhere can be, she was the genuine article. When she liked or championed a writer it was a crown for them although not one without weight. But she respected and defended them. To a young woman who had been telling stories of a brief affair with Saul Bellow to editors all over town, she had said coldly,

  “Look, that simply isn’t done. You have to earn the right to betray an important writer.”

  Diana had grown up, in the years before the war, on a diet of politics and current events in an apartment at the outer limit of respectability, far up on Central Park West. Her father had a small textile importing business and like everyone else had to struggle during the Depression, but the family sat down together every evening for supper and talked about what was happening in the city and the world as well as what was happening at school. From the time she was eight years old she read the Times every day, the four of them did, including the editorial page. No other newspaper was allowed in the house. In high school she read the Daily News on the subway with a feeling of sin.

  She revered her father, whose name was Jacob Lindner. She liked his hair, his smell, his solid legs. The vision of him in the morning in her parents’ small bedroom in his undershirt as he finished getting dressed was one of the prime images of her childhood. She loved his kindness and strength. In the end, with a longtime friend, he invested far more than he should have in some property in Jersey City and they could not keep up the mortgage. The bank foreclosed, and they were wiped out. He said nothing except to his wife, but they all knew. We’ll be all right, he told them, somehow.

  Years after, on the subway, a disturbing thing happened to her. She was sitting across from a bag lady, a poor old woman with all her possessions in a plastic bag.

  “Hello, Diana,” the woman said quietly.

  “What?”

  She looked at the woman.

  “How is Robert?” the woman asked. “Are you still writing?”

  She hadn’t written since college. She must have misheard, but suddenly she recognized who it was, a classmate, a girl she had known named Jean Brand who had been in college with her and had gotten married just afterwards. She had been good-looking. Now there were gaps where her perfect teeth had been. Diana opened her bag and took all her money out of her purse. She pressed it into her friend’s hand.

  “Here. Take this,” she managed to say.

  The woman reluctantly took the money.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. Then, “I’m all right.”

  Diana thought of her father. No one had helped him. He never recovered from the loss. We’ll be all right, he would say.

  She told Robert the story, but no one else. Merely telling it upset her. She had met Robert when she was eighteen. He was attracted to her but she was too young—he took her to be fifteen at the most. He was already a man. He had been in the war. When they got married, Diana had almost no sexual experience. She’d never known another man. I doubt that my mother ever knew another man, she said, and what did she miss? I don’t think anything.

  She was completely satisfied by marriage, by the intimacies that really could not be found elsewhere. She knew that views on that had changed, that young women were now much freer, especially before marriage and that second and even third marriages were common and often happier, but all of that was outside her own life. She and her husband were inseparable. It was deeper even than marriage, but, oh, she had loved her father. She had been formed by his standards and ideals.

  There was an idea that Baum had perhaps been involved with a woman in the office, and that Diana had known of it—she certainly would have known—but whatever she and her husband said concerning it, no one knew. The woman, who had gone on to another job as a publicist, was a tall, unmarried Catholic woman named Ann Hennessy, long-limbed, with a somewhat reserved personality. She was unmarried at thirty-eight and had some sort of past. Baum liked her sense of humor. He had often gone on long lunches with her. They might be seen together but never appeared to be hiding anything. She had gone to Frankfurt twice.

  Bowman liked Diana very much although he was always a bit cautious with her. He liked her, he was certain, more than she liked him or more than she showed, but that night at the restaurant she was unusually open, as if they were often together.

  “I’d like to live in Italy,” she mused aloud.

  “Who wouldn’t, darling,” Baum said.

  “One thing I always think of, in Italy they didn’t round up the Jews. Mussolini wouldn’t allow it, say what you like about him.” The Germans did that.

  “No, that came later,” Baum said. “Mussolini was happy to let Ezra Pound broadcast though. He thought that was OK.”

  “Oh, Ezra Pound,” Diana said. “Ezra Pound was crazy. Who listened to Ezra Pound?”

  “Probably not a lot of people. I think it was shortwave, anyway, but it was the idea of it.”

  “I don’t think they should have given him that prize, the Bollingen. They did it as soon as they could. It was too soon for that. You don’t honor someone who’s thrown sewage on top of you and stirred up ignorance and hatred.”

  Baum had fought in the war, but he knew and had even published men who’d avoided it, who’d managed to get deferments or some way fail the physical, but that was only craven. It was different than aiding the enemy, different than finally going back to Italy, landing in Naples and giving the Fascist salute.

  “I was against it,” he said.

  “Yes, but you didn’t say anything. Don’t you agree with me?” she said to Bowman.

  “I think I was against it at the time.”

  “At the time? That was when it was crucial.”

  They were interrupted by a well-dressed man in a dark suit who had come to the table and said,

  Hello, Bobby.” And to Diana, “
Hi, ya, Toots.”

  He looked prosperous and athletic. His well-shaved cheeks almost gleamed. He was a friend and an early backer named Donald Beckerman.

  “I don’t want to interrupt your dinner,” he said. “I wanted Monique to meet you. Sweetheart,” he said to the woman with him, “this is Bob and Diana Baum. He’s a big-shot publisher. This is my wife, Monique.”

  She was dark-haired with a wide mouth and the look of someone smart and unmanageable.

  “Sit down for a minute, won’t you?” Baum said to them.

  “So, how are things going?” Beckerman said when they sat. “Any new best-sellers?”

  He was one of three brothers who had gone into business together, investments, and made a lot of money. The middle brother had died.

  “I’m Don,” he said to Bowman reaching out his hand.

  The waiter had come to the table.

  “Will you be having dinner, sir?” he asked.

  “No, we’re at a table back there. We’re just sitting here for a few minutes.

  “Bobby and I were in prep school together,” Beckerman said. “We were the only two Jews in the class. In the whole school, I think.”

  He had a winning smile.

  “Ever go to one of the reunions?” he asked Baum. “I went about seven or eight years ago. You want to know something? Nothing has changed. It was terrible to see them all again. I only stayed the one evening.”

  “You didn’t see DeCamp?”

  It was a classmate who was a rebel that Baum liked.

  “No, I didn’t see him. He wasn’t there. I don’t know what ever happened to him. Did you ever hear?”

  While they were talking, his wife said to Bowman,

  “Have you known Donnal a long time?”

  “No, not long.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  She was Beckerman’s second wife. They’d been married for a little more than two years. They lived in his large, corner apartment in an expensive building near the armory. Monique had made it very comfortable. She had put a lot of his former wife’s furniture out on the street and gotten rid of all the dishes.