All That Is

by James Salter

  “I threw them away,” she said.

  “It was a lot of dishes,” Beckerman commented. “We kept a kosher house.”

  “I’m not kosher,” Monique said.

  She was from Algeria. Her family were French colonists, pieds-noirs, and when the trouble started they left and came back to France. She became a journalist. It was for a right-wing Catholic paper, but she had nothing to do with the politics, she only wrote book and theater reviews and sometimes interviewed writers. She met Beckerman through some friends.

  As he sat there, Bowman was more and more conscious of not being one of them, of being an outsider. They were a people, they somehow recognized and understood one another, even as strangers. They carried it in their blood, a thing you could not know. They had written the Bible with all that had sprung from it, Christianity, the first saints, yet there was something about them that drew hatred and made them reviled, their ancient rituals perhaps, their knowledge of money, their respect for justice—they were always in need of it. The unimaginable killing in Europe had gone through them like a scythe—God abandoned them—but in America they were never harmed. He envied them. It was not their looks that marked them anymore. They were confident, clean-featured.

  Baum was not religious and did not believe in a God who killed or let live according to an unknowable design unconnected to whether you were decent, devout, or useless to the world. Goodness had no meaning to God, although there had to be good. The world was chaos without it. He lived as he lived because of that and seldom thought of it. In his deepest feelings, however, he accepted that he was one of his people and the God they believed in would always be his as well.

  “Do you go to France?” Monique asked.

  “Not very often,” Bowman said.

  She had a rather coarse complexion, he observed, and was not beautiful, but she was the one you would pick out. She might be an ex-girlfriend of Sartre’s, he thought idly, though he had no idea what any of them were like. Sartre was short and ugly and made very frank arrangements that he could imagine her understanding.

  He decided to say,

  “Do you miss living in France?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What things do you miss?”

  “Life here is easier,” she said, “but in the summer we go to France.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “We go to Saint-Jean-de-Luz.”

  “That sounds very nice. Do you have a house there?”

  “Near there,” she said. “You should come.”

  It was no longer women of an Eastern European swarm, the toiling mothers and wives. It was now women who were glamorous and smart as in nineteenth-century Vienna, a breed of women, New York was known for them. No one called them Jewesses anymore. The word evoked rabbinates and pious, backward villages along the Pale. They were stylish, ambitious, at the center of things. Their allure. He had never gone with one. Their lives had warmth and no scorn of pleasure or material things. He might have married one and become part of that world, slowly being accepted into it like a convert. He might have lived among them in that particular family density that had been formed by the ages, been a familiar presence at seder tables, birthday gatherings, funerals, wearing a hat and throwing a handful of earth into the grave. He felt some regret at not having done it, of not having had the chance. On the other hand, he could not really imagine it. He would never have belonged.

  26

  NOTHING IS CHANCE

  A train had just left and in the crowd slowly making its way up the stairs he was almost certain he saw her, not looking his way. His heart jumped.

  “Anet!” he called.

  She saw him and stopped, people passing around her.

  “Hi,” she said. “Hello.”

  They moved to one side.

  “How have you been?” he asked.

  “I’ve been fine.”

  “Let’s go to the top of the stairs.”

  He had been going down to catch the train. If he had been a minute earlier he would have been standing on the platform and getting on as she got off, almost certainly at another door, and he would never have seen her.

  “How have you been?” he said again. “Are you in school? It’s been a while.”

  “No, I’m still in school, but I’m taking a break. I’m taking a year off.”

  She was wearing no lipstick. There was the piercing squeal of another train coming in and the groan of the cars.

  “So, what are you going to be doing?”

  “This is so unbelievable. Actually, I’m looking for a job.”

  “Really. What kind of job?”

  She laughed a little in saying it,

  “In fact, I was looking for a job in publishing.”

  “Publishing? That’s a surprise. How did that come about?”

  “I’m a Lit major,” she said, making a little face of disbelief.

  She was so unaffected that the pleasure from seeing her welled up.

  “Well, it’s lucky we bumped into each other, isn’t it? Look, I’m having a little thing tomorrow for a friend in British publishing, Edina Dell, but some other people will be there. It’s just drinks. Why don’t you come?”

  “Tomorrow?” she said.

  “Yes, at about five-thirty. At the apartment. Do you remember where I live? I’ll write it down. Here.” He wrote it on a card.

  They went up to the street together to say good-bye. They stood for a few moments on the corner. He was unaware of the buildings around them, the traffic, the tawdry signs of the shops. She was going east. He watched her walk away, younger and somehow better than others in the crowd. He had always liked her.

  He doubted she would come. She must have known about the trial and its consequences and thought of him as the enemy. As it happened, he was wrong.

  She arrived a little late. She came into the room almost unnoticed to find people drinking and talking and also at least one person her own age, Edina’s daughter, Siri, slender and half-black with great bushy hair. Edina was wearing a long, gauzy dress of violet and rose. She took Anet’s hand and said, “Who is this stunning girl?”

  “This is Anet Vassilaros,” Bowman said.

  “You’re Greek.”

  “No. My father is,” Anet said.

  “The great love of my life was a Greek man,” Edina said. “I used to fly to Athens to see him. He had a fabulous family apartment there. I could never get him to come back with me. Do you work in publishing? No, you’re still in school.”

  “No, I’m actually looking for a publishing job.”

  “I shouldn’t think you’d have to look long.”

  Bowman introduced her to several others. This is Anet Vassilaros, he said. There were two other women about Edina’s age, women who worked and whose names she didn’t get. There was a tall English agent, Tony something. Bowman had bought flowers and arranged them around.

  She talked to Siri, who had a soft voice and was in school in London somewhere.

  “Is she an adopted daughter?” Anet asked Bowman when she had a chance.

  “No, she’s her real daughter. She has a Sudanese father.”

  “She’s really beautiful.”

  Tony had left, saying good-bye to her. By seven-thirty, most of the others were going. Anet got ready to leave.

  “No, don’t go yet,” Bowman said to her. “We haven’t had a moment to really talk. Sit down. I’m just going to turn the TV on. There’s a piece about a writer of mine at the end of the news.”

  It would be a few minutes. He turned off the sound and as they sat there, inevitably thought of her mother. He remembered the images shifting silently on the screen like jumps in reality, the face of the actress as she pleaded and then threw open her coat, defiant and submitting.

  “You know, I never had the chance to tell you that I’m sorry about what happened,” Anet said. “I mean about my mother and the house. I don’t really know all the details.”

  “They’re not worth going into.
”

  “You don’t hate her?”

  “No, no,” he said easily.

  He was sitting with her daughter now, to whom he had always been careful not to show too much attention or false affection. He was able now to think freely about her.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  It was a painting on the jacket of a book on Picasso that was on the coffee table, a disjointed portrait of eyes and a mouth out of place.

  “Marie-Thérèse Walter,” he said.

  “Who is Marie-Thérèse Walter?”

  “She’s a famous model of Picasso’s. He met her when she was seventeen. He saw her outside a Metro station and gave her his card. He began to paint her and fell in love with her. They had a child. Picasso was much older than she was—I’m leaving out a lot of it—but when he died she committed suicide.”

  “How old was she then?”

  “Oh, she must have been in her sixties. I think she was born in about 1910. Picasso was 1881. I just read that again the other day.”

  “Do you know what Sophie called you? Do you remember Sophie? She called you the professor.”

  “Did she? Where is Sophie?”

  “She’s at Duke.”

  “You know what I have to say to Sophie?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, well, I don’t really have anything to say to her. Listen, do you want to do something?” he said. “Stay here a minute.”

  He went into the kitchen. She could hear the refrigerator door open and after a few moments close. He came back with something in his hand, a small, folded piece of white paper. He put it on the table and began to unfold it. It was a packet with silver foil inside. She watched him open the foil and there was a lump of something dark, like wet tobacco.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s hash.”

  There was the moment like the one at a dance when before taking your partner’s hand for the first time, you know without touching whether he or she can dance or be any good.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked calmly.

  “From Tony. The tall English fellow. He gave it to me. It’s Moroccan. Shall we try it? You use this little white pipe.”

  He started carefully pushing some of the brown lump into the bowl of the pipe.

  “Do you do this a lot?”

  “No,” he said. “Never.”

  “Don’t pack it too tight. You should have said you smoked it all the time.”

  “You’d have seen right through me,” he said.

  He lit a match and held it close to the bowl, sucking on the stem. Nothing happened. He lit another match and after a few tries drew in a little smoke. He inhaled it and coughed, handing the pipe to her. She drew on it and passed it back to him. They took turns without talking. In a few minutes they were high. He felt a gorgeous well-being and sense of ascent. He had occasionally smoked grass, not very often, sometimes at dinner parties, sometimes in the library afterwards with the hostess and one or another of the guests. He remembered a dizzying night in a divorcée’s apartment when he’d asked where the bathroom was, and she took him through a number of rooms into hers, her bathroom, and turned on the light and he was in a palace of mirrors, bottles, and creams, brightly lit. There were overlapped towels on the floor.

  “Should I leave you alone?” she had said.

  “Just for a minute,” he managed to say.

  “Are you sure?”

  And once he’d been given a couple of joints by a handsome Romanian he happened to meet. He smoked one of them with Eddins in the office, and they were laughing helplessly when Gretchen came in. They thought she had gone home.

  “What are you guys doing?” she said. “I know what you’re doing.”

  Bowman tried to keep from laughing.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said and broke out laughing again.

  “You two are really stoned,” she said.

  This was different. He felt things shimmering, shifting. He looked at her as she drew on the pipe, her brows, the line of her jaw. He was able to observe her closely. She had shut her eyes.

  “Are you wearing perfume?” he said.

  “Perfume?” she said vaguely.

  “You are.”

  “No.”

  He took the pipe. The hash was almost gone. He drew in and looked to see if there was a glow. He touched the ash. It was cold. They sat for a while in silence.

  “How are you?” he said.

  She didn’t answer. The TV was playing without sound.

  She smiled and tried to but couldn’t express something.

  “We should go out,” she said.

  “It’s too late. Too late. The museums will be closed. I don’t know if you want to do that anyway.”

  “Let’s go out,” she said and stood up.

  He tried to focus on the idea.

  “We can’t. I’m too high.”

  “Nobody will know,” she said.

  “All right. If you say so.”

  He composed himself. He knew he was incapable of going anywhere.

  On the street there were few people. They went a little way down the block. He was too loose.

  “No, I don’t want to walk,” he said. “Let’s take a cab.”

  It seemed almost immediately that one stopped. As they got in, the driver said,

  “Where to?”

  “Anet.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you live? You want to go home? Oh,” he said to the driver, “just drive around.”

  “Where do you want to go?” the driver said.

  “Drive down, no, go across Fifty-Ninth to Park, no, don’t do that. Go to the West Side Highway and go uptown. Then I’ll tell you.”

  They sat back as they drove. It was now dark and they were going along the river. On the far side was an almost continuous line of buildings, houses and apartments lit like hives, some of them very big, bigger than he seemed to remember. He was going to explain it, how there used to be nothing aross there, but it was of no interest. Light shone on the surface of the river. He remembered the ride with Christine, the night he first met her. Cars went past them. The necklace of the George Washington Bridge hung like a strand of jewels.

  “Where are we going?” she said. “We’ve been driving and driving.”

  He told the driver to turn around.

  “You’re right, that’s enough of this,” he said to her. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  After a while he said,

  “Driver, get off at Ninety-Sixth Street, will you? Go over to Second Avenue. We’ll go to a place I know,” he said to her.

  They finally stopped at Elio’s. He managed to pay the cab driver, counting the money out twice. Inside there was a crowd. The bartender said hello. The tables in front that were the best were all filled. An editor he knew saw him and wanted to talk. The owner, whom he knew very well, told them they would have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes for a table. He said they would eat at the bar. This is Anet Vassilaros, he said.

  The bar was equally busy. The bartender, Alberto—he knew him—spread a large white napkin on the bar in front of each of them and put down knives and forks and a folded napkin.

  “Something to drink?” he asked.

  “Anet, do you want anything? No,” he decided. “I don’t think so.”

  He ordered a glass of red wine, however, and she drank some of it. Conversations were going on all around them. The backs of people. He was nothing like her father, she was thinking, he was in a different world. They sat side by side. People were edging past. The bartender was taking orders for drinks from the waiters, making them, and ringing up checks. He came towards them holding two dishes of food. The owner came while they were eating and apologized for not having been able to seat them.

  “No, this was better,” Bowman said. “Did I introduce you?”

  “Yes. Anet.”

  The editor stopped by them on his way out. Bowman didn’t both
er to introduce him.

  “You haven’t introduced us,” the editor said.

  “I thought you knew one another,” Bowman said.

  “No, we don’t.”

  “I can’t do it right now,” Bowman said.

  The owner came back and sat on a stool beside them. Things were becoming a little quieter. It had been a busy night—she hadn’t had time to eat dinner herself. People leaving paused to say good night.

  “Let me buy you an after-dinner drink,” she said. “Do you like rum? We got in some really good rum. Let me get you some. Alberto, where’s that bottle of the good rum?”

  The rum was strong but extremely smooth. Anet didn’t drink any and the three of them sat talking for a while. More people came in, and the owner left them. They went back to the apartment. They had left the party, and Anet curled up on the couch. He gently removed her shoes. He felt colonial for some reason, as if in Kenya or Martinique, the heat of the rum. She was asleep. He felt completely assured. He gathered up her legs, put an arm beneath her, and carried her into the bedroom. She hadn’t protested but as he laid her on the bed he felt she was not asleep. Nevertheless, he went out of the room for a few moments. He looked at the couch where she had been lying. It was all happening, it seemed, by itself. He went back into the bedroom and quietly, after taking off his own shoes, lay down beside her. Before he could consider anything else she half-turned and rolled against him, like a child. He put his arm around her and began slowly caressing her back, slipping his hand beneath her blouse. The feel of her bare skin was glorious. He wanted to touch her everywhere. Their heads were close as they lay there, and after a while they began to kiss.

  From then it became more intense and also uncertain. He had pulled up her skirt rather than trying to remove it. Her legs were incredibly youthful. She was wearing panties and he began slipping them off, but she resisted. He caressed her. She was responsive, but when he tried once again she pressed her legs together.

  “No,” she said. “Please.”

  She moved from side to side and pushed his hand away, but he was insistent. Finally, not without relief, she gave in. She became his partner in it, more or less, and at length felt him climax, not realizing it at the time. They lay quietly together.