Dusk and Other Stories

by James Salter

  “Generosity purifies,” he said. He was later to tell her that words were no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints, he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it.

  His face was dark, his features deep. He was part of another, a mysterious race. She was aware of how different her own face was with its wide mouth, its gray eyes, slow, curious, clear as a stream. She was aware also that the dress she wore, the depth of the chairs, the dimensions of this room afloat now in evening, all of these were part of an immersion into the flow of a great life. Her heart was beating slowly but hard. She had never felt so sure of herself, so bewildered by the ease with which it all was opening.

  “I’m suspicious and grasping,” he said. He was beginning his confessions. “I recognize that.” Later he told her that in his entire life he had only been free for an hour, and that hour was always with her.

  She asked no questions. She recognized him. In her own apartment the lights were burning. The air of the city, bitter as acid, was absolutely still. She did not breathe it. She was breathing another air. She had not smiled once as yet. He later told her that this was the most powerful thing of all that had attracted him. Her breasts, he said, were like those of black tribal girls in the National Geographic.

  THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GOETHEANUM

  In the garden, standing alone, he found the young woman who was a friend of the writer William Hedges, then unknown but even Kafka had lived in obscurity, she said, and so moreover had Mendel, perhaps she meant Mendeleyev. They were staying in a little hotel across the Rhine. No one could seem to find it, she said.

  The river there flowed swiftly, the surface was alive. It carried things away, broken wood and branches. They spun around, went under, emerged. Sometimes pieces of furniture passed, ladders, windows. Once, in the rain, a chair.

  They were living in the same room, but it was completely platonic. Her hand, he noticed, bore no ring or jewelry of any kind. Her wrists were bare.

  “He doesn’t like to be alone,” she said. “He’s struggling with his work.” It was a novel, still far from finished though parts were extraordinary. A fragment had been published in Rome. “It’s called The Goetheanum,” she said. “Do you know what that is?”

  He tried to remember the curious word already dissolving in his mind. The lights inside the house had begun to appear in the blue evening.

  “It’s the one great act of his life.”

  The hotel she had spoken of was small with small rooms and letters in yellow across the facade. There were many buildings like it. From the cool flank of the cathedral it was visible amid them, below and a little downstream. Also through the windows of antique shops and alleys.

  Two days later he saw her from a distance. She was unmistakable. She moved with a kind of negligent grace, like a dancer whose career is ended. The crowd ignored her.

  “Oh,” she greeted him, “yes, hello.”

  Her voice seemed vague. He was sure she did not recognize him. He didn’t know exactly what to say.

  “I was thinking about some of the things you told me …” he began.

  She stood with people pushing past, her arms filled with packages. The street was hot. She did not understand who he was, he was certain of it. She was performing simple errands, those of a remote and saintly couple.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “I’m really not myself.”

  “We met at Sarren’s,” he explained.

  “Yes, I know.”

  A silence followed. He wanted to say something quite simple to her but she was preventing it.

  She had been to the museum. When Hedges worked he had to be alone, sometimes she would find him asleep on the floor.

  “He’s crazy,” she said. “Now he’s sure there’ll be a war. Everything’s going to be destroyed.”

  Her own words seemed to disinterest her. The crowd was pulling her away.

  “Can I walk with you for a minute?” he asked. “Are you going toward the bridge?”

  She looked both ways.

  “Yes,” she decided.

  They went down the narrow streets. She said nothing. She glanced in shop windows. She had a mouth which curved downward, a serving girl’s mouth, a girl from small towns.

  “Are you interested in painting?” he heard her say.

  “Yes.”

  In the museum there were Holbeins and Hodlers, El Grecos, Max Ernst. The silence of long salons. In them one understood what it meant to be great.

  “Do you want to go tomorrow?” she said. “No, tomorrow we’re going somewhere. Perhaps the day after?”

  That day he woke early, already nervous. The room seemed empty. The sky was yellow with light. The surface of the river, between stone banks, was incandescent. The water rushed in fragments white as fire, at their center one could not even look.

  By nine the sky had faded, the river was broken into silver. At ten it was brown, the color of soup. Barges and old-fashioned steamers were working slowly upstream or going swiftly down. The piers of the bridges trailed small wakes.

  A river is the soul of a city, only water and air can purify. At Basel, the Rhine lies between well-established stone banks. The trees are carefully trimmed, the old houses hidden behind them.

  He looked for her everywhere. He crossed the Rheinbrucke and, watching faces, went to the open market through the crowds. He searched among the stalls. Women were buying flowers, they boarded streetcars and sat with the bunches in their laps. In the Borse restaurant fat men were eating, their small ears close to their heads.

  She was nowhere to be found. He even entered the cathedral, expecting for a moment to find her waiting. There was no one. The city was turning to stone. The pure hour of sunlight had passed, there was nothing left now but a raging afternoon that burned his feet. The clocks struck three. He gave up and returned to the hotel. There was an edge of white paper in his box. It was a note, she would meet him at four.

  In excitement he lay down to think. She had not forgotten. He read it again. Were they really meeting in secret? He was not certain what that meant. Hedges was forty, he had almost no friends, his wife was somewhere back in Connecticut, he had left her, he had renounced the past. If he was not great, he was following the path of greatness which is the same as disaster, and he had the power to make one devote oneself to his life. She was with him constantly. I’m never out of his sight, she complained. Nadine: it was a name she had chosen herself.

  She was late. They ended up going to tea at five o’clock; Hedges was busy reading English newspapers. They sat at a table overlooking the river, the menus in their hands long and slim as airline tickets. She seemed very calm. He wanted to keep looking at her. Hummersalat, he was reading somehow, rump steak. She was very hungry, she announced. She had been at the museum, the paintings made her ravenous.

  “Where were you?” she said.

  Suddenly he realized she had expected him. There were young couples strolling the galleries, their legs washed in sunlight. She had wandered among them. She knew quite well what they were doing: they were preparing for love. His eyes slipped.

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  She ate asparagus, then a goulash soup, and after that a cake she did not finish. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps they had no money, she and Hedges, that it was her only meal of the day.

  “No,” she said. “William has a sister who’s married to a very rich man. He can get money there.”

  It seemed she had the faintest accent. Was it English?

  “I was born in Genoa,” she told him.

  She quoted a few lines of Valéry which he later found out were incorrect. Afternoons torn by wind, the stinging sea … She adored Valéry. An anti-Semite, she said.

  She described a trip to Dornach, it was forty minutes away by streetcar, then a long walk from the station where she had stood arguing with Hedges about whi
ch way to go, it always annoyed her that he had no sense of direction. It was uphill, he was soon out of breath.

  Dornach had been chosen by the teacher Rudolf Steiner to be the center of his realm. There, not far from Basel, beyond the calm suburbs, he had dreamed of establishing a community with a great central building to be named after Goethe, whose ideas had inspired it, and in 1913 the cornerstone for it was finally laid. The design was Steiner’s own, as were all the details, techniques, the paintings, the specially engraved glass. He invented its construction just as he had its shape.

  It was to be built entirely of wood, two enormous domes which intersected, the plot of that curve itself was a mathematical event. Steiner believed only in curves, there were no right angles anywhere. Small, tributary domes like helmets contained the windows and doors. Everything was wood, everything except the gleaming Norwegian slates that covered the roof. The earliest photographs showed it surrounded by scaffolding like some huge monument, in the foreground were groves of apple trees. The construction was carried on by people from all over the world, many of them abandoned professions and careers. By the spring of 1914 the roof timbers were in position, and while they were still laboring the war broke out. From the nearby provinces of France they could actually hear the rumble of cannon. It was the hottest month of summer.

  She showed him a photograph of a vast, brooding structure.

  “The Goetheanum,” she said.

  He was silent. The darkness of the picture, the resonance of the domes began to invade him. He submitted to it as to the mirror of a hypnotist. He could feel himself slipping from reality. He did not struggle. He longed to kiss the fingers which held the postcard, the lean arms, the skin which smelled like lemons. He felt himself trembling, he knew she could see it. They sat like that, her gaze was calm. He was entering the gray, the Wagnerian scene before him which she might close at any moment like a matchbox and replace in her bag. The windows resembled an old hotel somewhere in middle Europe. In Prague. The shapes sang to him. It was a fortification, a terminal, an observatory from which one could look into the soul.

  “Who is Rudolf Steiner?” he asked.

  He hardly heard her explanation. He was beginning to have ecstasies. Steiner was a great teacher, a savant who believed deep insights could be revealed in art. He believed in movements and mystery plays, rhythms, creation, the stars. Of course. And somehow from this she had learned a scenario. She had become the illusionist of Hedges’ life.

  It was Hedges, the convict Joyce scholar, the rumpled ghost at literary parties, who had found her. He was distant at first, he barely spoke a word to her the night they met. She had not been in New York long then. She was living on Twelfth Street in a room with no furniture. The next day the phone rang. It was Hedges. He asked her to lunch. He had known from the first exactly who she was, he said. He was calling from a phone booth, the traffic was roaring past.

  “Can you meet me at Haroot’s?” he said.

  His hair was uncombed, his fingers unsteady. He was sitting by the wall, too nervous to look at anything except his hands. She became his companion.

  They spent long days together wandering in the city. He wore shirts the color of blue ink, he bought her clothes. He was wildly generous, he seemed to care nothing for money, it was crumpled in his pockets like wastepaper, when he paid for things it would fall on the floor. He made her come to restaurants where he was dining with his wife and sit at the bar so he could watch her while they ate.

  Slowly he began her introduction to another world, a world which scorned exposure, a world more rich than the one she knew, certain occult books, philosophies, even music. She discovered she had a talent for it, an instinct. She achieved a kind of power over herself. There were periods of deep affection, serenity. They sat in a friend’s house and listened to Scriabin. They ate at the Russian Tea Room, the waiters knew his name. Hedges was performing an extraordinary act, he was fusing her life. He, too, had found a new existence: he was a criminal at last. At the end of a year they came to Europe.

  “He’s intelligent,” she explained. “You feel it immediately. He has a mind that touches everything.”

  “How long have you been with him?”

  “Forever,” she said.

  They walked back toward her hotel in that one, dying hour which ends the day. The trees by the river were black as stone. Wozzeck was playing at the theater to be followed by The Magic Flute. In the print shops were maps of the city and drawings of the famous bridge as it looked in Napoleon’s time. The banks were filled with newly minted coins. She was strangely silent. They stopped once, before a restaurant with a tank of fish, great speckled trout larger than a shoe lazing in green water, their mouths working slowly. Her face was visible in the glass like a woman’s on a train, indifferent, alone. Her beauty was directed toward no one. She seemed not to see him, she was lost in her thoughts. Then, coldly, without a word, her eyes met his. They did not waver. In that moment he realized she was worth everything.

  They had not had an easy time. Reason is unequal to man’s problems, Hedges said. His wife had somehow gotten hold of his bank account, not that it was much, but she had a nose like a ferret, she found other earnings that might have come his way. Further, he was sure his letters to his children were not being delivered. He had to write them at school and in care of friends.

  The question above all and always, however, was money. It was crushing them. He wrote articles but they were hard to sell, he was no good at anything topical. He did a piece about Giacometti with many haunting quotations which were entirely invented. He tried everything. Meanwhile, on every side it seemed, young men were writing film scripts or selling things for enormous sums.

  Hedges was alone. The men his age had made their reputations, everything was passing him by. Anyway he often felt it. He knew the lives of Cervantes, Stendhal, Italo Svevo but none of them was as improbable as his own. And wherever they went there were his notebooks and papers to carry. Nothing is heavier than paper.

  In Grasse he had trouble with his teeth, something went bad in the roots of old repairs. He was in misery, they had to pay a French dentist almost every penny they had. In Venice he was bitten by a cat. A terrible infection developed, his arm swelled to twice its size, it seemed the skin would burst. The cameriera told them cats had venom in their mouth like snakes, the same thing had happened to her son. The bites were always deep, she said, the poison entered the blood. Hedges was in agony, he could not sleep. It would have been much worse fifty years ago, the doctor told them. He touched a point up near his shoulder. Hedges was too weak to ask what it meant. Twice a day a woman came with a hypodermic in a battered tin box and gave him shots. He was growing more feverish. He could no longer read. He wanted to dictate some final things, Nadine took them down. He insisted on being buried with her photograph over his heart, he had made her promise to tear it from her passport.

  “How will I get home?” she had asked.

  Beneath them in the sunlight the great river flowed, almost without a sound. The lives of artists seem beautiful at last, even the terrible arguments about money, the nights there is nothing to do. Besides, through it all, Hedges was never helpless. He lived one life and imagined ten others, he could always find refuge in one of them.

  “But I’m tired of it,” she confessed. “He’s selfish. He’s a child.”

  She did not look like a woman who had suffered. Her clothes were silky. Her teeth were white. On the far pathways couples were having lunch, the girls with their shoes off, their feet slanting down the bank. They were throwing bits of bread in the water.

  The development of the individual had reached its apogee, Hedges believed, that was the essence of our time. A new direction must be found. He did not believe in collectivism, however. That was a blind road. He wasn’t certain yet of what the path would be. His writing would reveal it, but he was working against time, against a tide of events, he was in exile, like Trotsky. Unfortunately, there was no one to kill him. It
didn’t matter, his teeth would do it in the end, he said.

  Nadine was staring into the water.

  “There are nothing but eels down there,” she said.

  He followed her gaze. The surface was impenetrable. He tried to find a single, black shadow betrayed by its grace.

  “When the time comes to mate,” she told him, “they go to the sea.”

  She watched the water. When the time came they heard somehow, they slithered across meadows in the morning, shining like dew. She was fourteen years old, she told him, when her mother took her favorite doll down to the river and threw it in, the days of being a young girl were over.

  “What shall I throw in?” he asked.

  She seemed not to hear. Then she looked up.

  “Do you mean that?” she finally said.

  She wanted them to have dinner together, would Hedges sense something or not? He tried not to think about it or allow himself to be alarmed. There were scenes in every literature of this moment, but still he could not imagine what it would be like. A great writer might say, I know I cannot keep her, but would he dare give her up? Hedges, his teeth filled with cavities and all the years lying on top of his unwritten works?

  “I owe him so much,” she had said.

  Still, it was difficult to face the evening calmly. By five o’clock he was in a state of nerves, playing solitaire in his room, rereading articles in the paper. It seemed that he had forgotten how to speak about things, he was conscious of his facial expressions, nothing he did seemed natural. The person he had been had somehow vanished, it was impossible to create another. Everything was impossible, he imagined a dinner at which he would be humiliated, deceived.

  At seven o’clock, afraid the telephone would ring at any moment, he went down in the elevator. The glimpse of himself in the mirror reassured him, he seemed ordinary, he seemed calm. He touched his hair. His heart was thundering. He looked at himself again. The door slid open. He stepped out, half expecting to find them there. There was no one. He turned the pages of the Zurich paper while keeping an eye on the door. Finally he managed to sit in one of the chairs. It was awkward. He moved. It was seven-ten. Twenty minutes later an old Citroën backed straight into the grill of a Mercedes parked in the street with a great smashing of glass. The concierge and desk clerk went running out. There were pieces everywhere. The driver of the Citroën was opening his door.