by James Salter
“The house?”
“Me,” she said.
“Just for a few minutes.”
They walked to the door. It was heavy, the top was glass with iron bars. She fumbled with some keys.
“Let me go in first.”
The door closed behind them. She went up the stairs. In the room she turned on a light.
“There. You see. That’s all there is.”
He attempted to embrace her but she turned away.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Do you really want to?”
“No, I’m just kidding.”
“I’m very flat up here,” she said simply. “Practically a man.”
“I don’t care.”
After a moment or two she began to remove her shirt. There was resignation in her movements. She turned off the light and stepped from the last of her clothes. On the main highway beyond the window traffic flowed past. They lay in her narrow bed.
He seemed urgent, overpowering to her. She had no desires of her own. She had abandoned them, made them his. His intensity almost frightened her, his abruptness. As soon as it was over he fell asleep.
In the morning a sun like searchlights was pouring into the room. She returned from somewhere with a small white cup in each hand. Naked down to the sheet that crossed his waist, he was sitting up in bed. His torso seemed to taunt her. It was almost as smooth as hers.
Familiar sounds of morning, cups and indolent spoons. He is less interested in me this morning, she thought. Her heart was beating sadly. Around his neck was a pale green string of narrow beads; she saw them in the mirror as she dressed.
“You can stay if you like,” she said.
He watched her silently.
“I have to go,” she said. She gave a fleeting smile, as if required.
He lay in bed. A womanly smell still clung to it. He could hear footsteps elsewhere in the house, they seemed aimless. Opening and closing of doors. The empty cups were on the floor. As if it had suddenly started, he noticed the ticking of her clock. He felt luxurious. He took himself for granted, his legs, his sexual power, his fate. A consciousness that had faded came to life. It was like a film when the focus is blurred and shifting and all at once resolves; there leaps forth a hidden image, incorruptible, bright.
When he went by the shop he said only a few whispered words. Her expression softened, she did not reply. The thing that betrayed her was an unexpected, childish gesture. After he had gone, elated by his visit, she took hold of the end of the counter, leaned back and pulled herself dreamily forward, leaned back and did it again.
“Vous êtes bien?” Remy inquired.
“Très bien.”
18
THE CURTAIN HAD FALLEN. September was a month of good weather and always beautiful light, but the town was nearly empty, everyone had gone.
“I wouldn’t mind staying on,” Bray lamented, “but Audrey’s coming to Geneva. I said I’d meet her.” She was his girl friend. “This is the only time she could get away. Besides, my money’s gone. I’m not like you, I can’t live off women.”
He’d been driving Catherin’s little car around town.
“So, I’m afraid that’s it,” Bray said. He might have been a small-time crook with nerve and a taste for cheap display. He liked to smoke big cigars after dinner, drink Martell. The mountains had saved him.
He hadn’t the imagination which is indispensable to greatness. Supreme climbs need more than courage, they need inspiration. He was a sergeant in the ranks—perhaps, in tumultuous times, he might be a colonel, one who wears his blouse unbuttoned and gets drunk with the men.
Audrey was a nurse. She had the characteristics of her class, she was scornful, outspoken. She hated foul language and foreign cooking and was indifferent to sports. Her youth, in part, softened these things. In many English women there is, despite belief, a strong sensuality, even if denied. Her face was appealing, but it was the extraordinary skin which made her body luminous that Bray dreamed of. His letters were filled with an erotic imagery one would never expect.
“Why don’t you come to England? Tear yourself away. There’s work. You could work with me.”
“Doing what?” Rand said.
“Plastering. It has a tradition. O’Casey was a plasterer.”
“Who?”
“Juno and the Paycock. Have you heard of that? It doesn’t matter. We’ll throw in a little culture, too.”
“Maybe I’ll come.”
“We’ll be back here in December, anyway,” Bray said.
“What for?”
“The Eiger. Cabot asked me to come.” He was obviously pleased. “He didn’t tell you?”
“No.” After a pause, he added, “What about the Eiger?”
Suddenly Bray was embarrassed. He realized something was wrong.
“Ah, well, I thought …I thought you knew. He’s going to do a winter ascent.”
“I see,” Rand managed to say.
“You’re not going? I just assumed …”
Rand felt as if he had been slapped in the face.
“No,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Rand said. “Tell me about it.”
He hardly heard the words, they were slipping by. It was going to be like Scott …his push to the pole …bivouacs prepared in advance, bunkers, with two or three weeks of food so that they could ride out any storm. The BBC would be filming.
“I see.” He suddenly hated Bray. The feeling that something had been stolen from him was crushing his heart.
“I suppose everybody wants to climb it,” Bray said lamely.
“They don’t want to climb it, they want to have climbed it.” He was searching his pockets for money. “Here,” he said, putting some on the table, “pay for mine.”
He walked out into the empty afternoon. The sun threw light against the buildings. He felt utterly abandoned, ill.
“What’s wrong?” Catherin cried.
Desperation glittered from him. He slumped on the bed.
“Don’t you feel well?” she said.
“I’m all right.” He lay back.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s nothing. Cabot is going to do a climb, that’s all.”
“He can climb. Is that bad?”
“He’s going to do the Eiger.”
“Please, what is it? You look as if you were going to die.”
That night he lay awake while over and over in his mind turned the same bitter thoughts. The room seemed small. He longed to be up in the woods, alone. The sky would calm him, the icy galaxies. He felt he’d been caught away from home. He wanted to go to ground.
He remembered the girl from Kauai who had cut his hand. She believed in the occult. She was humorless, intense. Write down the names, she had said, of your three closest friends and I will circle the name of your deadliest enemy.
19
THE AUTUMN DAYS HAVE a fever. The sun is departing, it gives forth all that remains. The warmth is mysterious, it carries a message: farewell.
Catherin saved him. In her small car they drove off on weekends, Aix-les-Bains, Chambéry. In the countryside they pulled off the road and descended, feet slipping, a steep embankment. The hillside was facing the sun, not a house, not a person to be seen. The fallen leaves had drifted deep, they came to the knee. Here they ate and lay sprawled afterward, bees feeding on the remnants of the meal.
An hour went by, an hour and a half. Rand sat up. Catherin’s eyes swam open for a moment.
“Oh, God,” she murmured.
“Wake up.”
“It’s so hard,” she said weakly. “When I die, I hope I don’t have to wake afterwards. It would be so difficult.”
He knelt beside her. She leaned against him. There was a faint plop—two moths, gray as wood with one spot of dazzling blue, had fallen, attached. They did not move.
“You see?” she said.
There was a stream below. They walked down through blue and viole
t flowers, scattered, abandoned by summer. Then through a dry orchard. At the far end a goat, all white, was staggering about on its hind legs to eat from the branches. It would be cold that winter. The mice had left the pastures. The leaves were already down.
They looked back. Half-hidden in the earth were long, stone walls built to retain the hillside. The sun was fading. The white of the car glinted far above.
The last rites of autumn. They walked up slowly. She was out of breath; she had to stop. He carried her the rest of the way, not in his arms but over his shoulder, cheek against her haunch. She didn’t struggle. She hung quietly, touching him as if he were a horse.
In Annecy they walked by the lake. An empty dock stretched out into the water. The varnished boats creaked. He lived an entire life in Annecy, in a hotel with an iron balcony and the letters H-O-T-E-L fixed to it. The television cost a franc. A bottle of Perrier was outside the window. They went to bed at midnight. Her bracelets crashed on the table glass.
“Too much to drink,” she managed to announce. The windows were open. An occasional car, driving too fast, zoomed along the street.
Dawn turned the mountains dark. The sky was pale, the hour unknown. He went out on the balcony. Annecy was blue. The buildings had a phantom form, they were rising as if from the sea. A single eye looked up at him from among the bedclothes, an eye still stained with makeup. A drugged voice said,
“What are you doing up in the middle of the night?”
A lifetime and more. He began to see France, not just a mountain village filled with tourists, but the deep, invincible center which, if entered at all, becomes part of the blood. Of course, he did not know the meaning of the many avenues Carnot or boulevards Jean Jaurès, the streets named Gambetta, Hugo, even Pasteur. The pageant of kings and republics was nothing to him, but the way in which a great civilization preserves itself, this was what he unknowingly saw. For France is conscious of its brilliance. To grasp it means to sit at its table, sleep beneath its roofs, marry its children.
Immortal mornings. His genitals were heavy, like the dark, smooth stone carved by the Eskimos. They had a gravity, a denseness he could not believe. He drew aside the sheet. She was naked. Her hair was strewn across the pillow. She was like a drowned woman, she was sunk in bed like a burial at sea. He placed a hand on her, proprietary, calm. The first cars were driving past. Someone’s footsteps echoed in the street.
This love was the act of one person, it was not shared. He was like a man in a boat on a wide lake, a perfectly still lake at dawn. There was no sound except that of oars in the oarlocks, creaking, creaking, a man alone in a boat that slowly begins to shudder, to cry. Afterwards they lay close, like comrades.
His hair was like hers. His arm lay near her side, the muscle faint, sleeping, the light barely tracing it.
“Are we going back to Chamonix?” she asked.
“Never.”
“I’d like to take you to Paris.” She was stroking the arm with her finger. “I want to show you off.”
“Where would we stay?” He was filled with a complete weariness, as if he had just fallen into bed after an unforgettable party. “What about your job?”
“Oh, Remy will give it back. It’s very slow now, anyway.” She seemed to drop off to sleep. “I have some money,” she said. “We’ll have a marvelous time.”
They rose at noon to look for a restaurant. They were famished.
The apartment was on a small street off the Avenue du Maine. They arrived in the evening, a blue evening the color of storms and drove along the river in streams of traffic, then through dense neighborhoods. The early darkness was lit by storefronts. The buses were roaring by. There is an electric thrill to the city seen at this hour and for the first time. He was dazzled. The trees still held their enormous leaves. Outside restaurants there were stands selling oysters, the baskets tilted forward for customers to see. The streets were crowded. The city was singing to him, flowing like a great, unimagined dream.
Two rooms, strangely empty of furniture as if someone had just moved out. A kitchen, a long, narrow bath with red walls. The water limped into the tub, a gas heater roared to life when the hot was turned on. There were photographs and invitations stuck in the mirror. The refrigerator, there being no space elsewhere, was in the front room.
The woman who owned it, Madame Roberts, came around the next day. She had a long mane of hair and shapely legs. She admitted to being forty-five. It was her daughter who lived here normally and was away.
“In Rome,” she explained. “She’s decided to go to school. She took a lot of things. I hope you can be comfortable.” She had a very frank gaze. “But you’re used to sleeping in worse places, aren’t you?” she said to Rand. “Catherin has told me about you, your fantastic life. You’re not an intellectual, are you?”
“An intellectual?” he said.
“Good, I’m sick of them.” She had strong, white teeth, she brushed them with salt. She owned a shop across the river: imported clothing, accessories, things like that—she’d started it herself.
“It’s very nice. I have a certain clientele. Catherin knows. I treat them very well. I have good things.” Her presence was rich, full of life. She rummaged in her handbag for a cigarette. Her legs, in stockings that had a metallic sheen, were crossed above the knee. She’d been a mannequin, that was how she started.
“The first time I had absolutely no confidence. There was a woman in the dressing room who had experience. She saw how frightened I was. She took me aside. Just remember, she said, when you go out there—you are young and beautiful and they are shit. Everything I did, I did for myself,” she said. “No one gave me anything. My husband gave me half the apartment when we were divorced. He put up a brick wall. He kept the living room and kitchen and I got the bedroom and bath.”
Her business she conducted like the famous courtesans. The men who came to her she classified as payeurs, martyrs or favoris. “As long as they don’t compare notes. Being a mannequin was a help; I developed a taste for luxury.” Her voice was powerful and flowing. She used it like a stream of water. Her laugh was hoarse, the laugh of a free woman. “I developed a taste for it, but I didn’t let it ruin me,” she said.
Paris was filled with such women, he saw them on the streets, in buses, everywhere. Students, married women, extravagant faces in bars and cafés. In the windows of parfumeries gleamed seductive advertisements for the care of the breasts and skin. His eye lingered on them like a young husband looking at whores.
In a bar off Boulevard St. Michel there was a girl with her eyes outlined in black and a bright silk scarf wrapped around and around her swanlike neck.
“Who is it, someone you know?” Catherin asked—it took him by surprise—she was leafing through a magazine. He began to read over her shoulder. It was November. Nights were cold, but days still fair. Paris was opening itself to him, he thought.
“Bonsoir.” It was a friend of Catherin’s. A dark-haired man was behind her, he shook hands disinterestedly.
“This is Michel,” Françoise said as they sat down. “Michel has lived in England. You’re English?” she asked Rand.
“No,” he said.
“Americain,” Michel commented wearily. “C’est vrai?”
“That’s right.”
Michel nodded. It was too simple. “Vous êtes grimpeur?” he said offhandedly. Françoise had told him.
“Speak English,” she said.
“Je ne parle pas anglais.”
“Yes, you do.”
“It’s too difficult,” he said. He then told a story in French about a party he had gone to in London. A girl had come over and asked why he was off by himself. He told her he was French, he didn’t speak English. Oh, she said, in two months he would speak it fluently. He’d been there two years, he told her. She didn’t talk to him again.
“Oh, tu m’énerves,” Françoise said.
They sat in silence.
“What have you climbed?” he asked in French.
“I had a good friend who was a climber.”
“Who?” said Françoise.
Michel shrugged. “You don’t know him. He was in the army. He liked the army, but he got in some trouble and had to leave. Afterwards, he began to climb seriously. First not far from Paris, then down at Marseilles, and in the Alps. He was very strong, very pure. In some ways he was like a child.”
Rand was watching him suspiciously. Michel was aware of it. He spoke more slowly, unaffectedly, as if to them all.
“He began to climb the most difficult peaks in Europe. Climbing is more than a sport. That’s true. Ça dure toujours—it lasts forever.”
They were sitting in silence, listening. A sensation of panic had come over Rand. He could not believe these sentences were following one upon the other. Michel’s eyes were looking into his.
Rand smiled. He wanted to break this spell, to show that he was not subject to it.
“Who is your friend?”
“I can only tell you that his dream was to become one of the greatest climbers of all time.”
“Is that right?” A confusion was seizing him, a sense of isolation, as if all the people surrounding him, sitting at nearby tables, talking, laughing, were part of what was being enacted, were even aware of it.
“I don’t know anything about climbing,” Michel went on. He was confiding, he wanted to become a friend. “I saw him not long ago, I hadn’t seen him for almost a year. He had left his wife, he wasn’t working, and still he felt if he climbed one more mountain, the most difficult, everything would somehow fall into place. It was like a drug. He constantly had to have more and more, and the doses had to be bigger.”
“And so?”
“He was always an idealist. He had great inner strength, more than anyone I’ve ever known. But something had changed in him, I could see it in his face. He had done everything and he was still unhappy. Two weeks ago …”
Rand’s heart was pounding. The panes of illusion were slipping from his life. He felt himself disappearing.
“I don’t like this story,” Catherin interrupted.
“I don’t like it, either. Furthermore, I don’t believe it,” Françoise said.
