James Salter - All That Is

“I didn’t know you spoke German.”

“Well, until recently it wasn’t a great thing to do,” Bowman said.

He had taken German at Harvard, he explained, because it was the language of science.

“At the time I thought I wanted to be a scientist. I went back and forth between a number of things. I thought for a while I might teach. I still have a certain yearning for teaching. Then I decided to be a journalist, but I wasn’t able to get a job as one. I heard about a job as a reader then. It was pure luck or maybe destiny. What do you think of the idea of destiny?”

“Hadn’t thought about it,” she said casually.

He liked talking to her and the occasional smile that made her forehead shine. She was wearing a sleeveless dress and the roundness of her small shoulders gleamed. Her little finger was curled and held apart as she ate a bite of bread. Gestures, facial expressions, way of dressing—these were the revealing things. He was imagining places where they might go together, where no one knew them and he would have her to himself for days on end, though he was uncertain of how it might happen.

“New York’s a wonderful place, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes. I like coming here.”

“How do you know Louise?”

“We were in boarding school, in the same class. The first thing she ever said to me was a dirty joke, well, not exactly dirty but, you know.”

He told her about the time that the letters ES on the big sign above the Essex House had gone out and there it was, forty stories up, shining in the night. He went no further. He didn’t want to seem coarse.

At the end of the evening at the front door he was prepared to say good night but she acted as if he were not there, unlocking the door and saying nothing. Louise was gone for the weekend to visit her parents. Vivian was nervous though she did not want to show it. He went upstairs with her.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

“Yes, that would be… No,” he said, “not really.”

They sat for a few moments in silence and then she simply leaned forward and kissed him. The kiss was light but ardent.

“Do you want to?” she asked.

She did not take everything off—shoes, stockings, and skirt, that was all. She was not prepared for more. They kissed and whispered. As she slid from her white panties, a white that seemed sacred, he barely breathed. The fineness of her, the blondish fleece. He could not believe they were doing this.

“I don’t… have anything,” he whispered.

There was no answer.

He was inexperienced but it was natural and overwhelming. Also too quick, he couldn’t help it. He felt embarrassed. Her face was close to his.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t stop it.”

She said nothing, she had almost no way to judge it.

She went into the bathroom and Bowman lay back in awe at what had happened and feeling intoxicated by a world that had suddenly opened wide to the greatest pleasure, pleasure beyond knowing. He knew of the joy that might lie ahead.

Vivian was thinking along less heady lines. There was the chance of her becoming pg though she had, in truth, only an inexact idea of how likely that was. At school there had been a lot of talk, but it was only talk and vague. Still, there were stories of girls who got that way the first time. It would be just her luck, she thought. Of course, it hadn’t been entirely the first time.

“You make me think of a pony,” he said lovingly.

“A pony? Why?”

“You’re just beautiful. And free.”

“I don’t see how that’s like a pony,” she said. “Besides, ponies bite. Mine did.”

She nestled against him and he tried to think along her lines. Whatever might happen, they had done it. He felt only exaltation.

They spent the night together when he came to Washington that month and drove to the country the next day to have lunch with her father. He had a four-hundred-acre farm called Gallops, mostly given over to grazing. The main house was fieldstone and sat on top of a rise. Vivian showed him around, the grounds and first floor, as if introducing him to it and, in a way, to her. The house was lightly furnished in a manner that was indifferent to style. Behind a couch in the living room Bowman noticed, as in seventeenth-century palaces, were some dried dog turds.

Lunch was served by a black maid towards whom Amussen behaved with complete familiarity. Her name was Mattie and the main course came in on a silver tray.

“Vivian says you work in publishing,” Amussen said.

“Yes, sir. I’m an editor.”

“I see.”

“It’s a small house,” Bowman went on, “but with quite a good literary reputation.”

Amussen, picking at something near his incisor with his little finger, said,

“What do you mean by literary?”

“Well, books of quality, essentially. Books that might have a long life. Of course, that’s the top end. We publish other books, to make money or try to.”

“Can we have some coffee, Mattie?” Amussen said to the maid. “Would you like some coffee, Mr. Bowman?”

“Thank you.”

“Viv, you?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

The brief conversation about publishing had been without resonance. It was of no more interest than if they had been talking about the weather. Bowman had noticed only popular titles in the bookcase in the living room, Books of the Month with jackets that looked pristine. There were a few others, dark and leather-bound, the kind that are handed down though no one reads them, in a mahogany secretary, behind glass.

As they drank coffee, Bowman made a last attempt to cast himself favorably as an editor, but Amussen turned the subject to the navy, Bowman had been in the navy, was that right? There was a neighbor down the road, Royce Cromwell, who had gone to Annapolis and been in the same class as Charlie McVay, the captain of the Indianapolis . Bowman hadn’t run into him in the navy, by any chance?

“No, I don’t think so. I was only a junior officer. Was he in the Pacific?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there was a big Atlantic fleet, too, for the convoys, the invasion, and all that. Hundreds of ships.”

“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

Almost without effort he had made Bowman feel as if he were prying. The lunch had been one of those meals when the sound of a knife or fork on a plate or a glass being set down only marks the silence.

Outside, as they walked to the car, Bowman saw something moving slowly with undulant curves into the ivy bed along the driveway.

“There’s a snake, I think.”

“Where?”

“There. Just going into the ivy.”

“Damn it,” Vivian said, “that’s just where the dogs like to sleep. Was it big?”

It had not been a small snake, it was thick as a hose.

“Pretty good-sized,” Bowman said.

Vivian, looking around, found a rake and began furiously running the handle of it back and forth through the ivy. The snake was gone, however.

“What was it? Was it a rattler?”

“I don’t know. It was big. Do they have rattlesnakes around here?”

“They sure do.”

“You’d better come out of there.”

She was not afraid. She ran the handle through the dark, shiny leaves a final time.

“Damned thing,” she said.

She went to tell her father. Bowman stood looking at the thick ivy, watching for any movement. She had stepped right into it.

Driving back that day, Bowman felt they were leaving a place where not even his language was understood. He was about to say it, but Vivian commented,

“Don’t mind Daddy,” she said. “He’s like that sometimes. It wasn’t you.”

“I don’t think I made a very good impression.”