James Salter - All That Is

“Oh, you should see him with Bryan, my sister’s husband. Daddy calls him Whyan, why in hell did she pick him? Can’t even ride, he says.”

“You aren’t making me feel much better. I can sail,” he added. “Can your father sail?”

“He’s sailed to the Bahamas.”

She seemed ready to defend him, and Bowman felt he should not go further. She sat looking out of the window on her side, somewhat removed, but in her leather skirt, hair pulled back, face wide, with a thin gold chain looped around her neck, she was the image of desirability. She turned back towards him.

“It’s like that,” she commented. “You sort of have to go through the mud room first.”

“Is your mother anything like that?”

“My mother? No.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s a drunk,” Vivian said. “That’s the reason they got divorced.”

“Where does she live? In Middleburg?”

“No, she has an apartment in Washington near Dupont Circle. You’ll meet her.”

Her mother had been beautiful but you couldn’t tell it now, Vivian added. She started in the morning with vodka and rarely got dressed until afternoon.

“Daddy really raised us. We’re his two girls. He had to protect us.”

They drove for a while in silence and near Centerville somewhere he glanced over and saw that she was asleep. Her head had fallen softly to the side and her lips were slightly parted. Sensual thoughts came to him. Her smooth-stockinged legs, for some reason he thought of them separately—their length and shape. He realized how deeply in love he was. She had it in her power to bestow immense happiness.

When they said good-bye at the station he felt that something definitive had passed between them. He possessed, despite the uncertainty, assurance, an assurance that would never fall away.

Freely, as they sat or ate or walked he shared with her his thoughts and ideas about life, history, and art. He told her everything. He knew she didn’t think about these things, but she understood and could learn. He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter. Why would it occur? When you love you see a future according to your dreams.

In Summit, where he wanted his mother to meet Vivian, to see and approve of her, he took her first to a diner across from City Hall that had been there for years. It had actually been a railroad car with windows all along the side facing the avenue. Inside, the floor was tile and the ceiling pale wood that curved down into the wall. A counter where customers sat—there were always one or two—ran the length of the place. It was more crowded in the morning; the railroad station, the Morris and Essex line that went to the city, was just down the street. The tracks were low and out of sight. At night the lights of the diner were the only lights along the street. You entered by a door opposite the counter and there was another door at one end.

It was here that Hemingway placed his story “The Killers,” Bowman said.

“Right here, in this diner. The counter, everything. Do you know the story? It’s marvelous. Fabulously written. If you never read another word of his, you’d know right away what a great writer he is. It’s in the evening. Nobody’s in the place, there are no customers, it’s empty, and two men in tight black overcoats come in and sit down at the counter. They look at the menu and order, and one of them says to the counterman, This is some town, what’s the name of this place? And the counterman, who’s frightened of course, says, Summit. It’s right there in the story, Summit, and when the food comes they eat with their gloves on. They’re there to kill a Swede, they tell the counterman. They know the Swede always comes there. He’s an ex-fighter named Ole Andreson who double-crossed the mob somehow. One of them takes a sawed-off shotgun from beneath his coat and goes into the kitchen to hide and wait.”

“Did this actually happen?”

“No, no. He wrote it in Spain.”

“It’s just made up.”

“You don’t believe it’s made up, reading it. That’s what’s so incredible, you absolutely believe it.”

“And they kill him?”

“It’s better than that. They don’t kill him because he doesn’t show up, but he knows they’re after him, they’ll come again. He’s big, he was a boxer, but whatever he did, they’re going to kill him. He just lies in bed in the rooming house, looking at the wall.”

They began to read the menu.

“What are you going to have?” Vivian asked.

“I think I’ll have eggs with Taylor ham.”

“What’s Taylor ham?” she said.

“It’s a kind of ham they have around here. I’ve never really asked.”

“All right, I’ll have it, too.”

He liked being with her. He liked having her with him. There were only a few other people in the diner, but how colorless they seemed compared to her. They were all aware of her presence. It was impossible not to be.

“I’d like to meet Hemingway,” he said. “Go down to Cuba and meet him. Maybe we could go together.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

“You have to read him,” he said.

Beatrice had been eager to meet her and was also struck by her looks, though in a different way, the freshness and naked, animal statement. How much one knows from the first! She had bought flowers and set the table in the dining room where they seldom ate, usually using a table in the kitchen, one end of which was against the wall. The kitchen with shelves but no cabinets was the real heart of the house together with a sitting room where they often sat in front of the fireplace talking and having a drink. Now there was this girl with somewhat stiff manners. She was from Virginia, and Beatrice asked what part, Middleburg?

“We really live nearer to Upperville,” Vivian replied.

Upperville. It sounded rural and small. It was , in fact, small, there was one place to eat but no town water or sewage. Nothing had changed there for a hundred years and people there liked it that way whether they lived in an old house without heat or on a thousand acres. Upperville, in the county and beyond, was an exalted name, the emblem of a proud, parochial class of which Vivian was a member. There was no place to stay, you had to live there.

“It’s beautiful country,” Bowman said.

Beatrice said, “I’d love to see it. What does your family do there?”

“Farm,” Vivian said. “Well, my father farms some but also he puts his fields up for grazing.”

“It must be big.”

“It’s not terribly big, it’s about four hundred acres.”

“That’s so interesting. Apart from farming, what is there to do?”

“Daddy always says there’s lots to do. He means looking after the horses.”

“Horses.”

“Yes.”

It was not that she was difficult to talk to, but you immediately felt the limits. Vivian had gone to junior college, probably at the suggestion of her father to keep her out of mischief. She had a certain confidence, based on the things she absolutely knew and which had proved to be enough. Like all mothers though, Beatrice hoped for a girl like herself, with whom she could speak easily and whose view of life could almost perfectly be combined with her own. Among her pupils, over the years, she could think of girls who were like that, good students with natural charm that you admired and were drawn to, but there were also others not so easily understood and whose fate you were not meant to know.

“Didn’t Liz Bohannon come from Middleburg?” Beatrice asked, bringing up a name, a horse and society figure of the ’30s, always photographed with her husband aboard some ship sailing to Europe or in their box at Saratoga.