James Salter - All That Is

“Slipper me, darling,” she said to Travis.

He stood up without a word and got them for her but stopped short of putting them on her feet. She bent with a slight groan to do it herself.

“You are the limit,” she said to Eddie.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the limit.”

Peter Connors, who had said very little during dinner, managed to speak briefly, alone, with Amussen. He was hesitant about it, he needed some advice. It was about Dare, he was in love with her but couldn’t be sure of where he stood.

“You were talking to her this afternoon, I mean she got quiet when I came in. I wonder if it was about me. I know she looks up to you.”

“We weren’t talking about you. She’s a spirited girl,” Amussen said, “they can be hard to manage.”

“How do you go about that?”

“I expect she’d let you know if she didn’t want you around. I’d say, be patient.”

“I don’t want it to seem I don’t have any backbone.”

“Of course not.”

In a way, that was the impression he was afraid he gave, at odds with his hopes and desires. And dreams. He didn’t imagine anyone having dreams like his. She was in them, they were about her. She was naked and sitting in an armchair, one leg thrown carelessly over an arm. He is near her in a cotton robe that has fallen open. She seems indifferent but accepting, and he kneels and puts his lips to her. He lifts her and holds her up by the waist, like a vessel, to his mouth. He can see himself as they pass a dark silvery mirror, her legs dangling, beginning to kick as he hardens his tongue. She is leaning backward as in one smooth movement he sets her, in the dream and to an extent in life, on his unholy hard-on and as he does, comes in a flood.

After a while, except for Liz and Travis who were playing cards, they had all gone to bed. The snow went on falling though sometime in the early hours it stopped and stars appeared in the black sky. Also it became even colder.

In the morning through windows that were half-covered with frost the great white expanse of fields could be seen, not a footprint on them, not a flaw. The whiteness reached into the distance, into the sky. Two of the dogs had gotten outside and were flying over the snow, throwing up a white trail like comets as they ran.

One by one they all came down to breakfast in the dining room. Liz and Dare were among the last. Bowman and Vivian were just finishing. Amussen was still at the table.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.” Liz’s voice was a little hoarse. “Look at the snow,” she said.

“It finally stopped. That was a real storm. Don’t know if the roads will be open. Good morning,” he said to Dare as she took a seat.

“Morning.” It was almost a whisper.

“Your daddy already called,” Willa told her as she brought coffee.

They sat eating bacon and eggs. Travis joined them. Peter was the only one who didn’t appear.

A terrible thing had happened during the night. After everyone had gone to bed and it was finally quiet, Peter, who had waited as long as he could, stepped out into the hall in his pants and undershirt, carefully closing the door behind him. The light was subdued. All was silent. Quietly he walked to Dare’s room and put his face close to the doorjamb. He whispered her name.

“Dare.”

He waited and whispered again, more intently.

“Dare!”

He was afraid she was asleep. He called again and then, overcoming his fear, knocked lightly.

“Dare.”

He stood there, despite himself.

“I just want to talk to you,” he was going say.

He knocked again. Just as he finished, his heart leapt as the door opened slightly and revealed George Amussen, who said in a low, authoritative voice,

“Go on to bed.”

Liz all morning had been on the phone deciding whether or not to go to California. She wanted to go to Santa Anita and was asking about the weather there and if her horse would be running. Finally she decided.

“We’re going.”

“You’re sure, Bun?”

“Yes.”

Eddie watched it all without comment. Later he said,

“He won’t be around for long. She’ll marry someone else.”

It would not be Aly Khan, who had been divorced and was planning to marry a French model when he was killed in a car crash. Liz read it in the paper. She had never really stopped thinking about being married to him. It was always a fond dream. They would be in Neuilly in the morning, watching the horses train, the early mist still in the trees. He’d be in Levi’s and a jacket and they would walk back together to have breakfast at the house. She’d be the wife of a prince and converted to Islam. But Aly was dead, Ted had gone on to marry someone else, and her second husband had moved to New Jersey. Still she had lots of friends, some made one way, some another, and she rode.

Vivian had liked Christmas and being home. Liz, she could see, took to Philip, and even her father, who was in an amiable mood that morning, seemed to accept him more. They all said good-bye, Amussen said good-bye to Liz and then to Dare, whose boyfriend wasn’t feeling well, rubbing a bit of egg from the side of her mouth as they talked briefly. He did it with his napkin in a fatherly way.

“Is Liz Bohannon really your father’s cousin?” Bowman asked afterwards.

“They just call each other cousin, I don’t know why,” Vivian said.

The world was still white as they drove back to Washington, snow rushing across the road like smoke. Currently twenty-two degrees in downtown Washington, the radio said. The highway was disappearing in bursts of wind. The fur was up around Vivian’s face in the cold, the smooth miles passing soundlessly beneath. Good-bye to Virginia and the fields and strange feeling of isolation. He was taking Vivian home—in fact that was not what he was doing but it was what gave him the sensation of happiness.

Eddins had found a house in Piermont, a small factory town up the Hudson, quiet and parochial, even neglected, about thirty minutes from the city. The traffic going in was never heavy. Trucks were not allowed on the parkway, just cars usually with a single occupant. It was a plain white house with soiled asbestos shingles on a street that sloped down to the paper mill and the river. There was a downstairs room and kitchen and on the second floor two bedrooms and a bath with old fixtures. There was a narrow strip of exhausted lawn and a garden. The front step, just off the street, was made of two large, irregular stones laid flat. The street went steeply downhill, almost directly to the liquor store that was owned by the ex-mayor, who still knew everything that was going on in town.

He had recognized the house as soon as he saw it. It was a house like those he had grown up among, small southern houses, not those of doctors or lawyers or even of his father, who had a seed business. Eddins had loved his father, too old for the war but went in anyway, coming home on leave in 1943 in his khakis with crossed rifles on the collar, imperishable image. Men came home that way in the south, in uniform, it was a heritage. This was in Ovid, South Carolina—Oh-vid, as they pronounced it—oyster shell driveways and tin advertising signs, churches, whiskey bottles in brown paper sacks, and white-skinned girls with wavy hair who worked in stores and offices, you were born to marry one. It was in his blood, hard-imprinted there like the bottle caps and bits of foil trampled into the flat, fairground earth. There was also the gift of talk, the history of everything, told and retold, until you knew it all, the families and names. They sat on shaded porches in the afternoon or evening and talked in slow, intriguing voices of things that had happened and to whom. Time, in his memory, went at a different rate in those years, largely unmoving as you walked everywhere or if it was a good ways, sometimes drove. Just past town was the river, not wide, and flowing slowly, almost unnoticeably, but flowing, faint streaks of foam lying on it undisturbed, the water rusted and cold. On either bank as far as one could see, nothing: trees, river bank, a stray dog trotting on the road alongside. In the parts yard, half-fenced, the bodies of wrecked cars and, further along the road, one that had been driven one night straight into a tree, the hollowed doors hanging open, the engine gone.