James Salter - All That Is

They came home late, she on his arm, long-legged and unsteady, head down as she walked, as if from drinking. In bed he lay spent, like a soldier at the end of leave, and she was riding him like a horse, her hair blinding her. He loved everything, her small navel, her loose dark hair, her feet with their long, naked toes in the morning. Her buttocks were glorious, it was like being in a bakery, and when she cried out it was like a dying woman, one that had crawled to a shrine.

“When you fuck me,” she said, “I get the feeling that I’m going so far I’ll go right through, I won’t be able to come back. I feel like my head’s going to give up, like I’m going crazy.”

With Leon in the house they couldn’t behave that way, but even going shopping with her, it was just the two of them then, Dena in a jacket and jeans leaning across the counter to see something, the worn blue fabric drawn across her seat tight as a glove.

At five, Leon was wearing glasses. He was not a boy who would be good at sports, but he had spirit. The resentment and hostility towards a strange man in his mother’s bedroom and life he showed only briefly by being reserved. He knew instinctively who Eddins was and what he meant, but he liked him and was in need of a father. Also a friend.

“Look,” he said by way of showing him his room, “here is where I keep books. This is my favorite book, this is about football. And in this book here, you can learn everything, you can learn about stars and what is the deepest hole in the sea, and about thunderstorms and how to stop them. This is my best book. And this!” he cried, “this is a story I wrote. All by myself, you can read it later. And this! This is about soldiers.”

He picked up another.

“Do you know that where your belly button is you were attached when you were in your momma’s… what is it again? Where women have hair down there… you know…”

Eddins hesitated, but Leon went on unconcerned.

“They tie a knot in it. They cut it off and it hurts. They tie a knot and stuff it inside you, really!”

He looked up through his glasses to see if he was believed.

He showed Eddins games in the yard, making up the rules as they went along.

“There!” he cried as he kicked the ball. “If it hits there, it’s a goal! I have one point!”

“If it goes where?”

“There!” he cried, kicking it to another spot. “Play fair.”

“Oh, all right,” Leon said but soon wanted to show Eddins something else.

Vernon Beseler was living another life near Tompkins Square with a woman poet named Marian. Only infrequently did he see his son. He was destined to be a father who would never disappear because of the way he did. One day he called and asked Dena to meet him, he was thinking of heading back to Texas and wanted to see her before he left.

“Do you want me to bring Leon?” she asked.

“How is Leon?”

“He’s fine.”

“No, don’t bring him,” Beseler said.

He asked her to meet him at the airport. Dena hardly recognized him, he seemed gaunt and distracted. Despite herself she wanted to help him. He was the rebel and poet she had fallen in love with, and so much of her life, she felt, belonged to him.

“This woman you’re living with, I don’t think she’s taking good care of you.”

“She doesn’t have to take care of me.”

“Well, somebody should.”

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t look good,” Dena told him.

He ignored it.

“Are you writing?” she asked.

That was the sacred thing. He had always been its apostle. Everything would be forgiven because of it.

“No,” he said, “not at the moment. I may go and teach for a while.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure.”

He was silent. Then he said, “To be born a mole, ever think of that?”

“A mole?”

“To be born blind, with no eyes, eyes that are sealed. Everything is darkness. Living under the earth in narrow, cold passages, afraid of snakes, rats, anything that might be there, able to see. Seeking a mate, there underground, beyond all light.”

It was hard to look at him.

“No,” she said. “I’ve never thought of it. I was born with eyes.”

“Got to have mercy,” he said.

He was trying to light a cigarette with what seemed intense focus, putting it between his lips, then striking a match and applying it with great concentration, shaking it out and depositing it in an ashtray. He took the cigarette from his mouth with trembling fingers.

“It’s not from drinking,” he said.

“It isn’t?”

“I drink, but that’s not it. I’m just a little bit past the red line. Marian doesn’t drink. She’s a moonbather. She likes to undress and sit in the rays.”

“Where’s she doing that?”

“She can do it anywhere,” he said. “Vernon, why don’t we get a divorce?”

“Why would we get a divorce?”

“Because we’re not really married anymore.”

“We’ll always be married,” he said.

“I don’t think so. I mean I don’t think it makes sense.”

“They’ll be writing songs about us,” he said. “I could write a couple. How’s old Leon?”

“He’s a wonderful boy.”

“Yeah, I knew he would be.”

“What about our divorce?”

“Yeah,” Beseler said, smoking thoughtfully and saying nothing more.

Finally his flight was called.

“Well, I guess this is adios for a while,” he said.

He kissed her on the cheek. That was the last time she saw him. She was from Texas, though, where they were loyal, and in some disdainful way she remained loyal to him, to the boy who’d been her husband, carried her off, and whose destiny was to be a famous poet, maybe a singer. He had played the guitar and sung in a low voice to her.

A lawyer in Austin, hired by his family, took care of the divorce through some associate in New York. She was given child support of four hundred dollars a month—she’d asked for nothing for herself—and Eddins, in effect, had a son.

Great publishers were not always great readers, and good readers seldom made good publishers, but Bowman was somewhere in between. Often, in the city late at night when the sound of traffic had vanished, Bowman sat reading. Vivian had gone to bed. The only light was a standing lamp by his chair, near his elbow was a drink. He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

In the morning, Vivian asked what time he had come to bed.

“Twelve-thirty. About then.”

“What were you reading?”

“I was reading about Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeths.”

Vivian knew about St. Elizabeths. It was a synonym for lunacy in Washington.

“What’s he there for?”

“Probably because they didn’t know what else to do with him.”

“I mean, what did he do?”

“You know who he is?”

“I know enough,” she said.

“Well, he’s a towering poet. He was an expatriate.”

She didn’t feel like asking what that was.

“He made some broadcasts for the fascists in Italy,” Bowman explained. “They were addressed to America at the start of the war. He had obsessions about the evils of bank interest, Jews, the provincialism of America, and he talked about them in his broadcasts. He was at dinner in Rome one night and heard the news that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and he said, my God, I’m a ruined man.”

“He doesn’t sound that crazy,” Vivian said.

“Exactly.”

He wanted to go on talking about Ezra Pound and introduce the subject of the Cantos , perhaps reading one or two of the most brilliant of them to her, but Vivian’s mind was elsewhere. He was not too curious about where that might be. He thought back instead to a lunch a few days before with one of his writers who had been to school only through the seventh grade though he didn’t explain why. His mother had given him a library card and told him, go and read the books.