James Salter - All That Is

“I like them more than I can say,” he said. “They’re not like we are. For some reason there’s a depth and intimacy you find nowhere else. Perhaps it’s the result of the endless tyrannies. Akhmatova, I would love to publish her but she’s published by someone else. Her husband was executed by the Communists, her son spent years in a prison camp, she lived in a single room, under the surveillance of the secret police, always in fear of being arrested. Friends would visit her and, while talking of other things for the benefit of the eavesdropping police, she would hold up a piece of cigarette paper on which she had written the lines of a poem she had composed so they could read and memorize it, and when they nodded she would touch a match to the paper. When you go to their houses and sit down with them, in the kitchen usually, even if it’s only drinking tea, they give you their souls.”

Berggren himself did not possess that holy quality. He had the appearance almost of a banker, tall, reserved, with irregular teeth and blondish hair turned gray. He wore suits, often with a vest, and habitually took off his glasses to read. He had married three times, the first time to a woman with money and a house, an old house built a century before, with a tennis court and stone walks. She was conventional but very knowing and perhaps not wholly unaware when Berggren at a party managed to introduce her to his new mistress, to have her opinion, so to speak, since he trusted her judgment.

The mistress became his second wife—he regretted his divorce, he had loved his first wife, but life had turned a page. This second wife, Bibi, was stylish but also temperamental and demanding. The bills she ran up were always an unpleasant surprise, and she paid little attention to the cost of things like wine.

Berggren had been made for women. They were, for him, the chief reason for living or they represented it. He was not a man who was hard to live with, he was civilized and had manners though he could seem incommunicative at times. It was not a matter of being withdrawn, only that his thoughts were elsewhere. He generally avoided arguments although with Bibi it was not always possible. There was a hotel on Nackstromsgaten where he put up visiting writers, and he went there when things became too turbulent at home. The manager there knew him, and the desk clerk. The bargirl swirled cracked ice in a glass and then emptied it and poured in a Swiss wine, Sion, that he liked.

One afternoon he passed a shopwindow where a girl in her twenties in black fitted pants was arranging a dress dummy. She was aware of him standing there but she did not look at him. He stood there longer than he wished, he could not take his eyes from her. She, not the shopgirl but someone like her, became his third wife.

What the unseen part of their life was, who can say? Was she difficult or did she stand naked between his knees like the children of the patriarchs, her bare stomach, the swell of her hips? A certain unwanted coldness at his center kept him from real happiness, and though he married beautiful women, let us say possessed them, it was never complete and yet to live without them was unthinkable. The great hunger of the past was for food, there was never enough food and the majority of people were undernourished or starving, but the new hunger was for sex, there was the same specter of famine without it.

With Karen, Berggren did not feel young again but something better. Sex was more than a pleasure, at this age he felt joined to the myths. He had accidentally seen, a few years earlier, a wonderful thing, his mother dressing—her back was to him, she was seventy-two at the time, her buttocks were smooth and perfect, her waist firm. It was in his genes, then, he could perhaps go on and on, but one day he saw something else, perfectly innocent, Karen and a girlfriend she had known since school lying on the grass in their skimpy bathing suits tanning themselves, face down, side by side, talking to one another and occasionally the leg of one of them kicked idly up into the sun that was soothing their bare backs. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves on the stone terrace, reading a manuscript. He thought for a moment of going down to sit beside them, but he felt a certain awkwardness and the knowledge that whatever they were talking about, they would cease. He did not try to imagine what they were talking about, it was only their idle happiness in doing it while his own habits were less joyful and animated. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking calmly as he reread a few pages. They were standing up now and picking up their towels. On that day and other days he accepted the reality of what happened with women he loved, wives, principally, which was one of the things that led, despite his position and intelligence and the high regard in which he was held, to his suicide at the age of fifty-three, in the year that he and Karen parted.

Many of the guests had already arrived and others, with him, were on their way upstairs. The invitation had been offhanded, he was giving a costume party, Wiberg said, why don’t you come? Together with Juno in a gold and white mask and a silver Viking in a helmet with great horns, Bowman climbed the wide stairs. The door to the grand apartment was open and within was a crowd of another world, a Crusader in a tunic with a large red cross; some savages dressed in green, with long straw wigs; a few people in evening clothes wearing black masks; and Helen of Troy in a lavender gown with crossed straps in the Grecian way over a very bare back. Bowman’s costume, found at the last minute, was a hussar’s frogged jacket, red and green, over his own pants. Wiberg, in the traditional British idea of the exotic, was dressed as a pasha. On the landing a six-piece orchestra was playing.

It was difficult to move in the crowd. They were not literary people, at least not from their conversation. There were people from the embassies and society, movie people, and people using the night to advantage, a woman sticking her tongue in a man’s mouth and another—Bowman saw her only once—dressed as a carhop in very brief shorts, her legs shining in steel-colored hose, moving between several groups like a bee in clover. Wiberg talked to him only briefly. Bowman knew no one. The music went on. Two angels stood near the orchestra, smoking cigarettes. At midnight, waiters in white jackets began serving supper, oysters and cold beef, sandwiches and pastries. There were figures in beautiful silks. An older woman with a nose as long as an index finger was eating greedily, and the man with her blew his nose in the linen napkin, a gentleman, then. There was also, but only if one knew, the upper-class harlot who’d been dropped from the guest list but had come despite that and as an act of insolence had fellated five of the male guests, one after another, in a bedroom.

Bowman, having run out of things to notice and places to stand, was looking at a collection of photographs in thick silver frames on a table, well-dressed couples or individuals standing in front of their houses or in gardens, some of them inscribed. A voice behind him said, “Bernard likes titles.”

“Yes, I was just looking at them.”

“He likes titles and people that have them.”

It was a woman in a black silk pants-dress with a kind of pirate’s bandanna and gold earrings to go with it. It was a halfhearted costume, it might easily have been her normal wear. She, too, had a long nose, but was beautiful. He was suddenly nervous and with the unmistakable feeling that he would say something foolish.

“Are you from the embassy?” she said.

“The embassy?”

“The American embassy.”

“No, no. Nothing like that. I’m an editor.”

“With Bernard?”

How did she know him? he wondered. But, of course, almost everyone there did.