James Salter - All That Is

“Yes?”

“I have to say this, but have you been signing my name to anything?”

“Signing your name? No. What for? I signed it a couple of times,” he said.

“Only a couple of times?”

“Twice. Two or three times is all.” He was becoming uneasy. “When you were too busy on account of Caroline to do it.”

“To do what?”

“Go to the bank,” Cook said.

Wain sat quietly.

“You know, when I was in France, during the war…”

He could hardly remember the war, sitting in the unfinished house across from his failed son. He could hardly construct how he had gotten from there to here. Cook’s face was bored and defensive.

“In the winter when it was cold,” the old man said, “we’d pour a big circle of gasoline on the ground and light it and then jump in to warm ourselves before we flew. They said, what are you doing that for, aren’t you afraid of getting burned? We’d probably be dead in an hour anyway, so what difference did it make?”

He’d been an observer in the flying corps and had some photographs of himself in uniform. He realized he’d gotten away from the point.

“I don’t understand,” Cook said.

“What don’t you understand?”

“The point of it.”

“The point is, I’ll be dead and the bank account will be empty. There’ll be nothing left. The house will fall down around you and you’ll have Caroline to take care of, and that’ll be the end.”

“It was only a few checks. Just saving you some trouble.”

“I wish you knew how to,” Wain said.

The week after arriving, Vivian, sitting at her grandfather’s dark desk against the wall in the unfinished study, wrote a letter. Dear Philip , it began.

She always wrote Dearest Philip . Was this an unintentional lapse or was it something more? Bowman felt a kind of foreboding, a chill going through him as he read the strangely unfamiliar words. No one could possibly know what had happened in London. That was in another world, another completely. Nervously he read on. Caro is about the same. It’s very hard for her to talk and I feel like she gets tired of trying to make herself understood and she gives up, but you can tell things from her expression. It’s mainly me who takes her out, me and grand-dad. Apart from that we watch tv or she sits in the kitchen with me a lot. Nothing much gets done on the house. Cook is really useless. He’s in town doing what, I don’t know, or back in the shed. But that’s not why I’m writing .

Bowman turned the page over. He was reading quickly, apprehensive.

I’m not sure how to put it or why it is, but for a while now I’ve had the feeling that we’ve each been going our own way without a lot in common. I’m not talking about a particular thing (?)

Here, his eye skipped ahead. The question mark frightened him, he didn’t know what it meant, but there was nothing. I guess I can’t blame you. And I don’t blame myself. Probably it’s always been this way, but in the beginning I didn’t realize it. I really don’t belong in your world and I don’t think you belong in mine. I feel like probably I should be back where I fit in .

The words unaccountably went through him like something fatal. It was a letter of parting. Two nights before she’d left they’d made love with a pillow doubled beneath her like an innocent naked child with a stomachache, and he felt her become engaged in a way that had never happened before, perhaps because of how they were going about it or perhaps they were entering another level of intimacy, but now he saw with a sudden and poignant regret that he’d been wrong, she had been responding to something else, something known to her alone.

Daddy would probably have a fit if he heard me saying this, but I don’t want anything, any alimony. I don’t want you supporting me for the rest of my life. We haven’t been married for that long. If you could give me three thousand dollars to help me temporarily, that would be fine. Be honest, I’m not wrong, am I? We really weren’t meant for each other. Maybe I’ll find the right man, maybe you’ll find the right woman, at least someone more suited to you .

Her daddy. Bowman had never had a strong masculine figure in his own life to teach him how to be a man, and he had been drawn to his father-in-law despite himself and the real distance between them. There was no connection—he had no idea what his father-in-law thought or would do. He remembered him sitting with almost criminal ease, buttering a piece of toast and drinking coffee at breakfast the morning after the big snowstorm in Virginia when they all slept over. He remembered it clearly afterwards.

The day after having written the letter, Vivian happened to see her uncle Cook coming along the side of the house pushing a wheelbarrow with something heaped in it, and then with a shock she saw a foreleg hanging over the rim. She hurried out as Cook set the wheelbarrow down by the front door.

“What happened? Is he hurt?” she asked anxiously.

“I found him out by the shed,” Cook said.

The dog’s eyes were closed. She took its paw.

“Is he dead?”

“I think so.”

“You’d better call the vet. You’d better tell grand-dad,” Vivian said.

Cook nodded.

“He was just lying there,” he said.

Her grandfather came out to see. He was wearing an old straw hat, like a country lawyer. They could hear Caroline calling out something slurred. Wain stroked the dog’s foot and then slowly, as if thinking of something else, began to gently smooth its fine black coat.

“Should we call Dr. Carter?” Vivian asked.

“No. No,” Wain said. “No use calling him.”

Tears were running down his face. He seemed ashamed of them. Dr. Carter was the bow-legged vet who couldn’t see out of his left eye—he’d been hit on the head one time. He’d hold up a hand, “For instance, I can’t see my hand,” he would say.

Cook was standing silent and, to his father it seemed, emotionless. Wain was remembering what Cook had been like as a boy, mischievous but companionable, and what had gradually happened to him. He had a vision of what was to come, Cook, sullen and still handsome coming down the stairs to face foreclosure, naked legs first, wearing his gray paisley dressing gown, his silver hair uncombed. Tired and looking as if he had a headache, having spent it all.

“Well, what is it you want?” he would say.

Without any idea of what he would do, and Caroline slumped in her wheelchair, past trying to make herself understood.

It was bitter at first, being alone, being left. The pillow slip became dirty, he swept up himself. He felt angry but at the same time realized she had been right. They had been living a life of appearances and essentially she had had nothing to do, which included maintaining the apartment. The towels were usually damp, the bedding hastily pulled up, the windowsills had dirt on them. They had quarreled about it. Why didn’t she clean up a little? he asked conversationally.

She disdained to answer.

“Vivian, why don’t you spend a little time cleaning up the place?”

“It’s not my ambition.”

Her use of the word, whatever that meant, annoyed him.

“Your ambition. What do you mean, ambition?”

“It’s not my aim in life,” she said.

“I see. Just what is your aim in life?”

“I’m not saying,” she said.

“And what is mine?”

“I don’t know,” she said dismissively.

He was enraged. He could have broken the table with one blow.

“Damn it! What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know,” she said.

It was useless trying to talk. He could barely bring himself to lie in bed beside her, the sense of alienation was so strong. It seemed she was radiating it. He was nearly shaking, he couldn’t sleep. Finally he’d taken his pillow and gone to sleep on the couch.