James Salter - All That Is

In the small white house in Piermont, together with his wife and Leon, Eddins was living the life of a philosopher king. The house was still plainly furnished, two old wicker chairs with cushions were near the couch and there was a worn oriental rug. There were books, bamboo night tables in the bedroom, and a sense of harmony. They wanted for nothing. In the kitchen, which was also the dining room, was the table on which they ate and where Eddins often liked to sit reading with a cigarette burning in an amber holder and a feeling of the house around him, on his shoulders, as it were, his wife and Leon upstairs and sleeping and he, like Atlas, supporting it all.

Around the town they dressed casually, Eddins, as he said, in house-painter style, the locale seemed to call for it. He wore an overcoat, a scarf and suit jacket, sweatpants, and a fedora although he dressed up when he went into the city. He drove, usually alone, and always with a feeling of exhilaration when, crossing the George Washington Bridge, he saw the great skyline in the distance. At night, driving more freely and amid less traffic the farther he got from the city, he arrived home still humming a little with the energy of Manhattan.

For a long time they remained one of the new couples one always envies, a couple free of habit and familiarity, of history even, and at parties as they stood talking to people she would, unseen, hold his thumb. At night they would lie in bed listening to the stairs creak and watching television, hardly bothering to tell Leon to turn out his light. Night with the great river silent. Night with bits of rain. The entire house creaked in winter, and in the summer it felt like Bombay. Because of Leon, they could no longer sit, like William Blake and his wife, naked in the garden, but on the headboard of the bed she had printed a small sign that said Umda , a kind of Egyptian king or chief, and he wore only the bottoms of his pajamas.

In town and in the neighboring village, Grand View, they had made friends. At Sbordone’s one night they met a somewhat doleful-looking painter named Stanley Palm who looked like Dante in the painting of him seeing Beatrice for the first time and lived in a cinderblock house on the river with a small studio to the side of it. He was separated from his wife, Marian. They had been married for twelve years and had a nine-year-old daughter named Erica. Erica Palm, Eddins thought to himself. He liked the sound of it. Erica and Leon. It was unusual but very modern, the parents of both of them had been divorced or at least had come undone. In Palm’s case it was because his wife had gotten discouraged and given up on him: he was going nowhere. He had no gallery in New York, no reputation. He taught three days a week in the art department at City College, the rest of the time he worked in his studio on paintings that were sometimes all one color.

Palm didn’t have much luck with women though he hadn’t abandoned hope. Especially at bars he had no luck. In the city he stopped for a drink and to a woman who seemed to be by herself, ventured,

“Come alone?”

He could be sized up in a glance.

“No. My friend is getting me a drink,” she said.

Palm saw no one and finally asked,

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from the moon,” she said cooly.

“Ah. I’m from Saturn.”

“You look it.”

He’d been separated for more than a year. It was hard to understand things, he confessed to Eddins. There were painters doing very well who were not any better than he was. There were people for whom everything seemed easy. On impulse one night he called Marian.

“Hi, babe,”

“Stanley?”

“Yeah,” he said somewhat threateningly, “it’s Stanley.”

“I didn’t recognize your voice for a minute. You sound funny.”

“Do I?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No, I’m fine. What are you doing?” he asked more casually.

“What do you mean?”

“Why don’t you come over here?”

“Come over there?”

He decided to go ahead with it, in the spirit of the times.

“I feel like fucking you,” he said rather quickly.

“Oh, gosh,” she said.

“No, I mean it.”

She changed the subject, he’d clearly been drinking or listening to something.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’ve been thinking about us. Why don’t you be nice about it?”

“I have been nice.”

“I’m feeling really lonely.”

“It’s not loneliness.”

“What would you call it?”

“I can’t come over.”

“Why not? Why not be a good-hearted woman?”

“I have been. Lots of times.”

“That’s not helping me now,” he said.

“You’ll get over it.”

She talked to him a while longer. At the end she asked if he felt any better.

“No,” he said.

Then one day at the Village Hall, where he’d gone with some announcements of a show he was part of, there was a dark-haired girl in a tight sweater who seemed friendly. Her name was Judy, she was younger but they talked for a while and she was impressed that he was a painter. She had never met a painter before, she said. She gave him a ride back towards Piermont and along the way, as if in a trance, he reached over and slipped a hand inside her leather jacket, like a rock star, as she drove. She said nothing and became his girlfriend. Soon he told her about an idea he had which was to open a restaurant, the kind that was in New York that painters and musicians went to. It would be Italian and he had a name for it, Sironi’s, after a painter he admired.

“Sironi’s.”

“Yeah.”

Judy was enthusiastic. She would help with everything, she said, and be a partner. Palm saw a dream coming true, the kind of dream that seldom dies. Sironi’s would be in town somewhere, although there was also a possible location up on 9W. Judy was in favor of town, she didn’t like the idea of being away from everything, particularly late at night.

“Why do you want to be up there?” she said.

“Well, there’s an old place for rent there right next to a curve. Marian didn’t like the idea, either.”

“What does Marian have to do with it?” Judy said.

Stanley had known they were not going to get along and had even been uneasy about Judy spending nights with him. He had her park a little down the road.

“What’s wrong? You afraid someone will see me?”

“It’s not that. It’s Erica,” he said.

“Doesn’t Marian know you have a girlfriend? And what business is it of hers, anyway?”

“Marian doesn’t have anything to do with it, and it doesn’t matter what she thinks. I don’t give a damn what she thinks.”

“Yes, you do,” Judy said.

Stanley was bothered by this. He did talk to his wife a lot, she sometimes called when Judy was there. It was plain who he was talking to. But he was an artist, he felt he should not be constrained by bourgeois mentality or behavior. He asked Marian to write a letter saying that he was free to see anyone he liked and to make love to anyone he liked though she declined to say in any place he liked and in any way he liked.

Judy read the letter and began to cry.

“What is it?”

“Oh, God!”

“What?”

“You have to get her permission!”

The colored sketches Stanley had made of the front and also the bar area of Sironi’s notwithstanding, an unrelated event stopped everything. The mayor, who had been in office for years, a man with a family and many relatives in town, had been having an affair with a cashier who worked at the Tappan Zee Bank, and they were sexually engaged one night in his car when a diligent policeman shined a light in the window. The cashier claimed rape but then regained her poise, and the mayor sought to explain it to the policeman, who, unfortunately, was the chief of police. The mayor’s attempts to keep him from entering it on the blotter were of no avail, and the result was a state of hostility that divided the town into two camps with the mayor’s wife on the police side, and a state of administrative paralysis. Sironi’s permits were indefinitely stalled.