James Salter - All That Is

The rain was still heavy as, beneath an umbrella, he was being walked by Davies to cool down. Bowman borrowed one from a woman standing next to them and took Enid to the winner’s stand as Moravin was being led onto it, stepping with a daintiness, the gray markings along the side of his head making him look like an outlaw in a mask. His tongue was trembling in his open mouth as the trainer held him raised up in victory, in his arms like a lamb. Enid’s dog.

They had a drink together afterwards, it was likely that Davies had had one already. His face was filled with pleasure.

“Fine dog,” he said several times. “You had money down on him, missus, I hope.”

“Yes, a hundred pounds.”

“They dropped the odds on him. The bookmakers were betting their own money to lower the odds. They feared him. They feared him.”

He was staying outside the city with a friend, he said. He was more talkative than he’d been. With elation, he confided, “Shows promise, don’t he?”

They left him at the pub and went to dinner with some people on Dean Street, among them an older woman with a marvelous face like a prune and a voice, as it turned out, that was a little hoarse. Bowman was drawn to her. She said something in Italian that he didn’t quite hear, but she declined to repeat it. She’d been married to an Italian, she said.

“He was shot after the war.”

“Shot?”

“In reprisal,” she said. “He knew it would happen. There was a lot of that. His sister, my sister-in-law, who only died a year ago, had the distinction of having spat in Winston Churchill’s face in the Piazza San Marco. They were Fascists, I couldn’t help that. My husband was charming in every other way. It was all quite a while ago, you’re not old enough.”

“No, I am.”

“You’re what? Thirty-five?”

“I’m forty-five.”

“I remember the French Colonial Exposition, 1932 or ’33,” she said. “The Senegalese troops in their blue uniforms, red hats and bare feet. It was a different world, quite different. What has your life been like?”

“Mine?”

“What are the things that have mattered?”

“Well,” he said, “if I really examine it, the things that have most influenced my life, I would have to say the navy and the war.”

“Men have that, don’t they?”

He was not sure he had told the truth. His mind had just drifted back to it involuntarily. And among his dreams it had been the one that most consistently recurred.

Two weeks later, preparing for the Derby, Moravin ran at Wimbledon and fell on the turn, without cause, it seemed. He had a carpal fracture, not serious, but lying in a cast he seemed shamed, as if knowing what had been expected of him. Enid stroked his shoulders, the smooth gray and white of his coat. His small ears were laid back. His gaze was elsewhere.

The bone, though, was slow to heal. It was a drawn-out affair. She went to see him when it had finally healed, but there was something that had not come back. Whatever it was was invisible. He stood elegant and lean, almost entirely like the others, but he never ran again.

“I’m absolutely heartbroken,” she said.

When he was asked about it later, Davies said,

“Yes, he could have run in the Derby, but he had this fall. It’s always something like that. If there’s ever anyone you really fucking hate, buy him a greyhound.”

Enid had come to the airport with him, something she never did. As they stood waiting he’d felt an uneasiness. It was not in anything she said, only in the silence. It was slipping away and he could not stop it. They were not going to marry. She was already married and under some strange obligation to her husband—Bowman had never discovered just what it was. She had said that she couldn’t live in New York, her life was in London. He was only a facet of it there, but he longed to remain that.

“Maybe I can get back next month,” he had said.

“That would be lovely.”

They said good-bye in the main area. She gave a little wave of her fingers as he left.

He felt an emptiness as he boarded the plane, and even before they took off, an intense sadness. As if he were leaving it for the last time, he watched as England slowly passed behind them. Suddenly he missed her terribly. He should have somehow fallen to his knees.

In the carpeted hallway of the Plaza one winter evening, Bowman came face to face with a somewhat shapeless woman in a blue dress. It was Beverly, his ex-sister-in-law, with a chin that had almost completely vanished.

“Well, if it isn’t Mr. New York,” she said.

Bryan was beside her. Bowman shook his hand.

“What are you two doing in New York?”

“I’m going to the powder room,” Beverly responded. “I’ll meet you in the bar, wherever it is,” she said to Bryan.

Bryan was unruffled.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” he said when she had left. “We came up to see a couple of shows. Bev wanted to have a drink in the famous Oak Room bar.”

“It’s straight ahead. You look good.”

“You do, too.”

There was not much to talk about.

“How is everything?” Bowman said. “How’s Vivian? We’re not in touch.”

“She’s fine. Not much changed.”

“Remarried? I guess I would have heard.”

“No, she hasn’t remarried, but you know who has? George.”

“George? Remarried? To who?”

“A woman who lives down there. Peggy Algood. I don’t think you know her.”

“What’s she like?”

“Oh, you know. She’s about ten years younger than he is. She’s easy to get along with. She was married a couple of times before. She’s supposed to have sent a postcard to her mother when she was on her second honeymoon: Algood no good, too . Maybe that’s just a story. I like her.”

“Ah, Bryan, it’s nice to see you. It’s too bad our lives… diverged. How is Liz Bohannon? Is she still around?”

“She’s still around. I don’t think she still rides. We don’t get invited there. Beverly said some things one time.”

Of Bryan, it might be said that he was candid about his wife and uncomplaining. He treated her offhandedly, as he might treat bad weather.

“What show are you seeing?” Bowman asked.

“Pal Joey.”

“Yeah, that’s good. It would be great to see you again sometime.”

“For me, too.”

On a hot day in June, Bowman drove north from New York, generally following the Hudson for more than four hours to Chatham, a place once sacred for a love goddess, the poet Edna Millay, a siren of the 1920s, to spend two days working on a manuscript with a favorite writer, a square-faced man in his fifties with blue eyes and thinning hair who in his youth had dropped out of Dartmouth and gone to sea for three years. Kenneth Wells was his name. He and his wife—she was his third wife, he didn’t particularly look like a man who’d been married a number of times, he was homely, his eyesight was bad; she had been married to his neighbor and one day the two of them had simply gone off to Mexico together and not come back—lived in a house that Bowman liked and that always stayed in his mind as a model. It was a plain wooden house not far from the road and resembled a farm building or stables. You entered through the kitchen or into it. There was a bedroom on one side and the living room on the other. The main bedroom was upstairs. The interior doors, for some reason, were slightly wider than usual with glass in the upper half of some. It was like a small family hotel, a hotel in the West.

It had been a long day. The summer had come early. Sun struck the trees of the countryside with dazzling power. In towns along the way, girls with tanned limbs strolled idly past stores that looked closed. Housewives drove with kerchiefs on their heads and their men in hard yellow hats stood near signs warning Construction Ahead. The landscape was beautiful but passive. The emptiness of things rose like the sound of a choir making the sky bluer and more vast.