James Salter - All That Is

“Anyway, it goes very well with Bowman.”

“Quisqueya Bowman,” he said. “Well, let’s just keep it in mind.”

“And her sister, Vronsky.”

“Yes.”

All right, become intoxicated. It was always from the first word, the first look, the first embrace, the first fatal dance. It was there waiting. Christine, I know you, he thought. She was smiling at him.

He had to tell someone afterwards, he had to say it, it was simply bursting from him. He said it to the doorman,

“I’ve met the most wonderful woman!”

“Oh, yeah? Good for you, Phil.”

He’d never called him by his first name before although they sometimes chatted. His name was Victor.

You’ll meet her, Bowman felt like saying but realized how man-about-town it sounded, and also he did not know if it would happen. He might have regretted saying anything, but he hadn’t been able to help it. The apartment looked bright, welcoming. It was her presence, her initial presence, in his life.

They went to a dinner party given by a husband and wife who published art books, a branch of publishing all to itself, art books and also large-format books on architecture and even more particular subjects, hotels of the Amazon, things like that. Jorge and Felice Arceneaux, it was she who had the money. There were eight at the table, including a young French journalist and a biographer who was writing a life of Apollinaire, the poet who’d been badly wounded in the First War. Christine was perfect. Her looks, of course. They were certainly very conscious of her, and she was graceful and did not say much. She didn’t know any of them and didn’t force herself on them. The biographer, who had been working on the book for years, once had the chance to actually meet Apollinaire’s old mistress, not the one who threw herself out of a window when Apollinaire died but another one, who was Russian, Apollinaire had written about her in a poem.

“I was thrilled to be able to meet her. I mentioned the poem, of course. She was old by then. Do you know what she said? She said, Oui, je mourrai en beauté , I’ll be beautiful until I die, I’ll die beautiful—you can’t translate it exactly. When I die, I’ll still be beautiful, something like that.”

From this they began talking about dying and then heaven.

“I don’t like the idea of heaven,” the hostess said. “For one thing, the people who would be going there. There’s no such thing as heaven, anyway.”

“Are you certain?” someone said.

“Certain enough. And if I’m wrong, well, you might as well sin on earth—there’s not going to be any of that in heaven.”

“Are you married?” the biographer asked Bowman and Christine.

“No. Not quite,” Bowman said to finish more interest on the biographer’s part.

He had not been thinking of marriage but of everything that might lead up to it. He had been thinking ceaselessly of Christine. He knew he would have to do something ordinary, asking her up to the apartment for a drink or a nightcap, the word seemed old-fashioned and even preposterous. He was certain she liked him, but at the same time he was nervous about putting it to the test. He hated the idea of being awkward. At the same time he knew it to be unimportant, that once they were past that, anything awkward would be forgotten. But it didn’t matter what he knew, or else he’d forgotten all he knew. The journalist was telling the story of a notorious murder—it wasn’t clear where it had happened—that was solved because of traces of semen, he pronounced it semean, found on a cigarette. He managed to repeat the word several times. No one bothered to correct him.

As they left the table, Christine said in a low voice,

“Semean?”

“It must be the French pronunciation,” Bowman said.

“Seminé,” she suggested.

“It’s the title of a song.”

“Um. I’ll try some,” she remarked as if they were talking about an odd menu item. She added, “Do you happen to have any?”

Was she still kidding? She was not looking at him.

“Yes,” he said. “Lots.”

“I thought you might say that.”

For a few moments in the cab they rode quietly, as if they were going to the theater. Then he kissed her, fully, on the mouth. The taste was fresh. He smelled her perfume. He held her hand as they rode up in the elevator.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“I’m going to have a little something.”

He poured some bourbon. He felt she was watching him. He drank it rather quickly. He began to kiss her again, holding her by the arms.

In the bedroom, he removed her shoes. Then, in only the light from the other room, they undressed on opposite sides of the bed.

“Lots, you said.”

“Yes.”

She went into the bathroom. She came out and he said,

“No, stand there for a moment.”

He tried to look slowly at her but couldn’t. It was the first time, it was always blinding.

“Come here,” he said.

She lay beside him for a few minutes, the first minutes, as a swimmer lies in the sun. He could see her nakedness, almost all of it, in the near dark. They made love simply, straightforwardly—she saw the ceiling, he the sheets, like schoolchildren. There was no sound but the float of traffic distant and below. There was not even that. The silence was everywhere and he came like a drinking horse. He lay for a long time on top of her, dreaming, exhausted. She had not made love for more than a year, and she lay dreaming, too, and then asleep.

They woke to the fresh light of the world. She was exactly as she had been the night before though her mouth was pale now and her eyes plain. They made love again, he was like a boy of eighteen, invincibly hard. The apartment was beautiful in a way it had never been, the light in it, her presence. They had not been too hasty in going to bed together, nor had they waited too long. These were merely the days of initiation, he knew. So much was still to come.

They drank orange juice and made coffee. He had to go to work.

“Can we have dinner this evening?”

“No, I’m sorry, I can’t this evening… darling—it’s too early to call you darling, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, this once.”

“Go ahead.”

“Darling,” she said.

Tim Wille was a furniture designer, a little nervous and wild-eyed. When he talked to you he looked elsewhere, often at the wall. He no longer drank. He had been arrested while driving with a blood alcohol level that was .17 above the maximum limit. He’d spent the night in jail and thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees over the following year. It was the best thing that ever happened to him—he gave up drinking, he said. He still had the look of it, though, along the edges.

Someone was singing at his house, it was hard to make out what. It was a party. The sound drifted over in a loose, romantic way. She liked Bowman’s house, Christine said. Although she had lived in New York, she had never been out here.

“It’s like the cane fields or something.”

They could hear the sea, the continuous, low sound of waves that lay beneath the wind.

He took her to a restaurant on the highway, a farmhouse set back from the road and run by a Greek family, a mother and two sons who were both in their fifties. The older one, George, was in the kitchen. Steve, who was less taciturn, handled the front, and the mother was cashier and ran the bar. The restaurant was known for steak, grilled over coals, and various Greek dishes like moussaka. When Steve came to the table, Christine said to him in Greek,

“So, what do you have to eat?”

He looked at her and nodded slightly.