James Salter - All That Is

The porter had made up their berths while they were at dinner, fresh white sheets and taut blanket. Leon took the upper bunk and at about nine-thirty he climbed up into it. He took off his shoes and put them in a kind of hammock that hung along the side, then his shirt and pants, slipping out of them while lying down. The train meanwhile had stopped and didn’t move for what seemed a long time.

“Why are we stopped?” he called. “Where are we?”

“We’re in Syracuse,” Dena told him. “We’re still in New York. Way up.”

They could hear voices, people who were coming aboard late and some of them passing along the corridor.

“Where will we be in the morning?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

Finally the train began to move again. The country went past like a somber painting, trees in the darkness lit by the windows of the train. Lone, sleeping houses, black and silent. The lights of a town with vacant streets. Dena felt a strange happiness in the quiet of the compartment.

After a while, she said,

“Are you asleep?”

There was no answer. She saw the window becoming flecked with rain and slowly fell asleep herself, opening her eyes again as they began to join a wide expanse of other tracks curving in on theirs. It was Buffalo. Afterwards they crossed a river and traveled along Lake Erie passing forlorn stations, not a soul.

Sometime around one in the morning, its cause unknown, an electrical fire broke out at the end of the car, and the corridor filled with smoke. Dena woke from the acrid smell. Something was coming under the door of the compartment. She was half-asleep but got up quickly to see what it was. Smoke was coming in along the doorjamb, and when she opened the door it poured in on her. She closed it, coughing and crying out to Leon. No one had pulled the emergency brake or spread the alarm. The train had not slowed. A porter in the next car finally noticed. They jammed the doors open but could not get in because of the smoke. By the time the train was stopped and windows broken open, seven passengers, those in compartments closest to the fire, were dead, asphyxiated. They included Dena and Leon, her son.

The ways divide. In the house above the river to which a room had been added, a small room with a window at one end and of a size that almost invited one in to sit and open a book or gaze out into the little garden, untended but nevertheless intimate because of the sculpture in it, a piece of natural sculpture that had been part of a tree that was cut down and sawed into two-foot logs, one of them, thick and upright, happening to have the shape of a woman’s body from waist to where the legs began, a kind of primitive altarpiece, neo-African, rounded, dark, immune to weather—in this house where Eddins, his wife, and son had lived in happiness, free from all danger, where the neighbors were good people, the streets were quiet, the police, finally past the bitter feud with the mayor, were friendly and knew you by name, here, among the trees and village calm, like something fallen from the sky, a great engine detached from an airliner high above and unseen and unheard hurtling down, death had struck, destruction, plunging into life like a sharpened stake.

The ways part. Eddins’ life was now broken in two. The pieces were not equal. All that was happening and that could happen in the future was somehow lighter, inconsequential. Life had an emptiness, like a morning after. He kept rejecting the accident. He could hardly remember the funeral except that it was unbearable. They were buried in the cemetery in Upper Grandview, above the road, in graves that were side by side. Dena’s mother and father had come. Neil was hardly able to face them. He couldn’t rid himself of a feeling of guilt. He was a southerner, he had been raised to honor women and give them protection, to defend them. It was a duty. If he had been on the train, somehow this wouldn’t have happened. He had failed them, like the philosophy professor in Valley Cottage whose house had been broken into and he and his aging wife assaulted. He was never the same afterward. It was not so much the injuries and continuing fear, it was the shame he felt. He hadn’t been able to protect his wife.

Eddins appeared in many ways unchanged, his usual though slightly more casual self. He had a flower in his buttonhole, a boutonniere, he talked to people, joked, but there were things you could not see. He had failed them. He was stained.

For a while he continued to live in the house, but he disliked coming back to it in the evening, to the emptiness and what seemed the knowledge of the world that he was there alone. He rented a small apartment in the city, below Gramercy Park, where in the evening he watched the news and had a drink, sometimes a second or third, and decided not to cook dinner, simple as it was. He was not depressed, but he was living with the feeling of injustice. There were times when he almost broke into tears over his loneliness and what he had lost. He saw them now for what they were and had been, the great days of love. She had asked for and had demanded so little. She had given her love so completely, her great smile, her teeth, her lighthearted foolishness. I love you so much—who could say that with the overwhelming truth of countless acts of love behind it? He hadn’t done all he should have, he should have given more. I would give it now, he thought, and he said it aloud, I would so much give it! Ah, Jesus, he said, and rose to fill his drink. Don’t become a drunk, he thought. Don’t become an object of pity.

Bowman had the other. Without a wife or girlfriend he had seemed settled into a single life, of habit, not uncomfortably, appearing in a dark-blue suit at restaurants and readings, at ease in the visible world, familiar.

It turned out to be other than that.

He was not fully living with Christine, she had resisted it until her life, she explained, was on a more even keel. She continued to spend the night with him in the apartment two or three times a week. She would meet him at the end of the day, sometimes with a bunch of flowers or a fashion magazine, the European edition with its suggestion of the glamour of life there.

They were not married, but they had the pleasures of guiltless love. It was impossible to have enough of her. What Chekhov had meant was that lovemaking that took place once a year had a staggering power, the power of a great, religious experience, and more often than that it was merely something like nourishment, but if that were the price, Bowman was only too willing to pay it.

In the morning there were pieces of her clothing lying about, her shoes, which he particularly liked, near a chair. She was in the narrow kitchen making coffee. They could live in harmony, he knew from the way she talked and behaved, from their intimacy. He had fallen in love before, deeply in love, but it had always been with an other, someone not like himself. With Christine there was the feeling of always having known her. If she could rid herself of her husband, they would marry.

His thoughts were of this as he walked across Central Park, green and immense, with its boundary of tall buildings shining in the morning light. For all of her assurance and poise, Christine was seeking stability. She had confessed it, and it was something he could provide along with much more. He was noticing the youthfulness of various people he passed. He was in the middle of life and just beginning.

On the weekend it rained. They stayed in. They lay on the bed in the quiet of the afternoon, the rain like mist on the window. She was watching something on television, an old movie, Italian, as it happened, and he was reading Verga, Sicilian. A woman in a low-cut dress sat polishing her nails while two men talked. It was in black and white, white shirts, Italian faces, dark hair. The subtitles were partly washed out, Christine was hardly reading them. As Bowman read, her hand slipped inside his robe and held his cock, almost distractedly, although as it swelled her thumb began to move softly along it. The sound had been muted. He could hear himself as he swallowed. He could see from the corner of his eye Christine’s soft cheek. She was contentedly watching the film. His cock was hard, smooth as a scar. By the shore of a lake a woman in a black slip was struggling with a man. She suddenly broke free and ran but then for some reason gave up and awaited her fate. In the close-up her face was resigned but filled with scorn.