James Salter - All That Is

The view from upstairs was of two good-sized houses across the water, half-hidden in trees.

“Does it have heat?” he said.

“Yes. There’s a half basement with a furnace.”

They walked outside and down to the pond where, not far out, the dim outline of a sunken rowboat could be seen.

“There’s how much land, did you say?”

“There’s all this. The property goes to the road. It’s a little over an acre.”

“One twenty,” he said.

“That’s all. That’s a very good price.”

“Well, I think I’ll have to buy it.”

“I’m so happy! I knew you’d want it.”

“It’s going to be very nice living here. We could even get married.”

“Yes, we could.”

“Is that an acceptance?”

“I would have to get a divorce.”

“Why don’t we get married and get the divorce later?”

“And we could live in jail,” she said. “That would be all right.”

He bought the house, including some furnishings, for $120,000. He bought it in both their names, a country house that was ideal, big enough to have a guest or two occasionally, perfectly located, a house unto itself.

The bank in Bridgehampton took a generous view of his assets and gave him a mortgage of $65,000. He had some difficulties coming up with the difference. He sold most of the stocks he owned and borrowed $8,000 on a line of credit.

They closed the first week in December and moved in that very day carrying two upholstered chairs bought from an antiques—really, used furniture—dealer in Southampton. They were very happy. That night they lit a fire and made some supper. They drank a bottle of wine and while listening to music, part of another. A dreamed-of night, their first in the house. In bed she slipped the nightgown over her head and let it fall to the floor. She lay in his arms, it was like a wedding night. He took her arm and pressed his lips to the inside of her elbow in a long fervent kiss.

Soon after came Christmas. Anet had gone to Athens to be with her father. The house as yet had little furniture, only a sofa, some chairs, two tables, and a bed. The windows had neither shades nor curtains, and it would have been stark to be there for the holidays, even with a tree. In the city, the streets were alive. It was Christmas in New York, crowds hurrying home in the early darkness, captains of the Salvation Army ringing their bells, St. Patrick’s, the brilliant theater of the great store windows, mansions of plenty, the prosperous-looking people. They were playing “Good King Wenceslas,” bartenders were wearing reindeer antlers—Christmas of the Western world, as in Berlin before the war, the deep green forests of Slovakia, Paris, Dickens’ London.

There was a party at Baum’s. Bowman hadn’t been in the apartment for a long time. As he came in with Christine and a man in a white jacket took their coats, he thought back to having been there the first time with Vivian in her confident young naïveté.

“Philip, it’s so good to see you,” Diana greeted him.

“This is Christine Vassilaros,” he said.

“Hello,” Diana said taking Christine’s hand in hers. “Please come in.”

The room was crowded. Diana was paying special attention to Christine, no doubt having heard about her. Christine had a daughter, she learned, and asked,

“How old is she?”

“She’s sixteen.”

“She must be a beauty,” Diana said with sincerity. “Our son, Julian, is in law school at Michigan. He refused to go to Harvard. It was elitist. I felt like killing him.”

“Do you want a cigar?” Baum asked Bowman.

“No, thanks.”

“These are really fine. They’re Cuban. Take one, smoke it later. I’ve started smoking cigars. One a day. I like to sit and smoke one after dinner. A cigar should touch your lips exactly twenty-two times, anyway that’s what someone told me. Otherwise, as Cheever said, hick. Actually, he was talking about how to hold a cigar properly. I forget how that was.”

“My one regret,” Diana said to Christine, “is that we didn’t have more children. I wish we had three or four.”

“Four is a lot.”

“The happiest days of my life were when Julian was a little boy. Nothing really compares with that. You’re fortunate,” she told Christine, “you can still have children. That’s the whole point of it, it really is. Now we’re free, more or less. We go to Italy. It’s beautiful, but then I think of the love of a little boy.”

“I love Italy,” Baum said. “The people. You know, I call my Italian colleague and his secretary answers the phone—his assistant, I should say. Roberto! It’s wonderful to talk to you! You should be in Rome, it’s such a beautiful day, the sun is shining, you should be here! There’s nobody like them.”

“Why do you call her his assistant?” Diana asked.

“His secretary, then.”

“They’re not all like that. She’s a bit of a songbird. Eduardo is nothing like that. You talk to him and he says, hello, I feel terrible, the world is a mess. He’s the publisher.”

Other guests were coming in. Diana left to greet them. Baum stayed to talk on with Christine, he liked her looks. After the party, he asked his wife,

“What did you think of Philip’s new girlfriend?”

“Is she new?”

“Well, not exactly new but certainly not old.”

“No, she’s quite a bit younger.”

“It’s made him a bit younger.”

“Yes, that’s the general belief,” Diana said.

That spring Beatrice Bowman died. She had been weak and disoriented for a long time. She thought her son was someone else, and his visits had long periods of silence when she seemed to at least be aware of his company while he sat near her and read. To the world she knew, to the few friends who had by then drifted away, to everyone except himself and Dorothy, it was no longer important that she live. What had been her life, the people she knew and the deep pool of memory and knowing, had vanished or dried up and fallen apart. Or so it seemed when she could think about it. She would not have wanted to go on, but she had not been able to prevent it. Outwardly she was still handsome if baffled, and the lines in her face were gentle. She had many times said a final good-bye.

In contrast to her normal agitation, she died calmly. She simply did not wake one morning. Perhaps she had known something the night before, some not quite familiar sadness, a lessening of strength. Except for not breathing, one sleep was indistinguishable from the other.

She left no instructions. Bowman agreed with Dorothy that she should be cremated, and together they went to the funeral home to arrange for it. They asked for the casket to be open, they both wanted to see her for a last time. In the silent room, there his mother lay. They had done her hair and put some light cosmetic on her lips and cheek. He bent and kissed her brow. It seemed indecent. Some quality in her that he knew, not merely life, had been erased.

She had never told him all she knew, nor could he remember all the days of childhood and things they had done together. She had given him his character, a part of it, the rest had formed itself somehow. He thought, with a kind of desperation, of things he would like to talk to her about or talk about once more. She had been a young woman in New York, newly married, and in the blazing summer morning had been blessed with a son.

His stepmother, as it happened, died the same spring. He had never met her or either of the preceding ones. Someone sent him a clipping from a Houston paper. Vanessa Storrs Bowman was her name, she was seventy-three, a social figure. Examining the photo he read on until with a stab of something—it was not grief—he saw that his father had died two years earlier. He felt a strange jolt of time, as if he had been living a partly fraudulent life, and though in all the years he had never seen or heard from his father, some essential connection was now gone. Vanessa Storrs Bowman had two brothers and her father had been president of an oil company. The impression was of money, even wealth. He thought of his mother and the distant rich relative, cousin perhaps, whose mansion just off Fifth Avenue he remembered having been pointed out to him. Did he remember this or was it a dream, three or four dark granite stories, a green roof, and iron and glass doors? Perhaps it did not really exist. He had always expected to pass by it some day but never did.