James Salter - All That Is

“I was afraid it was going to hit the house,” Anet said. “What if it had hit the house?”

“Do you mean, would the house catch fire? Probably. You weren’t frightened, were you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s all over. I was born during a big thunderstorm.”

She was still unnerved.

“Maybe you’re used to them,” she said.

The thunder had become soft and distant.

“Is this the only candle?” Christine said.

“There’s just the stub of another one.”

Outside it was now evening. After a while he went upstairs to see if the houses across the pond had any lights.

“No,” he said coming down. “There’ll be lights in town. Let’s go in and get something to eat, and we’ll find out what’s going on.”

At the Century he had a late lunch with Eddins in the library. They sat at a table near the window looking down, more or less, at the street. Eddins was wearing a blazer and a yellow silk tie. He and a partner were buying the agency—Delovet was retiring, he said. They’d agreed on a price and on which books Delovet would continue to receive a portion of the commissions.

“I think most of the clients will stay with us,” he said. “No plans to change the name.”

“No, that’s going to go down in infamy.”

“Well, there is that, but we’d rather it just go smoothly.”

“Why is he retiring?”

“You know, I’m not sure. To devote himself more to pleasure, not that he hasn’t always. He’s gotten away with a lot.”

“What happened to the actress?”

“Dee Dee?”

Delovet had finally broken up with her. She had become a drunk. The last time Eddins saw her, she had fallen down some stairs at a party. You poor, drunk woman, Delovet told her. She was long gone. Delovet was taking his harem to France.

“Travel still seems to have its allure,” Eddins said. “Too many people though, too many tour buses. There’s no parking anywhere. I recall when I was a boy, there were 130 million people in the country, I remember the figure, we learned it in class. There was a thing called recitation, perhaps that was something else. The world was smaller: there was home, there was the Nawth, and there was California—no one had ever been to California. Vincent,” he said, beckoning to a waiter, “could you put this in the freezer for a few minutes? It’s a little warm.”

The room had emptied out. They were not in a hurry. Eddins had a book on the best-seller list and a sizeable advance for another.

“Dena wanted to travel,” he said. “She always longed to see the Leaning Tower. She wanted to have dinner on the Nile looking out at the pyramids. She should have married a more successful man, some tycoon. I should have been more of a success. She was an absolutely wonderful woman. I can’t tell you. As a man, I feel it would not be right. You’ve traveled, you’re lucky. I remember the English woman. What became of her?”

“She’s in London,” Bowman said. “In Hampstead, actually.”

“Ah, you see, I don’t even know where that is. Hampstead. Probably some place with great lawns and women strolling in long gowns. You know, I never saw her—you told me about her, but I never had the chance to see her with my own eyes. Superb woman, I’m sure. You’re still handsome, you swine. Was she tall? I don’t remember. I prefer tall women. Irene isn’t very tall. I’m afraid she’s not going to become tall. That would be a lot to ask. Should we have another bottle of this warm wine? No, I’m afraid that would be too much. Why don’t we have something at the bar instead?”

They had often stood at the bar as new members when Eddins was wonderfully sociable. He was still sociable and even better dressed. He tightened his silk tie slightly as they went down to the bar.

“Now, Christine,” he said. “How is Christine?”

“What do you mean, how is she?”

“Nothing, just in the ordinary conversational way. I haven’t seen her. She’s living in the country? You have her quartered out there?”

“Stabled.”

“You villain. Have you ever thought of settling down.”

“There’s nobody more settled than I am.”

“Getting married,” Eddins explained.

“There’s nothing I’d like to do more.”

“I remember your last wedding, your first wedding, that is. Whatever happened to that sultry girl who was having an affair with your rich father-in-law?”

“He died, you know.”

“He died? It was that intense?”

“No, no, that had nothing to do with it. He was married again, happily married. That was quite a while ago. It seems like centuries. People still had family silver.”

“I’d like to think that particular girl never got any older. Whatever happened to her? What do you suppose she’s up to these days?”

“You know, I don’t have any idea. Vivian might know.”

“Vivian was quite good-looking, too.”

“Yes, she was.”

“Women have that quality. They’re going to let them be members here, what’s your position on that? Probably not the good-looking ones, just the ones you avoid at parties. We’re in the middle of the woman thing. They want equality, in work, marriage, everywhere. They don’t want to be desired unless they feel like it.”

“Outrageous.”

“The thing is, they want a life like ours. We both can’t have a life like ours. So, the old fellow died, eh? Your father-in-law.”

“He died, and my father died.”

“Sorry to hear that. Mine did, too. He died just this last spring. It was sudden, I couldn’t get there beforehand. I come from a small town and a respectable family. We knew the doctor, we knew the president of the bank. If you called the doctor, even at some god-awful hour, he’d come to the house. He knew you. He knew your whole family. He’d held you up by the feet when you were two minutes old and whacked you to get the first wail of life out of you. Decency, that was a word you lived by. Loyalty. I’m loyal to all that, boyhood, the Old South. You have to have loyalty to things. If you don’t have loyalty, you’re alone on earth. I have a wonderful photograph of my father in his infantry uniform, he’s smoking a cigarette. I don’t know where it was taken. Photography is a tremendous thing. In this photograph he’s still alive.”

He paused as if to reflect or turn the page.

“I’m selling this book to the movies,” he said. “Handsome sum of money, but what jackals they are. Unworthy. They have too much money, limitless. I had a writer named Boyd, an ex-preacher, he could write, he had the gift. I couldn’t sell his stories. It’s a shame. He wrote a story I’ll never forget about a blind pig, it would break your heart. His ambition was to sell a story or two to Harper’s . Not very much to ask, other people managed to do it, other writers who for some reason or other they preferred.”

They shook hands on the street. It was past two and a beautiful afternoon. The light seemed unusually clear. He walked up Madison then. There was no neighborhood quite like it—the galleries on the side streets with fragments of statues, the bourgeois apartment buildings on the corners, monuments really, not of impressive height, eight or ten stories with wide windows. The traffic was not heavy, the green of the park only a block away. On the sidewalk the few tables of a small restaurant were empty now. Women were shopping. An old man was walking a dog.

There was a bookshop further up that he liked. The owner was a slight man in his fifties who was always dressed in a suit and came, it was said, from a well-to-do family in which he was the errant son. From childhood he had always loved books and wanted to be a writer, later copying out pages of Flaubert and Dickens by hand. He’d imagined himself in a light-filled room in Paris working in solitude and had eventually gone to Paris but was only lonely there and unable to write.