James Salter - All That Is

Later the same woman talked to them again. She was more familiar.

“Do you live in Paris?” she asked.

“We’re just on a trip here.”

“Yes, that’s the same,” the woman said.

She had dark lipstick. She was from Düsseldorf, she said.

“Are you working?” she asked Anet.

“Sorry?”

“Do you work?”

“No.”

“I work in a hotel. I’m the manager.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We’re just in Paris,” she explained, “for a visit. If you come sometime to Düsseldorf, you must stay at my hotel. Both of you,” she said.

“It’s a good hotel?” Bowman said.

“Very good. What is that wine you’re drinking?” she said.

She called the waiter.

“Bring another bottle for them,” she said. “Put it on my bill.”

She gave them her card a little later. It was clearly meant for Anet.

After she and her companion left, they drank the second bottle. There were still people waiting for tables. The overall sound of talk and dining never diminished.

In the taxi they caressed each other’s hand. The city was brilliant and vast. The shops were lit along the avenues as they passed. In the room he took her in his arms. He whispered to her and kissed her. He let his hands move down her back. She was twenty. He had known her when she was even younger, a young girl, at her birthday party, running with her girlfriends along the edge of the pond in the sunlight in their tops and underpants, kicking at the water, splashing each other and calling out, fucker-sucker! He’d been surprised at the language. He lifted her onto the bed.

This time it was in all fullness. His palms on either side of her were pressed flat against the sheet, and he held himself half-raised on his arms. He heard her make a sound like a woman, but that was not the end. He paused for a moment and began again. It went on for a long time. She became exhausted.

“I can’t,” she pleaded.

In the morning the room filled with light. He got up and closed the curtains, but there was a gap where the sun slipped through and lay across the bed. He pushed the covers away, and the strip of sunlight lay across the top of her legs. The pubic hair shone. She was unknowing but after a minute or two, feeling the air perhaps or her nakedness, she turned over. He bent and kissed the small of her back. She was not quite awake. He parted her legs and knelt between them. He had never been more confident or sure. This time he went in easily. The morning with its stillness. He stayed unmoving, waiting, imagining unhurriedly everything that was to follow. He was making it known to her. Barely a movement, as if it were forbidden. At long last he began, slowly at first with infinite patience that gradually gave way. His head was bowed as if in thought. The end was still far off. Far, far. The band of sunlight had moved towards the foot of the bed. He thought he might outlast it, but then slowly he could feel it mounting. His hand was on her body to steady it, his knees holding down her legs. The faint cries of children in the playground. Sweet Jesus!

Afterwards she had a bath. The water was good and hot. She put up her hair and got in, first her legs and then slowly the rest of her. She was in Paris with him, in a hotel. It was all outrageous, she thought. She was amazed at how it had come about. It was also perfectly natural, she didn’t know why. She was washing away the traces of travel, lovemaking, everything, and becoming fresh for the day. He could hear the pleasant sounds of it as he lay in the bed. He was in the person of his former self, in London, Spain, lying quietly, full, so to speak, with what had been accomplished.

“I love this hotel,” she said when she came out.

The Paris he showed her was a Paris of vistas and streets, the view across the Tuileries, coming into place des Vosges, rue Jacob, and rue des Francs-Bourgeois, the great avenues with their luxurious shops—the price of heaven—the Paris of ordinary pleasures and the Paris of insolence, the Paris that takes for granted one knows something or that one knows nothing at all. The Paris he showed her was a city of sensual memories, glittering in the dark.

Days of Paris. They omitted the museums and the student quarter, boulevard Saint-Michel, and the hurrying crowds, but he took her to see, in the dedicated mansion on rue de Thorigny, the pictures and etchings—many of them grotesque but others supreme—that Picasso had done of Marie-Thérèse Walter during their long love affair in the 1920s and ’30s. Some of them were painted in a single inspired afternoon or only days apart. She had been naive and docile when he met her, and he taught her to make love on his terms. He liked to paint her pensive or asleep, and his etchings of her are more beautiful than any incarnation, worthy of worship. In their presence, things assume their true importance, of how life can be lived.

Although he made her iconic, she was not at all interested in art or the circles he belonged to, and Picasso eventually chose another woman.

She remembered going to have a drink with a man Philip particularly liked, a publisher, Christian something, a big, white-haired man with manicured hands. It was in the bar of a hotel not far from his office where he went every afternoon after work and sat in one of the leather armchairs and drank and talked. She had an impression of someone solid and sweet-smelling from soap and cologne. He filled the chair. He was like a large, sacred animal, a fatted bull, barely able to turn in his stall but handsome. He was cordial to them, talking about Gide, Malraux, and others whose names she didn’t recognize.

“Are you a writer, mademoiselle ?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“You have to watch out for this fellow,” he said gesturing towards Philip. “You know that.”

“I know,” she said.

He was making the assumption that everyone made and that embarrassed her a little, although sometimes not. On the street it didn’t embarrass her or in restaurants, but in shops.

On the way back to the hotel they stopped and she wrote some postcards on the terrace of a restaurant that had a glass partition along the sidewalk.

“So, who are you writing to?”

She was writing to her roommate—you don’t know her—and to Sophie.

“Ah, Sophie again.”

“She’s great. You’d like her.”

“Are you writing one to your mother?”

“Are you kidding? She thinks I’m having an interview.” She paused and looking at the card she was writing said, “You know, you really should tell me. Are you mad at her? Have you forgiven her yet?”

“I’m in the process of it,” he said.

He was smoking a cigarette as they sat there, a French cigarette. It seemed fatter than an ordinary one. He put it, a little inexpertly, she thought, to his lips and took a light drag and as some of the bluish smoke slid up over his face, exhaled.

“Does the smoke bother you?”

“No, it has a nice smell.”

“You’ve never smoked, have you?”

“No, unless you count smoking a little dope.”

“It used to be that women weren’t allowed to smoke.”

“What do you mean, weren’t allowed?”

“They were allowed, but it was considered unseemly. No woman would smoke in public.”

“When was this? In the middle ages?”

“No, before the war.”

“Which war?”

“The world war. The first one.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true.”

“That’s incredible,” she said. “Let me try a puff.”

She took the cigarette, drew a little on it, and coughed. She handed it back.

“Here.”

“Strong, isn’t it?” he said.

“Much too strong.”

They were going to Flo for dinner.