James Salter - All That Is

“Flow?” she said. “What’s that?”

It was down a darkened alley that was unlikely to have anything like a restaurant. At last they came to it.

“Oh,” she said seeing the sign, “so that’s it. Flo.”

“The w is silent,” he said.

They had a booth that was too near the kitchen, but it was a good dinner. At the end of it they saw a fight. There was a great crash of dishes and a woman in a black coat was shouting and hitting the manager. He was trying to push her out the door. Finally he succeeded and she stood in the street cursing as a waiter brought her handbag out to her. She shouted something more at the manager, who bowed slightly. Good night, madame, he said to her. A demain , he said.

Where Flo was, Anet had no idea. It was somewhere in Paris. She didn’t speak French, and her outline of the city was of certain avenues without beginning or end, certain Metro stops and signs—Taittinger, La Coupole—and streets that had caught her eye. All of it would never arrange itself, especially at night and when drinking. They were driving back to the hotel, the shops fleeing past lit as always. They seemed familiar somehow.

“Where are we?” she said.

“I can’t read the signs. I think we’re on Boulevard Sebastopol.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s a big boulevard. Goes right into Saint-Michel.”

She could never have done this, she thought. She would never have done it by herself. It was still amazing and so easy. She’d remember it for a long time. She probably could go on with him if she liked for a few months. She’d had boyfriends, two anyway, but it had been different. They were just very young. Did you get the condoms—they were free at the dispensary, but sometimes they ran out of them. They wanted a fistful of them, but then it was usually over quickly. She saw something familiar and tried to think of where they were. They were crossing the Seine. They turned down another street. Above the buildings the top of the Eiffel Tower, brilliantly lit, was floating in the dark.

In the room she lay down in her clothes and let him undress her. He caressed her for a long time and she made plain she was his. He was tracing the cut with his tongue. He turned her over and put his hands on her shoulders and then slowly down along her body as if it were the neck of a goose. When at last he entered her it was as if he were speaking. He was thinking of Christine. Forgiveness. He wanted it to last a long time. When he felt himself going too far he slowed and began again. He could hear her saying something into the bedding. He was holding her by the waist. Ah, ah, ah. The walls were falling away. The city was collapsing like stars.

“Ah, God,” he said after. “Anet.”

She lay in his arms.

“You are something.”

The late hour. The absolute completion. He had been lucky, he thought. In a day or two more, probably, she would begin to be tired of opera like this. She would suddenly recognize how old he was, how much she missed her friends. But it would stay in her life. It would stay in her mother’s. He smoothed her hair. She relaxed in sleep.

She slept until nine. The room was quiet. He’d gone down to look at the newspaper, and she turned over and slept a while longer. When she came out of the bathroom she saw a piece of paper lying on his side of the bed. She picked it up and as she read it her heart seemed to scatter. She quickly put on some clothes to go down to the desk. The elevator was in use. She couldn’t wait and ran down the stairs.

“Have you seen Monsieur Bowman?” she asked the clerk.

“Ah yes. He left.”

“He left for where?”

“I don’t know. He called a taxi.”

“When was that?”

“An hour ago. More.”

She hardly knew what to do. She couldn’t believe it. She had missed something. She went back to the room and sat on the bed with a sickening feeling. Now that she looked she saw that his things were gone. She looked in the bathroom. It was the same. She was suddenly frightened. She was by herself. She had no money. She picked up the note again and read it. I’m leaving. I can’t bother now to explain. It was very nice . It was signed with an initial, P . This time she broke into tears. She fell back on the bed and lay there.

He had gone to a rental agency and gotten a car, a larger one than he wanted but it was all they had, and it was a long drive. He made his way out of the city by the Porte d’Orléans and drove south towards Chartres and towns further on where he had never been. It was sunny and clear. He had a vague idea of going all the way to Biarritz with its two great beaches like wings on either side and the ocean breaking in long white lines. There was little traffic. He had gotten up early and quietly gathered his things. She was sleeping, an arm beneath the pillow, a bare leg showing. The freshness of her, even afterwards. He had forgiven her mother. Come and get your daughter, he thought. At the door he paused and looked at her a last time. He paid the hotel bill while waiting for the taxi. He didn’t try to imagine what she would do.

Of the people he had started with, at about the same time, Glenda Wallace had done well. A senior editor, she was strong-minded and direct though she’d been less so when she was younger, and along the way she had developed a sharp, bitter laugh. She had never married. She had an ailing father she had looked after for years. After he died she bought a house in Tivoli, a town on the Hudson past Poughkeepsie. She’d had no connection with the town, only that she saw it and it appealed to her, the small business section, the undisturbed feeling, and the road going down to the river with the old houses.

As an editor she’d had little to do with fiction and seldom read any. She published books on politics and history and also biographies and was widely respected. She had become shorter over the years and Bowman one day noticed for the first time that she was bowlegged. He admired her, and it was because of the fact she was there and made it seem less remote that he rented a weekend house in Tivoli himself the next year.

Driving to Tivoli, north along the Saw Mill River, was pleasant. It was mostly woodland with very little business clutter, but it also felt strange. Wainscott and the towns around it had almost been home, and he had decided to go elsewhere not out of fear of seeing Christine or her daughter, but simply to eliminate the possibility of it and to put it all behind him. He didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened. At the same time he didn’t mind reflecting on part of it, the part in Paris.

The house belonged to a professor in the economics department at Bard who had gotten a fellowship in Europe and would be gone with his family for a year. Academic life had its stringencies. It was a decent-looking house, but aside from the fireplace there was not much in the living room, a sofa, some chairs, and a small table. The dishes in the kitchen were plastic and there was a miscellaneous collection of glasses, but the kitchen door opened onto a little garden with hedges and a wooden gate to the street.

The house and its meager comforts made publishing seem a rich life, though not as rich as it had been. It had changed greatly from the days when there were only eight of them in the entire firm and writers sometimes spent the night on a couch at the end of the hallway after drinking in various bars until two or three in the morning. There were always dinners and late hours. Drinking in Cologne with Karl Maria Löhr, who never tired and after a while never made sense but who somehow bound writers to him by ordeal. Nights in the German darkness, driving around in the icy fog. You couldn’t remember where you had been or what had been said, but that didn’t matter. There was a kind of intimacy. Afterwards you spoke as friends. He had thought at times of becoming a publisher himself. He probably had the temperament, but he would not have enjoyed the business part. That could be the province of someone who did, a congenial, perfect partner, but he had never encountered him, not at what would have been the right time.