James Salter - All That Is

“Do you want to go in again?” Bowman said, standing.

“All right,” she said.

They walked straight in, and when it was to the waist he dove, arms stretched out and his head tucked between them. The water was a dusty green, pure and silky with a gentle swell. This time they didn’t swim together but went different ways. He swam towards the east, slowly falling into a steady rhythm of it. The sea was passing around him, beside him, beneath him in a way that belonged to him alone. There were a few other swimmers, their solitary heads showing further in. He felt he could go a great distance, he was filled with strength. With his head down he could see the bottom, smooth and rippled. He went a long way and at last turned and started back. Though he was tiring he felt he could not swim enough, stay long enough, in this ocean, on this day. Finally he came out, spent but elated. Not far from him a group of children, ten or twelve years old, were running into the water in a long, uneven file, girl with girl, boy following boy, their faces and cries filled with joy. He began walking towards Ann, who had come out earlier and was sitting in her sleek red bathing suit, he’d been able to pick her out from a distance.

With a feeling of triumph—he could not explain it—he stood drying himself before her. It was nearly eleven. The sun had terrific weight, it was like an anvil. They walked up together to where the car was parked off the road. Her legs seemed to have tanned even more as she sat in the seat beside him. The cheekbones of her face were burned. As for himself, he was completely happy. He wanted nothing more. Her presence was miraculous. She was the woman in her thirties in stories and plays who for some reason, circumstances, luck, had never found a man. Desirable, life-giving, she had slipped through the net, the fruit that had fallen to the ground. She had never spoken about their future. She had never mentioned, except in enthusiasm, the word “love.” Standing before her that day though, having come out of the sea he had nearly said it, knelt beside her and said it, the love he had for her. He had nearly said, will you marry me? That was the moment, he knew.

He was unsure of himself and of her. He was too old to marry. He didn’t want some late, sentimental compromise. He had known too much for that. He’d been married once, wholeheartedly, and been mistaken. He had fallen wildly in love with a woman in London, and it had somehow faded away. As if by fate one night in the most romantic encounter of his life he had met a woman and been betrayed. He believed in love—all his life he had—but now it was likely to be too late. Perhaps they could go on as they were forever, like the lives in art. Anna , as he’d begun to call her, Anna, please come. Sit here beside me .

Wells had married again sure of even less. He had seen a woman’s legs and talked to her in the neighboring yard. They had run off together and his wife had formed her life around his. Perhaps it was a question of that, arranging a life. Perhaps they would travel. He had always meant to go to Brazil, to the place where Elizabeth Bishop had lived with her Brazilian companion, Lolta Soares, and to the two rivers, one blue and the other brown, that came together and she had written about. He had always wanted to go back to the Pacific, where the only daring part of his life lay, and travel across it, its vastness, passing the great forgotten names, Ulithi, Majuro, Palau, perhaps visiting a few graves, Robert Louis Stevenson’s or Gauguin’s, ten days by boat from Tahiti. Sail as far as Japan. They would plan trips together and stay in small hotels.

She had gone to visit her parents. It was October, he was alone. The clouds that night were a dark blue, a blue such as one seldom sees covering a hidden moon, and he thought, as he often did, of nights at sea or waiting to sail.

He was content to be alone. He’d made himself some dinner and sat afterwards reading with a glass at his elbow, just as he had sat in the little living room on Tenth Street, Vivian gone to bed and he sitting reading. Time was limitless, mornings, nights, all of life ahead.

He often thought about death but usually in pity for an animal or fish or seeing the dying grass in the fall or the monarch butterflies clinging to milkweed and feeding for the great funeral flight. Were they aware of it somehow, the strength it would take, the heroic strength? He thought about death, but he had never been able to imagine it, the unbeing while all else still existed. The idea of passing from this world to another, the next, was too fantastic to believe. Or that the soul would rise in a way unknown to join the infinite kingdom of God. There you would meet again all those you had once known as well as those you had never known, the countless dead in numbers forever increasing but never as great as the infinite. The only ones missing would be those who believed there was nothing afterwards, as his mother had said. There would be no such thing as time—time passed in an hour, like the time from the moment one fell asleep. There would be only joy.

Whatever you believed would happen was what happened, Beatrice said. She would go to some beautiful place. Rochester, she’d said, as a joke. He had always seen it as the dark river and the long lines of those waiting for the boatman, waiting in resignation and the patience that eternity required, stripped of all but a single, last possession, a ring, a photograph, or letter that represented everything dearest and forever left behind that they somehow hoped, it being so small, they would be able to take with them. He had such a letter, from Enid. The days I spent with you were the greatest days of my life…

What if there should be no river but only the endless lines of unknown people, people absolutely without hope, as there had been in the war? He would be made to join them, to wait forever. He wondered then, as he often did, how much of life remained for him. He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived. He would be going where they all had gone and—it was difficult to believe—all he had known would go with him, the war, Mr. Kindrigen and the butler pouring coffee, London those first days, the lunch with Christine, her gorgeous body like a separate entity, names, houses, the sea, all he had known and things he had never known but were there nevertheless, things of his time, all the years, the great liners with their invincible glamour readying to sail, the band playing as they were backed away, the green water widening, the Matsonia leaving Honolulu, the Bremen departing, the Aquitania, Île de France , and the small boats streaming, following behind. The first voice he ever knew, his mother’s, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child. He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home—the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned.

He had been weeding in the garden that afternoon and looked down to see, beneath his tennis shorts, a pair of legs that seemed to belong to an older man. He mustn’t, he realized, be going around the house in shorts like this when Ann was there, probably not even in the cotton kimono that barely came to the knee or in an undershirt. He had to be careful about such things. He always came out and went back in a suit. He’d come in the one from Tripler & Co., a midnight blue with a thin pinstripe.

It was the suit he wore to his aunt’s funeral in Summit. He went with Ann—he had asked her to come with him. The funeral was at ten in the morning. It was brief, and they left soon after. They had come on the early train. Crossing the marshlands in the first bluish light, New York in the distance looked like a foreign city, someplace where you could live and be happy. On the way he told her about his aunt, Dorothy, his mother’s sister, and his wonderful uncle, Frank. He described their restaurant, Fiori, with its red plush and couples who dropped in for dinner on their way home from work and others coming in later, not expecting to be seen. It had been years since it existed, but it seemed very real to him that morning, as if they could drive there for dinner and sit with a drink listening to Rigoletto , and the waitress would bring them steaks, slightly charred with a small pat of butter melting on top. He wanted to take her there for the first time.