James Salter - Light Years

It moved closer to his, as if for comparison.

“You have better fingers,” he said. They were pale, long, the bone within them showing. “Mine are square.”

“Mine are square, too,” she said.

“Mine are squarer.”

Lunch, brandy, coffee. She loved the isolation, one side on a rising street, of this store that had been abandoned. She was filled with a sense of peace, of accomplishment. She had received goodness, now she radiated it, like a stone warmed for bed in the evening. She left by the side door. The ancient trees had burst the sidewalk, enormous trees, their trunks scarred like reptiles. Only a few leaves had fallen. It was still mild, the last hour of summer.

He was slight, Jivan, inconsequential. He was devoted to those American emblems of drab middle class, shoes, pastel sweaters, knit ties. She drove his car when her own was broken down. He scolded her for her carelessness with it, the papers it was strewn with, the dents that appeared in the side. She smiled at him, she apologized. She did as she pleased.

His ambition was to be a man of property. He had the cunning for it. He owned the storefront in which he lived, he was buying a house on ten acres near New City. He accumulated quietly, patiently, like a woman.

“I’m interested in your house,” Nedra said.

“Yes, where is it, exactly?” Viri asked.

It was nothing, Jivan said, a very small house, but the land was nice. It was really a studio more than a house. There was a brook, though, with a ruined stone bridge.

They were eating dinner. They drank the Mirassou. Franca had half a glass. Her face seemed exceptionally wise in the soft light, her features indestructible.

“It’s in your blood to have property, isn’t it?” Nedra said.

“I think it’s how you’re brought up. But, in the blood… there could be something there, too. You know, I remember my father,” he said. “He told me, ‘Jivan, I want you to promise me three things.’ I was just a little boy, and he said, ‘Jivan, first of all, promise me you will never gamble. Never.’ I mean, I was seven, eight years old. And he was saying, never gamble. ‘If you must gamble,’ he said, ‘do it with the king of gamblers. You can find him in the streets, he is naked, he’s lost everything, even his clothes.’

“ ‘Secondly’—I was still picturing this king, this beggar, but my father went on, ‘Secondly, never visit whores.’ Excuse me, Franca. I was eight years old, I didn’t know what we were even talking about. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘now promise me. If you do visit them, go only in the morning; that’s when they have no paint, no powder, you can see what they are really like, do you understand?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, Father.’ ‘Good,’ he said, ‘and the third thing, now listen: always paint a house before you sell it.’ ”

He was dark, he was filled with stories like the serpent in myths; each white tooth contained a story and each story a hundred others, they were all within him, intertwined, sleeping. The stranger, flashing with legends, he cannot be overcome. Once they have escaped him, these hymns, these jokes, these lies join with air, they are breathed, they cannot be filtered out. He is like the prow of a ship cutting through seas of sleep. Silence is mysterious, but stories fill us like the sun. They are like fragments in which reflections lie like broken pieces; collect them and a greater shape begins to form, the story of stories appears.

“My father is dead,” Jivan said, “but my mother is still alive. She’s a wonderful woman, my mother. She knows everything. She has a house, a little garden, not far from the sea. Every morning she drinks a glass of wine. She’s never left her town. She’s like… who was it, Diogenes. In that little town with its trees in the square she’s as happy as we are in the heart of the greatest city.”

“Diogenes?” Viri said.

“Yes, isn’t he the one that lived in the barrel?”

IN THE MORNING THE LIGHT came in silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, infinite, the moist earth beneath—one could taste this earth, its richness, its density, bathe in the air like a stream. Not a sound. The rind of the cheese had dried like bread. The glasses held the stale aroma of vanished wine.

In the empty dining room hung the expulsion from Eden, a painting filled with beasts and a forest like Rousseau’s from which two figures were emerging, the man still proud, the woman no less so. She was graceful, only half in shame; she was irreverent, her flesh gleamed. Even in the early light which deprived the marvelous serpent of his colors, the trees of their fruit, she was recognizable, at least to the painting’s owner, her legs, the boldness of her body hair, its very life. It was Kaya.

He had noticed it only by chance. He had been drawn one day to its lambence, unthinking, as one is drawn to the worn spot on a relic, to a white face in a crowd. He had discovered it as if in confirmation, as if objects were proving his life.

On another wall was the famous photograph of Louis Sullivan in Mississippi, taken at Ocean Springs, his summer home. In white shirt and pants, a white cap, with a mustache and beard, he looked like a river captain or novelist. A large nose, delicate fingers, leaning almost daintily, posing, against a tree.

He could not be Sullivan, he could not be Gaudí. Well, perhaps Gaudí, who lived to that old age which is sainthood, an ascetic old age, frail, slight, wandering the streets of Barcelona, unknown to its many inhabitants. In the end he was struck by a streetcar and left unattended. In the bareness and odor of the charity ward amid the children and poor relations a single eccentric life was ending, a life that was more clamorous than the sea, an everlasting life, a life which was easy to abandon since it was only a husk; it had already metamorphosed, escaped into buildings, cathedrals, legend.

Morning. The earliest light. The sky is pale above the trees, pure, more mysterious than ever, a sky to dizzy the fedayeen , to end the astronomer’s night. In it, dim as coins on a beach, fading, shine two last stars.

Autumn morning. The horses in nearby fields are standing motionless. The pony already has a heavier coat; it seems too soon. Her eye is dark and large, the lashes scanty. Walking close, one hears the steady sound of grass being eaten, the peace of the earth being milled.

His dreams are illicit; in them he sees a forbidden woman, encounters her in crowds with other men. In the next moment they are alone. She is loving, complaisant. Everything is incredibly real: the bed, the way she is arranged…

He wakes to find his wife lying on her stomach, the children on top of her, one on her back, the other on her buttocks. They are sleeping on her, clinging, head to foot. Their presence absolves him, slowly he grows content. This world, its birds in their feathers, its sunlight… reason, at least for the moment. It consoles him. He is warm, potent, filled with impregnable joy.

What passes between them, this couple, in the endless hours of consort? What finds its way, what flows? Their bedroom was spacious, with a view of the river and waist-high windows, double-opening, the glass cut in diamonds, uneven, bowed outward, distorted as if by heat; here and there a sliver was missing, a lozenge escaped from its soft rim of lead. The walls were a faded turquoise, a curious color he no longer disliked. Beyond French doors was a white sunroom, white as linen, where, feet upward, on a wicker couch their dog was asleep.

Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less—at least it was the preparation for one—and it was an illustration of life for their children. They had never expressed this to one another, but they were agreed upon it, and these two versions were entwined somehow so that one being hidden, the other was revealed. They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachievable but in the sense of the pure.