James Salter - Light Years

Chaptelle was a name that had originally been Russian. His mother had come to Paris in the twenties, during the civil war. He had met Beckett, Barrault, he had met everyone. There is a kind of self-esteem which forces walls of ice. This is not to say he wasn’t remembered; his intensity, his dark eyes ringed with shadows, the confidence he carried within him like a tumor—these were not easily forgotten.

They talked about writers: Dinesen, Borges, Simone de Beauvoir.

“She is a dreary woman,” he said. “Sartre, now Sartre has esprit.”

“Do you know Sartre?”

“We have coffee in the same café,” Chaptelle said. “My wife, my ex-wife, knows him better. She works in a bookshop.”

“You’ve been married.”

“We are very good friends,” he said.

“What’s her name?” Eve asked.

“Her name? Paule.”

They had spent their marriage trip in all the little towns Colette had gone to in the years she was dancing in revues. They traveled like brother and sister. It was an hommage .

“Do you know what it is to be really intimate, to feel safe with someone who will never betray you, will never force you to act unlike yourself? That was what we had.”

“But it didn’t last,” Eve said.

“There were other problems.”

When Nedra met him, he was calm; he seemed bored. She noticed that his cuffs were dirty, his hands clean; she recognized him immediately. He was a Jew; she knew it the moment she saw him. They shared a secret. He was like her husband; in fact he seemed to be the man Viri was hiding, the negative image that had somehow escaped.

He drank a demitasse of coffee into which he stirred two spoons of sugar. He was an unmarried son come home in the morning, the son who has lost everything. He sniffed. He had nothing to say. He was as empty as one who has committed a crime of passion. He was his own corpse. One could see in him both the murderer and the half-nude woman crumpled on the floor.

“Your husband’s an architect,” he said finally.

“Yes.”

He sniffed again. He touched his face with the napkin. He had forgotten Eve, that was obvious; one had only to look at them to see that.

“Is he talented?”

“Very,” Nedra said. “You’re a writer.”

“I’m a playwright.”

“Forgive me for not knowing, but have any of your plays been put on?”

“Put on? Produced, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet,” said Chaptelle calmly. It was his brevity which convinced one, his disdain. “Could I borrow one of your cigarettes?”

The desperation of certain people is such that even in inactivity, even in sleep, we understand that their lives are being spent. They are saving nothing for later. They have no need to save. Every hour is a kind of degradation, an attempt to throw away all.

He crushed the cigarette out after one or two puffs. “I’m writing plays, but not for the stage, not for the present stage,” he said. “Do you know who Laurent Terzieff is? I’m writing a play for Laurent Terzieff. He’s the greatest new actor to appear in twenty years.”

“Terzieff…”

“I go to his rehearsals, no one knows I am there. I sit in the back row or over to the side. So far I have yet to detect a single failing in him, a single flaw.”

He was eager to talk. For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there. He questioned her knowledge of the theater. He told her who the great writers were, he named the unknown masterpieces of the time.

“Viri,” she said, “I’ve met the most marvelous man.”

“Yes? Who?”

“You don’t know him,” she said. “He’s a writer. He’s French.”

“French…”

An evening a week giving work as an excuse, sometimes twice a week, whenever he could, he stayed late in town. Slowly his life was being divided. It was true he seemed the same, precisely the same, but that is often all one sees. Collapse is hidden, it must reach a certain stage before it breaks the surface, the pillars begin to yield, façades pour down. His infatuation with Kaya was like a wound. He wanted to look at it every minute, to touch it. He wanted to speak to her, to fall on his knees before her, embrace her legs.

He sat by the fire. Two cast-iron Hessians held the burning logs, the glow of coals at their feet. Nedra was curled in a chair.

“Viri,” she said, “you must read this book. When I’m finished, I’m going to give it to you.”

A book with the edge of its pages dyed mauve, the title in worn letters. She began to read aloud to him, the wood erupting softly in the fireplace like shots.

“What is it called?” he said finally.

“Earthly Paradise.”

He felt weak. The words made him helpless; they seemed to describe the images that overwhelmed him, the silence of the borrowed apartment in which she slept, the width of the bed, her pure, lazy limbs.

In the morning he went early. The sun was white and glancing, the river pale. He drove in long, smooth curvings, straight-aways, the fever of expectation making him blind. The great bridge gleamed in the morning light; beyond it lay the city, wide as the sea, its trains and markets, its newspapers, trees. He was composing lines, speaking to her, whispering into her ear, I love you as I love the earth, white buildings, photographs, noons … I adore you , he said. Cars drifted alongside him. He looked at his face in the rear-view mirror; yes, it was good, it was worthy.

He began to be silent. The city streets were bare. They gave evidence in their stillness and desolation of the night that had passed, they confessed to it like a weary face. He began to be uneasy. It was like an anteroom that led to a place where something terrible had happened; he could smell it as beasts smell the killing house. Suddenly he became frightened. He would find the apartment empty. It was as if he had caught sight of her shoe outside a building; he could not bear to imagine more.

A white, winter morning. The street was cold. He unlocked the front door and ran up the stairs. At her apartment, not knowing why, he knocked lightly.

“Kaya?”

Nothing. He knocked again, softly, repeatedly. Suddenly, like a blow, he understood. It was true; she had spent the night elsewhere.

“Kaya.”

He unlocked the door and opened it. It stopped abruptly against the night chain.

“Who is it?” she said.

He had a glimpse of her, nothing more. “Viri.” There was a silence. “Open the door,” he said.

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Someone’s here.”

For a moment he could not think what to do. It was early morning. He was ill, he was dying. The walls, the carpets were drinking his life.

“Kaya,” he pleaded.

“I can’t.”

He was staggered because he was innocent. Everything was the same, everything in the world was still in its place, and yet he could not recognize it, his existence had vanished. Her nakedness, late dinners, her voice on the phone—he was left with these, like scraps she had left behind. He started down the stairs. I am dying, he thought. I have no strength.

He sat in the car. I must see him, he decided, I must see who he is. A postal truck went down the street. People were going to work. He was too near the door. There was a place to park further on. He started the car and drove to it.

Suddenly someone came out, a round-faced man with an attaché case, wearing a loden coat. No, Viri thought, impossible. The next moment there were two more emerging—was it going to be a comedy?—and then, still another. He was fifty; he looked like a lawyer.

He sat in the office unable to think. His draftsmen were arriving. Are you all right, they asked. Yes. Their wide, flat tables were already spilling sunlight. They hung up their coats. It seemed that the white telephones, the chrome and leather chairs, the sharpened pencils, had lost their significance; they were like objects in a store that has closed. His gaze passed over them in ringing silence, a silence that could not be penetrated though he spoke in it, nodded, heard conversation.