James Salter - Light Years

The elegance of the evening, the dishes remaining on the table, the ease with which Nedra and her husband treated each other, the understanding which seemed to stream from them, all of this filled Kate with a feverish happiness, that happiness which lies within the power of another to confer. She was drenched with love for these people who, though they had lived nearby all through her childhood, it seemed she was suddenly seeing for the first time, who were treating her as someone she longed at that moment to be: one of themselves.

“Can I come and see you while I’m here?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“I mean, I really like to talk to you.”

“I’d love to see you,” Nedra said.

One afternoon, then. They would walk together or have tea. She had never set foot beyond the borders, this woman Kate suddenly loved, this woman with a knowing face, not at all sentimental, who leaned on her elbows and smoked small cigars. She had never traveled, not even to Montreal, and yet she knew so well what life should be. It was true. In her heart she carried an instinct like that of a migrant species. She would find the tundra, the deeps, she would journey home.

Arnaud’s eyes were open. They were uninquisitive, calm, a signal that he was returning slowly. His face was soft, like a child’s. “For some reason, I am being urged to sleep,” he murmured. “Your house is so warm and good.”

“You may do anything you like,” Nedra said. “You should have anything you want.”

There was a silence. “You told me that once before,” he decided.

“And I’ve always practiced it.”

“Anything I want… you’ve practiced that?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m waking up,” he said.

He had not moved, but his eyes were alert. He was bearlike in his languor. One saw his innocence—that is to say, the innocence of great actors—as he came awake. “You’ve stopped playing, Kate,” he said.

She began again. She struck a few mournful chords, they fell slowly from her narrow fingers. In her thin girl’s voice, her head down, she began to sing. She sang on and on. She knew endless words, they were her true eloquence, the poems she believed in. The sheets, they were old, and the blankets were thin…

“My first boyfriend used to sing that,” Nedra said. “He took me for a weekend to his family’s summer house. It was after the season, they were all gone.”

“Who was that?” Viri said.

“He was older than I was,” she said. “He was twenty-five.”

“Who?”

“I had my first avocado there. I ate it, pit and all,” she said.

AT SIXTEEN, FRANCA CHANGED. She began to fulfill her promise. As if in a day, the way leaves appear, she suddenly had the power of self-possession. She woke with it one morning, it was bestowed upon her. Her breasts were new, her feet a little large. Her face was calm and unfathomable.

They were close, mother and daughter. Nedra treated her like a woman. They talked a great deal.

The world was changing, Nedra told her. “I don’t mean changes in fashion,” she said. “Those aren’t really changes. I mean changes in the way one can live.”

“For instance.”

“I don’t think I know. You’ll feel it. You’ll understand far more than I do. The truth is, I’m rather ignorant, but I am able to feel what’s in the ground.”

There is warmth in families but not often companionship. She loved talking to Franca, and about her as well. She felt that this was the woman that she herself had become, in the sense that the present represents the past. She wanted to discover life through her, to savor it for the second time.

There was a party at Dana’s one evening during the holidays. Dana, whose face already had a curious dead expression, one almost of resentment, but after all, what can you expect, as Nedra said, the father a drunkard, the mother a fool. She was reading a book on Kandinsky that night, heavy, beautiful, the paper smooth. She had seen his exhibition at the Guggenheim, for the moment she was dazzled by him. In the silence of the evening, in that hour when all has been done, she opened it at last. He had come to painting late, she read; he was thirty-two at the time.

She called Eve. “I love this book,” she said.

“I thought it looked good.”

“I’ve just started reading it,” Nedra said. “At the beginning of the first war he was living in Munich, and he went back to Russia. He left behind the woman—she was a painter, too—that he’d been living with for ten years. He saw her again just once—imagine this—at an exhibition in 1927.”

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates.

Franca came home at eleven. From the instant the door closed, she sensed something wrong. “What is it?” she asked.

“What is what?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. It was terrible.”

“How?”

Her daughter was suddenly crying.

“Franca, what is it?”

“Look at me,” she wept. She was wearing a suit with a little fur trim at the collar and hem of the skirt. “I look like some kind of doll you buy in a souvenir shop.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I was the first one to leave,” she said in desperation. “Everyone said, ‘Where are you going?’ ”

“You didn’t have to come home this early.”

“Yes, I did.”

Nedra was frightened. “What happened, was it the wrong kind of party?” she said.

“It was absolutely the right kind. I was wrong.”

“What was everyone else wearing?”

“You always insist on my being different,” Franca burst out. “I always wear different clothes, I can’t go here or I can’t go there. I don’t want any more of that. I want to be like everyone else!” The tears were streaming down her face. “I don’t want to be like you.”

In one stroke she had established her own world.

Nedra said nothing. She was stunned. It was the beginning, she suddenly knew, of something she had thought would never happen. She went to bed troubled, torn by the urge to go to her daughter’s room, and afraid, at the same time, of what would be said.

The next day it was all forgotten. Franca worked in the greenhouse. She painted. There was music in her room. Hadji lay on her bed, she was truly happy. It had passed.

A letter arrived from Robert Chaptelle, whose life had drifted downstream. It was difficult to remember him, his nervousness, his expensive tastes and impulses so like her own. He said nothing about the theater; it was all about some man who could save Europe.

…he is about five feet ten inches tall. He has the Kennedy appeal. His voice makes you tremble. It is an unforgettable voice. I have had the privilege of meeting him, hours in his company are minutes. His eyes! Finally I understand the nature of politics.

Celatient du prodige.

She read it only hurriedly. He would write again soon, he said in this final letter. He was traveling for his health, vanished into the remote towns of France from the insurance agency where for a time he had tried to work. Gone, passed into silence.