James Salter - Light Years

In the west Forties there were effeminate young men on street corners, still waiting. There were men slumped in doorways with filthy hands, their drunken faces scalded by the cold. The taxis that fled along the great avenues were falling apart, their fenders rattling, trash on the floor.

He began to hold his ears. He couldn’t walk from here; he lived on Sixty-eighth. He looked back toward the distant traffic, it seemed there were even fewer approaching cars. The tone of everything had changed, as when one listens too long to silence. His thoughts, which had been bundled about him like his coat, suddenly moved off, encompassed more: the dark, stained buildings, the cold legends of commerce written everywhere. He thought of going to the Chelsea; it was only three blocks away. Two men had turned the corner and were coming slowly toward him, one of them dancing a little from side to side, half-entering doorways.

“Hey, what time is it?” one of them asked. They were black.

“Twelve-thirty,” Arnaud said.

“Where’s your watch?”

Arnaud did not answer. They had stopped, the rhythm of their walking changed, they stood in his path.

“How you know the time with no watch? You unfriendly, man?”

Arnaud’s heart was beating faster. “Never unfriendly,” he said.

“You been to your girl friend? What’s wrong, you too big to talk?” Their faces were identical, gleaming. “Yeah, pretty big. Got a hundred-fifty-dollar overcoat, so you’re all right.”

Arnaud felt the strength, the ability to move draining from him, as if he were stepping onstage without an idea, without a line. A group of cars was coming, they were five or six blocks away. He began to talk; he was like an informer.

“Listen, I can’t stay, but I want to tell you something…”

“He can’t stay,” one of them said to the other.

“There was this deaf man…”

“What deaf man?”

The cars were coming closer. “He met a friend on the street…”

“Les see your watch. We played around enough.”

“I want to ask you one question,” Arnaud said quickly.

“Come on.”

“A question only you can answer…”

He suddenly turned toward the approaching cars and ran a few steps in their direction, calling and waving his arms. There were no taxis among them. They were dark, sealed vessels swerving to avoid him. He was struck by something that stung in the cold. He fell to one knee as if pushed.

He tried to stand. Whatever they were hitting him with sounded like a wet rag. It was the beginning of one thing, the end of another. He was staggering forth, like a flagellant, from the ease of uninjured life. He held his arms about his head, crying out, “For God’s sake!”

He stumbled, trying to grapple with the rain of grunting blows that was making him wet. He was trying to run. He was blinded, he could not see, lurching along the plank of legend, ridiculous to the end, calling out, his performance faltering in the icy cold, his legs crumbling.

On his knees in the street he offered them his money. They scattered the contents of his wallet as they left. His watch they did not even take. It was broken. It bore, like the instruments of a wrecked plane, the exact moment of disaster. He lay for more than an hour, the cars swerving past, never slowing.

Eve called in the morning. “Oh, God,” she moaned.

“What’s wrong?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” Nedra said. Outside the window in sunlight her dog was walking on the frozen ground.

“Arnaud…” She began to weep. “They beat him. He’s lost an eye.”

“Beat him?”

“Yes. Somewhere downtown,” she cried.

LIFE DIVIDES ITSELF WITH SCARS like the rings contained within a tree. How close together the early ones seem, time compacts them, twenty years become indistinguishable, one from another.

She had entered a new era. All that belonged to the old had to be buried, put away. The image of Arnaud with his thickly bandaged eye, the deep bruises, the slow speech like a record player losing speed—these injuries seemed like omens to her. They marked her first fears of life, of the malevolence which was part of its fluid, which had no explanation, no cure. She wanted to sell the house. Something was happening on every side of her existence, she began to see it in the streets, it was like the darkness, she was suddenly aware of it, when it comes, it comes everywhere.

In Jivan she noticed for the first time things which were small but clear, like the faint creases in his face which she knew would be furrows one day; they were the tracings of his character, his fate. The somewhat servile deference he paid to Viri, for example, she saw was not the result of a unique situation, it was his nature; there was something obsequious in him, he respected successful men too much. His assurance was physical, it did not go beyond that, like a young man practicing with weights in his room; he was strong, but his strength was childish. Things had somehow changed between them. She would always have affection for him, but the summer had passed.

“What is it?” he wanted to know.

She did not feel like explaining. “Love is movement,” she answered. “It is changing.”

“Yes, of course it’s movement, but between two people. Nedra, something is bothering you, I know you too well.”

“I just feel we need to breathe some new air.”

“New air. You don’t mean air.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Maybe I do. You know, you look wonderful. You look better than when I first met you. It’s natural, but I’ll tell you something you don’t realize. You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It’s not true. It’s very hard to find.”

“I haven’t been looking for it.”

“It’s like a tree,” he told her, “it takes a long time to grow. It has roots very deep, and these roots stretch out a long way, farther than you know. You can’t cut it, just like that. Besides, it’s not your nature. You’re not a child, you’re not interested simply in sensation. I don’t have another woman, I’m not married, I have no children.”

“You can marry.”

“You know I can’t.”

“Things will change.”

“Nedra, you know I love Franca. I love Danny.”

“I know you do.”

“It isn’t fair, what you’re saying.”

“I’m tired of looking on both sides of things,” she said simply.

She was above bickering. She had decided.

Her children became for her all there was, so much so that the remark of Jivan’s, about loving them, disturbed her. Somehow she found it dangerous.

Her love for them was the love to which she had devoted her life, the only one which would not be consumed or vanish. Their lives would be ascendent when hers was fading, they would carry her devotion within them like a kind of knowledge which swam in the blood. They would always be young to her; they would linger, walk in the sunshine, talk to her to the end.

She was reading Alma Mahler. “Viri, listen to this,” she said.

It was the death of Mahler’s daughter who had diphtheria. They had gone to the country and suddenly she became sick. It grew quickly worse. On the last night a tracheotomy was performed; she was choking, she could not breathe. Alma Mahler ran along the edge of the lake, alone, sobbing. Mahler himself, unable to bear the grief, went to the door of his dying child’s room again and again, but could not bring himself to go in. He could not even bear to go to the funeral.

“Why are you reading that?” Viri asked.

“It’s so terrible,” she confessed. She reached over and touched his head. “You’re losing your hair.”

“I know.”