James Salter - Light Years

“At least three weeks. I want to go to Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel. After all, this is the first time.”

“But Viri has been there.”

“So he says.”

“André knows Europe.”

“Is that right?”

“I went to school there,” André said. He had to clear his throat.

“Oh, yes? Where?”

“Near Geneva.”

“It’s funny,” Jivan said, “I don’t have any desire to go to Europe. I’d like to go and see my mother, but for me this is the land of marvels. Whatever there is in Europe, there’s more here.”

“But you’ve been there,” Nedra pointed out.

“You’ll see.”

She sipped her wine. Jivan had laid out an elaborate cold meal. He was serving as they talked. “Europe…” he continued.

“No more,” she said.

“No meat?”

“No more about Europe. I don’t want you to spoil it.” She opened her napkin and accepted a plate. “I love lunch,” she said. “It’s so good to have it with friends.”

“That’s true,” André said.

“People suspect you for it, though.”

He made a vague motion with his head.

“Do you live in the city?” she asked.

“Yes.”

In the city and alone. That was very interesting to her, she said, the idea of living alone. What was it like?

“Luxurious,” he said.

“You get used to it,” Jivan added.

“It depends so much on who you ask, doesn’t it?” she said. “If you don’t have a woman you must have some other passion,” Jivan said. “One or the other.”

“But not both,” André muttered.

He said little and said it mildly, almost indifferently. He ate very little. Instead he smoked a cigarette and drank the wine. The aroma of tobacco in the sunlit room was faint and delicious. Jivan brought out small dishes of candied grapes sent to him by his mother, and beside them placed tiny silver spoons. He poured coffee. The cigarette of the poet blued the air.

“What have you written?” Nedra asked.

“ These bbones in bbed .” He spelt it out.

“Is that a poem?”

“It’s a poem and a book.”

She sipped the coffee. “I’d love to read it,” she said. She liked the way he was dressed, like a businessman. The small cup in her hand, the clearness of her voice, the white of her clothing—it was she who was central to the room, her movements, her smiles. Beneath their brilliance women have a power as stars have gravity. In the bottom of her cup lay the warm, rich silt.

“More coffee?” Jivan asked. “Please.”

He poured the black liquid as he had so many times, Turkish, dense, it made no sound. “You know, in all my time in America,” he said, “I count it as one long day, I’ve never been able to like the coffee. And friends. I’ve made very few friends.”

“You’ve made a lot of them.”

“No. I know everyone, but that’s not a friend. A friend is someone you can really talk to—cry with, if necessary. I’ve made very few. One.”

“More than that.”

“No.”

“Well,” Nedra said, “I think you find them as you need them.”

“You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.”

He was like a seller who has lost a deal. There was something resigned in him; his appearance was the same, his gestures, but somehow the energy had gone. Beside him, thoughtful, like a divinity student, a vaulter, she could not characterize him, she would have liked to stare at him and memorize his face, sat a man of—she tried to guess—thirty-two, thirty-four? Their glances met briefly. She was beautiful, she knew it, her neck, her wide mouth, she felt it as one feels strength. She had been swimming aimlessly, resigned to vanishing in the sea, and suddenly she was at a sunlit meal, the light occasionally gleaming on his glasses.

When she left, Jivan walked with her outside.

“It was like the lunches we used to have,” she said.

“Yes. Somewhat.”

“I like your friend.”

“Nedra, I must see you.”

“Well, wasn’t this very pleasant?”

“I miss you terribly.”

She looked at him. His eyes were black, uncertain. She kissed his cheek.

She drove through the autumn sunlight. The horses she passed were at peace, straying, bathed by a day more brilliant than any of the year. The trees were calm, sentient. The sky seemed endlessly deep, teeming with light.

She sat in the white chair reading. Abandoned cities far up the Amazon, cities with opera houses, great European vessels beached in the green. She imagined herself traveling there, a guest at the old hotels. She walked in the early morning when the streets were cool, her heels struck the pavement like the clap of hands. The city was gray and silver, the river dark. At mirrors which had never seen her face she sat before dinner, preparing herself. There were automobiles without tires running on the railroad tracks, mosaic sidewalks, whores like Eve at twenty in the dim cafés. She flew to Brazil as light flies, as the words of a song go to the heart. She was wearing the white dress she had worn to lunch, she had taken off her shoes. The winter of the year was coming, the winter of her life. There it was summer. One crossed an invisible line and everything was reversed. The sun poured down, her arms were tanned. She was a woman from a far country, already part legend, unknown.

She was lost in the fantasies spreading before her; they flooded her with contentment. At four o’clock, muted, like an intermission bell at a concert, the phone rang. She rose to answer it.

“Nedra?”

She recognized the voice instantly. “Yes.”

“This is André Orlosky.”

THE SUN APPEARS, WITHOUT BODY, without heat, its color is pale, serene. The water lies as if dead. The moorings are dark on its surface, the pennants hang limp. The river is English, cool as silver. On the lawn is a body. It is Mark, asleep. He has arrived before daylight, down from New Haven, and lies beneath their window, a collection of long ax-handle limbs within his clothes.

Nedra, risen early, watches him from above. He is sleeping peacefully, she admires this simple act. Her thoughts pour down on him, she imagines him stirring beneath them, becoming animate, his eyes opening slowly, seeing her own. He is young, graceful, filled with abrupt ideas. The seminal overwhelms him, makes him drive long distances, search everywhere. To see him at rest is, for a moment, to be able to weigh and examine him, otherwise he is unapproachable, he runs, laughs, vanishes behind the face of youth.

She lay on the floor and began her exercises: first a profound relaxing, arms, shoulders, knees. She had found a yogi, Vinhara, in the city. She went to him four times a week. He was bald with a long, greasy fringe of black hair. He moved about in flowing clothes. His voice was confident, commanding. “Water purify de body,” he said. “Truth purify de mind.”

He was dark. His nose was broad and pitted, his hands enormous, his ears hairy as a cat’s. Wisdom purify de intellect, meditation purify de soul.

His apartment smelled of incense. The kitchen was filled with dirty pans. He slept on a mattress on the floor. In one corner was a dented dressmaker’s dummy which he sometimes struck with a stick. “Practice,” he explained.

For an hour, feeling warmer, more supple, feeling the parts of her body become manifest as if they were pointed out on a chart, she submitted herself to him. Then, tender, awakened, she walked the few blocks to André’s apartment. He was waiting for her; he knew almost to the minute when she would be there.

“I sometimes think,” she told him, “that if you lived on the West Side, I wouldn’t be doing this.”