James Salter - Light Years

She looked around her. In the darkness where the light could not penetrate there were partly assembled structures. It was like a shipyard; there were hammers, shavings of wood on the floor. The bed was mounted on four columns, high up, close to the fleurs-de-lis stamped in the metal ceiling. There were sketches tacked to the wall, announcements, photographs.

She stood quietly while they talked about work, shelves to be built in a gallery on Sixtieth Street. They were to run the length of the room, to be painted white. She did not look at either of them, they were warming their hands. She was afraid to look, the blood was jumping in her arms, her knees, she dared not see his face. He handed her a cup of something dimly colored, aromatic. She sipped it. Tea. His pants were a faded blue, his shoes had cleated soles.

“You want some sugar?” he asked.

She shook her head. He had not bothered to introduce her, but he was standing close as he talked, as if to include her. His limbs were spreading their authority. She tried not to think of them. She was weak as if from illness. She did not know what her face was doing, her body; she was too bewildered to remember them. They would plane the edges of the wood, they were saying, but allow the surfaces to remain rough. The walls were plaster over brick; they could not use ordinary nails. She listened uncomprehending, like a child listening to grownups, she knew them to be wiser, more powerful than herself.

Finally the other man left. She was not nervous, she was not frightened, she simply had no ability to speak.

“Let’s get in bed,” he said. He took the cup from her hand and helped her climb up. It was a man’s bed, unmade, the quilt dirty, the sheets with streaks of gray. She did not know what to do. She knelt there and waited. She thought of the houses on stilts in Thailand, the Philippines. The ceiling was barely a foot from her head.

He knelt beside her and stroked her hair. She trembled beneath his kisses. She had no second person within her wondering what would happen, what he would do next; every part of her consciousness was willing, compelled. She hardly realized what he was doing. As he lifted the dress from her raised arms, they wilted as if powerless. The broken shoe fell to the floor. His hands were slipping gently inside the elastic of her panties, her body was marked there, printed in red from the waistband. The marvelous, dumb mound, hair pressed flat, is revealed to the light. He touches her; it’s as if she is killed, she cannot move. The only thing she can remember is to murmur, “I haven’t done anything.”

He did not answer. She managed to repeat it.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

He was naked, his body was scalding her. She was helpless, he was parting her knees.

When it was over, she lay beside him dreaming, content. She could feel the creases in the sheets beneath her, smell their age. She was wet, afraid to touch herself. His body was hard, the muscles were embedded within it. The smell of his hair, like wood smoke, made her dizzy.

She did not move. I have done it, she thought. The light that came through the windows was wintry. There was a bite to the air, as of coal. High up, faint, the sound of a jet crossing the city, en route to Canada, France.

He watched her as she dressed. “Where are you going?”

She could not continue. She sat half-naked, her arms bare, her breasts heavy, firm. She was calm beneath his stare, almost lifeless. “I have to go.”

“Listen, I want to leave an order with you.”

“An order?”

“You deliver, don’t you? Three quarts a week. And a pint of cream.”

“I could come on Wednesday,” she said.

“Good.”

He had turned her life upside down. She wanted to kiss his hands; she wasn’t sure she was liked enough to show her feelings. She was embarrassed as she put on her clothes. They seemed childish, artificial.

A MORNING IN SUMMER, THE GREEN trees lashing one another, the leaves sighing in the wind, luggage by the door. Breakfast was hasty; they could not settle down to it.

“Do you have your passport, Viri? Do you have the tickets?” They were going to England at last.

Danny said goodbye at the door and again at the car, the windows rolled down. Hadji was unhappy. She was holding him.

“My God, he’s heavy!”

His eyes were clouded with age.

“Write to us at the hotel,” Nedra reminded.

“I will.”

“Come on, Viri, we’ll be late,” she cried.

The morning, open to light, untouched, lay before them like the sea. They sped into it, Franca with them to drive the car back. She was nineteen. She was going on a trip to Vermont.

“Too bad you’re not coming with us,” Nedra said. “I suppose it wouldn’t be as exciting.”

“I wish I could do both.”

“Viri, I can’t believe it,” Nedra said.

“That we’re going…”

“Finally.”

He cleared his throat and searched for Franca’s face in the mirror. “Next time we’ll go together,” he told her. The car was drifting off the road.

“For God’s sake!” Nedra cried.

“Sorry.”

The day was like a river that began far off. Slowly, fed by streams and tributaries, it became wider, faster, until it arrived at last in a watershed where the noise and confusion of the crowd rose like mist.

The engines had started; the great cabin, lurching slightly, was borne toward the runway’s end. Nedra, already satisfied that nothing of interest was to be seen from the window, was flipping the pages of Vogue , while Viri examined a card that illustrated the plane’s emergency exits. It was as if they had made this flight a dozen times. They waited a while in a shimmering line of aircraft, then, trailing a roar that even within was prodigious, the seats themselves trembling, they took off.

Nedra wanted champagne. “Will you have some?” she said to her husband.

“Of course.”

They spent six days in London and two in Kent in a beautiful house with gardens down to the sea. There was a graveled court and iron gate. The house itself was brick, painted cream and white. It belonged to Thomas Alba, a friend of the Troys’. He had a strong face, wide all the way down, cultured, reassuring. His voice was slow and clear. “We live a quiet life, I’m afraid,” he said.

The house was filled with pictures and prints. The windows in the study had shelves across them, and on these a collection of teacups. The views from every room were thrilling, views of remote, ordered country, of English sea. But the best thing was his wife; she was the real thing of value. She’d lived in Bordeaux. She’d been married before—all the best ones have, as Nedra said.

“Doesn’t this talk of London make you yearn for it?” Claire asked.

“No,” Alba said calmly.

“We haven’t been to London for a month.”

“Has it been a month?”

“It’s at least a month. Tommy hates London,” she said.

“Well, I used to like it, I suppose. I prefer this, now.”

“Oh, her lamps of night! Her goldsmiths, print-shops, toyshops, hardware-men, St. Paul’s Churchyard, Charing Cross, the Strand!”

“You’ve got it all muddled.”

“It’s something like that,” she said. She had a wonderful face.

They were at dinner, the sort of dinner Nedra liked to give, not elaborate but over which one could linger for hours. The windows were open to the garden, the cool of the English night had entered the room.

“I like to garden,” Alba said. “I go into the garden every day. If I don’t, I’m really not happy. I’m bearable, but not happy. Sometimes we travel. We went to Chester, do you remember?” he asked Claire. “I don’t mind traveling occasionally.”