James Salter - Light Years

“I’m sorry we didn’t make it long ago. We always wanted to.”

“I’m glad we didn’t. Think of how much better it is now. It’s like opening a door in your life.” She took a sip of wine. “And that can only happen when the time comes. Well, there’s one thing I’ve decided definitely…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to go back to our old life.”

She said it casually. The waitress was trying to pour more wine, but the bottle was empty. She looked into the neck for a moment as if uncomprehending and then turned it upside down in the bucket of ice. “Would you like some more wine?” she asked.

“Uh, no, thank you,” Viri said.

They ate in silence. The river was flat and unmoving.

“Would you like to see the sweet tray?” the girl recited.

“Nedra?”

“No.”

Afterwards they strolled across the bridge into the little market town where Shelley once lived. The whiteness of day still filled the heavens. The shops were closed.

They stood near the church. “The hand of St. James,” Viri said, “is reputed to be in the chapel.”

“His real hand?”

“Yes. A relic.”

He was still disturbed by her words; he had been unprepared for them. In the summer heat, in the silence of the village with its dark houses and curving streets, he suddenly felt frightened.

He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.

At that moment as they stood in the leafy churchyard redolent with the dust of Englishmen, with murmured ceremony, he had a sickening vision of what the years might bring: the too-familiar restaurant, a small apartment, empty evenings. He could not face it. “What do you mean by our old life?” he said.

“Look at this headstone,” Nedra said. She was reading a thin, weathered slab dense with words. “Viri, you know what I mean. That’s one of the things I like best about you. You know what I mean at every level.”

“In this case I’m not certain,” he said hesitantly.

“Don’t worry about it now,” she said reassuringly.

“It was like being hit by something. It was just such a surprise.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“When you say our old life, I don’t know exactly what to imagine. Our life has been changing all the time.”

“Do you think so?”

“But you know that, Nedra. As time has gone by, it’s always taken a form that more or less satisfies us, that allows us to be content. It isn’t the same as when we started.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“So what do you mean?”

She did not answer.

“Nedra.”

She turned toward the bridge. “The time will come to talk about it,” she said.

They walked back in the dusk. The river slept beneath them. The boats were almost gone.

They slept in Brown’s, the midnight cool at last, the city covered only with the sound of an airliner crossing. They bathed and undressed in the comfort of rooms maintained for a race that loves hunting, that knows perfectly the rules of behavior, is laconic in personal talk and triumphant in public. Side by side in separate soft beds they lay, like rulers of different realms.

She wrote to André: We have never walked in Hyde Park, which is one of the things you said you’d like to do when you showed me London. Of course it hasn’t been hard to avoid the park, there’s so much to see. It’s such a great city that you could never use it up .

I walk along these marvelous streets, I think of your face and how I love you, of those things you say which are somehow everything. I think of you often and and in ways I leave for you to imagine. For some reason I feel quite close to you here, and I’m really not unhappy because we are apart. No unhappiness can come because of you—that is the sun you’ve put inside me (the only son, I hope). I miss you, I long for you, I see you everywhere .

We are having a wonderful time. We talk buildings, we travel to see buildings, we track them down. I’m like the wife of a bug collector. We are on this extraordinary island of forests, concerts, restaurants—and everything is bugs. But I’ve always believed, I know it’s true, that any main branch leads you straight to the trunk. If you know one thing completely, it touches everything. But, of course you have to know it .

I love you very much today. I hug you with all my heart .

THEY WERE DIVORCED IN THE fall. I wish it could have been otherwise. The clarity of those autumn days affected them both. For Nedra, it was as if her eyes had been finally opened; she saw everything, she was filled with a great, unhurried strength. It was still warm enough to sit outdoors. Viri walked, the old dog wandering behind him. The fading grass, the trees, the very light made him dizzy, as if he were an invalid or starving. He caught the aroma of his own life passing. All during the proceedings, they lived as they always had, as if nothing were going on.

The judge who gave her the final decree pronounced her name wrong. He was tall and decaying, the pores visible in his cheeks. He misread a number of things; no one corrected him.

It was November. Their last night together they sat listening to music—it was Mendelssohn—like a dying composer and his wife. The room was peaceful, filled with beautiful sound. The last logs burned.

“Would you like some ouzo?” she asked.

“I don’t think there is any.”

“We drank it all?”

“Some time ago.”

She was wearing slippers and brown velvet pants. On her wrist were bracelets of silver and bamboo, her hair was loose. She was leaving to achieve a life, even though she was forty. She used the figure forty, in truth she was forty-one. She was miserable. She was content. She would do her yoga, read, calm herself as one calms a cat. Monkey breed tirty, tirty-two times each minute, monkey lib twenty years. Frog breed two, tree times each minute, go beneat mud in winter, frog lib two hundred years .

“That’s insane,” Viri had said. “Frogs don’t live two hundred years.”

“He’s thinking of something else.”

“They’d be as big as we are.”

She would have difficulties, of course, but she did not fear them. She was confident of what lay beyond. Perhaps—so many thoughts and ideas, most of them brief, came to her—she would even achieve, in the end, a kind of new, more honest understanding with Viri; their friendship would deepen, unfettered at last. In any case, she could imagine it as she could imagine many things. She was turning away from all that was useful no longer; she was turning to face what might come.

The next day she left for Europe. The car stood before the house in the late afternoon. From afar it seemed like any other departure, like one of the thousands that preceded it.

“Well, goodbye,” she said.

She started the engine. She turned on the radio and left quickly. The road was empty. The lights of nearby houses were on. In the early darkness, going swiftly, she passed the ghostly white fence of the field where Leslie Dahlander had ridden her pony. The silence of that meadow bade goodbye to her in a way that nothing else had. It was solemn, dark, like the site of a sunken ship. The pony was still alive. It had foundered; it was in a field beyond the house. And now she began to weep, without bowing her head, tears for someone’s dead child streaming down her face as the six o’clock news began.