James Salter - Light Years

He was wearing the clothes of a man released from prison—of two men, in fact, since nothing matched. His shirt was from a surplus store, his tie was loose. He had the confidence, the cracked lips of someone determined to live without money. He was a man who would fail any interview.

“How did you get this job?” he asked. He had picked up a book and was turning the pages.

“How? Well, I just applied.”

“You applied,” he said. “Funny, when I apply…” His voice trailed off. “They usually ask you a lot of questions. Did you have to go through that?”

“No.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m sure you can answer all the questions.”

“It isn’t that easy,” he said. “I mean, you never know what they’re driving at. They ask you, Do you like music? What kind of music? Well, I like Beethoven, Mozart. Beethoven, uh huh. Mozart. And what about reading, do you like to read? What books do you read? Shakespeare. Ah, he says, Shakespeare. So he writes down—you can’t see it, the cover of the folder is up: Talks only about dead people.” He turned the pages as if looking for something. “You’ve heard about the cannibal?”

“No.”

“He said to his mother: I don’t like missionaries. She said: Darling, then just eat your vegetables.” He turned more pages. “Is this one of your books? I mean, did you publish it?”

She looked to see.

“It’s meaningless,” he continued. “Listen, this is a conversation I had with a friend; this is not a joke. We were talking about a couple who’d had a baby. He said: What are they naming it? I said: Carson. Carson, he said, is it a boy or a girl? A boy, I told him. So, he said, that’s interesting, so they named the kid Carson… Well, I told you it’s not a joke. It’s just a… What do you suppose is going on?” he interrupted himself. “I’m filled with this great urge to talk to you.”

He was clever, he was helpless. At that time they were publishing his stories in the Transatlantic Review . He was the son of a woman who worked as a psychologist and who had been divorced since he was three. She had no illusions about her son: the thing he was most afraid of was succeeding, but one would have to know him very well to understand that. The impression he gave was of weakness, a voluntary weakness like certain vague illnesses. But after a time these illnesses cry out to be legitimatized, they insist on being treated as a natural condition, they become one with their host.

He knew everything; his knowledge was vast. He was like the irreverent student who passes any examination. His eyes were dark, the muddy brown of a Negro. His cuffs were soiled. Many of his sentences began with a proper noun.

“Gödel was at Princeton,” he said. “He was walking down the hall one day, apparently deep in thought, when a student passed and said: ‘Good morning, Dr. Gödel.’ Gödel looked up suddenly and said: ‘Gödel! That’s it!’ ”

During their first meal together as he questioned her leisurely, he learned of her house in the country. “Ah,” he said. “I knew it. I knew you had a house like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I imagined it. It’s a large house, yes? Where is it? Is it near the river?”

“Yes.”

“Quite near,” he guessed.

“Quite.”

“As near, in fact, as one would expect such a house to be.”

“Yes,” she said. “Just that near.”

He was elated. “There are trees.”

“Bird-thronged,” she said.

“This is meaningless,” he exclaimed.

“Why?”

“Your life,” he said. “Because there is no pain in it. After all, what is life without a little sorrow now and then? Will you show it to me?” he asked. “Will you take me there?”

She thought of her house. Suddenly, though she had grown up living inside it and knew it in every weather, she longed to go back as one longs to hold a certain book again though knowing every phrase, as one longs for music or friends. In her life, which had become more fortuitous, brushed by other lives like kelp in the ocean, in the city which was the great, inexplicable star toward which her suburb with its roofs and quiet days had always faced—suddenly this well-loved house reentered her thoughts through the words of a stranger. Like ancient churchyards in the heart of commerce, it was suddenly inextirpable.

There had been many changes. Her mother had gone. The house existed without her as clothes exist, photographs, misplaced rings. It was part of these memories, it contained them, gave them breath.

“Yes, I’ll take you,” she said.

Nile drove. The sun whitened his face. She was able to examine him in profile as he looked ahead.

“Are we on the right road?” he asked.

“Yes.”

His skin was pale. His uncombed hair was splitting at the ends. It was also thinning, which pleased her somehow, as if he had been ill and she would see him regain his strength.

A half-mile from the house she was suddenly shocked to see the land dug out. They were erecting apartments, the shape of a huge foundation was clear, the yellow construction machines lay abandoned in late afternoon.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

“What?”

“Look what they’re doing.”

The trees, the few old houses had been swept away, there was only bare, ruined earth. She almost wept. Somehow it could never have happened when Nedra was there—not that she would have prevented it, but her departure, in a sense, was the knell. Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

The shadow of change lay across everything. Her first view of the house from a place on the road she knew well—the chimneys above the trees, the line of the roof—brought a feeling of sadness as if it were doomed. It seemed empty, it seemed still. The rabbits that fled before Hadji—had they really been fleeing, they veered so rapidly, they leapt, they vanished into air—all gone.

They parked in the driveway. It was after five. No one was there. Nile stood looking at the house, the trees, the terraced lawn. “This is where you grew up?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder,” he said.

They walked to the pony shed; bits of straw were still scattered there. They sat in the conservatory with its gravel floor. The sun was setting fire to the glass. She went to get some wine.

“How did you ever manage to rise above all this?” he asked. “I don’t know.”

“It’s a mystery. What a life you’ve had. It’s so superior. I mean, I could mention a dozen things, but it’s manifest.” He spoke sincerely. His breath was a little bad.

“Laurence lived here,” she said.

“Laurence…”

“A rabbit.”

The sunlight fell like cymbals through the flats of glass. In the still air, a faint aroma of wine. The distant memory of the rabbit—his blackness, his long, rodent’s teeth—seemed to come upon her like a flush.

“Have you ever known any rabbits?” she asked.

“Periodically,” he said. “There seems to be no pattern. I worked in a laboratory once. There was this big, Belgian hare, her name was Judy. Could she bite!”

“Yes, they do that.”

“I had to wear my overcoat.”

“Laurence used to bite.”

“Everything does,” he said. “What became of Laurence?”

“He died. It was in the winter. It was very sad. You know how it is when animals are sick, you want so much to do something for them. We put him in a bed of straw and covered him, but in the morning he was gone.”

“He ran away?”

“He was in a corner, sort of fallen over. His eyes were open, but he was already stiff; it was as if he were made of wire. We buried him in the garden. He was bigger than we thought, we kept having to make a bigger hole. His fur was still warm. I threw the dirt on him with my bare hands. I cried, we were both crying, and I said, Oh, God, accept him, Thy rabbit…”