James Salter - Light Years

She sat with him. In her womanly gestures, her movements, her clear, direct glances, he constantly saw her mother.

“How was the play?” she asked.

“Apparently it was quite powerful,” he said. “It turned me into some kind of maniac, running around the house and baying for your mother.”

“Yes, it was strange. For a moment, when I woke, I thought she must be here.”

He drank his tea. He heard the clack of his dog’s old nails on the floor. Hadji sat at his feet, looking up, hungry like all the aged. His dog that had run in the breathless snow, stronglegged, young, his ears back, his keen glances, his pure smell. A life that passed in an instant.

He looked at his daughter. In the way that a gambler who has lost can easily imagine himself again in possession of his money, thinking how false, how undeserved was the process that took it from him, so he sometimes found himself unwilling to believe what had happened, or certain that his marriage would somehow be found again. So much of it was still in existence.

“How is the missus?” Captain Bonner would ask. He gathered junk up and down the road. Half the time he didn’t recognize Viri. Was the question malicious or only dull-witted? Stained, brown suitcoat, a stocking cap, a face old as Punch’s, a yellow face, teeth long gone, smiling as he thinks of something, is it food, women? He was carrying a door down the road; he leapt in front of the car as Viri drove toward him, waving, demanding a ride.

“I’m going to town,” he announced. He could not get the door into the car. He struggled. “I’ll put it on the roof,” he said. “I can hold it with my hand.”

The skin on his hands was blue, paper-thin, on his dried cheeks a stubble. His shoes were like dirty slippers, the toes curled up.

“Nice weather,” he said. He smelled of wine. Then, after a pause, that casual question about Nedra.

“She’s fine,” Viri answered, “thank you.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen her around.”

“She’s in Europe.”

“Europe,” the old man said.

“Ah. Lot of nice places there.”

Viri was watching the door, which overhung the windshield. “Have you been there?” he asked distractedly.

“No. No, not me,” Bonner said. “I’ve seen enough right here.” There was a pause. “Too much,” he added.

“What do you mean, too much?”

The old man nodded. He smiled vaguely at nothing, at the white sunshine before them. “It’s a dream,” he said.

The house still smelled of her potpourri, the garden lay neglected. In a drawer of a desk that the sun fell on were children’s notebooks from school in years past. Franca, her handwriting so obedient, so neat, had saved every one.

The feast was ended. Like the story he had read to them so many times, of the poor couple who were given three wishes and wasted them, he had not wanted enough. He saw that clearly. When all was said, he had wanted one thing, it was far too small: he had wanted them to grow up in the happiest of homes.

ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.

He went to dinner at the Daros’. There were people there he did not know. “How do you do?” they said. Handsome people, quite at ease. The woman wore an emerald floor-length dress with a gold necklace and bracelets of gold mesh. Her name was Candis. Her husband was an art director. He worked on films; he designed the jackets of books.

“Viri, what would you like to drink?” Peter asked.

“Do you know what I think—I haven’t had one for a long time…”

“Whatever you like.”

“I think I’d like a martini,” Viri said.

He drank one, icy cold, in a gleaming glass. It was like a change in the weather. The pitcher held another, potent, clear.

“How do you make them so cold?” he asked.

“Well, you happen to have commanded the drink which is, in my opinion, the one true test. You have to have the right ingredients—and also you keep the gin in the freezer.”

“Ah.”

“I once was going to do an article on the ten greatest bars in the world. I did a lot of research. It just about ruined my health.”

“Which is the greatest?” the art director asked.

“I don’t think you can pick one. It’s really more a question of which of them is nearest at hand. I mean, there’s an hour in the day when one’s tongue begins to depend, when nothing will avail except to have a drink, and to be close to one of these establishments at that time is like Mohamet’s paradise.”

“I don’t believe you’d find any liquor there,” Candis said, “not in a Moslem paradise.”

“Right,” Peter said. “Which would rule it out for me.”

“But women in abundance,” the husband said.

“I think,” Peter began, “that by the time I am being conducted into paradise…” He had risen to go into the kitchen, it was he who cooked the dinners “… my connection with women will be entirely historical.”

“Never, darling,” Catherine corrected, entering.

“Or imaginary,” he said.

“You will never lose your interest in women,” she said. “Hello, Viri. How are you? My, you look well.”

“My interest perhaps not, but my ability, I’m afraid…”

“Eternal,” she said.

“Well, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking in there,” he murmured, “but I’m moved by your confidence in me.”

“I think women know these things, don’t you?” she asked.

“They are sometimes in a position to,” Viri said.

During the laughter his glance caught that of Candis. She had a long nose, an intelligent face. Her eyes were very white and clear.

“Viri, we’ve missed you,” Catherine said.

Another couple arrived. Viri found himself talking freely. He was describing an evening at the theater.

“I’m the one in our family who loves the theater,” Candis said. “One of the first plays I ever saw—there’s a wonderful story about this—was The Petrified Forest.”

“Oh, you’re not that old,” Viri said. He felt immensely warm and at ease.

“I was fourteen at the time.”

“It was written before you were born,” he said.

“Well, perhaps it was a revival. Anyway—”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-eight…”

“When I came home afterwards, they said, ‘How did you like it?’ And I reported it was a very funny play. For example, there was a line in it when he says to the girl, ‘How about a roll in the hay?’ And the audience laughed, I said, because of course there’s no hay in the desert.”

The richness, the comfort of this apartment in an unfashionable neighborhood. It was in an old building, an apartment lovely as a park, like a beautiful volume found among the stacks in a secondhand bookstore.

Peter knew history, he knew painting and wines, the second and third Bordeaux growths that were as fine as a first. He knew a small town that was better than Beaune, he knew vineyards by name. He stood in the narrow kitchen, fresh vegetables and plates on every surface, and amid the clutter chopped parsley with a huge knife.

“In our next house,” he told Viri, “I’m going to have a kitchen big enough to maneuver in, a kitchen like yours.” He was wearing an apron over his suit. As he prepared the dinner he called out periodically, demanding of his wife where something was or whether she had bought it. “I want a kitchen big enough to give a dinner in—or for that matter, even sleep in. You know, I’m slowly going out of business. It’s not that I’m failing—in fact, just the opposite—but the trouble is the supply of good prints is drying up. I just can’t find them to sell, or if I do find them, I have to pay so much there’s no possibility of profit. I mean, if I sell a Vuillard, I can’t get another. You used to be able to go to Europe, but not any more. Their prices are higher than ours. There are plenty of buyers, but there’s nothing to sell them.”