James Salter - Light Years

“What will you do?”

“Spend more time in the kitchen. I really want only two things…”

“Which are?”

“I want a real kitchen,” he said, “and I want to die under the stars.”

The guests were deep in talk, the curtains drawn, the wine open on the long buffet. Peter was looking for the anchovies. “They’re in a small, thin can,” he muttered. “Thin but impregnable. Former battleship builders design them.” He had been in the navy. “If the battleships had just been half as strong—ah, here they are.”

“What are you going to do with anchovies?”

“I am going to try and open them,” he said.

The excellent smells, the disorder which was beautiful, the open pages of a cookbook written by Toulouse-Lautrec, a book filled with the dinners and outings of a lifetime—all these were creating in Viri the warmth of a night of love. There are hours when one literally drinks life.

He found himself beside Catherine. “This fellow you’ve just met…” she whispered.

“Which one?” The remark seemed very funny to him, he could not help laughing.

“… in the brown suit,” she was saying.

“The brown suit.” He leaned close to listen to her revelation. His eye, meanwhile, was on the subject of it, a heavy man with eyeglasses. “Tremendously brown,” he murmured. “What’s his name again?”

“Derek Berns.”

“Right,” Viri cried.

Berns glanced at them, as if aware. His face was smooth with somewhat large features, like a child who will be ugly, and he held his cigarette between his first and second fingers at its very tip.

“He’s a colleague of Peter’s, he has a marvelous gallery,” Catherine said. “He’s very close to one of the Matisse family. He gets all their things.”

Viri tried to talk to him later. By that time he had forgotten both his name and that of Matisse, but was afraid of nothing. He had some difficulty in pronouncing, which he overcame by forming carefully all consonants. In the middle of the conversation, he suddenly remembered the name and immediately used it: Kenneth. Berns did not correct him.

His attention was drawn back to Candis. She was sitting near him and was talking about the first thing men look at in a woman. Someone said it was the hands and feet.

“Not quite,” she said.

Together they found themselves going through the phonograph records.

“Is there any Neil Young?” she asked. “I don’t know. Look at this.”

“Oh, God.”

It was a record of Maurice Chevalier. They put it on. “Now there’s a life,” Viri said. “Menilmontant, Mistinguett…”

“What’s that?”

“The thirties. Both wars. He used to say that until he was fifty he lived from the waist down, and after fifty, from the waist up. I wish I could speak French.”

“Well, you can, can’t you?”

“Oh, just enough to understand these songs.”

There was a pause. “He’s singing in English,” she said.

How enormously funny this was he could not explain. He tried, but could not make it clear.

“Have you ever seen him?” he asked.

“No.”

“You’ve never seen him?”

“No, never.”

“Wait,” Viri said. “Wait here.”

He was gone for five minutes. When he came into the room again he was wearing a straw hat of Peter’s, and before the astonished eyes of everyone, with passionate movements, in a hoarse, imitative voice, he did the whole of “Valentine,” shrugging, stumbling, forgetting the words, and before dinner was ever served, had staggered through the kitchen to pass out, face down, on a bed in the maid’s room.

“Who is that pathetic man?” they asked.

He called Europe the next morning. It was afternoon there. Her voice was husky, as if she’d been asleep, “Hello.”

“Hello, Nedra.”

“Hello, Viri,” she said.

“It’s been so long since I’ve talked to you, I just felt like calling.”

“Yes.”

“I was at Peter and Catherine’s last night. He’s really a marvelous man. Of course they asked about you.”

“How are they?”

“Well, you know, their life is very curious. Their affection for each other isn’t very great, and yet they’re devoted.” He paused. “I suppose we were something like that.”

“Well, everybody is.”

“How have you been?”

“Oh, not bad. And you?”

“I’ve often been tempted, really innumerable times, to fly over.”

“Well, Viri, I mean, the idea is lovely, it would be good seeing you, but it wouldn’t… Well, you know, we’re past that.”

“It’s hard to keep reminding myself.”

“It is, I suppose.”

She answered his pleas with wisdom, it always stunned him. He wanted to cling to her to hear what she would say.

“You know, you’re going to be forty-four in a couple of weeks,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to miss your birthday.”

“Forty-four,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to look it.”

“The easy part is over.”

“It was easy?”

“We’re entering the underground river,” she said. “Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I know.”

“It’s ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help.”

“Are you reading Alma Mahler again?”

“No.” Her voice was even and knowing.

The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs.

“What makes you say that courage won’t help?”

“Courage, wisdom, none of it.”

“Nedra…”

“Yes.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Of course.”

“No, really. Nedra, you know, I always… I’m here.”

“Viri, I’m fine.”

“Are you happy?” he asked.

She laughed. Happiness. She meant to be free.

IT WAS MARINA TROY WHOM NEDRA was drawn to when she came back at last. She even stayed with them for a while. The saint of the theater at that time was Philip Kasine. His plays were not announced, the news of them was passed by word of mouth, one had to search, to find them like a voodoo ceremony or a cockfight. The man himself was inaccessible. He had a thin nose, bony as a finger, a city accent, emanations of myth. He would not talk on the telephone. A sense of self so great that it was taken for selflessness, the two had merged. He was a source of energy rather than an individual. He obeyed the laws of Newton, of the greatest of suns.

The night they went to his theater it was in an old dance hall. The audience had to wait in line for an hour on the stairs. Kasine did not appear, though someone said later he had been the man sweeping the stage while everyone was being seated. At last there was an announcement; the performance that evening was named. Silence. An actor walked out. He had the face of someone not to be trusted, a man who has tried everything, whose hunger is great enough to kill. His movements had the intensity of a maniac’s, but above all Nedra was struck by his eyes. She recognized their power, their derision; they belonged to someone who was her brother, the self she envied but had never been able to create.

“Who is that?” she whispered.

“Richard Brom.”

“He’s extraordinary.”

“Do you want to meet him?”

She did not understand the play, but it did not disappoint her. Whatever its meaning—it was all repetition, anger, cries—she was won by it, she wanted to see it again. When the lights came up and the audience clapped, she rose almost without realizing it, applauding with her hands held high. In her unashamedness, her fervor, she was clearly a convert.