James Salter - Light Years

Backstage was like a grocery that stays open all night. The lights were ancient and fluorescent; a number of badly dressed people who seemed to have no connection with the acting company were wandering back and forth. Brom was not there.

“Come to the party,” someone said.

They drove in a cab. The dark streets jolted by. “Did you like it?” Marina asked.

“It’s so overpowering. Not the play, but the performances. They don’t seem to be acting—at least, that’s not the word for it.”

“Yes, it’s some kind of slow-motion madness.”

“There’s a fantastic power in the way they seem to just turn themselves inside out. I was simply overcome. Does one man teach this?”

“He has a place in Vermont that was given to him,” Marina said. “Everyone goes there, they work, they discuss. Everything is done together.”

“But is he the teacher?”

“Oh, yes. He’s everything.”

They rode in a creaking elevator. Other people were already there. Among them was Brom. He was dressed in ordinary clothes.

“Your performance,” Nedra said, “was the greatest I’ve ever seen.”

His dark eyes stared at her. He merely nodded, still lifeless, still spent. She did not know what he thought or felt. Like all great performers, he stood in a kind of unconcealed exhaustion, like a bird that has flown too far. There was nothing to reply.

She was given a drink. Everyone was friendly. They laughed, they talked softly, they were the most congruous people she had ever seen, they accepted her. She listened to stories of Kasine. His gifts were prodigious. He was an extraordinary teacher; he knew instinctively where the difficulty was, like a healer.

“I went to him every day for two months at the same hour. We talked, that was all. I learned everything.”

“What did you talk about?” Nedra asked.

“Well, it’s not that simple.”

“Of course not. But, for example…”

“He always asked me the same thing: What did you do today?”

They were content in a way she envied but could not fathom. It was like meeting the members of an orthodox family, all of them different but firmly joined.

“I would like to study with him,” she said. She made no apologies, no conditions.

He had once taught an actress how to speak in only four hours. “What do you mean, to speak?”

“To use her voice. To make people listen.”

She wanted to meet him. She looked around like St. Joan; she wondered if he might be hiding among them.

“You must come to Vermont,” they said.

The hours passed without her noticing. Standing near the window later she realized the night was gone. The fragment of city below was silent and gray. She looked up. The roof of the sky was blue, a blue that was descending, as she watched, to earth. The trees in the street unfolded their leaves. As if in sympathy the lights in the room were turned off. Now it was clearly dawn. Outside were a few birds, the only sounds of nature; beyond that, stillness. She was not tired. She would have liked to stay. Her hands were cool and unused as she pressed in farewell the hands of those near her. She slept; she had never slept so well.

Ten or twelve pupils a year, that was all he took. They lived together, worked together. She wanted to be one of them, to shed all diversion, to study one thing and one thing only.

“Do you think it matters that I’m not an actress?”

“You are,” Marina told her.

“They have such strength, all of them. Such naturalness. It’s as if you’re seeing life for the first time. Come with me,” Nedra urged.

“I’d like to. I can’t.”

“Gerald would let you.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

She asked Eve. They sat in a booth at dinner, long menus in their hands. “Do you think it’s foolish?”

“Everyone I know wants to study with him.”

“Really?”

“Did Marina introduce you?”

“Well, I haven’t met him,” Nedra said.

Eve seemed worn, resigned. Arnaud had gone. He had never been the same, anyway. Whether it was physical or not, no one knew. She was thinking of remarrying her husband.

“Are you serious?” Nedra asked.

“We’ve talked a lot about it. Perhaps we should try it again. We do have a lot in common.” Nedra did not reply.

“He’s gone on a diet,” Eve said. “He looks quite well.”

“It wasn’t his weight that caused trouble.”

“He’s just showing that he wants to change. You don’t think it’s a good idea?”

“I don’t know. It just seems…”

“What?”

“That you’ve been through so much.”

“To be going back to the beginning, you mean?”

“It seems like giving up.”

“What can you do?”

“Let’s have some wine,” Nedra said. She drove to Vermont for an interview. She was nervous. There were fifteen or twenty others. They waited on benches near the barn. Kasine was receiving applicants in the kitchen. Sometimes half an hour would pass before the door would open, sometimes longer.

She waited through the afternoon and into evening. No one brought them food or anything to drink. They sat in silence. It became dark. It was April; it grew cold. Finally it came her turn. She felt weary. Her legs were stiff. She entered the house through a screen door.

Kasine was sitting at a bare table in dark glasses. He wore a chalky, black suit. She saw him in the village the next day in the same worn suit, a brief case in his hand like an accountant or lecturer. At the end of the table, impassive, sat Richard Brom. During the whole interview he said nothing.

She told them she’d had no experience. She told the truth: that somehow, without knowing, she had been preparing herself. Physically she was supple, strong. She had no responsibilities, no needs, she was free to devote herself completely. She had been reading St. Augustine…

“Who?”

“The Confessions,” she said.

“Yes, go on.”

There was the passage about our backs being turned to the light and our eyes seeing things lit by the light but not the light itself. That was what had overwhelmed her: the things lit by the light. She turned to look at Brom who sat immobile, as if not listening, as if in dreams.

“How old are you?” Kasine asked. He was looking at his hands clasped together on the table.

“Forty-three,” she said.

There was silence, as after a final question, the one that will linger. She felt a moment of helplessness, of anger.

“But that means nothing,” she assured them.

“We are a theater company,” Kasine said simply. If they accepted a young actress, he explained, she would of course grow older…

Yes, yes, she wanted to interrupt. She knew what would follow.

“I think for the present,” he said, “you should study elsewhere and see what happens. Perhaps it will make clearer whether or not there is a possibility for you here.”

This was the man who had written that just as the greatest saints had first been the greatest sinners, so his actors came from the most hopeless, the most desecrated and unlikely material he could find. But it was all the same—a woman asking for a passport, a work permit, anything; no matter what she said, she was no longer young.

“Age is not a true measure,” she said. “Surely nothing is so arbitrary here. I have more to learn, yes, but at the same time I know more.”

“It’s unfortunate,” Kasine said.

They were immune to her. She could not see the eyes of the man with whom she was speaking, she hardly dared glance at the other. She had shown them everything, her honesty, her devotion, it was not enough.

“Thank you for coming here,” he said.

There were four or five people still waiting. She tried to reveal nothing as she walked past them. She was like a woman leaving a cathedral, descending the steps, unapproachable, her face grave.