James Salter - Light Years

At midnight there was a knock on her door. A man was standing there holding something forth. It was Brom.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Come in.”

The room was cold. It was a novice’s room, bare floor, a small lamp. He did not smile, but neither was he distant. The range of possibilities of his mouth alone seemed infinite, but laid aside.

“Are you finished?” she asked.

“Not quite.”

She had washed her face. It was naked, the lines about her mouth and eyes were faint but eternal. She was a woman who had read, dined in restaurants, a woman to whom nothing need be explained.

He was a man of one talent, he had no minor interests, no flaws. He was like an illiterate, a martyr; there was no possibility for him either to the left or right. The severity of his life, its spareness, could be writ in an epitaph, a single line.

The land beyond the window, the trees, the dark hills were in moonlight. The moon itself was too large, too white. He had a chest like a runner’s, flat as boards. His arteries were thick, like a horse that has galloped. She was later to search them for scars. His fingers were strong.

It was as if they were aboard ship: some old, island steamer, clean and uncomfortable, the doors to the cabins thin. They were the only passengers.

“I think you’re discouraged,” he said. “Don’t be. You will find the way. You’ll find your new life.”

“I feel I’m just beginning to swim,” she said.

“I think you know how very well.”

“I’m just finding the river.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s only a question of having water.”

That was the first passus. A little later she added, “Except that now I want to fly.”

In the morning he gave her a small silver object from around his neck. It was a primitive fish, smooth as a dime. He allowed it no history. It was a kind of pass-safe; it would see her home.

She was living in a studio that Marina kept. It was down among trucks and littered streets. A couple with a child lived on the floor above her, she heard them arguing.

She bought a bedspread that was tan and rose, incense, dried flowers. There were books by the bed, a collection of magnifying glasses, a clock. Her daughters called her every day. She complained of nothing. She was filled with strength.

She wore the glinting fish and that alone beneath her dress when Brom came. Sometimes they had dinner late, after he had performed. He ate only lean meat then and salad, he drank wine, afterwards a bit of fruit. Scriabin was playing, Purcell. When he slept beside her, he was silent, still. His power did not leave him, it lay coiled. He was not muscular, but he was strong, like rope. They made love slowly. He was motionless, only an invisible flexing, faint as the gills of a fish. Her knees began to jerk. Moans came from her lips. Fifteen minutes, twenty, she was staggering, crying, he held her tightly, her arms against her sides, and began to roll a little one way and the other in a slow, meaningless annunciation. She was jerking like a slaughtered beast, the great, unstinted strokes had started, long, unending, like the felling of a tree. His hand was across her mouth as she tried to cry out, he was reeling, he fell as if shot from a foot away, abrupt, inexplicable.

An exhausted sleep from which she could not wake, a drunkard’s sleep. The night air poured over them. From the avenue came the sound of trucks.

A breakfast of chocolate and oranges. Reading, falling again into sleep. He said very little. They were deep in contentment; it was full, beyond words. It was like a day of rain.

Sometimes she went to see him perform. She sat in the audience, hidden among them, feasting on the sight of him, nourished by everything that existed between them and was unknown. She went to be able to watch him endlessly, to hoard, to steal his face, his mouth, the power of his thighs. Satisfied at last, she went to have a drink with Eve or dessert and coffee at the Troys’; they did not ask where she had been, they introduced her, she was more welcome than their guests, she was stunning, drunk with life, provocation written all over her. She was a woman both husband and wife liked to see, she excited them, they could talk in her presence, things that would have been unmentioned became easy, and at the same time the sweep of her life assured them somehow of the virtue of their own. She was living on more than she had, it was evident in her face, her every gesture; she would spend it all. They were devoted to her as one is devoted to the idea of life drunk in gulps. Her fall would confirm their good sense, their reason.

“Your life,” Marina told her, “is the only real one I know.” Nedra said nothing.

“I’m sorry now that I didn’t go with you.”

“Well, I wasn’t accepted.”

“I know, but you’re one of them.”

The theater was nomadic. One week it was in a rehearsal hall, the next in the ballroom of some rundown hotel. His performances were never the same, whether beneath the lights or during quiet days. They met in cafés. She wore oval, steel-rimmed glasses.

“What are those for?” he asked.

“Very small print.”

“No, you have perfect eyes. I can tell from the color, the clearness.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Of course it does,” he said. “Everything speaks through the body. The way someone moves, how they look at you—from that you can tell worlds if you know what to look for. Everything is visible.”

“Nothing is.”

Their legs were touching beneath the table. “Especially that,” he added.

“These are the real hours,” she said.

The afternoon is fading. She shows him photographs of her family, Franca, forgotten days.

“This is your daughter?”

“Incredibly.”

Later he brings forth, without a word, a picture of his own. It’s a clipping of a Van Dongen painting of Picasso’s mistress, the famous Fernande. She is naked, displayed like a tapestry. The resemblance to Nedra is startling.

“Where did you find it?”

“I’ve had it for a long time,” he said. “Even if you cannot marry, you must have some idea of a wife. So I’ve carried her around. She’s very convenient.”

Nedra felt a spurt of jealousy.

“I don’t believe in marriage, and I have no time for it,” he said. “It’s a concept from another age, another way of living. If you do what you really should do, you will have what you want.”

“That’s true.”

“The Bhagavad-Gita,” he said.

In the evening at the hour when, across small gardens, one can see people gathered in lighted rooms, she lies, her legs each pointing to a corner of the bed, her arms spread wide. From the street comes the faint sound of horns. Her eyes are closed; she is caught like a marvelous beast. Her moans, her cries excite him beyond anything. It takes a long time. Afterwards she lies naked, unmoving. She kisses his fingers. They are bathed in silence, in the long, swimming afterdream. She knows quite well—she is absolutely convinced—these are her last days. She will never find them again.

DANNY’S WEDDING TOOK PLACE AT the house of a friend. It was in the country, near Ossining, a wedding somehow old-fashioned despite its youth and informality. The day was warm. It was like Sundays in small villages. Her mother and father were there, of course, her sister, her lover, Juan. She was marrying his brother.

Theo Prisant was taller than Juan, younger, not as well-formed. He was still in school, his last year of law. Before he had ever met her he had heard his brother talk… the daughter of an architect, nineteen, she was fantastic in bed. An incandescent fragment was struck off in some sort of darkness. A longing and envy flooded through his veins.