James Salter - Light Years

“What do you mean, fantastic? What’s so fantastic about her?”

“She’s incredible.”

He was eager to meet her, half afraid. When he saw her for the first time, it was as if her clothes fell away before his eyes. He grew dizzy. He hardly dared show interest; he was ashamed of his knowledge. It was a knowledge which doomed him, singing in his ears from the first moment, whispering to his blood.

Their first time together they went to the Metropolitan, up the steps of which her father had once run. It was afternoon, lingering, serene. In the great guarded halls he could hardly look at her though she was at his side. He was aching to talk, to be able to speak to her as if nothing were at stake. He was conscious only of her limbs, her hair, the things he knew she had done. She seemed beautiful and calm. Everything reflected her, everything suggested love: the torsos, the clean, marble limbs, the roll of muscle that encircled the hips of a Greek boy. He was standing a bit behind her. He saw her gaze pass over the shoulders, the stomach, pause at the genitals and scribed, curling hair. It was as if she were scorning him. They walked on; his mouth was dry, he could not even make a joke. She cared nothing about him, he could feel it.

And now in a suit and a straw hat, the kind farmers wear, a dandelion in his buttonhole, he stood, possessor at last of the woman his brother had found, had prepared for him, brought to him unknowing. His face was young, his hands brown from the sun. He had met Viri a number of times but hardly knew him, and Nedra only once. He was waiting for them to arrive.

They were late. They parked where the road had broken and washed away—there were already eight or ten cars—and walked up a small stone path to the house together. It was a house shaded by huge trees. There were glasses gleaming on a buffet table inside, fruit, flowers, cake. The sunlight poured through large windows. Several cats strolled past their feet.

“I’m glad to see you,” Theo told them.

“We’re glad to see you.”

“What a lovely house,” Nedra said.

“Come and meet our host.”

She found her daughters upstairs. They wept together, they wept and smiled. They wiped the tears from Danny’s face that were running in straight lines down to her mouth. When Viri appeared hesitantly at the door, she began to cry all over again.

“What are you crying for?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Me too.”

A vast, brilliant day, the trees sighing, the rooms a bit warm. The ceremony was brief, a cat was rubbing against Viri’s leg. The wedding march was played as the bridal couple entered the reception room. In that moment as he saw his daughter in sun-struck white, near now to another, departing, already gone, he felt a sudden pang of bitterness and loss, as if he had somehow been proved a failure, as if his whole life could be dismissed in a word.

They drank red wine and opened the presents. They turned to Viri for a toast.

“Theo and Danny,” he began. He raised his glass and looked at it. “Come what may, you are entering the true happiness, the greatest that one ever knows.”

They all drank. There was a telegram from Chicago, MAY YOUR LIFE BE STREWN WITH FLOWERS NOW AND FOREVER. SEND PHOTOGRAPHS, ARNAUD. They talked about him; perhaps he knew they would. They told adoring stories. These stories had become his true existence, he was like a character in a play one imitates and admires. He could not fail or disappear. He was like a marvelous guest who leaves early, the memory of him lingering, made stronger by being cut off at just the right moment.

The marriage car departed, abruptly it seemed, suddenly there were waves, farewell cries, it was starting down the road, a Labrador running beside it.

“Well, there they go,” someone said.

“Yes,” Viri agreed.

Far off the black dog was running in the dust of the car, running and falling behind. Finally he abandoned the chase and stood in the road alone at the edge of some trees.

That was spring. Franca spent that summer with her mother at the sea. They had a small house faded by the weather on the edge of potato fields. Parked in front was the car, an English Morris they’d bought from the garage man, its paint gone to chalk in the sun. There was a garden, a bathroom in which water came, crippled, from the faucets, a view of the vanishing dunes.

They had long lunches. They drove to the sea. They read Proust. In the house they went barelegged and without shoes, their limbs tan, their eyes the same gray, their lips smooth and pale. The calm days, companionship, the sun leached all care from them, left them content. One passed them in the morning. They were in the garden, a beautiful woman watering flowers, her daughter standing near her holding along her forearm and stroking slowly a long white cat. Or the house when they were gone: the windows silent, brief bathing suits spread on the woodbox, the robins with their dark heads and weathered bodies hurrying across the lawn.

There was a wooden table outside at which they sat in the sun. Small yellow bees were eating the cheese rinds. Nedra’s palms lay flat on the smooth, hot boards. It was the beginning of August. The sea was singing. Above it was borne a silver mist risen that morning in which, in the empty hours just after lunch, a few children shouted and played.

They visited Peter and Catherine. Dinner beneath the great trees. Afterwards they sat and talked of Viri. Nedra had partly unbuttoned her dress and was rubbing her stomach. It aided digestion, she said. Overhead, the airliners crossed in darkness with a faint, lingering sound, their lights passing among the stars.

“I had lunch with him last month,” she said. “He’s a little tired from… you know, life. It hasn’t been easy for him, I don’t know exactly why.”

“Oh, I think there’s quite a simple reason,” Peter said.

“One is so often wrong…”

“Yes, but you and Viri—any two people when they separate, it’s like splitting a log. The pieces aren’t even. One of them contains the core.”

“Viri has his work.”

“But it’s you who’s carried off the sacred part. You can live and be happy; he can’t.”

“He’s really better now,” Franca said.

“We haven’t seen him for a long time.”

“He’s much better,” she assured them.

“He’s still living in the house?” Catherine asked.

“Oh, yes.”

They had talked about food and old friends, Europe, shops in town, the sea. Like a businessman who keeps important matters till the end, Peter asked, “What about you, Nedra?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve had such a good dinner, and I have such a comfortable bed…”

“Yes…”

“I’m thinking. I suppose I’m not used to giving an answer to that kind of question, especially to someone who will understand me.” She paused. “How do I seem?”

“Peter,” Catherine explained, “Nedra doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“The fact is,” Peter said, “I don’t want to disappoint you, but you seem wonderful; you seem the same as ever.”

“The same as ever… No. We’re none of us the same. We’re moving on. The story continues, but we’re no longer the main characters. And then… I had a strange vision a few days ago. The end isn’t like those woodcuts of a skeleton in a black cloak. The end is a fat Jewish man in a Cadillac, one of those men smoking a cigar, you see him every day. The car is new, the windows are rolled up. He has nothing to say, he’s too busy. You go with him. That’s all. Into the dark. Why am I talking so much?” she asked. “It’s the brandy. We must go.”

During the days, though, she was utterly at peace. Her life was like a single, well-spent hour. Its secret was her lack of remorse, of self-pity. She felt herself purified. The days were cut from a quarry that would never be emptied. Into them there came books, errands, the seashore, occasional pieces of mail. She read them slowly and carefully, sitting in the sunshine, as if they were newspapers from abroad.