James Salter - Light Years

“I feel very sorry for her,” Catherine said.

“Sorry? Why sorry?”

“She’s an unhappy woman.”

“She’s happier than ever, Catherine.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, because she doesn’t depend on a man, she doesn’t depend on anybody.”

“I don’t know what you mean by depend. She’s always had one.”

“Well, that’s not depending, is it?”

“She’s a woman bound to be unhappy.”

“Isn’t it funny?” Peter said. “I feel just the opposite.”

“You don’t know that much about women.”

“I saw her arranging flowers the other day.”

“Arranging flowers?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, except that I don’t think she’s unhappy.”

“Peter, I don’t know anything about what you may have seen, but a woman who leaves her home is bound to be unhappy, now, isn’t she?”

“Well, Nora Helmer left home.”

“I’m talking about real life.”

“So am I.”

“What you’re saying simply doesn’t make sense.”

“Catherine, you know perfectly well that in great works of art there is a truth that transcends mere facts.”

“If you’re talking about Nora… you mean Ibsen’s Nora?”

“Yes.”

“One doesn’t know what happened to her. You can form your own conclusions. Isn’t that so?”

“I like what Nedra represents,” he said.

“Of course you do.”

“I don’t mean that. You know exactly what I mean.”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“Damn it!” he shouted.

“What?”

“I’m talking about something else, don’t you understand? A certain courage, a kind of life.”

“I think it’s something you imagine.”

“A woman’s realm.”

“Why this sudden interest in women?”

“It’s not sudden.”

“It seems to be.”

“Men’s lives bore me,” he said.

PETER DARO HAD ONCE, AS A YOUNG man, lived in the Hotel Alsace in Paris where Oscar Wilde had died. In the very room, in fact; he had slept in the very bed. All that had disappeared.

He was a man of habit and a single comic expression: his mouth turned steeply down in mock dismay. It served all purposes, confusion, disbelief. He came from the city by train on Friday evenings, the axles creaking on the worn, disintegrating cars. Voices at the stations as they stopped in the mist, the exuberance and crudeness as policemen, steamfitters got off at their towns. Then the long, jolting ride through the flatlands, the fields at last appearing, restaurants he recognized, shops. Catherine sat waiting in the car; they drove home beneath the heavy, summer trees.

Their house was open, barnlike, unprotected. Its awkwardness was appealing, like a traveler stranded without money. The dirt road widened before it to form an island in which there was a cemetery of leaning stones, names that had faded, men drowned at sea. The car turned in to a drive of smooth pebbles. The lights were on inside, fires burning in the grates, the pale retrievers barking.

A creature of habit and, yes, eccentricity. He cooked the dinner, his children playing in their rooms upstairs. His wife was in the front room talking to Nedra. The platforms of the small stations were empty now, darkness was falling, the little houses everywhere were alight.

He moved about confidently; fresh scallops and cold, white Graves. He knew how to make things—a drink, a fire, dinner, what kind of stove to have. From his house one looked out on long, empty fields in which gulls sometimes stood.

His great love was fishing. He had fished in Ireland, the Restigouche, he had fished the Frying Pan and the Esopus. “That’s where I won Catherine,” he recalled. “A miraculous day. We went down to the river and she sat on the bank and read while I fished. Finally she said, ‘I’m hungry.’ And exactly at that moment, as if on cue, I pulled out two beautiful trout.

“But the best fishing story I know,” he said, “happened to a friend of mine who lives in France. His father-in-law has a big country house with a pond, and in this pond lived a huge pike. Very cunning fish, very old. The gardener had been after him for years, he had sworn his death. One day Dix was fishing there, he had nothing serious in mind, and he just cast out and accidently hooked the pike in the tail. Unusual, but it sometimes happens. Enormous struggle. The pike was three feet long. Dix was fighting and shouting for help. The gardener ran to the house and came racing back with a shotgun, and before they could do anything to stop him, was blazing away at the pike. There was blood all over, great confusion. The fish was stunned but alive. They put it in a bathtub where it was floating around, wounded. That night it died. There was some question of exactly how it died because there was evidence of stabbing, but anyway there was nothing to do, they froze it in a block of water—this happened in winter—and later it was sent to Paris to make a fish soup for an important dinner the father-in-law was giving. Dix was there, everyone, including the Minister of Education, who took a bite of fish and reached up to his mouth in bewilderment to take out pieces of buckshot. The father-in-law looked at Dix, who… what could he say? He just shrugged.

“Women don’t like fishing,” he decided, “do they?”

“Of course we do, darling,” his wife said.

“They don’t like to get up early in the morning. Actually, neither do I.”

He liked brandy, crystal glasses, vermouth cassis at the Century. His life was solid, well-made, perhaps not happy but comfortable; there were feasts of comfort like nights in sleeping-trains with their clean sheets and cities floating in the dark. The first anachronisms were appearing in his clothes, the first blotches of age on the back of his hands. There was seldom music in his house. Books and conversation, reminiscences. He wore blue-checked shirts, faded from many launderings. English shoes a little out of style. In his face a marvelous alertness, in the iris of one eye a small dark key like a holy stain. He had traveled, he had dined, he discussed hotels with the affection one usually reserves for women or beasts. He knew exactly in which museum a painting was hung. His French was a rickety structure based on a vocabulary of food and drink. He spoke it grandly.

The hours passed quickly. The mist was forming, the brandy gone.

“My God,” Nedra said, “what time is it?”

Peter looked at his wrist watch. After a moment of consideration, he answered, “One o’clock.”

“I’ve had too much brandy,” she said. “I can’t drink it any more.”

“Well, it’s all gone.”

“It goes to my legs.”

Silence. He nodded in agreement. “Nedra…” he said finally. “What?”

“It’s not doing them any harm,” he said.

A last image of him standing in the lighted doorway, the fog obliterating all else, the house, even the windows, the dogs crowding behind him.

“Let me drive you home,” he suddenly decided. “The fog is awful. You can get your car in the morning.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“I know the roads,” he said. He was earnest, his speech slurred. “Damn it, dogs! Wait a minute!” he shouted. “You shouldn’t drive alone,” he decreed.

They got only as far as the end of the driveway where he hit a post.

“I was right. You’d never have made it,” he said.

That fall, in November, his legs began to swell. It was something inexplicable. It affected his knees and ankles. He went to the hospital, they made tests, they did everything but nothing helped, until finally, as if by itself, the fluid disappeared and in its wake, like a mortal drought, a terrible change began. His legs began to stiffen and grow hard.