James Salter - Light Years

“What did she say to you?”

“She just kept saying, ‘My poor baby.’ ”

“I was seventeen the first time I came to New York.” She had never told this to Eve. “It was with a forty-year-old man. He was a concert pianist, he’d passed through Altoona. When he wrote to invite me, there was a rose in the letter. We stayed at his house in Long Island. He lived with his mother, and he came to my room late at night. You know, I don’t even remember his face.”

It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one’s back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children—she must not reveal it to them.

She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thrilled her. I am beyond it and I will not sink.

This submission, this triumph made her stronger. It was as if finally, after having passed through inferior stages, her life had found a form worthy of it. Artificiality was gone, together with foolish hopes and expectations. There were times when she was happier than she had ever been, and it seemed that this happiness was not bestowed on her but was something she had herself achieved, had searched for, not knowing its form, had given up everything lesser—even things that were irreplaceable—to gain.

Her life was her own. It was no longer there to be taken by anyone.

WHEN VIRI SOLD THE HOUSE, SHE was startled. It was something she assumed would never happen, for which she was unprepared. She was disturbed by the act. It was either sickness or great strength on Viri’s part; she did not know which she feared most. There were many things there that belonged to her, she had never bothered to take them, she was always free to. Now, when she suddenly saw them about to vanish, it did not matter. She told her daughters to take what they liked; the rest she would attend to.

Viri was going away, they told her.

“Where?”

“His desk is covered with travel folders. He has some of them marked.”

She called him. “I was so sorry to hear about the house.”

“It was falling apart,” he said. “Not really, but I couldn’t take care of it. It’s a whole life, you know?”

“I know.”

“I got a hundred and ten thousand for it.”

“That much?”

“Half is yours. Less the mortgage and all that.”

“I think you got a very good price. It isn’t worth that. I’m sure they didn’t look in the cellar.”

“It’s not the cellar, it’s the roof.”

“Yes, the roof. But in another way, it’s worth much more than a hundred and ten thousand.”

“Not really.”

“Viri, I’m very pleased with the price. It’s just… well, we can’t sell it again, can we?”

He sailed on the France in the noisy, sad afternoon. Nedra came to see him off, like a sister, an old friend. There was a huge crowd, a crowd that would stand at the end of the pier finally, jammed together, waving, a crowd of the twenties, of revolutions in Mexico, threats of war.

They sat in the cabin with a bottle of champagne. “Would you like to see the bathroom?” he said. “It’s very nice.”

“How long will you stay, Viri?” she asked as they examined the fixtures, the details that had been designed for rough sea.

“I’m not sure.”

“A year?”

“Oh, yes. At least a year.”

Franca came at last. “What traffic!” she said.

“Would you like some champagne?”

“Please. I had to get out of the taxi three blocks away.”

Viri took them on a tour. Glasses in hand, he showed them the salons, the dining room, the empty theater. The stairways were crowded, the passages redolent with Gauloise smoke.

“All these people aren’t going?” Franca asked.

“They’re either going or someone they know is.”

“It’s incredible.”

“It’s completely booked,” he said.

The announcements had begun for passengers to go ashore. They made their way toward the gangplank. He kissed his daughter and embraced her, and Nedra as well. “Goodbye, Viri,” she said.

They stood on the pier. They could see him at the rail on the deck where they had parted, his face very white and small. He waved; they waved back. The ship was enormous, there were passengers at every level, the vastness of its black, stained side overwhelmed them. It was like waving farewell to a library, a hotel. At last it began to move. “Goodbye,” they called out. “Goodbye.” The great moans of the whistle were flooding the air.

At dinner that night, Nedra found herself thinking of things that had gone with the house—or rather, despite herself, they were somehow washed up to her like traces of a wreck far out at sea. Nevertheless, much remained. She and her daughter sat now in a house—it was really just some rooms—left over from the one that was gone. They drank wine, they told stories. All that was missing was a fire.

Viri dined at the second sitting. He had a drink at the bar, where people entered with cries of greeting to the bartender. In the corridor were women of fifty, dressed for dinner, their cheeks rouged. Two of them sat near him. While one talked, the other ate long, triangular bread and butter pieces, two bites to each. He read the menu and a poem of Verlaine’s on the back. The consommé arrived. It was nine-thirty. He was sailing to Europe. Beneath him as he lifted his spoon, fish were gliding black as ice in a midnight sea. The keel crossed over them like a comb of thunder.

Franca had become an editor. She had manuscripts to think about now, to coax into being. She worked in a cubicle that was piled with new books, pictures, clippings, distractions of every sort. She went to meetings, lunches. In the spring she was going to Greece. She was serene, her smile was winning, she did not know the way to happiness but she knew she would arrive there.

“Are you still seeing Nile?” Nedra asked.

“Poor Nile,” Franca said.

Nedra was smoking a cigar, it provided a dash of authority, of strength. She turned on music, as a man might do for a woman, and drew her feet beneath her on the couch.

“This afternoon, on the boat, I was thinking how backward it all was. We should have been seeing you off,” she said.

“I’m going to fly.”

“You must go further than I did,” Nedra said. “You know that.”

“Further?”

“With your life. You must become free.”

She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her own case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.

NEDRA’S APARTMENT WAS NEAR the Metropolitan. It was on street level, an annex to a building. It had only two rooms, but there was a garden, more than that, a wall entirely of windows like a greenhouse. The garden had died; it was dry, the vines were brittle, the stone urns empty. But the sun fell into it all day long, and within, behind the bank of glass, she had many plants, protected, cared for. They bathed in the light; they gave off a richness and calm. The door to the garden, like that of a house in France, was of painted iron with glass in its upper half. There was a fireplace in her bedroom and a narrow, decaying bath. At a small table, in the mornings, barefoot, alone, she sat, and set her imagination free. The silence, the sunlight enclosed her. She began—not seriously she told herself—she was too proud to risk early failure—to write a few stories for children. Viri had been wonderful at making them up. Often she thought of him as would the widow of a famous man; she saw him again drinking tea in the morning, smoking a little awkwardly, his slightly bad breath, his thinning hair only adding to the memory. He was so dependent, so foolish. In a time of hardship or upheaval he would have quickly vanished, but he had been fortunate, he had found himself always in sheltered times, the years had been calm. She saw him with his small hands, his blue-striped shirt, his ineffectiveness, his vagaries. When it came to stories, though, he was like a man who knew railroad schedules, he was exact, assured. He would begin in wonderful, faintly witty sentences. His stories were light but not frivolous; they had a strange clarity, they were like a part of the ocean where one could see the bottom.