James Salter - Light Years

Her cheek was pressed to his naked feet. She seemed very small.

“And nothing happens,” she said. “It happens to all the others. Yes, you think, it will happen to me. And every year you have more to give, nothing is spent, nothing is taken away, you are richer, you are laden, and every year the same: nothing. Until finally there are almost no others, you are left alone like one flower in a great meadow, and it is autumn, yes, the days are growing shorter, the grass bends beneath the wind. And the sun comes and shines on you still, alone in that great field, the last flower, beautiful, yes, because of that, and there you are in the long, endless afternoons, waiting, waiting…”

She was a woman of great strength. She was slight, but she possessed will and also a terrifying loneliness. The city echoed it. The great, steel shutters closed at night, the streets became empty, the people disappeared. There were lights in occasional restaurants and empty cafés, the rest was darkness, void. The monuments were sleeping, the cats were crouched beneath parked cars. It was a city built on matrimony and law, even if ridiculed, even if despised; all else was fugitive, all in vain.

“You will find happiness,” he told her. They were at lunch. The winter held days of sunshine, noons of infinite calm. He broke a piece of bread to cover his confusion, dismayed at the tense of his verb.

“Do you think so?” she said coolly. Nothing escaped her.

“Yes.”

“That’s encouraging.” She examined his face. She was cautious, warned.

He regretted what he had said, it was as if he had tried to release himself from involvement in her life. His guilt and the healthy faces of those at tables nearby created turmoil and shame in him. The long, dark hair of the Italian women, their passionate faces—faces all the more poignant because they were soft and would not last a decade—the talk of couples, of families, their intense interest in one another, their laughter, all of it seemed to celebrate connubial life, the many facets of it richer than his own, and richer too than any possibilities of his. He was frightened to realize that he had already passed with Lia into the silence of dutiful meals, their attention straying to others, to people being seated, as they waited for dishes to be placed before them.

“You are silent,” she said.

“Am I?”

He did not know what else to reply. He could see across from him, as if it were already accomplished, the woman he had married, with whom he was destined to sit at table for all the remaining years of his life. He envied everyone about him who had married someone different and was engaged in easy conversation; in the long run, what is more important than that? It is the bread of sexual life.

At the same time, he saw that it was a kind of panic which was making him mute, that he was not himself, he was unsure. There were deep, almost invincible yearnings and hungers in this woman. They would not reveal themselves in a day, they had been too long steeping. She was like a convict, an outcast in whom one must believe or she would be lost, who needed someone to save her. And that man she would astonish, the man who committed his life. Thoughts of the underground river passed through his mind, the voyage few men dared take, in which one risked everything.

“You know what I’d like to do, Lia…”

“Tell me.”

“I’d like to take a trip. I’d like to go somewhere with you, away from Rome, the two of us. Would you like that?”

“ Sì, amore.”

“For a week or so.”

“ Sì. Can you wait just a little? My parents are planning to go away. That would be a good time.”

“Where are they going?”

“To Sicily.”

“We’ll go north.”

“Don’t worry, they won’t find us.”

He could not hold his thoughts intact long enough to understand what was happening. He was in turmoil; was he being tested? Was anything more than this swooping from a semblance of happiness to boredom and fear still possible for him? Or perhaps, in the way of someone blind to his own weaknesses, he was about to enact again a hopeless domesticity, to repeat those things which had already brought him here, to a strange country far from home.

Sometimes he slept in the apartment, uneasy, alone. She came to him in the morning. She had oranges in her handbag, flowers, pictures of her childhood, of the father who adored her too frankly, photos taken on Mikonos, in London when she weighed fifty-five kilos—horrible, she turned them over quickly, she was ashamed of them but she wanted to show him everything—the homely English girl friend at whose country house she spent an icy Christmas. She wanted him to share her life. In her white underpants she sat kneeling on the bed and prepared an orange. She was solemn, she did not speak. The shutters were open, the sunlight poured in.

She showed him her city, the keyhole in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta through which one saw a hidden garden, and beyond it, floating in air, vast as the sun, the dome of St. Peter’s. She showed him museums and the ruins at Ostia, San Giovanni at Porta Latina with the tree struck by lightning, St. Agnese where the barbers of Rome shaved the beggars, small restaurants, graves. In the faded red stucco of a wall where a madman lived beneath the sidewalk when she was a child—they used to listen to him and run when he howled—an inscription was scratched. Viri stood reading it. YOUNG MAN, GOOD-LOOKING, INDUSTRIOUS. OBJECT: MATRIMONY. SEEKS SERIOUS AND CARINA GIRL. Beneath was a telephone number and certain irreverent comments.

“Yes,” Lia said dryly. “Matrimony.”

“But doesn’t he mean it?”

“Who knows?”

It was a mild day. The winter was almost past.

THEY WENT TO THE ARGENTARIO in April. The roads were empty. They drove for hours and in the warmth of the sun through the windshield, the gentle swaying of the car, he felt at peace. The country they were passing through was not what he had expected; it was bare, industrial seacoast. There were no quiet towns, no farms.

Lia was driving. As he looked at her, talked, watched her small hands, he realized that he was somehow holding something back despite it all: it was his opinion of her. Instead, he was wondering vaguely what Nedra would think; he was almost nervous, he imagined everything, even a curt dismissal, he was preparing to argue with her—those arguments that were always infuriating, that he never won.

“What are you thinking of, amore?”

“What am I thinking of? Somehow I’m never able to answer that question.”

“Are they secret thoughts?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing is secret. It’s just that certain things can’t be said very well.”

“You make me curious.”

“I’ll tell you at dinner tonight,” he said.

She smiled.

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t want to pry.”

The hotel she had chosen was on the side of a hill. It was isolated and expensive. They signed their names in a small reception building before a young man dressed in striped trousers and a morning coat. Their luggage was carried down to one of the wings below, the door to their room was opened. Like a prisoner who is taken from an administrative office, along corridors, and finally hears the steel bolts close his cell, Viri, the moment they were alone, felt depressed beyond words. The floor he stood upon was tile. The room was chilly, dark, the window lay in the shadow of other walls. There was a wide bed, composed in a practical manner: two smaller beds put together. Given the bed, not much additional space existed.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “Do you like this room?”