James Salter - Light Years

He was in a period of contentment with daily life, of peace. He looked about himself gratefully. It was still not completely real to him, it was a kind of scenery he watched like someone on a train, some of it vivid, going by, some of it bare.

IN THE LETTER BOX WAS AN ENvelope addressed in the clear hand he recognized instantly. He opened it in the hallway and began to read, his heart thudding. Dearest Viri … How instantly she spoke to him across the miles, across everything. His eye fled through the lines. He expected always to hear her say she had been mistaken, she had changed her mind. There was not a day, not an hour, that his immediate, undefended response would not have been to surrender. He was like those veterans, long retired, to whom one day there comes the call to arms; nothing can keep them, their hearts come alive, they lay down their tools, leave their houses, their land, and go forth.

She wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars; she needed it, she said— you know how life is . She promised to pay it back.

Ten thousand dollars. He did not dare tell Lia; he knew what she would say. The venality of Italian life, the rigidity of it informed everything. The woman who came to clean received twenty thousand lire a week, the price of a pair of shoes on the Via Veneto, not even the price. How could he tell her? Rome was a southern city, a capital laid out on the iron axes of money and wealth, the banks were like mortuaries. They bared their teeth over money, the Italians, they showed them like dogs.

Lia read the letter. She was silent, cold. “No,” she said, “you cannot. Why does she need money?”

“She’s never asked for anything.”

“She will milk you. She cares nothing for money, you told me that yourself, she throws it away. If you give her money now, six months later she will want more.”

“She’s not like that.”

He could not explain it, he knew that, not to this woman suddenly suspicious, alert. She was slight, she was certain, she knew the language, the machinery of this world.

At dinner that night she opened the subject again. The desolate sound of forks hung in the air.

“Amore , I want to ask you something.”

He knew what she was about to say.

“Yes, of course, you know,” she agreed.

She seemed despondent, subdued, as if she accepted the presence of this other woman.

“Don’t send it,” she pleaded.

“Lia, why?”

“Don’t send it.”

“All right,” he said.

“Amore , believe me. I know.” She was the guardian of a bitter knowledge.

“But the fact is,” he said evenly, “you don’t.”

There was silence. She took the dishes to the kitchen. She returned. “Have you ever heard of Paul Malex?” she asked.

“No.”

“Paul Malex is a writer, he is the intelligence of Europe. You’ve never heard of him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then believe me, his knowledge is rich, his insight; there is no one to approach him. He reads fluently in Greek and Arabic. He passes freely in the most elevated groups in Europe.”

“What does this have to do with—”

“Malex has gone below the plankton. He has gone below a level in the mind, like the level in the sea where the whales feed. Beneath it is the blackness, the cold, creatures with huge teeth that devour each other, death. He has penetrated that. He does it at will. He perceives structures there, the basic structures of life.”

He had lost the thread. “What are you saying?” he asked.

“I am saying that in Europe one knows certain things. They have been proved again and again. This city is almost three thousand years old. You will see.”

The letter lay on the brown marble surface of a bureau in their bedroom, its words invisible in the dark. They had been written quickly, as Nedra always wrote, in long sentences, without pausing, words which, like an insult or exact judgment, had to be reread, one could never recall them exactly, they were like their author, instinctive, glinting, like a glimpse of fish in the sea.

…you know how I hate to go over things that are past, but how I wish we’d bought a little house somewhere near Amagansett. Either a house or ten acres of land. Marina told me what they wanted for land now and I couldn’t believe it. I suppose the reason we didn’t was the same as always: we had no money. I’m doing some interesting things now, things I always wanted to do. I’m working part-time for a florist, it’s ideal for me, it’s like going to a house I’m especially fond of. Very few flowers, actually. Mostly plants. It doesn’t sound too glorious as I write it—a florist—but I may not continue, I may do something else. Viri, there is one great favor you could do for me, and I want to ask it without a lot of explanation…

All night these words lay folded. They had arrived in Rome like so many other appeals, now they were waiting, they had joined that world of everything attendant, timeless, in despair. Still, they were dangerous. They lay amid crystal bottles, tattered lire notes, a comb, a gold pen. They were there at dawn.

Naked, Lia knelt near his waist. The morning light filled the room, he was still half-asleep. She was unbuttoning the worn, white buttons of his pajamas, her cool fingers did not hesitate, she was calm, assured, the Arab woman she had sworn. His head was rolled to one side, his eyes closed.

“Look at me,” she commanded.

She was dark, like a girl of the streets, struck along one side by the bright morning sun.

“Look at me,” she said. She was the blade of an angelic light; her arms were lean, her breasts like a sixteen-year-old’s.

She hesitated. Her movements were slow and dreamlike, her hands supporting her near her thighs. The letter was her audience, she was performing for it as if it had eyes, as if it were a poor, ineffectual child before whom she would demonstrate her shamelessness, her power. Her voice was uneven as she bent.

“Yes,” she whispered, “I will be your whore.”

His head lay back, as if severed, among the pillows.

His thoughts were tumbling.

“Everything,” she swore.

Afterwards she stepped from the bed. She was deliberate, unhurried, her act was not ended. The door to the bathroom closed. He lay with the room growing still, the walls fading, the ceiling, like silver water after the leap of a great fish. He was witness to this setting which remained, this world of memory as against the one of flesh, and his thoughts turned irresistibly to all he had been entreated to forget: to Nedra who was living on despite the letter, whose life still blazed strength, in whose wake—even before they had been husband and wife, before, during, after—he had always traveled. And then to her rival of whom he was afraid. These women with their needs and assurance, their dazzling selfishness, their smiles—he would never conquer them, he was too timid, too consenting. He was helpless with them; he was close to them, yes, enormously close, even kindred, but at the same time completely different and alone, like a lame recruit in barracks.

Alone, he lay in the sheets of the still-warm bed. He had drawn the covers to his waist, he could feel a wetness, dense and chill beneath one leg; alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.