James Salter - Light Years

“Where have you been?” Nedra asked.

They drank; they ate dinner with plates on their knees. A waiter was serving champagne. Someone was playing the piano, barely audible over the din. Gerald deBeque was sitting with a Japanese girl. His wife, who had a splitting headache, began to tell people it was time to go to the film.

They went down in a crowded elevator and walked three blocks to the theater in shattering cold, walked and half ran, stood in the entrance waiting for deBeque to arrive and instruct the manager to let them in. Several people had managed to get in anyway.

“Come on, Viri,” Nedra complained, “tell him that we’re from the party.”

“Everybody’s standing around waiting.”

“Oh balls, the waiting.”

She was talking to the manager herself when at last deBeque appeared. “Gerald, your film’s half over,” she said.

“Let them in,” he called to the manager. “Everybody can go in.”

Viri hung back. He touched deBeque on the elbow.

“Gerald…” he said.

“Yes?”

“The girl standing by the sign, the sort of thin girl…”

“What about her?”

“She’s wearing a leather coat.”

“Yes, with a belt.”

“Who is she? Do you know?” he said casually.

“She came with George Clutha. Her name is Kaya something… I forget.”

“Kaya…”

“He tells me she’s better than she looks.”

They were calling him; they were already partway down the aisle.

“She’s looking for a job,” deBeque remembered.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Viri.” He would not let him go. “You can do better than that.”

“It’s just that I thought I’d met her somewhere.”

Arnaud was standing at their seats, beckoning to him. It was a small theater, once respectable. They kept their coats on.

“I was trying to find out a little about the film,” Viri said. “It’s about a young woman’s sexual awakening.”

“I might have known,” Nedra said.

Arnaud yawned. “Gerald probably stars in it.”

The lights stayed on for a long time. There began to be whistles and claps. Viri looked back, as if to see if anyone else were entering. He seemed calm and at ease. He was doomed as a dog that chases cars.

“I have a feeling I’m going to go to sleep even before it begins,” Arnaud murmured.

Finally it grew dark and the film started. The many shots of a young girl with her blouse open loitering along roads and through fields or working in the kitchen in this improbable attire were not enough to rivet the viewers.

“This isn’t very interesting,” Nedra whispered.

Arnaud was asleep. Viri sat silent, made unhappy by the vague connection between the heroine and the girl who sat hidden somewhere in the bored, coughing audience. If only out of the corner of his eye he could see her a row or two ahead. He wanted to stare at her unnoticed. There are faces that subjugate one, that are turned away from with a feeling like that of giving up breath itself. In the morning I will have forgotten it, he thought; in the morning everything is different, things are real.

There was a crowd waiting on the street as they went out, people who had come for the first public screening at midnight. Arnaud had his coat turned up like an opera star or gambler.

“The book was better,” he commented as he passed through them.

“Oh, yeah? What book?”

“Save your money,” he said.

They came home after midnight, the long, flowing drive in darkness, snow on the edge of the road. The sitter had crumpled on the couch; she was soft-faced and bewildered as Viri took her home.

They went to bed in the large, cool room, their clothes scattered, the window admitting just a blade of icy air.

“Gerald deBeque is a dissolute man,” Nedra said. “And that movie was absolutely awful. There wasn’t anybody there I was interested in. Still, I had a good time. Isn’t that strange?”

He did not answer. He was asleep.

IT WAS A DAY OF COLD SUNLIGHT, the day on which, six years before, his parents had died. He sat at his desk. His two draftsmen were at work, the flats of their tables before them. The room was silent, that was what set him thinking; it was suddenly calm. His father and mother were lying beneath the earth, brown as the relics of saints, their funeral clothes rotting. He was thirty-two, alone in the world. Dreams and work.

Have I said he was a man of minor talent? He was born after one war and before another—in 1928, in fact, a year of crisis, a year on the path of the century. He was born in disregard of the times, like everyone; the hospital is there no longer, the doctor retired, gone south.

He believed in greatness. He believed in it as if it were a virtue, as if it could be his own. He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered, that would rise one day to the light. He was clear-eyed and exact about the value of other people’s work. Toward his own he maintained a mild respect. In his faith, at the heart of his illusions, was the structure that would appear in photographs of his time, the famous building he had created and that nothing—no criticism, no envy, not even demolition—could alter.

He spoke of it to no one, of course, except Nedra. It grew more and more invisible year by year. It vanished from his conversation, though not from his life. It would be there always, until the last, like a great ship rotting in the ways.

He was well-liked. He would have preferred being hated. I am too mild, he said.

“It’s your way,” Nedra told him, “you must use it.”

He respected her ideas. Yes, he thought, I must go on. I must make one building, even if it’s small, that everyone will notice. Then a bigger one. I must ascend by steps.

A perfect day begins in death, in the semblance of death, in deep surrender. The body is soft, the soul has gone forth, all strength, even breath. There is no power for good or evil, the luminous surface of another world is near, enfolding, the branches of the trees tremble outside. Morning, he wakes slowly, as if touched by sun across the legs. He is alone. There is the smell of coffee. The tan coat of his dog drinks the burning light.

For the day to unfold it must in its blueness, its immensity hide the conspiracy he lived on, hide but enclose it, invisible, like stars in the daytime sky.

He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming. He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge. The Sagrada Familia was as familiar to him as a barn to a farmer, the “new towns” of France and England, cathedrals, voussoirs, cornices, quoins. He knew the life of Alberti, of Christopher Wren. He knew that Sullivan was the son of a dancing master, Breuer a doctor in Hungary. But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams… one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea. We had children, he thought; we can never be childless. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives…