James Salter - Light Years

He was not himself somehow. The faint sound of the radio playing near the draftsmen’s tables was a strange distraction. He could not think, he was vague, adrift.

Arnaud came by in the late afternoon. He sat with his coat belted. He looked like a vintner, a man who owns land.

“What’s wrong?”

“I was just thinking,” Viri murmured.

“I had lunch today at the Toque.”

“Was it good?”

“I’m getting so fat,” Arnaud moaned. “Lunch is not a meal; it’s a profession. It takes your whole life. I had lunch with a very nice girl. You don’t know her.”

“Who?”

“She was so… everything she said was so unexpected. She went to school in a convent. The mattresses were made of straw.”

“Is that unexpected?”

“You know, there’s a kind of education, a kind of upbringing which is ruinous, and yet if you survive it, it’s the best thing in the world. It’s like having been a heroin addict or a thief. We try to save too many people, that’s the trouble. You save them, but what have you got?”

“Tell me more of what she said.”

“It wasn’t only what she said. She ate, that was the thing I liked about her, she ate as much as I did. We were like two peasants striking a bargain. Bread, fish, wine, everything. I began looking at her as something that was going to be served next. And she’s one of these girls who fill their clothes completely. She was—you know how they make those veal and ham pies in England?—she was en croûte . And the most interesting thing: she’s lame.”

“Lame?”

“She can’t walk very well. She limps. You don’t find that often. A lame woman… Louise de La Vallière was lame. Louise de Vilmorin, too. She had tuberculosis of the hip.”

“Did she?”

“I think so. Something else very nice is a woman with slightly crossed eyes.”

“Crossed eyes?”

“Just a little. And teeth. Bad teeth.”

“You like all three?”

“No, no, of course not,” Arnaud said. “Not in the same woman. You can’t have everything.”

There was something hidden in his expression, the smile of someone who should not reveal it. “It’s terrible,” he sighed.

“What?”

“I can’t do this to Eve. I can’t be unfaithful for a…”

“A bad leg.”

“It just isn’t right,” Arnaud said. “I mean, she cooks meals for me. She has a wonderful sense of humor.”

“And her teeth aren’t that good.”

“They’re passable. They’re not really bad.”

He shifted in the chair slightly, and found a new position. His clothing was somewhat tight on him.

“It’s so easy to be distracted,” he said. “Eve is good for me.”

“She loves you.”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“Me?” He looked about as if for something to involve him. “I love everyone. It’s your daughters I love, Viri. I’m serious.”

“Well, it’s reciprocated.”

“I’m jealous of them. I’m jealous of your life. It’s a sensible life. It’s harmonious, that’s what I’m trying to say, and most important, it’s intimately connected with the future because of your children. I mean, I’m sure you realize it, but what moment that gives to each day.”

“Why don’t you have children?”

“Yes. Well, first, I would say, I need a wife. And unfortunately, you also have the wife I like. Nedra doesn’t have a sister, does she?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. I’d like to marry her sister. It would really be an act of adultery.” There was no insult in his voice. “No, you’re very fortunate,” he said. “But you know that. Well, if anything should happen…”

Viri smiled.

“No, I mean it. If anything happened to you… your wife, your children, I would take care of them. I would continue your love.”

“I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”

“Well, you never know,” Arnaud said cheerfully.

“Listen,” Viri said, “why don’t you come out this weekend and have dinner?”

“Wonderful.”

“You and Eve.”

“I forgot something,” Arnaud said suddenly. He was searching in his pocket. “I have a present for Franca. I bought it at Azuma, it’s a frog ring.”

“Why don’t you give it to her?”

“No, take it with you. I want her to have it tonight.”

“I’ll tell her it’s from you.”

“Tell her it’s from Yassir Rashid, the king of the desert. Tell her if she is ever in danger to show it and she will be safe in the heart of the tribes.”

“Listen, Yassir, what would you think of a little Scotch before you disappear?”

“There are three things in the desert which cannot be hidden,” Arnaud said. “A camel, smoke and… you know something? We see too many movies.”

“On the rocks?” Viri asked.

“They kill the imagination. You’ve heard of blind storytellers. It’s in darkness that myths are born. The cinema can’t do that. Did I tell you about the girl I took to lunch? She was really okay. You know, in a sense it’s that way with her. She can never dance. That’s why the real grace, the real music is in her.”

Evening had appeared. The light was gone. The street outside trembled with buses, with enormous, fleeing cars. Along the river was stretched an endless procession which Viri would join. He would move with it, his legs weary though he had not walked, his neck aching slightly, borne alone homeward, listening to the endlessly repeated news.

NEDRA ROSE LATE IN SUMMER AND winter, whenever she could. Her real self lay in bed until nine, stirred, stretched, breathed the new air. Long sleepers are usually nonconformists; they are pensive and somewhat withdrawn. Her hair was rich and clung to her. She bound it in various styles. She bathed it, she wore it damp. One thinks of the ten, the twenty gleaming years of her ascendance. She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.

Her hair smells of flowers. The day is calm. The sun is still forming, the river is spilling light.

She has no friends, she says. Rae and Larry. Eve. It’s very difficult for her to make friends. She has no time for friendship, she is quickly disappointed. It is the shopkeepers who love her, the people on the street who see her passing, wrapped in herself, staring in the windows of bookstores at the beautiful, heavy volumes of painters, the Italian edition of Vogue .

“Tell her how much we love her and miss her,” the men who have the little shop for soap and perfumes near Bonwit’s cry. “Where is she? We don’t see her now that she lives in the country. Tell her to come by,” they say. They love her height, her elegance, her hazel eyes.

She is interested in certain people. She admires certain lives. She is subtle, penetrating and sometimes mischievous, strongly inclined to love and not overdelicate in the ways that must be taken. All of this is written in her dream book. Of course she does not believe it, but it amuses her and parts of the book are very true. Eve, for instance, is exactly as described. It’s also quite close to Viri.

One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love. Soon after they were married, perhaps an hour after, even Viri longed for this. His possession of her became sanctified; at the same time something in her changed. She became his closest relative. She committed herself to his interests and embarked on her own. The desperate, unbearable affection vanished, and in its place was a young woman of twenty condemned to live with him. He could not define it. She had escaped. Perhaps it was more; the mistake she knew she would have to make was made at last. Her face radiated knowledge. A colorless vein like a scar ran vertically down the center of her forehead. She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.