James Salter - Burning the Days

He looked sturdy in his trunks at Eze-sur-Mer, well-knit. He had three bullet wounds from the war but they had almost disappeared. I remember the day because of its great calmness, the horizon as if rubbed away. He walked some distance into the sea, then swam, far out. She put on a white bathing cap, her fingers sliding under it to let her stretch it down, and swam after him. For a long time, the only figures in sight, they played together in the soft, rolling water. We watched until slowly, emerging from it like a photograph, they came out.

They were living on her money, as she frequently reminded him, but it was worth it. Eventually they married. She became Mrs. Bezencenet. He was ten years her junior.

They traveled — these were the Aegean years, the purifying light. I saw them in London and Paris. The idea of doing something, a play or film, remained in her mind.

In Spain — it was the late 1960s — her legs began to swell. Then her ankles; they filled with fluid. Finally she went to the hospital. At length, with treatment, the fluid drained away but in its wake came something more terrible. It was scleroderma, a hardening of the skin and the tissue beneath. One gradually became petrified. They went back to England, where, as it happened, the world specialists were, but the doctors could do little and promised nothing.

I went to see her. She had bought a village house in Denham, about forty minutes from London. I took the train from Marylebone Station on a Sunday morning, the compartments sunstruck and empty. It was mid-October. I went down the long path, past meadows, from the station to the village and then down the quiet street to the house.

She came into the room, stately and shuffling. There were tears in her eyes. We sat in the library, which looked out upon a broad garden, and drank champagne, but after one taste she declared, “This isn’t good.”

“Darling, it’s what we always drink,” her husband said. He withdrew the bottle from the silver bucket to show her the label, Peiper-Heidseck.

“Come and feel my leg,” she said to me.

I put my hand on it and my heart grew weak. It was like a mummy’s leg, the lid of a wooden chest. Within this she was encased for life. Her coffin, more macabre than most, had already been made. It was in the shape of a body: her own. She could not get out of a chair by herself. It was that far advanced.

Over the months I came back. We had dinner in the bedroom. A friend, a pianist who was visiting, cooked it. We ate on a pink cloth with fresh, stiff napkins, gleaming glasses, wine. She lay, propped by pillows, in bed. It was as if we were in St.-Moritz and she had, perhaps, twisted her knee. As an hour passed she seemed, in a frightening way, to change. Her face altered, it melted away to a mask of exhaustion and death. The midnight bells were tolling.

She would dine no more at fine restaurants, sometimes asking to borrow the waiter’s glasses to read the menu, or gamble drunk at the White Elephant, or be driven back from London late in her Rolls.

It was at about this time that her nephew, Peter, died of a heart attack in a hotel in Munich, where he was on a buying trip. It was completely unexpected, though perhaps not by him. He’d felt pains in his left arm for months.

She took the news stoically. After a bit she remarked that her first recollection in life had been of her own mother in her coffin. Ethel had been four.

A year later, in Barbados for the last time, she died.

We had sat, as boys, by the windows, the light streaming in, she and her husband spiritedly playing board games with us. Later she had tried to guide me, to be a true friend, perhaps more. Her New York terrace apartment was available to me anytime she happened to be out of town, and once, a single long telegram somehow found me when I was lying in a state of serious illness in a hospital in France. It was from her.

I did not recall these things, they were merely part of me. I did not drift back to them, they were the vessel itself.

I went back to Denham in the fall. There was the ancient brick wall beside the footpath, leaning, staved by trees. In the distance the fields were speckled with gulls. The leaves lying at the bottom of puddles on the walk were still green.

I passed the Swan, where we often ate, the house called Wrango, uneven-roofed others. At last I came to Hills House, hers. Through the blinds, in the morning sunlight, I could see an empty table.

The house had been sold. She was next door, in the churchyard, intruder among old families, the Barretts, Tillards, and Wylds with their gravestones head and foot, fading in the earth. Newer than these, destined to be less visited, was a marble plaque in the wall beside the cottage garage. There was her name, Devoted Mother, Loving and Beloved Wife. At the bottom, 1904–1971. She had been born the same year as my mother.

—

There is the immortal city — Grant’s Tomb domed and distant in the early days, the great apartment buildings with their polished lobbies, the doormen and green awnings reaching out to the curb. The Metropolitan Museum flanked by worn grassy spaces where we could play beside it, and the wide second-story ledge onto which one could go far out and sit, feet dangling, to watch parades. The mansions and town houses the significance of which, as boys, we did not know.

We were shown the broad past, the Egyptian Wing with its reconstructed tombs and murals of stiff walking figures with almond eyes, and, across the park at the Museum of Natural History, the bones of whales and dinosaurs. I was only rarely taken to the theater and never to concerts.

And so I grew, born to the city and thus free not to love it. I knew the streets, the subways, the steam issuing from the lower parts of buildings, the stores with their proprietors, the movie houses, all the sounds. I felt deadened by the intimacy. I was unaware as yet of the invisible city — the sexual one, its geography forever fixed in memory by acts of love, Greenwich Avenue, Third, Eleventh Street, the Chelsea, the Beaux-Arts — and I was drawn away to what I imagined lay in the world beyond.

In 1948, in the Marianas as a member of an aircrew, I cut my leg on a coral reef and the wound refused to heal. Blood poisoning — septicemia — gradually set in. We had flown on to China and Peking. My upper leg was covered with sores, my khaki pants stuck to it in half a dozen places. A European doctor, an Italian, in Peking offered to treat me for fifty dollars gold, by which was meant U.S. dollars. There was roaring inflation in China at the time. Huge bundles of bills, tied with string, were only enough for a meal.

I didn’t have the fifty dollars. We flew back to Shanghai. By then I was feverish, and heading homewards in the slow droning plane hung far above the sea, I listened to the unearthly music of delirium.

In Hawaii, in the hospital, in the sunlight and silence, I sometimes fell asleep with a book forgotten in my lap. The book was dense and overwritten, though perhaps I did not see it as such; the pages were like slabs and the dialogue often artificial, but the closing lines, when I finally reached them, made the blood come to my face. It was You Can’t Go Home Again, the last of a series of thick novels in which the barely disguised author, Thomas Wolfe, talented and misunderstood, stormed through life in search of glory, love, and fame.

It was in New York, the seething city, that the unconquerable writer, his brilliant editor, and rich, married mistress carried on their lives in hypnotically repeated sentences. I lost myself in the book and the possibilities it described. I let its size and force sweep over me. That it was essentially banal and too earnest did not affect me. It was like spending three nights on a train with a disheveled stranger — Wolfe was in fact a gigantic man, a kind of Southern Pantagruel who wrote while standing up, on top of the refrigerator, it was said, with pages falling in disorder to the floor — who never stops talking and is able to make all you had formerly known dissolve. Foxhall Edwards was the name of the fabulous editor whose character was based on that of Wolfe’s actual editor, Maxwell Perkins, and a woman named Aline Bernstein was known to be the model for the book’s Esther Jack.