James Salter - Burning the Days

Horner and I had been separated. He was stationed in Florida, where, in a sudden conversion, like Pascal’s, he got married. I was to have been his best man but couldn’t get to the wedding. I knew the bride’s name, that was all.

We left for overseas that winter, destined for places with storied names that had now become backwaters — defeated nations, abandoned staging points. We sailed from San Francisco in early 1946, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, from which hung a huge sign we were unable to read. When our troopship had passed it we went to the rear deck, thrilled by the glory of mission at last though gloomy at the timing, and looked back. Facing the Pacific it read: WELCOME HOME, HEROES. It was the era of flight but not jet flight. The Pacific was endless — it took almost forty hours to fly to Japan and fifteen days to sail to Manila. Horner was in a group sent to Europe.

I had achieved, with assistance, a state of emotional nihilism, or had tried to achieve it. It seemed proper. We were going off for three years to the other side of the world with no real idea of what it would be like other than its great distance from home. This spoke for lack of attachment, even fatalism. At the same time, however, like a man with an unwholesome secret, I was in love.

During the final spring, at one of the last hops at West Point — gold buttons, gray trousers with black stripes, young faces, couples possessing the dream — there had been a moment when the crowd of dancers parted to reveal a girl in a black dress with many small slits, like the eyes in a silhouette, and a flesh-colored slip beneath, a girl with beautiful hair and a brilliant smile. She was leaning back from her partner and talking. It was an illumination. It overwhelmed me. They turned and she was visible on the opposite side of him. From the shadow of the balcony which was the running track, wait, that was not it, from the arched doorway that led to the stairs where the stags lingered on the landing, I stepped forward. I walked onto the floor without hesitation, as if I had received a signal, as if on cue. A hundred couples were dancing on the wide wooden floor. Not knowing her, barely knowing her partner, I said, “May I cut in?”

Fortunately I do not remember what else I said, only the confidence with which I took her in my arms and danced. Everything I was and that I was sure she was seemed clear. This close she was even more stunning, magnificent dark brows, fine arms, a touch of coolness in her level gaze. I was elated — she was so clearly the ideal.

I discovered she was a student at Pratt and came from West Newton, a town near Boston. She was not like the brittle New York girls. Deft with my questions, she was more grave, assessing. Physically she was breathtaking, flawlessly made — you can say all you like about soul — and capable of arousing the greatest desire. Poised and somewhat teasing, she was maddeningly discreet about who had invited her up for the weekend and whom she knew. But I had her name and address and in the rush of those final weeks I wrote to her.

After graduation I was able to come to New York more than once to see her. We went to nightclubs, a football game. That I was still in uniform and would stay in uniform was distracting to her. Her own ambitions lay in art. In a year or two she would be working as assistant to a prominent fashion illustrator, wearing the models’ clothes and sunbathing on the terrace when he was out. I said those things to her that come from enthusiasm and complete belief. I was in her thrall. I had hardly done more than kiss her, but that winter, as we prepared to board the troopship, it was she I called from California to say goodbye.

There were three other men sailing who were involved with her. I was aware of only one. I had learned his name, and several days out, having waited for an opportunity, I approached him as uneasily as if I were going to ask for a loan. He was at the railing by himself, a lean, romantic type with a rather elegant surname which I will approximate as Demont — I suspected that he knew her better than I did and perhaps in ways I did not. We looked at the sea for a while. As casually as I could, I mentioned her name.

He nodded his head, showing no sign of surprise. As, with an occasional glance at me, he began to talk, I realized I did not figure in his story, either among memories or rivals. I felt like a spy, one who with the greatest luck finds secret papers lying openly on a desk. He had met Toni when she was fifteen, he told me. She had been visiting a cousin in Charleston, West Virginia, where he was from. As he spoke he seemed like a young man from a good family who had fallen in love with an unknown girl who had been sailing by. “She’s always had men running after her in droves,” he said matter-of-factly.

“What is she like?” I asked. I had a very good idea of what she was like. I had kissed her. I had felt her against me, touched her neck and waist. Peripheral as these things were, I was certain what lay at the core.

She was ambitious, beautiful, heartless, he told me. A good drinker. One night when he was at Napier Field he had called her long distance and proposed for thirty minutes and then gone on leave to New York and stayed there for ten days, begging. He had managed to read some pages in her diary. He saw that there were others, someone named Beezy. I love him so! she had written. There was a telegram from him saying he was flying in from Oklahoma ( Love you like mad ) to see her. I can hardly wait! she wrote.

All this had crushed Demont. He had given up. She belonged to Neal now, he said — he’d had her up for June Week. Neal was on the ship, but instinct told me not to talk to him, too. In any case, I had decided: I was going to win her.

It took two years. Her love was slowly given and deeply held. One way or another I was able to come back to New York several times. The surprise of having me call. In a low voice she confessed, “I feel all heavy inside.” Down Park Avenue we fled in a kind of delirium, on our way to the theater, in a separate cab from my parents’, kissing passionately. I would wait outside the fashion illustrator’s apartment house and she would come down after work, young and smiling. Everywhere the city welcomed us. We were its renewal, its lyric. Along cool parkways drenched in green I drove to see her in the country, where she had borrowed for a weekend the house of some friends. It was early summer, the road filled with homeward-bound cars. Chappaqua, Campfire Road. The narrow signs are flashing by, the hour of shadow and the last, stunning light. She is waiting on shaded porches, alone in the house. I am flying along the side road, filled with life. Of course, it did not turn out as I foresaw. This was still in the beginning. Bare-shouldered and seemingly interested in other things — the dinner, how to open the wine — she shied away from me all evening. I did not know enough to take her ear in my teeth, so to speak, to hold tightly and force her to be still.

I sent close friends, when they were home from the Pacific, to see her, Crawford, who was gentle and sincere, Rafalko, the great end of the 1943 and 1944 teams. I did not want her to forget me, and there was also the power of all the letters, of being apart, the denied love that reality cannot equal.

I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know till the day I die. The intensity, the closeness.

For once only are we perfectly equipped for loving. That was the time; she, perhaps, was not the right person or I was not. It is heartbreaking to remember her pleas and her simple words: I am waiting.

There is the fever and afterwards the long white mornings, the blankness of recovery. I was in Washington by then, still on the road that led away from her, and among rivals she did not know. She had stopped begging me to let my true desires and real self live. She had written them off, although when love has been etched so fiercely, the scar remains always.