James Salter - Burning the Days

A few years later she married someone. He was away somewhere when I came to see her, one of the last times. My first book had been published; there was money from the sale of it to the movies and we were going to dinner at the Brazilian restaurant next door to her old apartment, where Greta Garbo, she once told me, liked to go.

She was wearing a blue silk dress. The same dark hair, birch-white skin, full mouth, bright teeth. The same goddess’s body. We drank, we talked as we used to, but it was not the same, it had been used up. We spent the night in harmony, like two veteran dancers, reunited but no longer lustrous.

She was married to still another man when she died at forty, beautiful and inachieved until the end. She had never had children or fame. Men had always desired her, some I never knew about. As if obedient to her wishes, I had finally turned to the life she always envisioned for me, but too late for the two of us. The years when we might have joined together had passed.

It is in the blizzards of New England that I see her, the snow, the old houses hidden in it, warm window lights. I drive through her town in winter, oak woods, pale sky, a stone boathouse, memories. I think of her mother, her mother’s life, when she brought her children east to live, or was it that her mother stayed in California and sent them to an uncle and aunt in West Newton? No matter, there is the pond, gray and ice-coated, and the railroad bridge that she passed on walks, in her girlhood, in her youth and perfection long ago.

—

In the Pacific the war had ended but its vast, shabby landscape remained. In Manila Bay the water was the color of rust from sunken ships. Unidentified masts and funnels were sticking above the surface. Manila was half destroyed; the tops were blown off the palm trees, the roads were ruined, the air filled with dust. There were still rotting helmets and field equipment to be found on Bataan. The licit had disappeared. Theft was an industry, deserters coming into barracks before dawn to steal what they could. There were incomplete rosters, slack discipline. Men were threatening to shoot officers who were too conscientious. On Okinawa a corporal was driving a nurse around to the black units in an unmarked ambulance. She lay on a bed in back, naked from the waist down. She charged twenty dollars.

I saw MacArthur in the Manila Hotel on Philippine Independence Day. He was thicker around the middle than I had pictured him and shorter, with hair slicked across a balding head. MacArthur was then still a disputed figure, slandered by many who had been under his command and of less interest to me than the fighter pilots met in the latrines of bars and nightclubs who, weaving on their feet, claimed to have been Richard Bong’s wingman or possibly McGuire’s. Of less interest also than one of my hutmates at Nielsen Field who every night showered, put on fresh khaki, and went off to an enormous dance hall in a once fashionable district, Santa Anna, returning the next morning soiled, unshaven, missing insignia, and smelling faintly of ammonia, which was the approximate odor of Filipino women. I went with him finally. It was a place as big as a field house, seething and crowded, with a full band on a stage at each end and a thousand sergeants, petty officers, and girls sitting at tables.

We were at last sent to squadrons where a few languid old-timers reigned, secure figures who were on intimate terms with the supply sergeant and knew how everything was done. The fighter pilots went to remote fields in Korea, Japan, and Okinawa. With fifteen or twenty others I was sent to transports and stayed on for a while in Manila, living in corrugated-iron huts that the last of the wartime flyers had abandoned, leaving behind among other things amateur photos of nude Australian girls and addresses scribbled in pencil on the back of instrument cards.

It was not long before, like the onset of a disease, the winnowing began. Word of mouth brought the news — someone had seen someone, someone had heard … Men began to disappear. One by one there came the names.

Did you hear about McGranery? they said. Spun in on Palawan in a P-51. Gassman was killed there, too. Jack Ray, always smiling, was killed on Okinawa. Woods crashed in a coral pit on takeoff there and died. The planes had to be flown correctly or they were treacherous; they would stall, one wing dropping abruptly, like a horse stumbling. At low speed, on a go-around, suddenly opening the throttle could make them roll onto their back, the controls unable to prevent it.

Schrader was dead, we heard. MacDonald. Like drops of pelting rain they were exploding in the dust. Averill got killed in Korea, going around in a P-38. Domey was killed; Joe Macur. Cherry got killed; Jim Smart, the streamers curling from his wingtips as he went into the sea.

The accidents. They were the stark trees in the forest that stood alone, at the foot of which nothing thereafter grew. The wreckage of the cities would be cleared away but never the oil slick on the sea that was all they found of Smart. For me, however, it was a siren song — the fierce metal planes with their weathered insignia, the great noise as they launched, the distant runways at Negros, Yontan, Cebu. The danger of it was a distinction which nothing else could afford. It would not happen to you, of course, it would never happen to you, and also, as has been pointed out, you could discover death as quickly by fleeing from it, be stung the soonest.

Mahl, with whom I had flown in primary, was dead in Europe, his funeral was in Paris; Joe Martin, split-“S”ing from fifteen hundred feet in a P-47; Dabney, a unique figure, killed in a crash in Italy, the local people cut the finger from his corpse to get his ring.

Who had been killed — it was that for years. I flew in many funeral formations, timed to pass over the chapel as the officers and wives, the widow among them, emerged, two flights of four, tight as nails, roaring past with one ship conspicuously missing. In the evening the piano is playing at the club. They are rolling dice at the bar. You are surviving, more than surviving: their days have been inscribed on yours.

—

In July 1946, five of us, Farris and I among them, went on to Hawaii. For more than a year I remained, flying transports.

Honolulu in those days was not much changed from the town James Jones described in From Here to Eternity. The war had filled it with money and strangers but the social structure and pace were those of a colonial domain, untroubled, remote. Visitors came by sea, on the Matson Line, and usually stayed for a couple of weeks at one of the two big hotels that were on the beach at Waikiki, the Moana or the famous Royal Hawaiian, which during the war had virtually belonged to naval officers on leave. There was a fountain in the lobby that gave forth pineapple juice and musicians strolled beneath the windows in the fragrant darkness. Close by was the private Outrigger Club, a few restaurants and shops, and beyond that the low, sunstruck façades of the tropics.

Hawaii was in many ways a distant province of California and its reputation so romantic that they said, as they did of Tahiti, you left it either crying or drunk. Movie stars were part of its lore. I had a navigator, part Hawaiian, whose beautiful sister had run off to the other side of Oahu with one, hoping to get into the movies in the time-honored way, and their mother had made him follow and humiliatingly retrieve her. He had been a beachboy, this navigator, at the Outrigger, an envied position something above a caddy and beneath a tennis pro. He told me that before the war when the old Matsonia sailed they would go from stateroom to stateroom, drinking and saying goodbye, and when the gangplank was raised they would still be aboard. As the ship passed the breakwater they would dive, fully clothed, heaped with leis, from the stern, aloha.