James Salter - Burning the Days

“I dreamed of you last night,” she said to me. “Wildly. I feel particularly close. Oddly enough,” she added, “I dream of you all the time.”

Meanwhile at bingo games Leland sat sulkily throwing beans at her across the table.

“You’re getting into my dress, Leland.”

He, doggedly: “Isn’t that where I’m supposed to be?”

And she and I would dance and whisper our deepest confessions. She hadn’t slept with him for three months, she told me, it was a crisis anyhow. “I dread nightfall,” she said.

“Paula is in love with you,” a mutual friend told me. I didn’t know what to do. I loved her passionately and I knew I would never find a woman like her again.

She could divorce him, but it would not be that easy. Divorce was a rarity in the society in which we lived. Besides, we were trusted. Afterwards, where would we go? A general’s wife told her a story about a well-known officer. He was stationed on the same post with a married woman named Eleanor Farrow. Her husband had to leave on a trip for two months and asked him as a friend to drop by and cheer his wife up while he was gone. The upshot was that when the husband returned, his wife asked him for a divorce. Farrow finally agreed, but with a condition: that she never see her little daughter again. She gave in and married the other officer. Of course, the general’s wife continued pointedly, they weren’t accepted in Hawaii after that and had to leave. After some years the wife died. Their son, who became a famous officer himself, used to say that his mother had died of a broken heart because she could never see her first child.

That was another thing, Paula’s son. He was well over a year old and they were having difficulties with him — something was wrong. He would not learn to talk or behave. It turned out that he was deaf — he had lost his hearing before birth as a result of Paula having German measles early in her pregnancy. There was also a heart defect. He would need more and more care, although we hardly thought of that — we were dealing only with today and tomorrow. I was not yet twenty-two. I had spent four years in a prep school, three more in military school. In the words of the epigram, I was magnificently unprepared for life.

“You know, you’re really stupid,” another officer’s wife said to me.

We were driving back from a party. I had been her escort — her husband, a classmate of Leland’s, was away. She’d been drinking. She was tall, in her lustrous twenties, the neck of her evening dress cut low.

“You don’t understand anything, do you?” she said.

“Some things,” I said warily.

“No, you don’t.”

Her hand was on my leg. Paula and Leland were in the back seat. This woman was the wife of their friend, and I didn’t know what she would say, I was afraid it was going to be some terrible, drunken truth. I could feel her looking at me as I drove.

“How is it you’re so stupid? I thought you were supposed to be smart.” I realized Paula was watching, amused. I caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror. The woman had moved closer. Her head was in my lap. “You’re not very smart. You don’t even know what I’m saying,” she mumbled.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, then?”

It wasn’t the right time, I said. The time? The right time, I said. She gave a moan of impatience. “Have it your own way,” she said, “I don’t care. Have it any way you want to”—she raised her head partway—“but for God’s sake, have it!”

I felt like a fool. I was made fun of afterwards but I didn’t mind.

It was the same thing later with a navy nurse from Pearl Harbor — she was a lieutenant commander; I went with her to prove how mature I was, and then with the daughter of a coast artillery colonel to show some sense of propriety. The colonel’s daughter was blonde and lively. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had just come out, and she liked to call herself “Fred C. Dobbs.” One night we went to Trader Vic’s and then for a midnight swim at one of the little beaches past Waikiki. We lay down in innocence for a few minutes in the darkness beneath the palms, and suddenly someone was shaking me and shining a light in my eyes — it was the morning sun.

I drove her home just before going to work. Half an hour later the telephone rang; her father wanted to see me. I went over at the end of the day. She met me outside and told me what had happened — they had taken her to a doctor for an examination.

“And?”

“Of course, I’m all right,” she said with relief.

A doctor. I couldn’t believe it. She shrugged. She had long blonde hair and pretty shoulders. We hadn’t even been swimming in the nude.

All these things I told to Paula. I was going out partly to entertain her and also I didn’t want to seem too tame. I was in a troop carrier squadron and I had another, in fact a primary, life. We flew to Hilo every day and Kauai twice a week, and there were irregular trips to Australia, Japan, or one of the dots of islands in the south, usually with double crews. Distances were greater then. Setting off for Sydney or New Caledonia meant being gone for a week. Flying hours were what was sought, either on routine flights or the long ones, when it came in large, sedentary servings. There were very few crashes. With native boys we walked at night in the knee-high surf of distant islands, the sea warm and pulling, hunting for lobsters, reaching down to grab them with gloved hands. That is what one remembers, the rain, the solitude, the dampness, and of course the longing, stepping outside the ramshackle buildings late at night wondering what they were doing elsewhere, in Honolulu or at home.

—

As the tide receded there had come back from the farthest reaches the last of the men who had gone out in wartime, some of whom landed in Hawaii.

From Shanghai, with a small “v” in his front teeth and a defiant jaw, came a nonrated major whom I first met playing cards. His name was something like O’Mara. He was in his mid-thirties and had the jaunty style of a bootlegger, gray already streaking his wavy black hair. He became the figure one finds in European books, my tutor. He flicked his cards across the table with a snap and smoked a cigar in the center of his mouth, holding it with two fingers above and a thumb below. In these as in other things, I imitated him. I was a choirboy to him, someone from a privileged neighborhood, and he set about showing me, without formal instruction, the way to act and talk.

How little one knows or cares about the background of idols. He knew military matters much better than I did, regulations and articles of war — he had been an adjutant and his expertise was irrefutable. In Shanghai he had won a large amount of money, twenty-five thousand dollars they said, then worth ten times what it is now. He did not dispute the figure. He had brand-new golf clubs, a camel’s-hair coat, and a Cadillac convertible. What I admired more than all this, however, was the impression he gave of a man who could face any odds.

We went often to town. He was going with the young wife of a navy pilot who was away in Kwajalein on extended duty. She was going to divorce him. She and O’Mara were going to have children, lots of them. “Five or six,” he agreed, moving his hand upwards in stages to show their height. Off they would drive in the soft, tropical night. She lived in quarters somewhere, Kaneohe probably, with the unfamiliar cream-colored car parked outside until first light of day.

Things run in cycles, and I did not know, and perhaps neither did he, that he had already gone through the best of his luck. In the nipa huts behind the officers’ club he drew losing hands and would disdainfully scoop up his cards and flip them over, face down. He had a wife in Philadelphia from whom he was estranged, someone he had mistakenly married in youth, before the great days. I heard occasional vague remarks; I don’t think I ever knew her name or saw a photograph. We were smoking Bankers and Brokers, skipping the club dances, and meeting every evening after work, sometimes not emerging from the huts before morning, having played all night.