James Salter - Burning the Days

The joy of meeting him, of seeing him walk unconcerned down the path — he was like the owner of a racing stable, in precarious shape, as it turned out, who had come up from nothing, and for a time I more or less wore his silks. Not officially, of course — I had a future. I was a lieutenant and he a major but my rank had weight. I was a regular. I had become a general’s aide. Through me he touched inner circles and legitimacy. He liked to hear stories about West Point, the visit of the president of Brazil, the saber accidentally left stuck in the ground after the parade had passed.

When not with him I would hurry to the quarters where Leland and Paula lived. Off we would go to the Hale Kalani, the Ala Wai Club, Gibson’s, or Elmer Lee’s. Leland knew Elmer Lee from before the war, he used to surf with him. Elmer Lee would come to the table.

“How’s your umalima, Elmer?” Leland asked.

“What’s that?”

“You know.” Leland put his elbow on the table and pretended to arm-wrestle.

“Oh, no. I got to learn the language all over. I thought it was something else.”

The nightclubs and restaurants, The Willows, and La Hula Rumba. Chun Hoon’s. More than once Leland was passed out in the car.

The current was pulling faster and faster. Nothing is as intense as unconsummated love. She was married to the wrong man. He was decent, loyal, understanding, though he would never really understand her. He was also finally jealous. When he returned quivering like a bull, she supposed, from one particular trip, she would have to calm him by being “very wifely and submissive.” The words made me tremble.

She had been so young when she married. It had been a kind of accident. She was then and would become an independent woman who drank, liked people with money, was scornful, and could charm anyone she chose to. You are the one, she said, why hadn’t she met me? Why hadn’t I met her? It would have been so easy, I wrote,

Could have been,

For every place you were

He came to later,

You could trace his footsteps

To the same

Hop, hotel, or football game …

“Read it again,” she said to me.

When we didn’t see each other we spoke for hours over the phone. Across the hall in the rickety bachelors’ quarters a friend of mine had a phone I could use. It would have been impossible to use the common one downstairs and carry on the low-voiced, endless conversations.

I flew my first fighter, a P-47—big engine throbbing slowly as I taxied, hard tires jolting on the concrete — out over the base soft-ball game and all of Honolulu, and when I landed, proud of myself and my sweat-darkened flying suit, went right to their house. “My God,” Paula said, “I’ve never seen you look so pale.”

I would die in a crash, I knew, without ever having made love to her. There is that certainty of a woman who was made for you just as Eve was for Adam. On my dresser was a photograph taken at their engagement party, laughing, joyous, filled with life, the best one of her I had ever seen. She had made Leland bring it over to me one day. She was ready to give anything, do anything, and we were held apart by all that was drawing us together: honor, conscience, ideals. There was no way out.

We used to take our planes, the four-engine transports, back to the States for major inspections and modifications. On one of the trips I went to Los Angeles for the first time and in the late afternoon, driving along Sunset Boulevard, was passed by a convertible with the top down. There were three or four people in it and one of them — she turned and I saw her clearly — was a girl I had been infatuated with in high school. I was in uniform and called out and waved. I saw her wave back but then whoever was driving the car sped up and cut through the traffic. I couldn’t catch them. I watched her disappear down the silky road and vanish around a curve, it was near Bel Air. The world of schooldays and youthful dreams from which I had never really separated myself had suddenly passed me by and gone. I was in a new world, a more serious world, in which love was even stronger and more consuming.

II

It didn’t end as I expected. The fever never broke as Leland had hoped, but Paula, sensing something perhaps, the impossibility of our situation, the hopelessness of pretending, put her mark on me in another way, a very feminine way, I came to see later, subtle, lasting, sure. She chose for me the girl I ought to marry, whom I had met one afternoon in the courtyard of the Moana, Ann Altemus, good-looking, unspoiled, very much of her class, which was minor society, she was from the horse country in Virginia. Her father owned a big farm near Warrenton. She was perfect for me, Paula said, exactly the kind of girl I needed. I believed her. Who else loved me as much or knew me as well? What she did not say was that she saw someone she knew she could be friendly with and who would not be a threat to her.

We were all stationed in Washington together for a year and a half, and not long afterwards I stood at the altar in the chapel at Fort Meyer with my wife-to-be. We had more or less strolled into marriage. Our parents — her father and my mother — disapproved. They did not understand that the rest of the world was pleased with the idea. We, too. I knew, as one does, that she saw life as I did but felt misgivings at the solemnity of the vows. To myself I said, “Five years.” Paula and Leland were there — he was my best man. The reception was in their little house in Georgetown. Paula held her new baby in her arms, a little girl, and my wife and I drove off in a dashing yellow MG, stopping for the first, uneasy night in some nameless motel on the road to Florida.

—

After I left Honolulu I saw O’Mara only once. It was in Valdosta, Georgia. He was driving through and came to dinner. We were stationed there, living in an apartment above the two spinsters who were our landladies and watched all comings and goings from the parlor below. I had been promoted but I could see I had fallen in O’Mara’s estimation, settled into predictable life with a woman who obviously did not take to him and was not stimulated by the things we were remembering. It was not that I had lost promise but rather, he must have felt, that I had been bridled. It was a friendly evening, but uninspired.

Later I heard he had gotten into trouble. Through cards he had lost his car and the beautiful golf clubs. He’d been at Kelly Field in an administrative job, feared and disliked, a martinet and, what seemed to say everything, an inconstant one, polished and immaculate one day, unshaven and inexplicably rumpled the next. So he passed from sight.

—

When our first child came she was named for Leland and he was her godfather. As couples we were living far apart by then. Leland was an attaché in South Africa. It was a great bore, Paula thought, but they traveled and had a certain status. We adored Rome. After a brief tour I am feeling extremely cultured and so annoyed with Nero.

I was assigned to a headquarters in Germany. Paula’s letters had beautiful stamps with animals on them. Everybody is a lieutenant colonel, she wrote, I love you. We saw them once or twice in Europe — once they drove up from Paris to visit. He was the same, cordial, more moody perhaps, the lines deeper in his face, a glass more often in his hand. They were giving each other false little smiles. They had come to a rocky part of marriage, but we knew they would continue together. They were bound by children, friends, career — everything that had once stood between Paula and me. It was the long journey that held them together. It was good sense, plus all they had lived through.