James Salter - Burning the Days

—

He went into the hospital for an aging man’s usual complaint and the operation had gone wrong — he very nearly died of an undetected hemorrhage. The patient, abdomen swollen with blood, and in great pain, lay for weeks in intensive care, longing to die. It was Marian who saved his life. She remembered something that had been done with her father, and kept after the doctors to do it. Finally they did; they injected a kind of gelatin, and some of it went to the spot and stopped the leaking.

He was never the same, even after he recovered. He had lost fifty pounds. There had been pneumonia, kidney failure, other unsuspected problems.

He opened the door in Southampton in the fall of 1981, thin, the shirt collar too big, his eyes unexpectedly large. It was a beautiful house, as always. Deep downy sofas, elegance, flowers. A young woman, his secretary, I assumed, was watching Traviata on television. “So, how’ve you been, Jim?” he greeted me cautiously. “What are you working on?”

He had an artificial hip, arthritis, and both knees were bad. It was September but he felt cold. In the restaurant — there were only a few people besides us — we talked about Europe. They were going back soon. He worked well there, he said, always had. He was only twelve years older than I was, but that evening it seemed much more. It felt like Europe — the trees, the tranquility, the wide street in front of the restaurant — I thought of Antibes, where we used to go.

I was longing to go to Europe myself, I said. It was beckoning me.

“Well, why don’t you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Difficulties. I suppose I’ve created them. But I’d like to go to Sicily. Ever since reading The Leopard.”

“That’s a sad story,” he said. “Terrific book. He wrote it when he was sixty-five and sent it to a publisher. They rejected it and he died before it was published by someone else. Very sad.”

“You’re assuming there’s no afterlife,” I said.

The waiter interrupted, a young waiter who wanted an autograph. He placed a blue paper napkin on the table, which Irwin signed.

He couldn’t write any more, Irwin said, as if that had brought it to mind. He didn’t have the mental energy, he said. He envied me.

The first of many evenings and days. We walked out through the large kitchen of the house on the way to restaurants, or there were dinners and many voices at the long, lacquered dining table. When I remember it I think of waiting for them at the bar somewhere, in the fall in the Hamptons. That was part of the pleasure, the lovely anticipation. The leaves have turned. The place is warm and soon to be lit by their presence, a few cars passing outside.

—

He had moved into the front lines. Friends were dying, enemies, critics who had once wounded him. His life was like a deck of cards nearly all out on the table and he musing on them, his eye returning to the same ones again and again. He remembered football games of long ago, playing in Lowell in the cold afternoon, the earth hard as cement, the ball on the two-yard line, final minutes and them with first and goal. On defense, he was safety. He remembers it with the skinny arms of age and a lessened frame.

He was also the quarterback; they stood waiting while he looked the other team over and then stepped into the huddle and told them what they would do. He guessed he was still that way.

“You guess?” Marian said.

“His trouble,” the old cook said, “is that he drinks too much.” She had a broad, handsome black face. She loved him, everyone did. “Drink and scratch, that’s all he does.”

He lay in bed thinking, like a blind sailor remembering the sea, of the happiest moments of his life, catching a pass, going out on the stage to cheers after the opening of Bury the Dead. They were not diamonds, they were sapphires perhaps or opals, but in them a shining star.

He was crumbling, he said. He was a fortress, but they were breaching the walls. “I’ve never breached them,” Marian commented. He was hunched. His smile was like an old dog’s, wry and faded. He was waiting for the end, for the angel of death. If necessary he was ready to do it himself, except that his mother was still alive, ninety-one, and he could not die before she did, the small woman filled with determination who had single-handedly kept the family alive during the hopeless 1930s. She was living in California. He seldom saw her but he was indissolubly attached. His father, he said, had been lucky — he had died suddenly, in a matter of seconds, while on a flight from Europe to New York. They were then going to make an emergency landing in London, but his mother said no, go on to America. She sat and held her husband the entire flight.

He did not complain, although he hated the fact that wealth had come to him at seventy, when he was in dissolution, rather than at forty, when he would have been able to enjoy it. This was not really true. In the second and third acts he had known all the material comforts of life and remained curiously undevoted to them. He seemed to pay so little attention to things. He lived both in and beyond luxury.

When I saw him for the first time after having been away for a few months, he reported that he’d been moderate, he’d gotten drunk only once during the summer. Only once did he have to be helped home. “Carried home,” Marian corrected. There was something boyish about him, even as an old man, the clean pleasant face, the cordial manner.

There was a game he liked that he had once played all the time. It was who could get you to cry in the fewest words? There was a line in The Three Sisters: “You mean, I’m being left behind?” But Irwin always quoted the article by Gay Talese about Joe DiMaggio: On their honeymoon in Tokyo, Marilyn Monroe had gone off on a USO tour and come back and said, Joe, there were a hundred thousand people there and they were all cheering and clapping; you’ve never seen anything like it. Yes, I have, DiMaggio said.

Yes, I have! It was Irwin’s favorite story. Yes, I have. Three words, and you cried.

—

And now it is April and the long campaign is ending. The winter was difficult, in and out of the hospital, his lungs filling with fluid and other problems no less grave. His son phoned from Europe — he was in the hospital again, heart trouble, lung trouble, kidney trouble. He was exhausted from the ordeal. His brother was there and some old friends, the Parrishes.

I set out to see Irwin for the last time. I landed in the morning. It was May. I had a bottle of Haut Brion with me that I was carrying on the off chance we could have a glass of it in the hospital room. They once wet the lips of newborn kings of France with such wine. I was thinking of that, and the journey he was soon to take.

On the train it began to grow dark. There was light only in the mountains to the west. The afternoon was moving towards America with the news, homeward, the yellow fields more bright as it went.

The hospital was in Davos, the same one in which Marian had lost a baby twenty-seven years earlier. The last connection I could make went no farther than a town about thirty miles from there. I called from the vestibule of a soiled-looking restaurant. At the apartment, a private nurse had no news. She suggested I call the hotel where the family was gathered. I did; Adam came to the phone. “Irwin died this afternoon, about an hour ago,” he told me gently.

“Oh, God.” I could think of nothing to say. “Well, I’ll be there in the morning.”

“There’s no point in flying over now,” he said.

“I’m already here. I’m in Landquart.”

“Landquart? I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said.

He had died at about seven in the long, soft evening. Beneath the window of the room in which he lay was a stream, I could hear it there in the dark. There was a clean blue pillowcase on the pillow. His clothes were neatly folded, a blue sport shirt of silk or cashmere, corduroy pants.