James Salter - Burning the Days

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In first-class cabins, paid for with movie money — a good portion of the money, as it happened — in the warm autumn of 1967 we sailed on the France. Tremendous departure, crowds on the pier, the water widening, the ship assuming life. In the blue, oceanic evening, waiters brought drinks and packs of cigarettes to the table.

We dressed for dinner. Madeleine Carroll and her daughter were aboard, and Edward Albee en route to Paris and Leningrad for the openings of his play. As they entered, the bartender called out greetings to familiar couples by name. At afternoon tea there was an orchestra, and miniskirted girls without partners sat slumped in chairs. A theater producer told stories of Ireland — men who approached him in the street crying grandly, “Sir John!” He tried to correct them but could not. “A little something for charity,” they pleaded.

“What charity?”

“Sir John!” they wailed.

The second night at three in the morning, I woke abruptly. Someone was throwing gravel against the port-holes. It was heavy rain; we had run into a storm. The ship rolled, soared ominously, slid down. The steel shivered and creaked. We had three staterooms and four children, most of whom became seasick. His twin sister, Claude, was smiling and unaffected, but in the empty dining room I could see my son’s face — he was five, Fidi was his pet name — changing color as food was brought to the slanting table.

There was bingo in the calm of the next afternoon. Amid the old couples and children sat a dark-browed Edward Albee, two cards in front of him. The handsome blond boy he was traveling with we saw little of.

We were going to France for a year, to a village in the south, not far from Grasse, where we had rented a large, sparsely furnished farmhouse — a mas in the regional dialect — solidly built with walls two feet thick. It had been occupied the year before by Robert Penn Warren and his wife, Eleanor Clarke. I wrote to ask if they recommended it, and a letter came from her in reply. It described a paradise, from the windows of which the sea could be distantly seen. You will have the most wonderful year of your life, it concluded, if you don’t happen to freeze to death. The house, of course, had no heat. In the worst months of winter the sheets were so cold we could not turn over in bed — we lay like statues of saints, rigid, arms crossed.

La Moutonne, the house was called, the female sheep. The long, descending driveway was bordered by great eucalyptus trees, whose bark hung in sinuous strips. The front of the house more or less faced empty air. There was an embankment, the roofs of a few houses below and, far off, the tinfoil sea. The most wonderful year of your life — the simplicity of that promise.

All through the summer, to prepare them for regular French school— école communale —our two oldest daughters had been taking French lessons. In the Manhattan apartment of a professor, several times a week they sat and talked for an hour. The amount they learned, it turned out, was limited by a large wart the professor had on the tip of his tongue, visible when he spoke and absolutely mesmerizing to two little girls.

It was a long, beautiful fall. Many mornings I rose before dawn and went out on the bedroom balcony to read. Grasse rose blue in the distance. Its buildings had the luminous form and serenity of palaces. The only people we knew in the first months were Harvey Swados, the writer, and his family, half an hour away in Haut de Cagnes. It was they who had persuaded us to come to France — he was on a sabbatical.

Haut de Cagnes was on top of a hill, overlooking its then sleepy sister, Cagnes sur Mer, where Modigliani once lived and the gypsies used to come and bathe their horses in the sea. The Swadoses’ small house belonged to a sculptor or perhaps his children — he had abandoned his family, and his wife had died of drink, with empty bottles piled on the stairs. There were hundreds of books, many moldy, and often inscribed by famous figures from the 1920s, when a disheartened Scott Fitzgerald had sat in the square not far from the house and moaned, “Ernie’s done it,” of The Sun Also Rises, which had just come out.

The village of which La Moutonne was part was less distinguished, able to claim only some years when Renoir, the painter, had lived there. There was a stucco church and a restaurant or two, and beneath our olive trees with their silvery leaves a white goat danced on her hind legs, striving to strip the lowest boughs. This was Lily, sweet-smelling, graceful, and deeply unaffectionate. The children adored her, though treating her with caution. Her face offered little in the way of expression other than satisfaction at eating, and her yellow eyes, set high on her head, were as cold as those of a serpent. It was impossible to estimate what she knew, but whatever it was, we came to realize, was firmly ingrained. At night she was kept in a roomy stone shed attached to the house. During the day she would graze, often climbing onto the red-tile roof of the shed, from there stepping onto the balcony where I worked, and even, if they were open, through the french doors into the bedroom. It was only at milking time that she disappeared.

In memory my forehead is pressed against her round side and I am listening to the thin, metallic sound of milk shooting into the pail, which at a certain point, with seeming inattention, she will step in with a dirty rear hoof. I can only guess why this gave her pleasure.

She was, for a long time we hoped it — we had taken her in the car to her “wedding”—carrying a kid. Finally it was apparent. She was provided with a bed of fresh straw, to which she seemed indifferent, and one winter morning before school the children came running into the kitchen to say that there were four extra legs in the shed!

I have forgotten what we named Lily’s child, but in a matter of a day or two she was climbing the stone walls with her mother and learning the fundamentals of disdain.

I had my picture taken with Lily, holding her close while she looked the other way. One leg with its blackened, worn knee is visible and her mouth has the trace of a triumphant smile.

We were living in isolation. I had no one to talk to aside from my wife, no one whose opinion I could seek about what I had written. Late one afternoon I finished a story — it was about a man whose imaginary life slowly consumes his identity until ordinary events become fantastic — and in the panic that followed I gave it to my wife to read, desperate for a response. It was compelling, it was not. I went for a walk in the dusk. The path was desolate late in the year, but the house was lighted and alive as I returned. She was in the kitchen preparing supper. “Well, what did you think?” I asked.

“About what?”

“The story.”

“I couldn’t make head or tail of it,” she remarked.

In time we met people, among them John Collier and his wife. He was, at that time, essentially a scriptwriter. He had strong leftist convictions, though they did not affect his manner of living, which was lordly, if thinly funded. He had come through everything, marriages, leaving England, the blacklist, financial ruin, and somehow made it to shore near Grasse in a huge country house said to have once been the property of Pauline Bonaparte. He readily admitted his mistakes, they came bobbing along behind. He had been offered The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to write when he was working in Los Angeles, but failed to see a film in it. He was luckier with The African Queen and had a profitable interest, even though his script was not used.

He was in his sixties, smiling, cherubic, not old, still quite green in fact, virtually a youth, he concluded. Nimble and rosy-cheeked, his thrusts were light as air. One time he came to ask if Harriet, his wife, could borrow some birth-control pills. My wife apologized, she was sorry but she didn’t have any extra. “Well,” he said unperturbedly, almost gaily, “I guess I’ll have to come over here.”