James Salter - Burning the Days

Flats, visas, jobs, were staples of her conversation. She was the fierce but generous matron of many lives, around whom animals purred and weaker spirits crumbled. “Robert,” she had warned Ginna, “I want to know about any lady friends you plan to bring in.”

She had earned her intractability, at the very least by her actions during the war, when she worked for British Intelligence in occupied France. Her son had been born while she was a prisoner, and she jumped off a train with him when they were on their way to the death camps. Later she had come to England. “Listen,” she explained, “I learned languages.” She’d been born in Latvia. She was instructing us all in the art of survival; the lesson was wideranging. “I knew all those people: Gide — he was kind, he was a kind man. Thomas Mann, God. His children … it was all incest, constantly.”

She was like a figure from the Old Testament, her sternness, her prejudices. On a large plate being passed was the fruit for dessert. She had gotten it at Covent Garden. “Lying in the gutter,” she said. “There were some bad spots on it but it was perfectly good. While I was picking it up they were insulting me and throwing fruit at me. Do you know what they did in the end? They came and began stamping on the fruit, crushing it! Perfectly good fruit. Wasting it. That’s what’s wrong with this country, I tell you. That’s why the Communists will sweep over you!”

There was still the threat of this at the time. She was like a commissar herself, whatever her politics, and one felt the chill of her warning: The waste will come back to haunt you.

Ginna knew her well and had lived through too many prophecies to be disturbed. He had his own formulas. In the evening, looking through the refrigerator, he discovered a bottle. After reading the label, he handed it to me. Polmos Zubrowka, I read.

“It’s vodka,” I said.

“Keep reading.”

It said something like, flavored by an extract of Zubrowka, the fragrant herb beloved by the European bison. I remember especially the word “beloved.” “Have you ever drunk this?” I asked.

“Very well known,” he assured me.

I did not know whether to believe him, but in such matters I hesitated to dispute his knowledge. I had seen him many times sign his name laboriously to bar checks late at night though in the morning he was always lucid and fresh.

The many nights and glasses. They were ritual, above all with old friends, Harry Craig, who had been, was it Beckett’s secretary? back from somewhere and signaling for another bottle of Haut Brion — Château O’Brien, he called it. His old friend, Jules Buck, at the Bibliothèque, over near the United Nations. It’s late, the restaurant is empty, in a hush that its name suggests. They know the bartender, Roger, however; they recognize him and pound on the glass door. He unlocks it, polite and tough-looking, like an Algerian boxer. They greet him in French. At the vacant bar Roger asks, “Que désirez-vous, messieurs?”

“Cognac, Roger,” they say.

“Oui, monsieur.”

He lays three large brandy glasses on their side and fills them until the amber-colored liquid is ready to pour over the rim. Then he sets them upright and places them in front of us. A quarter of an hour passes, perhaps more.

“Cognac, Roger.”

They have missed the place, they tell him. It’s good to see him again— c’est bon de vous revoir. Jules Buck is wearing an expensive trenchcoat, the belt unfastened and hanging down. They are talking about Peter O’Toole, with whom Buck has made films and who starred in one of Ginna’s. The deeply aromatic smoke from Ginna’s French cigarettes tints the air. One last cognac. They are so drunk they are looking at things with great discernment, as if discovering them. Finally it is time to leave. The bill is thirty-five dollars. We tip him fifteen and thank him. At the door, hands are raised in warm farewell, “ Au revoir, Roger.”

He nods. “Bonne nuit. Je m’appelle Gérard,” he adds wearily.

We part with Jules Buck at the corner. Ginna’s speech is clear, but his thoughts seem to slide off into the ditches. “What time is it?” I ask him.

“A lot,” he mutters, then, “What the devil is this?” at something found in his pocket. He becomes difficult to steer. At last a cab stops. We head uptown. “Your old copain is torpedoed” are his final words.

—

You recall, perhaps, the three actresses the studio had named, any one of whom would have been a bottle of champagne across the bow, and down the ways, majestic and large, we would glide.

One of them was Maggie Smith. Ginna had given her one of her first movie roles in a film called Young Cassidy, taken from Sean O’Casey’s autobiography. She would remember that — it was easy for him to transfer to her his own sense of loyalty. We went to see her and she turned him down. He managed to hide his disappointment.

We had moved to the Cadogan Hotel, the hotel where Wilde had been arrested, and on a June evening drove out to Chiswick to see Vanessa Redgrave. It was a house facing a small green park. The tall Greek Revival windows had no drapes. We waited in the large sitting room. There was a shabby couch with a huge framed mirror leaning behind it, books and records strewn about, seashells, toys, a kind of bar, and pillows on the floor by the garden window. It was the house of all suburban women with unraveling lives. Here and there a bare nail was driven into the plaster wall.

Then she came in, tall, very nearsighted, in a mauve jersey dress with no sleeves and a slit skirt. Near her shoulder was the glint of a white, embroidered brassiere strap. She was completely natural. She could not find ice to put in our drinks. One liked her immediately.

She was thirty-four years old and already at the pinnacle of a celebrated life, playing the lead in Mary, Queen of Scots, then being made. Her young son came in and began climbing over her. Glass beads and part of her drink spilled onto the floor. Later her two daughters, plump and with dirty feet, came to say they were going to bed, they wanted her to read to them. She promised them two chapters. We had imagined a smooth seduction but the distractions were hindering us. I asked about some reel cans stacked near the couch. They contained a film she liked very much, she said; “It’s Italian. It’s called The Policeman. It’s about a young man from a village who becomes a policeman — is recruited — and how, slowly, bit by bit, he is changed and grows away from all the things that formed him, becomes less human, less kind, and in the end … well, the end is a little too much — that’s not the point of it.”

I felt that familiar moment of unhappiness; I realized I had written the wrong script. All one could do was not think about it or perhaps suggest some similarities between that one and ours.

She would read our script, she said, although the script she enjoyed most, she added cryptically, was one that was read to her, by the director.

Driving back to town, Ginna remarked how deeply the story of the movie she described had affected him. “Yes,” I agreed.

“The Interpreter,” he said, naming the original story on which a movie he had produced, Before Winter Comes, was based, “was that kind of story. But we never made it,” he confessed.

By now Max Schell had agreed to be the director. He, too, liked a script read to him, and in the luxury of his London house, rented from a maharanee, he listened, proposed changes, acted out portions, and told stories. One of his examples I remember, to illustrate character, was from Anna Karenina. In the railway carriage, he said, when the old woman comes in with her coat all bundled up and complains that it’s cold. “It’s cold, isn’t it,” she says, to one person after another, but they ignore her. At last she turns to Anna and says, “It’s cold.” “Yes, it’s cold,” Anna says.