James Salter - Burning the Days

Sonnenberg telephoned the next morning. “Well, how does it feel to be famous?” he asked. “All the actresses calling?”

“Not really.”

“How did you feel about the play?”

I said I thought it wasn’t too bad. How did he like it?

“I didn’t like it,” he said simply, “not at all. All the directorial choices were wrong, casting, staging, everything. It was much too slow and certain actors”—he named the girl Beary had instantly picked—“were hopeless.”

—

Sonnenberg’s illness, which proved terrible beyond description, had first showed itself in the most trivial way: the toe of a shoe caught for an instant in a sidewalk crack. I did not see that, but I watched the cane slowly become more than an item of dress and then change to two canes as their owner struggled to emerge from a taxi and shuffled slowly towards the door of a restaurant. Inside he fell across one of the tables. A waiter and people sitting nearby tried to help him to his feet but he grimly declined.

“Is it a matter of balance?” I asked when we had sat down.

“Yes, largely.”

“Do you have feeling down there?”

“Yes. It’s just that the nerves won’t control,” he said calmly.

It was multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacked the nerve sheathings. It progressed relentlessly. He lost the use of his hands. At the bottom of typed letters was a scrawl — he could barely sign his name. The pleasure of food was gone, so much of it had to do with the satisfaction of cutting, the holding of utensils, and so forth. He mentioned this at dinner at his apartment — more and more rarely did he go out — and, as if to prove it, spilled a glass of water over himself when he tried to drink. Pieces of food had fallen around his plate, dropped from dead fingers.

He appeared not to notice. His calm behavior, his lack of complaint, were a kind of scorn. He was proud of the torment, as if it were part of the price of the expensive clothes, the girls he had known, the exotic names. Stupidity and death must not alarm you, he seemed to say. The illness was a mark of superiority like his faint, forbearing smile. The useless fingers, the disobedient limbs, were a sign of aristocracy. We who did not have them were inferior.

Year by year it grew worse. The New Year’s birthday parties were abandoned. The magazine, in which I had been published a number of times, was gone. He was reduced to the inexhaustible, the life of the mind, but without relief. Memories, yes, but from the rest he was removed except as people came to tell him of it, the city that lay all around in dawn and darkness, the traffic floating at night on the streets below, the crowds, the avenues and shops, women with their daughters in department stores, long elegant noses, tumbling hair, the floor of cosmetic booths with scores of salesgirls, cheeks smoothed with color, white smocks, bright mouths, beckoning, counseling, smiling. He had known all this in the days when, as someone said, the life of reason was not in itself sufficient. Now he had stoicism, essential but useless. I think of the plea of Sonnenberg’s father when he was ill and dying, which echoed something my own father had said near the end. “If you have a son,” the old man said, “teach him to shoot.”

—

It is the evenings one remembers, the end of the day, dinners in the Fifties, dinners downtown.

Dinners with Fox, beyond counting. He lived on the south side of the park in a luxurious building that had originally been painters’ studios. His apartment was lofty with a curved, white balcony above the main room and bookcases everywhere. He was the ultimate New Yorker. In the city he invariably wore a suit. He had worked first for Alfred Knopf, the legendary publisher, and was related by marriage to the Canfields and Burdens. His best friends, in all likelihood, were women, to whom he attached himself with little difficulty.

Dinners with him at Caravelle, Remi, Petite Marmite, smoked salmon in slender coral sheets, lamb, expensive Pauillac. Dinners at a hotel in the country, a table in the bar. Winter night, black as ice. The warmth of the room, a fire burning. The Japanese woman hostess, the bartender in vest and white shirtsleeves. Mussels à la barque. Bacala. Women taking off their coats at the door and being shown with their escorts to tables.

The fragrant smoke rose from his after-dinner cigarette. He told of famous parties, the one of George Weidenfeld’s in London. The invitation in beautiful calligraphy said Exotic dress. Weidenfeld himself came as a pasha. There were three orchestras, one of them on the stairs, and the most beautiful women Fox had ever seen. Couples would disappear into the garden or splendid upper floors and return after long intervals. There was that English phenomenon, an upper-class wanton who, though dropped from the guest list, came anyway. As an act of disdain she pleasured nine of the guests, one after another, in a bedroom. Marie Antoinettes and Japanese samurai lay collapsed on the sofas at dawn.

Through him one met many writers. He was like an old courtier who understood and could arrange almost anything. His nostrils were large, sometimes with hair in them. He hadn’t gone to his twenty-fifth reunion at Harvard, he told me. He’d looked over the list very carefully. There were fifteen hundred names, only forty he knew, twenty-five of whom he didn’t want to see again, ten, for a few minutes, and only five he liked. The figures were probably inaccurate but they were stamped with his self-confidence; his ancestors preceded Benjamin Franklin. One of them contemptuously shook Andrew Jackson’s hand with his own wrapped in his coattail. At Random House his position was secure. He was not one of the razors. He was protected by his ability and by not having an ambition to run things.

Dinners on Park Avenue, the Schwartzes’ apartment, comfortable and serene. Their two children, sons, coming in and out of the room, the younger one in various costumes. He is handsome. There can only be envy of him, his intelligence and future. His father, Alan, is a lawyer who married the most beautiful girl at Bryn Mawr; people would talk about it for a generation.

In the kitchen everything is laid out, thick ribs of beef, fresh loaves. There are cookbooks, stacks of china. Pinned to a cork-board: notes, cards, addresses, the order and complexity of this life. A scene that never fails to draw one in, the heaped green of the salad, the dark bottles of fine Bordeaux, the abundance and preparation. Halberstam is coming, Alan tells me, Hope Lange, Helen Frankenthaler. Drinks in the living room. The women are well dressed, at ease. They have traveled, been admired; one longs to hear their confessions. I do not know that Hope Lange, blonde and clear-faced in the audience, once caught the eye of a man on the stage reading — it was John Cheever, a fateful glance — or that she had been Sinatra’s; her allure I could see was powerful. In the dining room, filled with books, I sit next to her; Halberstam is across the table. In Vietnam — his name was inextricably linked with it — the war is finally over.

“Did you know John Vann?” I ask.

“How do you know him?” Halberstam replies.

“I don’t.”

“The most extraordinary figure of the war.”

Halberstam then summons him up, the military adviser of the early days, a lieutenant colonel who was an idealist, educated, spoke Vietnamese. The extensive writing about him had not yet appeared, I had only come across “John Vann” and a few telling lines of description. I was like a woman who fixes on a horse because of its name.

In the beginning, Halberstam says, the correspondents all sat at his feet, they could talk to him and he spoke frankly to them. “He knew more than anybody. The war could never be won by weapons, he continually said.” He had incredible energy and instinct. At the time of the Tet offensive he smelled something funny, and it was he who was responsible for pulling back certain units before the enemy struck and avoiding complete disaster. “He never had anything to do with Vietnamese women.” I feel an odd mixture of elation and disappointment. “It was beneath his image and belief, and it was taking advantage of them.” Halberstam himself had a beautiful girlfriend in Saigon. “Everybody did.”