James Salter - Burning the Days

The lone and perhaps foolish figure whose fate it was to believe in something with all his being — something stirs in me as I listen, something dusty and forgotten, struggling to its feet. Halberstam is manly-looking with big hands and a strong, resonant voice. I feel I know him and also Vann.

“But he was killed, wasn’t he?” I say.

“He died in a helicopter crash.”

We leave the table. Cognac and coffee in the living room. A fire of small, city logs is burning in the fireplace. The hostess and Helen Frankenthaler are lying together on the sofa, feline and content, beneath a quilt. My mind is still on the conversation at dinner, which has somehow removed me from the present. It has opened a gap like the narrow band of water that appears, in the first moments of departure, between the ship and the dock, designating two worlds. The uniform of the dead lieutenant colonel seems to lie there, ghostly, on the floor, my own size.

Dinners on Shelter Island at Max Wilkinson’s, first at his house and later, when it was sold, in the little house that belonged to his new wife. She was repetitive and scolding. “Oh, Max,” she said at the table, “you are so stupid! You talk and talk and talk and talk.”

There was silence. He had been summoning up the image of his old partner’s wife, in Arizona in the thirties when he first saw her, Helen Doughty, in a white linen dress. She was so beautiful, he said.

Finally he answered his wife. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I suppose so.”

Dinners in Europe. A small restaurant, perfect, well lit. The feeling of attentive service, fresh white cloth. The face before me, Buddha-like and wide, is an older woman’s. She is the widow of a man who was still older. He was her second husband, she was in her late thirties when she met him, he had already broken up with his wife. “I didn’t steal him from her but she hated me.”

There were two children. “I didn’t want to be their mother, after all. They were always welcome, but she was the mother. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘come. If we are friends, good. If not, then we are not.’ ”

The European lucidity and understanding. “It’s more difficult for a woman,” she says. The wine bottle has become empty and another unobtrusively appears. “A man can always, at fifty or sixty, start a new life, but a woman is used up. It’s not fair, but that’s the way life is.”

There is something very appealing about her, the lack of sentimentality, the frankness. She had an earlier marriage and a child, she reveals. He died, she says simply. A brain tumor. He was two. I calculate quickly, sometime just after the war. “He was only two,” she says again. That is the extent of self-pity. “He was absolutely normal and then it began. He would fall and hit his elbow, for instance, and cry holding his head — it hurt him there.”

One cannot say she is a stronger woman because of it, she was always such a woman. She has gone through the most difficult thing of all. She speaks three languages, perhaps four, and if she dreams of marrying again does not bother to confess it. Not surprisingly, the ex-wife and stepchildren are very close to her now. The ex-wife lives in Lugano. “She always comes to see me. She likes me to come there.”

I think of her and of Jonathan Swift’s mistress, Stella, a symbol of Europe, justly admired, as the stone that covers her says, for many virtues as well as for great natural and acquired perfection. One thing stands out: I have never heard her complain.

Drunken dinners, parties, really, where the food is ignored and they are jammed at the bar. At midnight the music is pounding; in the street the thin sleet of winter drives down. For some reason I think of the Village, where Pat Kenny lived when we were fifteen. Her parents were gone for the weekend, or at least the night. I did not know how to begin. We sat on the couch. She was pleasant. There was a copy of Robert Briffault’s Europa, a thick novel of the 1930s, in the bookcase. “Have you read this?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

She knew nothing of the passage that had electrified me, the gown torn from the back of the sumptuous woman who had cheated at cards and her hands quickly tied to a ring above her head. I did not know how to connect this to the two of us; it did not illustrate what was intended but it shared something. I wanted to see her wrenched from the vague, infuriating conversation we were having. I saw only the victim beneath her clothes, I wanted it revealed.

—

The years have their closure. Many of the people upon whom I had based characters passed from sight. It was only in part an accident. They had been consumed, my interest had waned. There were exceptions. The girl of A Sport and a Pastime I was always curious to see again, what had become of her, the details of her life, the closet in which her dresses hung, the drawer with her folded things, the bottles of perfume, shoes. I wanted again to lie there watching her prepare as if she were alone in the room, before the performance, as it were, putting on makeup, slipping into heels. She would be twenty-eight, thirty, completely changed. In fact she was married and living in Los Angeles. There were children. It was very like the book.

I had met her at Kennedy when she first arrived in America. She came through the crowd, innocent in her beauty, filled with joy. She was eighteen. Counts had coveted her. I met her also in dreams. I went through someone’s empty room and knocked at her door. “Yes, come in,” she said without asking who it was; I sensed she was expecting someone else. She looked up. Everything about her. I pulled up her dress in a single motion. The incredible nakedness. Laughing, she pushed it back down. In the dream I had lost the photograph of her, I didn’t have an address. “You say you adore, but I think it’s something else you like,” she said. She was curled up, wearing nothing. At the end of a crowded road under gray clouds my ship was preparing to sail. There was traffic, the imminence of departure. My heart was sick.

Nedra, the stylish woman of Light Years, I sometimes saw again, usually in the city, the last time in the house she now lived in alone — true to the book, she and her husband had eventually divorced. I loved her, her frankness and charm, the extravagance and devotion to her children. I never tired of seeing her and listening to her talk. She smoked, drank, laughed raucously. There was no caution in her.

Her old lover, one of them, sat with us that last night. Nedra had aged. The years had seized and shaken her as a cat shakes a mouse. Her jawline was no longer pure and there were small pouches beneath her eyes. Her nose had gotten larger. Her still-long hair had traces of gray. In her face, which I loved, was my own mortality. The lines at the corners of my mouth, which were more terrible than an illness — I jumped up to look each morning; they were there.

She was going to give him her father’s old tie pin, she said impulsively, it was the best thing her father had owned. “Do you still have the pearl cuff links?” she asked, pulling up the sleeve of his jacket. “No. They’re on the other shirt,” she guessed. He lived in a small house behind hers. I had no idea if they were still intimate — she was capable of every appearance of it without the thing itself.

Hers was a singular life. It had no achievements other than itself. It declared, in its own way, that there are things that matter and these are the things one must do. Life is energy, it proclaimed, life is desire. You are not meant to understand everything but to live and do certain things. Despite all I had written about her, there was more, and the carnal scenes, a minor element, I imagined entirely. It would have been gratifying to know if they were appropriate. Some things, however, she did not talk about.