James Salter - Burning the Days

She is gone, and the other wives, too, it seems, the ones men had; they are widowed or divorced, wise from intimacy, strong-voiced. The families, like old temple columns, are broken, never to be restored. When the world was young it seemed impossible. The unions were too firm, the comfort of an open, loving heart too great. I stood on deck one winter morning, coming back from Europe by boat, near to docking, the unawakened city in gray light. A family came to the rail nearby. They were German; they’d been in first class. The woman’s face was beautiful, that clarity, composure, and breeding that make one long for one more chance at life. I felt a burning, terrible shame. Everything I valued was suddenly made worthless and I was plunged into confusion, trying to imagine what this marvelous woman said, how she argued, sat down at the table, slept, dressed. I could not picture a single detail of her life. I was like a desperate young boy, kept from, not even knowing that the test of elegance was close inspection, and that to her husband she was quite a different person than she was to me.

“Moritz!” she called to her child. He was as handsome, with a white hat made of crudely sewn leather and square earflaps. He was seven or eight, well-mannered. He came and stood by her, near her side. Suddenly the concept of virtue as strength was real.

I often came across her opposite, the heroine of all our books and films, still young, divorced. In a bar she was wearing a kind of toque made from a colorful scarf, tight jeans, a turtleneck shirt. How had she been, I asked.

“Hello! I’m fine. I’m settling down.”

Though she was still broke, as she said. She was the daughter of a writer I knew who had reversed the usual sequence — he had published some novels first and then came the list of other roles: restaurant owner, bandleader, policeman. His daughter had been working as a waitress; she had her father’s unorthodox spirit. She was going to get another job when her complexion cleared up, she said. “It’s hard being alone. Will you buy me a drink?”

In fact, she hadn’t been alone. She’d had a guy for a month, very straight, she explained, but nice, Notre Dame, all that. He left. “He said I was taking up too much of his time. I wanted him to move in, but he didn’t love my children enough. He said he did, but he didn’t. Well, you know, it’s difficult. I should take the time to write down twenty lines a day, shouldn’t I?” she asked.

Yes, like putting pennies in a jar, it would add up, be valuable some day, perhaps salvage her life.

That was some years ago. I don’t know what became of her.

There are certain houses near the river in secluded towns, their wooden fences weathered brown. Near the door in sunlight, stiff-legged, a white cat pulls itself up in an arc. Clothes on a half-hidden line drift in the light. It is here I imagine the wives, their children long grown, at peace with life and now drawn close to the essence of it, the soft rain flattening the water, trees thick with foliage bending to the wind, flowers beneath the kitchen window, quiet days. Men are important no longer, nor can they know such tranquillity, here in perfect exile, if it can be had that way, amid nature, in the world that was bequeathed to us.

—

At the end of the summer in 1980 we drove East. I had been living, toward the end divorced, in Colorado and after the death of my daughter decided, more or less, to go home. I was drawing a line beneath ten years. It was late August. In the morning the grass was cold and the topmost leaves of the trees had begun to yellow. I took my last walks along the river, which was teeming with light. I had a dog, a Welsh corgi named Sumo, white-footed and clever. I used to compliment him on his behavior, his ears. He would look away, yawn. We walked together. Mist rose from the brow of the bank, a solemn, ennobling mist. Not another soul.

We passed through Denver, where I used to go often — it was like an equatorial city, steaming, inert, we were dying of the heat — and went on to Red Cloud, the town in Nebraska where Willa Cather lived as a child. The Republic River, in which she once swam, was stagnant and dark. The sun was murderous. Mosquitoes light as ash drifted onto us as we sat.

In Ohio was a lesser shrine, Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. Bromfield had been a best-seller in the years before the war. In the beautiful old house we were the lone visitors and the attendant’s knowledge was limited to the names of movie stars who had been Bromfield’s guests decades before.

The long drive ended far out on Long Island. We rented a house near the sea. It was the beginning of off-season, the warm fall days. We could walk down the road to the beach; over a ragged dune the Atlantic lay, a collapsing line of surf. The bathers were in a group, men, children, and a sprinkling of young women gleaming like seals. The heavy waves rose, scattering them amid shrieks.

It was the season of bleached telephone poles and hordes of black sparrows perched on the wires. In the afternoon haze the sea burst white where bluefish were feeding. Inland were fields of rye. It was the country where I had written parts of books and where legends existed as they did in Tahiti and Key West — the blind caretaker who lived with his wife and knew all the houses, and some of their occupants, by feel. He went around and attended to whatever needed care, even in the dead of winter. He had fallen off a roof once. “Well, that happens,” he said.

I first knew the region when I came in the 1950s and was stationed at Westhampton. The airfield might have been in North Africa, it was that desolate and open to the sky. In the metal alert hangars at the end of the runway we slept in our flying suits with boots laced, ready to sprint for the ships when the klaxon blared into sound in the dead of night. Heading out over the black water in a sky without stars, talking in pilots’ shorthand with the radar station.

My wife and I had lived in an apartment near the bay. The town was quiet, like a failing country club. We were friends with the mayor, who was a doctor, and his good-looking wife. Their circle seemed sophisticated and a little bored. There was the feeling that there were lives ready to be capsized, a vague feeling of unseen fracture. It was exciting.

I saw my first Stanford White houses, and the ocean on every kind of day: frothing with huge waves in the distance; green and veined like marble; calm, with the waves far out and a slow, majestic sound. In the fall the geese flew over in long, wavering lines, sometimes breaking apart, drifting into wedges, great-hearted leaders at the apex.

If I look back and try to locate the center of my life it must be those days, I should probably say that decade. I had come through the early storms. I had a young wife. My idealism was at its height. I remember trying to write and being unable to — the atmosphere was wrong, the intimacy, the lack of solitude. Also, no one read. We were at the opposite pole from reading. Even at West Point there had been apostates, but not here. I had the seed within me but it was not yet time.

On the surface one might say I was thwarted, and perhaps that is true. Nevertheless I was happy then. I can only compare the feeling to being loved.

—

Now it is fall, a long time afterwards. The geese are dropping down to the ponds. The sea is huge, a storm coming. We had been swimming in it, exalted. Then drinks at Fox’s in his new house. Gloria Jones is there, her capped teeth and rich, vulgar voice, “Jamais de ma vie!” she cries, never in my life. “How did you two meet?” she asks, it is her quintessential question, “You met, how? Just like that, as they say?”

The then and now are intertwined, the dimming past and the present. Like an enduring disease there are the dreams. I am flying with someone, wide open, on the deck. The sky is cloudy, the flak terrifying. We are going at top speed, flashing past storage tanks, along a river on the way to the target. Suddenly ahead in the mist, steel bridges! Too late to pull up! We hit them! A great wave of heat sweeps over me. I have crossed — it is completely real — over into death.