James Salter - Last Night

Morris had lost a lot on Micronics. It was impossible to say how much. He kept his own shaky figures, but Arthur had gotten it out of Marie, the sexless woman who cleared trades.

— A hundred thousand, she said. Don’t say anything.

— Don’t worry, darling, Arthur told her.

Arthur knew everything and was on the phone all day. It was one unending conversation: gossip, affection, news. He looked like Punch, with a curved nose, up-pointing chin, and innocent smile. He was filled with happiness, but the kind that knew its limits. He had been at Frackman, Wells from the time there were seven employees, and now there were nearly two hundred with three floors in the building. He himself had become rich, beyond anything he could have imagined, although his life had not changed and he still had the same apartment in London Terrace. He was living there the night he first met Noreen in Goldie’s. She did something few girls had ever done with him, she laughed and sat close. From the first moment there was openness between them. Noreen. The piano rippling away, the old songs, the noise.

— I’m divorced, she said. How about you?

— Me? The same, he said.

The street below was filled with hurrying people, cars. The sound of it was faint.

— Really? she said.

It had been years since he had talked to her. There was a time they had been inseparable. They were at Goldie’s every night or at Clarke’s, where he also went regularly. They always gave him a good table, in the middle section with the side door or in back with the crowd and the unchanging menu written neatly in chalk. Sometimes they stood in front at the long, scarred bar with the sign that said under no circumstances would women be served there. The manager, the bar-tenders, waiters, everybody knew him. Clarke’s was his real home; he merely went elsewhere to sleep. He drank very little despite his appearance, but he always paid for drinks and stayed at the bar for hours, occasionally taking a few steps to the men’s room, a pavilion of its own, long and old-fashioned, where you urinated like a grand duke on blocks of ice. To Clarke’s came advertising men, models, men like himself, and off-duty cops late at night. He showed Noreen how to recognize them, black shoes and white socks. Noreen loved it. She was a favorite there, with her looks and wonderful laugh. The waiters called her by her first name.

Noreen was dark blond, though her mother was Greek, she said. There were a lot of blonds in the north of Greece where her family came from. The ranks of the Roman legions had become filled with Germanic tribesmen as time passed, and when Rome fell some of the scattered legions settled in the mountains of Greece; at least that was the way she had heard it.

— So I’m Greek but I’m German, too, she told Arthur.

— God, I hope not, he said. I couldn’t go with a German.

— What do you mean?

— Be seen with.

— Arthur, she explained, you have to accept the way things are, what I am and what you are and why it’s so good.

There were things she wanted to tell him but didn’t, things he wouldn’t like to hear, or so she felt. About being a young girl and the night at the St. George Hotel when she was nineteen and went upstairs with a guy she thought was really nice. They went to his boss’s suite. The boss was away and they were drinking his twelve-year-old scotch, and the next thing she knew she was lying facedown on the bed with her hands tied behind her. That was in a different world than Arthur’s. His was decent, forgiving, warm.

They went together for nearly three years, the best years. They saw one another almost every night. She knew all about his work. He could make it seem so interesting, the avid individuals, the partners, Buddy Frackman, Warren Sender. And Morris; she had actually seen Morris once on the elevator.

— You’re looking very well, she told him nervily.

— You, too, he said, smiling.

He didn’t know who she was, but a few moments later he leaned toward her and silently formed the words,

— Eighty-seven.

— Really?

— Yes, he said proudly.

— I’d never guess.

She knew how, one day coming back from lunch, Arthur and Buddy had seen Morris lying in the street, his white shirt covered with blood. He had accidentally fallen, and there were two or three people trying to help him up.

— Don’t look. Keep going, Arthur had said.

— He’s lucky, having friends like you, Noreen said.

She worked at Grey Advertising, which made it so convenient to meet. Seeing her always filled him with pleasure, even when it became completely familiar. She was twenty-five and filled with life. That summer he saw her in a bathing suit, a bikini. She was stunning, with a kind of glow to her skin. She had a young girl’s unself-conscious belly and ran into the waves. He went in more cautiously, as befitted a man who had been a typist in the army and salesman for a dress manufacturer before coming to what he called Wall Street, where he had always dreamed of being and would have worked for nothing.

The waves, the ocean, the white blinding sand. It was at Westhampton, where they went for the weekend. On the train every seat was taken. Young men in T-shirts and with manly chests were joking in the aisles. Noreen sat beside him, the happiness coming off her like heat. She had a small gold cross, the size of a dime, on a thin gold necklace lying on her shirt. He hadn’t noticed it before. He was about to say something when the train began bucking and slowed to a stop.

— What is it? What’s happened?

They were not in a station but alongside a low embankment, amid weedy-looking growth. After a while the word came back, they had hit a bicyclist.

— Where? How? Arthur said. We’re in a forest.

No one knew much more. People were speculating, should they get off and try to find a taxi; where were they, anyhow? There were guesses. A few individuals did get off and were walking by the side of the train.

— God, I knew something like this would happen, Arthur said.

— Something like this? Noreen said. How could there be something like this?

— When we hit the cow, a man sitting across from them offered.

— The cow? We also hit a cow? Arthur exclaimed.

— A couple of weeks ago, the man explained.

That night Noreen showed him how to eat a lobster.

— My mother would die if she knew this, Arthur said.

— How will she know?

— She’d disown me.

— You start with the claws, Noreen said.

She had tucked the napkin into his collar. They drank some Italian wine.

Westhampton, her tanned legs and pale heels. The feeling she gave him of being younger, even, God help him, debonair. He was playful. On the beach he wore a coconut hat. He had fallen in love, deeply, and without knowing it. He hadn’t realized he had been living a shallow life. He only knew that he was happy, happier than he had ever been, in her company. This warmhearted girl with her legs, her fragrance, and perfect little ears that were tuned to him. And she took some kind of pleasure in him! They were guests of the Senders and he slept in a separate room in the basement while she was upstairs, but they were under the same roof and he would see her in the morning.

— When are you going to marry her? everyone asked.

— She wouldn’t have me, he equivocated.

Then, offhandedly, she admitted meeting someone else. It was sort of a joke, Bobby Piro. He was stocky, he lived with his mother, had never married.

— He has black, shiny hair, Arthur guessed as if goodnaturedly.

He had to treat it lightly, and Noreen did the same. She would make fun of Bobby when talking about him, his brothers, Dennis and Paul, his wanting to go to Vegas, his mother making chicken Vesuvio, Sinatra’s favorite, for her.