Burning the Days (49 page)

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.

I wake in the darkness and lie there. The aftertaste is not bitter. I know, just as in dreams, I will die, like every living thing, many of them more noble and important, trees, lakes, great fish that have lived for a hundred years. We live in the consciousness of a single self, but in nature there seems to be something else, the consciousness of many, of all, the herds and schools, the colonies and hives with myriads lacking in what we call ego but otherwise perfect, responsive only to instinct. Our own lives lack this harmony. We are each of us an eventual tragedy. Perhaps this is why I am in the country, to be close to the final companions. Perhaps it is only that winter is coming on.

One night in the darkness, outside, listening to the distant booming surf, “Isn’t it strange,” I say, “how you want different things at different times? Now all I want is a house by the sea. Hawaii was like this, still empty then, still beautiful. We used to make love in the cane fields.”

“Who? Who did you do it with?”

“A naval officer’s wife, I remember. Her name was Sis Chandler.”

“Whew! That’s a hot name. She must have been something. Was she blonde?”

“No.”

In fact I could not recall what she looked like, but I remembered her and one or two things she said. It was her name that mattered, especially after so long a time. Pronouncing it had made me feel a long-vanished warmth towards her.

I have not forgotten those days, I have only Forgotten how simply they seemed to occur …

    It was difficult to write. The heart for it was faint. It was useless, as in Chekhov’s crushing story, to try and tell someone of my child’s death. I could hardly bring myself to mention it. You must remember, but it was precisely that which was terrible. In reality I tried to forget her and what had happened.

In a jeweler’s window off Bond Street I had once seen an antique gold box about the size of a box of matches. It had a small drawer in which lay half a dozen ivory strips upon which riddles or questions were written in black enamel. Inserted in a slot they produced an answer in a narrow window on top of the box.
Qui nous console
—who consoles us—was one of the riddles.
Le temps
was the answer, a word which can mean either weather or time.

In the country there was both.

——

I woke on Christmas morning two or three years later. My father was born on this day. Eight decades back. Wearing a long fur coat I had bought secondhand in Southampton, I walked in the woods, the two of us did, the dog running ahead. At the weir the stream was frozen along the banks. In the light dusting of snow were the footprints of a wild duck.

We had lunch at the Lords’, Sherry and Pam’s—he was a painter, Fox’s good friend; theirs was that rarity, a perfect marriage, his third, her second. His income was meager but he owned a house. Occasionally they argued. “You’ve never been poor!” he cried, furious.

“Darling, I didn’t have the time,” she said.

The clear winter light was streaming across the fields. There were views from every window of the house. Sherry’s eighty-three-year-old mother was there also. She was a widow. I knew the story
of her husband’s death. His heart was failing. The family had gathered to see him and at the end of the afternoon had left for the day. He was alone with the nurse. There was a bottle of scotch over there, he told her, would she care to join him for a drink? They sat sipping from their glasses as the sun set and evening came on. He finished his and held out his glass. “What would you say to one for the road?” he asked and then lay back. I believe they were his last words.

During the week before New Year I made some lists, jotted things, really: Pleasures, those that remained to me; Ten Closest Friends; Books Read. I also thought of various people as you do at year’s end. Did Not Make the Voyage: my mother’s baby sister who died, I think, unnamed; George Cortada; Kelly; Joe Byron; Thomas Maynard, aged eight; Kay’s miscarried child; Sumo’s puppies …

Late in the day we walked on the deserted beach.

Afterwards I bathed, dressed, put on a white turtleneck, and, looking in the mirror, combed my hair. I had seen worse. Health, good. Hopes, fair.

Karyl Roosevelt and Dana, her son, came for drinks. She had been the most beautiful woman. Perhaps as a consequence her life had been devoted to men. Even afterwards she spoke of them with affection.

She’d been married to a very rich man. The first time they went to Europe they flew directly to Yugoslavia and boarded Marshal Tito’s yacht. Tito, his sleeves rolled up, rowed her around a bay near Dubrovnik himself.

We drove to dinner at Billy’s. Very few customers. Then back to the house before midnight, where we made a fire, drank toasts, and read aloud from favorite books. I read the last speech in Noël Coward’s
Cavalcade,
the one in which the wife toasts her husband. They have lost both their sons in the war (1914–1918) and she drinks to them, to what they might have been, and to England.

Kay read from
Ebenezer Le Page.
Karyl, the last part of Joyce’s “The Dead,” where the snow is falling on all Ireland, also from
Anna Karenina, Humboldt’s Gift,
and
The Wapshot Chronicle.
Dana read Robert Service, Stephen King, and Poe, something long and incomprehensible. Perhaps it was the drinks. “As the French say,
comment?”
Kay remarked.

The fire had burned to embers, the company was gone. We walked in the icy darkness with the old, limping dog. Nothing on the empty road, no cars, no sound, no lights. The year turning, cold stars above. My arm around her. Feeling of courage. Great desire to live on.

ALSO BY
J
AMES
S
ALTER

“Extraordinary … at once tender, exultant, unabashedly sexual, sensual, and profoundly sad.
Light Years
is a masterpiece.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

LIGHT YEARS

This exquisite, resonant novel is a brilliant portrait of marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose life is centered around ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, James Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74073-2

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