Authors: James Salter
“No,” Bowman said. “I’m divorced.”
“That’s too bad,” she said. “We’ve been married for twelve years, my husband and I. We met in Florida—I’m from Florida—I was just floating around after school, working in an antique shop, hanging pictures, and he saw me and fell in love. He saw this blond WASP—you know, men have this thing in their minds—and that was really it.”
Beyond her and past the hostess, Bowman could see the doorway to the brightly lit kitchen.
“What are you looking at?”
“A mouse just ran across the floor there,” Bowman said.
“A mouse? You must have really good eyes. Was it big?”
“No, just a little mouse.”
“Anyway, do you want to hear the rest of the story?”
“Where were we?”
“The architect …”
“The divorced architect.”
“Yes. Well finally the woman, his date, showed up. She was in a tight-fitting dress. She was all wrong for him. I mean, she made a big entrance. I used to dress like that. I know. The thing is,” she suddenly said, “I fell madly in love with this guy. He was divorced, he was so vulnerable. After dinner I fell asleep on the couch and I looked up later and there he was. We talked for a while. He was so handsome. He was a Catholic. I had fantasies, you know? I would have given anything to have him, but it was impossible at the time.”
She was drinking wine. She had lost what might have been called her poise. She said, “You probably don’t understand, maybe I haven’t told it right. He was two years younger than me, but we had a real rapport. Can I tell you something? There hasn’t been a day gone by that I haven’t thought about him. You probably hear stories like this all the time.”
“No, not really.”
“I mean, it’s just fantasy. We have two children, two really nice children,” she said. “We met in Florida—that was in 1957—and now we’re here. Do you know what I mean? It all went by in such a rush. My husband is a good father. He’s been good to me. That night, though. I can’t explain it.”
She paused.
“He kissed me when he left,” she said.
She looked into Bowman’s eyes and then looked away.
Near the end of the evening she found him near the door and, without saying anything, put her arms around him.
“Do you like me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said to console her.
“If somebody writes that story,” she said, “it’s all right with me.”
Enid had never asked if he liked her. He had been mad for her. In England they had driven north, into Norfolk, green and flat with large houses and dismal towns, horse country, to see a dog. In Newmarket, four or five
stable boys in shirtsleeves were standing on a corner, one of them languidly pissing against a wall. He brandished his cock at them, at her, as they passed.
“Very nice,” said Bowman. “English lads, then?”
“Unmistakably,” Enid said.
A few miles past town they came to the house they had been looking for, a low, stuccoed house at the end of a drive. A man in a gray sweater with cheeks that were almost meat-colored came to the door.
“Mr. Davies?” Enid asked.
“Yes.”
He’d been expecting them.
“You’ll want to have a look at him, I suppose,” he said.
He led the way around the corner of the house to a large wire enclosure in back, and as they approached, dogs began barking. More joined in.
“Take no notice,” Davies said. “It’s good for them to see people.”
They walked along the fence until, nearly at the end, “There he is.”
A young greyhound lying in a corner of the kennel rose slowly and with a slow dignity came to the wire. He was very much the dog of kings, white with a gray saddle and gray like a helmet around the head. Rulers of the East were buried with their greyhounds. Enid put her fingers through the mesh to touch his ear.
“He’s very beautiful.”
“Just short of five months old,” Davies said.
“Hello,” she said to the dog.
She’d been given the dog by a friend. It’s name was Moravin, and the sire was a dog with a decent record named Jacky Boy. Davies was a trainer. He’d been around dogs all his life. His father, he told them later, had been a builder and always wanted to own a racehorse but settled for dogs. They ate less. Davies had had some success, but you never knew, they could also betray you. Some were promising but never came to much. They were bred to run, but not all of them ran well. Some were fast out of the box, some good at distances, there were wide runners that liked to go to the outside and others that liked to run on the rail.
“They’re all different,” he said.
He was cautious in his expectations, but he had some hopes for this dog, who, even at a young age, was very intent on the rag doll and pursued
it wildly, catching it in his long white rows of teeth. Later, he timed out well and had no trouble running in practice with two other dogs.
In his first race finally, everything went wrong. Right at the start he was bumped by another dog and never got free of the pack. He was caught at the back of it the whole way. It was a disappointment, the trainer said on the phone.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Enid said.
“It may not have been, but there’s no such thing as fair in a race. It’s only a first race. He’ll just need his confidence again.”
He was run with a couple of other dogs a few times. He showed some speed and then, in his next race, he came in fourth. It was out of London, Enid hadn’t been there.
In his third race, at Romford, he was in box number two at odds of twenty to one. Something on the rail shot past. The doors flew open and out they came. He was in front most of the way, and they were so closely bunched at the finish you could not tell, but as it turned out he won by a head. “Hats off to the graders!” they cried and played a fanfare, it had been so close—hats off not to the judges but to the men who’d determined the odds. In the papers that week were the first plaudits,
Running well
and
Don’t rule him out
.
He won twice more. It began to have meaning.
Won three of the last five
, they wrote and, more impressively,
Speed to burn. Won by four lengths
.
Bowman flew over for it when he was to run at White City, the great London track that drew people from the theater district and had some glamour. He felt heady that evening with Enid. They were a racing couple.
En route they stopped for a drink. It was somewhere near a hospital, a sign over the bar offered fifteen percent off to medical staff and to patients with thirty or more stitches. At the track there was a huge crowd with people moving through it, talking and drinking. The night was dark, there were clouds and a feeling of rain. Moravin was posted at three to one. Davies had already rubbed the dog down with an embrocation of his own, shoulders, body, all the way to the powerful hindquarters as if preparing for a Channel swim, and then up and down each leg. He then stretched the legs, the dog had ceased resisting this and lay quietly as it was done.
He was running in the fifth race. By then it had begun to rain lightly
as the dogs were being led out. There were two white dogs, Moravin and a dog named Cobb’s Lad. The crowd was becoming quiet.
“I’ve never been so nervous,” Enid whispered. “I feel as if I were about to run myself.”
For some reason, Bowman noticed, the odds had dropped to three to two. The business of getting the dogs into the boxes had begun. Suddenly from out of darkness, the mechanical hare went by and the boxes sprang open. They were off and running close together as they rounded the first turn and came around on the far side. The rain was falling harder. It was slanting across the lights in silver sheets. You could barely distinguish one dog from another, but a white dog was close to the lead. The pack was flying, low and streaming through the rain. How one of them could pull away from the rest was hard to imagine. As they went around the final turn, the head and shoulders of a white dog could be seen, and like that they crossed the finish. It was Moravin.
The rain was still heavy as, beneath an umbrella, he was being walked by Davies to cool down. Bowman borrowed one from a woman standing next to them and took Enid to the winner’s stand as Moravin was being led onto it, stepping with a daintiness, the gray markings along the side of his head making him look like an outlaw in a mask. His tongue was trembling in his open mouth as the trainer held him raised up in victory, in his arms like a lamb. Enid’s dog.
They had a drink together afterwards, it was likely that Davies had had one already. His face was filled with pleasure.
“Fine dog,” he said several times. “You had money down on him, missus, I hope.”
“Yes, a hundred pounds.”
“They dropped the odds on him. The bookmakers were betting their own money to lower the odds. They feared him. They feared him.”
He was staying outside the city with a friend, he said. He was more talkative than he’d been. With elation, he confided, “Shows promise, don’t he?”
They left him at the pub and went to dinner with some people on Dean Street, among them an older woman with a marvelous face like a prune and a voice, as it turned out, that was a little hoarse. Bowman was drawn to her. She said something in Italian that he didn’t quite hear, but she declined to repeat it. She’d been married to an Italian, she said.
“He was shot after the war.”
“Shot?”
“In reprisal,” she said. “He knew it would happen. There was a lot of that. His sister, my sister-in-law, who only died a year ago, had the distinction of having spat in Winston Churchill’s face in the Piazza San Marco. They were Fascists, I couldn’t help that. My husband was charming in every other way. It was all quite a while ago, you’re not old enough.”
“No, I am.”
“You’re what? Thirty-five?”
“I’m forty-five.”
“I remember the French Colonial Exposition, 1932 or ’33,” she said. “The Senegalese troops in their blue uniforms, red hats and bare feet. It was a different world, quite different. What has your life been like?”
“Mine?”
“What are the things that have mattered?”
“Well,” he said, “if I really examine it, the things that have most influenced my life, I would have to say the navy and the war.”
“Men have that, don’t they?”
He was not sure he had told the truth. His mind had just drifted back to it involuntarily. And among his dreams it had been the one that most consistently recurred.
Two weeks later, preparing for the Derby, Moravin ran at Wimbledon and fell on the turn, without cause, it seemed. He had a carpal fracture, not serious, but lying in a cast he seemed shamed, as if knowing what had been expected of him. Enid stroked his shoulders, the smooth gray and white of his coat. His small ears were laid back. His gaze was elsewhere.
The bone, though, was slow to heal. It was a drawn-out affair. She went to see him when it had finally healed, but there was something that had not come back. Whatever it was was invisible. He stood elegant and lean, almost entirely like the others, but he never ran again.
“I’m absolutely heartbroken,” she said.
When he was asked about it later, Davies said,
“Yes, he could have run in the Derby, but he had this fall. It’s always something like that. If there’s ever anyone you really fucking hate, buy him a greyhound.”
Enid had come to the airport with him, something she never did.
As they stood waiting he’d felt an uneasiness. It was not in anything she said, only in the silence. It was slipping away and he could not stop it. They were not going to marry. She was already married and under some strange obligation to her husband—Bowman had never discovered just what it was. She had said that she couldn’t live in New York, her life was in London. He was only a facet of it there, but he longed to remain that.
“Maybe I can get back next month,” he had said.
“That would be lovely.”
They said good-bye in the main area. She gave a little wave of her fingers as he left.
He felt an emptiness as he boarded the plane, and even before they took off, an intense sadness. As if he were leaving it for the last time, he watched as England slowly passed behind them. Suddenly he missed her terribly. He should have somehow fallen to his knees.
In the carpeted hallway of the Plaza one winter evening, Bowman came face to face with a somewhat shapeless woman in a blue dress. It was Beverly, his ex-sister-in-law, with a chin that had almost completely vanished.
“Well, if it isn’t Mr. New York,” she said.
Bryan was beside her. Bowman shook his hand.
“What are you two doing in New York?”
“I’m going to the powder room,” Beverly responded. “I’ll meet you in the bar, wherever it is,” she said to Bryan.
Bryan was unruffled.
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” he said when she had left. “We came up to see a couple of shows. Bev wanted to have a drink in the famous Oak Room bar.”
“It’s straight ahead. You look good.”
“You do, too.”
There was not much to talk about.
“How is everything?” Bowman said. “How’s Vivian? We’re not in touch.”
“She’s fine. Not much changed.”
“Remarried? I guess I would have heard.”
“No, she hasn’t remarried, but you know who has? George.”
“George? Remarried? To who?”
“A woman who lives down there. Peggy Algood. I don’t think you know her.”
“What’s she like?”
“Oh, you know. She’s about ten years younger than he is. She’s easy to get along with. She was married a couple of times before. She’s supposed to have sent a postcard to her mother when she was on her second honeymoon:
Algood no good, too
. Maybe that’s just a story. I like her.”
“Ah, Bryan, it’s nice to see you. It’s too bad our lives … diverged. How is Liz Bohannon? Is she still around?”
“She’s still around. I don’t think she still rides. We don’t get invited there. Beverly said some things one time.”
Of Bryan, it might be said that he was candid about his wife and uncomplaining. He treated her offhandedly, as he might treat bad weather.
“What show are you seeing?” Bowman asked.
“Pal Joey.”
“Yeah, that’s good. It would be great to see you again sometime.”