Authors: James Salter
— You can see why coming here is like a breath of fresh air for me, she said.
The women were sympathetic. They knew what she had to do—she had to rethink completely the past seven years.
— That’s right, her companion agreed.
— What is there to be rethought? Phil wanted to know. He was answered with impatience. The deception, they said, the deception—she had been deceived all that time. Adele meanwhile was pouring more wine for herself. Her napkin covered the place where she had already spilled a glass of it.
— But that time was spent in happiness, wasn’t it? Phil asked guilelessly. That’s been lived. It can’t be changed. It can’t be just turned into unhappiness.
— That woman stole my husband. She stole everything he had vowed.
— Forgive me, Phil said softly. That happens every day. There was an outcry as if from a chorus, heads thrust forward like the hissing, sacred geese. Only Adele sat silent.
— Every day, he repeated, his voice drowned out, the voice of reason or at least of fact.
— I’d never steal anyone’s man, Adele said then. Never. Her face had a tone of weariness when she drank, a weariness that knew the answer to everything. And I’d never break a vow.
— I don’t think you would, Phil said.
— I’d never fall for a twenty-year-old, either.
She was talking about the tutor, the girl who had come that time, youth burning through her clothes.
— No, you wouldn’t.
— He left his wife, Adele told them.
There was silence.
Phil’s bit of smile had gone but his face was still pleasant.
— I didn’t leave my wife, he said quietly. She threw me out.
— He left his wife and children, Adele said.
— I didn’t leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else. It was my son’s tutor, he explained. I fell in love with her.
— And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.
— Oh, yes.
There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.
— Within two or three days, he confessed.
— There in the house?
Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was abandoning himself.
— I didn’t do anything in the house.
— He left his wife and children, Adele repeated.
— You knew that, Phil said.
— Just walked out on them. They’d been married fifteen years, since he was nineteen.
— We hadn’t been married fifteen years.
— They had three children, she said, one of them retarded.
Something had happened—he was becoming speechless, he could feel it in his chest like a kind of nausea. As if he were giving up portions of an intimate past.
— He wasn’t retarded, he managed to say. He was . . . having trouble learning to read, that’s all.
At that instant an aching image of himself and his son from years before came to him. They had rowed one afternoon to the middle of a friend’s pond and jumped in, just the two of them. It was summer. His son was six or seven. There was a layer of warm water over deeper, cooler water, the faded green of frogs and weeds. They swam to the far side and then all the way back, the blond head and anxious face of his boy above the surface like a dog’s. Year of joy.
— So tell them the rest of it, Adele said.
— There is no rest.
— It turned out this tutor was some kind of call girl. He found her in bed with some guy.
— Is that right? Morrissey said.
He was leaning on the table, his chin in his hand. You think you know someone, you think because you have dinner with them or play cards, but you really don’t. It’s always a surprise. You know nothing.
— It didn’t matter, Phil murmured.
— So stupid marries her anyway, Adele went on. She comes to Mexico City where he’s working and he marries her.
— You don’t understand anything, Adele, he said.
He wanted to say more but couldn’t. It was like being out of breath.
— Do you still talk to her? Morrissey asked casually.
— Yes, over my dead body, Adele said.
None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.
— I talk to her, he admitted.
— And your first wife?
— I talk to her. We have three kids.
— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.
— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .
He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.
— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.
After he had gone outside they went on talking. The woman whose husband had been unfaithful for seven years knew what it was like.
— He pretends he can’t help it, she said. I’ve had the same thing happen. I was going by Bergdorf’s one day and saw a green coat in the window that I liked and I went in and bought it. Then a little while later, someplace else, I saw one that was better than the first one, I thought, so I bought that. Anyway, by the time I was finished I had four green coats hanging in the closet—it was just because I couldn’t control my desires.
Outside, the sky, the topmost dome of it, was brushed with clouds and the stars were dim. Adele finally made him out, standing far off in the darkness. She walked unsteadily toward him. His head, she saw, was raised. She stopped a few yards away and raised her head, too. The sky began to whirl. She took an unexpected step or two to steady herself.
— What are you looking at? she finally said.
He did not answer. He had no intention of answering. Then,
— The comet, he said. It’s been in the papers. This is the night it’s supposed to be most visible.
There was silence.
— I don’t see any comet, she said.
— You don’t?
— Where is it?
— It’s right up there, he gestured. It doesn’t look like anything, just like another small star. It’s that extra one, by the Pleiades. He knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.
— Come on, you can look at it tomorrow, she said, almost consolingly, though she came no closer to him.
— It won’t be there tomorrow. One time only.
— How do you know where it’ll be? she said. Come on, it’s late, let’s get out of here.
He did not move. After a bit she walked toward the house where, extravagantly, every window upstairs and down was lit. He stood where he was, looking up at the sky and then at her as she became smaller and smaller going across the lawn, reaching first the aura, then the brightness, then tripping on the kitchen steps.
Eyes of the Stars
SHE WAS SHORT with short legs and her body had lost its shape. It began at her neck and continued down, and her arms were like a cook’s. In her sixties Teddy had looked the same for a decade and would probably go on looking the same, there was not that much to change. She had pouches under her eyes and a chin, slightly receding when she was a girl, that was lost now in several others, but she dressed neatly and people liked her.
Myron, her late husband, had been an ophthalmologist and proud of the fact that he treated the eyes of many stars, although frequently it was a relative of a star, a nephew or mother-in-law, almost the same thing. He could recite the exact condition of all these eyes, retinitis, mild amblyopia . . .
— So, what is that?
Silvery-haired, he would confide,
—Lazy-eyed.
But Myron was gone. He hadn’t really been a very interesting man, Teddy would sometimes admit, apart from knowing exactly what was wrong with famous patients’ eyes. They had married when she was past forty and resigned to the idea of being single, not that she wouldn’t have made a good wife in every way, but she had only her personality and good nature by that time, the rest, as she herself would say, had turned into a size fourteen.
It had not always been that way. Though she did not state, like London’s notorious Mrs. Wilson two hundred years earlier, that she would not reveal the circumstances that had made her the mistress of an older man at the age of fifteen, Teddy had had something of the same experience. The first great episode of her life had been with a writer, a detoured novelist more than twenty years older than she was. He had first seen her at a bus stop. She was not, even in those days, exactly beautiful, but there was a body that spoke, at the time, of much that youth could offer. He took her to get her first diaphragm and she was his mistress for three years until he left town and returned to literature and in the end a large house in New Jersey.
She had stayed in touch with him for a time, her real link to the grown-up world, and read his books, of course, but slowly his letters became less frequent until they simply stopped and along with them the foolish hope that he would come back someday.
Through the years she began to remember him less and less as he had been and more as one lone image: driving. The boulevards in those days were wide and very white and the car was weaving a little while he, half-drunk, was telling her stories about actors and parties he had not taken her to.
He had gotten her a job in the story department and she began a long career in the world of movies with its intimate acquaintances, fraudulence, and dreams. One could, though, as that world went, rely on her and she tried to be honest. In the end she became a producer. She had never actually produced anything, but she had suggested things and seen them on the way to realization or oblivion, sometimes both. The marriage to Dr. Hirsch had helped. One of his patients was a rich man who owned a game-show company, and through him she met figures in television. It was after she was widowed that the long-awaited opportunity came. She was invited to coproduce a show that turned out to be a success, and a year later she became the sole producer when her partner fell in love and left to marry a Venezuelan businessman. Easygoing in manner, sentimental but shrewd, she drove to work in an inexpensive car and was well liked by the crew. They wanted to please her, to see her laugh and smile.
YOU WILL PROBABLY RECOGNIZE the outlines of the plot. A romantic and mysterious figure, cynical and well able to take care of himself, is, beneath all that, a lost idealist. In this version he is a lawyer, first in his class at law school, who throws it all in after several years in a large firm and proceeds on his own, as much investigator as anything else and not above fixing a DUI charge for a suitable fee. In short, the dark hero of dime novels. In one memorable episode he leaves the office in evening clothes to drive to a birthday party in Palm Springs where he sees the moral rot of his rich client and ends up seducing the wife.
The fortunate thing was how well the actor fit the role. Boothman Keck was in his forties but looked younger. He had come late to acting, taking his twelve-year-old son to an open call one afternoon and being asked if he had ever done any acting himself.
— No, he said.
— None? Never?
— Well, not that I know of.
He had a quality they were seeking for a small part as an alcoholic who still had an essential manhood.
— So, what do you do for a living?
— I’m a swimming coach, Keck said.
— Personal?
— No, I coach a team. A high school team, he explained.
They liked him. Luck followed. The movie got some attention and he with it. Teddy had hired him. He was not impressed with her at first, but over time he began to see her differently and even to like her looks, the fact that she was heavy, that she was short. For some reason she called him Bud. They got along. He had had an ordinary life but was now living one that was the complete opposite. He never lost his modesty.
— It’s all a dream, he would admit.
Then Deborah Legley, who had not been in a movie for some years but whose name was still alive—the slender arrogance when she was younger, the marriage to an immortal— came from the east for a guest appearance. She was being paid a lot of money, too much, Teddy felt, and from the beginning she was difficult. She came off the plane in dark glasses and no makeup though expecting to be recognized. Teddy met her on arrival. They had to wait a little too long for the car. On the set she turned out to be a monster. She made everyone wait, snubbed the director, and barely acknowledged the presence of the crew.
Teddy had to invite her to dinner and invited Keck, too, whose wife was out of town, to make the evening bearable. She bought caviar, Beluga, in the large round tin with the sturgeon on the label. She set the caviar in crushed ice with lemon halves around it. They would have caviar, a drink, and go on to the restaurant. Keck was picking up Deborah at the hotel. Teddy looked at her watch. It was past seven. They would arrive before long.