Текст книги "Dusk and Other Stories"

Автор книги: James Salter

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

VIA NEGATIVA

There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. His index finger is the color of tea, his smile filled with bad teeth. He knows literature, however. His sad bones are made of it. He knows what was written and where writers died. His opinions are cold but accurate. They are pure, at least there is that.

He’s unknown, though not without a few admirers. They are really like marriage, uninteresting, but what else is there? His life is his journals. In them somewhere is a line from the astrologer: your natural companions are women. Occasionally, perhaps. No more than that. His hair is thin. His clothes are a little out of style. He is aware, however, that there is a great, a final glory which falls on certain figures barely noticed in their time, touches them in obscurity and re-creates their lives. His heroes are Musil and, of course, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bunin.

There are writers like P in an expensive suit and fine English shoes who come walking down the street in eye-splintering sunlight, the crowd seeming to part for them, to leave an opening like the eye of a storm.

“I hear you got a fortune for your book.”

“What? Don’t believe it,” they say, though everyone knows.

On close examination, the shoes are even handmade. Their owner has a rich head of hair. His face is powerful, his brow, his long nose. A suffering face, strong as a door. He recognizes his questioner as someone who has published several stories. He only has a moment to talk.

“Money doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “Look at me. I can’t even get a decent haircut.”

He’s serious. He doesn’t smile. When he came back from London and was asked to endorse a novel by a young acquaintance he said, let him do it the way I did, on his own. They all want something, he said.

And there are old writers who owe their eminence to the New Yorkerand travel in wealthy circles like W, who was famous at twenty. Some critics now feel his work is shallow and too derivative—he had been a friend of the greatest writer of our time, a writer who inspired countless imitators, perhaps it would be better to say one of the great writers, not everyone is in agreement, and I don’t want to get into arguments. They broke up later anyway, W didn’t like to say why.

His first, much-published story—everyone knows it—brought him at least fifty women over the years, he used to say. His wife was aware of it. In the end he broke with her, too. He was not a man who kept his looks. Small veins began to appear in his cheeks. His eyes became red. He insulted people, even waiters in restaurants. Still, in his youth he was said to have been very generous, very brave. He was against injustice. He gave money to the Loyalists in Spain.

Morning. The dentists are laying out their picks. In the doorways, as the sun hits them, the bums begin to groan. Nile went on the bus to visit his mother, the words of Victor Hugo about all the armies in the world being unable to stop an idea whose time has comeon an advertisement above his head. His hair was uncombed. His face had the arrogance, the bruised lips of someone determined to live without money. His mother met him at the door and took this pale face in her hands. She stepped back to see better. She was trembling slightly with a steady, rhythmic movement.

“Your teeth,” she said.

He covered them with his tongue. His aunt came from the kitchen to embrace him.

“Where have you been?” she cried. “Guess what we’re having for lunch.”

Like many fat women, she liked to laugh. She was twice a widow, but one drink was enough to make her dance. She went to set the table. Passing the window, she glanced out. There was a movie house across the street.

“Degenerates,” she said.

Nile sat between them, pulling his chair close to the table with little scrapes. They had not bothered to dress. The warmth of family lunches when the only interest is food. He was always hungry when he came. He ate a slice of bread heavy with butter as he talked. There was scrod and sautéed onions on a huge dish. Voices everywhere—the television was going, the radio in the kitchen. His mouth was full as he answered their questions.

“It’s a little flat,” his mother announced. “Did you cook it the same way?”

“Exactly the same,” his aunt said. She tasted it herself. “It may need salt.”

“You don’t put salt on seafood,” his mother said.

Nile kept eating. The fish fell apart beneath his fork, moist and white, he could taste the faint iodine of the sea. He knew the very market where it had been displayed on ice, the Jewish owner who did not shave. His aunt was watching him.

“Do you know something?” she said.

“What?”

She was not speaking to him. She had made a discovery.

“For a minute then, while he was eating, he looked just like his father.”

A sudden, sweet pause opened in the room, a depth that had not been there when they were talking only of immorality and the danger of the blacks. His mother looked at him reverently.

“Did you hear that?” she asked. Her voice was hushed, she longed for the myths of the past. Her eyes had darkness around them, her flesh was old.

“How do you look like him?” She wanted to hear it recited.

“I don’t,” he said.

They did not hear him. They were arguing about his childhood, various details of it, poems he had memorized, his beautiful hair. What a good student he had been. How grown-up when he ate, the fork too large for his hand. His chin was like his father’s, they said. The shape of his head.

“In the back,” his aunt said.

“A beautiful head,” his mother confirmed. “You have a perfect head, did you know that?”

Afterward he lay on the couch and listened as they cleared the dishes. He closed his eyes. Everything was familiar to him, phrases he had heard before, quarrels about the past, even the smell of the cushions beneath his head. In the bedroom was a collection of photographs in ill-fitting frames. In them, if one traced the progression, was a face growing older and older, more and more unpromising. Had he really written all those earnest letters preserved in shoe boxes together with schoolbooks and folded programs? He was sleeping in the museum of his life.

He left at four. The doorman was reading the newspaper, his collar unbuttoned, the air surrounding him rich with odors of cooking. He didn’t bother to look up as Nile went out. He was absorbed in a description of two young women whose bound bodies had been found on the bank of a canal. There were no pictures, only those from a high school yearbook. It was June. The street was lined with cars, the gutters melting.

The shops were closed. In their windows, abandoned to afternoon, were displays of books, cosmetics, leather clothes. He lingered before them. A great longing for money, a thirst rose in him, a desire to be recognized. He was walking for the hundredth time on streets which in no way acknowledged him, past endless apartments, consulates, banks. He came to the fifties, behind the great hotels. The streets were dank, like servants’ quarters. Paper lay everywhere, envelopes, empty packages of cigarettes.

In Jeanine’s apartment it was better. The floor was polished. Her breath seemed sweet.

“Have you been out?” he asked her.

“No, not yet.”

“The streets are melting,” he said. “You weren’t working, were you?”

“I was reading.”

From her windows one could see the second-floor salon in the rear of the Plaza in which hairdressers worked. It was red, with mirrors that multiplied its secrets. Naked, on certain afternoons, they had watched its silent acts.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Gogol.”

“Gogol…” He closed his eyes and began to recite, “In the carriage sat a gentleman, not handsome but not bad-looking, not too stout and not too thin, not old, but not so very young…”

“What a memory you have.”

“Listen, what novel is this? For a long time I used to go to bed early…”

“That’s too easy,” she said.

She was sitting on the couch, her legs drawn up beneath her, the book near her hand.

“I guess it is,” he said. “Did you know this about Gogol? He died a virgin.”

“Is that true?”

“The Russians are a little curious that way,” he said. “Chekhov himself thought once a year was sufficient for a writer.”

He had told her that before, he realized.

“Not everyone agrees with that,” he murmured. “You know who I saw on the street yesterday? Dressed like a banker. Even his shoes.”

“Who?”

Nile described him. After a moment she knew who he must be talking about.

“He’s written a new book,” she said.

“So I hear. I thought he was going to hold out his ring for me to kiss. I said, listen, tell me one thing, honestly: all the money, the attention…”

“You didn’t.”

Nile smiled. The teeth his mother wept over were revealed.

“He was terrified. He knew what I was going to say. He had everything, everybody was talking about him, and all I had was a pin. A needle. If I pushed, it would go straight to the heart.”

She had a boy’s face and arms with a faint shadow of muscle. Her fingernails were bitten clean. The afternoon light which had somehow found its way into the room gleamed from her knees. She was from Montana. When they first met, Nile had seen her as complaisant, which excited him, even stupid, but he discovered it was only a vast distance, perhaps of childhood, which surrounded her. She revealed herself in simple, unexpected acts, like a farmboy undressing. As she sat on the couch, one arm was exposed beside her. Within its elbow he could see the long, rich artery curved down to her wrist. It was full. It lay without beating.

She had been married. Her past astonished him. Her body bore no trace of it, not even a memory, it seemed. All she had learned was how to live alone. In the bathroom were soaps with the name printed on them, soaps that had never been wet. There were fresh towels, flowers in a blue glass. The bed was flat and smooth. There were books, fruit, announcements stuck in the edge of the mirror.

“What did you actually ask him?” she said.

“Do you have any wine?” Nile said. While she was gone, he continued in a louder voice, “He’s afraid of me. He’s afraid of me because I’ve accomplished nothing.”

He looked up. Plaster was flaking from the ceiling.

“You know what Cocteau said,” he called. “There’s a fame worse than failure. I asked him if he thought he really deserved it all.”

“And what did he say?”

“I don’t remember. What’s this?” He took the bottle of sea-colored glass she carried. The label was slightly stained. “A Pauillac. I don’t remember this. Did I buy it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He smelled it. “Very good. Someone gave it to you,” he suggested.

She filled his glass.

“Do you want to go to a film?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

He looked at the wine.

“No?” he said.

She was silent. After a moment she said, “I can’t.”

He began to inspect titles in the bookcase near him, many he had never read.

“How’s your mother?” he asked. “I like your mother.” He opened one of the books. “Do you write to her?”

“Sometimes.”

“You know, Viking is interested in me,” he said abruptly. “They’re interested in my stories. They want me to expand Lovenights.”

“I’ve always liked that story,” she said.

“I’m already working. I’m getting up very early. They want me to have a photograph made.”

“Who did you see at Viking?”

“I forget his name. He’s, uh… dark hair, he’s about my size. I should know his name. Well, what’s the difference?”

She went into the bedroom to change her clothes. He started to follow her.

“Don’t,” she said.

He sat down again. He could hear occasional, ordinary sounds, drawers opening and being shut, periods of silence. It was as if she were packing.

“Where are you going?” he called, looking at the floor.

She was brushing her hair. He could hear the swift, rhythmic strokes. She was facing herself in the mirror, not even aware of him. He was like a letter lying on the table, the half-read Gogol, like the wine. When she emerged, he could not look at her. He sat slouched, like a passionate child.

“Jeanine,” he said, “I know I’ve disappointed you. But it’s true about Viking.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be very busy…. Do you have to go just now?”

“I’m a bit late.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “Please.”

She could not answer.

“Anyway, I have to go home and work,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back by eleven,” she said. “Why don’t you call me?”

She tried to touch his hair.

“There’s more wine,” she said. She no longer believed in him. In things he might say, yes, but not in him. She had lost her faith.

“Jeanine…”

“Good-bye, Nile,” she said. It was the way she ended telephone calls.

She was going to the nineties, to dinner in an apartment she had not seen. Her arms were bare. Her face seemed very young.

When the door closed, panic seized him. He was suddenly desperate. His thoughts seemed to fly away, to scatter like birds. It was a deathlike hour. On television, the journalists were answering complex questions. The streets were still. He began to go through her things. First the closets. The drawers. He found her letters. He sat down to read them, letters from her brother, her lawyer, people he did not know. He began pulling forth everything, shirts, underclothes, long clinging weeds which were stockings. He kicked her shoes away, spilled open boxes. He broke her necklaces, pieces rained to the floor. The wildness, the release of a murderer filled him. As she sat there in the nineties, sometimes speaking a little, the men nearby uncertain, seeking to hold her glance, he whipped her like a yelping dog from room to room, pushing her into walls, tearing her clothes. She was stumbling, crying, he felt the horror of his acts. He had no right to them—why did this justify everything?

He was bathed in sweat, breathless, afraid to stay. He closed the door softly. There were old newspapers piled in the hall, the faint sounds from other apartments, children returning from errands to the store.

In the street he saw on every side, in darkening windows, in reflections, as if suddenly it were visible to him, a kind of chaos. It welcomed, it acclaimed him. The huge tires of buses roared past. It was the last hour of light. He felt the solitude of crime. He stopped, like an addict, in a phone booth. His legs were weak. No, beneath the weakness was something else. For a moment he saw unknown depths to himself, he glittered with images. It seemed he was attracting the glances of women who passed. They recognize me, he thought, they smell me in the dark like mares. He smiled at them with the cracked lips of an incorrigible. He cared nothing for them, only for the power to disturb. He was bending their love toward him, a stupid love, a love without which he could not breathe.

It was late when he arrived home. He closed the door. Darkness. He turned on the light. He had no sense of belonging there. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. There was a skylight over his head, the panes were black. He sat beneath the small, nude photograph of a girl he had once lived with, the edges were curled, and began to play, the G was sticking, the piano was out of tune. In Bach there was not only order and coherence but more, a code, a repetition which everything depended on. After a while he felt a pounding beneath his feet, the broom of the idiot on the floor below. He continued to play. The pounding grew louder. If he had a car… Suddenly the idea broke over him as if it were the one thing he had been trying to think of: a car. He would be speeding from the city to find himself at dawn on long, country roads. Vermont, no, further, Newfoundland, where the coast was still deserted. That was it, a car, he saw it plainly. He saw it parked in the gentle light of daybreak, its body stained from the journey, a faintly battered body that had survived some terrible, early crash.

All is chance or nothing is chance. That evening Jeanine met a man who longed, he said, to perform an act of great and unending generosity, like Genet’s in giving his house to a former lover.

“Did he do that?” she asked.

“They say.”

It was P. The room was filled with people, and he was speaking to her, quite naturally, as if they had met before. She did not wonder what to say to him, she did not have to say anything. He was quite near. The fine wrinkles in his brow were visible, wrinkles not yet deepened.

“Generosity purifies,” he said. He was later to tell her that words were no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints, he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it.

His face was dark, his features deep. He was part of another, a mysterious race. She was aware of how different her own face was with its wide mouth, its gray eyes, slow, curious, clear as a stream. She was aware also that the dress she wore, the depth of the chairs, the dimensions of this room afloat now in evening, all of these were part of an immersion into the flow of a great life. Her heart was beating slowly but hard. She had never felt so sure of herself, so bewildered by the ease with which it all was opening.

“I’m suspicious and grasping,” he said. He was beginning his confessions. “I recognize that.” Later he told her that in his entire life he had only been free for an hour, and that hour was always with her.

She asked no questions. She recognized him. In her own apartment the lights were burning. The air of the city, bitter as acid, was absolutely still. She did not breathe it. She was breathing another air. She had not smiled once as yet. He later told her that this was the most powerful thing of all that had attracted him. Her breasts, he said, were like those of black tribal girls in the National Geographic.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GOETHEANUM

In the garden, standing alone, he found the young woman who was a friend of the writer William Hedges, then unknown but even Kafka had lived in obscurity, she said, and so moreover had Mendel, perhaps she meant Mendeleyev. They were staying in a little hotel across the Rhine. No one could seem to find it, she said.

The river there flowed swiftly, the surface was alive. It carried things away, broken wood and branches. They spun around, went under, emerged. Sometimes pieces of furniture passed, ladders, windows. Once, in the rain, a chair.

They were living in the same room, but it was completely platonic. Her hand, he noticed, bore no ring or jewelry of any kind. Her wrists were bare.

“He doesn’t like to be alone,” she said. “He’s struggling with his work.” It was a novel, still far from finished though parts were extraordinary. A fragment had been published in Rome. “It’s called The Goetheanum,”she said. “Do you know what that is?”

He tried to remember the curious word already dissolving in his mind. The lights inside the house had begun to appear in the blue evening.

“It’s the one great act of his life.”

The hotel she had spoken of was small with small rooms and letters in yellow across the facade. There were many buildings like it. From the cool flank of the cathedral it was visible amid them, below and a little downstream. Also through the windows of antique shops and alleys.

Two days later he saw her from a distance. She was unmistakable. She moved with a kind of negligent grace, like a dancer whose career is ended. The crowd ignored her.

“Oh,” she greeted him, “yes, hello.”

Her voice seemed vague. He was sure she did not recognize him. He didn’t know exactly what to say.

“I was thinking about some of the things you told me…” he began.

She stood with people pushing past, her arms filled with packages. The street was hot. She did not understand who he was, he was certain of it. She was performing simple errands, those of a remote and saintly couple.

“Forgive me,” she said, “I’m really not myself.”

“We met at Sarren’s,” he explained.

“Yes, I know.”

A silence followed. He wanted to say something quite simple to her but she was preventing it.

She had been to the museum. When Hedges worked he had to be alone, sometimes she would find him asleep on the floor.

“He’s crazy,” she said. “Now he’s sure there’ll be a war. Everything’s going to be destroyed.”

Her own words seemed to disinterest her. The crowd was pulling her away.

“Can I walk with you for a minute?” he asked. “Are you going toward the bridge?”

She looked both ways.

“Yes,” she decided.

They went down the narrow streets. She said nothing. She glanced in shop windows. She had a mouth which curved downward, a serving girl’s mouth, a girl from small towns.

“Are you interested in painting?” he heard her say.

“Yes.”

In the museum there were Holbeins and Hodlers, El Grecos, Max Ernst. The silence of long salons. In them one understood what it meant to be great.

“Do you want to go tomorrow?” she said. “No, tomorrow we’re going somewhere. Perhaps the day after?”

That day he woke early, already nervous. The room seemed empty. The sky was yellow with light. The surface of the river, between stone banks, was incandescent. The water rushed in fragments white as fire, at their center one could not even look.

By nine the sky had faded, the river was broken into silver. At ten it was brown, the color of soup. Barges and old-fashioned steamers were working slowly upstream or going swiftly down. The piers of the bridges trailed small wakes.

A river is the soul of a city, only water and air can purify. At Basel, the Rhine lies between well-established stone banks. The trees are carefully trimmed, the old houses hidden behind them.

He looked for her everywhere. He crossed the Rheinbrucke and, watching faces, went to the open market through the crowds. He searched among the stalls. Women were buying flowers, they boarded streetcars and sat with the bunches in their laps. In the Borse restaurant fat men were eating, their small ears close to their heads.

She was nowhere to be found. He even entered the cathedral, expecting for a moment to find her waiting. There was no one. The city was turning to stone. The pure hour of sunlight had passed, there was nothing left now but a raging afternoon that burned his feet. The clocks struck three. He gave up and returned to the hotel. There was an edge of white paper in his box. It was a note, she would meet him at four.

In excitement he lay down to think. She had not forgotten. He read it again. Were they really meeting in secret? He was not certain what that meant. Hedges was forty, he had almost no friends, his wife was somewhere back in Connecticut, he had left her, he had renounced the past. If he was not great, he was following the path of greatness which is the same as disaster, and he had the power to make one devote oneself to his life. She was with him constantly. I’m never out of his sight, she complained. Nadine: it was a name she had chosen herself.

She was late. They ended up going to tea at five o’clock; Hedges was busy reading English newspapers. They sat at a table overlooking the river, the menus in their hands long and slim as airline tickets. She seemed very calm. He wanted to keep looking at her. Hummersalat, he was reading somehow, rump steak. She was very hungry, she announced. She had been at the museum, the paintings made her ravenous.

“Where were you?” she said.

Suddenly he realized she had expected him. There were young couples strolling the galleries, their legs washed in sunlight. She had wandered among them. She knew quite well what they were doing: they were preparing for love. His eyes slipped.

“I’m starving,” she said.

She ate asparagus, then a goulash soup, and after that a cake she did not finish. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps they had no money, she and Hedges, that it was her only meal of the day.

“No,” she said. “William has a sister who’s married to a very rich man. He can get money there.”

It seemed she had the faintest accent. Was it English?

“I was born in Genoa,” she told him.

She quoted a few lines of Valéry which he later found out were incorrect. Afternoons torn by wind, the stinging sea…She adored Valéry. An anti-Semite, she said.

She described a trip to Dornach, it was forty minutes away by streetcar, then a long walk from the station where she had stood arguing with Hedges about which way to go, it always annoyed her that he had no sense of direction. It was uphill, he was soon out of breath.

Dornach had been chosen by the teacher Rudolf Steiner to be the center of his realm. There, not far from Basel, beyond the calm suburbs, he had dreamed of establishing a community with a great central building to be named after Goethe, whose ideas had inspired it, and in 1913 the cornerstone for it was finally laid. The design was Steiner’s own, as were all the details, techniques, the paintings, the specially engraved glass. He invented its construction just as he had its shape.

It was to be built entirely of wood, two enormous domes which intersected, the plot of that curve itself was a mathematical event. Steiner believed only in curves, there were no right angles anywhere. Small, tributary domes like helmets contained the windows and doors. Everything was wood, everything except the gleaming Norwegian slates that covered the roof. The earliest photographs showed it surrounded by scaffolding like some huge monument, in the foreground were groves of apple trees. The construction was carried on by people from all over the world, many of them abandoned professions and careers. By the spring of 1914 the roof timbers were in position, and while they were still laboring the war broke out. From the nearby provinces of France they could actually hear the rumble of cannon. It was the hottest month of summer.

She showed him a photograph of a vast, brooding structure.

“The Goetheanum,” she said.

He was silent. The darkness of the picture, the resonance of the domes began to invade him. He submitted to it as to the mirror of a hypnotist. He could feel himself slipping from reality. He did not struggle. He longed to kiss the fingers which held the postcard, the lean arms, the skin which smelled like lemons. He felt himself trembling, he knew she could see it. They sat like that, her gaze was calm. He was entering the gray, the Wagnerian scene before him which she might close at any moment like a matchbox and replace in her bag. The windows resembled an old hotel somewhere in middle Europe. In Prague. The shapes sang to him. It was a fortification, a terminal, an observatory from which one could look into the soul.

“Who is Rudolf Steiner?” he asked.

He hardly heard her explanation. He was beginning to have ecstasies. Steiner was a great teacher, a savant who believed deep insights could be revealed in art. He believed in movements and mystery plays, rhythms, creation, the stars. Of course. And somehow from this she had learned a scenario. She had become the illusionist of Hedges’ life.

It was Hedges, the convict Joyce scholar, the rumpled ghost at literary parties, who had found her. He was distant at first, he barely spoke a word to her the night they met. She had not been in New York long then. She was living on Twelfth Street in a room with no furniture. The next day the phone rang. It was Hedges. He asked her to lunch. He had known from the first exactly who she was, he said. He was calling from a phone booth, the traffic was roaring past.

“Can you meet me at Haroot’s?” he said.

His hair was uncombed, his fingers unsteady. He was sitting by the wall, too nervous to look at anything except his hands. She became his companion.

They spent long days together wandering in the city. He wore shirts the color of blue ink, he bought her clothes. He was wildly generous, he seemed to care nothing for money, it was crumpled in his pockets like wastepaper, when he paid for things it would fall on the floor. He made her come to restaurants where he was dining with his wife and sit at the bar so he could watch her while they ate.

Slowly he began her introduction to another world, a world which scorned exposure, a world more rich than the one she knew, certain occult books, philosophies, even music. She discovered she had a talent for it, an instinct. She achieved a kind of power over herself. There were periods of deep affection, serenity. They sat in a friend’s house and listened to Scriabin. They ate at the Russian Tea Room, the waiters knew his name. Hedges was performing an extraordinary act, he was fusing her life. He, too, had found a new existence: he was a criminal at last. At the end of a year they came to Europe.

“He’s intelligent,” she explained. “You feel it immediately. He has a mind that touches everything.”

“How long have you been with him?”

“Forever,” she said.

They walked back toward her hotel in that one, dying hour which ends the day. The trees by the river were black as stone. Wozzeckwas playing at the theater to be followed by The Magic Flute. In the print shops were maps of the city and drawings of the famous bridge as it looked in Napoleon’s time. The banks were filled with newly minted coins. She was strangely silent. They stopped once, before a restaurant with a tank of fish, great speckled trout larger than a shoe lazing in green water, their mouths working slowly. Her face was visible in the glass like a woman’s on a train, indifferent, alone. Her beauty was directed toward no one. She seemed not to see him, she was lost in her thoughts. Then, coldly, without a word, her eyes met his. They did not waver. In that moment he realized she was worth everything.

They had not had an easy time. Reason is unequal to man’s problems, Hedges said. His wife had somehow gotten hold of his bank account, not that it was much, but she had a nose like a ferret, she found other earnings that might have come his way. Further, he was sure his letters to his children were not being delivered. He had to write them at school and in care of friends.

The question above all and always, however, was money. It was crushing them. He wrote articles but they were hard to sell, he was no good at anything topical. He did a piece about Giacometti with many haunting quotations which were entirely invented. He tried everything. Meanwhile, on every side it seemed, young men were writing film scripts or selling things for enormous sums.