All That Is by James Salter
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There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
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Bowman, too, had been born in a great city, in the French Hospital in Manhattan, in the burning heat of August and very early in the morning when all geniuses are born,
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Kindrigen stirred the coffee, opened the newspaper, and began reading it, sitting sideways to the table. Bowman had seen villains in Westerns sit this way.
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He could not keep his eyes from her. Her face was as if, somehow, it was not
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completely finished, with smouldering features, a mouth not eager to smile, a riveting face that God had stamped with the simple answer to life. In profile she was even more beautiful.
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The women she knew were known for their style, their riding ability, and their husbands. Also their nerve.
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She threw a drink in his face at a party in Middleburg that fall and wept in the car on the way home from several others. She became known as a drinker, that was not so bad—drinking, even too much, was an aspect of character, like courage, in their society—but Amussen became tired of it and of her.
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Bowman forgot the fact that girls, in time, became like their mothers. He felt that Vivian took after her father and would become her own woman.
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He had come from that and it was now behind him, but it still existed, like the impression on a sheet of paper beneath the one you are writing on. He retained the deep things, a sense of family, respect, and also a kind of honor in the end.
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They came home late, she on his arm, long-legged and unsteady, head down as she walked, as if from drinking. In bed he lay spent, like a soldier at the end of leave, and she was riding him like a horse, her hair blinding her. He loved everything, her small navel, her loose dark hair, her feet with their long, naked toes in the morning. Her buttocks were glorious, it was like being in a bakery, and when she cried out it was like a dying woman, one that had crawled to a shrine.
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from Texas, though, where they were loyal, and in some disdainful way she remained loyal to him, to the boy who’d been her husband, carried her off, and whose destiny was to be a famous poet, maybe a singer.
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In the morning there was England, green and unknown beneath broken clouds. They drove in from Heathrow in a cab making a sound like a sewing machine with the driver offering occasional comments in a language difficult to understand. Then there were the outskirts, drab and interminable, becoming at last streets at odd angles and buildings of Victorian brick. They turned onto a wide avenue, The Mall, with the dense green of a park alongside and black iron fence peeling past. At its end, far off, was a great pale arch. They were driving swiftly on the wrong side. Bowman was struck by the proud, outdated character of the city, its irregularity and singular names. The most important thing, its separation from the continent, was not yet known to him.
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And England had won. Its enemies stumbled through ruins, went hungry. What was left of their cities smelled of death and sewage, the women sold themselves for cigarettes, but it was England, like a battered fighter somehow left standing, that had paid too much. A decade later there was still food rationing and it was difficult to travel, currency could not be taken out of the country. The bells that had tolled the hour of victory were long silent. The ways of before the war were unrecoverable. Putting out a cigarette after lunch, a publisher had said calmly, “England is finished.
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She tried on not one but two dresses in the small but stylish shop, coming out from behind the curtain and turning slightly from side to side. The white glint of a brassiere strap that she pushed underneath as an afterthought seemed a sign of purity. When she said good-bye, it was like a play ending.
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voice was anguished, she was singing in blindness, her eyes closed, her bare arms, silver loops in her ears and long dark hair. The song was her song but it belonged to the Vega, the wide plain with its sun-dark workers and shimmering heat, she was pouring out life’s despair, bitterness, crimes, her clapping fierce and relentless, a place called Utrera, the house in which it had happened, the lover left for dead, and a man in black pants and long hair suddenly came from the darkness, his steel-tipped heels exploding on the wood floor and his arms hung above his head. The woman was singing with even greater intensity amid the relentless chords, the savage, tight beat of the heels, the silver, the black, the man’s lean body bent like an S, the dogs trotting in darkness near the houses, the water running, the sound of the trees.
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Afterwards in the room he began to kiss her wildly, her lips, her neck. He slipped the dress straps from her shoulders. You could never have anyone like this. His old, fettered life was behind him, it had been transformed as if by some revelation. They made love as if it were a violent crime, he was holding her by the waist, half woman, half vase, adding weight to the act. She was crying in agony, like a dog near death. They collapsed as if stricken.
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soap, she had said. He’d had a bath. You washed all the man-smell away. It’ll come back, he’d said. The suited leg made him think of New York, of the office. He thought of Gretchen with her stigma and how it somehow made her more desirable. He thought of the girl in Virginia that Christmas, Dare, who breathed a sexuality, she would be yours in a minute if you were the one … if you were the one. It had happened and he was, in Spain with a woman who had given him the feeling of utter supremacy. He had crossed some line. Her blond hair, her lean style. He saw himself now to be another kind of man, the kind he had hoped, fully a man, used to the wonder. Enid smoked cigarettes, she did it only now and again, and breathed out the rich fragrance slowly. The light in the Ritz made her beautiful. The sound of her high heels. There is no other, there will never be another.
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Of Bryan, it might be said that he was candid about his wife and uncomplaining.
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He treated her offhandedly, as he might treat bad weather.
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Nearby on the wall a postcard of the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna was pinned, along with a photograph of a girl in a bikini, and another of a dish of pasta clipped from some magazine. “T T T,” Wells said. “T T T?” “Tits, towers, and tortellini.
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He saw her now, of course, in a different way. He was tempted to call her but felt it would not be right, from a moral viewpoint and something besides. They were not the people they had been. He admired her, however, the marred girl she had been, the poised woman she now was. She was the age when she could still be naked. He could be gone from the office for several hours in the afternoon, almost any afternoon, and so could she. It was not indiscretion, it was what was due her.
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Age doesn’t arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.
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He tried to look slowly at her but couldn’t. It was the first time, it was always blinding.
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Greece was in one’s blood, they wailed at the grave there, they washed the bodies of the dead. But it was not death that drew him, it was the opposite. With Christine it would be unimaginably rich, living in the sunlight, on the water, on terraces hidden by vines, in the bare rooms of hotels. She would shake it flat and read some of the Greek newspaper to him, perhaps she would, he imagined her able to do anything. He wanted the Greek words for morning, night, thank you, love. He wanted some dirty Greek words so he could whisper them. Nude, he remembered, was the same in every language but probably not in Greek. He loved her nude, he loved thinking of it. He was for the moment emptied of desire but not in the broader sense.
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He had fallen in love before, deeply in love, but it had always been with an other, someone not like himself. With Christine there was the feeling of always having known her.
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Afterwards they were like victims, face up, unable to move.
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There was the moment like the one at a dance when before taking your partner’s hand for the first time, you know without touching whether he or she can dance or be any good.
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When at last he entered her it was as if he were speaking.
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He could hear her saying something into the bedding. He was holding her by the waist. Ah, ah, ah. The walls were falling away. The city was collapsing like stars.
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The power of the novel in the nation’s culture had weakened. It had happened gradually. It was something everyone recognized and ignored. All went on exactly as before, that was the beauty of it. The glory had faded but fresh faces kept appearing, wanting to be part of it, to be in publishing which had retained a suggestion of elegance like a pair of beautiful, bone-shined shoes owned by a bankrupt man. Those who had been in it for some years, he and Glenda and the others, were like nails driven long ago into a tree that then grew around them. They were part of it by now, embedded.
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“Never give men your best,” Nadine said. “They come to expect it.
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She had an appealing face and seemed a bit too big for her legs.
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