All That Is

31


WITHOUT END



He had asked her, more or less on impulse, if she would like to come to dinner with Kenneth Wells and his wife, neither of whom she had met, who were down for a few days to talk about the book he was writing and to break the boredom of the country. It seemed the right occasion.

“Have you met them?” Bowman said. “I think you’ll like them.”

He had not been able to conceal that he had been for a while attracted to Ann, he was not sure how greatly. But he did not want a romance, an episode. Their work was too closely related for that. He felt it would be crude. On the other hand, there she was, he now saw, in her heels and quiet manner permitting him to think about her.

She arrived at the restaurant that night wearing black pants and a white, ruffled shirt and Wells stood up like an obedient schoolboy when she joined them.

“I love your books,” she told him.

Michele Wells was drinking a glass of wine. Wells had ordered a bourbon old fashioned.

“What’s that?” Ann asked.

He described it briefly.

“My father used to drink them,” he explained.

“I’ll try one.”

“Do you drink them?” he asked with some pleasure.

“No, this will be the first time.”

“I haven’t heard that for a while,” Wells said. “Actually when he died my father was drinking scotch. He’d had a heart attack and one evening he asked for a drink. He wanted a scotch with a little water and he asked the nurse if she would have one with him. They sipped their drinks and talked a little and when he’d finished my father said to her, how about one for the road? She poured it and he was drinking it, and he died.”

Wells was stimulated by the presence of another woman. His combed-back gray hair and glasses made him look Germanic. There was nothing much to do in Chatham in the evening except watch television.

They’d been watching Brideshead Revisited, Michele said. “The actor who plays Sebastian is wonderful.”

Wells made a vulgar remark.

“I thought this was going to be a clean in body, clean in mind night,” she said.

“Ah, yes. I remember,” he admitted.

In fact she liked obscene talk, in private, especially if it had some literary or historical flavor. He sometimes referred to her p-ssy as the French Concession and went on from there. He had fallen in love with his wife before he ever saw her, he said. He saw a pair of legs beneath some sheets being hung up next door to dry.

“You never know what they’re drawn to,” Michele said. “The next thing, we were off to Mexico.”

When the waiter brought the menus, Wells took off his glasses in order to examine his more closely. Later he asked a number of questions about the dishes and how they were prepared, unwilling to be hurried. There was something about his homeliness and manner that allowed him to do this.

“What’s everyone want, red or white?” Bowman asked.

It was decided red.

“What’s your best red?”

“The Amarone,” the waiter said.

“We’ll have a bottle of that.”

“Very good wine,” Wells said. “It comes from the Veneto, probably the most civilized part of Italy. Venice was the great city of the world for centuries. When London was filthy and sprawling, Venice was a queen. Shakespeare laid four of his plays there, Othello, The Merchant, Romeo and Juliet …”

“Romeo and Juliet,” Ann said. “Isn’t that in Verona?”

“Well, that’s nearby,” Wells said.

When the food came, he turned his entire attention to what was on his plate. He ate like a favored priest and he responded while chewing.

“I’ve never been to Venice,” Ann said.

“You haven’t?”

“No, I just never have.”

“The time to go there is January. No crowds. Also, bring a flashlight to see the paintings. They’re all in churches without real lighting. You can put in a coin and get some light, but it only lasts about fifteen seconds. You have to have your own light. Also, don’t stay on the Giudecca. It’s too far from everything. If you go there, tell me, and I’ll tell you what to see. The cemetery is the best thing, Diaghilev’s grave.”

Ann seemed fascinated by every word.

“Diaghilev’s grave is not the best thing,” Bowman said.

“Well, it’s close to it. I’ll play a game with you, best thing in Paris, best thing in Rome, best thing in Amsterdam. The winner gets a prize.”

“What’s the prize?”

The prize would be Ann Hennessy, Wells thought to himself but was far from being drunk enough to say it.

It was a very congenial dinner. The Amarone was substantial and they ordered another bottle. Ann’s face shone. She was a catalyst for the evening. Bowman hadn’t noticed the gracefulness of her hands before. He saw that she certainly had been Baum’s mistress though she had the quality of resisting suspicion. He could tell by looking at her that she had been. Later he saw that he was wrong when they all stood on the dark street bidding an extended good-bye and she had her hands clasped together in front of her like a young girl and something—the animation—had gone out of her. He flagged a cab and she got in ahead of him without a word.

“I enjoyed the evening,” he said as they drove.

She said nothing.

“You were wonderful tonight,” he said.

“Was I?”

“Yes.”

After a while she began looking in her handbag for her keys.

Her apartment was on Jane Street. The building had no doorman, just two sets of locked glass doors.

“Would you like to come up?” she said unexpectedly.

“Yes,” he said. “For a few minutes.”

She lived on the third floor, and they walked up. The elevator was out of service. She turned on the lights as they came into the apartment and took off her coat.

“Would you like something to drink?” she said. “I don’t have much here. There’s a little scotch, I think.”

“All right. I’ll have just a little.”

She found the bottle and a glass but didn’t get one for herself. She poured him a drink and sat down almost at the other end of the couch. She was a little drunk, he then saw, but she had regained some simple glamour in the pants and ruffled shirt. She sat looking at him. She wanted to talk. There were some things she wanted to say, but she did not. She sat silent. Bowman felt uncomfortable, and for want of anything to do moved close to her on the couch and calmly kissed her. She seemed to consider it.

“I should go home,” he said.

“No, don’t,” she said. “You can …,” she didn’t finish it. “Don’t go.”

She reached down and slipped off her shoes. Her instinct was to not embrace him. She would not have felt comfortable doing it. She stood and went unhurriedly into the bedroom. He felt she was going to lie down and pass out. After a few minutes he went to the bedroom door.

“Will you lie in bed with me?” she said.


On the platform at Hunters Point, where he caught the early train on most Fridays in the spring and fall, he walked back to where the rear cars would be when the train arrived. It was quarter to four and few other people were there yet. There was an old man in a linen suit with a handkerchief in his breast pocket and a blue shirt and tie reading the folded page of something with a magnifying glass, a widower who lived alone or perhaps a man who had never married, but what man at that age had never married? He’d be getting off at Southampton as he had probably done for many years. Walking off into the evening dark.

The train had pulled in. Passengers were clattering down the stairs from the street. Bowman got aboard and took a seat by the window. It was consoling, going into the country. The weekend lay ahead. The conductors in their hard blue caps were checking their watches. Finally, with a slight jolt, the train began to move.

For a while he read and then closed the book. The commercial suburbs and warehouses were left behind. At crossings there was evening traffic, lines of waiting cars with their headlights on. The boulevards were jammed. Houses, trees, unknown places flowing past, embankments, mysterious ponds. He had passed through it many times. He knew nothing about it.

He had left Tivoli the year before—the professor had come back from Europe—it had only been an interlude in any case. He promised to see Katherine in New York, but his life was separating from hers. He rented a house not far from the one he had first rented in Wainscott. His former life, he felt, was being returned to him. Ann Hennessy came for a weekend. There was a certain awkwardness, but it vanished over dinner.

“I have a bottle of Amarone at the house,” he mentioned.

“Yes, I noticed it.”

“You did? What else did you notice?”

“Very little. I was too excited.”

“Well, the Amarone will calm you.”

“Hardly.”

But it led to the subject of Venice.

“I’d love to go there,” she said.

“There’s a wonderful guidebook on Venice—I think it’s out of print—by a man named Hugh Honour. An historian. It’s one of the best guidebooks I’ve ever read. I may have a copy. He has a companion named John Fleming. They’re known as the Honour and the Glory. They’re En glish, of course.

“I dislike the word ‘gay,’ ” he said. “They’re too eminent to be called gay. Perhaps in private they call themselves gay. The Roman emperors weren’t gay. They swam naked in pools with young boys trained for pleasure, but it seems strange to call them gay. Depraved, pleasure-addicted, pederast, but not gay. It destroys the dignity of perversion.”

“I hadn’t thought of Roman emperors.”

“Well, Cavafy then. It doesn’t seem right to call him gay. Or John Maynard Keynes. It’s too colloquial. Cavafy was a deviate. I think he uses the word himself. Gay doesn’t seem right. But there are certain gay practices. You’re familiar with them?” he said offhandedly.

“I suppose so,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

“I don’t mean to suggest anything,” he said.

“That’s all right.”

Though she waited, he did not continue.

It was the first of many weekends. They became a kind of informal couple. It was not in evidence at work where they preferred not to show it, but in the evenings and in the country. There they had leisure and no encumbrances. She slept in a simple white gown that he gently pushed upward from her hips, where it remained halfway or she pulled it over her head and off. Her bare skin was cool. Her arm was placed alongside her, her hand open. He laid himself in her narrow palm.


In June the water was still too cold for swimming. If after a minute he had the courage to dive in, in a split second he regretted it. But the days were beautiful and long. The beaches were still empty. Sometimes the sun, because of clouds, lay on only a section of the water, turning it almost to white while the rest remained deep blue or gray.

By July the ocean was warmer. They went to swim early in the day. In the parking lot a white van with its side cut away sold coffee and fried-egg sandwiches and later, cold drinks. A few kids were already lounging around and walking barefoot on the asphalt. The beach was uncrowded at that hour and stretched out of sight in both directions. Ann’s bathing suit was a dark red. Her arms and legs had lost the city paleness.

The temperature of the water was perfect. They swam together for fifteen or twenty minutes and then came out to lie in the sun. There was little wind, the day was going to be hot. They lay with their heads not far apart. Once, she opened her eyes for a moment, saw him, and closed them again. Finally both of them sat up. The sun felt heavy on their shoulders. More people had come, some with umbrellas and chairs.

“Do you want to go in again?” Bowman said, standing.

“All right,” she said.

They walked straight in, and when it was to the waist he dove, arms stretched out and his head tucked between them. The water was a dusty green, pure and silky with a gentle swell. This time they didn’t swim together but went different ways. He swam towards the east, slowly falling into a steady rhythm of it. The sea was passing around him, beside him, beneath him in a way that belonged to him alone. There were a few other swimmers, their solitary heads showing further in. He felt he could go a great distance, he was filled with strength. With his head down he could see the bottom, smooth and rippled. He went a long way and at last turned and started back. Though he was tiring he felt he could not swim enough, stay long enough, in this ocean, on this day. Finally he came out, spent but elated. Not far from him a group of children, ten or twelve years old, were running into the water in a long, uneven file, girl with girl, boy following boy, their faces and cries filled with joy. He began walking towards Ann, who had come out earlier and was sitting in her sleek red bathing suit, he’d been able to pick her out from a distance.

With a feeling of triumph—he could not explain it—he stood drying himself before her. It was nearly eleven. The sun had terrific weight, it was like an anvil. They walked up together to where the car was parked off the road. Her legs seemed to have tanned even more as she sat in the seat beside him. The cheekbones of her face were burned. As for himself, he was completely happy. He wanted nothing more. Her presence was miraculous. She was the woman in her thirties in stories and plays who for some reason, circumstances, luck, had never found a man. Desirable, life-giving, she had slipped through the net, the fruit that had fallen to the ground. She had never spoken about their future. She had never mentioned, except in enthusiasm, the word “love.” Standing before her that day though, having come out of the sea he had nearly said it, knelt beside her and said it, the love he had for her. He had nearly said, will you marry me? That was the moment, he knew.

He was unsure of himself and of her. He was too old to marry. He didn’t want some late, sentimental compromise. He had known too much for that. He’d been married once, wholeheartedly, and been mistaken. He had fallen wildly in love with a woman in London, and it had somehow faded away. As if by fate one night in the most romantic encounter of his life he had met a woman and been betrayed. He believed in love—all his life he had—but now it was likely to be too late. Perhaps they could go on as they were forever, like the lives in art. Anna, as he’d begun to call her, Anna, please come. Sit here beside me.

Wells had married again sure of even less. He had seen a woman’s legs and talked to her in the neighboring yard. They had run off together and his wife had formed her life around his. Perhaps it was a question of that, arranging a life. Perhaps they would travel. He had always meant to go to Brazil, to the place where Elizabeth Bishop had lived with her Brazilian companion, Lolta Soares, and to the two rivers, one blue and the other brown, that came together and she had written about. He had always wanted to go back to the Pacific, where the only daring part of his life lay, and travel across it, its vastness, passing the great forgotten names, Ulithi, Majuro, Palau, perhaps visiting a few graves, Robert Louis Stevenson’s or Gauguin’s, ten days by boat from Tahiti. Sail as far as Japan. They would plan trips together and stay in small hotels.


She had gone to visit her parents. It was October, he was alone. The clouds that night were a dark blue, a blue such as one seldom sees covering a hidden moon, and he thought, as he often did, of nights at sea or waiting to sail.

He was content to be alone. He’d made himself some dinner and sat afterwards reading with a glass at his elbow, just as he had sat in the little living room on Tenth Street, Vivian gone to bed and he sitting reading. Time was limitless, mornings, nights, all of life ahead.

He often thought about death but usually in pity for an animal or fish or seeing the dying grass in the fall or the monarch butterflies clinging to milkweed and feeding for the great funeral flight. Were they aware of it somehow, the strength it would take, the heroic strength? He thought about death, but he had never been able to imagine it, the unbeing while all else still existed. The idea of passing from this world to another, the next, was too fantastic to believe. Or that the soul would rise in a way unknown to join the infinite kingdom of God. There you would meet again all those you had once known as well as those you had never known, the countless dead in numbers forever increasing but never as great as the infinite. The only ones missing would be those who believed there was nothing afterwards, as his mother had said. There would be no such thing as time—time passed in an hour, like the time from the moment one fell asleep. There would be only joy.

Whatever you believed would happen was what happened, Beatrice said. She would go to some beautiful place. Rochester, she’d said, as a joke. He had always seen it as the dark river and the long lines of those waiting for the boatman, waiting in resignation and the patience that eternity required, stripped of all but a single, last possession, a ring, a photograph, or letter that represented everything dearest and forever left behind that they somehow hoped, it being so small, they would be able to take with them. He had such a letter, from Enid. The days I spent with you were the greatest days of my life …

What if there should be no river but only the endless lines of unknown people, people absolutely without hope, as there had been in the war? He would be made to join them, to wait forever. He wondered then, as he often did, how much of life remained for him. He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived. He would be going where they all had gone and—it was difficult to believe—all he had known would go with him, the war, Mr. Kindrigen and the butler pouring coffee, London those first days, the lunch with Christine, her gorgeous body like a separate entity, names, houses, the sea, all he had known and things he had never known but were there nevertheless, things of his time, all the years, the great liners with their invincible glamour readying to sail, the band playing as they were backed away, the green water widening, the Matsonia leaving Honolulu, the Bremen departing, the Aquitania, Île de France, and the small boats streaming, following behind. The first voice he ever knew, his mother’s, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child. He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home—the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned.

He had been weeding in the garden that afternoon and looked down to see, beneath his tennis shorts, a pair of legs that seemed to belong to an older man. He mustn’t, he realized, be going around the house in shorts like this when Ann was there, probably not even in the cotton kimono that barely came to the knee or in an undershirt. He had to be careful about such things. He always came out and went back in a suit. He’d come in the one from Tripler & Co., a midnight blue with a thin pinstripe.


It was the suit he wore to his aunt’s funeral in Summit. He went with Ann—he had asked her to come with him. The funeral was at ten in the morning. It was brief, and they left soon after. They had come on the early train. Crossing the marshlands in the first bluish light, New York in the distance looked like a foreign city, someplace where you could live and be happy. On the way he told her about his aunt, Dorothy, his mother’s sister, and his wonderful uncle, Frank. He described their restaurant, Fiori, with its red plush and couples who dropped in for dinner on their way home from work and others coming in later, not expecting to be seen. It had been years since it existed, but it seemed very real to him that morning, as if they could drive there for dinner and sit with a drink listening to Rigoletto, and the waitress would bring them steaks, slightly charred with a small pat of butter melting on top. He wanted to take her there for the first time.

His mind moved elsewhere, to the great funerary city with its palazzos and quiet canals, the lions that were its feared insignia.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about Venice. I’m not sure Wells was right about the best time to go there. January is so damned cold. I have a feeling it would be better to go before then. So what, if there’re some crowds. I can ask him about hotels.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes. Let’s go in November. We’ll have a great time.”



A Note About the Author

James Salter is the author of numerous books, including the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; the collections Dusk and Other Stories, which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Last Night, which won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award; and Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days, written with Kay Salter. He lives in New York and Colorado.