James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime

THEY ARRIVE HOME ON Sunday evening, weary from traffic. The roads are crowded. For half an hour Dean has been dogging the pale of his headlights which now, in the narrow streets, begin to show bright. It’s like driving under water. A green twilight gleams far above. He turns the last corner. The great, battered truck of the Corsicans is parked among the strewn wrappings, the marvelous rotting odors. As he pulls in, the headlights reflect on the glass of the darkened store. He switches them off, then the motor. They sit for a moment. A great joy, a sense of completion comes over him. They gather all her things, and he carries them upstairs. He’s anxious to leave her. He’s tired of having to be with her all the time.

I find him lying on the bed in blue canvas shoes. His hands are folded behind his head. The radio is playing. It feels good to be back, he tells me. It really does.

He looks black as an Egyptian. When he smiles his teeth seem to leap out of his sunburned face. We swim in a faint aroma, a bouquet of music as he talks.

“Well, where did you go?”

“Everywhere,” he says. “Angers. Orléans. Perros-Guirec. We really drove.”

“Was it nice?”

“It’s a beautiful country,” he says quietly. He begins to tell me about it, the sea with its rocks, the old hotel. He describes the Loire, the haunted evening in Bagnoles. He is talking almost compulsively. All the details come forth, descriptions, feelings, smells. He falls silent, gathers things, goes on. Somehow I have the impression that he is laying it all before me, the essence of this glorious life he has spent in France. He is setting the past in order. There are certain things which should be confessed, and he knows I am interested. Nothing he says is exceptional, but I recognize the events. I understand everything we are not saying.

“How’s Anne-Marie?”

“She’s as tan as I am. You ought to see her,” he says. “She looks great.”

“You’re the color of teak.”

“We had beautiful weather,” he says. “Almost every day. And we ate. We sat at the table like an old French couple, you know, just eating. And we made love every night. But the sun, you really can’t believe what good sun we had.”

He pulls his shirt out to show me the line. He grins. He is invincible. It’s like a game of chess in which his pieces continually overpower me, but we have long ceased to contest.

He begins to wander around the room while he talks. His clothing is scattered everywhere. He goes into the bathroom and discovers some lotion which he slowly rubs into his face, especially around his mouth. He lies down again. That lean face, dark as a farm boy’s. It has an edge to it. The bones seem able to cut right through me. He gets up again and begins to look through his suitcase. There’s an apple among his clothes. He offers me half.

“No, thanks. Didn’t you eat?”

“No. Just lunch.”

He lies supine, the pillow doubled beneath his neck. I listen to the moist explosion of his teeth in the hard flesh.

“I’m too tired to eat,” he says.

“Come on. I haven’t had anything.”

“I’m really not hungry,” he says.

He picks around the core, getting the last flecks with little incisions of his teeth. When he finishes, he lays it on a magazine. He stares at the ceiling.

“I may be leaving,” he says.

An enormous silence which I am finally obliged to break.

“Oh, really?”

“I think so.”

“Where will you be going?”

“America,” he says. “Home.”

“I see. Alone?”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “I mean, I’m coming back.”

“I see.”

I can’t think of what to say.

“Well…” I begin.

“You know, I just have to go home for a while. I don’t have any money. I’ve been hanging on ever since last fall, and I can’t any more. You get to the point where you just can’t. So I have to go back and…” he sighs, “…talk to my father. Well, more than that. I have to organize myself a little. I’ve even been thinking about going back to school.”

“Back to Yale?”

“Oh, I couldn’t get back in. Some smaller college. NYU maybe.”

“Smaller?”

“Well, I didn’t mean it that way,” he says. “I really haven’t thought about where.”

“No.”

Then, as if commenting, he allows himself the briefest of laughs.

“The only thing is,” he says, “uh, I’m a little short of money.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t have quite enough for the ticket.” He pauses. “So, I was wondering…”

“How much would it be?” I ask.

“I’d leave you the car, you know, if anything happened …”

“The car? But it’s not your car,”

“Yes, it is,” he says.

“I thought it belonged to some friend.”

“No, no, he gave it to me. I can even get a letter from him if I have to.”

I know it’s not true. He’s simply out of money, like a gambler, and he must be supplied. I hurriedly try to think of a phrase to help me refuse him, but I can’t. If I were to deny him … anyway, it wouldn’t make that much difference. He would go on. Besides, I cannot make such a decision. He isn’t subject to judgments of mine—and I have the money.

“I need about three hundred dollars,” he says.

“Three hundred.”

“Can you let me have that much? I mean, against the Delage, of course.”

“Well… Yes, I guess so.”

“Oh,” he says, his head falls back, “listen, you’re a great guy.”

Yes, and I find myself believing it even though I am helping prepare his escape. The act is somehow criminal. It is something I will be ashamed of later. I am only exchanging his disgust for my own.

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I honestly don’t. Not long. Maybe a month or so, I’m not sure.”

“Well, if you really go back to school…”

“That’s right, it would be much longer. Of course, that’s only a possibility.”

“…you wouldn’t be back.”

“Oh, don’t worry. If that happens, I’ll send you the money. I mean, I can get it easily enough. Even if I had to take it out of tuition or something. It wouldn’t make any difference.”

“I’m not worried. It’s not that. The whole thing surprises me, that’s all.”

“You thought I was getting married,” he says.

“No.”

“I might.”

“Really?”

“I’ve thought about it,” he says.

“I suppose so.”

He jumps up. The promise of money has given him an appetite. We go down towards the Champ, walking along the blank streets. Autun is silent, but it sleeps like an ancient woman. It hears every scrap of sound without even waking. It is ageless. It can see in the dark.

Buried among other buildings deep in the town—there are alleys one can pass by, cats know the way—above the level of trees and black foliage, the mysterious fragrance, the movement of branches, in a room filled with this same cool air of evening she lies asleep, her pale arms fallen, her lips apart. The varnished, orange doors of the armoire are closed, and a towel is hung, unfolded, by the sink. Her toothbrush—my finger dares to touch it lightly—is no longer damp. On the floor clothes are dropped. I can see her shoes, her limp stockings. Finally I glance at her, and the blood drops out of my heart; her eyes are not shut. She is staring at me. The pure, young white of her eyes, that blue white—I am found by it.

I even have a premonition that we are going to meet her as we walk down for a sandwich. It frightens me. I’m sure she could read what we have done in my face. I am ready to confess it all, I haven’t the slightest instinct to escape or he, but Dean, ah, he would greet her with a smile. The whole difference lies in that. I am not strong enough to love her. One must be selfish.

Watching him eat, I am plagued by this. Gradually I sink into a fine, a delicate hatred. I no longer hear what he says. I am only conscious of my own thoughts and the sound of his teeth chewing bread. He reeks of assurance. We are all at his mercy. We are subject to his friendship, his love. It is the principles of his world to which we respond, which we seek to find in ourselves. It is his power which I cannot even identify, which is flickering, sometimes present and sometimes not—without it he is empty, a body without breath, as ordinary as my own reflection in the mirror—it is this power which guarantees his existence, even afterwards, even when he is gone.

HE WILL RETURN FOR her. Silence. She looks at him. Then a single word,

“Non.”

“Yes.”

“Non,” she says flatly.

Well, then, he can’t explain it, he says. If she’s going to insist that she knows … She sits watching him, her mouth drawn down, her eyes suspicious. He will send for her, he says.

“When?”

“I don’t know exactly. I have to get the fare.”

“What?”

“The fare. The money for the ticket.”

A quick, bitter shrug.

“Will you just listen?” he says.

She says nothing.

“I don’t have it right now,” he explains.

Her face seems softer, but there is no understanding in it, or at least no agreement. She looks at the floor.

“Listen, I swear to you,” he says. He raises his hand.

She glances up.

“Really,” he says.

“On the head of your mother?”

“Yes.”

She motions with her chin.

“What?”

“Say it,” she says.

“On the head of my mother.”

She sighs. He is sitting beside her on the bed. He lies back and begins to talk of what it will be like. At first she resists, but then he can tell from the way the sound of his voice vanishes, from her very stillness, that she is listening. They will go all over the city, he will show her every part of it. They will walk the great avenues, look in all the stores. Saturday night they stay out very late and go dancing. She has only two kinds of clothes: slacks and a pull to five in—corduroys for him—and one marvelous dress to go out in. Two, he corrects, one for the afternoon, another for evening. And he has a single, fine suit, very dark, grey, black maybe. A bed. A table. A few chairs. Their windows look out on a bridge.