James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime

In the middle of the afternoon there is a call from Paris. It’s Dean. The connection is poor—his voice sounds very shrill.

“How’s Paris?”

“God, it’s crowded,” he says. “There are a million tourists here.”

“Really?”

“You ought to see the cars.”

“Did they have your reservation all right?”

“Yes,” he says, “everything is fine. I’m leaving at seven-thirty. They took me for a Frenchman, what a great feeling. I think it’s because I’m wearing my black shirt. Well, maybe it’s because it’s a little dirty…”

“It’s your haircut.”

“You’re right. Listen, thanks for everything. I miss it down there already. I’ll write a long letter.”

“Fine.”

The evening is calm and clear. I am having dinner at the Jobs’. I leave the house about seven. There’s plenty of time. The streets seem strangely quiet, perhaps I am no longer listening. Place du Carrouge. I cross the far side, glancing up. Her shutters are closed. I cannot tell if she is there. She will go home on the weekends now, I know, walking from the station in the dusk, the bicycles weaving past her, the voices soft. She shifts the suitcase from one hand to the other, her walk is a little uneven because of it, almost clumsy. She’s wearing high heels. It takes her almost half an hour, the last part along the bank. The water in the canal lies flat. The light is going. Swallows are cutting across the fields in the dark. Madame Job, her face like an elbow, meets me at the door.

Before he boarded, the sun was already low at Orly. Almost no wind. A vast, malicious calm. In the distance, blue as winter, the dim roofs of the city. Smoke. The east growing dark. Aboard the plane all is brilliance. Dean sits at the window as they move, in the stillness of evening, towards the runway, the great tires bumping over the concrete joints. The seat-belt signs are lighted. The NO SMOKING is on. All of a sudden my imagination begins to panic, to rush from one thing to another. I have followed him so long I am sensitive to dangers. They turn smoothly into the direction for takeoff. All the perfect machinery of flight is beginning its motion. The huge, graceful wings are quivering. The engines roar. And now, at the last moment, it begins to move, slowly, with a majesty I cannot bear, for a long time seeming to go no faster until suddenly it is racing past, raising, clearing the ground. It climbs steeply. The soft darkness of the summer sky receives it. The lights grow fainter, the sound, and finally all of France, invisible now, silent, the France of all seasons deep in the silence of night, is left behind.

WE MEET IN THE Café Foy. It’s like an empty railroad car with its bleak line of booths, its tables in the rear. The light of late afternoon fills it, the provincial calm. The patron is playing dominoes with a friend.

All alone, the day behind her, she walks back to where I am sitting and mechanically extends her hand. A single, downward shake which we are embarrassed by.

“Bonjour,” she says quietly.

“Bonjour.”

She sits with her eyes lowered, the bare table between us. It seems that the day is very white at the doorway, the white of clouded water. The traffic moves by without noise.

Dean was killed in a motor accident on the twelfth of June. There are only a few details. It was raining. It was at night. He was on his way to the country to visit his sister. Splinters of glass strewn everywhere, the rain thudding down. In each direction, waiting to pass, the line of cars, their headlights crowded, long lines, slow-moving like part of a great cortege. I could not believe the news. It seemed impossible, it seemed false, even if I’d expected it all along.

I feel I am looking at her endlessly before we speak—I am able to do it without her even noticing—and I see, as if nothing more had ever happened, the same girl who sat across the table at the Etoile d’Or, because suddenly she is the same, pale, uncertain, somehow resigned. It’s exactly as if we are meeting for the first time. I can’t think of what to say. It’s hopeless. I simply don’t know. Across from me is an ordinary girl, good-looking, not too intelligent perhaps. The silence begins to consume us. We sit in the narrow, empty room. I am facing the window, she the rear. I take her hand. As soon as I touch it, her eyes fill. She begins to cry. I look down. She knew it, she says. When she speaks the tears run down her face. She lets them. We sit without talking.

“Anne-Marie,” I say, “what will you do? Will you stay in town here?”

She shrugs.

“I don’t know,” she murmurs.

“Perhaps it would be better if you went home.”

“No,” she says.

“I see. Are you sure?”

She nods.

“Well… you know, I’m going to be leaving, myself. I thought you might not want to stay here, and if you needed help going somewhere else, well, I’d be very happy to…do whatever I can. I mean, if you needed money…”

She seems not to be listening. Merci, she says.

It’s very difficult. After a while I try to begin again. I ask about having dinner. She appears to consider it and finally shakes her head, no. I wait for her to talk about him, about herself, anything, but it never comes. The tears have stained her cheeks. She doesn’t wipe them away. And it’s here, in the Foy, that we say goodbye and then walk together to the door. Outside, the street is filled with shoppers. The cars are barely able to pass through. I watch her cross; she moves by people, not touching them, walking rather fast.

Perhaps—she is capable of this, I know—she will appear in the evening after all, down at the gare, coming along the wide street alone, descending, as if merely on a stroll. For in Dean’s life, if there were such a thing, she would come wherever he asked, no matter how far. She would not hesitate. She would arrive to meet him, I know exactly what she would do, how generous she would be, how natural. And how sweet their first exchanges in the language that she taught him.

MANY FRAGMENTS COME TO me, are discovered, reappear. I wander about the room picking up or remembering things which are narcotic, which induce me to dream—the details, the relics of love, suffused with an aching beauty. In the back of a drawer I find the lost portion of the list they made in Nancy, names of hotels. It fits the other piece exactly. On it, the curious, dead words: Obelisk. Suez. Tous les Oiseaux du Monde. There is just one in her writing: Ritz.

The sunlight of that icy morning falls on my face through enormous windows, through flats of glass with tiny flaws, purified by bitter, Sunday silence. The smoke floats blue in the cheap bars at dawn. The veterans cough. Nancy, where she was born, where she learned to write in that young, undistinguished hand:

I receive a letter from his father, sent on to me in Paris, asking me to forward the personal effects. Cristina will take care of that, she says. I assure her there isn’t much. As for the car, it’s a curious thing—it’s registered in the name of Pritchard, 16 bis rue Jadin, and they know him. He’s off in Greece for the summer, they think, but they’ll handle that, too. Perhaps. It’s parked under the trees near the house and locked, but like a very old man fading, it has already begun to crumble before one’s eyes. The tires seem smooth. There are leaves fallen on the hood, the whitened roof. Around the wheels one can detect the first, faint discoloring of chrome. The leather inside, seen through windows which are themselves streaked blue, is dry and cracked. There it sits, this stilled machine, the electric clock on the dash ticking unheard, slowly draining the last of life. And one day the clock is wrong. The hands are frozen. It is ended.

Silence. A silence which comes over my life as well, I am not unwilling to express it. It is not the great squares of Europe that seem desolate to me, but the myriad small towns closed tight against the traveler, towns as still as the countryside itself. The shutters of the houses are all drawn. Only occasionally can one see the slimmest leak of light. The fields are becoming dark, the swallows shooting across them. I drive through these towns quickly. I am out of them before evening, before the neon of the cinemas comes on, before the lonely meals. I never spend the night.

But of course, in one sense, Dean never died—his existence is superior to such accidents. One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten—one hears of them no more.

As for Anne-Marie, she lives in Troyes now, or did. She is married. I suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.

James Salter (b. 1925) is a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, best known for his critically acclaimed classic novels A Sport and a Pastime (1967) and Light Years (1976). Though his earliest novels centered on life in the military, Salter’s subject matter has been diverse, and his potent, lyrical prose has earned him praise from critics, readers, and fellow novelists.