James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime

Her divorce was very expensive, she told me. I noticed the mole painted on her cheekbone. It cost four hundred dollars, she said, and her husband four hundred, too, and besides that, she had to give him almost all the furniture, this vanished husband who was an eyeglasses salesman and had to travel a lot. She makes a little gesture of resignation.

Her daughter sits beside her, attentive, composed. She’s eight years old and already as marvelously slow of movement as her mother. Quite a pretty child. She eats with a fork that is too big for her. She glances up at Claude from time to time.

Dean has a healthy appetite, but after the second glass of wine there’s a tendency for things to fall from his fork. He casually eats them right from the tablecloth. We’re having quenelles made from river pike, quenelles de brochet. He keeps asking me what they’re called.

His French is better already. Of course, the waiter pretends not to understand him. Dean doesn’t care.

“They’re all like that,” he says. “Quenelles. Is that right? What did you tell me?”

Long, unhurried hours of evening, the car parked outside where light from the entrance falls on it, people pausing to look, the winter coming on. Plates being silently removed, the taste of foods lingering. The immortal procession of a French meal. We’ve finished the wine. Dean is pouring Perrier water into his glass. He’s thirsty as a horse, he says.

“They always tell you drink wine to be safe.”

“Yes, but I drink the water.”

“Everywhere, so do I,” he says. “You know where the cleanest water in the world is?”

“No.”

“The Yale swimming pool,” he says. His voice is fading. “Anyway, that’s what they always told us.”

“When did you get out of Yale?”

“I didn’t,” he says. “I quit.”

“Oh.”

He describes it casually, without stooping to explain, but the authority of the act overwhelms me. If I had been an underclassman he would have become my hero, the rebel who, if I had only had the courage, I might have also become. Instead I did everything properly. I had good marks. I took care of my books. My clothes were right. Now, looking at him, I am convinced of all I missed. I am envious. Somehow his life seems more truthful than mine, stronger, even able to draw mine to it like the pull of a dark star.

He quit. It was too easy for him, his sister told me, and so he refused it. He had always been extraordinary in math. He had a scholarship. He knew he was exceptional. Once he took the anthropology final when he hadn’t taken the course. He wrote that at the top of the page. His paper was so brilliant the professor fell in love with him. Dean was disappointed, of course. It only proved how ridiculous everything was. He’d already been given a leave in his freshman year, now he took another. He went to see a psychiatrist. He lived with various friends in New York and began to develop a style. It lasted a whole year, but the university was very understanding. Finally he went back and did another year, but in the end he quit altogether. Then he began educating himself.

DEAN AT THE WASHBASIN, shaving. Standing there half-naked, he seems very thin. He has bony shoulders. I am trying to create details. Narrow, white feet. I am trying to make him real, the darling of his father’s friends. He visited their houses. He drove their cars.

The bathroom is enormous with a window crossed by low shelves bearing Cristina’s bottles, many of them filled with color, bath salts, toilet water, apothecary jars. The razor scrapes like a barber’s, short, even strokes and then a pause. He cleans it with occasional bursts of water. His beard isn’t heavy. It’s mostly around his chin. In the outer room, fully dressed, I sit waiting. He inspects himself hastily in the mirror.

“You ready?” he asks innocently.

Those first, early weeks with the cold skies of Europe covering them, weeks that seem now never to have been, that later events washed out of existence, almost out of memory. In October we went—I am taking these from a list—to Châlons-sur-Seine, to Beaune, Dijon (three times), and even to Nancy.

Over the crown of western hills we sail beneath a brilliant sky of clouds shot through with sunlight and begin the descent to town, the road cutting back and forth in deep, blind turns. And then those great, lineal runs through neighborhoods I knew nothing of, making straight for the perfect square which marked the city like a signet. Nancy. How could I know? Streets that later would become as sacred to me as those of my childhood. Boulevard Georges Clemenceau. We pass it and are gone.

It’s Saturday. The streets are crowded. Men are roasting chestnuts on the corners. We sit near the window of the Café du Commerce. Four in the afternoon. The blue sky of France flooding with clouds. The last of the year upon us, the cold coming on—one can feel it every day. Dean is studying the guidebook. I stare out the window. Around the square cars turn, slow as oxen. Occasionally a Jaguar or Mercedes goes past, one of those great, ghosting machines and sometimes a lovely face inside. The shops are jammed with shoes, gold ornaments, suedes, beautiful cheeses.

I see it at dawn now, when the light is chalky and then the palest blue. The streets are absolutely still. The huge portes are silent—Place Carnot, its long regiment of trees. I wander this city like a somnambulist. The blue cigarette smoke is rising, the odor of reminiscences, in the Bar de la Division de Fer. Avenue du XXme Corps. The veterans sit hunched in their sweaters, their blue suit-coats, surrounded by the relics of a glory now spent, gone to rust, the white hand of mould staining it, the smell of dampness. Dawn comes in the flat windows of the cafés. They walk home alone, along the canal, their shoes scuffing the grey sidewalk.

Autumn nights. We stroll in the early darkness, deciding where to eat, and start for home in the first flurries of snow, bundled up and breathing vapor in the old Delage. The heater is still no good. Snow is streaming into the headlights, pouring against us, exploding on the glass. The gear box is grinding away. Taking a curve, we begin to snake wildly.

“Oh, watch it, Dean,” he says.

Across the road a river of snow is flowing, spilling sideways, shifting, rushing away. We begin to drive slower. The snow beats white against us, making no sound. We are lost in a whirling whiteness, in the rich voice of the car.

“Did you see that sign? What did it say?”

“Langres, I think.”

“Langres,” he says.

“Yes. We’re on the right road.”

It takes hours. After a while, there’s no other traffic. We’re sailing along roads as deserted as the steppes. The villages are dark.

When we finally arrive, we stop in at the Foy. It’s nice to enter, to be inside. The wood of the floor feels good. We sit down in one of the booths. There are some couples scattered around. It’s all very cosy. The waitress brings us tea. She’s a girl from the country who works here on weekends, I’ve seen her before. She wears a turtleneck sweater, black skirt, a leather belt cinched tightly around her waist dividing her into two erotic zones. Behind the bar the radio is going softly. Outside, the snow is falling, covering the car like the statue of a hero, filling the tracks that lead to where it is parked. Dean watches as she removes the things from her tray and sets them on the table: cups, saucers, the silver pot. His eyes follow her as she walks away.

“She likes you,” I tell him.

His gaze jumps to me, hesitates.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can tell,” I say.

He looks at me and then glances at her. She’s leaning against the bar, paying no attention. Dean smiles then, tired and lonely.

“That’s right,” I tell him.

“I know. She’s been dreaming about me for weeks,” he says.

MADAME JOB, PASSIONATELY THIN, bony as a boy, thinks he looks like an actor: Eddie Constantine. When I tell Dean this, he says,

“Who?”

I explain that it’s somebody who appears in cheap films.

“I’ve never heard of him,” he says.

“You’ll see him. I don’t think you look like him, but anyway…”

“It’s wild,” he says.

Madame Job is smiling. She doesn’t speak any English. She follows the conversation from mouth to mouth, like a dog.

The room has a bare, modern look. Somehow inexpensive, too. Rugs are scattered over a floor of polished wood. There are a few magazines on a table. The furniture almost seems to be there on loan. I don’t know if there’s a reason. Henri Job works at the glove factory. He’s a manager, quite important. Billy wrote a letter to him for me. When I called, they were very friendly. Of course, this isn’t his house, it belongs to her father. It’s just next door to her father’s house in fact—not an unusual situation.

Henri doesn’t come from here. He’s from Lyon. Ah, that second greatest city of France, beside its wide river. He holds this over her like a title. Her father has done very well in chauffage—he has the biggest shop in town—but, after all, Lyon. One can see it all in her face. Besides that, he’s quite strict. He doesn’t permit her to dance, a thing she loves madly she confided to me. It’s he who has the bad heart, but nevertheless…

A bitter, foggy week in November. We drove along the Boulevard Mazagran without seeing another pair of headlights. The lime trees were black as iron in the dark. We turned off on the street where the Jobs live in a newer section of town. Blank walls. Everything looks abandoned, even the cars parked along the curb. I’ve already warned Dean that the evening will probably be boring. Many of the houses along here are recent. It’s like a new planting, they simply haven’t become anything yet. There are embarrassing spaces between them, bare trees.