Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(28)
The attraction to men of young women cannot be marked down solely under the heading of education, of course. Many other things are involved, including the imbalance. Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality, and one of the imperishable visions of it is of life among a burnished, graceful people not as advanced as we—among them are to be found servants with whom, as with slaves in the Koran, pleasure is permitted for those so disposed, the pleasure that simplifies everything: Tahiti, 1880; Bali, 1910; Mexico, 1930; Bangkok, 1950. . . .
Well, all that is struck down. It is part of the darkness of colonialism and perhaps racism. If you care to include it, there is sexism, too. Men’s dream and ambition is to have women, as a cat’s is to catch birds, but this is something that must be restrained. The slightest understanding of things shows that men will take what they are not prevented from taking, and all the force of society must be set against this impulse.
Not long ago I watched an instance of this—they are, after all, countless. It was at a wedding reception in Paris, in one of those apartments that are obtained only through inheritance: huge windows, silk on the walls, rooms and salons tumbling into one another, women in large hats, champagne. In the crowd the groom’s niece, fifteen years old with a lovely broad face that seemed to hold nothing but purity, was boxed in against the wall by a wild Englishman of forty, heavy, with florid cheeks and curly black hair, who was talking to her passionately and without pause.
“We have to get him away from her,” I heard a woman remark nervously, “he’s mad as a hatter.”
Mad, perhaps, but a member of the wedding party, and among the wives and divorcees he had found something more thrilling. The stitching had given way under one arm of his coat and he was telling her in inspired language of . . . who knows what? No one had ever paid her this kind of attention before, no adult. If he had just a day and a night, he was thinking feverishly, even only a night. If she drank just one more glass of dizzying champagne. . . .
My God, how awful! one thinks fearfully. But he will be dead in ten years most likely, from drink or a car accident, and everything he knew, the poems of Cavafy, the gossip of famous names, the best years for Pauillac, great music, restaurants in Lucca, all of it gone along with the books, pictures, and expensive suits, gone except for the things she remembers, and that is a lot. She will be only in her mid-twenties then with not a wrinkle or scar, not much taken from her and a great deal given, and perhaps she will come once, years later when she is older and has children, to visit the grave. Perhaps she will still have the note he left, the lines like those last few written by the heartsick narrator of Lolita telling her to be true to her husband, “. . . do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy.”
Alix came in in the evening, tall and smiling though she was tired. She had just finished work—she was housekeeping for the summer for someone who had rented a big place near Chilton. She did everything, took care of the cleaning, cooked—she hadn’t known how to boil an egg but after a month she was doing dinners for twelve with fresh asparagus.
“What’s so hard about cooking asparagus?”
“The sauce,” she said airily.
She was a senior at Radcliffe. Her father was a lawyer. She had a brother who was at Duke. She’d come to the Vineyard to get away from Boston and also her boyfriend, Gordon. He was an investment banker and avid sailor. Also a model. “You can see what an identity crisis he has.”
He called her all the time. “He called me tonight, in fact. He’s still in love with me. He wants me to marry him. I’m not about to marry him, he’s much too old. He’s thirty-nine.” She pushed back her hair and went on. “He’s great, but he always takes things a little too far you know? He goes just a little past where he should. He has one drink too many, he wants to go to just one more place, he looks at some other woman just a little too long . . .
“I remember he gave this big party, I mean all his friends. I wasn’t nervous, men never make me nervous. I felt totally secure. It was my house, I was totally at ease. I was wearing this great dress cut down to here. Believe me, they noticed.” Her breast touched one’s arm as she talked. That was the thing, her body belonged to both of you, as if you were teammates, parts of it brushing you from time to time. “Everybody was there and of course he had to invite his ex-girlfriend Sharon. You can imagine why. Anyway, it got late and there were four of us sitting there, Gordon and me and Sharon and her date, and it was like a contest who was going to go to bed first? Finally Sharon’s date left and there were just the three of us. The two of them were whispering and finally Gordon said, ‘Look, Alix, why don’t you go up and go to bed? I’m going to talk to Sharon for a while; she has some problems she wants to talk about.’
“So I went up and took off my clothes and put on a real sexy nightgown. After a while I went to the head of the stairs and called. I waited until he came to the bottom of the stairs and could see me, you know, and I said, ‘Don’t forget to put out the cat, will you?’
“He was great but you had to watch him all the time.”
The thing that aristocrats have is the sum of their breeding, going back for centuries, so that what might be called random behavior is minimal in them. You can learn how, let us say, to put on a pair of gloves so that you can fool almost anybody, but how is one to learn acts that are wholly unrehearsed? It can’t be done; you have to have the code, passed down through countless unions.