Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(29)

So it is with women. The millennia have created them and certain things are known to them instinctively, by reflex, as it were.

A woman, as the Russian proverb goes, is a complete civilization. Men may aspire to this but generally things come to them more slowly. Think of it as two long lines, one male and one female, placed side by side according to the degree of being civilized. The males will be opposite females much younger. In short, at the same age they are less far along. Their manners are unsettled and their speech artless. They may be kept for drinking at a future date but they require aging.

This is something women are always concerned with, the maturing, or let us say the perfection, of men. It should come as no surprise that in certain cases they may choose a wine that is ready to enjoy rather than one that must be laid down for five or ten years.

Men, on the other hand, are in the opposite position. As the Abbe de Brantome noted in his gallant tales, there is wood like ash and young elm that burns quite green and quickly, and there are others that will burn only with terrible difficulty. So it is, he observed, with girls and women: “Some, as soon as they are nicely green, mere saplings, ignite easily and burn so briskly that one would think they had imbibed love’s heat and whorishness while still in their mothers’ wombs,” to such a point, he added, that they do not even wait until maturity to begin lovemaking. They are the tinder to which men supply the match. The French, expert in this as in other things, have a rule of thumb regarding the proper difference in age for couples: the woman’s age should be one half that of the man’s plus seven years. At first this yields nothing remarkable—a boy of twenty and a sweetheart seventeen—but it becomes a man of thirty and a woman twenty-two, a man of forty and a woman twenty-seven. The real intent may be to assure there can be children, but the formula has an appeal of its own.

I have never become cynical about them, Raymond Chandler wrote, “never ceased to respect them, never for a moment failed to realize that they face hazards in life which a man does not face, and therefore should be given a special tenderness and consideration.” Though Chandler is a handful of generations back and died before the last of the statues in the temple were smashed, his words strike a chord. Women have a harder duty in this world. They have been given their beauty in recompense. Beauty in its brevity.

Isn’t this the message of so many things, the ballet for instance, with its perfect grace? The dedication and labor of the dancers rewards them with an aura. Pliant and slender, they were made to be adored, but one cannot really—not ever—know them, for they are not what they seem—when the lights go down their reality disappears. As dancers and women they belong to that order which is the greatest of all, of things truly unpossessable.

Out on the field in the cold sunshine the soccer teams are playing, girls in shorts and numbered white shirts, shrill shouting and coltish legs. On the sidelines you have a chance to talk to your daughter’s roommate for the first time. Her name is Avril. Long blond hair, fine brows. On her radiant jaw the light picks up a faint youthful down. She wears jeans and boots with high heels although she’s already quite tall. She hasn’t gone out for the team, she hasn’t really gotten into anything, she admits. She hates the school, she suddenly says, looking out at the field, they have such senseless, stupid rules. It’s something about a weekend and signing back in, but she doesn’t really explain, she is already running awkwardly onto the field, the game is over and a loose huddle of sixteen-year-olds are shouting, “Ice-cold beer, makes you want to cheer! Ice-cold gin, makes you want to sin! Ice-cold duck . . .”

If it were not for the idiotic rules, and perhaps in spite of rules, Avril, not a day older, might be imagined in the etchings of Picasso’s Vollard Suite, idyllic drawings with an irresistible purity of line. The bearded sculptor, his forehead barely creased, relaxes with his naked young model in bed or on a couch, fulfilled by her but not ardent, distracted in fact, in a kind of vague equilibrium with the joys of this earth—to paraphrase Kazantzakis—women, art, ideas. It is a depiction of immortality and the spareness of the furnishings essential for it.

Picasso’s life itself might serve as an illustration. He is that sculptor, of course, and a large portion of his work is of one or another of the women in his life, all of whom were younger. Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was his mistress and bore him a child, was seventeen when they met; he was forty-six. Fran?oise Gilot was twenty-one and Picasso was over sixty. The first, fatal interviews. Why not? He was rich, both in money and—more seductive—fame, probably the richest painter who ever lived. His pictures, masculine, frank, would be a logical target of feminism were it not for their greatness. Picasso, in fact, stands in the path of new ideas and relationships. The order he represents and is inseparable from is as archaic as the gender pronouns in the Bible. Why, for instance, didn’t he paint women his own age? Why didn’t Leonardo, why didn’t Gauguin or Matisse? After all, there are women who cannot easily be imitated, who come down in the morning with a sly smile and ease, hair loose, face purified by sleep, needing coffee and talk. They have been in hotels, houses, countries, and risen from many forgotten nights; not all of them are interested in money or weary of men.

The floor bare, music blaring. Aerobics. The class is in three ranks, an ordinary class, salesgirls, housewives, the man who works in the auto parts store: common clay. Amid them, one long-nosed girl with a strong back, shapely legs: the sole swan. She’s wearing white shorts, a green tank top over a white T-shirt. There’s a slight tense sinew up where her legs join, the apex. Kick, kick, kick, higher, higher. Her movements are youthful, ecstatic, hands thrown out loosely as her leg sweeps free, fine hair leaping. From time to time she looks back and smiles at a dumpy woman behind her, her mother. During the last half of the class she rolls her T-shirt sleeves above the shoulder like an Oklahoma boy and looks down admiringly at her slender arms. What joy there is in her! The girlfriend by her side is of a separate species.