Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(30)
In the sit-ups she struggles, can’t do them, and finally gives up and lies helpless, lanky calves flat on the floor. One wants to seize and embrace her, the life, the aimless perfection! Her name is scribbled on the roster beneath her mother’s: Chris.
This glimpse of the divine standing dampened in the entry to an empty gym, skin glowing, pulse still a fraction high returning slowly to normal and making one think of the dreamlike descent from other heights. Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae, the poet says: I feel again a spark of that ancient flame. You cannot take your eyes from her. It will be such a long time before she becomes her mother, perhaps never.
In Thailand mistresses are an accepted part of the society, often a mark of riches. They are called small wives and their children bear no stigma, any more than those of French kings. But this is not Thailand and Chris and her retinue have walked out the door. It was fantasy, though others are not: high heels, black stockings, tight little skirt, a young woman and all the pleasure she brings. I have had two friends, both Yale men as it happens, who told me that they had never deceived their wives. I know a famous movie director, often married, who says the same thing. From time to time I think about this, especially since one of the Yale men also claimed he had never once in his life told a lie—of course, in his case an important motive had been removed. I am not praising faithlessness—that is too dangerous—only reflecting that these men seem less interesting, like those who don’t drink. Certain faults, if you can call them that, make men intriguing, just as certain flaws make a more beautiful face. In any case, rules are only rules. We live in society but also in zoology. We will never escape that, and if we do, hope of salvation is gone.
There are complications, however, and the uncertainty of what to do about them. In the office, for instance. The end of the day, streets dark with people. The girl who works on the floor below. She comes in out of the cold with a smile, face flushed, and in the intimacy of the crowded bar says, “Hello, darling,” and without a pause, “I love you. I’m so glad I met you.” Her smooth skin, her legs, her apartment with its cat. The exhilaration, the thrilling nights without care. On the one side there exists a perfectly decent domestic life. On the other, the forbidden and inexpressibly sweet. The real temptation is not pleasure but the idea of capturing it, of abandoning everything and starting again.
There are advantages in being a man. In Lysistrata, with its sexual boycott more severe than any since, the women are credited with all the determination and most of the intelligence, but as the heroine herself says, when a soldier returns from the war, even though he has white hair he can quickly find a wife. With women it is different, she declares, women have but one summer.
I heard this same observation made by a European woman I know whose second husband had died. She was past the age of childbearing and though she had lost none of her charm, a woman of fifty, unlike a man, was used up, she commented, whereas a man that age could go out and begin again. It was perhaps unfair, but that was the way it was. I don’t mean to heavy-handedly connect Aristophanes to a restaurant in Basel but merely to note the obvious at each end of a two-thousand-year span.
So he marries, not the wife of his youth, then, but someone who comes along later, the stunning ex-student or assistant or even the daughter of a friend. She is a potent object, this new wife, the dreams she excites in others, the envy, the unexpected things she can say, none of them familiar, none of the wearisome stories about house and children. The cities they will conquer together, the journeys, the sacred mornings! The glory of walking in with a young woman—power over her may wane, but the power of her, never. She is a pardon, a second chance. This time there is everything: happiness, reason, money enough. The years, not treating them equally, roll by. In the end the inevitable happens and he, unfortunately grown old, one day falters and drops in the traces. He dies. There are the photos on the piano, all in handsome frames, which the two ravishing children still in school identify: Daddy and Mommy before they got married, Daddy in his uniform—don’t know where that was, the four of us at the lake, Daddy before he got sick . . .
There remains of the vanished father and the memories surrounding him something romantic, even exalted. Things that are gone acquire this patina, people, decades, cars. His white suit will always be white, his lined face kind and unaging. He will never become cranky, wear pants with baggy seats, or in any way diminish their love for him. And widowhood, for her, is not uncomfortable. There is the house, money, the children, and something she always had little of, time to spend by herself. It’s a welcome thing and there are always friends.
She is still undeniably young, the house is a wonderful one, would she—this is a funny question—would she rather have married a younger man? the interviewer asks.
The shadow of something like reflection crosses her face and she shakes her head. “But I wouldn’t mind one now,” she says.
Esquire
March 1992
Karyl and Me
We first met—that’s not the right word, I first became aware of her spectacular existence—at a seminar on film in Aspen in the late 1960s. She was sitting in an upper row, stunning face with high cheekbones, dark hair, rapt expression, and I was more aware of her than of anything of supposed importance that was being said. I didn’t know who she was or anything about her, and it’s been so long now that I don’t remember how it happened that we first spoke or how I learned everything.