Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(70)

Lunch is classic, gigot and green beans, preceded by a crab and avocado salad, and with the main course, roast potatoes. The grownups are drinking wine at one end of the table and the children are at the other, talking and eating with forks too big for their hands. One of them is my son, born in Paris and now back in France on a visit—the first of many, I hope. He’s three years old. The remark is made that the sweetest thing about them at this age is the way they love their mothers.

“They all love their mothers.”

“Ah, non!” Isabel cries. Not her husband. His only memories of his mother are of the perfume she wore and the soft touch of her gloved hand on his cheek when she came home in the evening. “The love you receive as a child,” Isabel says, “is like a bank—you give it to others later.”

A tingle of anticipation goes through me as when the horses begin to line up in the starting gate. I feel we may be approaching one of the three taboo subjects and am eager to hear it talked about in the French way, perhaps in the way that the actress friend of Isabel’s with the high cheekbones and great eyes that have stunned audience after audience would do it, an actress who lives nearby but who is at the moment on vacation and doesn’t want to do anything, such as come to lunch and talk about love. I would give anything to hear her on the subject, and you might too, but we somehow end up instead talking about the sex life, more or less, of Isabel’s father who is eighty-four and has just remarried. She’s very unhappy about it. Her mother—his first wife—had died not that long ago.

“How long?”

“Four years.”

“And it’s the unseemly haste?”

“No, no not that,” Isabel says, “but this wife is his age. What is the sense of that? He should have married someone young—that would be rigolo, at least.”

The French like the word rigolo, which means funny or comic. Something or someone is tres rigolo. The groundskeeper of a friend of mine who has a large place in the Dordogne fell out of a boat in the middle of a pond—he was almost certainly not sober—and the owner fell in trying to rescue him. The groundskeeper liked to tell the story. He described the owner as tres rigolo.

We had some friends in another part of France, not far from Bergerac—Paul and Monique. A cosmopolitan couple, he was a former builder around Paris and she’d gone to college in California. Paul does a lot of the cooking—in my experience, all of it—and the meals are not tentative: roasts, baked fish, vegetable dishes of the region, handsome desserts, and he sits down at the table with the aplomb and apparent anticipation of a man in a new restaurant. One Sunday when we were there, the guests also included a French psychiatrist and his wife who lived in the vicinity. His wife had the sort of looks that roused my hopes. She could have stepped out of the pages of Laclos, poised, knowing, with, I understood immediately, the capacity to be entertained—there was a trace of being half amused already in her expression. They were telling a story about a merchant in town who had sold wine to the psychiatrist for years without having an inkling of his profession. It was surprising, the wine merchant said, he had no idea the man was a doctor.

“Why?” Paul had asked. “Would you have any hesitation in going to him if you were, say, very depressed?”

“I think the wife could cure me more quickly,” the wine merchant replied.

Everyone laughed, including the psychiatrist. I was now following the conversation with avid interest, even accepting without wondering about it a further story of the wine merchant who’d had a smile found in a cask of his wine—I thought they said smile (sourire)—actually it was a mouse in the wine (souris). As far as I could tell, however, nothing further in the nature of sex or politics presented itself.

Later, in Gascony, we met a couple who lived in a chateau, and at a dinner in what could easily have been a wing of the Metropolitan, I sat next to the hostess who I immediately wished I’d met when I was twenty years younger although this would have made her about seven or eight. She was good-looking and vivacious and from the first moment we were talking animatedly and I was telling her everything I knew. Part of her charm lay in making me overlook the difference in our ages and I was trying to recall what Victor Hugo had said to a young woman to justify a physical attraction—they had in common being close to heaven, he because of his age and she because of her beauty, something like that. One thing the hostess said that I liked was that she had been trying to take up painting again. She had painted when she was younger and now she missed it. At the moment, she said, she was painting the ceiling.

Although there was someone seated on the other side of her who shared her attention, I was certain that her fascination was with me. We had begun to talk about her attempts to have children and the complete failure of them. It was probably more clinical than intimate but I felt it might fall under the heading of sex when unexpectedly, something else began to fall. Hornets from high above—the first dropped down a guest’s collar at the next table, causing him to dance about in a kind of inexplicable pantomime. Then others began to fall. The hornets were apparently sleeping up in the molding and the heat of the candles or possibly of the conversations that I could not hear had stirred them, not enough to fly but to stagger forth and then lose their grip, dropping like fruit. This effectively broke up the party.

There were times they came to us, when we could say chez nous. The conversation was at our own table, though technically, it was still French.