Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(77)
They opened their shop two years ago, although Jane has been in Aspen for ten years and has already owned or managed three similar places. Jane is the brunette—beautiful facial bones, dark eyes, and dazzling smile. She was born in Alabama and studied interior design in college. Every year she goes on a six-day juice fast (two hour-long massages a day, an enema, and plenty of juice) under the supervision of “an old lady who comes up from Florida.” “I had a friend who kept saying, ‘You’ll love Aspen,’” she says, “and I did.” She was in her early twenties at the time. She started a clothes shop, ran it for a while, and then started another one, called 20th Century Fox.
The name Heaven was inspired by a girl friend who always said, talking about Aspen, “Here in heaven . . .” The clientele includes Cher, Anjelica Huston, and Tatum O’Neal—as well as a lot of wealthy Mexicans and South Americans. The shop has been doing well. “But I think it’s a tough town for a girl,” Susan Olsen says. She is a stunning Californian with a contemptuous mouth, the sort of woman men would give anything to possess. You see her on the street, long-legged and golden, and think she cannot have a care in the world. “It’s tough to make ends meet,” she says. “It’s hard to find a niche in this town and make some money. It’s very unstable. A lot of people go through a lot of problems. They get caught up in the fast life. It’s too casual. Guys take advantage of women here.”
The myth dies hard. There are those haunting visions of a unique happiness. Meanwhile they drive, they fly, they come over the mountains in blizzards and storms. The drive from Denver is four to five hours long—but it can take days. Getting to Aspen is part of the legend.
Still, it is there: the steep blue mountains, the wood fires, the trees bearing fresh snow—like a mistress, in Browning’s words, with great, smooth, marbly limbs. Morning comes. The river is covered with ice. There are occasional breaks in it, fissures that run in the direction of the current like wounds. The water is black, but the trout are surviving the cold. Not half a mile from town are animal tracks in the snow leading down to the bank. A few miles farther and you are in the wilderness, in a world without men. Here you can breathe, see the country as it was, as it will be forever. Here in heaven.
Geo
November 1981
Snowy Nights in Aspen
In those days we got dining room chairs, as well as other items, from the dump. This was in Aspen. The grocery store was in the basement of the opera house and ran charge accounts. Houses, most of them from the mining days, were selling for five figures.
It was the 1960s. The town still had a vague air of destitution and most streets were unpaved. It was a ski town, a kind of legend even then. I had a house near the Meadows with two bedrooms and a small brick basement, the bricks unmortared. In the winter the snow came down, almost horizontal as it swept past the windows, heavy and white, unending, like silent applause. In the fireplace, logs, which in early autumn we had virtuously cut and split, were burning with a furious sound. It’s hard to think of a feeling of greater well-being: storm without, fire within. What was going on in the rest of the world? It little mattered. The porch was buried in snow, the skis leaning against the wall. People were coming to dinner.
It seems, looking back, to have been the dinners. They were countless. Friends, and sometimes their friends, people from out of town, people met skiing. There were dinners when the candlesticks fell over on the sideboard and the frame of the mirror caught fire. Nobody noticed until flames were running up the wall. There were triumphant dinners and dinners that were simply disasters, when the meat was like cardboard and Gordon Forbes’s passionate daughter threw it on the floor—by unfortunate coincidence the potatoes were underdone that night.
There were dinners when marvelous things were said, confessions and opinions that would never have come forth but for the company and the wine, and dinners when guests, in need of a little fresh air, went out and were discovered, after an hour, sleeping on the woodpile.
Somewhere along the way we began to jot down a few lines as a reminder of who had been there and what was served, mainly to avoid repeating the menu, and over time there crept in brief comments, a record, like notes one might make in the margin of a book.
Thus were created The Annals, Robin Fox dramatically reciting Swinburne, Lorenzo unexpectedly appearing, as if at the opera, in a fur-collared coat—that was the night when the exotic-looking wife of a painter was the sexual star of the evening. She had high cheekbones and arched eyebrows. She had been to France, she said—it seemed to have a special meaning.
Leafing through the notebook in which all this was written, one comes across loose pages and others that are water-or wine-stained, difficult to make out. But there is also a strange feeling, almost of accomplishment, in thinking of bygone evenings—no matter what else, life has been lived. Names I have forgotten are there, and others I simply don’t recognize. “Four bottles of Bordeaux,” is one succinct entry and beneath it, “Spaghetti carbonara like glue.” There were five at the table that night, and the couple later got divorced. It happened in an odd way. The husband had had a long affair which he knew his wife was aware of and was causing her unhappiness. He was very fond of his mistress but decided the marriage came first and one day announced to his wife that it was over.
“What’s over?” she said.
“Me and Maya.”