James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime

Suddenly someone is behind me.

“Did I scare you?” Cristina says, smiling.

“What? No.”

“You jumped about a foot,” she says. “Come on, I want you to meet somebody.”

A friend from Bristol, Tennessee, she tells me as she leads me back. No, but I’m going to like her, she’s very funny. She’s married to a rich, rich Frenchman. She puts flowers in all the bidets. He gets furious. Already I dread her.

People are still coming in, even this late, appearing after other dinners, the theatre. Beneduce is guiding a handsome trio into the room, a man and two stunning women in suede boots and tightly belted coats. Mother and daughter, Cristina tells me. He’s marrying them both, she says. Near the bar Anna Soren listens to the conversation around her with a wavering, a translucent smile. She doesn’t always know who’s speaking. She looks at the wrong person. Her false eyelashes are coming loose.

“You know something?” Cristina says. “You’re the only friend of Billy’s I like.”

It pleases but disturbs me, this remark. I’m not sure what it means, I just have the feeling it will prove to be fatal. I don’t want to answer or even to appear as if I’ve heard.

“They’re all illiterates,” she tells me.

Through the crowd a woman is approaching.

“Isabel!” Cristina cries. It’s her friend.

There is no way to begin except with admiration for Isabel who is forty and dressed in a beautiful, black Chanel suit with silver buttons and a ruffled, white shirt. On her finger is a ring with a large diamond, a perfectly round diamond that catches every piece of light, and her smile is as dazzling as her clothes. There’s a young man with her whom she introduces.

“Phillip…” Her hand flutters hopelessly, she’s forgotten his name.

“…Dean,” he murmurs.

“I’m the worst in the world,” she says, the words drawling out. “I just seem to forget names as fast as people can tell them to me.”

She laughs, a high, country laugh.

“Now, don’t take it to heart,” she tells him. “You’re the best-looking thing in this room, but I’d forget the name of the President himself if I didn’t already know it.”

She laughs and laughs. Phillip Dean says nothing. I envy that silence which somehow doesn’t disgrace him, which is curiously beautiful, like a loyalty we do not share.

“He’s been traveling in Spain,” she says, “isn’t that right?”

“Spain!” Cristina says.

His face seems to show it. There still remain the faint, lustrous tones of journeys in an open car.

“I love Spain,” Cristina says.

“You’ve been there?”

“Oh,” she says, “many times.”

“Barcelona?”

“I love it.”

“And Madrid…”

“What a city.”

“We went to the Prado every day,” he says.

“I love the Prado.”

“What is it?” Isabel says.

“The museum.”

“The museum?” she says. “Why, I love it, too. I forgot what it was called.”

“It’s the Prado,” he says.

“Why, that’s right. I remember it now.”

“What were you doing in Spain?” Cristina asks.

“I was just traveling,” he says.

“All alone?”

Images of a young man in the dun-colored cities of late afternoon. Valencia. Trees line the great avenues. Seville at night, the smell of dust that has settled, the smell of oleander, richer, green. In front of the big hotel two porters are hosing the sidewalk.

“No, I was with my father,” he says.

Suddenly I like him. Cristina can’t take her eyes away. She asks when he was born, and it turns out he’s a Sagittarius which is a very good sign.

“Really?”

“It’s one of the best for me,” she says. “Scorpio is the worst.”

“I’m a Libra,” Isabel says and laughs. “Isn’t that right?”

Dean has a small, straight mouth and wide-set, intelligent eyes. Hair that the summer has dried. It’s of schoolboy heroes that I am thinking, boys from the east, ringleaders, soccer backs slender as girls.

“You have a great face,” Cristina says. She is seized with a sudden gaiety. “You know, I’d like to do a painting of you.”

Isabel laughs. The evening has only begun.

At three in the morning—Cristina never goes to bed when she’s drinking—we are wandering through the disorder of les Halles. The air is chilly at this hour, noises seem to ring in it. The workmen glance up from their crates at the unmistakable sound of high heels. Isabel is talking. Cristina. They are pointing everything out. We trail foolishly between great barricades of fruit and produce, past empty bars, through the carts and trucks. Finally we emerge at the roaring, iron galleries where meat is handled. It’s like coming upon a factory in the darkness. The overhead lights are blazing. The smell of carnage is everywhere, the very metal reeks with an odor denser than flowers. On the sidewalk there are wheelbarrows of slaughtered heads. It’s right out of Franju and that famous work which literally steams of it. We stare down at the dumb victims. There are scores of them. The mouths are pink, the nostrils still moist. Worn knives with the edge of a razor have flensed them while their eyes were still fluttering, the huge, eloquent eyes of young calves. The bloody arms of the workers sketch quickly. Wherever they move, the skin magically parts, the warm insides pour out. Everything is swiftly divided. An animal which two minutes ago was led to them has now disappeared. Cristina draws her white coat around her like a countess.

“I’m going to have nightmares,” she says.

“We’re really going to sleep sometime?” Billy asks.

“Let’s go to the pig place,” Isabel says.

“Sweetheart, where is it? Isn’t it right around here?”

“It’s just down the street,” Billy says.

It takes us ten minutes to find it. Of course, there’s an enormous crowd, there always is this time of night. Taxis are waiting with their lights on dim. Cars are parked everywhere. The restaurant is filled. There are tourists, wedding parties, people who’ve been to cabarets, others who’ve stayed up in order to visit the famous market. It’s said they are planning to move it to a location outside the city, it will soon be gone.

Somehow we find a table. Billy is rubbing his hands. There’s a delicious odor of rich, encrusted soup which is the specialty. Cristina doesn’t want any, she wants wine.

“It’s not good for you, you know that,” Billy tells her. She’s had jaundice, she was in bed for months. “Why don’t you just have some soup?”

“You have it,” she says.

“Bummy…”

“What?”

“I’m going to order it for you.”

“Go right ahead,” she says. She turns and gives us a brilliant smile.

The crowd is thick. The waiters struggle to get through. They seem to hear nothing, or it has no effect. The patrons are multiplying as if in a dream. Incredible faces on every side, Algerian, bony as feet, cardboard American, the pink of French. Isabel is laughing, laughing. She claps her hand over her mouth and rocks back and forth a little. She’s telling about an argument that started when her husband was packing for a trip. He was shouting at her in French.

“Now, you obey me this instant,” he said.

“I will not.” She performed some angry, little stamps.

“Stop doing that with your feet.”

“I won’t.” Laugh, laugh.

Of course, he adores her, I know they’re going to tell me that.

“Don’t ever marry a Frenchman,” she says. Then she laughs. She is hugging Coco, her poodle, and laughing. She is opening boxes from Lanvin, the tissue crashing as she brushes it aside. The telephone rings, and it’s one of her friends. She laughs and laughs, she talks for hours.

“Do you live in Paris?” Dean asks me.

“Pardon?”

“Do you live in Paris?” he says.

Isabel is telling about her husband’s family. She’s sick of them. All they’re interested in is their grandbaby, she says. I explain I’m living in the Wheatlands’ house. It’s in a little town.

“You know Dijon?”

“Yes.”

“It’s near Dijon.”

“It’s in the center of France,” he decides.

“The very heart. It’s a small town, but it has a certain quality. I mean, it’s not rich, it’s not splendid. It’s just old and well-formed.”

“What town is it?”

“I doubt if you’ve ever heard of it. Autun.”

“Autun,” he says. Then, “It sounds like the real France.”

“It is the real France.”

“He’s crazy,” Billy warns.

It’s almost five in the morning when we drive Isabel home. There are just the four of us left, Dean has gone. I am exhausted. I feel as if I am entering a grave crisis of the soul. The streets are completely abandoned. The sky has begun to pale. We pull up before a building on the Avenue Montaigne, Billy takes her to the door. I stay in the car with Cristina, our heads leaning back, our eyes closed.

“He’s a nice boy,” she says. “Don’t you wish you were that young again?”

“I’m not that old.”

“Baby…” she says soothingly.

“I only feel it.”

“No, you look very young. Really. You look as if you could still be in school.”

“Thank you.”

“What were you like then?” she says sleepily.

“It’s too long ago.”

“No, really, what were you like?”

“I was the idol of my generation.” I can hear her head move.

“Didn’t you know that?” I tell her.

The door opens, it’s Billy. He slumps down in the seat. We start to drive.

“Let’s go somewhere for a drink,” Cristina says.

He is silent.

“Billy?”

“Do you really want to?”

“Where can we go?”

“The Calvados,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, “let’s go there.”

COURTYARDS WITH RUSTY GATES receive me back. Enclosures. Great walls crumbling at the sill. The trees stand like brewers in the Place d’Hallencourt. Bricks are laid beneath them. The sidewalks are veined with moss. As one descends, the streets begin to flower out. Rue Dufraigne. Faubourg St. Blaise, a fine house here, small iron balcony, enormous garden. The trees pour over the wall and shade the public side as well. The doors look quite secure.

There’s another house on rue de la Grille. A marvelous color—faded brick, with the doors, windows, all the major lines set in white stone. Gravel driveway. Tall, iron gates. I pass it in the morning as a girl in a pink smock opens the shutters room by room. Belongs to a doctor, I’m sure. They’re all doctors. Vétérinaires. Yeux, nez, gorge, oreilles. They’re fortified within the most solid houses in town, the biggest ones, commanding every street. The fixtures are polished. The plaques are always shined.

Posters for football stuck in the windows of cheap cafés. Autun against Charolles. Autun against Chagny. No one seems to read them. A few men are playing dominoes; they look like North Africans. At the bottom of town the factories are silent. The old ones have been abandoned, tanneries with their tall chimneys cold, their windows dark. Beyond, the river lies still.

Four in the afternoon. The trees along the street, the upper branches, are catching the last, full light. The stadium is quiet, some bicycles leaning against the outer wall. I read the schedule once again and then go in, turning down towards the stands which are almost empty. Far away, the players are streaming across the soft grass. There seem to be no cries, no shouting, only the faint thud of kicks.

It is the emptiness which pleases me, the blue dimensions of this life. Beyond the game, as far as one can see, are the fields, the trees of the countryside. Above us, provincial sky, a little cloudy. Once in a while the sun breaks out, vague as a smile. I sit alone. There are the glances of some young boys, nothing more. There’s no scoreboard. The game drifts back and forth. It seems to take a long, long time. Someone sends a little boy to the far side to chase the ball when it goes out of bounds. I watch him slowly circle the field. He passes behind the goal. He trots a while, then he walks. He seems lost in the journey. Finally he is over there, small and isolated on the sideline. After a while I can see him kicking at stones.

I am at the center of emptiness. Every act seems purer for it, easier to define. The sounds separate themselves. The details all appear. I stop at the Café St. Louis. It’s like an old schoolroom. The varnish is worn from the curve of the chairs. The finish is gone from the floor. It’s one large, yellowing room, huge mirrors on the wall, the same size and position as windows, generous, imperfect. Glass doors along the street. Wherever one looks, it seems possible to see out. They’re playing billiards. I listen without watching. The soft click of the balls is like a concert. The players stand around, talking in hoarse voices. The rich odor of their cigarettes… They’re never there in the daytime. It’s very different with the morning light upon it, this café. Stale. The billiard table seems less dark. The wood is drawing apart at the corners. It’s quite old, at least a hundred years I should think, judging from the elaborate legs. Beneath the pale green cloth which is always thrown over it, the felt is worn, like the sleeves of an old suit.