James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime

Across from us there are more Negroes, but these are Americans. Soldiers. One can see it immediately in their faces, their clothes. They have thick mouths, a certain crudity. And they’re big. They have great hands, broad shoulders. They seem ready to burst out of their clothes. There are Coke bottles on the table—for their French girls, of course. One of them sits in a skimpy, plaid dress, green I make it to be. Short-sleeved, though the night is cold. She turns her head a little. She’s very young. Pure, expressionless features. Suddenly I am in anguish, I don’t know why—she obviously cares nothing—but somehow because of her predicament. She looks sixteen. Her young arms flash softly in the gloom.

Now one of them begins talking to her in that rich, melodious under-language. She doesn’t understand him—perhaps it’s the noise of the band. He leans closer. His mouth is moving just next to her ear. She nods her head then. She looks at him calmly and nods. The others are sitting with their huge forearms on the table, listening to the music, occasionally passing a word. I can’t see the other girl very well. Her hair is quite long. The music is crashing around us. The drummer’s face is wet.

We have traveled from Innsbruck to bedlam. It’s no longer possible to talk. I’m very sleepy and suddenly a little depressed. I keep looking across to their table. When they leave, I am sure I know exactly how it will be. They’ll go out to a big, green Pontiac at least five years old, maybe a Ford. The muffler is broken. The sound of the engine is powerful and raw. She sits between two of them in the back. That means… I don’t really know what it means, what low, graceful phrases are offered in the dark. As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away. Still, they are not so bad, these black men. They are very sweet, I have heard, they are very tender. They will spend every penny they have on a girl, absolutely everything. They are foolishly generous. I envy them for that.

We drive in silence through a dense fog which swallows the headlights of the car. The yellow beams are smoking before us. Nothing can be seen. La Rotonde is very distant. The doors have closed behind us, the music has disappeared. We crawl down invisible roads, barely faster than a walk. The drive home will take hours, the last hours of a night which we have left behind. We’ve given it to the soldiers. They possess nothing. They withhold nothing. When the bill comes they reach in their pockets vaguely and ask each other for coins.

I have the window partly open. The damp air leaks on my face.

“I have to learn more French,” Dean says.

“Well, that’ll come. I see you writing down words all the time.”

“The trouble is it’s all food,” he says. “That’s the only thing I can talk about. You can’t just keep talking about food.”

“You’re right. You should read the newspapers.”

“I’m going to start.”

We are sneaking past the outskirts of Dijon, only occasionally passing anything we recognize, an intersection, a particular sign.

“I’ll tell you what’s great about this country,” he says suddenly. “The air. Everything smells good.

“It’s the real France,” he says. “You were right. I’d never have discovered it if it weren’t for you.”

“Oh, you would have.”

“No, I’d just be hanging around Paris like everybody else. It’s easy to do that. But who goes to Dijon?”

“Not too many people.”

“Or Autun?” he says.

“Fewer.”

“Nobody,” he says. “That’s what makes it.”

THE MORNINGS ARE GROWING colder, I enter them unprepared. Icy mornings. The streets are still dark. The bicycles go past me, their parts creaking, the riders miserable as beggars.

I have a coffee in the Café St. Louis. It’s as quiet as a doctor’s office. The tables have chairs still upturned on them. Beyond the thin curtains, a splitting cold. Perhaps it will snow. I glance at the sky. Heavy as wet rags. France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners. In the fine weather, all the world can love her. Still, it’s depressing. One feels like a fugitive from half a dozen lives.

These dismal mornings. I stand near the radiator, trying to warm my hands over iron that’s cold as glass. The French have a nice feeling for simplicity. They merely wear sweaters indoors and sometimes hats as well. They believe in light, yes, but only as the heavens provide it. Most of their rooms are dark as the poorhouse. There’s an odor of tobacco, sweat and perfume, all combined. A dispirited atmosphere in which every sound seems cruel and isolated—the closing of a door, footsteps beneath which one can detect the thin complaint of grit, hoarse bonjours. One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it. I see her almost daily. I can always go down there on some pretext, but it’s difficult to talk while she’s working. Oh, Claude, Claude, my hands are tingling. They want to touch you. In her elaborately done hair there is a band which she keeps feeling for nervously. Then she touches the top button of her sweater as if it were a jewel. Around her neck there are festoons of glass beads the color of nightclub kisses. A green stone on her index finger. And she wears several wedding bands, three, it seems. I’m too nervous to count.

“You’re not from here, are you?” I had asked her.

“Oh, no. I am from Paris.”

“I thought so.”

She smiles.

“But do you like it here?” I said.

“Oh,” she shrugs helplessly.

When I am near her I can almost experience the feel of her flesh, taste it, like a starving man, like a sailor smelling vegetation far out of sight of shore.

She opened her purse and took out photographs of herself made in the salons of hotels. It happened too quickly, I wanted to look at them longer. She had been a mannequin, she said. She traveled around to do shows in those days. It was very nice. Weekends in Vichy, she told me… weekends in Megève.

December the third. A day that promises nothing, that passes quickly. In the afternoon, a light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold. The town is already in that rapid descent towards darkness, the lighted shops appearing, headlights, restaurants, the small cafés. Everything else is turning black in a great, incorruptible cycle, too serious, too ancient to vary, while behind the shutters and heavy curtains an evening life is measured out in mean portions, as exact as those of an old shopkeeper.

I stop for a paper in the bookstore. I know the old man there very well. The counter is near the window where the light catches him flat on, like a cabinet minister before breakfast. He’s wearing a heavy sweater and a scarf. His cheeks are absolutely purple. He seems very mournful, but there is all the winter still to be survived. He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights, each one perilous as a lunar journey. He hands me the change. His fingers are rough as wood.

In a room with every light burning, Dean opens wide his arms.

“Where’ve you been?” he says. “I have a surprise for you.”

“What?”

He doesn’t answer right away.

“You’re going to be pleased,” he assures me, stopping before the mirror to look at himself from one angle, then the other, his movements light as a bird’s. Mon vieux, he is singing to himself off key, vous êtes beau, vous êtes beau.

“Well, aren’t you going to tell me?” I ask him.

“Oh, in time,” he says, “in time.”

I watch him tie his shoes. He’s finished dressing. Now he inspects himself full-length.

“It’s snowing,” I say.

“Snowing!” He goes straight to the window. He can see it. “Ahh!”

“That pleases you?”

“Perfect,” he says. “It’s just perfect.”

We go off to the Foy.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can’t bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

The Étoile d’Or. One lighted room along a cold street, the snow descending fitfully, the traffic thin. The waiter is a young boy in a soiled, white jacket. Only one other table occupied—by a man reading the newspaper—in this modest room, this room of a country house, almost empty in the flat of winter, the dark, icy hours. The three of us over the printed cloth, she quite nervous. It shows in her hands. Her ears are pierced, I notice. Through the tender flesh of the lobes cheap ornaments are hooked, and she touches them from time to time. She looks exactly as she looked in Dijon that night. The same dress. The same white arms. The waiter comes with three trays of oysters, deep, irregular shells within which the bodies lie, pure and glistening. For a moment she sits motionless as we begin to eat and only then begins herself, as if in respect or an unwillingness to appear hungry. The real reason is much simpler: she was watching us, she’d never eaten oysters before.

Anne-Marie Costallat, born October 8, 1944. I was beginning high school and masturbating twice a day, curling over it like a dead leaf, when she was born, in a bed of violets, as she says—all French mothers tell their children that. Dean tries to offer her some wine. Non, she says, merci. It isn’t good for her. Her cheeks are a little red from the cold, but the closer one gets the more marvelous-looking she is. Eighteen, I think! She seems even younger. It frightens me, of course. Eighteen, and a nigger for a lover. Right out of Jean Genet.

“How did you meet her!” I say. I realize my voice is strained. She’s excused herself. The W.C. is in the next room, past the bar.

“What do you think of her?” he says.

“She’s only a child.”

She ate like a dockhand, leaning over the plate and taking big forkfuls. She finished all the bread.

“Did you notice that?”

Of course. I remembered it forever.

“Food,” he says.

“Yes?”

“My big subject.”

She is returning. She sits down with a little smile.

By ten, the waiter has vanished. The restaurant is silent, and the chill of cheap hotels begins to surround us. She is speaking English, but it’s hard to understand and very funny. She smiles when we laugh, a tentative, friendly smile.

“Comment?” she asks.

She worked six months for the U. S. Army in Orléans. That’s where her English is from, although she’s forgotten a lot. Then she worked in a hotel in Troyes. (I’ve never seen this place. I can only imagine it—a small, commercial hotel, quite modern. Roland is the son of the owner. He and his friends all have cars. They have parties, and there’s a big, empty house that belongs to one of them where they can take the girls…) This summer she will get a job in La Baule. Where is that, Dean wants to know. Brittany, I tell him. It’s on the coast. She nods. I’m not sure she understands much of what we’re saying. Dean puts his jacket over her shoulders. It’s become very chilly in the room.

We drive her home. Place du Carrouge. The building she lives in is dark. Her room is over an alley where some Corsicans have a fruit business. The tissues from lemons, pears, the oranges of Spain, blow fitfully along the pavement. They have an old truck, lofty and battered, which is always parked close to the store. It’s a section of town I have somehow never seen, one of those quiet backwaters of a few houses and streets that don’t run very far. I sit in the car while Dean takes her to the door, but first she comes to the window on my side. I hurriedly roll it down.