James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime

“Now, why is it you can’t come to dinner?”

For a moment Dean thinks crazily of bringing her along. Her clothes are so cheap though. The leather of her shoes is cracked. It would be awful. They would greet her with indulgent smiles, ask little questions.

“I really can’t,” he says.

When he gets back, finally, he finds her asleep. He lifts the edge of the covers. She is naked. He pulls off his shoes and undresses. He lies down beside her, and she rolls into his arms. Seven in the evening. The noise from the streets drifts upwards. The soft hours of early night. He reaches for the pack of préservatifs on the telephone stand, but she takes hold of his wrist.

“You don’t need to,” she says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He is overwhelmed. As his prick goes into her, he discovers the world. He knows the source of numbers, the path of the stars. Music pouring over them from somewhere, ah, from her white plastic radio. She’s put a hand towel beneath her, and it becomes bloody. He finds it later. He packs it secretly when they leave.

On Sunday they walk the bridges and sometime in the early afternoon, leave town.

That night he tells me about it, not everything, of course. I’m so happy to see him, to have him confiding in me, that I miss a lot. He’s worn out from the drive. In the street, dark as a ship’s hull, the car is parked. The engine is still warm. Beneath the chilled body there’s a faint cracking, as of joints. In the house we sit shivering. The walls are like steel. We go down to the Foy for some hot tea and cognac. By this time he’s talking of other things—where to eat cheaply—I don’t remember. I am hardly listening. I hear only enough to keep track of what he’s saying while my real thoughts circle around us like hungry dogs.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED? THEY had gone off and made love. That isn’t so rare. One must expect to encounter it. It’s nothing but a sweet accident, perhaps just the end of illusion. In a sense one can say it’s harmless, but why, then, beneath everything does one feel so apart? Isolated. Murderous, even.

In a way I could calmly expect that from this point they would begin, having discovered all there was so soon, to lose interest in each other, to grow cold, but these acts are sometimes merely an introduction—in the great, carnal duets I think they must often be—and I search for the exact ciphers which serve to open it all as if for a safe combination. I rearrange events and make up phrases to reveal how the first innocence changed into long Sunday mornings, the bells filling the air, pillows jammed under her belly, her marvelous behind high in the daylight. Dean slowly inserts himself, deep as a sword wound.

I prefer not to think about it, I turn away, but it’s impossible to control these dreams. The forbidden ones are incandescent—they burn through resolutions like cloth. I cannot stop them even if I want to. I cannot make them vanish. They are brighter than the day that surrounds me. I am weary from it. I have become a somnambulist. My own life suddenly seems nothing, an old costume, a collection of rags, and I walk, I breathe to the rhythm of his which is stronger than mine. The world is all changed. The scabs of reality are picked away and beneath them, though I try not to see, are visions which cause me to tremble.

In her room they are warming their hands at the heater. She’s tired. Her work that day was hard. He undresses her, a little awkwardly, for she is still far from being his—one can imagine her still refusing—and puts her to bed. Above the thick quilt her face shines like a child’s. He stands looking at her, filled with contentment. They say nothing. He adjusts the covers, which are somewhat soiled, smooths them down. Then hurriedly, as an afterthought, he takes off his clothes and slips in beside her. An act which threatens us all. The town is silent around them. On the milk-white faces of the clock the hands, in unison, jerk to new positions. The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass and bells mark the hours, the quarters, the halves. With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull. They remain close for a long time, still without talking. It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love.

I hear him come in. I am reading. I appear to be. Henry the Fourth is beautifying Paris, building the Place Royale, the Pont-Neuf. I keep going over the same lines again and again. I can tell what has happened, but I cannot bring myself to say anything. Nothing. I am possessed of nothing but phrases as heavy as logs.

IT IS ALL IN fragments, like the half of a paper napkin—for a time in the top drawer of his bureau—on which they both had written words. There are two columns, and I can see they were added to alternately, like a game. His is on the left. It begins with Croix de Fer. Opposite, in her hand: Les Martiens. He writes Les Escaliers. She writes Le Select. They are naming a hotel, the one they will have together someday. Dean can get the money, he says—his father knows everybody. His father has rich friends. The list continues:

and the bottom is missing, like a letter torn apart on the wet street.

It is in Nancy, in the hotel on the square. A bright December afternoon. In the center of everything, the statue of Stanislas, traces of old snow at his feet, his green arm pointing to the barren park. They are ushered into the silence of a room on the side. She is happy. It is the weekend. They have wandered along the street in the great, plain-faced crowd, and she has seen a leather suit that costs 130 francs which she imagines he may buy for her. She was wearing a black fur hat. Every eye followed when she walked.

The radio is playing. They undress in the winter daylight. Dean is a little embarrassed at his condition. His prick gets hard whenever he looks at her. He can’t help it. His chief desire is to raise her on it, exultant, to run her up into the sunshine, into the starlight where she can see the world. They begin to dance a little, naked, in the early darkness, the music thin and foreign, their feet bare on the rug. Then they make love, she astride him, in the favorite manner of the Roman poets, as he informs her. He lies gazing up at her, his hands encircling her ankles. The rich smell of her falls over him. At the bottom of it all, his eyes lingering there, the mute triangle in which he is implanted.

“Do you think you will remember me in five years?” she asks him at dinner.

He tries to smile, but it’s dry. He is empty, with no desire to talk about love.

“You will go,” she says. “You are the type.”

“No.”

“Si,” she insists calmly.

By now they know something of each other. There is a fund they can draw on together. The encounter begins to have an essence of its own which neither can define but which nourishes them both, and happily, in the single unselfish ritual of love, they contribute to it all they can. Nor does it matter how much either takes away. It is a limitless body. It can never be exhausted but only, although one never believes this, forgot.

They are served a dish piled high with écrevisses, salty, pale. The tiny legs crack like dry wood under their teeth. The hidden juices spurt. She wants to know what they are called. Dean isn’t sure. Crayfish, he says.

“Crayfish?”

“I think so,” he says.

She invents a story: The Prince of Crayfish. Dean listens, licking his fingers while she unfolds, as if to a child, a tale filled with mysteries.

Deep down, where it is only darkness, the prince of crayfish was born. It was very difficult. It took a long time because his feet kept getting tangled up with his mother’s, but finally he was swimming, a little weakly, by her side. From all over the sea important fish came to bring him presents: necklaces of coral, little monies to eat, seaweed to lie on, green and black…

He is watching her mouth, her clever eyes. Her teeth are a bad color and not well cared for. One can see that when she smiles, but he is only watching the phrases, he hardly notices.

When he was six months old, he said to his mother: I am going up to see the world. Ah, she was very sad. She cried. She didn’t want, but then she said: God be with you, my dear son. Be brave and honest and no hurt will…

“Befall you,” Dean supplies, as if in a dream.

“Befall you,” she says, the word funny in her mouth. “No hurt will befall you.”

“Go on,” he says.

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes.”

From waters so deep he had to swim for three days before it even began to grow light, he makes his way to the surface …

An odyssey which ends—Dean is shocked—in disaster, in a great, frothing kettle where the prince is scalded to death, still brave, still honest… She shrugs over the soup at the abruptness of it all. Dean sits silent. He is drained of all invention and also aware, for the first time, that she is fully able to speak, to create images strong enough to alter his life.

They return to the hotel at ten. The corridors are empty. Shoes are set outside each room. The catch of the door makes a little click as it closes and with that sound, Dean suddenly awakes. He turns the bolt. They are safe. The city is his. No one in it is more powerful. Hushed in sleep it lies, white specks of frost on its windows, steeped in the cold. No one is more blessed, more demonic.

In the bathroom she stands naked before the thin mirror. Dean appears behind her. His hands, all reverence at first, like those of men reprieved, move to possess her. Tenderly he weighs her breasts.

“I would look very well in that suit,” she reflects.

With no resonance, he says, “Oui.”

“This one grew first,” she says.

“Is that true?” Dean says inanely.

“He was always bigger. Oui.”

He becomes attentive to the smaller.

“Poor baby,” he murmurs.

Above the basin on a glass shelf: her bottles. Biodop, one of them reads. Her stockings lie crumpled on the floor. Over the radio: Nights of Spain. The suit, he remembers, had a belt which was a gleaming, leather thong.

They have turned off the light. In the room there is a huge armoire, a wicker basket, chairs. A metal tree on which garments can be hung. The ceiling is very high. In its center—one’s eyes must become accustomed to the dark—a grotesque fixture. The hours pass. She is pinioned on the bed, her arms trapped beneath her, her legs forced wide. Her eyes are closed. The radio is playing Sucu Sucu. The world has stopped. Oceans still as photographs. Galaxies floating down. Her cunt tastes sweet as fruit.

Morning. She lies face down, warm still from sleep. Her arms are up on either side of her head, the elbows bent. Dean is on top of her, encircling, in the early light, and they are fucking like weight lifters. He pauses at last. He leans over to admire her, she does not see him. Hair covers her cheek. Her skin seems very white. He kisses her side and then, without force, as one stirs a favorite mare, begins again. She comes to life with a soft, exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.

Her narrow, cool back commanding the breakfast. The waiter who brings it does not even glance towards the bed. When he is gone she jumps up and, still naked, prepares the trays. In the noiseless light she opens the croissants, diligent as a maid, spreads them evenly with butter, arranges them back on the plates. Her flesh shines. It draws him. He moves to stay near her, like a child, hoping she will smile at him, give him a taste. He feels like jumping around, making noise, she is so occupied, so serene. She opens the confiture. Put some here, he wants to say. Grab her around the waist. Dance. He kisses her elbow. She glances at him and smiles.