by
James Salter
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It was in the uterus and had travelled from there to the lungs. In the end, she had accepted it. Above the square neck-line of her dress the skin, pallid, seemed to emanate a darkness. She no longer resembled herself. What she had been was gone; it had been taken from her. The change was fearful, especially in her face. She had a face now that was for the afterlife and those she would meet there. It was hard for Walter to remember how she had once been. She was almost a different woman from the one to whom he had made a solemn promise to help when the time came.
:(
He was barely breathing. He waited, but she did not say anything more. Hardly believing what he was doing he pushed the needle in—it was effortless—and slowly injected the contents. He heard her sigh. Her eyes were closed as she lay back. Her face was peaceful. She had embarked. My God, he thought, my God. He had known her when she was in her twenties, long-legged and innocent. Now he had slipped her, as in a burial at sea, beneath the flow of time. Her hand was still warm. He took it and held it to his lips. He pulled the bedspread up to cover her legs. The house was incredibly quiet. It had fallen into silence, the silence of a fatal act. He could not hear the wind.
— Susanna.
— Yes.
— I need you.
She more or less heard him. Her head was thrown back like that of a woman longing for God.
— I shouldn’t have drunk so much, she murmured.
He began to unbutton her blouse.
— No, she said, trying to rebutton it.
He was unfastening her brassiere. Her gorgeous breasts emerged. He could not take his eyes from them. He kissed them passionately. She felt herself moved to the side as he pulled down the cover of the white sheets. She tried to speak again, but he put his hand over her mouth and pushed her down. He devoured her, shuddering as if in fright at the end and holding her to him tightly. They fell into a profound sleep.
They sat at the table drinking coffee. They were complicit, not long risen, and not regarding one another too closely. Walter was admiring her, however. Without makeup she was even more appealing. Her long hair was not combed. She seemed very approachable. There were calls that would have to be made, but he was not thinking of them. It was still too early. He was thinking past this day. Mornings to come. At first he hardly heard the sound behind him. It was a footstep and then, slowly, another—Susanna turned white—as Marit came unsteadily down the stairs. The makeup on her face was stale, and her dark lipstick showed fissures. He stared in disbelief.
— Something went wrong, she said.
— Are you all right? he asked foolishly.
— No, you must have done it wrong.
— Oh, God, Walter murmured.
She sat weakly on the bottom step. She did not seem to notice Susanna.
oh my god
That was how she and Walter came to part, upon being discovered by his wife. They met two or three times afterward, at his insistence, but to no avail. Whatever holds people together was gone. She told him she could not help it. That was just the way it was.
[...] Really he was a solitary thinker, not interested in most of his colleagues. The vision he had for the school – with children as thinkers and artists at its core – went needless to say against the grain of public policy on education. It went against the way the world worked. And unlike Zachary, Alex had no conviction that progress was possible, or that you could build any institution into a power for good. There was a contradiction, Christine thought, between his passionate scepticism and his commitment to the children’s education. He didn’t believe that anything could get better, and was often despairing – yet he dedicated himself to building and nourishing their imaginations, as if hope depended on it. She also sometimes thought, when she was angry with him, that when they left his class he forgot them.
There was something intolerable in the expectation in that room, strained around Zachary’s absence, which could not be filled. The time when they might have been waiting for him to walk through the door was so recent, so close at hand, that it seemed vividly possible; they could imagine how he’d make his entrance, noisy with reassurances, full of jokes, puzzled by their glum faces. He was always so up to date on everything, so full of news. It seemed impossible he didn’t know this latest fact, his own death.
In the street things were better. She gulped down the tarry, tainted city air, felt the heat of the car engines on her legs and the paving stones hard under her feet, took in the shopfronts one after another in all their vivid detail: the bolts of African fabrics, rows of bottles of coloured varnish in the nail parlour, jars of vermilion peppers lined up on the shelves of the Polish delicatessen. All this was a relief: the impersonal solid forms of the world which would persist without Zachary, without happiness, without her.
Alex turned on his side, to face her in the dark; he put his hand on her pyjama top, onto her breast. Christine was shocked by the violence of her reluctance to make love to him. She knew they ought to be opened up to each other: Alex was right, his instincts were always good, more generous than hers. She half longed for the comfort he wanted to give her, and to comfort him. It was the same as when he’d made her listen right through to the end of the music, the day before. In her mind she understood how sex and death were both part of the mystery of entrances and exits, both opening onto this same strange place where they all belonged now, in the sudden shadow of Zachary’s death. But her body contracted against him in spite of her mind, she felt withdrawn inside her flesh, concealed in its sealed chamber, fierce against its violation. She wanted to try to explain to him that she couldn’t bear to be touched, not now, not yet: but she couldn’t, the words seized up in her chest, they wouldn’t come out. She pushed his hand away without a word, turned over with her back to him and pretended to sleep.
Lydia felt herself at some crisis, now they’d arrived at the end of their formal education. Dissent and scepticism had been easy while they were held tight inside its frame – now something more was called for, and she dreaded testing her reserves of imagination and energy, finding them empty. At first she had played at falling in love with Alex because it gave a shape to her days, and a motivation: then her obsession had swallowed up its original purpose. Her lack of him gnawed at her, making her incomplete; she thought fatalistically that if she had any talent it was probably for this, for a destructive passion. Lydia had the biggest room in the shared house, with the biggest bed – where she slept sprawling luxuriantly in dirty sheets, rarely getting up before midday. Her room was chaotically untidy, with clothes heaped on every piece of furniture, or dropped on the floor where she’d taken them off. She had a gift for finding treasures – old couture silks and satins, stiff net petticoats – among the dross in junk shops; everything smelled of mothballs, or of beer and cigarette smoke from the bar.