Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [25]
One morning Gloria was upstairs when something happened to catch her eye. The door to the little guest room was open and on the night table, folded, was a letter. It lay there in the silence, half of it raised like a wing in the air. The house was empty. Truus had gone to shop and pick up Christopher at nursery school. With the curiosity of a schoolgirl, Gloria sat down on the bed. She unfolded the envelope and took out the pages. The first thing her eye fell upon was a line just above the middle. It stunned her. For a moment she was dazed. She read the letter through nervously. She opened the drawer. There were others. She read them as well. Like love letters they were repetitious, but they were not love letters. He did more than work in an office, this man, much more. He went through Europe, city after city, looking for young people who in hotel rooms and cheap apartments—she was horrified by her images of it—stripped and were immersed in a river of sordid acts. The letters were like those of a high school boy, that was the most terrible part. They were letters of recruitment, so simple they might have been copied out by an illiterate.
Sitting there framed in the doorway, her hand nearly trembling, she could not think of what to do. She felt deeply upset, frightened, betrayed. She glanced out the window. She wondered if she should go immediately to the nursery school—she could be there in minutes—and take Christopher somewhere where he would be safe. No, that would be foolish. She hurried downstairs to the telephone.
“Ned,” she said when she reached him—her voice was shaking. She was looking at one of the letters which asked a number of matter-of-fact questions.
“What is it? Is anything wrong?”
“Come right away. I need you. Something’s happened.”
For a while then she stood there with the letters in her hand. Looking around hurriedly, she put them in a drawer where garden seeds were kept. She began to calculate how long it would be before he would be there, driving out from the city.
She heard them come in. She was in her bedroom. She had regained her composure, but as she entered the kitchen she could feel her heart beating wildly. Truus was preparing lunch.
“Mummy, look at this,” Christopher said. He held up a sheet of paper. “Do you see what this is?”
“Yes. It’s very nice.”
“This is the engine,” he said. “These are the wings. These are the guns.”
She tried to focus her attention on the scrawled outline with its garish colors, but she was conscious only of the girl at work behind the counter. As Truus brought the plates to the table, Gloria tried to look calmly at her face, a face she realized she had not seen before. In it she recognized for the first time depravity, and in Truus’ limbs, their smoothness, their volume, she saw brutality and vice. Outside, in the ordinary daylight, were the trees along the side of the property, the roof of a house, the lawn, some scattered toys. It was a landscape that seemed ominous, too idyllic, too still.
“Don’t use your fingers, Christopher,” Truus said, sitting down with him. “Use your fork.”
“It won’t reach,” he said.
She pushed the plate an inch or two toward him.
“Here, try now,” she said.
Later, watching them play outside on the grass, Gloria could not help noticing a wild, almost a bestial aspect in her son’s excitement, as if a crudeness were somehow becoming part of him, soiling him. A line from the many that lay writhing in her head came forth. I hope you will be ready to take my big cock when I see you again. P.S. Have you had any big cocks lately? I miss you and think of you and it makes me very hard. “Have you ever read anything like that?” Gloria asked.
“Not exactly.”
“It’s the most disgusting thing. I can’t believe it.