Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [41]
On the plate glass the first drops of rain appeared. “Look at that. It’s started,” Vera said.
Mrs. Chandler turned her head. She watched the cars go by. It seemed as if it were years ago. For some reason she found herself thinking of the many times she had driven out herself or taken the train, coming into the country, stepping down onto the long, bare platform in the darkness, her husband or a child there to meet her. It was warm. The trees were huge and black. Hello, darling. Hello, Mummy, was it a nice trip?
The small neon sign was very bright in the grayness, there was the cemetery across the street and her own car, a foreign one, kept very clean, parked near the door, facing in the wrong direction. She always did that. She was a woman who lived a certain life. She knew how to give dinner parties, take care of dogs, enter restaurants. She had her way of answering invitations, of dressing, of being herself. Incomparable habits, you might call them. She was a woman who had read books, played golf, gone to weddings, whose legs were good, who had weathered storms, a fine woman whom no one now wanted.
The door opened and one of the farmers came in. He was wearing rubber boots. “Hi, Vera,” he said.
She glanced at him. “Why aren’t you out shooting?”
“Too wet,” he said. He was old and didn’t waste words. “The water’s a foot high in a lot of places.”
“My husband’s out.”
“Wish you’d told me sooner,” the old man said slyly. He had a face that had almost been obliterated by the weather. It had faded like an old stamp.
It was shooting weather, rainy and blurred. The season had started. All day there had been the infrequent sound of guns and about noon a flight of six geese, in disorder, passed over the house. She had been sitting in the kitchen and heard their foolish, loud cries. She saw them through the window. They were very low, just above the trees.
The house was amid fields. From the upstairs, distant barns and fences could be seen. It was a beautiful house, for years she had felt it was unique. The garden was tended, the wood stacked, the screens in good repair. It was the same inside, everything well selected, the soft, white sofas, the rugs and chairs, the Swedish glasses that were so pleasant to hold, the lamps. The house is my soul, she used to say.
She remembered the morning the goose was on the lawn, a big one with his long black neck and white chinstrap, standing there not fifteen feet away. She had hurried to the stairs. “Brookie,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Come down here. Be quiet.”
They went to the window and then on to another, looking out breathlessly.
“What’s he doing so near the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s big, isn’t he?”
“Very.”
“But not as big as Dancer.”
“Dancer can’t fly.”
All gone now, pony, goose, boy. She remembered that night they came home from dinner at the Werners’ where there had been a young woman, very pure featured, who had abandoned her marriage to study architecture. Rob Chandler had said nothing, he had merely listened, distracted, as if to a familiar kind of news. At midnight in the kitchen, hardly having closed the door, he simply announced it. He had turned away from her and was facing the table.
“What?” she said.
He started to repeat it but she interrupted.
“What are you saying?” she said numbly.
He had met someone else.
“You’ve what?”
She kept the house. She went just one last time to the apartment on Eighty-second Street with its large windows from which, cheek pressed to glass, you could see the entrance steps of the Met. A year later he remarried. For a while she veered off course. She sat at night in the empty living room, almost helpless, not bothering to eat, not bothering to do anything, stroking her dog’s head and talking to him, curled on the couch at two in the morning still in her clothes. A fatal weariness had set in, but then she pulled herself together, began going to church and putting on lipstick