Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [44]
His first, much-published story—everyone knows it—brought him at least fifty women over the years, he used to say. His wife was aware of it. In the end he broke with her, too. He was not a man who kept his looks. Small veins began to appear in his cheeks. His eyes became red. He insulted people, even waiters in restaurants. Still, in his youth he was said to have been very generous, very brave. He was against injustice. He gave money to the Loyalists in Spain.
Morning. The dentists are laying out their picks. In the doorways, as the sun hits them, the bums begin to groan. Nile went on the bus to visit his mother, the words of Victor Hugo about all the armies in the world being unable to stop an idea whose time has come on an advertisement above his head. His hair was uncombed. His face had the arrogance, the bruised lips of someone determined to live without money. His mother met him at the door and took this pale face in her hands. She stepped back to see better. She was trembling slightly with a steady, rhythmic movement.
“Your teeth,” she said.
He covered them with his tongue. His aunt came from the kitchen to embrace him.
“Where have you been?” she cried. “Guess what we’re having for lunch.”
Like many fat women, she liked to laugh. She was twice a widow, but one drink was enough to make her dance. She went to set the table. Passing the window, she glanced out. There was a movie house across the street.
“Degenerates,” she said.
Nile sat between them, pulling his chair close to the table with little scrapes. They had not bothered to dress. The warmth of family lunches when the only interest is food. He was always hungry when he came. He ate a slice of bread heavy with butter as he talked. There was scrod and sautéed onions on a huge dish. Voices everywhere—the television was going, the radio in the kitchen. His mouth was full as he answered their questions.
“It’s a little flat,” his mother announced. “Did you cook it the same way?”
“Exactly the same,” his aunt said. She tasted it herself. “It may need salt.”
“You don’t put salt on seafood,” his mother said.
Nile kept eating. The fish fell apart beneath his fork, moist and white, he could taste the faint iodine of the sea. He knew the very market where it had been displayed on ice, the Jewish owner who did not shave. His aunt was watching him.
“Do you know something?” she said.
“What?”
She was not speaking to him. She had made a discovery.
“For a minute then, while he was eating, he looked just like his father.”
A sudden, sweet pause opened in the room, a depth that had not been there when they were talking only of immorality and the danger of the blacks. His mother looked at him reverently.
“Did you hear that?” she asked. Her voice was hushed, she longed for the myths of the past. Her eyes had darkness around them, her flesh was old.
“How do you look like him?” She wanted to hear it recited.
“I don’t,” he said.
They did not hear him. They were arguing about his childhood, various details of it, poems he had memorized, his beautiful hair. What a good student he had been. How grown-up when he ate, the fork too large for his hand. His chin was like his father’s, they said. The shape of his head.
“In the back,” his aunt said.
“A beautiful head,” his mother confirmed. “You have a perfect head, did you know that?”
Afterward he lay on the couch and listened as they cleared the dishes. He closed his eyes. Everything was familiar to him, phrases he had heard before, quarrels about the past, even the smell of the cushions beneath his head. In the bedroom was a collection of photographs in ill-fitting frames. In them, if one traced the progression, was a face growing older and older, more and more unpromising. Had he really written all those earnest letters preserved in shoe boxes together with schoolbooks and folded programs? He was sleeping in the museum of his life.
He left at four. The doorman was reading the newspaper, his collar unbuttoned, the air surrounding