Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [52]
“Oh, Christ,” he murmured, looking around.
It was William Hedges. Alone.
They all began to talk at once. The owner of the Mercedes, which was blinded, fortunately was not present. A policeman was making his way along the street.
“Well, it’s not too serious,” Hedges said. He was inspecting his own car. The taillights were shattered. There was a dent in the trunk.
After much discussion he was finally allowed to enter the hotel. He was wearing a striped cotton jacket and a shirt the color of ink. He had a white face, damp with sweat, the face of an unpopular schoolboy, high forehead, thinning hair, a soft beard touched with gray, the beard of an explorer, a man who washed his socks in the Amazon.
“Nadine will be along a little later,” he said.
When he reached for a drink, his hand was trembling.
“My foot slipped off the brake,” he explained. He quickly lit a cigarette. “The insurance pays that, don’t they? Probably not.”
He seemed to have reached a stop, the first of many enormous pauses during which he looked in his lap. Then, as if it were the thing he had been struggling to think of, he inquired painfully, “What do you … think of Basel?”
The headwaiter had placed them on opposite sides of the table, the empty chair between them. Its presence seemed to weigh on Hedges. He asked for another drink. Turning, he knocked over a glass. That act, somehow, relieved him. The waiter dabbed at the wet tablecloth with a napkin. Hedges spoke around him.
“I don’t know exactly what Nadine has told you,” he said softly. A long pause. “She sometimes tells … fantastic lies.”
“Oh, yes?”
“She’s from a little town in Pennsylvania,” Hedges muttered. “Julesberg. She’s never been … she was just a … an ordinary girl when we met.”
They had come to Basel to visit certain institutions, he explained. It was an … interesting city. History has certain sites upon which whole epochs turn, and the village of Dornach gave evidence of a very … The sentence was never finished. Rudolf Steiner had been a student of Goethe. …
“Yes, I know.”
“Of course. Nadine’s been telling you, hasn’t she?”
“No.”
“I see.”
He finally began again, about Goethe. The range of that intellect, he said, had been so extraordinary that he was able, like Leonardo before him, to encompass all of what was then human knowledge. That, in itself, implied an overall … coherence, and the fact that no man had been capable of it since could easily mean the coherence no longer existed, it was dissolved. … The ocean of things known had burst its shores.
“We are on the verge,” Hedges said, “of radical departures in the destiny of man. Those who reveal them …”
The words, coming with agonized slowness, seemed to take forever. They were a ruse, a feint. It was difficult to hear them out.
“… will be torn to pieces like Galileo.”
“Is that what you think?”
A long pause again.
“Oh, yes.”
They had another drink.
“We are a little strange, I suppose, Nadine and I,” Hedges said, as if to himself.
It was finally the time.
“I don’t think she’s a very happy woman.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Happy?” Hedges said. “No, she isn’t happy. She isn’t capable of being happy. Ecstasies. She is ecstatic. She tells me so every day,” he said. He put his hand to his forehead, half covering his eyes. “You see, you don’t know her at all.”
She was not coming, suddenly that was clear. There was going to be no dinner.
Something should have been said, it ended too vaguely. Ten minutes after Hedges had gone, leaving behind an embarrassing expanse of white and three places set, the thought came of what he should have demanded: I want to talk to her.
All doors had closed. He was miserable, he could not imagine someone with weaknesses, incapacities like his own. He had intended to mutilate