Last Night - James Salter [11]
— The best thing is to just forget about tonight.
— Yes, she said. It was nothing.
Brennan went through a fence on Hull Lane and up on to somebody’s lawn at about two that morning. He had missed the curve where the road bent left, probably because his headlights weren’t on, the police thought.
SHE TOOK THE BOOK and went over to a window that looked out on the garden behind the library. She read a bit of one thing or another and came to a poem some lines of which had been underlined, with pencilled notes in the margin. It was “The River-Merchant’s Wife”; she had never heard of it. Outside, the summer burned, white as chalk.
At fourteen I married My Lord you, she read.
I never laughed, being bashful . . .
There were three old men, one of them almost blind, it appeared, reading newspapers in the cold room. The thick glasses of the nearly blind man cast white moons onto his cheeks.
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
She had read poems and perhaps marked them like this, but that was in school. Of the things she had been taught she remembered only a few. There had been one My Lord though she did not marry him. She’d been twenty-one, her first year in the city. She remembered the building of dark brown brick on Fifty-eighth Street, the afternoons with their slitted light, her clothes in a chair or fallen to the floor, and the damp, mindless repetition, to it, or him, or who knew what: oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. The traffic outside so faint, so far away . . .
She’d called him several times over the years, believing that love never died, dreaming foolishly of seeing him again, of his returning, in the way of old songs. To hurry, to almost run down the noontime street again, the sound of her heels on the sidewalk. To see the door of the apartment open . . .
If you are coming down the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you.
As far as Chô-fu-Sa
There she sat by the window with her young face that had a weariness in it, a slight distaste for things, even, one might imagine for oneself. After a while she went to the desk.
— Do you happen to have anything by Michael Brennan? she asked.
— Michael Brennan, the woman said. We’ve had them, but he takes them away because unworthy people read them, he says. I don’t think there’re any now. Perhaps when he comes back from the city.
— He lives in the city?
— He lives just down the road. We had all of his books at one time. Do you know him?
She would have liked to ask more but she shook her head.
— No, she said. I’ve just heard the name.
— He’s a poet, the woman said.
ON THE BEACH she sat by herself. There was almost no one. In her bathing suit she lay back with the sun on her face and knees. It was hot and the sea calm. She preferred to lie up by the dunes with the waves bursting, to listen while they crashed like the final chords of a symphony except they went on and on. There was nothing as fine as that.
She came out of the ocean and dried herself like the gypsy girl, ankles caked with sand. She could feel the sun burnishing her shoulders. Hair wet, deep in the emptiness of days, she walked her bicycle up to the road, the dirt velvety beneath her feet.
She did not go home the usual way. There was little traffic. The noon was bottle-green, large houses among the trees and wide farmland, like a memory, behind.
She knew the house and saw it far off, her heart beating strangely. When she stopped, it was casually, with the bike tilting to one side and she half-seated on it as if taking a rest. How beautiful a lone woman is, in a white summer shirt and bare legs. Pretending to adjust the bicycle’s chain she looked at the house, its tall windows, water stains high on the roof. There was a gardener’s