Last Night - James Salter [4]
— Come on, you can look at it tomorrow, she said, almost consolingly, though she came no closer to him.
— It won’t be there tomorrow. One time only.
— How do you know where it’ll be? she said. Come on, it’s late, let’s get out of here.
He did not move. After a bit she walked toward the house where, extravagantly, every window upstairs and down was lit. He stood where he was, looking up at the sky and then at her as she became smaller and smaller going across the lawn, reaching first the aura, then the brightness, then tripping on the kitchen steps.
Eyes of the Stars
SHE WAS SHORT with short legs and her body had lost its shape. It began at her neck and continued down, and her arms were like a cook’s. In her sixties Teddy had looked the same for a decade and would probably go on looking the same, there was not that much to change. She had pouches under her eyes and a chin, slightly receding when she was a girl, that was lost now in several others, but she dressed neatly and people liked her.
Myron, her late husband, had been an ophthalmologist and proud of the fact that he treated the eyes of many stars, although frequently it was a relative of a star, a nephew or mother-in-law, almost the same thing. He could recite the exact condition of all these eyes, retinitis, mild amblyopia . . .
— So, what is that?
Silvery-haired, he would confide,
—Lazy-eyed.
But Myron was gone. He hadn’t really been a very interesting man, Teddy would sometimes admit, apart from knowing exactly what was wrong with famous patients’ eyes. They had married when she was past forty and resigned to the idea of being single, not that she wouldn’t have made a good wife in every way, but she had only her personality and good nature by that time, the rest, as she herself would say, had turned into a size fourteen.
It had not always been that way. Though she did not state, like London’s notorious Mrs. Wilson two hundred years earlier, that she would not reveal the circumstances that had made her the mistress of an older man at the age of fifteen, Teddy had had something of the same experience. The first great episode of her life had been with a writer, a detoured novelist more than twenty years older than she was. He had first seen her at a bus stop. She was not, even in those days, exactly beautiful, but there was a body that spoke, at the time, of much that youth could offer. He took her to get her first diaphragm and she was his mistress for three years until he left town and returned to literature and in the end a large house in New Jersey.
She had stayed in touch with him for a time, her real link to the grown-up world, and read his books, of course, but slowly his letters became less frequent until they simply stopped and along with them the foolish hope that he would come back someday.
Through the years she began to remember him less and less as he had been and more as one lone image: driving. The boulevards in those days were wide and very white and the car was weaving a little while he, half-drunk, was telling her stories about actors and parties he had not taken her to.
He had gotten her a job in the story department and she began a long career in the world of movies with its intimate acquaintances, fraudulence, and dreams. One could, though, as that world went, rely on her and she tried to be honest. In the end she became a producer. She had never actually produced anything, but she had suggested things and seen them on the way to realization or oblivion, sometimes both. The marriage to Dr. Hirsch had helped. One of his patients was a rich man who owned a game-show company, and through him she met figures in television. It was after she was widowed that the long-awaited opportunity came. She was invited to coproduce a show that turned out to be a success, and a year later she became the sole producer when her partner fell in love and left to marry a Venezuelan businessman. Easygoing in manner, sentimental but