All That Is by Salter James

Author:Salter, James [Salter, James]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307961099
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

15

THE COTTAGE

On a hot day in June, Bowman drove north from New York, generally following the Hudson for more than four hours to Chatham, a place once sacred for a love goddess, the poet Edna Millay, a siren of the 1920s, to spend two days working on a manuscript with a favorite writer, a square-faced man in his fifties with blue eyes and thinning hair who in his youth had dropped out of Dartmouth and gone to sea for three years. Kenneth Wells was his name. He and his wife—she was his third wife, he didn’t particularly look like a man who’d been married a number of times, he was homely, his eyesight was bad; she had been married to his neighbor and one day the two of them had simply gone off to Mexico together and not come back—lived in a house that Bowman liked and that always stayed in his mind as a model. It was a plain wooden house not far from the road and resembled a farm building or stables. You entered through the kitchen or into it. There was a bedroom on one side and the living room on the other. The main bedroom was upstairs. The interior doors, for some reason, were slightly wider than usual with glass in the upper half of some. It was like a small family hotel, a hotel in the West.

It had been a long day. The summer had come early. Sun struck the trees of the countryside with dazzling power. In towns along the way, girls with tanned limbs strolled idly past stores that looked closed. Housewives drove with kerchiefs on their heads and their men in hard yellow hats stood near signs warning Construction Ahead. The landscape was beautiful but passive. The emptiness of things rose like the sound of a choir making the sky bluer and more vast.

It was the period when, in Paris, the lengthy and futile negotiations to end the war in Vietnam were continuing for month after unsuccessful month. America was in endless and violent upheaval, the entire nation torn apart by the war, but Wells seemed curiously uninvolved. He was more interested in baseball, from other passions he lived apart. He was an avid reader, so was his wife. Their bookshelves were divided into his and hers, their books were kept apart. On an old, marble-topped buffet were stacks of books, many of them new. Nearby on the wall a postcard of the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna was pinned, along with a photograph of a girl in a bikini, and another of a dish of pasta clipped from some magazine.

“T T T,” Wells said.

“T T T?”

“Tits, towers, and tortellini.”

He grinned and showed the spaces between his teeth that were like walrus tusks pointing in several directions. There was also a black-and-white photograph of German women weeping with emotion at a Nazi parade and upstairs, though no one ever saw it, a framed photo of a woman’s naked legs and lower body tumbled across a bed.

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