Last Night by James Salter

Author:James Salter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction, Anthologies, Fantasy, American, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780307426567
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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THE BRULE apartment had a magnificent view of the park, bare and vast in winter and in the summer a rich sea of green. The apartment was in a fine building, narrow but tall, and it was in a way comforting to think of how many others there were, dignified and calm, building upon fine building, all with their unsmiling doormen and solemn entrances. Rare carpets, servants, expensive furniture. Brule had paid more than nine hundred thousand for it at a time when prices were high, but the apartment was worth far more now, priceless, in fact. It had high ceilings, afternoon sunlight, and wide doors with curved brass handles. There were deep armchairs, flowers, tables dense with photographs, and many pictures on the walls, including Vollard prints in the hallway that led to the bedrooms and a ravishing dark painting by Camille Bombois.

Brule was one of those men about whom more is rumored than known. He was in his fifties and successful. He had defended some notorious clients and, less publicized, was said to have done unpaid work for those with no resources or hope. Details were vague. He had a soft voice that nevertheless carried authority and iron beneath a calm smile. He walked to work, perhaps a mile down the avenue, in a cashmere overcoat and scarf during the winter, and the doormen, who murmured good morning, received five hundred dollars apiece at Christmas. He was a figure of decency and honor, and like the old men described by Cicero who planted orchards they would not live to see the fruit from, but who did it out of a sense of responsibility and respect for the gods, he had a desire to bequeath the best of what he had known to his descendants.

His wife, Pascale, who was French, was warm and understanding. She was his second wife and had herself been married before, to a famous Parisian jeweler. She had no children of her own and her only fault, Brule felt, was she didn’t like to cook. She couldn’t cook and talk at the same time, she said. She was not beautiful but had an intelligent, faintly Asiatic face. Her generosity and good instincts were inborn.

— Look, she had said to his daughters when she and Brule were married, I’m not your mother and I can never be, but I hope that we’ll be friends. If we are, good, and if not, you can still count on me for anything.

The daughters were young girls at the time. As it turned out, they loved her. The three of them and their husbands and children came on all the holidays and often, though not all at once, of course, for dinner. They were an intimate and devoted family, a matter of great pride to Brule, the more so since his first marriage had failed.

You belonged to the family, not as someone who happened to be married to a daughter, but entirely. You were one of them, one for all and all for one.

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