Light Years by James Salter

Author:James Salter [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Hudson River Valley (N.Y. And N.J.), Fiction, gr:read, Domestic Fiction, Divorced People, General, Literary, AHudson River Valley (N.Y. And N.J.), gr:favorites, gr:kindle-owned, Married People
ISBN: 9780679740735
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1975-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Three

1

AT SIXTEEN, FRANCA CHANGED. She began to fulfill her promise. As if in a day, the way leaves appear, she suddenly had the power of self-possession. She woke with it one morning, it was bestowed upon her. Her breasts were new, her feet a little large. Her face was calm and unfathomable.

They were close, mother and daughter. Nedra treated her like a woman. They talked a great deal.

The world was changing, Nedra told her. “I don’t mean changes in fashion,” she said. “Those aren’t really changes. I mean changes in the way one can live.”

“For instance.”

“I don’t think I know. You’ll feel it. You’ll understand far more than I do. The truth is, I’m rather ignorant, but I am able to feel what’s in the ground.”

There is warmth in families but not often companionship. She loved talking to Franca, and about her as well. She felt that this was the woman that she herself had become, in the sense that the present represents the past. She wanted to discover life through her, to savor it for the second time.

There was a party at Dana’s one evening during the holidays. Dana, whose face already had a curious dead expression, one almost of resentment, but after all, what can you expect, as Nedra said, the father a drunkard, the mother a fool. She was reading a book on Kandinsky that night, heavy, beautiful, the paper smooth. She had seen his exhibition at the Guggenheim, for the moment she was dazzled by him. In the silence of the evening, in that hour when all has been done, she opened it at last. He had come to painting late, she read; he was thirty-two at the time.

She called Eve. “I love this book,” she said.

“I thought it looked good.”

“I’ve just started reading it,” Nedra said. “At the beginning of the first war he was living in Munich, and he went back to Russia. He left behind the woman—she was a painter, too—that he’d been living with for ten years. He saw her again just once—imagine this—at an exhibition in 1927.”

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates.

Franca came home at eleven. From the instant the door closed, she sensed something wrong. “What is it?” she asked.

“What is what?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. It was terrible.”

“How?”

Her daughter was suddenly crying.

“Franca, what is it?”

“Look at me,” she wept.

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