Burning the Days by James Salter

Author:James Salter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307781710
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-15T22:00:00+00:00

II

FORGOTTEN KINGS

IN MY HAND is a blue square of paper, the blue of Gauloises, and slowly I unfold it once more. I feel the excitement still. The creases have acquired a memory, opening, they reveal the invitation:

Can you meet me for a drink Relais

Hotel Plaza Athénée Saturday

evening seven P.M.?

It is signed simply, Shaw.

November, the darkness coming on early, or perhaps December, late in the fall and the year, 1961. The city, as I thought of it, was like a splendid photograph, every wide avenue, every street. I had never met a writer of distinction. My agent, who was Irwin Shaw’s agent also, had given him my name, and I was driving to Paris to meet him, coming in from the chill provinces by way of the thrilling diagonal that ran on the map from Chaumont, up through Troyes, to the very heart.

I had a large, elegant secondhand car, blue also, the shade of uniforms of the fleet, steering wheel on the wrong side, four speeds forward and four in reverse as well, small ignition key like those to a safe-deposit box or clock. The engine purred, the boulevards blazed with light. I drank the very air, I was entering Paris.

Crossing a vast intersection crowded with traffic I suddenly jammed on the brakes and managed to stop in the act of barely kissing—there was no sensation attached—the gleaming rear fender of the car ahead, a brand-new, as it happened, Citroën. The owner kept on shouting in a French more rapid than any I had ever heard, cars were blowing their horns and inching around us, we were trying to find an invisible dent in the shining black finish. At length police arrived and finally dismissed the case. Half an hour had passed. I arrived at the Plaza Athénée sick with despair. It was nearer to 8 than 7. I had missed the appointment. The doorman—the car was frequently saluted by them in those days—allowed me to park in front, and empty-hearted I went into the Relais. The first thing I saw was a solidly built man standing at the bar in an open trench coat, a copy of Le Monde stuffed in one pocket. I recognized him instantly. “That’s all right,” he said as I stumbled through an apology, “what are you drinking?” It was quintessentially him.

Time with its broad thumb has blurred nothing. He was forty-eight that year and already late for a dinner he was going to on Avenue Foch. He gave me the address—come afterwards for coffee, he said. A few minutes later, paying the bill, he left. Thus I discovered that Paris. There were worlds above, I learned, but there are also worlds below. I found Avenue Foch—the name itself has only a faint resonance now, the century is ending and into its crypt all such things will vanish, marshals of France as well as unknown poilus—and I also found the île St.-Louis, rue de Grenelle, Place St.-Sulpice, and apartments and restaurants as well as other towns and regions, not always in France, because of him.

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