Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter

Author:James Salter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781588369581
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-06T10:00:00+00:00

II.

Today was sunny. He was writing in brief, disconsolate phrases. Yesterday it rained, it was dark until late afternoon, the day before was the same. The corridors of the Inghilterra were vaulted like a convent, the doors set deep in the walls. Still, he thought, it was comfortable. He gave his shirts to the maid in the morning, they were back the next day. She did them at home. He had seen her bending over to take linen from a cabinet. The tops of her stockings showed—it was classic Buñuel—the mysterious white of a leg.

The girl from publicity called. They needed information for his biography.

“What information?”

“We’ll send a car for you,” she said.

It never came. He went the next day by taxi and waited thirty minutes in her office, she was in seeing the producer. Finally she returned, a thin girl with damp spots under the arms of her dress.

“You called me?” Lang said.

She did not know who he was.

“You were going to send a car for me.”

“Mr. Lang,” she suddenly cried. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

The desk was covered with photos, the chairs with newspapers and magazines. She was an assistant, she had worked on Cleopatra, The Bible, The Longest Day. There was money to be earned in American films.

“They’ve put me in this little room,” she apologized.

Her name was Eva. She lived at home. Her family ate without speaking, four of them in the sadness of bourgeois surroundings, the radio which didn’t work, thin rugs on the floor. When he was finished, her father cleared his throat. The meat was better the last time, he said. The last time? her mother asked.

“Yes, it was better,” he said.

“The last time it was tasteless.”

“Ah, well, two times ago,” he said.

They fell into silence again. There was only the sound of forks, an occasional glass. Suddenly her brother rose from the table and left the room. No one looked up.

He was crazy, this brother, well, perhaps not crazy but enough to make them weep. He would remain for days in his room, the door locked. He was a writer. There was one difficulty, everything worthwhile had already been written. He had gone through a period when he devoured books, three and four a day, and could quote vast sections of them afterward, but the fever had passed. He lay on his bed now and looked at the ceiling.

Eva was nervous, people said. Of course, she was nervous. She was thirty. She had black hair, small teeth, and a life in which she had already given up hope. They had nothing for his biography, she told Lang. They had to have a biography for everybody. She suggested finally he write it himself. Yes, of course, he imagined it would be something like that.

Her closest friend—like all Italians she was alert to friends and enemies—her most useful friend was a hysterical woman named Mirella Ricci who had a large apartment and aristocratic longings, also the fears and illnesses of women who live alone. Mirella’s friends were homosexuals and women who were separated.

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