Comet
Philip married Adele on a day in June. It was cloudy and the wind
was blowing. Later the sun came out. It had been a while since Adele
had married and she wore white: white pumps with low heels, a long
white skirt that clung to her hips, a filmy blouse with a white bra
underneath, and around her neck a string of freshwater pearls. They
were married in her house, the one she’d gotten in the divorce. All
her friends were there. She believed strongly in friendship. The
room was crowded.
– I, Adele, she said in a clear voice, give myself to you, Phil,
completely as your wife … Behind her as best man, somewhat
oblivious, her young son was standing, and pinned to her panties as
something borrowed was a small silver disc, actually a St.
Christopher’s medal her father had worn in the war; she had several
times rolled down the waistband of her skirt to show it to people.
Near the door, under the impression that she was part of a garden
tour, was an old woman who held a little dog by the handle of a cane
hooked through his collar.
At the reception Adele smiled with happiness, drank too much,
laughed, and scratched her bare arms with long showgirl nails. Her
new husband admired her. He could have licked her palms like a calf
does salt. She was still young enough to be good-looking, the final
blaze of it, though she was too old for children, at least if she
had anything to say about it. Summer was coming. Out of the
afternoon haze she would appear, in her black bathing suit, limbs
all tan, the brilliant sun behind her. She was the strong figure
walking up the smooth sand from the sea, her legs, her wet swimmer’s
hair, the grace of her, all careless and unhurried.
They settled into life together, hers mostly. It was her furniture
and her books, though they were largely unread. She liked to tell
stories about DeLereo, her first husband-Frank, his name was-the
heir to a garbage-hauling empire. She called him Delerium, but the
stories were not unaffectionate. Loyalty-it came from her childhood
as well as the years of marriage, eight exhausting years, as she
said-was her code. The terms of marriage had been simple, she
admitted. Her job was to be dressed, have dinner ready, and be
fucked once a day. One time in Florida with another couple they
chartered a boat to go bonefishing off Bimini.
– We’ll have a good dinner, DeLereo had said happily, get on board
and turn in. When we get up we’ll have passed the Gulf Stream.
It began that way but ended differently. The sea was very rough.
They never did cross the Gulf Stream-the captain was from Long
Island and got lost. DeLereo paid him fifty dollars to turn over the
wheel and go below.
– Do you know anything about boats? the captain asked.
– More than you do, DeLereo told him.
He was under an ultimatum from Adele, who was lying, deathly pale,
in their cabin. – Get us into port somewhere or get ready to sleep
by yourself, she’d said.
Philip Ardet heard the story and many others often. He was mannerly
and elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you
were a menu. He and Adele had met on the golf course when she was
learning to play. It was a wet day and the course was nearly empty.
Adele and a friend were teeing off when a balding figure carrying a
cloth bag with a few clubs in it asked if he could join them. Adele
hit a passable drive. Her friend bounced his across the road and
teed up another, which he topped. Phil, rather shyly, took out an
old three wood and hit one two hundred yards straight down the
fairway.
That was his persona, capable and calm. He’d gone to Princeton and
been in the navy. He looked like someone who’d been in the navy,
Adele said-his legs were strong. The first time she went out with
him, he remarked it was a funny thing, some people liked him, some
didn’t.
– The ones that do, I tend to lose interest in.
She wasn’t sure just what that meant but she liked his appearance,
which was a bit worn, especially around the eyes. It made her feel
he was a real man, though perhaps not the man he had been. Also he
was smart, as she explained it, more or less the way professors
were.
To be liked by her was worthwhile but to be liked by him seemed
somehow of even greater value. There was something about him that
discounted the world. He appeared in a way to care nothing for
himself, to be above that.
He didn’t make much money, as it turned out. He wrote for a business
weekly. She earned nearly that much selling houses. She had begun to
put on a little weight. This was a few years after they were
married. She was still beautiful-her face was-but she had adopted a
more comfortable outline. She would get into bed with a drink, the
way she had done when she was twenty-five. Phil, a sport jacket over
his pajamas, sat reading. Sometimes he walked that way on their lawn
in the morning. She sipped her drink and watched him.
– You know something?
– What?
– I’ve had good sex since I was fifteen, she said.
He looked up.
– I didn’t start quite that young, he confessed.
– Maybe you should have.
– Good advice. Little late though.
– Do you remember when we first got started?
– I remember.
– We could hardly stop, she said. You remember?
– It averages out.
– Oh, great, she said.
After he’d gone to sleep she watched a movie. The stars grew old,
too, and had problems with love. It was different, though-they had
already reaped huge rewards. She watched, thinking. She thought of
what she had been, what she had had. She could have been a star.
What did Phil know-He was sleeping.
Autumn came. One evening they were at the Morrisseys’-Morrissey was
a tall lawyer, the executor of many estates and trustee of others.
Reading wills had been his true education, a look into the human
heart, he said.
At the dinner table was a man from Chicago who’d made a fortune in
computers, a nitwit it developed, who during the meal gave a toast,
– To the end of privacy and the life of dignity, he said.
He was with a dampened woman who had recently found out that her
husband had been having an affair with a black woman in Cleveland,
an affair that had somehow been going on for seven years. There may
even have been a child.
– You can see why coming here is like a breath of fresh air for me,
she said.
The women were sympathetic. They knew what she had to do-she had to
rethink completely the past seven years.
– That’s right, her companion agreed.
– What is there to be rethought? Phil wanted to know.
He was answered with impatience. The deception, they said, the
deception-she had been deceived all that time. Adele meanwhile was
pouring more wine for herself. Her napkin covered the place where
she had already spilled a glass of it.
– But that time was spent in happiness, wasn’t it? Phil asked
guilelessly. That’s been lived. It can’t be changed. It can’t be
just turned into unhappiness.
– That woman stole my husband. She stole everything he had vowed.
– Forgive me, Phil said softly. That happens every day.
There was an outcry as if from a chorus, heads thrust forward like
the hissing, sacred geese. Only Adele sat silent.
– Every day, he repeated, his voice drowned out, the voice of reason
or at least of fact.
– I’d never steal anyone’s man, Adele said then. Never. Her face had
a tone of weariness when she drank, a weariness that knew the answer
to everything. And I’d never break a vow.
– I don’t think you would, Phil said.
– I’d never fall for a twenty-year-old, either.
She was talking about the tutor, the girl who had come that time,
youth burning through her clothes.
– No, you wouldn’t.
– He left his wife, Adele told them.
There was silence.
Phil’s bit of smile had gone but his face was still pleasant.
– I didn’t leave my wife, he said quietly. She threw me out.
– He left his wife and children, Adele said.
– I didn’t leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been
for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had
happened to someone else. It was my son’s tutor, he explained. I
fell in love with her.
– And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.
– Oh, yes.
There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even
breathe.
– Within two or three days, he confessed.
– There in the house?
Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was
abandoning himself.
– I didn’t do anything in the house.
– He left his wife and children, Adele repeated.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Last Night
by James Salter
Copyright © 2005 by James Salter.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
James Salter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-4312-3
