A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter Read Free Book Online Page A

disappeared. We crawl down invisible roads, barely faster than a walk. The drive home will take hours, the last hours of a night which we have left behind. We’ve given it to the soldiers. They possess nothing. They withhold nothing. When the bill comes they reach in their pockets vaguely and ask each other for coins.
    I have the window partly open. The damp air leaks on my face.
    “I have to learn more French,” Dean says.
    “Well, that’ll come. I see you writing down words all the time.”
    “The trouble is it’s all food,” he says. “That’s the only thing I can talk about. You can’t just keep talking about food.”
    “You’re right. You should read the newspapers.”
    “I’m going to start.”
    We are sneaking past the outskirts of Dijon, only occasionally passing anything we recognize, an intersection, a particular sign.
    “I’ll tell you what’s great about this country,” he says suddenly. “The air. Everything smells good.
    “It’s the real France,” he says. “You were right. I’d never have discovered it if it weren’t for you.”
    “Oh, you would have.”
    “No, I’d just be hanging around Paris like everybody else. It’s easy to do that. But who goes to Dijon?”
    “Not too many people.”
    “Or Autun?” he says.
    “Fewer.”
    “Nobody,” he says. “That’s what makes it.”

[8]
    T HE MORNINGS ARE GROWING colder, I enter them unprepared. Icy mornings. The streets are still dark. The bicycles go past me, their parts creaking, the riders miserable as beggars.
    I have a coffee in the Café St. Louis. It’s as quiet as a doctor’s office. The tables have chairs still upturned on them. Beyond the thin curtains, a splitting cold. Perhaps it will snow. I glance at the sky. Heavy as wet rags. France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners. In the fine weather, all the world can love her. Still, it’s depressing. One feels like a fugitive from half a dozen lives.
    These dismal mornings. I stand near the radiator, trying to warm my hands over iron that’s cold as glass. The French have a nice feeling for simplicity. They merely wear sweaters indoors and sometimes hats as well. They believe in light, yes, but only as the heavens provide it. Most of their rooms are dark as the poorhouse. There’s an odor of tobacco, sweat and perfume, all combined. A dispirited atmosphere in which every sound seems cruel and isolated–the closing of a door, footsteps beneath which one can detect the thin complaint of grit, hoarse bonjours . One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it. I see her almost daily. I can always go down there on some pretext, but it’s difficult to talk while she’s working. Oh, Claude, Claude, my hands are tingling. They want to touch you. In her elaborately done hair there is a band which she keeps feeling for nervously. Then she touches the top button of her sweater as if it were a jewel. Around her neck there are festoons of glass beads the color of nightclub kisses. A green stone on her index finger. And she wears several wedding bands, three, it seems. I’m too nervous to count.
    “You’re not from here, are you?” I had asked her.
    “Oh, no. I am from Paris.”
    “I thought so.”
    She smiles.
    “But do you like it here?” I said.
    “Oh,” she shrugs helplessly.
    When I am near her I can almost experience the feel of her flesh, taste it, like a starving man, like a sailor smelling vegetation far out of sight of shore.
    She opened her purse and took out photographs of herself made in the salons of hotels. It happened too quickly, I wanted to look at them longer. She had been a