Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter Read Free Book Online Page A

moment.
    “Why don’t you just take a photograph?” the woman said.
    “A photograph?”
    “Of those women. You’re looking at them so much.”
    He put down the binoculars.
    “You know, the curve is so graceful,” she said. “It’s what makes this square so perfect.”
    “Isn’t the weather glorious?” Frank said in the same tone of voice.
    “And the pigeons,” Alan said.
    “The pigeons, too.”
    After a while the couple got up and left. The pigeons leapt up for a running child and hissed overhead. “I see you’re still playing games,” Brenda said. Frank smiled.
    “We ought to get together in New York,” she said that evening. They were waiting for Alan to come down. She reached across the table to pick up a magazine. “You’ve never met my kids, have you?” she said.
    “No.”
    “They’re terrific kids.” She leafed through the pages not paying attention to them. Her forearms were tanned. She was not wearing a wedding band. The first act was over or rather the first five minutes. Now came the plot. “Do you remember those nights at Goldie’s?” she said.
    “Things were different then, weren’t they?”
    “Not so different.”
    “What do you mean?”
    She wiggled her bare third finger and glanced at him. Just then Alan appeared. He sat down and looked from one of them to the other. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did I interrupt something?”
    When the time came for her to leave she wanted them to drive toRome. They could spend a couple of days and she would catch the plane. They weren’t going that way, Frank said.
    “It’s only a three-hour drive.”
    “I know, but we’re going the other way,” he said.
    “For God’s sake. Why won’t you drive me?”
    “Let’s do it,” Alan said.
    “Go ahead. I’ll stay here.”
    “You should have gone into politics,” Brenda said. “You have a real gift.”
    After she was gone the mood of things changed. They were by themselves. They drove through the sleepy country to the north. The green water slapped as darkness fell on Venice. The lights in some palazzos were on. On the curtained upper floors the legs of countesses uncoiled, slithering on the sheets like a serpent.
    In Harry’s, Frank held up a dense, icy glass and murmured his father’s line, “Good night, nurse.” He talked to some people at the next table, a German who was manager of a hotel in Düsseldorf and his girlfriend. She’d been looking at him. “Want a taste?” he asked her. It was his second. She drank looking directly at him. “Looks like you finished it,” he said.
    “Yes, I like to do that.”
    He smiled. When he was drinking he was strangely calm. In Lugano in the park that time a bird had sat on his shoe.
    In the morning across the canal, wide as a river, the buildings of the Giudecca lay in their soft colors, a great sunken barge with roofs and the crowns of hidden trees. The first winds of autumn were blowing, ruffling the water.
    Leaving Venice, Frank drove. He couldn’t ride in a car unless he was driving. Alan sat back, looking out the window, sunlight falling on the hillsides of antiquity. European days, the silence, the needle floating at a hundred.
    In Padua, Alan woke early. The stands were being set up in the market. It was before daylight and cool. A man was laying outboards on the pavement, eight of them like doors to set bags of grain on. He was wearing the jacket from a suit. Searching in the truck he found some small pieces of wood and used them to shim the boards, testing with his foot.
    The sky became violet. Under the colonnade the butchers had hung out chickens and roosters, spurred legs bound together. Two men sat trimming artichokes. The blue car of the carabiniere lazed past. The bags of rice and dry beans were set out now, the tops folded back like cuffs. A girl in a tailored coat with a scarf around her head called, “Signore,” then arrogantly, “dica! ”
    He saw the world afresh, its pavements and architecture, the names