Light Years by James Salter Read Free Book Online

cheerfully.
    “Listen,” Viri said, “why don’t you come out this weekend and have dinner?”
    “Wonderful.”
    “You and Eve.”
    “I forgot something,” Arnaud said suddenly. He was searching in his pocket. “I have a present for Franca. I bought it at Azuma, it’s a frog ring.”
    “Why don’t you give it to her?”
    “No, take it with you. I want her to have it tonight.”
    “I’ll tell her it’s from you.”
    “Tell her it’s from Yassir Rashid, the king of the desert. Tell her if she is ever in danger to show it and she will be safe in the heart of the tribes.”
    “Listen, Yassir, what would you think of a little Scotch before you disappear?”
    “There are three things in the desert which cannot be hidden,” Arnaud said. “A camel, smoke and … you know something? We see too many movies.”
    “On the rocks?” Viri asked.
    “They kill the imagination. You’ve heard of blind storytellers. It’s in darkness that myths are born. The cinema can’t do that. Did I tell you about the girl I took to lunch? She was really okay. You know, in a sense it’s that way with her. She can never dance. That’s why the real grace, the real music is in her.”
    Evening had appeared. The light was gone. The street outside trembled with buses, with enormous, fleeing cars. Along the river was stretched an endless procession which Viri would join. He would move with it, his legs weary though he had not walked, his neck aching slightly, borne alone homeward, listening to the endlessly repeated news.

8
     
    NEDRA ROSE LATE IN SUMMER AND winter, whenever she could. Her real self lay in bed until nine, stirred, stretched, breathed the new air. Long sleepers are usually nonconformists; they are pensive and somewhat withdrawn. Her hair was rich and clung to her. She bound it in various styles. She bathed it, she wore it damp. One thinks of the ten, the twenty gleaming years of her ascendance. She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.
    Her hair smells of flowers. The day is calm. The sun is still forming, the river is spilling light.
    She has no friends, she says. Rae and Larry. Eve. It’s very difficult for her to make friends. She has no time for friendship, she is quickly disappointed. It is the shopkeepers who love her, the people on the street who see her passing, wrapped in herself, staring in the windows of bookstores at the beautiful, heavy volumes of painters, the Italian edition of Vogue .
    “Tell her how much we love her and miss her,” the men who have the little shop for soap and perfumes near Bonwit’s cry. “Where is she? We don’t see her now that she lives in the country. Tell her to come by,” they say. They love her height, her elegance, her hazel eyes.
    She is interested in certain people. She admires certain lives. She is subtle, penetrating and sometimes mischievous, strongly inclined to love and not overdelicate in the ways that must be taken. All of this is written in her dream book. Of course she does not believe it, but it amuses her and parts of the book are very true. Eve, for instance, is exactly as described. It’s also quite close to Viri.
    One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love. Soon after they were married, perhaps an hour after, even Viri longed for this. His possession of her became sanctified; at the same time something in her changed. She became his closest relative. She committed herself to his interests and embarked on her own. The desperate, unbearable affection vanished, and in its place was a young woman of twenty condemned to live with him. He could not define it. She had escaped. Perhaps