Free Light Years by James Salter

languor of a delivery boy, of someone who could not be hurt. She had lived through unheated bedrooms, unpaid bills, her father’s abandoning them, his returns, beautiful birds he had carved out of applewood and painted and placed on her bed. He had spent a lot of time with her when she was a child. She remembered some of it. She had lived in the waves of color he had chosen, irradiated by them as by the sun. She had seen his torn sketchbooks on the floor with footprints across their pages, she had found him sprawled drunk in her room, his face on the thick spruce boards. She could never betray him; it was unthinkable. He asked nothing of her. All these years he had been beaten, as if in a street fight, before her eyes. He did not complain. He talked about painting sometimes, about pruning the trees. There was in him the saintliness of a man who never looked in the mirror, whose thoughts were dazzling but illiterate, whose dreams were immense. Every penny he had ever made he had given to them, and they had spent it.
    Her boyfriend in California was a painter. They smoked, with music filling the air, for days at a time. They stayed out late, they slept half the day. Her father had taught her nothing, but the fabric of his life was the only one that felt good to her; she wore it as she wore his old shoes sometimes, his feet were very small.
    “Well, where is she?” he asked. “You can’t get rid of her when you work. Then when you want her, she leaves. Why don’t you go and tell her Jivan is here?”
    “Oh, she knows,” Kate replied.

11
     
    JIVAN LOVED CHILDREN. THEY showed him their games, they knew he would learn to play them quickly. He did not descend to it; he became a child. He had time for it. He embodied the simple virtues of a life lived alone. He had time for everything—for cooking, for plants.
    He lived in an empty store that had once been a pharmacy. A long, serene room in front, the windows curtained with bamboo and dense with plants. At night one could just barely see in. It looked like a restaurant, the last patrons lingering. A racing bicycle hung on the wall. A white Alsatian put his nose silently, without barking, to the glass of the door.
    He had birds in a cage and a gray parrot that spread its wings.
    “Perruchio,” he would say, “do the angel.”
    Nothing.
    “The angel, the angel,” he said. “Fa l’angelone.”
    Like a cat stretching its claws the parrot would slowly fan out its wings and feathers. Its head turned in profile to one, black, heartless eye.
    “Why is he named Perruchio?” Danny asked. As she tried to approach him, he moved sideways a step at a time.
    “That was his name when I got him,” Jivan said.
    He played twenty questions. His education had been the simplest possible: books. He read no fiction, only journals, letters, the lives of the great.
    “All right,” he said. “Are you ready? I have one.”
    “A man,” Danny said.
    “Yes.”
    “Living.”
    “No.”
    A pause while they abandoned hope of its being easy.
    “Did he have a beard?”
    Their questions were always oblique.
    “Yes, a beard.”
    “Lincoln!” they cried.
    “No.”
    “Did he have a big family?”
    “Yes, big.”
    “Napoleon!”
    “No, not Napoleon.”
    “How many questions is that?”
    “I don’t know—four, five,” he said.
    He brought them gifts, boxes in which expensive soap had come, miniature playing cards, Greek beads. He appeared for dinner in the October dusk, his feet crushing the cool gravel, a bottle of wine in his hand. Autumn was coming; it was in the air.
    Hadji was lying on his side in the shadow of a shrub, the dark leaves touching him.
    “Hello, Hadji. How are you?” He stopped to talk as if to a person. There was a faint movement near the dog’s rump, a beat of the missing tail. “What are you, having a rest?”
    He entered the house confident but correct, like a relative who knows his place. He respected Viri’s knowledge, his background, the people he knew.