Solo Faces by James Salter Page A

it ruin me,” she said.
    Paris was filled with such women, he saw them on the streets, in buses, everywhere. Students, married women, extravagant faces in bars and cafés. In the windows of parfumeries gleamed seductive advertisements for the care of the breasts and skin. His eye lingered on them like a young husband looking at whores.
    In a bar off Boulevard St. Michel there was a girl with her eyes outlined in black and a bright silk scarf wrapped around and around her swanlike neck.
    “Who is it, someone you know?” Catherin asked—it took him by surprise—she was leafing through a magazine. He began to read over her shoulder. It was November. Nights were cold, but days still fair. Paris was opening itself to him, he thought.
    “Bonsoir.” It was a friend of Catherin’s. A dark-haired man was behind her, he shook hands disinterestedly.
    “This is Michel,” Françoise said as they sat down. “Michel has lived in England. You’re English?” she asked Rand.
    “No,” he said.
    “Americain,” Michel commented wearily. “C’est vrai?”
    “That’s right.”
    Michel nodded. It was too simple. “Vous êtes grimpeur?” he said offhandedly. Françoise had told him.
    “Speak English,” she said.
    “Je ne parle pas anglais.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “It’s too difficult,” he said. He then told a story in French about a party he had gone to in London. A girl had come over and asked why he was off by himself. He told her he was French, he didn’t speak English. Oh, she said, in two months he would speak it fluently. He’d been there two years, he told her. She didn’t talk to him again.
    “Oh, tu m’énerves,” Françoise said.
    They sat in silence.
    “What have you climbed?” he asked in French. “I had a good friend who was a climber.”
    “Who?” said Françoise.
    Michel shrugged. “You don’t know him. He was in the army. He liked the army, but he got in some trouble and had to leave. Afterwards, he began to climb seriously. First not far from Paris, then down at Marseilles, and in the Alps. He was very strong, very pure. In some ways he was like a child.”
    Rand was watching him suspiciously. Michel was aware of it. He spoke more slowly, unaffectedly, as if to them all.
    “He began to climb the most difficult peaks in Europe. Climbing is more than a sport. That’s true. Ça dure toujours— it lasts forever.”
    They were sitting in silence, listening. A sensation of panic had come over Rand. He could not believe these sentences were following one upon the other. Michel’s eyes were looking into his.
    Rand smiled. He wanted to break this spell, to show that he was not subject to it.
    “Who is your friend?”
    “I can only tell you that his dream was to become one of the greatest climbers of all time.”
    “Is that right?” A confusion was seizing him, a sense of isolation, as if all the people surrounding him, sitting at nearby tables, talking, laughing, were part of what was being enacted, were even aware of it.
    “I don’t know anything about climbing,” Michel went on. He was confiding, he wanted to become a friend. “I saw him not long ago, I hadn’t seen him for almost a year. He had left his wife, he wasn’t working, and still he felt if he climbed one more mountain, the most difficult, everything would somehow fall into place. It was like a drug. He constantly had to have more and more, and the doses had to be bigger.”
    “And so?”
    “He was always an idealist. He had great inner strength, more than anyone I’ve ever known. But something had changed in him, I could see it in his face. He had done everything and he was still unhappy. Two weeks ago …”
    Rand’s heart was pounding. The panes of illusion were slipping from his life. He felt himself disappearing.
    “I don’t like this story,” Catherin interrupted.
    “I don’t like it, either. Furthermore, I don’t believe it,” Françoise said.
    “But it’s true.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Then I