Tales from the front lines of relationships

James SALTER spent his formative years as a writer serving in the Army Air Forces as a fighter pilot. His first novel, “The Hunters” (1957), describes dogfights over the Yalu River during the Korean War. Salter, a West Point graduate who flew about 100 missions, is well-acquainted with the fathomless sky, the play of light upon water, Earth and skin, the vicious, split-second turn of fate that can snuff out a life. As a fiction writer he is steely nerved, precise, distanced in a way that makes the surface of his work gleam.

Despite that cool distance, Salter’s work tends to have an elegiac tone. “September. It seems these luminous days will never end,” begins his widely admired third novel, “A Sport and a Pastime” (1967), which is narrated by a young American fantasizing about the affair that his buddy, a Yale dropout, is having with a provincial French shopgirl. At the end of “Light Years” (1976), his exquisitely rendered novel of a marriage lived and lost over 20 years, he writes, “It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.”

Salter’s retrospective tone adds to the haunting quality of the 10 stories in the collection “Last Night.” Set among a sophisticated circle in New York, the Hamptons and Hollywood, “Last Night” should be X-rated, not for its eroticism, although there is that, but to forewarn the uninitiated of its scalding truths about the deceptions and devastations of love.

“Give” takes its title from one married couple’s pet name for a request to abandon an annoying habit. The narrator describes a 31st birthday gathering for his wife, Anna. With them are their 6-year-old son, Billy, and Des, a gifted and unstable poet who visits them frequently (the narrator refers to Des as his “closest friend”). Later, Anna asks for a “give” that ups the ante substantially. “There are things you cannot give, that would simply crush your heart,” he thinks. “It was half of life she was asking for....” He loves Des (although he denies the affair to Anna), but he makes the sacrifice. “I had some photographs that I kept in a certain place, and of course I had the poems. I followed him from afar, the way a woman does a man she was never able to marry.”

In “Comet,” a woman at a dinner party who has just learned about her husband’s mistress of seven years, says, “That woman stole my husband. She stole everything he had vowed.”

“That happens every day,” says Phil, one of the men at the table. Phil’s current wife, Adele, a woman who on their wedding day was in the “final blaze” of her beauty (but who now drinks too much), chimes in with his back-story: “He left his wife and children,” she says, for the children’s tutor, who was “some kind of call girl.” The wife’s reductive comments trigger Phil’s memories of fleeting pleasure: “ ... none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art.” Within a matter of moments, Phil is in the backyard looking for a rare comet before it burns out, reconsidering his life. And his wife.

“My Lord You” begins with the remnants of another dinner party, which has been marred by the intrusion of a poet named Brennan, who arrives three sheets to the wind and gropes the narrator. She conceives a fascination for him, finds out where he lives and bikes past on her way home. His aging dog follows her: “She could hear the clatter of his nails like falling stones.” Somehow Salter makes the power of her attraction to the dog, and to the poet’s empty house, which at one point she explores in the nude, both predictable and mysterious.

In “Bangkok,” a former lover comes back to tempt a rare-book dealer who now has a wife and child. “Such Fun” is set in Greenwich Village, where three women get drunk together and reveal a little bit of themselves (but not the crucial fact that one of them is dying of cancer). The title story gives us a somber farewell dinner on the eve of a woman’s intended death. She has metastasized uterine cancer. Her husband has agreed to give her a syringe after their evening out with a younger female friend. Your life is like a novel, she thinks: “You were going through it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there were bloodstains.” It is an astonishing story, lean, heartbreaking, with deftly flickering points of view. In the end, nothing turns out as expected, except perhaps the sense of betrayal one comes to expect in Salter’s universe.

In his 1997 memoir “Burning the Days,” Salter writes of his time in Hollywood, “There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable, too pleasurable, perhaps, the lights dancing on dark water as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.”

His stories leave the reader with this sort of afterglow. His work is distinguished by the purity of his prose. A sometime screenwriter (“Downhill Racer”), he has a remarkable ease with shifts in perspective, place and time, and a masterful sense of plot, showing us quick glimpses of his characters, snatches of dialogue, saving the most daunting and potent revelation until the end. But there is something beyond the purity of language and the skill. Each story has at its heart an underlying sensibility that treasures each moment of beauty, each burning day. “Last Night” is another lovely, glowing gem in Salter’s remarkable body of work. *