Nightwork (31 page)

“That’s the nice thing about this place,” Fabian said, as he maneuvered around them. “The kids. There’re three or four international schools here. A ski resort needs young people. It gives an atmosphere of innocence to the sport. And the clothes are designed for youthful bottoms and the climate for adolescent complexions. You’ll see them all over the hills tomorrow and you’ll mourn that you had to go to school in Scranton.”

The car climbed a twisting hill, the wheels spinning erratically in the new snow. On top of the hill, dominating the town, was the huge fake castle of the hotel. Inside and out, the hotel gave no impression of innocence. “The standard joke runs,” Fabian said, “that Gstaad is trying to be St. Moritz and will never make it.”

“That’s okay with me,” I said. I had no desire ever to see St. Moritz again.

We signed in. As usual, everybody at the reception and behind the concierge’s desk knew Fabian and seemed deeply pleased to see him. He moved from place to place in waves of welcome.

“The ladies,” the concierge said, “left a message. They are in the bar.”

“What a surprise,” Fabian said.

The bar was a large dark room, but not so dark that I couldn’t see Lily and Eunice at the other end. They were still in ski clothes and they were seated at a table with five men. There was a magnum of champagne on the table and Lily was telling a story which I couldn’t hear, but which ended with a loud burst of laughter that made the other people in the bar turn and look at their table.

I stopped at the door. I doubted that either Fabian or I would be greeted with pleasure. “They haven’t been wasting their time, have they?” I said.

“I didn’t doubt that they would.” He was undisturbed as usual.

“I think I’ll go up to my room and take a bath,” I said. “Call me when you’re ready for dinner.”

Fabian smiled slightly. “Faint heart,” he said.

“Up yours,” I said. As I left the bar, there was another burst of male laughter. Fabian strolled toward the table.

As I went up to the concierge’s desk, a group of youngsters came out into the hall from a doorway that led to a bowling alley. They were a mixed bunch of girls and boys, the boys with long hair, some of them with beards, although the oldest couldn’t have been more than seventeen. There was a high-pitched gabble of conversation in French and English. I remembered what Fabian had just said about going to school in Scranton. I felt the wrong age, in the wrong place. One of the girls, the prettiest of the lot, stared at me. She had long, uncared-for blonde hair that almost hid a tiny pink face, and she was wearing skintight jeans with flowers embroidered in pastel colors over babyish full hips. She pushed her hair back from her eyes in a languid, womanly gesture. She wore green eye shadow, but no lipstick. Her gaze made me uneasy, and I turned my back to ask for the key.

“Mr. Grimes …” The voice was hesitant, high-pitched, childish.

I looked around. She had let the other boys and girls in her group go out the front door and was alone now. “You
are
Douglas Grimes, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re the pilot.”

“Yes.” I didn’t see the need of correcting the tense.

“You don’t remember me, I suppose?”

“I’m afraid not, miss.”

“I’m Didi Wales. Dorothea. Of course it was ages ago. Three years. I had buckteeth and had braces that I wore at night.” She shook her head and the long blonde hair obscured her face. “I wouldn’t expect. Nobody remembers a thirteen-year-old brat.” She threw her hair back and smiled, showing that she no longer needed braces. Her teeth were nice, white, young-American teeth. “Stowe,” she said. “You used to ski once in a while with my mother and father.”

“Of course,” I said, remembering. “How are they? Your mother and father?”

“They’re divorced,” she said. Of course I thought, I could have bet on it. “My mother is recovering from her heartbreak in Palm Beach. With a tennis player.” The girl giggled. “And I’m stashed away here.”

“It doesn’t seem like such a hardship,” I said.

“If you only knew,” she said. “I used to like to watch you ski. You never showed off, like the rest of the boys.”

Boy, I thought. Miles Fabian was the only other person who had called me a boy since I was twenty.

“I could tell it was you,” the girl went on, “even a mile away on the slope. You used to ski with a very nice, pretty lady. Is she here with you?”

“No,” I said. “You were reading
Wuthering Heights
the last time I saw you.”

“Kid stuff,” she said. “You once led me down Suicide Six in a snowstorm. Do you remember?”

“Of course,” I said, lying.

“It’s nice of you to say so. Even if you don’t. It was my accomplishment of the year. Have you just arrived?”

“Yes.” She was the first person who had recognized me since I had come to Europe and I hoped the last.

“Are you going to stay here long?” She sounded like a little girl who was afraid to stay alone at night when her parents were going out.

“A few days.”

“Do you know Gstaad?”

“This is my first time.”

“Maybe I could lead
you
this time.” Again there was the languid gesture of pushing her hair back.

“That’s very kind of you, Didi,” I said.

“If you’re not otherwise occupied,” she said formally.

A boy with a beard came back through the door and shouted, “Didi, are you going to stand there gabbing all night?”

She made an impatient gesture of her hand. “I’m talking to an old friend of my family. Screw off.” She smiled gently at me. “Boys these days,” she said. “They think they own you body and soul. Hairy beasts. You never saw such a spoiled bunch of kids. I fear for the world when they finally grow up.”

I tried not to smile.

“You think I’m peculiar, don’t you?” It was an accusation, sharp and clear.

“Not at all.”

“You ought to see them arriving in Geneva after holidays,” she said. “In their father’s private Lear jets. Or driving up to the school in Rolls-Royces. A royal pageant of corruption.”

This time I couldn’t help smiling.

“You think the way I talk is funny.” She shrugged. “I read a lot.”

“I know.”

“I’m an only child,” she said, “and my parents were always someplace else.”

“Have you been analyzed?” I asked.

“Not really.” She shrugged again. “Of course, they tried. I didn’t love them enough, so they thought I was neurotic.
Tant pis
for them. Do you speak French?”

“No,” I said. “But I guess I could figure out what
tant pis
means.”

“It’s an overrated language,” she said. “Everything rhymes with everything else. Well, I’ve enjoyed our little conversation. When I write home, whom should I send your regards to, my mother or my father?”

“Both,” I said.

“Both,” she said. “That’s a laugh. There is no both. To be continued in our next. Welcome to never-never land, Mr. Grimes.” She put out her hand and I shook it. The hand was small and soft and dry. She went through the door, the embroidered flowers on her plump buttocks waving.

I shook my head, pitying her father and her mother, thinking, maybe going to school in Scranton wasn’t so bad after all. I took the elevator and went upstairs and ran a hot bath. As I soaked, I played with the idea of writing a short note to Fabian and quietly getting on the next train out of Gstaad.

At dinner that night, there were only the four of us, Lily, Eunice, Fabian, and myself. As unostentatiously as possible, I kept studying Eunice, trying to imagine what it would be like sitting across the breakfast table from her ten years from now, twenty years from now. Imagining sharing a bottle of port with her father, who hunted three times a week. Standing at the baptismal font with her, as our children were christened. Miles Fabian as godfather? Visiting our son at what would it be—Eton? All I knew about English public schools had been gleaned from books by men like Kipling, Waugh, Orwell, Conolly. I decided against Eton.

The few days of skiing had given Eunice’s complexion a pretty, flush, summery color. She was wearing a figured silk dress that clung to her figure. Buxom today, would she be stately later? The old saw had it, as Fabian had pointed out, that it was just as easy to love a rich girl as a poor one. But was it?

The sight and sound of her and Lily surrounded by lolling, arrogant young men (at least they seemed so to me) at the table with the magnum of champagne on it had made me flee from the bar. There was no denying that she was a pretty girl, and there would undoubtedly always be young men of that caliber and class in attendance. How would I take that if she were my wife? I had never really thought about what class I belonged to or what class
other
people might think I belonged to. Miles Fabian could leave Lowell, Massachusetts, behind him and pretend to be an English squire. I doubted that I could ever get rid of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and pretend to be anything but what I was—a grounded pilot, a man trained as a kind of superior technician, dependent on a payroll. What would the guests at the wedding be whispering about me as I stood beside the altar of the English country church waiting for the bride to descend the aisle? Could I invite my brother Hank and his family to the wedding? My brother in San Diego?

Fabian could educate me to a degree, but there were limits, whether he recognized them or not.

As for sex …Still affected by my reveries at the wheel that afternoon I was sure that it would be, at the very least, agreeable. But the passionate desire which I couldn’t help but believe was the only true foundation of any marriage—would I ever be stirred to anything even approximating it by this placid, foreign, hidden girl? And what about the ties of family? Lily, as sister-in-law, with the memory of the night in Florence as a permanent ghost at every reunion? At that very moment I knew I wished the room would empty, leaving Lily and myself alone, untrammeled. Was I doomed always to get close to what I wanted, but never
exactly
what I wanted?

“This really has turned into a smashing holiday,” Eunice was saying, as she buttered her third roll of the meal. Like her sister, she had a splendid appetite. No matter what else might finally turn out wrong with the children, they would be born with at least half a chance of having marvelous digestions. “When I think of all the poor folk back in bleakest London,” Eunice said, “I could cheer. I have a lovely idea …” She looked around the table with her innocent, blue, childish eyes. “Why don’t we all just stay here in the beautiful sunshine until everything melts?”

“The concierge says it’s going to snow again tomorrow,” I said.

“Just a manner of speaking, Gentle Heart,” Eunice said. She had begun calling me Gentle Heart the second day in Zurich. I hadn’t figured out what it meant yet. “Even when it’s snowing here, you have the feeling the sun is shining, if you know what I mean. In London in winter it’s as though the sun has wandered away permanently.”

I wondered if she would have been so eager to continue the quadruple holiday with old Gentle Heart and his friends if she had been able to overhear the cold-blooded conversation about her future that had taken place in the car on the road to Bern.

“It seems like such a waste to go rushing off to crumbling, noisy Rome when we’re having such a lovely time here,” Eunice said, the roll now thoroughly buttered. “We’ve all
been
in Rome, after all.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“It’ll still be there in the spring,” she said. “Don’t you agree, Lily?”

“It’s a good bet,” Lily said. She was eating spaghetti. She was perhaps the only woman I had ever met who could look graceful eating spaghetti. The sisters had come into my life in the wrong order.

“Miles,” Eunice said, “are you absolutely frantic to get to Rome?”

“Not really,” Fabian said. “There’re a couple of things I want to look into here anyway.”

“Like what?” I asked. “I thought we were here on a holiday.”

“We are,” he said. “But there’re all sorts of holidays, aren’t there? Don’t worry, I won’t interfere with your skiing.”

By the time the meal was over we had decided that we’d stay in Gstaad at least another week. I said I wanted some air and asked Eunice if she would like to take a walk with me, feeling that perhaps if we were alone for once we could make some sort of overt move toward one another, but she yawned and said that the exercise and the cold air all day had left her exhausted and she just had to fling herself into bed. I escorted her out of the dining room to the elevator and kissed her on the cheek and said good night. I didn’t go back to the dining room, but got my coat and took a walk alone, with the snow whirling down around me out of the black night.

The concierge had been wrong. It wasn’t snowing in the morning, but clear, blue, and cold. I rented skis and boots and had some wild runs down the mountain with Lily and Eunice, both of whom skied with a devoted British recklessness that was certain to land them in the hospital eventually. Fabian wasn’t with us. He had some telephone calls to make, he said. He didn’t tell me to whom or on what subject, but I knew I’d find out soon enough and did my best not to speculate just how much more of our joint fortune would be engaged in perilous enterprises before we met for lunch. He had told us he’d meet us around one thirty at the Eagle Club, on a mountain called the Wassengrat, so that we could eat together. It was an exclusive club, with rules about membership, but Fabian naturally had arranged for us all to be accepted there as guests for our stay in Gstaad.

It was a marvelous morning, the air glittering, the snow perfect, the girls graceful and happy in the sunshine, the speed intoxicating. By itself, I thought at one moment, it made everything that had happened to me since the night in the Hotel St. Augustine almost worthwhile. There was only one slightly annoying development. A young American, hung with cameras, kept taking photographs of us again and again, getting onto the lifts, adjusting our skis, laughing together, starting off down the hill.

“Do you know that fellow?” I asked the girls. I didn’t recognize him as one of the men at the table in the bar with them the evening before.