He has to sleep, though, and he must do what will let him sleep. He wants to see the sun rise in the morning, and he wants to be rested then. He wants to eat the early breakfast that has always been his favorite meal, and to feel in the other people there the excitement of anticipation. He may feel it—unfortunately, perhaps—too strongly in himself, because to stand on skis at the top of a mountain is a thrill that time and weakness have never dulled. Sometimes he feels like a character in a fable, whose Midas wish has been wholly granted, and in his old age he must pay tenfold for all the pleasures he has had from all the cold bright days and those lovely, curving descents across the snowfields.
He can say to himself that he has had a good life, that his moderate success in the wool business (yarns) has let him enjoy his hobbies. His twenty-four-foot sloop, Prometheus, is snug in its rather dim accountant, Verna Price, does not bother Japh as much as he feels it should. He has always suspected Herbert of being a romantic fool, and he feels that Herbert will come back. Everyone has taken advantage of Margaret’s good nature.
He can say to himself that he has led a good life, but this is like saying that his life is over, and he is cursed with a perpetual eagerness. To see the sun rise, to see the first deep snow of the winter, to smell the bay mud at low tide, with the sand eels shooting away in formation beneath the bow of his dory as though swept by a broom—it is almost as though these little visions, these little memories that impinge upon all of his senses, are the only real losses he must suffer. He does love. He does try to protect the people he loves, but has he ever needed them very badly? His wife, who died twenty years ago—a good woman, who loved him, whom he never really disappointed. Margaret, who is so much like her, so generous. He cannot say that he doesn’t love, but then it is not a word he cares to define too exactly. What is true is that in his brightest memories, in those memories that make him feel his heart beat in his chest, there is just the one man alone against a beautiful and dangerous world.
Bucky is in bed, but the shower he took beforehand has waked him up. It is still relatively early, and at first he considers getting dressed and going out, maybe to the Bella Vista, to look for a little action. He knows a girl who is there for the week, sans husband. He met her last year when she bought the series of lessons called “The Housewives’ Special.” She’s all right—blond, lean, nervous, all decked out in the very latest stuff advertised in the skiing magazines. But she reminds him so much of all his women, and he wonders if he has become sick of the illicit, sick of the vacation spirit in which there are just two kinds of liaison, one justified by a weirdly out-of-date coyness that later turns false and hysterical: “I love you! God! I love you!” The other is just as false: “You were good, you know?” The sophisticated camaraderie of the adulterers.
He has eaten dinner with Margaret, and she is not like that. He knows that she has never been unfaithful to Herbert Woolley, for instance, and he knows it because this is the kind of thing he knows. He can see her clear blue eyes, and in them he sees no avarice, no larceny. Like many libertines, he believes in the existence of another race of human beings, so different from himself—the ones who are faithful and honorable, to whom love and sex are exquisitely the same, who stand immaculate in the sight of heaven. He feels that somehow he has been excluded from this race, and that he could no more enter it than he could grow wings.
He can’t sleep, but he doesn’t feel like going out, so he reaches over to the table beside his bed, snaps on the lamp, and takes the new Skiing and turns its pages, thoughtfully staring at all the new faces, the kids who are expected to do well at Chamonix, at Snow Valley, at Innsbruck, at Zakopane. Or who did well at the F.I.S. Games. He’s seen some of them. Perillat, with this thing called projection circulaire; it looks like nothing Toni Sailer didn’t do. But it’s something; it’s an improvement. How would Dick Durrance have utilized the new equipment, the new techniques? Or Torger Tokle (dead in the Italian mountain campaign)? Oh, they were all good, and all brave, the old and the new. There was no Golden Age, even if Japh says so. There is age, though, Buck.
Can he remember himself back there, when the snow was lighter and more powdery? He almost got married once, but then he got the invitation to go out and train for the Harriman, and it seemed too complicated, at the moment, to do both. And after the Harriman, in which he did very well, there was the business of promoting the Bucky Scudder Quick Release Binding. It wasn’t a bad binding, either, and while it was in fashion he and its inventor and its backer made some money. The only trouble was that all this was in the West and Lois, who was his fiancee, wanted to graduate from Smith.
She was like Margaret. With this thought, he trembles, surprising himself. Margaret is here in the same lodge, sleeping in a bed similar to his. Lois was like Margaret in that she always seemed to be looking beyond the day or the night, to be seeing something out there more meaningful and complete, like a whole life.
He drops the magazine beside the bed and turns out the lamp. In the dark, he is rigid, his hands on his thighs, which are as hard as iron. He has always had amazingly strong legs. Maybe he’s a little overweight, but he’s hard, his body is hard. Then he feels his heart pumping in his breast. It seems to be working so fast, so desperately. He doesn’t like to be aware of the machinery. He must relax, but the pump can never rest. It is then that he half wills himself into his old dream, the one that frightens him. First, there is the vision of himself rising out of his body. As he rises up and out above the lodge into the night, he can see his body down there on the bed. Smaller and smaller it grows as the mountains rise smoothly up with him. It is silent up here, silent as a gondola, but down there in the little body is the tiny heart. Then he can no longer see the little body at all, and he is somewhere like Chamonix, at the top of the Piste Verte, which falls away below him like a cliff. How can he run it in the moonlight, with the shadows of the dead crags crossing the blue snow? But he must race back down to his body before it is too late. He has never been so afraid, and even more horrible is the knowledge that when he reaches the Alpine town all the windows will be dark, all the chimneys will be cold. No one else will be there at all.
In his room, Billy lies in bed constructing the most elaborate fantasy. The object is to strand himself and Gloria in a gondola—all night long. He is kind, and doesn’t want to strand a hundred other people, so he is thinking powerfully to find a way to keep them off the lift. Of course, he then has to invent the most godawful snarl somewhere in the lift mechanism. Everything has to be practical, because if it isn’t, some of the fantastic reality of his vision will depart. It’s cold, but not too cold up there—just cold enough to make Gloria chilly. Say twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. For a while, they sit not touching, side by side in the little two-passenger egg. The moon rises over Splitback and bathes her cheek with soft blue light. She shivers, and the night wind gently sways the cable. He puts his right arm up, up, and she leans softly against his chest. Her golden hair lies along his neck, smooth as soap; it is silver in the moonlight. Her right hand moves across and lies chastely upon his ribs. His parka covers them, and as she breathes he can feel her alive in his arms. All right: let eternity pass.
In her room, Margaret is sound asleep. Her long hands are together beneath her cheek, and if it weren’t pitch dark one could see her abundance of soft black hair, the sweet curve of her lips, the softened line of her lower cheek with its almost invisible fuzz. She makes a long shape beneath the blanket, and as she breathes long, steady breaths she exudes warm moisture into the cold air. It is very cold in the room; the air seems as cold as iron. She stirs, and whimpers softly. But it is nothing—no more than any dream in which loneliness and death put on silly disguises and caper about masquerading as birds, or snowflakes, or upside-down houses.
When the phone rings, Margaret comes swimming up from sleep. She doesn’t want to. She has at last found a calm place down there, where it is warm and silent. The jangle of the phone pulls her up, up like some underwater crea
ture, and unwillingly she surfaces into the cold air. The phone keeps ringing, and she puts her hand out to see if Herbert has got up to answer it. The sheets are cold, and she realizes that Herbert has not been there at all, that she is at the Mountain View. She takes the phone from the bed table. It is so cold she rubs it in both hands to warm it up.
“Margaret? Margaret?” she hears it say. As she puts it to her ear, the voice grows and becomes Herbert’s voice, but she is still half asleep, and it is confusing that Herbert should be calling her by phone while she is in bed.
“Margaret? Are you awake? It’s not late. It’s not late.”
“Yes,” she says. Now she is awake. She can see his face, wherever he is—the heavy, worried expression he always wears, the petulance around his mouth.
“Margaret? Did I wake you up?”
If she says that he did, he will be unhappy. He knows he woke her up, of course, but Herbert is always discomfited if one answers his rhetorical questions with the truth.
“No, I was awake,” she hears herself say.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
Again she cannot give him the answer he deserves. “I’m fine, Herbert.” She cannot make herself ask him about Verna Price, either, because whenever they speak to each other (and not through letters, in which he knows what he wants and says so with authority) she hears in his voice the nervous little child she knows is there. “What do you want, Herbert?” she asks, as kindly as she can.
“I’m at the Bella Vista,” he says, and she knows she has been untactful. She has asked him a question he isn’t yet able to answer. “I want to see you, Margaret. Are you sure you’re all right?”
Are you happy, Herbert? she wants to ask. But of course that sort of question would disorganize him totally, the way Billy’s questions and answers always do.
“I was coming from Montreal, on business,” he says. Whenever he lies, there is a very slight change in the register of his voice, as though the diameter of his throat had grown smaller. “I just thought I’d swing It’s been six months, Margaret.”
So he wants to come back, she thinks. He doesn’t like Verna Price anymore. She is very sorry for Herbert. Every once in a while, he thinks he has found someone whose admiration for him is unalloyed. If she could only explain to him that he isn’t such a bad man after all, that the truth about himself he sees reflected in other people’s eyes is not such a horrible truth, that everyone meets with that look.
“I want to see you, Margaret. I want to see you tomorrow morning.”
“I have ski lessons tomorrow, Herbert.”
“Ski lessons!” he says, and she hears behind his disdain that he is hurt.
“I’ve paid for them already.”
“With that—professional?”
“Bucky Scudder, yes,” she says. She is sick of his jealousy, mainly because he will never admit it, and so she adds, knowing that she is being as cruel as she has ever been to him, “He’s very good.”
Herbert is silent. Finally, he says, “You watch out for him, Margaret. He’s no good.”
She wants to laugh, but she cannot be that unkind. Neither can she understand why she is so fond of Herbert. “We’ll be skiing all morning at Splitback,” she says.
“All right, Margaret.”
“If you want to see us,” she says.
“All right. Good night, Margaret.”
“Good night, Herbert.”
The room is so cold. She squirms down into the warm place, but the cold has crept in upon her, and she must push her feet into frigid places. She thinks, with a smile, that she could use Herbert right now. Yes, she would like him here beside her. The very resilience of the mattress is wrong; it doesn’t slope down toward the warm man. She liked him in his sleep, when she could mold her body to his back. He slept warm, and his skin seemed to glow with smooth warmth. They made love quite often, and then she was happiest, for they never spoke. It was only afterward that he became cold and disapproving, and she knew he thought her a mess. But while it lasted it seemed to her that inside the man there were great bent springs so strong that when they were let go, their wonderful, awful recoil threatened the very bases upon which they were mounted, and in truth they did jar and weaken the whole hulk of the man so that he was for a time afterward sprung, like a broken clock. Sprung and cold, for she was never allowed to comfort him then.
At her window, she hears the ticktick of the beginning snow—those hard little pellets that often come at the start of a snowfall. She will ski tomorrow, but now she wonders how she will want to get up and face that coldness, that singular movement through the cold daylight air. She would like to be deep in warm darkness, with a man to hold her until she descended into sleep.
Bucky wakes up at the first light. He hasn’t gone to bed so early in a long time, or after so few drinks, and he feels just good enough to worry about his physical condition. If he doesn’t eat a lot, he feels weak, but he’s got to lose some weight. He lies in bed and looks around his room. It is his winter room—his Northern Hemisphere winter room; he owns part of the Mountain View. The room is a shambles, as usual. Clothes hanging all over the place. Empty quart beer bottles in the corner. Sue, the owner-manager’s wife, comes in once in a while and cleans up—she’s awfully nice about it—but why, he asks himself, must he be such a slob? Why must that stick of deodorant be on the windowsill and not in the bathroom cabinet? Why must a damp washcloth be sitting in a ball on top of the bureau? Perhaps this small-boy carelessness was once excusable, even charming, but now he is a big man of forty-two. God! Why doesn’t he get his clothes to the laundry more often? He has twenty shirts, and seventeen of them are dirty.
He gets up on his elbows and looks out the window. His room is in the back, and he looks across a field toward a hill gray with hardwood trees. New snow—it’s a beautiful day, and the clean snow and blue sky, seen across the room full of his jumbled and soiled possessions, depress him so much he shuts his eyes. Suppose he’d had a heart attack and died in the night, died and ended himself forever here among his grubby artifacts? What has he ever done that could stay bright and clean? Oh, he has plenty of memories of fun and glory, but all that passes. Whatever he’s really wanted to do he’s done very well, and so he does have those memories, but they keep passing back into the years. He’s had good luck with his investments in places like the Mountain View, and if skiing stays popular, and snow continues to fall in the right places, he’ll probably do better. He’s been a good friend, and a generous one. He has no idea how much money is owed to him, but it must be thousands. Every once in a while, he’s surprised by a check for twenty dollars or five hundred dollars from an old friend who did remember some loan or other.
Nobody will hate him when he goes out, probably, except maybe a few husbands, so what the hell? But what’s he done in this world except have a pretty good time? It’s too late now to worry about it—you’re not a young anything at forty-two, except maybe President, and he hasn’t been nominated—so why does he worry about it? Maybe it’s the idea of dying alone, and having them find his corpse with all its little secrets. He’s got to change. Something has to make him change. So he stops biting the cuticle of his little finger.
Enough! He jumps out of bed. He’s going to clean up his room, for a start. He takes a shower, shaves carefully, does a few knee bends, applies the deodorant. But he can’t find any clean shorts, so that’s one strike against him. This is depressing, but he does tear the sheets off his bed and pile all his dirty clothes on them, including the Bogners with that grease spot on the back. He puts on one of his three clean shirts, and an old pair of non-stretch ski pants—they’re clean, anyway. He’s got a million pairs of socks, and he does find a clean pair of them. He thinks, Now what’s dirty about me except my shorts and my personality?
He hoists the large bundle of dirty clothes onto his shoulder and goes down to the kitchen. Sue and her husband, Roger, are preparing for breakfast, and he helps them set out the silverware. There are
thirty paying guests, and since they are all skiers, at least twenty-five will make it to breakfast. When he sees that there isn’t much more he can do, he sits down at a kitchen table to look at the morning ski reports. Excellent everywhere. Then he looks up and sees Sue and Roger working side by side at the counter. They’re young kids, really—in their late twenties. She’s shaking up frozen orange juice, and he’s running the big toaster. They are in their working clothes and aprons, and her arm touches his accidentally, meaninglessly, and neither of them even notices it. Bucky stares at them, the man and the woman working together as though they weren’t man and woman at all. They slept in the same bed last night. And he thinks about how they live together and see each other all the time, naked and dressed, and how they must know all about each other. They must be so honest. Roger happens to turn and see him staring, and to cover his embarrassment Bucky grins at him and shakes the morning ski report. “Good snow!” he says.
“We’re doing all right!” Roger says. “A good winter so far. Doing all right, Bucky! “
Bucky has a glass of orange juice and one piece of toast, calls the ski school and arranges to have one of his instructors take over his earliest class, then puts his bundle of clothes in his car and drives down to the village laundry and dry cleaners. On the way back to his car, he is startled to see Herbert Woolley going into the drugstore. What’s Herbert Woolley doing around here? He thinks of Margaret as he’s seen her on the mountain, skiing alone down the Cataract, tall and graceful even if she is an unreconstructed Arlberger. And there is Herbert Woolley, come nosing around. Bucky knows the whole story—how Herbert left her. He’s talked about it with Japh, who seemed, on the whole, pleased that Herbert had gone. But the sight of Herbert in his dark blue overcoat, his city pallor, and his city shoes is a shock to Bucky, and suddenly he realizes that he is jealous, that he has been counting upon Margaret’s loneliness, and that his new regimen of cleanliness is an attempt to make himself worthy of her. And the moment he admits this to himself he sees that he must have Margaret—she will improve him; he loves her. She is so valuable he must go to her right away. Has Herbert seen her yet? What if they spent the night together? With this thought comes a stroke of jealousy that is painful. It is in his stomach, in his diaphragm. He has trouble getting a breath. Her lesson with him is in one hour, but can he risk waiting that long? Then he gets his breath. He knows what he wants, and suddenly he feels very strong—what he wants is dangerous, but he can cope with danger.
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