Even after having skied and going home to shower this morning, I made a point of arriving early. Though I don’t know why I’d bothered. Zuzana was usually late. Both my mind and my stomach were churning as I sat among the casually dressed clientele talking or texting on their smart phones. The longer I sat, the more unwound I became. Why had Zuzana invited me to lunch? What exactly was it all about?
She made her entrance fifteen minutes after the appointed hour, nothing outside the ordinary. Dressed all in beige, she was a monochromatic vision of style. Beige slacks and sweater and jacket. Even beige leather boots. I was sure her ensemble was as expensive as it looked comfortable. I was wearing my second-hand black cashmere turtleneck gleaned from the Thrift Shop last winter and one of my better pairs of jeans.
Her eyes scanned the room for important people before she floated over to me. ‘I’m so sorry to be late,’ she said not very quietly. ‘I had a call from the mortuary in Glenwood just as I was walking out the door. There were some last-minute questions about the service.’
I let the comment drop, a none-too-subtle shot across the bow that pre-warned me of the direction the lunch might take. Warren’s service was scheduled two days from now, an event I dreaded more than I can say. Without waiting for my reaction to her announcement, she turned and walked into the dining room, leaving me to follow behind her like a humble servant. The hostess seated us in a corner booth, enabling both of us to look out across the room. The clientele was typical of winter. Half were local bankers or real-estate agents looking for the golden calf and half were tourists taking a day off from skiing.
We looked at the menus and placed our order quickly, pumpkin soup for me, chicken noodle for her. Two green salads. Zuzana ordered a glass of wine, something I found peculiar in light of her pregnancy though from what I knew a glass or two is within reasonable limits. But at lunch? I stuck with water.
The waiter brought out Zuzana’s Chardonnay followed by the two bowls of soup. She sipped at her wine and stared at me over the rim of her glass with cool blue eyes set in porcelain skin, her lashes dusted blond. ‘You know Warren and I considered you among our closest friends,’ she opened.
The hackles that climbed my back made me wonder if this was how Toby felt when he was in an ambush. My intuition had told me that lunch was going to be unpleasant, but it hadn’t me prepared for just how unpleasant. My friendship with Warren dated back ten years pre-Zuzana, so where did this ‘our’ come from? Her use of ‘our’ was sort of like men saying ‘we’re’ pregnant these days. I’ve never quite figured out the other half of the ‘we’ in that equation. Did that mean my father, whoever he was, the guy who disappeared, was pregnant with Toby and me too at the same time as my mother? That would be quite the trick.
‘So I hate to bring you back to that day,’ she continued, ‘but I’m sure you can understand how disturbed I am. I just can’t get it out of my mind, trying to figure out what the two of you were doing out of bounds together. I’m going to stop beating around the bush and ask you straight out. Were you having an affair with my husband?’
The question was so unanticipated it would have blown me off my chair had we not been sitting in a booth. Even so, I was having trouble staying upright, the blood draining from my face like it had been plunged into ice. In a few sentences I had gone from being one of ‘our’ closest friends to a conniving mistress. Though the question didn’t merit a response, my resounding NO drew looks from around the room, and I should have let it rest at that. I owed her no explanations. But the question was eating at me, so after a count of five I asked, ‘Where in hell did that come from?’
‘I don’t know …’ she started to say. Then she stopped herself. ‘Yes, I do know. Since no one seems to know what the two of you were doing there, I have to wonder if you two were having some kind of rendezvous that went wrong.’
My soup spoon fell from my hand and clattered loudly against the bowl. The heads that had turned at my forceful response turned again. Well, maybe the spoon didn’t just fall. Perhaps it was thrown down a little. It was a challenge not to shout out the five-letter word banging the sides of my skull. The one that starts with a B. But somehow I maintained my cool. ‘What would give you an idea like that?’
‘These,’ she said. She pulled a manila envelope from her purse and threw it on the table in front of me. Inside was a stack of photographs. I leafed through them and recognized them as Warren and me in the pre-Zuzana years. There was a shot of us at the top of the Highland Bowl on a clear day and another at the top of Walsh’s waiting for tandem paraglides. There was a photo of us sitting at the top of West Maroon Pass on the hike to Crested Butte and of a moonlight ski up Buttermilk. Warren and I always seemed to end up together somewhere at the top. The photos were all innocent, each taken by some unremembered third party. There was nothing incriminating in any of them. ‘I found them in his desk.’
‘Zuzana,’ I said, staring her directly in the eye. ‘I have no idea why he was keeping these pictures other than as memories of good times.’ I studied the photo in my hand. We were straddling our bikes at the top of Independence Pass, sweaty and gritty after the tortuous ride, our helmets off, his hair stuck to his head with sweat, my hair whipping in the wind. He was wearing the smile of achievement while I looked at him with what was clearly adoration. Was I that transparent? Evidently. I re-examined the other photos and saw some variation of that look on my face in all of them. The thought that he had intentionally saved these pictures from the dozens taken of the two of us over the years made me sadder than I already was.
You see, the truth was that I was having an affair with Warren. Unfortunately it was only in my mind. I lay the pictures back on the table. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I want to make it perfectly clear that I was not sleeping with your husband and never have. The only physical contact I ever had with Warren was giving him a hand up. And vice versa.’
She pushed the pictures toward me. ‘These are yours. Keep them.’
Any protest I may have offered died as a local realtor, a tall redhead with a facelift that basically left her teeth barred, came over to the booth. Edna Blood was renowned for sweetening her deals by buying her clients Range Rovers after their closings. As if someone who can afford a fifty-million-dollar house needs another car. She’d been part of a group who’d tried to do a land grab on Sam’s property while he was alive, starting at mere pennies and offering him everything from a place in Honolulu to a trip to the moon by the time they were done.
Her eyes glossed over me and glued themselves on Zuzana. I scooped up the pictures and stuffed them into my backpack. Edna Blood sat down uninvited and started offering up condolences to the widow. This segued into a question if she intended to stay all alone in that huge Starwood house, a thinly veiled attempt to solicit business.
‘Well I won’t be totally alone,’ Zuzana said, her chameleon face finding the silver-lining-in-a-tragedy kind of look. ‘We were pregnant.’
‘Congratulations,’ the realtor gushed, toning it down appropriately after realizing the congratulations were bittersweet. She continued a tête-à-tête with Zuzana while I quietly ate my soup. The pumpkin turned bitter in my mouth and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be out of there. Edna Blood got up and said something consoling before taking her leave, and it was just Zuzana and me once again. I wanted the realtor back. I wanted out of there so much more than bad it was sick.
Deciding I’d filled my obligation to Zuzana, I made a show of looking at my watch. ‘Hey, I really hate to do this, but I just remembered I have to be somewhere.’ Anywhere but here. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
Her face turned entirely kind. ‘I’ve upset you. Of course, I don’t mind, but before you go, can I just ask you one more thing?’
I nodded to keep the resounding Yes, I mind from exploding out of my mouth. Anything, anything to be out of there. Exercising the utmost patience, I asked, ‘What is it, Zuzana?’
‘There’s this part of me that wonders if this pregn
ancy didn’t upset you. And that maybe … just maybe …’ She didn’t finish her statement, but the words hung in the air, their ugliness slowly taking shape in my brain, congealing like grease floating on the top of last night’s cold dishwater. And then she articulated it. ‘Only you didn’t die.’
That was it. I couldn’t hold myself back. The words catapulted from my mouth. ‘You bitch. I may not remember everything that happened on that mountain, but I remember some. What I saw was Warren going out of bounds before me. And I’m pretty sure I went to stop him. My memory may be coming back slowly, but it is coming back and when it does, you’ll be the first to know.’ I stood up and threw a twenty on the table which actually wouldn’t have come close to covering my half of the meal, but that was all I had on me and I was in no mood to wait for a credit card transaction. ‘I’ll see you at the service.’
Her face, which had at first registered shock at the revelation of my partial recovery of my memory, turned to plain ugliness as she said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t come.’
I wanted to gasp. To shout how dare she cheat me of the chance to send Warren off to wherever. Then again, that wasn’t nearly as bad as accusing me of attempted murder-suicide. By banning me from Warren’s service, she was emancipating me from worse pain. I left the room feeling liberated. I had suspected lunch was going to be unpleasant, though I’d had no idea how much so. One good thing had come from the lunch, though. Zuzana’s actions had absolved me of my guilt. My grief and misery had morphed into anger, which felt a whole lot better than guilt.
I should have thanked her.
TWENTY-ONE
My anger kept intensifying as I walked along the streets, and I was so spitting-fire mad by the time I climbed into the Wagoneer, I was probably a danger behind the wheel. The good news was I was no longer the simpering put-upon wimp I’d been since Warren’s death. That dog had taken its tail out from between its legs. I was myself again. An angry self, but myself. And although anger sure isn’t the finest emotion, it ranks far above guilty in my world. The anger stayed with me the entire way home. The nerve of Warren’s widow, implying that her husband was dead because of some misfiring of my impulses.
The anger grew worse as the afternoon passed. I circled the living room thinking ‘how dare she’ to ‘what a bitch’ that she would deny me access to the funeral. I tried to calm myself – I’m good at deflecting negative energy – but all logic was overruled in this case by my unchecked emotions.
The saving grace was that it was Monday and I had Mythology class at four o’clock. I contemplated skipping class altogether, but I’d already missed last week’s class because of the avalanche and getting my degree was important to me. I wasn’t going to let Zuzana ruin that. Besides, I needed something to knock my brain back into its normal groove. This confrontation with Warren’s widow had put me into an alien mental state. The only time I’ve felt my blood pressure rise is coming upon a ski accident or tossing off one of the charges we use for avalanche mitigation. Right now I felt if I didn’t have some kind of distraction my head might explode.
I grabbed my books and headed out the door.
I’d started back to college after Sam died, taking one class a semester. I’d done some community college while Mom was alive, but it was tough both time-wise and financially. At the time my goal was getting a degree in finance. We were always so on the edge of bankruptcy in my youth that I thought the only thing a person should want to do is make a lot of money. So to me finance said it all. I was going to make sure our family was financially secure.
Then Mom died and life changed. I bailed from Milwaukee, came to the mountains, and my eyes opened up. Money can’t buy the peaks with the setting sun cresting over them or the pure blue sky at noon or waking up after a major snow and taking your first crisp breath of morning air. It can’t buy the feeling you have floating down the mountain both conquering or working with gravity. It can’t buy the feeling you have when you’re beholden to no one other than yourself or when working feels the same as not working. And in all truth, there hasn’t been one minute of regret about moving here instead of getting a degree.
But there was this part of me that wanted to better myself. I loved my job and the folks I skied with, but the reality was that at thirty-five my brain was hungry. So another goal I was acting on was getting my degree. God knows what I was going to do with it when I got it, but for the time being attending classes filled a need to expand my horizons. Who knows, maybe I’d end up teaching some day. Or going on to law school. Take history, for example.
But at this stage of the game, I found myself intrigued by the story of our world, how we kept screwing things up over and over and somehow recovering before doing it all over again. In other words history. If you understand what’s gone before, you have a better chance of understanding what’s happening now. Or misunderstanding what’s happening now.
Now I know Mythology isn’t exactly history, but Greek culture sure is. Besides, there were no openings in American History that semester.
I got to class late on purpose, not wanting to share the perils of Pauline with any of my classmates and especially not with the professor, Timothy Dale. Tim and I had a dating encounter during my first semester a couple years ago, and while the relationship ended on a positive note, he occasionally acted like he still had some skin in my game. Courtesy of the local paper, he would already have been informed about the avalanche and my near miss with carbon monoxide poisoning, and I was in no mood to answer the questions I knew would be forthcoming.
He was putting an outline on the board with his back to the class when I snuck into the room. Rail thin with an intense lean face, he wore his hair in a gray ponytail swept back from a receding hairline. And though he was pretty far along in the second half of the game, you’d never guess it. Even as the marker swept across the board, he exuded a sense of suppressed energy. He’d stopped skiing for what he called ‘safety’ reasons, but he was a distance runner in the summer and snowshoed the back country in the winter. His not being a skier was one of the reasons we weren’t really compatible. That and the fact he was the controlling type and I wasn’t the type to be controlled.
The room was nearly full. It was early in the semester and interest remained high. His class was the typical mix you found at the community college, half young age-appropriate people working towards degrees, the other half north of fifty, most of them older women expanding their horizons or looking for a positive way to kill time. I couldn’t be sure which. The older people audited the classes, which meant they didn’t take the tests and they didn’t write papers. But they always did the week’s readings, unlike some of us taking the class for credit like yours truly this particular week.
My attempt to slip in unnoticed was an exercise in futility. My celebrity of the past week had preceded me and all heads turned at my entrance, including that of Tim Dale who had the visual acuity of a fly.
‘Ms Westerlind, we are truly glad to see you in one piece,’ he said, returning to his work on the board, putting into words what the rest of the class must have been thinking. The room more or less broke out into a flurry of congratulations on my being alive, on my good luck to have survived two so very close calls. No one made mention of Warren. They didn’t have to. He was there in the room with us. Tim Dale finished his outline and turned around to face the room.
‘And now since we’ve noted how Greta has avoided having her thread prematurely cut by the fates, let’s see what’s happened to those less fortunate at escaping the wrath of the gods.’
The board behind him held an outline of the Titan family tree. It was more of the same lunacy that Ovid was throwing us. At the top of the tree was Cronus, who ate all his children at birth so they couldn’t grow up to usurp him. Number two on the board was his wife Gaia who threw him the ultimate curve and hid Zeus from him. Uh-oh. We all know who won that battle in the end. Thank God he hadn’t outlined Zeus’s progeny. I don’t know if the semester was long enough for tha
t outline.
Professor Tim erased the Titan family tree and moved on to the story of Heracles, who, as it turned out, was one of Zeus’s many sons. Big surprise there. Tim pointed out Heracles’ name had been changed to Hercules when the Romans hijacked Greek culture, as had Zeus changed to Jupiter and Hera to Juno. ‘The Romans so worshipped the greatness of the Greeks, that the better educated Romans spoke Greek rather than Latin. And we all know that the Romans were only good for two things. What are they, class?’
‘Wars and sewers,’ the upper ten per cent called out.
Anyhow, over the course of the evening’s class, Heracles was conceived when Zeus seduced Alcmene by disguising himself as her husband. Hera was so pissed about Heracles being spawned by Zeus’s seed that later in his life she inflicted him with a madness that caused him to kill his wife and children. So what do you do when you’ve committed such a despicable act?
‘You go to the Oracle at Delphi. Kind of like going to confession,’ said Tim Dale, crinkling his nose in a manner that told us he found the entire concept of confession absurd. ‘The oracle told him he would have to report to his arch enemy, King Eurystheus, who assigned him to twelve labors to exonerate him from his crime.’ The nose crinkled again. ‘You see, purgatory hadn’t been invented yet, so Heracles had to do his penance on earth.’
Tim walked us through one of the more creative of the labors, cleaning out a stable that hadn’t been cleaned for thirty years, a daunting and unpleasant chore to be certain. But Heracles rose to the occasion, changing the course of a couple of rivers to flush all that shit out. And you think we live in creative times.
More mythological notes. At one point Hera was tricked into nursing baby Heracles and her milk was so strong he spat it out and invented the Milky Way. Hera often punished Zeus’s girlfriends by turning them into animals or causing them to explode into flame.
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