Precious Moments

by Suzanne Roberts

  “No. Kurt wrote me about them though; he had just begun getting into some sort of social circle. He didn’t really like it—I guess he felt it interfered with his skiing. You see,” she said softly, “that was his real love. It was always that way with him. He wanted to be the greatest skier in the world.”

  It wasn’t until he’d brought the steaming pot of tea to the table, sliced some stale-looking bread for them, finally found some jam and sat across from her that he asked the question.

  “Why are you staying on here, Jamie?”

  “Because I—I don’t want to go back, I guess.” She smiled. “That sounds like a foolish reason, doesn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. Depends on why you don’t want to go back. Is it because you won’t like it there without your cousin?”

  She felt her face flush. Was it? Was that a part of it? She suddenly realized he was right; she had grown up with Kurt back home, but here, he’d been dead before she arrived. This place was not laced throughout with memories of their childhood days.

  “I guess,” she said slowly, “I’ve been—running. I shut my eyes and see myself working here in Aspen, meeting people, maybe even getting invited to some of the fun things they do.” She looked down at her cup. “That sounds vain and silly, doesn’t it?”

  He reached out and covered her hand with his. “Of course not. You know what I think, Miss Jamie whatever? I think that’s a very sound, healthy kind of reaction. I think you’re reaching out to grab hold of life once again, after a very bad time. What it probably means is, you’re ready to begin living again.”

  Their eyes met. She felt almost as if she’d been forever released from something that had been holding her back, some shadowy sadness that would not permit her to feel quite at peace with herself. Now, that was gone, just as Kurt was gone. She was alive; she had a right to live and be happy again, only, until she had come to this house, spoken with this stranger, she had not been able to rid herself of the last threads of her grief.

  “Drink your tea,” he said kindly. “As I said, tea is famous for making people feel better.”

  The coffeehouse was crowded; young people moved about the room much as they had on the terrace of the Lodge. The place was packed, as usual. Jamie finally found a place to sit, a tiny table far in the back, not big enough to accommodate the groups of well-dressed young people who’d all come in together.

  She spotted her friend Donna carrying a tray filled with marshmallow-topped mugs of hot chocolate. She waved, deciding to wait until her friend could come sit down for a moment.

  “I get my break in ten minutes,” Donna said hurriedly, the mugs still on the tray. “Wait for me. I want to hear about your job-hunting.”

  Finally, when the two girls sat facing each other, Jamie smiled at her friend. Donna was plumpish, pretty and she seemed to have an unfailing sense of cheerfulness, even though she’d been working and on her own since she was barely sixteen. When Jamie had been unable to comfort her aunt and uncle, it had been Donna who had, on many occasions, comforted her. It was hard to look at Donna’s chubby, smiling face without feeling better.

  “I think I have good news,” Jamie told her. “I might have a job!”

  Surprisingly, her friend didn’t looked delighted. “Better tell me about it, Jamie. I’ve worked Aspen long enough to know there are a lot of con men out there who talk girls into paying them to get them a job. It’s done all the time. I hope you didn’t—”

  “What I did,” Jamie said proudly, “was to have an interview with none other than Mr. David Saunders himself! And he’s the dearest, sweetest, kindest person I’ve ever met, Donna.”

  Her friend’s wise blue eyes looked wary. “Isn’t he that writer who puts out that stuff about all the sins of the jet set? He’s always putting them down—it’s a wonder he has the nerve to live here!” She touched Jamie’s hand lightly. “Watch out for him, honey. He sounds like he knows an awful lot about sinning, or whatever you care to call it. I mean, he’s got a bird’s-eye view!”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Jamie said almost defensively; “all I know is, he made me feel good, just sitting in his kitchen. He’d be wonderful to work for.”

  For a change, Donna looked almost serious. “I’m not so sure David Saunders is really going to hire someone.”

  “What?”

  Donna shrugged. “I hear a lot of gossip in here, Jamie. A lot of those rich people come in here and, small as it is, it’s hard not to hear them. It used to bother me—I didn’t want to make Listen to Local Dirt my life’s work, but after a while, it made life more interesting.” She smiled. “They used to talk about your Mr. Saunders a lot. They were all—awed by him. I hear he got very rich, writing about them.” Her face sobered. “And I also heard that now he isn’t writing a thing and hasn’t been able to for three years, since his wife died.”

  “But then why—” Why, indeed? Why would he invite all those girls to come for interviews? The ugly thought that he might be—peculiar—filtered into her mind, but she rejected it immediately. He had been good to her, very tender and nice. He was a good man; his eyes couldn’t look the way they did if he wasn’t. Once the reserve and the faint cynicism had left them, after she’d spoken of Kurt, there had been a clear kindness in those brown eyes.

  “Why does he run that ad and talk about hiring a secretary? I’ve heard them talking about that, too. They say it’s better than it was when he was drinking, right after Margo Saunders died.”

  Jamie felt her heart soften, and for the moment the fact that she very likely had no chance at all to get that job, since in reality there was no job, wasn’t important.

  “I didn’t know about his wife. I mean, I read one of his books, but just the one, and I didn’t much care to know about him.”

  The book had been brilliant and brittle, a searing commentary on a life-style that she had known nothing at all about, and, since she’d been only a senior in high school at the time, wasn’t particularly interested in.

  “I remember his wife,” Donna said, taking quick sips of her black coffee. “She used to come in here. Nice lady, tall, kind of willowy. I have to get back to work now. Remember, don’t count on a job from David Saunders. He’s supposed to have had writer’s block for three years, and some people are saying he’s finished as a writer. He really loved that woman.”

  The memory of her sudden, almost miraculous release from her sorrow over Kurt stayed with Jamie all the rest of that evening. She fixed herself early dinner, wrote a letter home without actually saying, but hinting that she’d probably be back within the week, before she had to spend her saved air fare.

  A good-night call from Donna only served to make her feel even more certain that, although he obviously was a wonderful man, David Saunders was in no real need of a secretary, not when he wasn’t producing any work.

  She could not sleep. Outside, the stars were crystal bright in the black sky, and hanging so low that they were breathtakingly beautiful. Then, for some reason, her eyes were drawn toward Ajax, the killer mountain that had taken Kurt’s young life.

  Something was going on there, on the mountain. Lights, there were lights being strung up. Some of them were not yet put up and some of them hung crookedly, so that the effect, glistening on the snow, was an uneven pattern of amber, shooting across the quiet fields.

  Jamie watched, legs drawn up under her, sitting in the window seat of her room over the bakery. The night was so pure and clear that she could see very well, even though the figures moved in and out of the trees, working on the lights.

  Suddenly, the lights went out and the snow beyond returned to its color of silver-blue. Then, as Jamie leaned forward to see, they went on again, all in accord, all perfectly hung, running far up, up the side of the great mountain, two rows of them, with a wide berth between, up the mountain and down.

  Her breath suddenly caught in her throat

  A ski run—it’s a ski run! Set far away from the regular skiers’ runs, set
on the steepest slopes, those with runoffs and deep holes and pine trees that seemed to appear suddenly, over a deep dip in the earth, as if they’d been sent there to kill the unsuspecting skier who emerged at the top of the dip.

  Jamie knew it well. Last August, she had climbed a part of it, and had strewn mountain wild flowers along the path, as well as she could, because long before she’d gotten anywhere near the top of the dangerous run on foot, she’d been forced to give up; it had simply been too wild and steep for her to go farther.

  That trail had been the one Kurt had been killed on. And now they were stringing up lights as if it were the preparation for a carnival, as if this were a boardwalk and soon, now, the sweet candy and the popcorn smells would begin to show themselves.

  Someone else was going to try to make it safely down that deadly ski trail!

  Jamie climbed back into bed, shut her eyes and reached out with her mind for elusive sleep. It came, but not for a long while; it was nearly dawn and the black sky had turned into a lavender color before she finally fell asleep. But the reflection of the amber lights was gone, finally.

  The sound of the phone next to her bed woke her up. The sky was morning bright outside her bedroom window; she could hear the daily sounds of traffic on the street below.

  “Hello,” she said, struggling to sit up in bed. Her yellow bedside clock said nine-thirty. She certainly hadn’t gotten much sleep.

  “Sorry if you’re sleeping in,” the deep voice said. “This is David Saunders. I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him, fully awake now. There was something, some kind of excitement, or urgency in his tone that had gotten through to her. “What is it, Mr. Saunders?”

  “It’s a miracle,” he said at once, “an absolute, sanctioned miracle that I should run into you at this particular time of my life. I can’t thank you enough, Jamie.”

  “Thank me? For what?” She shut off her clock’s tiny alarm; she’d planned to get up at eleven and give Aspen one last going-over before accepting the fact that, as Donna had many times told her, every single job in town was filled.

  “We’ll talk about that later. In the meantime, when can you report to work? Tomorrow, I hope.”

  Her mouth nearly dropped open. After everything Donna had told her about this man’s mental block, he was surely right when he said a miracle had occurred.

  “I can come today if you want,” she told him.

  “I worked straight through for fifteen hours,” he said, his voice throbbing with emotion. “Three years I haven’t been able to do anything more than type my name and yesterday, after you left, I sat down and my head began to pour it all out on paper! It’s great—it’s the best thing I’ve ever written!”

  She was to report for work at his house at seven the following morning. They’d discuss salary then, he told her, but he was willing to pay her whatever she asked.

  There was no point, Jamie told herself, in trying to sleep any more that day. She’d do well to try to buy some of David Saunders’ books and settle down to read them, so she could more or less expect what kind of thing she’d be typing.

  There was, she found, a whole section devoted to his work in one of the nearby bookstores. Jamie bought three—all very large and all, she noted, written before his wife’s death. Then she made her way past the strolling crowds to the coffeehouse.

  Someone was putting up a poster on the light post near the café. Jamie stopped to watch, her heart beginning to beat harder.

  It was an ad for the oncoming skiing exhibition, and in bold, bright, scarlet letters, it announced that a young man named Thorne Gundersen would be trying the “death-defying” Silverlode Run down the great Ajax Mountain.

  She found herself gazing into the face of that young man. He wore the professional skier’s cap, or he had, just before the picture had been snapped. He must have taken it off quickly, because his sun-blonded hair looked damp against his head. The eyes were a clear, candid blue and the wide, sensual mouth was determined. It was a beautifully put together face, like that of a Greek god.

  And suddenly she remembered. Kurt had spoken of this man often; Gundersen had been her cousin’s greatest hero. Thorne K. Gundersen was not only the son of one of the richest men in the country, he was also an internationally famous ski champion.

  You’re a fool, Jamie said silently. You’re a fool to try that run, and before long, you’re very likely going to be a dead fool!

  TWO

  Within two weeks, Jamie and her new employer had established a daily routine that proved to be suitable to both of them. Jamie came from people who were a part of large families, people who were used to “doing” for one another, so she found nothing at all strange about fixing David’s breakfast for him at quarter-past five every morning.

  Her second day there, she heard him puttering in the kitchen. The kitchen of the house, that often cold room in the back, was located exactly next to the rooms of the housekeeper and her husband, a loyal but extremely lazy old couple who apparently had worked for David Saunders for a number of years. Their presence in the house had made it possible for Jamie to move into the house and live in, so to speak, with David Saunders.

  “You’re up early,” he said to her that morning; “I thought I was the only one in Aspen who got up before dawn. Want some eggs?”

  She looked at the mess he was making of the kitchen. “Would you mind letting me do that?”

  He sat at the table, obviously relieved to have the burden of cooking lifted from him. “My kitchen is your kitchen, my friend.” He gave her a thoughtful look. “A strange thing has happened.”

  “Strange thing?” She began looking for an eggbeater. “Oh—you mean your being back at work on your book? That isn’t strange; it’s natural. Have you an eggbeater, do you know?”

  He regarded her with level, darkened eyes. “What I mean is, I’m afraid I’m becoming attached to you.”

  She looked steadily at the drawer she’d opened. His words had somehow touched a nerve. Almost from the first she had sensed that this was a man she might someday come to love. For the moment, though, what she felt was just a kind of intense liking for him.

  “Please, let’s not do that,” she said quietly, busy with the eggs.

  “It had to happen, of course,” he told her. “You see—you somehow managed, either by miracle or magic, to release me from a bond that was sending me straight to the gates of hell, my dear. That’s putting it a bit dramatically, perhaps, but actually my not being able to work simply meant, in everyday terms, that I was slipping deeper and deeper into melancholia over Margo’s death. I knew,” he said, his voice thoughtful and quiet, “that if I could only get back to work, I could pull out. But I couldn’t get my mind tuned into the key, the point, I’d make in my next novel. Do you—understand what I’m saying to you, Jamie?”

  Yes, she had understood. Here was a man who had, for all practical purposes, been lost. Suddenly he wanted to live. And she had something to do with that. Or rather, her own grief did, her own shedding of that grief. Indeed, it had been a miracle of sorts; she felt it, too.

  But that did not mean she was falling in love with David, because she was not.

  “I’m thrilled for you,” she said, deciding that surely she had been mistaken. How could she for a moment have thought that David Saunders felt anything for her but exactly what she felt for him—friendship and gratitude?

  “Okay, then, if you’re so thrilled, kindly start calling me David instead of Mr. Saunders, okay?”

  And so it had been settled, the fact that he was, as he’d said, dependent upon her in many ways. Breakfast became a time they both began looking forward to, that very early hour when, as David had said, most of Aspen still slept.

  Jamie would wake up very early; she’d been an early riser all her life, as many farmers’ children are. She would dress in front of the heater, a present from David to be sure her room was warm enough, for the house was old. Most of the
time, she wore jeans and a comfortable blouse and sweater, in case her arms got chilly as she typed. By the time she got to the kitchen, though, David was there, sometimes reading over the work he’d done the morning before.

  Their day began very early, but it ended more or less in midafternoon. Usually, David began getting phone calls then, some from his agents in New York, some apparently from people living right here in Aspen. Sometimes, if the calls came too early in the day and he was still working, he would instruct Jamie to tell the caller he was busy. “Hang up if you have to,” he’d told her grimly; “those vultures aren’t going to keep me from my work.”

  And yet, many of his evenings were apparently spent with those same “vultures.”

  Jamie’s actual work began around ten or eleven, when David had finished for the day. So from the time after she’d finished cooking his breakfast, leaving the dishes, at David’s insistence, for the late-rising housekeeper, until the time when she sat down and either typed up his notes or typed up the manuscript itself, there was a span of sometimes as much as four hours.

  She chose that time to read his books, the ones that had already been published. To her surprise, there were many more than the latest ones, the ones written shortly before his wife’s death. There were others, written when he was single, fresh out of college.

  It was in one of those books, the earlier ones, that Jamie found the passage that intrigued her.

  She’d been there only two weeks, but even in so short a time, she found herself settled in, comfortable, even happy living here. David was kind and good-natured and his books fascinated her, this latest one as well as the earlier ones.