Precious Moments

by Suzanne Roberts

  It was crowded with the younger crowd, mostly high-school people, children of the very rich who were, for the most part, good-looking and terribly confident of what they had been taught by their parents, namely that a fortune in money meant they need not feel any responsibility for anything or anyone. For the most part, they skied, gave and went to parties, drank too much and were sexually very promiscuous, just like their parents.

  Some of them were fifteen or sixteen, but some of the girls were even younger.

  “Jamie!” It was Donna, plump, obviously pleased to see Jamie, carrying a tray high above her head. “Hey—find a seat; I’ll be over in a minute!”

  Jamie stood by the door until Donna hurried over to her.

  “I can’t stay, Donna. I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry I may have seemed to—”

  “I knew you hadn’t turned into a social snob, if that’s what you mean. I knew you’d get around to coming in to see me.” She smiled happily at Jamie. “Guess what? I’m getting married!”

  Jamie reached for her friend’s hand. “I’m glad—I want to hear all about it.” She looked uncertainly toward the Lodge. “I have to meet Thorne in a few minutes. I should be there now.”

  “Aren’t we lucky, Jamie, you and I? Both of us in love—Has he proposed yet, honey?”

  “No, not yet.” She gave her friend a quick hug. “I’ll call you, I promise.”

  “Send me a card from Vegas; I hear you’ve been invited aboard Rhonda’s private jet. What a life you’ve found for yourself!”

  Yes, what a lonely, mixed-up, unhappy kind of life! She took a cab the rest of the way. Cars were parked in front of and all around the Lodge; people were being picked up, sometimes by chauffeurs, more often by parents or friends. Thorne’s car was there in the parking lot, with fresh snow on its roof. He must have been out on the ski runs all day, Jamie thought, as she pushed open the front doors of the place.

  There was, as there always was in this big place, a general feeling of casual affluence; young, good-looking people wearing imported ski sweaters and jeans from Paris or one of the local shops sat around sipping drinks and talking. Jamie had met a lot of them at parties with Thorne, but now, knowing how he would surely hate her before this meeting was over, all the tanned, beautiful faces of the Beautiful People seemed to blur together. People came up and hugged her, some even kissed her lightly as she made her way toward the bar, where Thorne sat with his broad back to her, a glass of brandy between his hands.

  “You’re going on the jet to Vegas, aren’t you, darling? Wonderful!”

  “Is it true you’ve been offered ten thousand dollars to write your own book about what it’s really like under David Saunders’ roof?”

  “Thorne’s looking thoroughly miserable over there, won’t talk to a soul. What kind of game are you playing, anyway?”

  “She wants him to marry her, idiot.”

  “Oh, so that’s what it’s all about.”

  She pushed her way through, finally standing behind him, feeling a bit breathless.

  “Hello.”

  He swung himself around on the high stool. “I’ve been sitting here feeling terrible because you took a cab.” He stood beside her, taking her arm; in some mysterious way he was always able to take her immediately away from the crowd. First, it was a catching of her mind, a quick union that occurred whenever they were together. Then, his hand would be on hers, or around her waist or resting lightly on her shoulders, and he would take her out of the room. It had happened before, at parties, when the noise was too much, the people too drunk, the smoke too heavy.

  Now, they were outside the Lodge, facing the ski runs on the fair side of the mountain, the easier ones.

  “Where do you want to go, Jamie? You were right all along, you know. We do have to talk.”

  She nodded. Inside the Lodge, inside the big glass walls, one could see all the moving, smiling, talking people.

  “Not inside anyplace,” she said. “Here, I guess. This is okay.”

  So they sat on one of the benches near the little short run called “Babies,” and their breath frosted as they spoke.

  “It only needs explaining,” he told her. They sat facing the moon, not sitting close together. It was as if they both knew this was the leaving, the parting. It’s the end of us, Jamie thought, and suddenly she didn’t want to sit here, friendly and polite; she wanted to go someplace and cry.

  “There isn’t anything that needs explaining,” she said, her voice low but steady. “David is going to stop the Silverlode run. He’s already begun doing it.”

  Thorne was silent for a moment. The moon, a high sliver of a winter moon, watched; it seemed to Jamie that there was no sound in the world just then.

  “What about you, Jamie? Are you—helping him do this?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, “I am.”

  “Even though you know what it means to me to go down Ajax? Even though I want that more than anything in the world?”

  Now, she thought, speak the truth to him; if he remembers you in any way at all, let it be honestly!

  “I don’t think you really want to do it, Thorne,” she said. “I don’t understand it—I don’t know why it is—but for some reason, you think you have to do that.” She took a small breath. “Even though you know as well as I do that you’ll never make it.”

  She thought that would finish it, that he’d get up and walk away from her and it would be finished. But he didn’t. Surprisingly, he reached for her hand and held it very tightly.

  “This will be the last time,” he told her. “I’ll make it down and I swear to you—I’ll never try another mountain. But you can talk to David, make him lay off. You can do it, Jamie. And I swear,” he said, his voice thick with feeling, “I swear I’ll never give you cause to worry about me again.”

  “That,” she told him, “is the nearest thing you’ve ever said about a future for us. I’ve never been really sure there would be.” She held his hand to her face. “I don’t want anything to happen to you—that’s why, that’s what this is all about.” She turned to put her lips to his hand, and it was then that she saw the bruise. Very slowly she raised her eyes to meet his.

  “You’ve been hurt. Thorne, would you mind telling me what’s going on? Are you in—in some kind of trouble or something?”

  “The only trouble I’m in is the trouble your boss is about to give me. You’ve got to talk him out of this, honey. He’s on some kind of—humanity binge, and I’m the first scapegoat!”

  “Have you been fighting? Is that how the glass got broken and your hand—”

  “I told you about the glass. I bumped into it and it broke, that’s all. And last night, I bumped into a lamp. That house I rented has too much stuff in it—a guy can’t find his way around in the dark. Jamie, I’ve been thinking about going with you, to talk to him. There’s one thing he’s got going for him; he’s a gentleman. I’ll put it to him that way. But I need you to go with me. Come on,” he said, pulling her to her feet, “my car’s just outside, in the lot.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she said. A cold wind had blown in from around the mountains; she began feeling its chill. “It won’t help, Thorne. He’s going to stop you. And I want him to.”

  “Now you listen,” he said quietly. “If you care about me, you’ve got to see my side of it. You’ve got to stop thinking like—like some kind of doting auntie who’s afraid I’ll break my arm. Speed is my business, Jamie, and you and your boss aren’t going to change that. Do you think you can stop people from going down ski slopes or driving race cars or doing anything else they want to do, even though it’s dangerous? Tell your bleeding-heart boss it isn’t going to work. I’m going down Silverlode just as planned.”

  There was nothing more to say. She hurried into the Lodge, through the crowds of people. She saw Lydia Markin at the bar, watching, but nobody tried to stop her. At the door, Thorne came up behind her.

  “I’ll take you home, Jamie.”

&
nbsp; She shook her head no, and, fighting tears, hurried down the steps to a waiting taxi.

  “I can’t take a single, lady,” the driver said. “You’ll have to wait until I get an earful.”

  So she sat in the taxi, painfully conscious of Thorne’s presence there on the Lodge porch. He stood, leaning against the log wall, arms folded, watching her, until finally three giggling young girls got into the taxi and the driver started it, heading for town.

  David’s book was completed the following day; he seemed in very high spirits as he dictated the last page. Jamie tried to share his pride and joy, but inside her there was a heaviness. She’d thought Thorne would call; all day she had thought that, but now, sitting in the quiet of evening, the day’s work finished, she had to admit he wasn’t going to call. Not ever.

  “Call Max in New York and tell him it’s done,” he told her. “Then, kindly order three dozen roses, white.”

  “For Rhonda?”

  “Of course not for Rhonda. Nobody ever sends Rhonda flowers.”

  “David, did you hear what you just said?”

  He’d been smiling; his face was flushed with triumph and from a glass of brandy he’d raised in a salute to “chapter twenty-seven, where they all get their just dues and live miserably ever after.”

  “What I just said was that nobody sends Rhonda flowers.” He was silent for a second or two. “All right,” he said finally, sitting heavily in his chair near the fireplace, “I know, I know. I’ve treated her badly, I suppose, allowing her to drag me off to those stupid, boring parties, allowing her to fancy that I might—care about her.” His eyes held worry. He took off his glasses and cleaned them; Jamie sensed a new sadness in him. “I should never have let her stay here the other night,” he said. “She seemed sure you wouldn’t be coming in at all, and she looked so—like a kitten or something. Usually, Rhonda is all cat; tigress is a better word, I believe. But—” his voice warmed, “she can be a kitten, too, sometimes, the kind you find in dark doorways, the kind that cries a lot.”

  “You’re in love with her, David.”

  “Oh, rubbish.” He glared at her. “In love? What the devil is that supposed to mean? That I’m in today and out tomorrow, maybe? It doesn’t work that way, little girl. And if you don’t know that, you’re in for a very bad time. I’ve told you that. Now, before long, you’re going to find it out for yourself.” He stood up. “Look—I’ve worked long and hard on this book. Now, it’s finished. So let’s celebrate and not worry about anything. Hard to do in this life, but every so often, the lucky ones can manage a few hours without feeling the miseries of the world. I’ll take you to Zach’s, okay? Even you will like the French cooking there.”

  She gave him a small, grateful smile. He knew her, knew her mind and feelings. He very likely sensed that she had broken up with Thorne. They hadn’t spoken of him all day, except that David had mentioned some phone calls from various newspapers around the country, and one straight from The Associated Press. They’d wanted to know about his forthcoming lecture, about why he chose to hold up skiing as a kind of slaughter.

  “What those idiots don’t understand,” he told Jamie as they drove up to Zach’s, a delightfully small and very elegant place famous since the claim jumpers and mine shafters got rich there, “is that it isn’t the sport I’m knocking—it’s the attitude of the people who go to watch it. Don’t tell me that crowds who go to see the Grand Prix aren’t secretly hoping one of the heroes will end up in pieces somewhere along the way.”

  Now, sitting in the quiet restaurant, with the mountains rising beyond like steadfast ghosts, and soft candlelight between them, Jamie looked into David’s brown eyes and suddenly she wanted all pretense to be gone between them.

  “Maybe it’s time for me to give the advice, David. If I do—will you please listen?”

  He frowned. “I’m saving your blue-eyed boyfriend’s skin for him, and that fact alone means you must not give me advice, ever. I consider myself above advice.” He finished his wine. “Actually, I brought you here to discuss my newest idea for my next novel.”

  “That’s very nice,” she said stubbornly, “but I want to talk about Rhonda. What right do you have to put her down simply because she’s rich and beautiful?”

  “Will you kindly stop dragging her into our conversation?” His voice had risen; he looked around him, lowered his tone and held onto her hands almost, she thought, with desperation. “My idea is about an older, worldly man who is very lonely after the death of his wife. Then, one day, a kind of—of princess comes to his door and asks to be let in. Now this man has always been an exceedingly great fool, but this time he is given the wisdom to open the door and let this lovely creature into his house. There, she gave him peace and his sense of humor began to come back to him, so that he could do his work once again.” He touched her cheek. “So, in order not to lose this friend, he asks her to marry him.”

  She felt the breath stop in her for an instant. Marry David? There he was, not old at all, not creaky at all, but instead, a man who was perhaps at his peak. Plus, he had the wisdom about life that Thorne did not have and possibly could not have because he was too young still.

  “I’m very honored,” she said finally, her voice gentle. “But it’s no good marrying people when you happen to be in love with other people.”

  “There’s that idiotic combination of words again.” He let go of her hands and began fumbling at his clothes for his pipe. “I’m offering you friendship, a good life of traveling and reading, a house wherever you happen to want it—and you’re prattling about some state of mind that, I understand, transports one into the same frame of mind that schizophrenics have.” His eyes were stern as he began puffing away on his pipe. It was hard, in that moment, to believe that he had just proposed marriage to her. “You don’t know a damned thing about loving, Jamie. I suppose that comes as a very great shock to you. It usually does, to girls who think they’d go to the moon or anywhere else because they’re in some state of mental retardation.”

  She was beyond getting furious with him. “That’s not,” she told him, “a very nice thing to say to someone you just proposed to.”

  “Let me tell you about loving, Jamie.” He leaned back in his chair for a moment. Outside, the moonlight lay spilled across the frozen snow, so beautiful that for a second she thought of him, of Thorne. There was an unfinished feeling inside her, more than just the anguish of a lost love. She’d never felt this way before about a man, never. And yet David kept telling her she knew nothing at all about loving.

  “All right,” she said, “since I’m a complete shell, someone who doesn’t know about loving, kindly give me a lesson. But why you’d even consider marrying me—”

  “Because you’re like a child,” he told her, his voice suddenly kind. “In many ways, you’re like Margo. You’ve never seen a picture of her, have you?” He reached into his wallet. For a moment she tried to take him seriously; he actually had asked her to be his wife. Now that she knew he thought of her as a friend, nothing at the moment seemed more appealing than the thought of spending her life with someone who did not make her angry, or hurt her. Marriage with a friend, she thought. And then Rhonda’s lovely face came into her mind, the silver-gray eyes, the exquisite clothes, the air of absolute sophistication and coolness.

  David had said that sometimes Rhonda was like a small, helpless and lost kitten. The kind that cries.

  She could not do it. She could never marry him, not when another woman loved and needed him so much. Even though he didn’t seem at all inclined to propose that he and Rhonda do much more than spend time together at a party—she could not do it.

  He was holding out a picture of his wife, Margo.

  “We took it at Tahoe,” he said. “She used to love it there. We had a home there; I bought it for her right after my agent sold the movie rights to All That Glitters. I sold it after she died, and all her furniture. I suppose I knew that, if I kept it all, I’d end up one of those crazies
who walks around in the past, not changing one piece of anything.” He looked at her. “Do you think I’m one of those crazies, Jamie? Do you by any chance think that the reason I’m proposing to you is because I’m afraid to spend my life with the woman who wants me to do that very much?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, “I think you’ve asked me to marry you because you’re still in hiding. But it was a very sweet idea, all the same.”

  David sighed and raised his glass to her. “Here,” he said, “is to what was a very sweet, but probably stupid, idea.”

  Jamie found herself concentrating on the small picture, a tiny color portrait, that of a woman sitting by a window with her hands crossed in her lap. She wore a soft looking dress and the light softly touched her face and hair.

  She was not beautiful. She was, Jamie saw with a mental start, not even plain; she was, in terms of classical, accepted beauty-forms, homely. She leaned closer to look. What had there been about this slender, rather fragile-looking woman with her long dark hair and her unlovely face? Jamie saw it then, some fleeting look of magic there was about the small smile, the merry eyes.

  “She was a blithe spirit,” David said softly.

  So that had been her secret, her secret of holding a man in her arms even after her death. Poor Rhonda, Jamie thought.

  At the end of the meal, just before a flaming tray of sweets was brought in, Jamie looked again at David and smiled.

  “Are you ready for my advice now?”

  “I’ll never be ready for advice from babies.”

  “You mean because you’ve had a great love in your life and so far all I’ve been able to do is feel something close to hero worship for Thorne?”

  “Something like that,” he said rather grumpily. He looked at his watch. “It’s still early—we could go someplace else.”

  “David, you know perfectly well you’re bored with nightlife. Let’s go home and I’ll make you a very good cup of coffee.” She realized how very dear this man was to her. “My advice,” she said, as he helped her into her wool coat, “is to think about life without being loved. I imagine it’s very lonely. Perhaps you don’t know how lucky you are, being loved by Rhonda.”