Precious Moments

by Suzanne Roberts

  “You’d better have a brandy,” he said quietly, going to pour. “Here—and sit down. You were very foolish, you know, to come over here and get all upset this way, simply because your friend has red eyes. I have red eyes too, most of the time.”

  “David,” she said evenly, “if you won’t tell me the truth, I swear I’ll call up Mel and ask him myself!”

  “He’s a doctor; he isn’t going to give you any medical information.”

  “Then there is medical information!” The knowledge that she’d been right came upon her with renewed horror. “He’s going blind,” she said. Sudden tears clogged her voice. “And he can’t face that, because like most of your people, David, he’s really all alone. Nobody really cares much if he lives—he’s just something beautiful for them to worship for a little while.”

  He eased her into a chair. “Mel cornered him after the meal and told him he wanted to talk to him. When Thorne didn’t come back to the hotel—I guess you were with him—Mel waited until he did. Then he banged on his door and asked him a few questions. It had nothing to do with prying; he was concerned, as a doctor, about whether or not Thorne had seen anybody about his eyes. Mel still wasn’t certain, of course, but he figured some tests would be in order.”

  “Thorne’s going to take the tests?” That’s crazy, she thought. He’ll never make it down the mountain and he’s thinking of getting his eyes checked—no; Thorne knows what it is that he has. He knows what’s wrong with his vision—“He’s taken tests already, hasn’t he, David?” She let her breath out.

  “Yes, weeks ago. It’s uveitis, and he may or may not be having a lot of pain. Sometimes it may be a passing thing and other times it might be very bad. According to Mel, there’s usually blurred vision, but it’s a thing where there will be recurrences.” He reached for her trembling hands, taking the untouched glass from her. “They have drugs, medicines now that can very often control it. Only your friend apparently doesn’t or can’t accept the fact that it’s happening. Frankly, I think he’s scared, scared to death—of going blind.”

  “David,” she said, hanging on, trying to think of A Way. “David—we’ve got to stop him!”

  “That’s the point, Jamie. That’s why I didn’t tell you. We can’t stop him. I’m going to announce at my press conference that a certain young man can’t see and he’s still going down Silverlode. That’s overstepping my territory.”

  She stared at him unbelievingly. “Do you mean to say that you know Thorne can’t see well enough to try that or any other run and you’re not going to stop him? All you’d have to do is tell the newspaper people that, when you talk about your book and its theme, and they’d see that he doesn’t go down. David—you’re helping to kill him!”

  His eyes were steady, dark, somehow gentle. “What you don’t seem to be able to understand, my dear child, is that each of us must be allowed some degree of absolute privacy, some private place to go with our souls and make decisions. Apparently, your friend has made his—he’d rather die than be blind. It’s as simple as that. And I’ve no intention in the world of trying to force him to live if he chooses not to.” He poured himself more brandy. “When does your flight leave, Jamie? I’ll be glad to run you to the airport.”

  She felt dizzy, the way she’d felt when they told her Kurt was dead. The world, David’s words, seemed far away; she was shut up in some tight, terrible world of horror. David, solid, good, yes, even loving, David, was telling her that it was the right thing to do, doing nothing. Watching Thorne die was not going to be very nice, so would she please hurry and go away on an airplane, back to Wisconsin, so she wouldn’t have to watch?

  “You’re wrong,” she said suddenly. She’d been sitting where he put her, sitting like a sad little child, when the thought came into her mind: David is wrong. This time he is dead wrong!

  “I’m not wrong about his stubborn death wish, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But you’re wrong about—about letting him do it, not trying to stop him! David, when you say every person has a right to choose his or her time to die, you’re wrong! Listen—we owe each other something! If Thorne or any other one of us decides to cop out, then there’s no telling how many of us left behind will suffer because of that one, insane, totally selfish decision on his part Do you realize what he’d be throwing away?”

  David’s eyes had gone dark; he looked at her with a totally new, mature kind of respect.

  “You really believe that, don’t you?”

  “I know it! We all need each other, need love and kindness and understanding from each other. To murder love, or to simply ignore it when it’s there, offered, waiting for you—that’s not only sinful, it’s foolish. I love Thorne; I want to spend my life making him happy. If he dies, he’ll never give my love a chance to grow and become bigger and bigger and bigger. And there happen to be a lot of blind children that are going to lose a friend!” She had begun to cry; she had not wanted to cry in front of David, and here she was, doing just that. It wasn’t the kind of crying she’d been likely to do before in her life, the kind that immobilizes; instead, it seemed to spark her with a fierce anger, some kind of desperate frustration. “You’ve got to stop it when you talk to the newspeople,” she said again. “If you don’t do that, you’ll never be able to write another book that has anything at all valid to say, David. I mean that.”

  His face had gone a bit pale. Finally, he went over and poured himself another drink, a rather large one. He was drinking again; he would never begin his new book if he did that. She suddenly saw him as a man who was losing, not gaining in life, not gathering love and prosperity to himself, but instead, a man who, for all his glib language and powerful prose, failed to see the real truth about life.

  “I’ll take you to the airport,” he said finally, his voice remote. “If you’re still planning to go back to Wisconsin, that is.”

  Jamie picked up her coat. “I’m not going back,” she said quietly. “At least not now. Not until he’s dead. I’ll have a whole lifetime to go back there and grieve for him.” Her voice was steady. “Good-bye, David.”

  He didn’t answer her.

  David’s lecture and remarks about his forthcoming book, which had been purchased by a movie producer and was soon to be made into a film, shot in Aspen on location, took place as scheduled.

  There was a tea afterward, according to the evening paper; Mr. Saunders had been in fine form, talking about the latest news that he’d been asked to do the screenplay on the upcoming film version of his book.

  Not a word about Thorne, not a word about the petition he’d promised to circulate.

  She was busy that evening, helping in the bakery, getting up early morning to help make the bread and rolls, the way she’d once done when her aunt and uncle owned the place. The Eikerts were a nice, serene couple who perhaps guessed that their unexpected young guest was going through a very private kind of agony.

  On the night before the exhibition, Jamie sat up all night, curled in the wide window seat of the little attic room. There was a high, pure silver moon and the mountains shimmered in their snow blankets. The whole world, it seemed, looked especially beautiful, as if dressed for some very special happening.

  Toward dawn, when already cars were lining up, people were finding places behind the guard ropes along the slopes, Jamie slept, her dark head buried in her arms.

  The pounding on the door was so loud that she nearly fell off the window seat. There were voices, one of them unmistakably that of David.

  Footsteps on the stairs then, and poor, little Mrs. Eikert was standing there looking bewildered and upset.

  “Your former boss is downstairs with a lady and they want you right away. Emergency, he says. He might be drunk, but I don’t think so. Shall I call the police?”

  Jamie hadn’t undressed; now she groped for her shoes, slid them on over her wool socks and hurried out into the upstairs hallway. She leaned over the railing and saw David, standing on first one foot and th
en the other, and Rhonda, who was wearing, weirdly enough, no coat and a fuzzy blue bathrobe.

  “David—what on earth—”

  “Get down here at once, dammit! Rhonda can tell you on the way.”

  Jamie ran down the stairs. They were hustling her, bundling her, kidnapping her, and taking her out the door of the bakery, past early-bird, startled customers, and on outside to David’s car.

  “Get in,” Rhonda said, and gave Jamie a push. David jumped in the driver’s seat, started the engine and roared off with such force that whatever Rhonda had been about to say was lost in the noise.

  They were heading for the mountains, or, to be more specific, toward Ajax. Rhonda turned around and began talking, her voice quite loud, because something was wrong with the heater and it was making a loud noise.

  “He’s up at the Lodge. A reporter saw him and phoned David.” And before Jamie could protest, say she didn’t want to see Thorne, not now, not this one last time because the very fact that it was the last time angered her, Rhonda held up her hand.

  A thin, old-fashioned wedding band was on her finger, the married finger, as her aunt would have said. Rhonda, married!

  “It happened yesterday,” Rhonda said, smiling. “David came over and told me he kept thinking about something you’d said, about how it was a sin to throw away love. And the next thing I knew, we flew to Vegas and got married in one of those awful, commercial chapels.” She gave David a quick kiss on the ear. “We’re going to be married again, properly. In the same church where my grandmother was married—for the first time.”

  “I’m very happy for you both, I really am,” Jamie said. “But I’m not going up there to talk to Thorne, and neither of you has any right at all to try to force me to—”

  “You see,” Rhonda told her, as if Jamie hadn’t spoken at all, “there was never anybody in my family who understood that, who valued being loved. All my people threw away husbands and wives and kids as if replacing people with new people was perfectly sane. So of course they were all miserable.”

  “What my beautiful wife is trying to get through to you,” David said, “is that we believe what you said. Murdering love, ignoring it, that’s just what Thorne is doing if he goes down that mountain. But,” he said, “there’s a reason. In this case, Thorne thinks he wouldn’t be acceptable any longer. He sees a dark room where nobody wants him. The same thing is wrong with him that was wrong with Rhonda—the poor guy doesn’t know the first thing about love, because if he did, he’d kick this whole crazy thing down the tube.” He looked at Jamie, then back at the winding road. “The least you can do,” he said, “is tell him.”

  She got out of the car at the Lodge and walked up the steps, not hurrying. People were lined on the wide porch, standing with binoculars pressed against their faces.

  They obviously didn’t know Thorne was at the Lodge, so Jamie went straight to the bartender, a bored-looking young man who spoke with a Southern accent.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Gundersen, please.”

  “Go on outside, miss. That’s what all them people are doin’ out there, looking for him.” He began putting peanuts into silver dishes. “It’ll be on TV a little later on, though, so you can watch him and keep warm.” He grinned. “It’s a color set, so you’ll be able to see the blood real good and all.”

  “He’s here,” she said, suddenly feeling desperate, “he’s here in the Lodge, in one of the rooms. Someone saw him—please—”

  “You a friend of his?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m a friend of his.”

  “He’s down in the private dining room section, by himself. Looked to me like he could use a woman; I don’t think he’s comin’ back and I think he knows it.”

  She ignored the insult and hurried down the wide hallway, to the darker, smaller part of the building. She knocked on several doors, then began opening them. In one, a couple quickly jumped apart; in another, a maid glared at her suspiciously.

  She found Thorne sitting in a deep chair in front of the fireplace in a room that had three small, intimate table settings for private parties.

  She came up behind him, not touching him. “I know you don’t want to see me,” she said quietly, and he turned around, startled, then jumped to his feet. He was dressed, ready to go down the run, wearing his sky-blue ski clothes, the goggles hanging loosely around his neck.

  “I hadn’t planned on a last-ditch meeting,” he said. “If you came here for a last shot at telling me to quit, be it known the answer remains the same. I think you’d better go, Jamie.”

  She took a small breath. “I love you,” she said clearly, raising her chin. “I’m not In Love with you, or maybe I’m that, too, but most importantly, I love you, Thorne. Not because of anything but because I do. Because God has given us to each other and neither of us has a right to deny the other of that love. Do you understand that? Do you understand—that I’m telling you I want to be with you, whether or not you can see, or walk, or even talk. I love you. Please—don’t hide from that!”

  He looked stunned. The blue eyes darkened, and suddenly Jamie found herself staring at his broad back.

  “Good-bye,” he said. “Find yourself a nice dairy farmer.”

  She didn’t remember walking out of there, out of the room, the Lodge, down the steps to where David and Rhonda waited in the car.

  “Well?” David held the car door open for her.

  “Can’t you see she didn’t get anywhere with him, idiot?” Rhonda put her arms around Jamie, there in the car. “Take us home, David—Jamie needs another woman with her for a while.”

  “No,” Jamie said suddenly, and she sat up straighten “I’m going up on the runs, to find a place to watch.”

  It was crowded, but because it had begun to snow again lightly, a damp snow, some people left choice spots to go to the Lodge and watch on television. Jamie stood a long time waiting, waiting for Thorne to appear.

  When he did, it was suddenly; the lift had stopped sometime before, letting him out at Deadman’s Peak, a run that was used for practice by the experts.

  She was surprisingly near him; he glanced downward, and as if she were compelled, she raised her hand in a silent salute to him. The crowd, who had set up a mighty roar at the first glimpse of their blood hero, suddenly stopped making any sound at all. Thorne stood poised like a bird, ready to spring forward and then down, down Silverlode.

  What happened then had a dreamlike sequence to it. Thorne suddenly straightened up, looked to one side and then stepped out of position and backward. Some sound went through the waiting crowd, a kind of murmur of disapproval, and then, as it became clear what he was doing—taking off his skis—they began yelling, shouting, cursing him. It was like a chant, the sound of them, calling to him to put on his skis again, to take off—

  To die.

  He moved toward her in the thick crowd, towering above most of them, pushing forward to get to her. When he did, with one hand he took off his snow cap and with the other he pushed her body close to his own.

  “I want to look at you every second,” he said, his mouth against her wool cap; “I want to be able to remember how you look forever.”

  People were pushing toward them, asking questions, angry, some insulting. For a moment anger flashed in Thorne’s face, but then, then, her hand went into his and together they began to walk down the hill, not talking, past the crowd, to where Rhonda and David stood by their car.

  “I think we should all get out of town for a few days,” David said, shaking hands with Thorne.

  Jamie climbed in beside Thorne, in the back.

  “Are you ready to start talking some more about our kids?” She smiled at his look of surprise and pleasure. “I mean our blind kids. Thorne, I thought you could get right on their ski lessons, and maybe we could plan a tournament or something. And remember that house and vineyard you own, the one you never visit? Well, how about starting another school for blind kids there—”

  His warm kiss silenced her,
but only for a moment.