by Dick Cluster
“So she was quiet?”
“No. Like you said. Secretive. Like I said. So am I. I think it was an accident, bad and crazy as that seems. She, I don’t know, she thought the snowbank was softer than it was. She thought she’d sink into it and stop. Instead it was icy and speeded her up.”
Alex put the picture of Scat and Caroline on the table next to the letter from Rosemarie. If the letter was his visa, this was his gun, his badge. This was what he had to flash that apparently nobody knew to expect. Pamela didn’t anyway. She didn’t say anything, but somewhat to Alex’s surprise what she did was blush. He watched the blush spread like a red tide through her neck and face and ears. Even her hands, red already, seemed to deepen their color. Finally she said, “I guess I didn’t know her all that well. I guess some of the things people said about her were true.”
“What people?” Alex asked.
Pamela got up, circled past him, and retreated to her station behind the counter. She put the sign away. Alex followed and repeated his question, eyes as sharp as he could make them, palms down flat, uncompromising, on the wood. Pamela shook her head; her face was slowly getting its whiteness back.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re both dead. It doesn’t matter to me.”
19. FLATTERY AND IDLENESS AND MIRTH
Alex skied back more distracted than he’d come. So he got his weight forward on a downhill and then he fell on his face when his right ski hit a bump. One minute there had been beautiful motion, a free ride, and the next minute there was cold snow rubbing his cheek raw and more cold snow up his sleeves. He brushed himself off, embarrassed, and considered whether everybody— Suzanne, Dennis, even maybe Scat himself— could have been wrong. Maybe she’d had something on her mind, maybe also something in her brain, in her blood, and she’d made a bad, a fatal mistake. She’d thought she was in control. When you were nineteen, you relished being in charge of yourself. You didn’t like to think that you weren’t. When gravity showed her otherwise there hadn’t been much time left.
Maybe, but Alex still doubted it. He waited a minute, regaining his balance, and then pushed off again. He needed enough time to shower and change clothes and clean up Scat’s condo. He had no illusions about control, but only wanted to stack the deck as favorably as he could. When he reached the cross-country center, he stashed the rented skis in his car and drove back to Katahdin Homes. This time number B-71 was empty. He called Suzanne at the Black Pine and told her he’d be meeting Dennis MacDonald at Larabee’s at six. “If I can make a connection, I’m going to bring whoever it is back here,” he said. “Just sit tight, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m done.”
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m fine. I don’t want to get in your way.”
He showered and changed clothes, using the shower that Scat, no doubt Suzanne, and possibly Caroline Davis had used. Two dead, and one alive. It used to be, when people didn’t move around so much and made things to last, that it was quite common to sleep in the bed or ride on the saddle or cross the threshold that you knew for a fact had been used by someone now dead. He threw the clothes he’d been wearing into Scat’s washing machine. He thought that going through Scat’s domestic motions ought to tell him something about the man. It didn’t, except that Lowell Townsend Johnston had died down to the bottom of a carton of detergent. While the machine ran, Alex straightened up the place so there’d be no sign of a search. He switched the clothes from washer to dryer, and then he climbed the ladder into the loft where Scat apparently had spent most of his time. He sat watching the mountains not move.
After a while he got up and practiced cleansing the marrow and then he practiced Punch Under Elbow and Repulse Monkey several times. He made his own movement as slow as he possibly could— like the mountains, not like the swiftness of skis or of cars or of human lives. When he climbed down from the loft, his clothes were dry. They had the softness that came from machine drying, and a fresh smell that he associated with the clean air outside. Scat Johnston may not have been much of a human specimen, but he still would have appreciated the feel and the smell of his freshly laundered clothes— assuming he ever did his own laundry, of course.
* * *
Alex nursed his drink and rehearsed. His name was George. He was here for the weekend with the Industrial Chemists’ Association. The chemists’ program was already laid out in interchangeable white letters on a black signboard in the lobby: Friday banquet and band in the Slalom Room, Saturday breakfast in the Traverse, etcetera through Sunday afternoon. Alex thought he could pass for an industrial chemist. George had been able to come up a day early, but wasn’t finding much action and was feeling lonely. It had been a long time since he’d last slept with a woman. How long was long? A month? Six months? What was the best way to rehearse that?
Alex made his eyes roam around the mostly empty tables and up and down the bar. He wasn’t sure whether George was single or was no longer on intimate terms with his wife. Not that he actually planned to spew out George’s tale. It was just that he’d been told having those kinds of details down helped an actor relax into a part. He wanted to play the part, for a while. He didn’t want to scare the woman, whoever she would be, away. That’s what he’d told Dennis MacDonald, before Dennis had pointed out the right room and the right bartender. Then Dennis had wished him good luck and drifted away.
What was funny was that the conversation going on at the bar had been right on the mark. There were two men, one of them older than Alex, the other probably Alex’s age. Three women. It was hard to tell who was connected to whom. “You don’t even know how the two of us got back here,” one of the women said. She had said this before, at least once, but she repeated it as if she had never gotten a satisfactory response. “You left us, but we got a ride over here with this guy in a Jaguar. He offered to take us”— she paused for effect— “anyplace we wanted to go.”
“You came here,” the older man said at last. He had gray hair and a red nose. He was clean-shaven, his sweater looked expensive, but his accent revealed that he did not come from the upper class. A self-made man, as they said. Business or professional, it was hard to choose which. The woman had light brown hair, styled short, and a tan in February.
“Yeah,” she said in exasperation, real or feigned. “And you don’t even know how. He tried to talk me into coming with him.” This got no rise, so she paused again. “I bet I could have gone with him and got three hundred bucks for the night.”
Like a conductor’s baton, that brought a quick, almost audible hush all around. Then everybody laughed, and the second man followed it up, anxious to demonstrate that the comment had been a little rough, maybe, but still it was only a joke. “Right,” he said. “We all know Donna has got what it takes. Anyway, Donna, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Donna laughed. “Hey, honey?” she asked the bartender. He looked young and collegiate. He was dressed in a white turtleneck with the sleeves rolled up. The “hey, honey” was more motherly than flirtatious, Alex thought. “Is this place going to liven up? We get a lot better crowd at Happy Hour on Route 1.”
“Route 1?” the bartender said. “You mean the Palace? Diamond Head? Platters?” He sounded homesick. They were talking about the same stretch of North Shore that housed the Typhoon.
“You know Route 1?” the younger man said. “Did you ever work there? I met my wife in one of those clubs.”
“Did you?”
“That’s right,” one of the other women answered. Alex thought she was the one who’d been abandoned with Donna on the slopes and had got the ride back with the guy in the Jaguar. “He saw me dancing. He came up to me and said, ‘Let me take you away from all this.’ ”
“And you said,’’ the older man jumped in, “for three hundred dollars, let’s go.” By the time he finished, it had become a chorus, the unwelcome thought banished in jollity. The five of them had ordered another round, drunk it down, and headed for dinner. Now Alex held up his empty g
lass. When the bartender came, he said, “You know what they were all talking about, before?” He inclined his head in a wistful way toward the group’s stools, which were empty now.
“What?”
“Oh, about the three hundred a night.”
The bartender squinted at Alex’s glass, then added fresh ice and refilled it. “I don’t think she was worth that much,” he said. “I think there are some girls who are.”
“That’s what I was wondering about. I don’t want to spend all the time I’m up here alone.”
The bartender turned away but inclined his head toward Alex to show that he was listening. There was a crisp part, like a crease from an iron, in his straight blond hair. Alex waited while he wiped the bar and slid some new, clean wineglasses onto a rack where they hung upside down. “There is a kind of escort service,” the man told him. “If taking a lady to dinner is what you want.”
“That would be great,” Alex said. “I’m up here with the Industrial Chemists,” he added self-importantly, “but I thought I’d get a head start. I’d like, uh, somebody I could relate to as equals. Maybe a college girl, somebody like that.”
“Sure,” the bartender said. “There’s a finder’s fee, headhunter’s fee, a hundred cash to me. Then the rest is up to you and she.”
“To me and her,” Alex corrected. He handed over five crisp bank-machine twenty-dollar bills.
“For another hundred,” the bartender added, “I can make sure to find somebody that’s free all night.”
“I’m not that hard up,” Alex smiled. “Let me meet the lady first.”
The bartender smiled back, no doubt because the customer was always right. “You’re not that hard on, you mean. Where do you want the lady to meet you?”
“Tell me a good restaurant. The one upstairs?”
“No.” The bartender wrinkled his nose. “Why don’t you meet her at the one in the Silver Birch? If you can afford her, you can afford it.”
Rosemarie Davis could afford it, Alex hoped.
* * *
She looked like a model, Alex would have said. She looked like one of the mannequins at Jordan Marsh. She looked like a Revlon ad. He tried to look as if he already knew her, as if they were already friends. That’s what George would do. George would try not to gape or stare.
She had straight dark hair, cut to look spiky and wild. She wore tailored pants and a flared brown suede jacket that buttoned at her slim waist. Under the jacket was a white blouse, maybe silk, with half of its buttons left undone. Her eyelashes were impossibly long and dark, her lips impossibly rounded and an impossible cool dark red. She looked to be the same age as Caroline, nineteen or twenty. Any man with her would be sure to enjoy the covetous glances of the other men passing by.
“Hi,” she said. “I guess you must be George.” The dialogue was not original, nor was it dressed up with hype. The tone was cool and professional, but friendly. “I’m Lena Hanson.”
“Hi, Lena Hanson,” Alex said. He thought it was strange that she gave him a last name. It was part of the fiction, he guessed; it meant that the name was a fiction too. He guided her to a table and ordered wine. When the wine came, he led in clinking glasses. “Lena Hanson,” he repeated. “Where are you from?”
“Nebraska.”
He realized he’d been expecting it. It was something about the name, but he’d had two bourbons and now he was drinking the wine. Lena was like Ilene, of course, the name, this much of a connection swam up at him in a dreamy way. She didn’t look like Ilene, who wore big round glasses and a suit when Alex first met her, whose light brown hair fell halfway to her shoulders and then curled up— who had looked just like what she was, the librarian.
“Really,” Alex said. “You’re not from Nebraska. Tell me where you’re really from.”
“What are you, George, a mind reader?” Lena Hanson raised her eyebrows, impossibly rounded and dark. She let a doubtful curve break the symmetry of her fashion-model lips.
“You tell me,” Alex answered. “Did you really grow up within a thousand miles of where you said?”
“A thousand miles? Yes, within a thousand. The true story is that I grew up in Dubuque.”
The way she said it meant that it might be the true story and it might not, but Alex decided to believe that it was. Dubuque, Iowa, he thought. That made some sense, that she could get from there to here, because Dubuque wasn’t so far from New Hampshire after all. A poor town, a factory town, farm equipment and animal feed and packing houses. Switch the packing houses for pulp mills and it might be northern New Hampshire, say Grafton or Berlin. That was his impression, anyway, though he’d only driven through Dubuque. Well, stopped to eat lunch and buy groceries, in fact. He’d been driving Laura’s car, it would be about a year and a half after that day in the library when he first met Ilene. In Dubuque he’d been driving, with Laura beside him, as New York as she could be, leaving Grand Island and Hans Heidenfelter and Ilene Paciorek behind. Before he knew it, Alex found himself telling so-called Lena Hanson all this.
“Are you sorry?” she asked.
“No, I guess not. I got a daughter out of it. And I got back east where I probably belong.” And I’m staying here, he added to himself. Apparently New England is where I’m going to live this new and perhaps final phase of my life. This is where Maria and I live, it’s where Maria and Laura live too. If I move in with Meredith, that will only be confirmation of the fact: Boston, the White Mountains, the Atlantic, Cape Cod. Not the Great Plains or the Rockies or the high sunshine of Cuernavaca or the fog of San Francisco Bay. With Meredith Phillips, not getting married in the eyes of court or church, but planning to be with each other in sickness and in health. Till death do us part, amen? Alex found he was unconsciously feeling for tumors at the base of his neck. He quickly put his hand to the neck of his wineglass instead. There was a certain similarity between Ilene and Meredith, he noted. Unlike Laura, they were both literary sorts. And then he had it. The connection floated up like a bubble and lodged in his head.
“Willa Cather,” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it? Tell me that’s not where you got your name.”
Lena Hanson smiled back, a real smile, though she got it quickly under control. “I’d like the brook trout, if you don’t mind. And a small garden salad. Who is this Willa Cather, by the way?”
“And I’ll have the pheasant, or prairie chicken, like we used to go after with our shotguns on the long summer days after we were done fixing cars. Willa Cather wrote stories about people who lived on that prairie, Norwegians and Bohemians and people like that. Ilene taught me about Willa Cather— so many of the stories were about romances, or missed romances, between sophisticated Easterners and yearning but ignorant prairie folk. There’s a Lena Hanson in one of the stories, or some of those stories…”
Alex stopped because Lena, or whoever she was, signaled for a waitress and then sat back so that Alex could be the man in charge and order the meal as it was supposed to be done. The waitress was older, in her thirties, Alex thought, and she wore a wedding ring. If she knew Lena Hanson, if she knew Lena came in every weekend or every other weekend with a different man, she did not let on. She took the order, as from two strangers, and went on her way. If this weren’t tonight, but say a week ago, Caroline Davis might have taken the order. But then he wouldn’t be here, of course.
“ ‘Her name was a reproach through all the Divide country,’ ” Lena Hanson quoted then. “ ‘She wore a pink wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, and she sang accompanying herself on a battered guitar. She had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and she knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.’ You have a very good memory for literature, George. Now tell me some more about yourself.”
“My name is Alex,” Alex said, feeling that after her admission somehow he owed her this much. It occurred to him that he could be her father’s age, if her father in Dubuque had married as young as they often did. He didn’t say any more, or as
k any more, directly anyway. While they waited for dinner they talked about the deadness of winter on the plains, about the condition of the ski slopes here in the Woods, about it being late February and mud season not all that far away. Then they ate, sometimes locking glances, and sometimes Lena Hanson’s fingers would brush Alex’s fingers or the back of his hand.
All in all, Alex was impressed with both her performance and his. It was almost possible to believe that this was just dinner, two attractive people getting acquainted, nothing being bought or sold. While he talked, and looked, he mused on the idea of selling one’s body. It was really only certain rights to her body she was selling— her labor power, which Marx would say all proletarians sold, but this type of labor was supposed to be private and to mean more than what it physically was. Which was more offensive, he wondered, having to sell your body or having to sell your blood? Somebody might conceivably pay for his own sexual services, but nobody would want his blood. Though somebody did want one of his lymph nodes for a study, Dr. Wagner had once pointed out— ”someday, when it’s convenient”— and then she had let the request rest.
If your body was going to disappear, Alex thought, did that make it a more precious commodity, one that would fetch a higher price? Men would pay for Lena Hanson’s body because of its youth as well as its beauty. Because youth disappeared. Alex sipped and ate and watched Lena Hanson and enjoyed thinking these morbid but interesting thoughts. He wasn’t sorry that he wouldn’t really be going to bed with her. Not that he would mind feeling Lena Hanson’s warm body, but he didn’t want to feel George’s empty soul. He was partly sorry, and partly glad, that he was going to pry further into Lena’s real life.
She brought the charade to an end, delicately, by declining Alex’s offer of dessert. “My diet,” she said in a disparaging way. She patted her waist, then took Alex’s hand in hers and squeezed it. She said “my diet” the way somebody says, by way of excuse, “my job” or “my boss.” “A hundred to me now for another hour,” she added. “Three hundred if you’re going to keep me busy all night.”
