Top of the Hill, page 15
“Oh,” Michael said, surprised.
“Good evening,” Mrs. Heggener said.
“Good evening,” he said, not moving from the door. “Is anything wrong?”
“No. I was coming along the corridor and I happened to see the light under your door and I decided to make sure you were comfortable.”
“Couldn’t be more so.” He noticed that she didn’t explain what she was doing prowling around the hotel in the middle of the night.
“You’re sure you have everything you need?”
“Everything.”
She looked past him into the room. “Do you mind if I come in for a moment and see that everything’s all right?”
“Of course.” He stepped aside to let her pass him. He was about to close the door, then thought better of it and left it ajar.
Mrs. Heggener crossed the room, inspecting it as she did so. Michael was sorry he had thrown his overcoat and jacket over chairs and that he had left a pile of shirts on a table.
Mrs. Heggener touched the radiator. “Warm enough?”
“Just right.”
“The wine cold enough?” she asked. “I could ring down for some ice.”
“It’s fine, thank you.” He was feeling ill at ease. The sight of the handsome woman moving around his room so intimately in the middle of the night began to make him wonder if perhaps with her . . . “Oh,” he said, making a sudden resolve, thinking, What have I got to lose? She’s over twenty-one. “Would you like to join me in a little wine? There seem to be two glasses.”
“So there are. I suppose Rita doesn’t approve of solitary drinking.” She seated herself across from the chair in which he had been sitting, crossing her legs, showing a very pretty, rounded calf and a fine ankle. Whatever she was, she wasn’t ill at ease.
He sat down and poured some wine for each of them.
“I was speaking about you this evening,” Mrs. Heggener said.
“Oh, you were?” Maybe he ought to stop all this inane small talk and just grab her and see what happened. By now he was sure that it would not be what had happened in New York with the physiotherapist and the old girlfriend. His erection was firm and unmistakable, caught awkwardly in the folds of his shorts and trousers and he had to sit twisted to keep it from being noticeable, like an old-fashioned actor in a drawing room comedy.
“An old acquaintance of yours dropped by. David Cully. He was coming from a meeting and he gave me the schedule of the courses and the events they’ve planned from Thanksgiving until Christmas. As the head of the ski school he and I often have things to discuss for the benefit of my guests. He’s a great favorite in town. I suppose this is the only place people remember that he won all those downhill races out West that year.” She sighed. “Fame,” she said. “Especially in America. People flicker on, then flicker off. I feel sorry for Mr. Cully, although he seems quite happy himself, with his wife and children. He said you’d been a beau of his wife, Norma, when you were here.” .
“That isn’t exactly true,” Michael said, twisting again in the chair. “He didn’t seem to take it too seriously,” Mrs. Heggener said. “He said you were the stud of the year, you had all the girls chasing you.” “I was young and exuberant in those days,” Michael said lightly, although he disliked the. way the conversation was going. The word stud had always annoyed him and it sounded particularly provocative coming, accented, from Mrs. Heggener’s lips.
“He said you were a very good ski teacher and that they tried to prevail upon you to come back.”
“He said that?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I thought we didn’t part exactly friends,” Michael said. “Anyway, I had other things to do.”
“So I gather. Do you plan to teach again this year?”
“I’ve played with the idea.”
“David said he’d like to see you. They’re running short on instructors this year. There’s a new lift just been put in and they have to expand.”
“Maybe I’ll look in on him.”
“I ski, too,” Mrs. Heggener said. “But I’m one of those timid souls who has to follow an instructor at all times.”
“I must say, Mrs. Heggener,” Michael said, “you don’t look like a timid soul to me.”
“Eva is the name, Mr. Storrs. And appearances can be deceiving. And remember, I am on my own home ground here in the hotel. No ski slope feels to me like my home ground.” She poured some more wine for both of them, leaning forward as she did so, her breasts stretching the cloth of her dress a little. She put the bottle down and leaned back again. “I know all the instructors here well,” she said. “Too well. As in Europe, the conversation is limited, to say the least. Country boys who are only beguiling when they are going downhill. In my country—peasants. Only you can’t call anyone a peasant in America.”
“No,” he said. “In America we range only from middle-class to noble.”
She looked at him speculatively. “I have a feeling that your conversation would not bore me.”
She is getting ready to lay it on the line any minute now, he thought. “You must not flatter me, madam,” Michael said ironically. “Eva,” she said.
“Eva,” he repeated.
“If I tell David I want you, he will assign you to me as a private instructor. I pay the ski school and the ski school pays you. It is an impersonal arrangement.”
“The best kind,” he said. He sneaked a look at his watch. Halfpast twelve and we’re still talking, he thought. But he’d be damned if he’d make the first overt move. “And if you find that my conversation, too, bores you . . . ?”
She shrugged. “I will tell David that we do not hit it off. That you go too slow for me, or too fast, or are too demanding. And ask him to suggest someone else.”
Bitch, he thought, but sounded interested as he asked, “Do you ski every day?”
“No. Only sporadically. And in the afternoons mostly. But I like to have the instructor on tap in case I get a sudden urge to go up the hill. When I am in a dark mood, I seem to want to ski more often. It is a way of forgetting.” Her speech, he noticed, was beginning to sound a little thick, the accent more marked. He wondered if she had been drinking all evening, alone. “I thank God for winter,” she went on, her voice crooning sadly now.
“What do you have to forget?”
“That I am living in a country not my own.” She seemed on the verge of tears and Michael wondered if she was one of those women who had to cry a man into bed. “That when I want to see my husband, I must go to clinics, hospitals all over the country, different places, every time my husband hears of a doctor who has developed a new treatment or one who has saved a patient’s life. . . . That when he is at home with me, I am a nurse. That when I say, Take me home to Austria, he says, Yes, dear, perhaps next year. He was bom there, you know . . .”
“I know,” Michael said. “Ellsworth told me.”
“But when he goes there, he can’t stand it for more than a week at a time. It is a make-believe country, he says, it is no place for him.”
Finally, Michael felt moved, although whether it was for the woman who, acting or not, was on the verge of tears, or for the doomed husband he had not yet met, he did not know. He leaned forward and took her hand. It was cool and steady and limp in his own hand. “I hope I will not go too slow for you or too fast for you or be too demanding,” he said. Now he didn’t know whether it was he who was acting or whether he honestly wanted to console her.
“Do you mean that?” she whispered dramatically, breathing deeply.
“Yes, I do.”
“We shall see,” she said abruptly. She withdrew her hand, stood up and moved quickly to the door. He watched, stunned, thinking, What in hell was that all about?
She stopped at the half-open door, then pulled it shut with a sharp little click and locked it. She turned and faced him, her head high, put her hands up to her hair, pulled something, and the ash blond hair, almost reddish in the firelight, cascaded down over her shoulders to her breasts and to the middle of her back in golden tumult. “Now,” she said, staring at him seriously, “please put out the damned light.”
Her body was deceptive. Given her height and the narrowness of her face, he had taken it for granted she was thin and angular. Her figure had been hidden in the loose black gown. But now he saw it was full and rounded, nourished on Viennese pastries and pots of rich hot chocolate mit Schlag from the best confiseries of the old capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The ascetic face proved also an illusion. There was nothing ascetic about her tastes and no reticence in her performance. She was instructive and demanding and he, reveling in the renascence of his virility, was happily instructed and answered all her demands. In the imperial balls in the old palace it must have been one of her grandmothers who led the waltzes, not the hussar who was her partner. Half-smothered in the fragrant flood of her hair, he could not help but think, in one of the rare moments he thought at all, the physiotherapist should see me now.
He had no idea how much time passed before she finally rolled off him and stretched out beside him, one leg across him. She sighed contentedly. “Another way of forgetting,” she said. “Maybe the best.”
He noted, a little bitterly, for future reference, that she was categorizing him merely as a teammate in a particularly vigorous sport and he was not pleased with the image. Affection, he guessed, was not in her repertoire.
“And to think,” she said, “all Europeans keep saying that Americans don’t know how to make love. And I listened to them.” She chuckled, rolled a little closer to him and kissed him under the ear. “You said before that you would stay at least for the season. If all went well. Has all gone well?”
“Extremely well.”
She chuckled again. “That’s American, I must say. The laconic Yankee. The Gary Cooper syndrome. An Austrian would be quoting Heine or Schiller to me for a half-hour.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know anything from Heine or Schiller. Next time, I’ll try Yeats, though. ‘When I am old and gray and full of sleep . . .’ ”
“You’re not as old and gray as you think you are.”
“Not tonight.” If only she knew what he had been through since the day he and Tracy’s father had nearly drowned in Long Island Sound.
“Not tonight,” she said, musingly. “I take that as a compliment.”
“It was meant to be.”
“Have you any idea what time it is?”
“A quarter past delirium,” he said, and she chuckled once more, complacently. She was, he could tell, used to pleasing men. He reached over for his watch on the bedside table and peered at the illuminated dial. “It’s twenty past four.”
“Mein Gott. The maids will be moving about soon. It would not do to see the lady of the house leaving a guest’s room at this hour in what used to be called complete disarray.” She got briskly out of bed and dressed quickly, but left her hair down. Then she came over and kissed him.
“You’re something,” he said.
“A lady does her best,” she said and kissed him again, then said, softly, “Du. Du.” '
“What does that mean?”
“You,” she said. “You. The familiar second person singular.”
Well, he thought, be grateful for the small gifts the night bestows.
Then she was gone, a silent shadow in the last glow from the fireplace.
He stretched hard in the warm bed, appreciating the taut pull of his muscles. For once, as he closed his eyes, he didn’t regret that he was no longer twenty-one. Snow or no snow, he thought as he dropped off to sleep, it’s a cinch I’m not going to get up early this morning.
CHAPTER TWELVE
He ate a late hearty breakfast in the deserted dining room, served by the boy who had brought in his bags. Looking out the window, he saw that it had snowed, but lightly, and what there was on the lawn was already thawing down to the grass in the warm sunshine. No skiing today. No matter.
Mrs. Heggener, as he still thought of her, was nowhere to be seen. He remembered that she had said Dave Cully wanted to talk to him and when he finished breakfast went out to get in the car and into town to the ski school.
There was an old station wagon parked next to the Porsche and as he went between the two cars, he heard a woman’s voice say, “Hello, Michael.”
It was Norma Cully, sitting at the wheel of the station wagon.
“Hello, Norma,” he said. “What’re you doing here at this time of the morning?”
“Waiting to see you. Pa told me where you were staying.” She was wearing a bright checked scarf over her head and she looked pale and tired with all that color around her face. She kept twisting her hands nervously as she smiled tentatively at him. “There’re a couple of things I have to tell you. Have you got the time?”
“Of course.”
“Do you want to get into the car? It’s a cool morning and I’ve got the heater on.”
“I’m all right here,” Michael said.
“You needn’t worry about coming close,” Norma said, smiling wanly. “This time I won’t attack you.”
“Why didn’t you come to dinner at your parents’ house last night?”
Norma shifted uneasily on the driver’s seat. “Account of you. I didn’t know how I’d act the first time I saw you and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of Ma and Pa. I didn’t know whether I’d laugh or cry or fall down in a faint or accuse you of ruining my life or throw my arms around your neck and say you’re the only man I’ve ever loved. Anyway, I needed at least one night to think you over.”
“Norma, dear,” Michael said gently, “you had a schoolgirl crush on an older friend of your parents’ fourteen years ago. Now you’re married and have two kids and you’re a grown, sensible woman, according to your mother, and you wouldn’t have done any of those things. You would have said, ‘How are you, Michael? We’re all glad to see you back again. Have you seen the pictures of my two kids?’ ” “Maybe,” Norma said doubtfully. “But maybe I’d have said you shouldn’t have kissed me goodnight after taking me to the movies that time and you shouldn’t have said you liked skiing with me better than with any of the other girls and maybe I’d’ve said you had no right to tamper with the affections of a simple mountain girl and lead her on so that she had fantasies of making love with you and even marrying you and going to live with you in New York.”
“I’m sorry, Norma,” Michael said, with a pang of guilt at his thoughtlessness so many years before. “I liked you. I thought you were a nice girl, as indeed you were, and I just was too stupid to guess anything about your fantasies.”
“You must have guessed that just about every girl in town, and almost every woman, too, was crazy to get their hands on you.”
“You had a higher opinion of my charm,” Michael said dryly, “than I ever did.”
“You seemed so sure of yourself. As though everything was due you. It was one of the things that attracted women to you, as much as anything else.”
Michael laughed ruefully. “Did I seem like that then? Well, I wasn’t at all sure of myself then and I’m even less sure of myself now. Anyway, we can be friends now, can’t we? The next time I come to dinner at your parents’ house, you’ll come, won’t you?”
She didn’t answer his question. “I put on an awful act when you left without even saying good-bye. I wept and I wouldn’t leave my room for days and I nearly drove my poor father out of his mind with my goings-on. I guess I’d seen too many movies about great tragic loves, girls left behind while their lovers went off to war or took up with other women.” There was a harsh self-mocking tone to her voice as she spoke. “Anyway, I was ashamed of myself. And I did something worse, that I’m even more ashamed of, and that’s why I decided I had to talk to you right away, before you settled in here.” “What’s that?”
“I boasted.”
“About what?”
“About you,” she said. “I sort of let it be known to some of my girlfriends and some of the boys, too, that I’d had an affair with you. You were the catch of the year and I wanted to make them jealous and at the same time make myself important. Now you’re back you’re going to hear some stories and I thought you ought to be prepared.”
Michael sighed. “Thank you for telling me. It was foolish, but it’s not important. Both you and I will survive.”
“I wish it had been true,” Norma said defiantly. “Even now, looking at you, I feel very funny.”
Michael laughed at the childish word. “I feel funny when I see a lot of people, Norma.”
“I heard you were married.”
“We’re separated.”
“I’m going to tell you something awful, Michael,” she said. “I’m glad.”
“I’m not,” he said soberly.
She leaned toward him, through the open window. “Will you kiss me, just once, for old times’ sake?”
He' pulled back a little. “Old times’re not what they used to be, Norma.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said sadly. “Anyway, I’m happy to see you here and I guarantee I won’t make any trouble for you and that’s what I came here to say and I’ve said it.”
“You’re a dear woman.”
“Dear,” she said dully. Then she started her car and drove off.
He watched the car wind down the road and disappear, then shook his head and got into the Porsche and headed for town.
He parked the car in front of the store in which the ski school had its headquarters. But he didn’t go in immediately. He was more shaken by the scene with Norma than he had realized and he took a few minutes to compose himself before he entered the building.
There was a young girl sitting behind a desk, typing with two fingers, her forehead furrowed in concentration. Behind her was a poster with the schedule of rates for the school and a list of the dates and types of races to be run for the season and an advertisement for a hang-gliding school. The office was big and roomy and businesslike, which it had not been fourteen years before.
“Good morning, miss,” Michael said to the girl, who glanced up from her typing. “I’m looking for Dave Cully.”
