Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

  “Of course,” I said, remembering. “How are they? Your mother and father?”

  “They’re divorced,” she said. Of course I thought, I could have bet on it. “My mother is recovering from her heartbreak in Palm Beach. With a tennis player.” The girl giggled. “And I’m stashed away here.”

  “It doesn’t seem like such a hardship,” I said.

  “If you only knew,” she said. “I used to like to watch you ski. You never showed off, like the rest of the boys.”

  Boy, I thought. Miles Fabian was the only other person who had called me a boy since I was twenty.

  “I could tell it was you,” the girl went on, “even a mile away on the slope. You used to ski with a very nice, pretty lady. Is she here with you?”

  “No,” I said. “You were reading Wuthering Heights the last time I saw you.”

  “Kid stuff,” she said. “You once led me down Suicide Six in a snowstorm. Do you remember?”

  “Of course,” I said, lying.

  “It’s nice of you to say so. Even if you don’t. It was my accomplishment of the year. Have you just arrived?”

  “Yes.” She was the first person who had recognized me since I had come to Europe and I hoped the last.

  “Are you going to stay here long?” She sounded like a little girl who was afraid to stay alone at night when her parents were going out.

  “A few days.”

  “Do you know Gstaad?”

  “This is my first time.”

  “Maybe I could lead you this time.” Again there was the languid gesture of pushing her hair back.

  “That’s very kind of you, Didi,” I said.

  “If you’re not otherwise occupied,” she said formally.

  A boy with a beard came back through the door and shouted, “Didi, are you going to stand there gabbing all night?”

  She made an impatient gesture of her hand. “I’m talking to an old friend of my family. Screw off.” She smiled gently at me. “Boys these days,” she said. “They think they own you body and soul. Hairy beasts. You never saw such a spoiled bunch of kids. I fear for the world when they finally grow up.”

  I tried not to smile.

  “You think I’m peculiar, don’t you?” It was an accusation, sharp and clear.

  “Not at all.”

  “You ought to see them arriving in Geneva after holidays,” she said. “In their father’s private Lear jets. Or driving up to the school in Rolls-Royces. A royal pageant of corruption.”

  This time I couldn’t help smiling.

  “You think the way I talk is funny.” She shrugged. “I read a lot.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m an only child,” she said, “and my parents were always someplace else.”

  “Have you been analyzed?” I asked.

  “Not really.” She shrugged again. “Of course, they tried. I didn’t love them enough, so they thought I was neurotic. Tant pis for them. Do you speak French?”

  “No,” I said. “But I guess I could figure out what tant pis means.”

  “It’s an overrated language,” she said. “Everything rhymes with everything else. Well, I’ve enjoyed our little conversation. When I write home, whom should I send your regards to, my mother or my father?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “Both,” she said. “That’s a laugh. There is no both. To be continued in our next. Welcome to never-never land, Mr. Grimes.” She put out her hand and I shook it. The hand was small and soft and dry. She went through the door, the embroidered flowers on her plump buttocks waving.

  I shook my head, pitying her father and her mother, thinking, maybe going to school in Scranton wasn’t so bad after all. I took the elevator and went upstairs and ran a hot bath. As I soaked, I played with the idea of writing a short note to Fabian and quietly getting on the next train out of Gstaad.

  At dinner that night, there were only the four of us, Lily, Eunice, Fabian, and myself. As unostentatiously as possible, I kept studying Eunice, trying to imagine what it would be like sitting across the breakfast table from her ten years from now, twenty years from now. Imagining sharing a bottle of port with her father, who hunted three times a week. Standing at the baptismal font with her, as our children were christened. Miles Fabian as godfather? Visiting our son at what would it be—Eton? All I knew about English public schools had been gleaned from books by men like Kipling, Waugh, Orwell, Conolly. I decided against Eton.

  The few days of skiing had given Eunice’s complexion a pretty, flush, summery color. She was wearing a figured silk dress that clung to her figure. Buxom today, would she be stately later? The old saw had it, as Fabian had pointed out, that it was just as easy to love a rich girl as a poor one. But was it?

  The sight and sound of her and Lily surrounded by lolling, arrogant young men (at least they seemed so to me) at the table with the magnum of champagne on it had made me flee from the bar. There was no denying that she was a pretty girl, and there would undoubtedly always be young men of that caliber and class in attendance. How would I take that if she were my wife? I had never really thought about what class I belonged to or what class other people might think I belonged to. Miles Fabian could leave Lowell, Massachusetts, behind him and pretend to be an English squire. I doubted that I could ever get rid of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and pretend to be anything but what I was—a grounded pilot, a man trained as a kind of superior technician, dependent on a payroll. What would the guests at the wedding be whispering about me as I stood beside the altar of the English country church waiting for the bride to descend the aisle? Could I invite my brother Hank and his family to the wedding? My brother in San Diego?

  Fabian could educate me to a degree, but there were limits, whether he recognized them or not.

  As for sex …Still affected by my reveries at the wheel that afternoon I was sure that it would be, at the very least, agreeable. But the passionate desire which I couldn’t help but believe was the only true foundation of any marriage—would I ever be stirred to anything even approximating it by this placid, foreign, hidden girl? And what about the ties of family? Lily, as sister-in-law, with the memory of the night in Florence as a permanent ghost at every reunion? At that very moment I knew I wished the room would empty, leaving Lily and myself alone, untrammeled. Was I doomed always to get close to what I wanted, but never exactly what I wanted?

  “This really has turned into a smashing holiday,” Eunice was saying, as she buttered her third roll of the meal. Like her sister, she had a splendid appetite. No matter what else might finally turn out wrong with the children, they would be born with at least half a chance of having marvelous digestions. “When I think of all the poor folk back in bleakest London,” Eunice said, “I could cheer. I have a lovely idea …” She looked around the table with her innocent, blue, childish eyes. “Why don’t we all just stay here in the beautiful sunshine until everything melts?”

  “The concierge says it’s going to snow again tomorrow,” I said.

  “Just a manner of speaking, Gentle Heart,” Eunice said. She had begun calling me Gentle Heart the second day in Zurich. I hadn’t figured out what it meant yet. “Even when it’s snowing here, you have the feeling the sun is shining, if you know what I mean. In London in winter it’s as though the sun has wandered away permanently.”

  I wondered if she would have been so eager to continue the quadruple holiday with old Gentle Heart and his friends if she had been able to overhear the cold-blooded conversation about her future that had taken place in the car on the road to Bern.

  “It seems like such a waste to go rushing off to crumbling, noisy Rome when we’re having such a lovely time here,” Eunice said, the roll now thoroughly buttered. “We’ve all been in Rome, after all.”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “It’ll still be there in the spring,” she said. “Don’t you agree, Lily?”

  “It’s a good bet,” Lily said. She was eating spaghetti. She was perhaps the only woman I had ever met
who could look graceful eating spaghetti. The sisters had come into my life in the wrong order.

  “Miles,” Eunice said, “are you absolutely frantic to get to Rome?”

  “Not really,” Fabian said. “There’re a couple of things I want to look into here anyway.”

  “Like what?” I asked. “I thought we were here on a holiday.”

  “We are,” he said. “But there’re all sorts of holidays, aren’t there? Don’t worry, I won’t interfere with your skiing.”

  By the time the meal was over we had decided that we’d stay in Gstaad at least another week. I said I wanted some air and asked Eunice if she would like to take a walk with me, feeling that perhaps if we were alone for once we could make some sort of overt move toward one another, but she yawned and said that the exercise and the cold air all day had left her exhausted and she just had to fling herself into bed. I escorted her out of the dining room to the elevator and kissed her on the cheek and said good night. I didn’t go back to the dining room, but got my coat and took a walk alone, with the snow whirling down around me out of the black night.

  The concierge had been wrong. It wasn’t snowing in the morning, but clear, blue, and cold. I rented skis and boots and had some wild runs down the mountain with Lily and Eunice, both of whom skied with a devoted British recklessness that was certain to land them in the hospital eventually. Fabian wasn’t with us. He had some telephone calls to make, he said. He didn’t tell me to whom or on what subject, but I knew I’d find out soon enough and did my best not to speculate just how much more of our joint fortune would be engaged in perilous enterprises before we met for lunch. He had told us he’d meet us around one thirty at the Eagle Club, on a mountain called the Wassengrat, so that we could eat together. It was an exclusive club, with rules about membership, but Fabian naturally had arranged for us all to be accepted there as guests for our stay in Gstaad.

  It was a marvelous morning, the air glittering, the snow perfect, the girls graceful and happy in the sunshine, the speed intoxicating. By itself, I thought at one moment, it made everything that had happened to me since the night in the Hotel St. Augustine almost worthwhile. There was only one slightly annoying development. A young American, hung with cameras, kept taking photographs of us again and again, getting onto the lifts, adjusting our skis, laughing together, starting off down the hill.

  “Do you know that fellow?” I asked the girls. I didn’t recognize him as one of the men at the table in the bar with them the evening before.

  “Never saw him before,” Lily said.

  “It’s a tribute to our beauty,” Eunice said. “All three of us.”

  “I don’t need any tributes to my beauty,” I said. At one point, when Eunice had fallen and I was climbing back to help her up and put her skis on again, the man appeared and began snapping pictures from all angles. As politely as possible, I said, “Hey, friend, don’t you have enough by now?”

  “Never have enough,” the man said. He was a gaunt, easy-speaking young man in baggy old clothes and he continued to click away. “Back at the paper they like to have a wide choice.”

  “Paper?” I said. “What paper?”

  “Women’s Wear Daily. I’m doing a story on Gstaad. You’re just what I need. Chic and photogenic, with your skis together. Happy people, in the height of fashion, not a care in the world.”

  “You think,” I said sourly. “There’re lots of other people around who answer to that description. Why don’t you work on them?” I didn’t relish the idea of having my photograph all over a newspaper in New York with a circulation of maybe a hundred thousand. Who knew what paper the two men who had visited Drusack read every morning?

  “If the ladies object,” the man said pleasantly, “of course I’ll stop.”

  “We don’t object,” Lily said. “If you’ll send us copies. I adore pictures of myself. If they’re flattering.”

  “They could only be flattering,” the young man said gallantly. I suppose he’d taken pictures of a thousand beautiful women in his career and I was sure he hadn’t been shy to begin with. Meanly, I envied him.

  But he did ski off, loose and careless over the bumps, and we didn’t see him again until we were on the terrace of the club, having a Bloody Mary, waiting for Fabian to appear.

  By that time another complication had arisen. Just at noon I noticed a small figure following us at a distance. It was Didi Wales. She never came within fifty yards of us, but wherever we went, there she was, skiing in our tracks, stopping when we stopped, moving when we moved. She skied well, lightly and surely, and even when I put on a real burst of speed, which made Lily and Eunice fly down the hill completely out of control, to keep me in sight, there was that small figure faithfully on our trail as though attached to us by a long, invisible cord.

  On the last run down, just before lunch, I purposely waited at the bottom of the lift, allowing Lily and Eunice to go up together, in one of the two-seater chairs. Didi came into the lift building, her long blonde hair now caught in a bow of ribbon at the nape of her neck and falling down her back. She was still wearing the flowered blue jeans and a short, bulky orange parka.

  “Let’s take this one up together, Didi,” I said as the chair swung into place and she clumped up in her heavy boots.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. She sat quietly as we swung up out into the open sunlight. The chair mounted silently and we got a view of the whole town spread out in the sunlight. The jagged white peaks, stretching everywhere, were like white cathedrals in the distance.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” she said, starting to get a package of cigarettes out of a pocket.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay, Daddy,” she said. Then giggled. “Having a nice day?” she asked.

  “Wonderful.”

  “You’re not skiing as well as you used to,” she said. “More effort.”

  I knew this was true but wasn’t pleased to hear it. “I’m a little rusty,” I said with dignity. “I’ve been busy.”

  “It shows,” she said matter-of-factly. “And those ladies with you.” She made a peculiar little noise. “They’ll kill themselves one day.”

  “So I’ve told them.”

  “I bet when there’s no men with them, if they ever go anywhere without a man, they snowplow all the way down. They sure have fancy clothes though. I saw them in the stores the day they came, buying up everything in sight.”

  “They’re pretty women,” I said defensively, “and they like to look their best.”

  “If their pants were one inch tighter,” she said, “they’d strangle to death.”

  “Your pants aren’t so loose either.”

  “That’s my age group,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “I thought you said you were going to lead me in Gstaad.”

  “If you weren’t occupied,” she said. “Well, you sure look occupied.”

  “Still, you could have joined us,” I said. “The ladies would have been pleased.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said flatly. “I bet you’re all going to have lunch at the Eagle Club.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  “It happens, yes.”

  “I knew.” There was a note of scornful triumph in her voice. “Women who dress like that always have lunch there.”

  “You don’t even know them.”

  “This is my second winter in Gstaad. I keep categories.”

  “Do you want to join us for lunch?”

  “Thank you, no. That’s not for me. I don’t like the conversation. Especially the women. Nibbling away at reputations. Stealing each other’s husbands. I’m a little disappointed in you, Mr. Grimes.”

  “You are? Why?”

  “Being in a place like this. With ladies like that.”

  “They’re perfectly nice ladies,” I said. “Don’t be censorious. They haven’t nibbled a reputation yet.”

  “I have to be here,” she went on stubbornly. “I
t’s my mother’s idea of where a well-bred young lady ought to be while she pursues her education. Education. Hah! How to grow up useless in three languages. And expensive.”

  The bitterness in her voice was disturbingly adult. It was not the sort of conversation one would expect to have with a pretty, plump, little sixteen-year-old American girl while rising slowly in the sunshine over the fairy-tale landscape of the winter Alps. “Well,” I said, knowing it sounded lame, “I’m sure you’re not going to grow up useless. In no matter how many languages.”

  “Not if it kills me,” she said.

  “Do you have any plans?”

  “I’m going to be an archaeologist,” she said. “I’m going to dig in the ruins of old civilizations. The older the better. I want to get as far away as I can from twentieth-century civilization. At least, my mother’s and father’s version of twentieth-century civilization.”

  “I think you’re being a little harsh on them,” I said. I was defending myself, I suppose, as well as her parents. After all, they belonged almost to the same generation as I did.

  “I’d rather not talk about my parents, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’d rather talk about you. Are you married yet?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t plan to get married either.” She looked at me challengingly, as though daring me to comment on this.

  “I hear it’s going somewhat out of style,” I said.

  “With good reason,” she said. We were approaching the top now and prepared to debark. “If you want to ski with me sometime, alone …” She accented the word. “Leave a note for me in your box at the hotel. I’ll pass by.” We got off the chair and took our skis. “Though if I were you,” she said as we walked out of the shed into the sunlight, “I wouldn’t stay here too long. It isn’t your natural habitat.”

  “What do you think is my natural habitat?”

  “I’d say Vermont.” She bent and started to put on her skis, limber and competent. “A small town in Vermont, where people work for a living.”

  I put my skis over my shoulder. The club was just about fifty yards away, on the same level with the top of the lift, and a path was cleared through the snow to the entrance.