There are scientific studies of avalanches. They will tell you that they occur on slopes over 35°. Depth hoar is one of the classical causes. Like the charming hoar frost that paints pumpkin fields for autumn postcards in New England, it is created by the crystalization of moisture from evaporation, hoar frost from dew, depth hoar from snow. These crystals have a cuplike shape and so fail to bond with the next layer of snow, leaving a layer of instability. The studies will speak of dry snow and wet snow. Dry snow avalanches usually occur during, or within several days after, snowfall. They may affect whole slopes even if wooded, and may exceed 100 miles per hour. Wet snow avalanches are slower. But the reality is that avalanches are at least as tricky as sex. They fail to happen when they should, then occur where they shouldn’t. Like the big slide at the eastern end of town that took out the Shell station and twelve people back in ’88. Or the one at the beginning of the ’90 season, near Stuben, with less than a meter of snow on the ground and not more than fifty meters from a very well skied piste. It swept over a twenty-two-year-old girl. Fifteen people watched. Everyone joined in to dig her out. It took less than twenty minutes to find her. By then she was dead.
It is possible to outski an avalanche. It’s been done on film. Charles, Prince of Wales, was almost caught in an avalanche while skiing off-piste in Klosters, Switzerland, in March of 1988. It buried one member of the prince’s party, Major Hugh Lindsay, and threw Patricia Palmer-Tomkinson 1,200 feet, breaking both her legs. No one establishes chic quicker than the British royals, and being avalanched has had a certain snob appeal ever since.
The rumbling got louder. No. Bigger. It was a rumble the size of a mountainside. Low and deep and huge.
The run to safety was less than a quarter mile. There was a ridge and a flat. A skier could turn to the left, over the ridge and down, while the slide would—most likely—take the path of least resistance to the right, hit the wide, slight slope of the meadow, and roll itself to a halt.
Hans put his skis straight and wide. He bent, went into a tuck, his poles under his arms, hands way out in front, the way he had been taught way back before he found out how tough racing really was. Hiroshi did his best, in his stiff, precise way, to imitate. Wendy first felt fear, then an immense exhilaration. She too got into a tuck. Hans had the weight and the longest skis. He began to pull away from them.
Now the powder, which had been their delight, was their enemy, slowing them down, holding them back, like a molasses trap.
Hiroshi was fine for the first two hundred yards. Then his thighs began to burn. The burn was exactly midpoint between the knee and the hip. There was a secondary pain just above the knees. He looked upon the pain as a test. One of discipline. Something to feel and to go through. But still it ached and robbed him of strength.
Wendy, looser and younger, leaning back on her heels, planed her skis higher, and passed Hiroshi. He would have hated her for it, but he was centered in his pain, being very Zen. Wendy had never felt such exhilaration. She was moving faster than she had ever gone. At some point in her acceleration she had gone beyond herself, moving faster than she knew how to ski, leaving fear behind. Lost luggage bounded on someone else’s plane.
Still, the avalanche was gaining.
Hiroshi’s left leg trembled. He wished to stand, to stretch it, relax the muscle. It trembled. He caught an edge on the snow beneath the snow. The snow held the ski, the binding released, as it was supposed to. Hiroshi thought, as he felt it come off, that he could continue to ski on just one ski. But that wasn’t true and it was only the hyperawareness of the moment that made it possible to have the thought, so very clearly, between the time he caught the edge and when he went tumbling. He lost both skis, then one pole. He rolled on his shoulder and head as he came to rest at the point where, one gasp later, the avalanche would roll over him, bury him, drown him.
Wendy was doing fine. Not as fast as the avalanche. Not even as fast as Hans, but fast enough so that in the convergence of time she would reach the ridge before the wall of snow behind her. The wall that had just covered her generous lover.
But that was not to be. There was a section of windblown hardpack under the powder. The backward lean that had given her extra speed in the deep snow was what now betrayed her. The hardpack slapped her skis upward and her position didn’t give her the balance she needed to absorb it.
She fell. The avalanche rushed over her. She knew it. She hoped it would knock her out so she would die unknowing that she would die. It didn’t. It just rushed over her and began to smother her. Caught with her skis and boots and poles on, she fought to find some way that was up and some tunnel to air. Every movement was hampered. The fear that she’d lost came back, wrapped itself around her and she whimpered. Time is elastic. Time is subjective. A downhill race lasts less than two minutes, finishing position is measured in hundredths of a second, and those two minutes are at least two hundred moments long. Anyone who has ever boxed knows that one round in the ring, three minutes, is longer than three hours with a book. Asphyxiation takes one to four minutes. If the subject holds his breath, like a drowning swimmer might, or has some air, like a person caught in a snow-slide, he might last several minutes more. However few or many the minutes between her fall and her demise, Wendy, the nineteen-year-old girl from Connecticut, was a long time dying.
Hans made it over the ridge before he looked back. He was alone. He was sorry that the other two hadn’t made it. But that was a mild feeling next to the exaltation that he felt. He felt high and strong and clean. He had played the greatest game of all, the one with the biggest stakes. The deaths of Hiroshi Tanaka and Wendy Tavetian were proof of that.
RICK’S AMERICAN LAUNDROMAT
ACCORDING TO MY PASSPORT my name is Richard Cochrane. That’s not true. My native home is Ireland. That’s not true either. I’m an exile, an expatriate, a man without a country, a stateless person. Here in a white land. A snow-covered alpine country where they speak a language I barely understand in a landscape like none I’ve ever known.
But who cares? I have money in the bank. They have excellent banks here. But then, they do almost everywhere these days. I have a full-breasted young woman as my companion. Younger than me. Heavy breasted, round bellied, and ripe with child. My child. She says so. I believe her. Her passport says her name is Marie. That’s true. Marie Laure. My passport says my profession is priest. That’s not true. On the one recent occasion that anyone has actually read the slot by profession and looked at Marie’s belly at the same time, I just grinned. The border guard grinned back. Then we both laughed. He was happier with the notion of a lecherous priest than of a false passport. The image harked back to a merrier age—Chaucerian, Machiavellian, Rabelaisian—when priests and even politicians were presumed to have penises. The alternative, the modern reality of false papers, would have just meant more work.
The truth is that I love Marie pregnant. Sexually. This is a surprise. All that roundness. I love to take her from behind and feel the fullness of her buttocks, that waddling wideness against my thighs, and my hand weighing the swollen tits and feeling the shape of her baby-holding belly. She’s vibrant, and healthy, and womanly. There’s no cancer-scary pills to think about, no age-of-AIDS rubbers, no Catholic rhythmic counting of days, no pulling out just in time. There is a free and mindless ejaculation, thoroughly primitive, into a completely technology-free vaginal canal.
I was very fortunate. I got dollars when dollars where strong. Artificially and excessively high because a strong dollar made Ronald Reagan feel good. I had the sense to realize that. But I was foolish enough to think that gold would be a good hedge. Fortunately, my banker, who carped about handling a mere $100,000, suggested that I simply put it in a variety of currencies—yen, deutsche mark, Swiss franc, and even British pound.
I was almost tracked down in the south of France.
We decided to move to the mountains. That was when Marie was with me the first time. I discovered skiing. And went into business. Marie lef
t me. Not because of skiing or business. She had the hots for someone else. Someone younger. And I gave her every excuse. Fool that I used to be for French women. I was a pushover, a slut, for any female who did that thing with their r’s and their eyes, dropped their h’s and moued.
Four days into our first ski trip we needed clean underwear. Marie was going to wash out things in the sink. There is love, there is duty, but I’d come from the States and this seemed excessive. I insisted that we go to the Laundromat. The washing machine was FF50. Five ten-franc pieces. Even at the good old rate of FF7 to the dollar, that was $7.14 to wash one load. Another FF50 for one twenty-minute cycle in the dryer. A big load could easily take forty minutes. There was only one Laundromat in town.
That was the business for me.
Except that the owner had a “relationship” with the mayor. A family relationship. It was not possible to get a license for a competitive Laundromat. But the ski area extends far beyond the one town. In the advertising brochures the whole thing is called, in cosmic letters, L’Espace Killy (Killy did ski there, he did win Olympic gold in all three Alpine events—downhill, slalom, giant slalom—so he probably is a god). Connected by lifts and trails, and beyond the sway of the mayor of Val d’Isère, are the demi-towns of Val Claret, Tignes le Lac, Le Lavachet, Tignes les Boisses, built almost entirely for skiers, with no history but greed in a hurry, ripe and open for coin-operated entrepreneurship. I not only established a Laundromat, I got laundry machine franchises in two apartment buildings. It was much easier if the businesses were owned by a French person, so Marie became my partner. It was her first nonjob source of income. To remember the delight on her face when she came to understand what it means to have business income with tax deductible costs and, even better, a strictly cash business with all those jingling, unrecorded, ten-franc pieces can still bring a bright, nostalgic smile to my face.
Given that Marie and I had made no promises. Given that my escape to her had been after years trapped with another woman in a molasses of misapplied fidelity, a tar baby embrace made of gratitude and of a guilt that was not even about the woman herself but about her son. And even that I had had to blow up my entire world to get out of it. Given that the joy of my relationship with Marie was its utter simplicity. For God’s sake, we didn’t even speak the same language. I didn't even know how to say “Did you come?” and she never once asked me if I wanted to buy a condo. She was still my girlfriend. And my partner. She came to Sardinia when I called her and when I was in hiding. She was my lover when I went around disguised in monk’s robes. She protected my secrets. She asked for nothing.
So she deserved better than to find me with the two entirely too posh English girls on holiday who found me “rough,” “roguish,” “quaint.” Not even I believed my story that it was merely a hunger for my native tongue.
I didn’t understand that I was in love with her until she took up with Gerard, the ski instructor. Very much the coxcomb. More satisfied by making another man a cuckold than by getting laid. It made L’Espace Killy intolerable for me. I didn’t care how many English girls there were. I didn’t care about other women with cute French accents. Just the one. I didn’t give a goddamn if my skiing was improving avec rapidité or about those ten-franc pieces clunking away into my machines. It made me insane to be in the same L’Espace with that woman with another cock between her legs and everyone in town, it seemed, aware of it.
There are those who will say it served me right.
There are those who will say it’s the least I deserved.
Quite right, too. I left town. I left Marie the Laundromat and the machines and said I would trust her with the books. Even though I had taught her to cook them, even with her getting her hands on the cash before ever I saw it—if I ever saw it—and with her being the owner of record and myself being a stateless person traveling on a not quite real passport.
I went skiing. I had become, in a short time, addicted. I became a Byronic figure, noble, heartbroken, athletic, oft laid but never loving. To Chamonix and Courcheval to Verbier and Zermatt in Switzerland from which I skied over to Cervina in Italy, looking, looking always for a place that needed Laundromats.
Such was my condition when I arrived here.
A place like this is called a ski circus. Circus, from the Latin, means circle or circuit, like Rome’s Circus Maximus, which was an oval race track. The lifts and the runs go from town to town to town, from Lech, to Zürs, to St. Christoph, to St. Anton. The tree line is about 500 meters above the town, at 1,800 meters, and the cable car to the Valuga goes to about 2,650 meters, a vast skiable landscape. Half of it is in the Arlberg, the other half, Lech and Zürs, are in a region called the Vorarlberg, which means in front of the Arlberg. Back in the days before the tunnel was built, when villages were truly the complete social unit, Arlbergians and Vorarlbergians were barely on speaking terms. Intermarriage over the pass was seriously frowned on. The Arlberg makes a reasonably valid claim to being the historical center of alpine skiing. A lot of good skiers ski there. It has a famous race, the Kandahar. St. Anton is named for Saint Anthony of Padua. I have been told that he is the patron saint of cows, a weather saint, and the saint who taught poor people to ski. Actually, he is the saint to pray to for finding lost things. The area is extremely Austrian and rather overfond of itself. But none of that is really to the point.
I was staying in a small pension, the equivalent of a guest house or bed and breakfast. It is the custom in these places for the woman of the house to take in the guests’ laundry, make it look like very hard work, and charge the guests far more than they would pay at home. What the hell. The punters are on holiday, they expect a certain amount of ripoff, and the person scrubbing—or at least loading her machines, ironing, and folding—is their hostess. It’s very hard to tell her to her face that she deserves less for handling your personal soil.
It happened that the Frau of this house took sick and there was no one to do the laundry. After recycling my cleanest dirty clothes one time too many, I asked my host for a laundry, and even hinted, for the sake of saving a few bucks, that perhaps I could simply use the laundry machine in his basement. He couldn’t conceive of that. That was Frau territory. He said he would call the local laundry, they would pick up and deliver.
9 Trikothemden ÖS252
8 Unterhosen 96
2 Unterhemden 26
2 Unterhosen lang 36
1 Hosen 65
3½ Socken 42
Summe 517
+ 20% MWSt. (tax) 103
Total ÖS 620
We are speaking here of T-shirts, underwear, sleeveless T-shirts, longjohns—one pair with a hole in the thigh so large that my foot went through it when I tried to put them on—one pair of jeans, three and one half pairs of socks. We are not speaking of delicate silken underthings, lace and pleats, suits of virgin wool, dress shirts of hand-loomed Egyptian cotton. We are not speaking of special handling, spot removal, dry cleaning, or tailoring.
At today's rate of exchange—ÖS11.60:$1—what we are speaking of is $53.44.
Fifty dollars for a half load of laundry. I had found my new home.
I was reasonably happy. I found an apartment. It was expensive. I found an Austrian, influential in the local community, and made a member of his family my paper partner. The beer was good. And reasonable. Alcoholic beverages were perhaps the only thing in town reasonably priced. The women tended to be blond, German, healthy. Friendly too.
In puberty, that most vulnerable and suicidal of ages, I was always able to make it through to the next morning by the thought of having sex with a new girl. No depression was so deep, so dark, so lasciviously sad that it couldn’t be countered by the mere concept of new stuff. But in St. Anton my desire wearied at last.
The thought of another blonde, healthy and friendly, ready to play “bounce the mattress” and “bump in the moguls,” was as exciting as one more glass of flat beer. When I did find myself in the act I seemed to hear a weary Peggy Lee,
husky and cynical, singing “Is That All There Is?”
So I called Marie Laure. She answered the phone. Not Gerard. That was good. I said so. I shouldn’t have said so. It pissed her off. So I said I was calling to make sure she was putting my share of the Laundromat money aside. Marie Laure hung up on me. But I felt better. She was a brunette, with dark and magic eyes.
The next day there was a knock on the door.
I opened it. She was standing there. A duffel bag on her shoulder. I was glad to see her. “You couldn’t stay away,” I said. “Could you?”
She swung the duffel off her shoulder in an arc and at me. Ten kilos of ten-franc pieces bashed into my midsection. It was like a giant blackjack.
“’Ere. ’Ere is your mon-ee,” Marie said.
I just smiled and smiled. I took her hand and pulled her into the apartment.
Later on I asked her about Gerard.
“’E is a jerk,” she said.
“So am I,” I said.
“Oui,” she said, “but that is different.”
“He’s a lot younger than me. And better looking,” I said.
She looked at me. She had always had the knack of speaking paragraphs with a glance. This glance was a brief lecture on how funny men were about what they thought women thought was important and how sad it was to be a woman and have to bear such knowledge.
I pulled her closer, insofar as that was possible. Then I entered her. I wasn’t bored at all. I wasn’t sad. “Je t’adore,” I said.
“I know that,” she said, challenging, but her hips were moving. Heavy hips, not chic at all, round and muscle solid.
“Je t’aime,” I said.
“Tell me in English,” she said.
Aimer, “to love,” is also “to like,” and though je t’aime sounds terribly romantic to Americans, I think it sounds insufficiently definite in French. “I love you,” I said.
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 2