“But you can make extra. Lots of people don’t want to sit and wait. For that matter they don’t want to separate and fold. Plus they want stuff ironed and all that. All of that we charge extra. All the schillings that go into the machines, that’s mine. All the rest, where you do the work, we split. Plus, when the punters want to do their laundry, at the hotels and pensions and they ask the chambermaid, if the girl doesn’t have access to her own washer, she’s going to come here. She charges the tourist double, triple, whatever’s going. There’s lots of room because what a Frau charges 250 schillings, 350 schillings for, it costs 120 schillings in the machines. So the ski bums can make a couple extra schillings. They don’t always want to do the work either, so they ask you and then you split with them.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I could go for that.”
“It’s very entrepreneurial,” I said.
“It’s very American,” she said.
“That’s what it says over the door—” I said, “Rick’s American Laundromat. But in New York, last time I saw New York, all the Laundromats were run by Koreans.”
“The first place to look for a job, particularly if you don’t speak good Deutsch,” Anita said, “is Down Under.”
Down Under is a restaurant and disco run by an Aussie named Paul. He’s a smart businessman and steals good ideas wherever he can. All the tour operators have resort reps. They help the tourists get into ski school, rent equipment, fight with their hotels, find a laundry. In imitation of Dick’s T-Bar in Val d’Isère, Paul got the reps for the British tour companies to make Down Under their local—“Every day at 4:00 P.M. your rep will be Down Under. Stop by with any problems or just to have a friendly drink.” In imitation of The Underground, a St. Anton bistro, the staff is English-speaking. The Brits, Australians, and Americans love it. You can see them breathe a sigh of relief every time they walk in the door. Rather than resent it, the Germans and Viennese think it’s clever and quite exotic.
“You wouldn’t wait till closing time to chat her up,” Paul said. “Yeah, she came here looking for a job.”
“You didn’t give her one?”
“Down Under is the first stop for a pretty girl looking for a job, now isn’t it? Clean kip, good grub, you can speak the king’s English and still get better tips than at the Krazy Kangaruh. We fill up fast.”
“So where’d she go from here?”
“Dunno, mate. But I’ll tell you what. She came back, a week or so before she died, asking again. During the storm. Did a lot of business. What with people drinking instead of skiing and then coming in after the avalanche, because if the mountain is falling down on people they want to be in here chatting about it and having a drink rather than out there where it’s falling. How’s the Laundromat business?”
“Great during the storm. Everybody doing their laundry. Not much to do here if you’re not skiing. She come here much?”
“Fair amount. Her boyfriend, the Nip, he was a good spender.”
“I hope he didn’t run a tab.”
“Not a chance,” Paul said. “American Express. Platinum Card all the way.”
“Typical Jap?”
“No. No, he wasn’t. Quite Western. He was hardly here with a group all packing Nikons and clicking away, now was he? You’re not just dropping in and passing the time of day, are you, mate?”
“I had the misfortune to meet her mother. The dead girl’s mother asked me to see what I could find out about the final days. She asked me in front of Marie and the baby. Marie pulled some motherhood solidarity shit on me and I can hardly say no to her, can I? She’s the one breast-feeding.”
“How is the babe, then, anyway?”
“Fine. She feeds every three hours. Marie hasn’t slept since she was born.”
“Gets a bit rocky, that. I know how that is. Went through it a couple of times in Sydney. Best thing for you is out of the house. Drink?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“See, that’s one of the things that makes it hard for people to believe you’re really Irish. You don’t have the drink in your hand enough, now do you?”
“That’s what keeps people from thinking I’m Australian. So what did you say to her when she came back the second time?”
“I said I’d put her on the waiting list, is what I said.”
“Did she have any friends that you know about?”
“Well, mate, there’s Carol—bosom buddies I think those two were. Carol’s American too. I’ve got her washing dishes. She’ll be in tonight. You come in, go to the back and chat with her. You ever done this kind of work before?”
“Me? No. I just got boxed in.”
“I don’t like Japs particularly. Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere I think it was that they were going to have if they’d won the war. Would’ve made a Jap port out of Sydney, now wouldn’t they? Maybe they still will.”
“What about this one? Tanaka?”
“A little on the arrogant side. But so are a lot of Germans and the French, of course—not exactly egalitarian, like your people and mine. But aside from that, dressed well, spent a lot of money, drank old Scotch, didn’t make no trouble.”
“Sounds boring,” I said.
“There’s a Jap around. Another one,” Paul said. “He’s also asking about Tanaka.”
Skis pulled out of a Finnish bog have been carbon dated as being four to five thousand years old. There is a picture of a skier on a rock in Rodney, Norway, from 2,000 B.C. Peasants from Scandinavia to the Sudtirol had been putting boards on their feet to get from here to there, even to slide down hills for the fun of it, for a long time. But that didn’t count because they were poor people in the backwaters of Europe and skiing did not become a “sport” until the British—those snow-starved, Alpless islanders—made it a sport at the turn of the century. It was the Edwardian Age, the days of Pax Britannica, the pound sterling ruled, and whatever a British gentleman did set a standard for those lesser people who had to get by with marks, francs, kroner, florins or forint, dollars and dolares, dinars, drachmas, lire, lei, or lev. The English came to the Alps for recreation—they hiked, they climbed, they sledded, they skied—and for the first time people realized how to make something lucrative from these scenic but otherwise totally impoverished peaks. The automobile was rare, any major snowfall blocked what roads there were, neither the airplane nor the bus tour had yet been invented, so they came by train. There were lots of alpine hamlets with slopes and snow. But St. Anton was on a main rail line and thus became one of the first great ski resorts.
It’s the same track that carries the Orient Express—Paris, Zurich, St. Anton, Innsbruck, Vienna, Istanbul.
“We met,” Carol said, “on the train.”
She sniffled, stifled a sob, and dropped a glass. The door banged open. A waitress—one of five that hustled in and out, dumping dirty glasses and grabbing refills—spun through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Every time one of them opened the door we got a blast from the Bulgarian rock band doing a very creditable cover of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.”
“Oh, shit,” Carol said, about both grief and broken glass.
“We became friends, like, instantly,” she said. “This is my first time in Europe. And there I was. Like, I hardly made it from the airport to the train with my skis and my suitcases and all this stuff. It was my first train ride too, you know. Two cute American girls. Well, one really cute and the other not so cute.” She pushed a stray clump of hair off her damp forehead with a wet hand. She was right. Wendy had been the attractive one. “She was my best friend. Here. Maybe ever. We would have been friends like forever, if you can believe that. What a bummer. For her parents, too.”
Somebody stuck his head in from the bar. “Glasses, darling, we need glasses!” he yelled. The Bulgarian rock band had reached the important part of “Love to Love You,” the stylized sighs and moans of disco orgasm. Kitchens, like laundries, are hot. Carol’s skin was damp with sweat, the tank top clung to
her awkwardly, her jeans stuck to her skin. She was thick and probably strong, but she just looked meaty. I thought of the German word for meat, Fleisch.
“Why shouldn’t I believe that you and Wendy would be best friends?”
“Look at me and look at her,” Carol said, as if it were obvious.
I have been in the waiting rooms of dentists in America. I have seen the covers of Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle and I know there are specific codes about whether a pretty girl should hang out with an equally pretty girl, or a less pretty girl, or a truly plain girl, or even a girl who is overweight, has a slight mustache, fails to use deodorant, and has no fashion sense. It is a burning issue because it will determine the kind of men they will attract, in what combinations, and dictate the options of what can be done with such men once they have approached.
“I saw a picture of her,” I said, “in the newspaper.”
“I saw that,” she said. “But you couldn’t know Wendy from that. I mean you had to see her … her total presence. Like her clothes. She had the kind of body that they actually make clothes for. Not”—she gestured at herself—“this.”
“Glasses, darling, clean glasses,” a voice yelled through the door. The Bulgarian rock band had two girl singers, “Ohhhhh, ohh”—harmonizing their orgasm.
Carol opened the dishwasher. Steam and the odor of dishwashing detergent rushed up at her. Her tank top got even wetter. As it molded itself to her, I realized that she was one of those women that had one breast noticeably larger than the other. She cursed and began furiously pulling glasses out of the machine and stacking them on trays to be taken away.
“You mean you shouldn’t be friends because clothes fit her?”
“You don’t get it,” she said.
“No.”
“Didn’t you ever notice that some people are right and some are wrong.”
“Right and wrong?”
“And there’s not a whole lot you can do about it, you know. Even though everybody tries. There are some people just naturally look good in the right clothes, and whatever they pick, that’s the right clothes. You put me in ski pants and I’m a cow. You put Wendy in ski pants and guys are skiing into trees. Not because she wants them to. Just because that’s the way things are. She was a natural blond. She was a cheerleader. She got good grades without being a grind or a nerd. She was good at skiing and tennis and swimming. But she wasn’t a snot or a snob. And she was my best friend.”
“I like your T-shirt,” I said. It was one of those standard wiseass ski resort T-shirts—JUST BECAUSE I SLEPT WITH YOU LAST NIGHT DOESN’T MEAN I HAVE TO SKI WITH YOU IN THE MORNING—but I wanted to lighten things up. “Where did you get it?”
“The last guy I slept with gave it to me,” she said. “He thought it was funny.”
Three waitresses came in, one after another, leaving trays of dirty glasses, picking up the clean ones. There was a bus load of Swedes in the other room and the beer was flowing very fast. The disco simulation of Donna Summer sex takes about six minutes. It’s quite impressive. But the Bulgarians had finally worked all the way through it.
“Some things must work out for you better than her. I mean you got a job here. Paul said she tried to get one. She didn’t, you did.”
“Oh, wow, lucky me,” Carol said. “Wendy, if she’d taken a job here, which she was not going to do—no way, José—she would’ve gotten a bar job or waitress and been out there with people, and with tips, not back here with suds and slops.”
“Why didn’t she want to work here?”
“Hey, look, to some people working Down Under is a primo supremo job. Even back in the steam room,” she said, sorting glasses. Some went straight into the dishwasher. The ones with cigarette butts and other sodden debris had to be dumped and rinsed first. “I’ll never find, you know, true love back here, but I can ski every afternoon, which is what life is really about. ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ I get free food. It’s mostly bar snacks, but I’m from the world of Burger King and Dairy Queen. So it’s just the thing with Paulie, and back in the real world I’ve put out for worse than Paulie.”
I almost missed the beat. “Uh,” I said, “so Wendy wouldn’t put out for Paul?”
“And, like, I do?” She’d sensed an attitude and gave me attitude back.
“Hey, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Wendy would’ve handled Paulie if she wanted to handle Paulie. You don’t understand. Wendy had it together.” The Bulgarian band had moved on to “Staying Alive”—BeeGees, 1977. Pop Europa is a time warp of white teen Americana. “Well,” Carol said, “I have my own way of dealing with Paulie.”
“How’s that?”
“I lay there like I was like dead, you know. I’m not a video game. You turn me on and I start to go ping, ping, ping all over the place.”
“But Wendy just said no?”
“I wish you understood, I wish you could meet her. You know, I diet and get fat. Wendy could live on candy and beer and look perfect. Wendy knew she had it. So she didn’t have to put out. Unless it was what she wanted to do. If Wendy wanted to go with Paulie, she would’ve—and probably blown his mind. If she wanted to.”
“Like with Kurt, the ski instructor?”
“You mean tall, blond, married Kurt?”
“That one.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Wendy thought it would be fun to make it with one of the ski instructors. But he was, like, not worth it.”
“What do you mean, ‘not worth it?’”
She sighed like I was an idiot, then layed it on the line for me. “A lousy lay. She didn’t even stay the night. He didn’t cut it, she cut out. I wish I was more like that. Now with Hiroshi everything was different. It was, like, you know, something to do. He was, like, Japanese, and older, and had lots of money and was into stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Like, interesting stuff,” she said defensively, as if I’d suggested something perverse. “Like, money and getting exactly the right clothes, and he was even into art and the differences between being Japanese and American and Austrian and stuff. He was fun, too. He knew he had more money than us and he was generous about it without doing, like, mind games. Well, that’s, like, not entirely the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but he wasn’t a pig about it. A lot of older guys who have a lot of money are pigs about it. So it was, like, really good for her to have Hiroshi taking care of her—especially compared to working here.”
“Like, what do you mean?” I asked her.
“About being pigs about it?”
“No, I mean what kind of games did he play without being a pig?”
“You really wanna know this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Right. And this is for her parents?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, and you’re gonna tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“Does anybody?”
“Wendy did.”
“To her parents?”
“Nobody tells the truth to their parents. Even if they have okay parents. Which Wendy had—she said so. She liked them. Particularly her dad. Her mom was a little obsessive-possessive. But they were no way Parents from Hell.”
“What are Parents from Hell?”
“You know, daddies who come to your bed at night, mommies who drink all day—there are lots of different kinds, you know—Parents from Hell.”
“Did you have parents like that?”
“I’m older than Wendy, you know. I’m a nurse. When I go back to the States I can get a good job anywhere emptying bedpans and passing out pills. It doesn’t pay much, but a lot of nurses—they feel good about themselves. So I’m out of the house and that’s all settled. You know? So you want to know about Wendy?”
“Yeah, you were telling me about Wendy and Hiroshi.”
“What do you want? You want some dirt? Some exciting stuff?”
“I want whatever was happening.”
“Can I watch,” she said, “while you tell Wendy’s mom about this? Oh, shit, that was a mean thing to say. They’re probably in real pain. I should just tell them that Wendy was the greatest.”
“Yeah, you probably should.”
“You think so?”
“They’re at the Schwarzer Adler. You can tell them that. But, in the meantime, why don’t you tell me about Wendy and you and Hiroshi.”
“It was really just Hiroshi’s thing,” she said. “We were willing, but it didn’t work. I mean we got all undressed and naked and stuff. I was more into it, I think, than Wendy. I mean my body—some people like it, but it’s like almost gross it’s so big.” The Bulgarian rock band was doing Billy Joel’s “Vienna.” “Wendy’s body was, like, just right with those cupcake tits that never give you trouble when you’re shopping for clothes, and she had that good skin, that was smooth and no hairs in the wrong places. Anyway, so Hiroshi’s, like, oooing, and ohing and candlelight and stuff. I’m touching Wendy, you know, and she’s touching me. But, like, you know, she doesn’t get it. Even though she’s drunk, she doesn’t get it and she’s touching me like I’m a chair or something. So what ends up happening is I go down on Hiroshi and Hiroshi goes down on Wendy. Which is probably the right way to organize this. Because when he went down on her, he was really, really good. Much better than I could ever be.”
At an earlier time in my life I would have envied the dead Hiroshi Tanaka. Salacious thoughts would have dominated my reactions. But I seem to have given up possession of my head and my heart and my genitalia as well to the mother of my daughter. Nothing stirred between my legs. I wondered how long that would last.
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 5