The Last Descent

by Jeff Soloway

  Once we were inside, all gossip and wisecracks ceased. The lobby made even the most jaded writers, even Brian, spin around like dazzled children to take everything in. It was a hunting lodge built for giants. The ceiling was as high as the dome in St. Peter’s. Supporting it were wooden pillars as tall as redwoods. Mounted on the log-cabin walls were massive heads of genetically engineered elk, grizzly bear, and bison. There was even an arctic musk ox, with its heavy coat of weeping-willow hair—it wouldn’t have lasted an afternoon in Arizona. In niches up on the wall, various smaller and sprier animals were mounted whole in lifelike poses. A bobcat was frozen in midleap, a stuffed owl set just out of reach of its claws. In the place of honor high above the front desk, two bighorn sheep faced off, heads lowered. You wanted to clap your hands and set them going, see which one survived.

  The lobby was lively with guests, many of them gawking not at the stuffed wildlife but at our slow-moving ungainly herd. Some must have been waiting for the evening’s featured “adult-cultural” shindig, as advertised on the overhead Diamond Vision screen—a jazz concert in the basement auditorium. New Orleans jazz, of course; there were limits to the Grand Chalet’s high-cultural pretensions. The all-ages Broadway Does Pixar spectacular was already well under way.

  Grant began doling out room keys. “Tomorrow night is the pub-and-club blowout,” he announced. “Tonight we stay fresh. The resort tour is at nine A.M. sharp. Best believe I’ll come find you if you try to skip it. After that, it’s choose your own adventure—mud treatments, whiskey karaoke, canyon chopper tour, or Jeep to the rim for kick-ass hiking. I personally will be skipping that last.”

  “What about breakfast?” Brian asked.

  “Who eats in the morning?” The old joke. Grant was trying to recapture his rhythm.

  Brian laughed and kept laughing until a posse of writers joined him, all cheering on Grant’s legendary nighttime boozing and equally legendary morning sloth, all trying to console him for the night’s disaster. Only I knew that he had Doby to face tomorrow. Would Victoria remain by his side?

  Grant saluted his fans and fled to the elevators. Victoria followed. The writers, trailing their rolling bags, drifted away more slowly, some to the elevator, some to the bar. I did neither.

  In the far reaches of the lobby, amid a little grove of wilderness-themed furniture arranged to form a little private party area amid the larger social arena, I saw the coppery glint of overhead light on red hair.

  Marlene was sitting alone in a loveseat that looked to be upholstered in yak fur. I felt itchy just looking at it. Facing it was an Adirondack chair that appeared to be covered with a beaver pelt. I sat on the surprisingly rough tail—I could feel its tiny dimples through my jeans.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Marlene insisted. “Where we’re going is off-limits.”

  “Did you know Jewel?”

  “I met her. She was always with Grant. I kept away. Victoria didn’t deserve that bullshit. From either one of them.”

  “Did you see her the weekend she died?”

  “No.”

  “Did Grayson? Was he working on Sunday?”

  “Not until ten A.M. We slept late. He always sleeps late. I want him to quit. He hates it. The things they make him do. And then they hang him out to dry. That wasn’t him on that banner. Not really him. It was what they made him into. He changes back when we’re alone. He watches cooking shows with me. He plays the guitar.”

  I thought of his fingers digging into the back of Freddie Bridgewater’s neck and then tried to imagine those talons rearranging themselves into a C chord.

  “Victoria understands,” she said. “She’s the only one I can talk to. People from the East know how to listen.”

  “The East? You mean, New York City?” In my experience, the only New Yorkers who really listen are those billing fifty-minute hours.

  “Don’t you know? She’s Islamic.” She said the word with a kind of dreamy admiration, as if she were saying the Dalai Lama. These days a romantic Orientalism was almost refreshing; at least she wasn’t deploring Victoria’s failure to apologize for ISIS. In any case, Victoria’s philandering math-professor father, from what she had told me, cared about as much for Islam as for professional hockey.

  “Security is the worst job there is,” she said. “I used to do it here. That’s how I met Grayson. I spent all day in the control room watching video for shoplifters. They still stick me in the hole when they’re shorthanded. Working security bends your mind backward. You got to suspect everyone, especially the local kids. They’re all dangerous squirts who could get you fired. Grayson’s always running them back to Camper Village. Some nights he can’t sleep and we have to get out the guitar. Or he gets jealous and questions me like I’m some hooker from the rez. And what if he gets hurt someday? Like tonight.”

  “Tell him to quit or you’ll leave him.”

  “Leave him?”

  “And then do it. Someday all his days will be bad days, and you don’t want to be in love with him then.”

  She said nothing. Behind her, the lobby had cleared out. The show must have started. I heard a single set of footsteps, growing steadily softer, like a dying heartbeat, and then the ping of an elevator.

  “Follow me.” She stood and picked yak strands off her blouse. She didn’t seem ready.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Why do you need to see her stuff? It’s just her pack and some clothes. Nothing valuable.”

  “Jewel thought she could discover a secret about this hotel. Maybe she did. I want to know what it is. Maybe her things can tell me something you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Victoria said you were in love with her.”

  “I used to be.”

  “You can’t take anything out of the room. It’s all catalogued.” But Marlene’s voice was gentler—she approved of my romanticism.

  “I just need a minute.”

  “You’re okay.” She patted my forearm. Her act of pity flooded me with gratitude, and floating on top of that came the desire for more pity. No one else had acknowledged my grief. Magda’s ritual of old jokes, like any ritual, seemed a way to honor the dead without thinking too hard about them.

  Marlene led me across the lobby. All the mounted animals overhead, even those engaged in hunting or dueling, seemed to pause to stare at us, as if they too were caught up in my search. We stopped at the front desk, a long oaken counter designed to look like the bar in an old-time saloon. The lone clerk was slim and tall and had a long braid that flicked behind her when she turned to face us.

  “We need the new brochure,” Marlene said, making an apologetic curtsy of her face. “Is he still back there?”

  The clerk—her name tag read CLAUDIA—leaned over the desk, and the professional attitude seemed to spill out of her. “He might have left by the back,” she whispered.

  “Is he pissed?”

  A phone trilled, and Claudia pounced on it.

  Marlene ushered me behind the desk and through a door, and we passed into a plain, painfully lit corridor, as featureless as a hospital passage. The doors on either side were flanked with tall windows, black eyes staring at us as we passed. Empty offices. We could hear, up ahead, a noise that alternated between a rattle and a clunk, like a lawn mower passing through a field of rocks.

  Marlene stopped. “It’s him,” she whispered.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Greenbaum! That’s how he gets when he’s angry. He must be talking to corporate.”

  “You go back. Just tell me where to go.”

  “I can’t. I didn’t know he was here. We have to leave.”

  “Marlene, you know what this means to me. This is for Jewel.” A naked appeal to her sentimentality, but at least it was true.

  “You helped Grayson. And I owe Victoria. But we’re even after this. More than even. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “You can’t make a sound.”

  “I promise.”

  I’ve
never walked so slowly. With every step, the angry rattle-clunk grew louder. The one lit window in the hall was broader than the others. It had blinds you could pull for privacy—the kind only the boss and the HR director enjoy—but they hung unpulled. We stayed close to the wall, to cut off his view through the glass. It cut off our view as well. Just before the window, Marlene turned to me and mouthed, “Wait.”

  Was she going to throw a grenade to create a diversion? Slither like a snake on the floor? She smoothed the sides of her skirt, as if to make herself more presentable, or more aerodynamic. She took a deep yoga breath. She cocked her head to one side and pushed it slowly forward, to glance through the window. Then she pulled it back, took a shorter breath, and sprinted across. Greenbaum’s conversational cacophony never ceased. On the other side, she about-faced, released her breath, and held up one finger: Wait. Wait for what?

  I was close enough now to make out a few words, mainly masculinisms like “chain of command,” “action plan,” and “pressure point.” It was like being at war. But I was cut off from my platoon.

  “No more wait-and-see!” I heard. “No more holding our dicks.”

  And then I heard a different voice, quieter, female. “Who’s holding a dick?” Greenbaum wasn’t alone.

  Marlene hooked her finger to beckon me over; then she turned and speedwalked down the hall. If I was caught, she didn’t want to be around. Should I slither?

  I walked the plank, resisting the urge to glance through the window. The voices in the office were silent. I heard a squeak as I passed, as if someone were writing on a whiteboard. I listened for a door opening behind me, a shout.

  Nothing came. I rounded the bend and almost rear-ended Marlene. She had bent over a doorknob. There was no window beside this door. She turned a key and shoved it open and me inside.

  We were in a walk-in closet. Metal shelves held suitcases, briefcases, laptop cases, laundry bags, hiking sticks, binoculars, and telescopes. Also an unopened box containing a Philips alarm clock “with natural birdsong alarm” and a stuffed panda, its synthetic fur worn out around the belly and neck. Stuff left behind. You had to hold on to it. You never knew what people would desperately miss.

  Standing in a corner, a little slumped as if ashamed to be left on the floor, was Jewel’s purple backpack.

  “Is that all they found?”

  “And her clothes. We had to stuff them in bags.”

  She pointed to three white kitchen-size drawstring garbage bags, crammed under the lowest shelf. A little more classy than one big black Hefty. Jewel might have been slovenly, but she didn’t travel light. She liked to have on hand essential clothes for various conditions—wool and synthetic socks, sports and regular bras, Marmot rain jacket and heavy parka, hiking pants with detachable legs and snow-resistant hiking pants—it added up. And now all of it would go to her mother, or a thrift shop.

  “No papers? No laptop or phone?”

  “This is it. Can we go now?”

  I saw that Marlene had left the door cracked open so that we could hear footsteps out in the hall. If we did, where could we run to?

  “I want to look in the backpack.”

  “It’s empty. Her stuff was in the dresser.”

  She was always an unpacker.

  “Just let me look in the pack. She’d had it for years. It’s all I have left of her.”

  I brushed the backpack with my hand, testing Marlene’s resolve.

  “Be quick,” she said.

  I crouched over the backpack—careful to keep my back to Marlene—unzipped it, and peered inside. The closet’s overhead light seeped through the nylon, creating a purple twilight inside. I sent my hand in to probe. The interior felt warmer, as if it contained the last traces of Jewel’s breath.

  I felt along the edges, then the bottom, along the floor—and there I found what I was searching for. A slit under a nylon flap, deep in the lowers reaches of the pack. I had seen her extract her notes; I knew she kept them hidden more carefully than her wallet or passport. If they existed, they’d be here.

  I penetrated the slit with my fingers. I touched something smoother than nylon, ran my finger across it, felt a series of edges. Papers. With two fingertips I drew them halfway out of that inner pocket. Her notes. I was right. I knew one thing about her that no one else did. The secret was the last vestige of our love, surviving the death of both our love and her.

  I glanced back at Marlene. Her head was tilted pityingly. I realized I had the dazed look of someone communing with a dead lover.

  “Marlene,” I whispered, “do you hear someone coming?”

  She lurched to the doorway.

  I pulled out the papers and stuffed them down the front of my pants. My sweatshirt hung low enough to hide the disturbance. There weren’t many papers. I stood.

  “Are you through?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing there. Thanks anyway.”

  In the hallway, she locked the door behind us and told me to leave the way we’d entered. She would wait five minutes before following, so we wouldn’t be seen together, like illicit lovers parting after a tryst.

  I slowed when I approached Greenbaum’s office. No sound came from within, but the window was still lit. I was suddenly exhausted. I wanted to slide down the wall and rest on the carpet.

  The light in the window went out. I held my breath. The door opened. I told myself I was lost, confused, grateful for assistance. I’m a Method man when it comes to lying.

  Glenda Greenbaum appeared in the darkened doorway. “Who let you back here?”

  “I let myself. The desk clerk was busy.”

  “Really? At this time of evening? What are you looking for?”

  “I had a few questions about Gus’s speech.”

  She spread her arms wide. It was not a sign of understanding; she looked like she wanted to clap me around the ears. “Come inside. You better hope Gus doesn’t return. It’s his office.”

  She turned the light back on.

  Gus Greenbaum had the bare desk of someone who’s either maniacally organized or rarely at work. Hanging on the wall behind it was an oversize photo of him and his wife—Glenda was tightly wrapped in a long dress, one arm slung over Gus’s shoulders, the other extended toward the camera. I wanted to turn around to see what she was pointing at. Maybe someone sneaking up behind me.

  Glenda sat behind the desk. She looked at me looking at her. I felt outnumbered. She had almost no earlobes, but two pearl earrings stuck out like blisters in the ridge around each ear, as if to declare she would endure any pain to look classy.

  “Do you know what Gus would say right now? He would ask if you knew how much he paid for your vacation. And he would ask if he was getting his money’s worth. It’s like every dollar has to be pulled out of his intestines.” She made little hand-over-hand motions with two pinching sets of thumb and forefinger. I imagined a little gnome living inside Gus’s guts, hauling up funds.

  “Don’t you have investors?”

  “Not enough of them.”

  People in Gus Greenbaum’s profession had a lot of cash available to start reputable businesses. Expanding them wasn’t so easy.

  “Gus hates ingratitude,” Glenda added. “And questions. And sneaks.”

  “He’d kill me if he caught me here.”

  “He wouldn’t dare, not with me around. I’m the mayor. I know why you came here. I know why you were talking to Florence Doby. I know you fought Grant over that woman.”

  I shifted in my seat. The papers slid and poked in my crotch. I hoped my sweatshirt was still hiding them, but I couldn’t glance down to check. I felt she suspected already. She’d seen it all. The crotch was the first place she’d look. “Does Gus know?”

  “Not yet. You don’t want me to tell him.”

  “Is he that dangerous?” I asked.

  “After a night like this he is. The only thing he hates worse than ingratitude is bad publicity. But I’m not concerned. These radicals, they always destroy thems
elves. PETA hates the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club hates Freddie Bridgewater’s little team. They all like to say the Grand Canyon is worth dying for. That means it’s worth killing for. You can’t trust people who care nothing for money. They have no incentive to avoid bad publicity like Gus does. Just wait. You’ll see what they do to each other.”

  “What might that be? The same thing that happened to Jewel?”

  “Ask them, not me.”

  “They told me that you killed Jewel.”

  “Me?”

  “Your organization. The Grand Chalet.”

  “I hope, for your sake, you’re not planning to write something libelous. Jewel’s death was quite likely an accident. But if it wasn’t, one of the radicals was certainly responsible.”

  “Which one?”

  No one wanted to accuse him by name.

  “Perhaps Ranger Doby will tell us tomorrow. She seems to have her suspicions. I think you do too.”

  “Does Gus know about Grant’s affair with Jewel?”

  “He prefers to ignore personal matters. Grant doesn’t make it easy. Why can’t he be content with his wife? But I suppose men never are.”

  “We’re not all like Grant.”

  “Gus is. You will be too. You’ll see.”

  “Don’t wives get discontented too?”

  She laughed. “I know who you mean. Decent wives resign themselves to their husbands’ imperfections.”

  “But not all wives.”

  “Not the whores. Sorry to offend. I’ve been watching you and Victoria. I knew right away.”

  Was I that obvious? When would my obsession be over? I tried to imagine some version of myself far in the future, my desire for Victoria spent, my mind now capable of recognizing its irrationality in real time.

  “You shouldn’t use that word,” I said.