The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  Rassond, confined to a wheelchair now, owns a café in Chamonix. He refused to talk, even to confirm a rumor that he’d asked Didier to marry him after he’d left the hospital and she’d refused.

  “Inez Didier is part of my past,” was all he’d say.

  Valoir was nineteen when he met Didier. Between 1985 and 1988, Valoir pioneered twenty-three skiing routes in the French and Swiss Alps. He performed a series of difficult enchainments that garnered him commercial support, including two TV advertisements for French beer.

  In secret, however, Didier was making films of Valoir in remote areas such as the Mer de Glace glacier and on couloirs in the Grandes Jorasses. The most spectacular footage of Valoir was shot in the Augilles (literally the “Needles”). Valoir was obsessed with the needles, tall sharp granite towers that dominate the Chamonix Valley. Very little snow clings to the spires, considered among the world’s most perilous runs.

  On March 17, 1988, Didier contracted with the aerial tramway to stop one of the cars over the 12,473-foot Auguille de Midi (the Needle of Noon) to let her film Valoir’s attempt at a first descent. Valoir had climbed the route twice in the previous three days, and had commented on the lack of snow and ice as late as the evening before. Many thought he would not ski it.

  He died the next day when a huge chunk of snow and rock dislodged above him while he skied. It swept him into a deep crevice. His body has never been recovered.

  Didier left Chamonix soon after the accident, but returned in December to debut a film she spliced together from interviews and footage of Valoir’s activities during their three years together. Elle Le Fera Mourir (She Will Be the Death of Him) was hailed by critics and condemned by the mountaineering community. Here’s a brief review from the French publication Cinéma:

  Continuing with a technique that she pioneered in Le Retour à L’Aire, Didier combines breathtaking ski sequences of the young Alain Valoir with his rambling personal monologues.

  The effect is disconcerting, almost dreamlike. Valoir is so open in his conversation that we believe he is unconscious of the camera’s presence, as if the camera were hidden.

  Didier, for the most part, is conspicuously absent. While her voice is heard questioning Valoir, she is seen on screen only once. Here, she is nude in bed with Valoir, resting on his chest while he stares into the camera and talks about his bisexuality.

  Valoir died last spring in Chamonix while attempting a never-before-tried descent of the famous Auguille de Midi.

  As evidenced in the film’s title and structure, Didier seems conscious of her participation in the events that led to Valoir’s death, yet only obliquely suggests responsibility.

  Late in the film—indeed, the night before Valoir dies—Didier asks him, “Don’t you know the risks?”

  Valoir nods.

  “Then why do you go?” she asks.

  Valoir drinks some wine, then looks directly into the camera, at Didier, at the audience, and says “I go for you …”

  An acid taste bubbled up from his stomach as Farrell remembered uttering those same words. The sun beat now on the back of his neck and the year’s first insects—tiny black bugs—danced before his eyes.

  “She gives us what we want,” Farrell said out loud, hearing the threat in the timbre of his voice. His heart raced and he skipped ahead in the fax:

  Members of the climbing community and Valoir’s family were outraged at Elle Le Fera Mourir. They believed Didier had driven Valoir beyond his capabilities. Even more troubling, they felt the film’s title and tone made light of her own role.

  “I think she used Valoir for her own ends,” said Richard LaFevre, the owner of the climbing store where Valoir worked before becoming associated with Didier. “And she baldly capitalized on the entire mess.”

  Valoir’s sister, Marie, said, “For a long time, I was Inez’s biggest defender. I thought she cared for him. But she was cold in that movie. That film was wrought out of my brother’s feelings—for the mountains, for skiing, most of all for her. But it was like she didn’t feel anything for him.”

  Farrell read those words a dozen times. For almost two hours he let them collide off everything he knew about Inez. He walked aimlessly back and forth across the butte, examining all the possibilities. By early afternoon he thought he understood her; and with that he came to a terrible conclusion: to stop Inez from assaulting the Grand Teton, to save the others, indeed to save himself, he had to crush her. To crush her, he had to use her techniques.

  Chapter 26

  FARRELL KNOCKED AT THE door to Inez’s room at half past seven that evening. She opened the door wearing tight jeans and a thick purple chamois shirt styled in a drover’s yoke. Video monitors glowed behind her.

  “Where has you been?” she snapped. “Page and Wave have spend all their own time to put your equipment together for you.”

  “I just talked to the ranger station at the top of Teton Pass,” Farrell said. “The snow pack will deteriorate over the next two days. It won’t even get to freezing at night.”

  Without speaking, she drew back to let him in. She smelled stale after his afternoon among the budding plants. Farrell took a seat on the edge of the credenza.

  Inez rolled her head around, cracking her neck. “You give me an ache with all this talk about snow packs,” she said. “As Page has said, we do not know until we look.”

  “You’ve got Page so messed up he doesn’t know which way to turn,” Farrell said.

  “Really?” Inez said. “My impression, it is the opposite: he knows exactly where he’s going.”

  “Like Henri Rassond and Alain Valoir?” Farrell asked.

  The question threw her off guard. She cleared her throat. “Well … no,” she said. “I consider Page a bit more like yourself.”

  Farrell felt a draft, as if someone had opened a window in the room. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing at all,” Inez said, getting up. She crossed to a bottle of wine chilling in a plastic bucket and poured herself a glass. “It’s just that in Utah you go, so straight ahead. And now, so reservé. I think constantly how little I know of you.”

  “You paid for my athletic ability, not me,” Farrell said. He looked around the room at all the electronic equipment. A red light glowed on a camera standing on a tripod in the far corner. Farrell stiffened.

  “Yes, that camera is on,” Inez said, amused.

  Farrell looked away from the lens, then back to Inez. “Maybe it’s good that you film this,” he said. “The director begins to act.”

  Inez glanced at the camera, frowning as if she had rethought her decision to film this encounter. She lit a cigarette.

  “What do you want to know?” Farrell asked.

  “Everything,” she said.

  “Greed gets people in trouble,” Farrell said. “You’ll have to share.”

  “We make the bargain then?” she asked.

  “I tell you about me, you tell me about you,” Farrell said.

  Inez paused, drinking her wine. A door opened outside and music drifted through the air. Inez adjusted the angle of her head to it, as if she were trying to hear the words to the song. She hummed with it, then said, “First you. When you are about to leap off the cliff, what is the first thing of which you think?”

  “Easy,” Farrell said. “The landing.”

  “What is the last thing of which you think?”

  “That’s two questions,” Farrell said. He paused to consider his answer. “What it will feel like out there in the air. And that’s different every time.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Sometimes it’s direct, like infatuation: your lungs ache, your brain spins, your palms sweat, but you know it’s going to be good. Real good.”

  “Like sex?” She rolled back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  Farrell knew what she was up to, but he decided to play along. He said, “No, not like sex … like before sex. Like you know you’re going to have your hands all
over each other before long and you want that, but somehow you know the anticipation is better.

  “Sometimes the feeling in the air is not like that at all,” he continued. “Sometimes it’s indirect and that’s stronger. Like you visit a place you haven’t been to in a long time, a place you visited last with an old lover. And there’s just the suggestion of a fragrance in the air, but boom! she’s there in the room with you.”

  “Do you feel that with me now?”

  “No,” Farrell lied, trying to hurt her. “You were entertainment.”

  Inez sucked fiercely on the cigarette. She composed herself, sat up, reached for the wine bottle, and poured herself another glass.

  “My turn,” Farrell said. “Why do you like to watch us?”

  “I do not know,” she said. “It is just so.”

  “Not good enough, Inez.”

  She said, “All right, when I see you about to go, it brings something out in me, a feeling, a … this I don’t understand, that I do not receive by myself.”

  “The feeling is good?”

  “Good, bad at the same time,” she said. “The most close I can describe it is the state so desperate you fall down into when you love someone you hate.”

  She sucked on the cigarette again, then shuffled back on the bed until she was leaning against the headboard, the wineglass between her folded legs.

  “Tell me about your father,” Farrell said.

  “My choice now,” Inez protested.

  “You had two questions, I have two questions,” Farrell said.

  Inez pouted. “My father was brilliant and I know him very little. Even when he was alive, I see him not much. A photographer. Vietnam.”

  “The Dividing Line?”

  Inez’s eyebrows arched in on themselves. “Yes, The Dividing Line. How do you know of this?”

  “I used to be interested in photography,” Farrell lied again. “It was in a portfolio of work I saw mentioned in Life magazine once. I put two and two together.”

  Her jaw moved slightly, then locked left. She sipped from the wine, stood, and began to talk about her father’s theories of photography. Some of them Farrell had read about in the preface to the book. Much of what Inez discussed was new: technical arguments, approaches to mood and setting; snippets of her father’s mind that she had gleaned from his letters to her mother and to the Associated Press photography chief in Paris.

  “He thinks you only can capture the real about the person when they are at their frontiers,” Inez said, walking around the bed toward a cooler. She opened another bottle of wine and filled a glass for Farrell. He took it, but only sipped at the chilled liquid.

  “What do you mean real?” he asked.

  “Not the surface,” she said. “Their thoughts, their fears, their hopes.”

  “Yours or theirs?”

  Inez’s cheeks hardened. “The camera person and the actor, they are together, no?”

  “If you say so. Your father, did you love him and hate him?”

  Inez kneaded the fabric of one of the pillows, but did not look at Farrell. Softly, she said, “I am a child when he dies. I see other girls my age with their fathers on the walk to school. I learn to go by myself.”

  “When—”

  “No, my question now,” Inez interrupted. “Your worst memory?”

  Farrell answered even though he didn’t want to. “The worst?”

  “It is required to tell the truth.”

  Farrell was quiet, conscious of the camera rolling. Finally, he said, “A boy, eight years old, gets off the school bus and he’s stricken with diarrhea. He runs to his home, but the door’s locked. He knows his father is inside, but he knows his father is mad. The father won’t let him in. The boy holds it as long as he can, then he squats and shits all over the back of his legs and closes the garage door so none of his friends will see. He listens to his father sing to the radio. He waits for his mother.”

  “You say it like this happens to another person,” Inez said.

  “Did I?” Farrell asked, surprised. He thought about it and realized that that was how he always thought of himself—as someone apart, alone. It saddened him, yet made him more determined than ever to finish.

  “Yes, you did,” Inez said. “What does your mother do when she comes to the house?”

  “She cleaned me up, so …”

  “So?”

  “So my father wouldn’t stop singing,” Farrell said.

  “Strange, your father …”

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” Farrell said. “There are only so many things you can blame on the past. Go on.”

  “When are you most happy?”

  “I don’t know,” Farrell said. “Probably when I ski.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it happens so fast there are few choices,” Farrell said, surprising himself again. “It just happens. There’s no anticipation. It’s instinct. And when you come out of a bad situation okay, your heart pounds and your breath … even the hair on your arms tingles.”

  Inez smiled, then her expression turned hard. “From where does your money come, Collins?”

  The question jolted him out of the lax state into which she had drawn him; he realized that he’d revealed more than she had. “Money?”

  “You have money,” Inez said. “You do not ask me for any.”

  “I don’t need to,” Farrell said, trying to appear at ease. “It’s a gauche habit—talking of money. But I’ll tell you: I was once very lucky in the markets. I’m frugal now.”

  Inez gave him a smug expression. “But this is the unusual, is it not—to give up that mode of life, to make much money?”

  “Everyone has their fill of such things after a while,” Farrell said. “I decided to follow through on the common threat and go to the mountains.”

  “To find yourself?”

  “No,” Farrell said honestly. “I wanted to find nothing.”

  “You do not tell the truth when you say you before you are a tax attorney,” Inez said. “Vraiment what is it really, the Wall Street, the properties … the banks?”

  Farrell coughed, feeling color take to his cheeks like a welt. He made a complicated show of standing, walking to the table, and pouring himself another glass of wine.

  Inez did not seem surprised. “The banker, then. A strange vocation for someone of your taste for speed.”

  “One of my problems,” Farrell said. “I could never stay interested in handling money just to make money.”

  “Relationships?” Inez asked. “A wife, a lover? Children.”

  “My wife left me,” Farrell said. “We had a child who died young.”

  “I feel sorry.” Inez frowned. “This was horrible for you and your wife?”

  “Things pass and become part of your memory, like the images on film, I’d imagine,” Farrell said.

  “When it is best, the film is like memory,” Inez agreed, “but more like the dream. You are in the dark theater and these situations come on the screen that you are feeling before … or you imagine you are feeling before.”

  Inez stopped and stared into space. Then she said, “It is an accident, the death of your baby?”

  Farrell faltered for a second. He saw Jenny’s blue hand. But instead of the chill that had always filled him when he thought of her, he felt a steady, warming pressure at the nape of his neck, a pressure which gave him strength.

  “No. No accident,” he said, in a steady, sure voice. “She died like most people do—for reasons no one quite understood.”

  Inez seemed disappointed with his response. Before she could speak again, Farrell said: “Tell me about Henri Rassond.”

  Inez glanced at the wall over his shoulder. “No.”

  “I thought we were being honest.”

  “Henry is a specific, like your father. We speak to the general, no?”

  “It seemed to me we have become very specific,” Farrell said. “No exclusions on details now.”

  Inez clenched
her hands tightly around the glass.

  “Now that I know these rules, it goes easier,” Inez said cryptically. “Years ago, Henri Rassond is a climber of talent. He allows one event—yes, very terrible, but just one—to shake him. For a time we are good for each other. That is all. You have seen the film, no?”

  “I’ve read about it. They called it art.”

  Inez waved her hand in the air. “Maybe yes, maybe no. When I meet Henri, he is weak. He needs someone to remind him of his gifts.”

  “And you were that person?” Farrell asked.

  Inez nodded.

  “Did you love him?”

  Inez laughed, “What is this, love? We join in the night like you and me. But Henri, when we are joined, he takes from me so much. He breaks his eggshell inside me. He takes from me his wings. For a year, maybe more, he is the eagle again.”

  “People say you used him, broke him, left him,” Farrell said.

  “C’est merde,” Inez said. “He goes to Italy the last time alone. I do not request this.”

  “So you cared for him after the crash, as any lover would?”

  Inez’s eyes grew thick and sidelong. “I am there at the hospital. I watch him come to know that he never walks again. I hold his hand all that night while he cries like the baby.”

  “And then what? Did you cry too?”

  “I cry when he cries,” Inez said, reaching for the wine. “But these are terrible times. I … I do not wish to talk of them.”

  “Thought you said these are necessary shading devices,” Farrell said, and he pointed to the camera.

  “I warn you once,” Inez replied harshly. “Do not mock me.”

  They stared at each other in silence. Then Farrell got up and used the bathroom. When he got back, Inez was lying on her back again. She said, “Tell me, Collins, is the concept—right and wrong—absolu or relatif?” Farrell thought for a moment. “If your talking in a biblical sense, it’s absolute. In a legal sense, I suppose it’s relative.”

  “Give me the example,” Inez said.

  “I don’t have one,” Farrell said. “You describe the situation, I’ll give you an answer.”