A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  In her room Margaret is sound asleep. Her long hands are together beneath her cheek, and if it weren’t pitch dark one could see her abundance of soft black hair, the sweet curve of her lips, and the softened line of her lower cheek with its almost invisible fuzz. She makes a long shape beneath the blanket, and one can hear her long, steady breaths, and feel the warm moisture she exudes into the cold air. It is very cold in the room; the air seems as cold as iron. She stirs, and whimpers softly. But it is nothing—no more than any dream in which loneliness and death put on silly disguises and caper about masquerading as birds, or snowflakes, or upside-down houses.

  When the phone rings Margaret comes swimming up from sleep. She doesn’t want to; she has found a calm place down there, where it is warm and silent. The jangle of the phone pulls her up, up like some underwater creature, and unwillingly she surfaces into the cold air. The phone keeps ringing, and she puts her hand out to see if Herbert has gotten up to answer it. The sheets are cold, and she realizes that Herbert has not been there at all, that she is at the Mountain View. She takes the phone from the bed table; it is so cold she rubs it in both hands to warm it up.

  “Margaret? Margaret?” she hears it say. As she puts it to her ear the voice grows and becomes Herbert’s voice, but she is still half asleep, and it is confusing that Herbert should be calling her by phone while she is in bed.

  “Margaret? Are you awake? It’s not late. It’s not late.”

  “Yes,” she says. Now she is awake. She can see his face, wherever he is; the heavy, worried expression he always wears, the petulance around his mouth.

  “Margaret? Did I wake you up?”

  If she says that he did he will be unhappy; he knows he woke her up, of course, but Herbert is always discomfited if one answers his rhetorical questions with the truth.

  “No, I was awake,” she hears herself say.

  “Are you all right?” he asks, and again she cannot give him the answer he deserves.

  “I’m fine, Herbert.” She cannot make herself ask him about Verna Price, either, because whenever they speak to each other (unlike letters, in which he knows what he wants and says so with authority) she hears in his voice the nervous little child she knows is there.

  “What do you want, Herbert?” she asks, as kindly as she can.

  “I’m at the Bella Vista,” he says, and she knows she has been untactful; she has asked him a question he isn’t yet able to answer.

  “I want to see you, Margaret. Are you sure you’re all right?“

  Are you happy, Herbert? she wants to ask. But of course that sort of question would disorganize him totally, the way Billy’s questions and answers always do.

  “I was coming from Montreal, on business,” he says; whenever he lies there is a very slight change in the register of his voice, as though the diameter of his throat had grown smaller. “I just thought I’d swing over and see how you and Billy were. It’s been six months, Margaret.”

  So he wants to come back, she thinks. He doesn’t like Verna Price any more. She is very sorry for Herbert. Every once in a while he thinks he has found someone whose admiration for him is unalloyed. If she could only explain to him that he isn’t such a bad man after all, that the truth about himself he sees reflected in other people’s eyes is not such a horrible truth, that everyone meets with that look.

  “I want to see you, Margaret. I want to see you tomorrow morning.”

  “I have ski lessons tomorrow, Herbert.”

  “Ski lessons!” he says, and she hears behind his disdain that he is hurt.

  “I’ve paid for them already.”

  “With that…professional?”

  “Smucky Scudder, yes,” she says. She is sick of his jealousy, mainly because he will never admit it, and so she adds, knowing that she is being as cruel as she has ever been to him, “He’s very good.”

  Herbert is silent. Finally he says, “You watch out for him, Margaret. He’s no good.”

  She wants to laugh, but she cannot be that unkind. Neither can she understand why she is so fond of Herbert.

  “We’ll be skiing all morning at Splitback,” she says.

  “All right, Margaret.”

  “If you want to see us,” she says.

  “All right. Good night, Margaret.”

  “Good night, Herbert.”

  The room is so cold. She squirms down into the warm place, but the cold has crept in upon her, and she must push her feet into frigid places. She thinks, with a smile, that she could use Herbert right now. Yes, she would like him here beside her. The very resilience of the mattress is wrong; it doesn’t slope down toward the warm man. She liked him in his sleep, when she could mould her body to his back. He slept warm, and his skin seemed to glow with smooth warmth. They made love quite often, and then she was happiest, for they never spoke. It was only afterwards that he became cold and somehow disapproving, and she knew he thought her a mess.

  But while it lasted it seemed to her that inside the man were great bent springs so strong that when they were let go their wonderful, awful recoil threatened the very bases upon which they were mounted, and in truth did jar and weaken the whole hulk of the man so that he was for a time afterward sprung, like a broken clock. Sprung and cold, for she was never allowed to comfort him then.

  At her window she hears the tick tick of the beginning snow, those hard little pellets that often come at the beginning of a snowfall. She will ski tomorrow, but now she wonders how she will want to get up and face that coldness, that singular movement through the cold daylight air. She would be deep in warm darkness, with a man to hold her until she descended into sleep.

  Smucky wakes up at the first light. He hasn’t gone to bed so early in a long time, or after so few drinks, and he feels just good enough to worry about his physical condition. If he doesn’t eat a lot he feels weak, but he’s got to lose some weight. He lies in bed and looks around his room. It is his winter room—his Northern Hemisphere winter room; he owns part of the Mountain View. The room is a mess, as usual. Clothes hanging all over the place. Empty quart beer bottles in the corner. Sue, the owner-manager’s wife, comes in once in a while and cleans up—she’s awfully nice about it—but why, he asks himself, must he be such a slob? Why must that stick of deodorant be on the windowsill and not in the bathroom cabinet? Why must a damp washcloth be sitting in a ball on top of the bureau? Perhaps this small-boy carelessness was once excusable, even charming, but now he is a big man of forty-two. God! Why doesn’t he get his clothes to the laundry more often? He has twenty shirts, and seventeen of them are dirty.

  He gets up on his elbows and looks out the window. His room is in the back, and he looks across a field toward a hill gray with hardwood trees. New snow; it’s a beautiful day, and the clean snow and blue sky, seen across the room full of his jumbled and soiled possessions, depresses him so much he shuts his eyes. Suppose he’d had a heart attack and died in the night, died and ended himself forever here among his grubby artifacts? What has he ever done that could stay bright and clean? Oh, he has plenty of memories of fun and glory, but all that passes. Whatever he’s really wanted to do he’s done very well, and so he does have those memories, but they keep passing back into the years. He’s even done well in business; he’s had good luck with his investments in places like the Mountain View, and if skiing stays popular, and snow continues to fall in the right places, he’ll probably do better. He’s been a good friend, and a generous one; he has no idea how much money is owed to him, but it must be thousands. Every once in a while he’s surprised by a check for twenty dollars or five hundred dollars from an old friend who did remember some loan or other.

  Nobody will hate him when he goes out, probably, except maybe a few husbands, so what the hell? But what’s he done in this world except have a pretty good time? It’s too late now to worry about it—you’re not a young anything at forty-two, except maybe president, and he hasn’t been nominated—so why does he worry about it? Maybe it’s the idea of dying alone,
and having them find his corpse with all its little secrets. He’s got to change. Something has to make him change. So he stops biting the cuticle of his little finger.

  Enough! He jumps out of bed. He’s going to clean up his room, for a start. He takes a shower, shaves carefully, does a few knee bends, finds the deodorant. But he can’t find any clean shorts, so that’s one strike against him. Always there is at least one little secret; this is depressing, but he does tear the sheets off his bed and pile all his dirty clothes on them, including his Bogners with that grease spot on the back. He puts on one of his three clean shirts, and an old pair of non-stretch ski pants; they’re clean, anyway. He’s got a million pairs of socks, and he does find a clean pair of them. He thinks: Now what’s dirty about me except my shorts and my personality?

  He hoists the large bundle of dirty clothes onto his shoulder and goes down to the kitchen. Sue and her husband, Roger, are preparing for breakfast, and he helps them set out the silverware. There are thirty paying guests, and since they are all skiers at least twenty-five will make breakfast. When he sees that there isn’t much more he can do he sits down at a kitchen table to look at the morning ski reports. Excellent everywhere.

  Then he looks up and sees Sue and Roger working side by side at the counter. They’re young kids, really—in their late twenties. She’s shaking up frozen orange juice and he’s running the big toaster. They are in their working clothes and aprons, and her arm touches his accidentally, meaninglessly, and neither of them even notices it. Smucky stares at them, the man and the woman working together as though they weren’t man and woman at all. They slept in the same bed last night. And he thinks about how they live together and see each other all the time, naked and dressed, and they must know all about each other. They must be so honest.

  Roger happens to turn and see him staring so hard, and to cover his embarrassment Smucky grins at him and shakes the morning ski report.

  “Good snow!” he says.

  “We’re doing all right!” Roger says. “A good winter so far. Doing all right, Smucky!”

  Smucky has a glass of orange juice and one piece of toast, calls the ski school and arranges to have one of his instructors take over his earliest class, then takes his bundle of clothes down to the village laundry and dry cleaners. On the way back to his car he is startled to see Herbert Woolley going into the drugstore. What’s Herbert Woolley doing around here? He thinks of Margaret as he’s seen her on the mountain, skiing alone down the Cataract, tall and graceful even if she is an unreconstructed Arlberger. And there is Herbert Woolley, come nosing around. Smucky knows the whole story, how Herbert left her—he’s talked about it with Japh, who seemed, on the whole, pleased that Herbert had gone. But the sight of Herbert in his dark-blue overcoat, his city pallor and his city shoes is a shock to Smucky, and suddenly he realizes that he is jealous, that he has been counting upon Margaret’s loneliness, and that his new regimen of cleanliness is an attempt to make himself worthy of her. And the moment he admits this to himself he sees that he must have Margaret; she will improve him; he loves her. She is so valuable he must go to her right away. Has Herbert seen her yet? What if they spent the night together? With this thought comes a stroke of jealousy that is painful. It is in his stomach, in his diaphragm. He has trouble getting a breath. Her lesson with him is in one hour, but can he risk waiting that long?

  Then he gets his breath. He knows what he wants, and suddenly he feels very strong—what he wants is dangerous, but he can cope with danger.

  When he gets to the mountain it is nine-thirty. He spots Margaret’s car in the parking lot; everything is under control so far, but how is he going to approach her? How is he going to let her know that he is going to change his life?

  He sees her in the T-bar line; it is a weekday and the lines are all short. He half runs to his office in the base of the gondola lift, puts on his boots and picks out a pair of limber recreational skis. By the time he gets back to the T-bar she is on her way up, and he puts on his skis, deciding to wait for her. But he’s trembling, and he seems to have all kinds of excess energy, so he herringbones a third of the way up the slope to meet her. On her way down she sees him and stops next to him—stemming too much, but her eyes are bright from the wind, her legs are trim and strong, and he has the feeling that he can teach her to ski very well. He knows he has that power.

  “Is it time for my lesson?” she asks, surprised.

  “No, I just saw you.” That seems to him a poor effort, and he tries again. “I just saw you going up the T-bar.” Now she is looking at him queerly, and he doesn’t know what to say, so he does a kick turn, jumps off his poles and does a gigantic gelandesprung from the top of a mogul, four wedels and four hop Christies, another gelandesprung during which he turns lightly in the air and comes down to a dramatic stop, snow exploding higher than his head. He feels like a bird; in the air he could feel the pressure of the air itself on the bottoms of his skis.

  Down she comes, checking a little and flexing her knees. He knows he can teach her how to use reverse shoulder. Now, he thinks as she does a pretty fair parallel christie and gains speed, Now put your weight on the downhill ski and face the fall line. There! She goes by him quite fast, her skis hissing over the snow, and stops before the last steep grade to wait for him. He feels so good he takes the grade down to her on one ski and jumps high into the air before he turns and stops beside her, light as a feather.

  “Beautiful!” she says. “Smucky, you’re beautiful!” Tiny points of light glint all over her clothes. Her face shines with admiration for him, and in his triumph it seems that his life has changed already, that from now on his whole life will have a chance to be as beautiful as have been so many of his days.

  The last of the skiers have gone to the lifts. Japh has watched them go. He didn’t sleep very well; his knees feel weak this morning, so after Margaret and Billy left he took his second cup of coffee into the lounge and watched the skiers decide where to go, who would go in whose car, who was going to be brave and take the Spout. They swung their boot trees and checked to see if they had their wax, their wine, their cigarettes. The women were gaudy and happy in their bright clothes; the men strode around proudly in their trim, varied uniforms. Now they have all gone, and Japh doesn’t know what to do with himself. He feels too weak even to skate, and yet his hands are trembling with excitement.

  Wryly he considers this gift of his, the gift of excitement that has outlasted his youth. There are two things that have never lost their power: the sea and the mountains. They are all he has ever needed; they have always been there, indestructible, and they have never failed him. The one receives and cannot be filled, the others can never be diminished. Now he would be at the summit of Splitback, putting on the new skis he has never used, letting them slip for the first time through the new powder.

  At least he can look at his new gear. He goes to the ski rack in the hall and takes his boots and his new Heads up to his room. This is more or less against the rules, but he is careful not to let his edges touch the walls or the doorframes. He puts the skis down on the rug, where they bounce upon their camber. They are subtly arched and tapered, and look like speed. They haven’t received their first scratch, and they are black and silver. He has always liked the look and the feel of gear—a brass turnbuckle for the rigging of his sloop, or a toe release; both are so spare and pure about what they do. Here are his skis, perfect and ready. His Arlberg straps are threaded to the cables, and now lie slack, waiting to be crossed over his boots.

  So he takes his boots out of his boot tree. He admires the boot tree, too; it is made of extruded aluminum, not an ounce heavier than it must be, and like all fine gear there is not a dimple or a bump or a rivet upon it that does not perform some necessary function. And the boots, their leather and lacing, their handsome thick soles. It is a little painful for him to bend and put them on, to pull the inner and outer lacings tight, but he does, and then he fits them to the bindings of his skis, snaps the cables t
ight and winds his Arlberg straps around and down through their tension buckles. All this equipment is heavy, and though his legs are bound rigidly to all this weight he suddenly feels light and agile. He bounces, and unweights his skis; there is some pain, but the camber pushes him up so that for a moment he is weightless. It is the strength of memory in his legs.

  Where shall he choose to be, poised for the long downhill run? No choice—it is Tuckerman’s Ravine, on the corn snow of late spring. Tuckerman’s because you have to climb those miles to get there. You have to pay for each precious christiania; as you descend there is the memory of the long climb like a debt paid in full. There is the Headwall beginning its impossible curve up toward the vertical, all blinding white. Who schussed it that time? Was it twenty years ago? Names of skiers, and their tough red faces, pass through his memory. Berndt Madsen? Joe Foss? Pee Wee Bellavance? Smucky Scudder? Dick Dionne? Who was that black dot, no bigger than a spider, he once saw drop down across the snow at the speed of falling?

  But it is his own long run he can feel now, the curving, the kernels of ice from his wake hissing and rattling as he unweights and begins his next long turn toward the narrowest part of the Chute, where he will flash through a cleft in the dark granite, his ears popping. The skis, their pressure and their edges, the perfection of control at speed; there is no other thing in the world so prideful and so beautiful.