It was true that she was as adept as anyone at lying to herself: the five or six cigarettes that were really half a pack, the one or two glasses of wine that were really three or four. But when it came right down to it, she knew what the score was, and that it was a pretty good one. She had her gauges: her mirror, her scale, her joints—the watchdogs that reproved her for her excesses and congratulated her on her restraint. What did surprise her was how smug she felt, as if the computer really was prescient. She wanted to believe in the infallibility of the bookkeeper in the sky who said she was entitled to an extra thirteen years for good behavior. But she also knew he wasn’t as punctilious as the Anne-Maries of the world would have her believe. It was her experience that he was as prone to foolishness and whimsy as anyone else. His ledger was apt to be full of errors and omissions: debits in the column of the health food devotee, credits in the column of the chocolate chip cookie binger. She put people who believed they could forestall death by drinking carrot juice in the same category as people who believed that everything will go right for them if they go to church every Sunday. They were both in for a rude awakening.
She handed the printout back. “Not really,” she replied.
“The guests who are older than their biological ages rarely are. It’s the ones who are younger who are shocked.” She turned her attention back to the printout. “You have at least one area where there’s room for improvement. Can you guess what it is?”
“The cocktails,” replied Charlotte.
Anne-Marie nodded. She urged Charlotte to switch to white wine spritzers and to limit herself to one or two.
In fact, Charlotte thought her biological age would probably be higher were it not for her nightly manhattan. She was a firm believer in the psycho-therapeutic virtues of alcohol, and said as much. For soothing the spirit, Lord Byron had said, apply rum and true religion.
But Anne-Marie, invoking the specter of shriveled gray cells to add to those of bat wings and liver spots, wasn’t convinced. She returned her attention to the printout, a disapproving frown slipping across her viking brow. “I see another area. What about the cigarettes?”
Charlotte damned the computer. She could hardly argue that cigarettes were therapeutic, but she had managed for most of her adult life to keep her habit to ten or less a day, an achievement that she, at any rate, considered an outstanding example of self-control.
“You realize, don’t you, that there’s no threshold for lung cancer?” Anne-Marie leaned forward, her arms folded on the desk. “In other words, there’s no point below which you are not subjecting yourself to a risk.” She raised a forefinger. “Even one cigarette is a risk.”
In her mind’s eye, Charlotte saw the celestial hand making an entry in the debit column of the giant ledger in the sky. Meekly, she pledged to refrain, or at least to cut back.
Anne-Marie set the printout aside.
Charlotte leaned back in relief.
“You’ll be in C-group—for those whose biological ages are forty-five and above. All our guests take the same classes, but the workouts are tailored to individual fitness levels. Here’s your exercise prescription.” She handed Charlotte a booklet with an engraving of the Indian maiden on the cover. Inside there was a page for each day of Charlotte’s stay. The pages were marked off in half-hour intervals: six A.M., wake-up; six-thirty A.M., mineral water prescription; seven A.M., Awake and Aware; seven-thirty A.M., breakfast; eight A.M., Terrain Cure; and so on.
“Six o’clock?” said Charlotte.
“We like you to get up early to take the waters. The spa physician, Dr. Sperry, will be giving you your mineral water prescription and your bath prescription this afternoon. We generally reserve the afternoons for treatments at the Bath Pavilion or at L’Institut de Beauté.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Charlotte said. She had been looking forward to her spa stay in terms of a long, luxurious soak in the tub, but it was beginning to sound more like boot camp—without the food.
“Don’t worry. It’s not as strenuous as it looks,” said Anne-Marie with a smile that was intended to be reassuring. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.” With that, she rose, signaling the end of the interview. “Frannie will take you down to the locker room now; your first class is in twenty minutes.”
Charlotte thanked her and shook her hand. She had the grip of a heavyweight champion.
Frannie was waiting for her outside Anne-Marie’s office. She smiled her crooked smile. Next to the robust Anne-Marie, she looked like a case study in bad health. Her posture was poor, her complexion pasty, her hair thin and lank. Even her eyes, which were magnified by her glasses, were dull and pale. She reminded Charlotte of the baby mice—blind, pink, and helpless—that she had once found nesting in an old orange crate as a child.
“How did you do?” she asked as they headed toward the stairs.
“Group C,” confessed Charlotte. She felt as if she was admitting to being relegated to the slow track in ninth grade.
“I mean, your biological age,” said Frannie. She descended the stairs with much less difficulty than she had climbed them.
“Forty-nine.”
“I guessed forty-eight.”
“How did you know?”
“By your appearance. Generally speaking, if people look younger than they are, their biological age is younger than their real age.”
“So much for the wisdom of the computer.”
Frannie smiled. They had reached the foot of the stairs. Frannie headed across the lobby to a door on the far wall.
“This is the treatment area,” she said as she entered. She reeled off a list of treatments, which ranged from biofeedback to herbal wraps to tanning beds. “A typical treatment cubicle,” she added, opening a door on a small room with a cot. “It also happens to be the one where I work.”
“What do you do?” asked Charlotte.
“Shiatsu,” she replied. She briefly explained the Japanese system of finger massage. “You asked how I estimate biological age. One way is by appearance. Another is by touch. If I’ve done a massage on a person, I can usually estimate their biological age pretty accurately.”
“Why’s that?” asked Charlotte.
“Oh, it’s not hard. Skin quality, muscle tone …” she replied. “If someone’s poisoning their body, it will show up in a massage. The body is supposed to be the temple of the spirit, but some people treat it like a hotel room.” With that, she opened a door leading to the weight area.
A hotel room? Charlotte pondered the metaphor for a while and decided that it didn’t hold up. It wouldn’t be right to treat your body like a flophouse, but as a temporary abode in which you were privileged to reside—a first-class hotel, so to speak? That hardly struck her as so reprehensible.
“Sometimes I can even tell about past lives from a massage,” Frannie added as they entered a room filled with gleaming chrome exercise machines.
“Past lives?”
“Sure. The body is imprinted with every incarnational event the soul has ever experienced—not only from the present lifetime, but from every lifetime. Every cell is a storehouse of the energy of experience. Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve been somewhere before?”
“Yes,” replied Charlotte, wondering what she was opening herself up to.
“That’s because you have been there before, in another life. Ordinarily, you don’t remember because it would interfere with your functioning. You’re prohibited from remembering by a veil of forgetfulness. But once in a while, the veil lifts. That’s when you have the feeling of déjà vu.”
Here we go again, thought Charlotte. Mozart, who was composing at four because he’d been a musician in a past life. Patton, who was strategically familiar with the battlefields of Europe because he’d been over them before as a Roman commander. She raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Frannie paused next to a machine into which a young woman was strapped on her back, ready for takeoff. Her ankles were tucked under padded cylinders, which sh
e raised by extending her legs.
“This is our compound leg machine; it exercises the quadriceps muscles. We have twenty-three machines,” she said. “Each machine exercises a different muscle or muscle group. I’ll be showing you Row to use the machines later in the week. But first we have to get you conditioned. What were we talking about?”
“The veil of forgetfulness.”
“Oh, yes. The veil lifting. It happened to me with my husband. The first time we met—it was in a metaphysical bookstore in the Village—I had this feeling of closeness, as if I’d known him before. I wasn’t into reincarnation then, but he was. He felt it too; he knew right away what it was.”
As she spoke, a young man entered the room. He had black hair, a black beard, and a black belt that identified him as a martial arts instructor.
Frannie’s face lit up. “I was just talking about you.”
“Oh?” He grinned. “Anything nice?” He spoke with a soft southern accent that Charlotte pegged as North Carolina or Tennessee.
“I was just telling Miss Graham how we met. Miss Graham, this is my husband, Dana LaBeau.”
He extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“It wasn’t until Dana regressed me that I realized we were soul mates,” Frannie continued. “Not twin souls. Twin souls are quite common—people who’ve had a relationship of some sort in another life. Soul mates are very rare; our souls vibrate at the same electromagnetic frequency.”
“They were created together at the time of the Big Bang,” added Dana.
“How romantic,” said Charlotte with a twinge of sarcasm that went unnoticed. She studied Dana more closely: he was good-looking enough, with strong white teeth, a pleasant smile, and deep green eyes with long, silky lashes, but Charlotte thought him disappointingly unprepossessing for someone whose soul dated back to the Big Bang.
“I mean, it all makes sense if you think about it,” said Frannie.
Charlotte withheld comment.
“If you’re interested in finding out more about your past lives, you can take our course,” said Dana. “It’s called Other Lives/Other Selves. It’s on Wednesday nights. It’s a prerequisite for Past Life Regression. If you want to sign on, just tell Frannie.” He extended his hand with a warm smile. “It was a pleasure meeting you. I hope we’ll be seeing you again on Wednesday.”
“Maybe,” said Charlotte, returning his handshake.
“Dana teaches karate in the morning and works as a bath attendant in the afternoon,” Frannie explained after he left. “He was a samurai warrior in a previous life; that’s why he’s so interested in the martial arts. We often remember our past lives through our interests and predilections.”
“Does that mean that I was an actress in a previous life?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. If you take our course, you’ll find out. It often helps you advance spiritually if you’re familiar with your past lives. It’s easier to work off your karmic debts when you have a clear idea of what they are. You know—coming to terms with your cosmic responsibilities.”
“I think I’d prefer not to know.”
Frannie shrugged. “Some people just prefer to live in a state of cosmic ignorance,” she said with a good-natured smile.
The tour ended at the women’s lounge, where Frannie issued Charlotte a white terry-cloth kimono, a pair of red rubber thongs, and a white sweat suit with racing stripes of Langenberg red. Then she directed Charlotte to her locker, wished her good luck, and bade her good-bye.
Charlotte wasn’t sure which was worse: Anne-Marie’s overbearing enthusiasm or Frannie’s metaphysical malarkey.
She found herself sharing a corner of the locker room with a woman who was struggling to stuff a large leather tote bag into a narrow floor-to-ceiling locker. She was of the type who used to be called voluptuous, but was now just called fat.
“For four grand a week, you’d think they’d give you a bigger locker,” she complained as she slammed the door.
She was a short woman with frizzy brown hair cut in a twenties-style bob and a piquant mouth that turned up at the corners. But underneath its expression of wry amusement, her face was careworn: the forehead was deeply creased and the skin hung in yellowish folds under distant gray eyes.
“Are you a new inmate?” She enunciated her words carefully, as if she wasn’t sure they’d come out right if she didn’t.
“I guess you could say that.” Charlotte did have the feeling that she was being treated like a mental defective confined to some sort of institution—the childlike days plotted out for her in half-hour segments, no decisions to make, not even what to wear.
“It’s a nice place,” the woman said. Taking a seat on a bench, she removed a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. She pulled out one for herself and then offered the pack to Charlotte. “Want a smoke?”
“Do they allow it?”
The woman lifted her shoulders in a shrug.
Charlotte smiled and sat down next to her, taking her up on her offer. She liked her immediately.
“I see you’re in the backward group too,” the woman said as she offered Charlotte a light. Charlotte noticed that her hand shook.
“You’re in C-group.” She nodded at Charlotte’s sweat suit. “We’re color-coded—dark gray, light gray, and white. White is for the backward group, those of us whose biological age is forty-five and over.” She gestured at the booklet in Charlotte’s hand. “Do you have Swing and Sway now?”
Charlotte checked her booklet. “Yes.”
“Good. So do I. There are only four from the backward group in that class and two are men. It’ll be nice to have some more female company.”
“How is it?” asked Charlotte.
“Swing and Sway isn’t bad. It’s Backs and Bellies and Absolutely Abdominals that are the killers. In case you haven’t noticed, they’re big on alliteration here,” she added with a little smile. “The real killer is Awake and Aware—that’s the one at seven.”
“At that hour, I’m more like semiconscious and stupefied.”
The woman laughed. “I know what you mean. What age did you clock in at?”
“Forty-nine.”
“Hey!” Drawing away, the woman gazed at Charlotte in wide-eyed admiration.
It was true that Charlotte didn’t look her age. Outside of her hair style and a few crow’s-feet, she still looked much as she had in her twenties. The years had dealt lightly with the fine structure of her face. As for her body, she had gained a few pounds, but she still had a good figure and she carried herself with the lightness and grace of a woman half her age.
“Congratulations. I clocked in at forty-eight, but that’s not much of an achievement. I’m really only thirty-eight. My name’s Adele Singer, by the way,” she added, extending her hand.
“Charlotte Graham.”
“I know. I recognized you right away. I always imagined you would be tall. But so often movie stars turn out to be a lot shorter than you think—you know what I mean?” She continued: “I’m a fan. But don’t worry. I’m not going to hound you for an autograph.”
“Thanks,” replied Charlotte. She hoped the same would be true of the other guests. She was counting on the guests at a posh spa like this one to be considerate enough not to harass their celebrity fellows.
As Charlotte changed, Adele filled her in on the other C’s. The two men were Art, a middle-aged chemist who had been ordered to the spa by his cardiologist, and Nicky, an obese young man who worked as a counter boy at his father’s Greek deli in Astoria, and who had been eating more than he sold. He had sold the Buick he’d saved three years to buy to pay for his stay. The third C was Corinne, a model who’d come to the spa to promote a new line of Langenberg products, the chief ingredient of which was mineral water. Corinne had technically been assigned to A-group—she’d clocked in with a biological age in the teens—but she’d voluntarily relegated herself to the ignominy of C-dom. Her attitude was that she’d come to the spa to do a promotion, not to to
rture herself, which Adele thought a sensible attitude indeed.
As she entered the exercise room a few minutes later in her white sweat suit, Charlotte felt like a spa virgin about to be sacrificed on the altar of physical fitness. Her usual idea of athletic wear was a sturdy pair of walking shoes and her usual idea of exercise a brisk walk up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue. The front of the room had been claimed by the dark gray sweat-suited A’s, who awaited the commencement of class with grim seriousness of purpose. Adele wisely staked out their turf at the back next to Art and Corinne, whose face Charlotte recognized from magazine ads. She was a vague-but-wholesome-looking beauty who wore sweatbands around her forehead and wrists to match her low-cut plum leotard, which was definitely not spa-issue.
While they waited, Charlotte chatted with Art, the chemist. By now, she had recognized “What’s your biological age?” to be the conversational equivalent of “How do you like the weather?”—the icebreaker that established a bond of shared experience. For Art, the report wasn’t good. His biological age was seventy-three, a disastrous sixteen years older than his real age. Forty pounds overweight and with a cholesterol level in the stratosphere, he was a prime candidate for a coronary. His doctor had sentenced him to the fourteen-day cardiac rehabilitation program as restitution for a nightly shakerful of martinis, a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and little exercise outside of an occasional expedition onto the golf course.
Charlotte liked him enormously. He had a wonderful face: long and narrow, with prominent temples from which his thin blond hair had long ago receded; eyebrows suspended like circumflexes over small, deep-set blue eyes; and a long nose leading down to a narrow mouth filled with small, even teeth. It was a Gothic face, a knight’s face. He looked, with his furrowed brow and pugnacious jaw, like a St. George who had wearied of slaying dragons.
The class commenced with the arrival of the teacher, a limber young woman named Claire who led them through body circles, waist twists, and scissor kicks to the gentle strains of easy listening music. A stylish and energetic leader, she regularly interrupted her routine to cheer on her students with exhortations of the “Come on, you can do it” variety or to demonstrate variations they could do at home or in the car.
Murder at the Spa Page 3