Top of the Hill, page 4
The toasts were in champagne and Mr. Cornwall shook his hand warmly and said, “You’ve done yourself proud, my boy. Now I know why you seemed on a private leave of absence the last few months at the office.” He had laughed heartily, but forgivingly. “Now,” he said, “you can stop racing around like a rooster in a henhouse and settle down and do the work you’re really capable of.” What Cornwall didn’t know was that since Michael had met Tracy, his work had seemed all the more unreal, misted over, remote, to him. Once, when he had been away on a field trip for a few days and returned to New York, he had just hurried to put his bags away in his own apartment and gone over to Tracy’s place, even though he knew she wouldn’t get back from her job for more than an hour. He had started a fire in the fireplace and without putting on the lights had sat staring at the flames, lost in reverie he could not have described. Tracy had let herself in quietly and while he hadn’t known she was there had watched him. Then she had gone over to him and kissed him softly on the back of the neck. He had pulled her around onto his lap and just held her, the both of them not moving. “Darling,” she said softly, “I’m worried about you.”
“Worried?” He was surprised. “Why?”
“When you’re alone—like just now—you look—well—I guess the word is melancholy.”
“What’ve I got to be melancholy about?”
“You’ll have to tell me.”
“I couldn’t,” he said, “because as far as I know I don’t feel melancholy.”
“Sometime,” she said, “you’ll have to tell me about your past.”
“I don’t have a past.”
She ignored that. “Your other women, how you grew up, so I’ll know why you’re like you are now, why I love you.”
“You love me because I adore you.”
“Nonsense.” She got up from his lap. “I need a drink. And you look as though you do, too.”
She went into the kitchen to get some ice and he sat staring into the fire. His past—the almost demented mother, her maternal instinct gone rank because of a random death; the clumsy, fat, unpleasant child; the inability or unwillingness to make friends, the loneliness; the recklessness on ski slopes, in the surf, in the air; and then all that behind him as though it never existed and his falling into the false mold of the proper young executive, the meaningless, crowded company of easy unloved debutantes, actresses, divorcees, other men’s wives, the wariness with women that had kept him from falling in love until the age of thirty—tell her all that? Never, he thought. It would weigh on her, on both of them, would darken their lives, crop up at bad moments. If he was putting on a show of being the lighthearted, careless, humorous young lover, it was for both their sakes, and if it kept their love unshadowed, the deception was valuable. He had become an expert at deception at the age of twelve and it was too great an asset to lose.
They had had their drinks and had made love all evening after that and then had gone for a late supper to a little place Michael frequented, where a young hawkfaced Frenchman named Antoine Ferre played the piano marvelously and sang sad songs in French, Italian and English, which made Tracy’s eyes glisten with unshed tears, although she prided herself on being a hardheaded woman who was miserly with her emotions.
As they drove into New York after the wedding, Tracy said, “Well, it’s over.”
“On the contrary, it’s just begun.”
Tracy laughed. “Shall we consider this our first marital disagreement?”
“Agreed,” he said. And he laughed, too.
They flew out to Aspen for the honeymoon. Tracy didn’t ski and had no intention of learning, but she knew that Michael had skied when he was younger and yearned for the snow and she said that she loved mountains and cold weather and besides she was friendly with a couple who had a small house there who had offered to lend it to them for two weeks.
The snow was good, the weather perfect for a mountain honeymoon and he skied blithely all day, with the old exaltation that he had thought he had forgotten. He left for the slopes early each morning, leaving Tracy lying cuddled lazily in bed. During the day she took long walks in the bulky fur coat he had bought her for a wedding present, and when he saw her in the early evening in the bar they had chosen for their own after the last run down the hill, she was rosy from the cold and looked, he thought, like a glorious eighteen-year-old girl.
He had been stopped on the slopes and warned by a patrolman that his lift ticket would be taken away from him if he was caught speeding down the hills again, endangering not only his life but that of the other skiers on the slope. “I’m on my honeymoon, pal,” Michael had explained, “and I’m celebrating and I sure don’t want to kill anybody, especially myself.”
The patrolman had grinned and said, “Okay, partner. Just make sure my head is turned the other way when you go past. And if you can’t restrain yourself, there’s a downhill race on Friday and nobody’ll try to slow you down. You’re pretty old for that sort of thing, but you look as if you won’t disgrace yourself. And give my regards to the bride.” After that, they had skied down together, fast, but careful to stay on the edge of the run just at the rim of the trees, where there was nobody in their way. Michael invited the patrolman, who was perhaps twenty-two years old, to have a drink with him and his wife and the patrolman had kept staring dumbly at Tracy over his hot wine and stuttered when he answered her questions. “Man,” he said, after telling her how he had come to meet Michael, “I wouldn’t take any chances with my neck if I was married to you ”
Tracy had chuckled at that and patted the young man’s hand. “You don’t know how hard I had to work to get him,” she said.
“I bet,” the patrolman said.
Michael ordered another round of drinks and the young man asked where he’d learned to ski the way he did. “Back East, then out in California,” Michael said. “Then I was an instructor for a season when I was your age.”
“How come you didn’t keep it up?”
“I went to New York to make my fortune and wait until Tracy Lawrence came along.”
“Maybe I ought to try New York myself, before I get too old,” the patrolman said. He finished his drink and stood up. “Got to go now. And Mr. Storrs, anytime you want to ski the way you were going this afternoon, remember you got a wife at home waiting for you.”
“Will do,” Michael said.
The young man waved stiffly, took one more hungry look at Tracy and clumped off in his boots past the noisy skiers at the bar.
“Nice young man,” Tracy said.
“He looked as though he wanted to grab you and take you home under his arm.”
Tracy chuckled. “You don’t mind if your bride gets a little attention, do you?”
“A little, okay. He was dealing it out in wagonloads.”
“I see how the girls keep looking at you. By the way, what do you do with them up on the mountain all day long?” she said teasingly.
“It’s ten below zero up there, darling. There’s very little fucking over ten thousand feet in altitude in the winter in the Rockies.”
“You mean I have to worry about the summers—at sea level.” She was still teasing him.
“I want you to remember one thing,” he said, more seriously. “For the first time in my life I have discovered the ultimate sexual pleasure—monogamy. I invite you to join me.”
“Will do, as you put it,” she said.
For a moment they just sat in silence, soberly, looking into each other’s eyes.
“You’re a different man up here,” she said.
“Than where?”
“New York. This seems to be your climate, your ambiance.”
“Am I better for it or worse?”
“Better, I think. I haven’t caught you looking melancholy since we drove up from Denver. And you seem ten years younger.”
He laughed. “That’s just what I was thinking about you when you walked in tonight.”
“Maybe we ought to set up housekeeping in a place like this and never go down off the hill.” There was a note of wistfulness in her voice. “Maybe I’m a mountain woman, myself.”
“I have some money,” Michael said, “and there’s more coming to me when I reach thirty-five, but if I want to continue eating I’m afraid I have to stay in New York.”
“Ah, New York,” she said ambiguously. “You hate it and love it at the same time. Everything presses on you—the good things as well as the bad things. You always seem to be behind schedule there. Here you go fast on skis—there it’s your soul that’s racing. Here, hardly anybody seems to read the newspapers. You forget there’s a war on, people killing each other in the jungle, Americans. In New York, when you read the Times you feel it’s intolerable, that your own security, your good meals, your warm bed is unbearably selfish. You look at the faces of the people in the street and you wonder how they can take it day after day. Don’t you ever feel that way?”
“I know what you mean about the other people but I can’t do anything about it, so I try not to think about it.”
“Are they liable to take you?”
“I’m too old. I’m safe.” What he didn’t tell her was that when he was twenty-four, in his last semester at Wharton, when the war in Vietnam was accelerating, he had, after a particularly boring class in statistics, almost without thinking about it, gone down to a recruiting office and said he wanted to enlist. The sergeant at the desk had looked at him dubiously, as though he were drunk or on dope, but had helped him fill out the form and sent him on for his physical ex- . amination. The doctor who examined him was a weary, slow-moving captain who looked too old to be just a captain and who kept humming tunelessly to himself as though the whole business bored him. But when he put the stethoscope above Michael’s chest he became more interested. After a minute or so he stepped back and took the stethoscope plugs from his ears and said, “Sorry, son.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the Army can’t use you. You’ve got a heart murmur. Maybe you’ll die young and maybe you’ll live to be a hundred, but either way it won’t be in uniform. You can put on your shirt now.” Michael was stunned. The last time he had been to a doctor had been in Green Hollow when he had had a bout with pneumonia, but that had been more than a year before and the doctor hadn’t said anything about a heart murmur then.
He had kept the news to himself. He hadn’t told anyone that he was going to enlist and now he wasn’t going to let anyone know that he had been rejected. But he brooded over it and finally went to see the doctor at the University Hospital for a checkup. He told the doctor about the heart murmur and the doctor ran a series of tests on him. “Mr. Storrs,” the doctor said, “either that Army doctor is the least competent man in the history of military medicine or he’s running-a one man campaign against our being in Vietnam. Your heart is as normal as could be. My advice is to forget the whole thing.” Michael couldn’t forget it, but he didn’t try to enlist again. From time to time he couldn’t help but wonder what his life would have been like if he had run up against another doctor in the Army hospital that morning.
“Safe,” he repeated to Tracy. He could have said, saved, and told her the story, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to talk about on your honeymoon.
“I’m married to a safe old man,” Tracy said. “Thank God.”
On Friday, he ran the downhill race. He had scouted the course the day before and memorized the points where he would have to check if he didn’t want to wipe out. It was a tough course, long, with difficult sneaky turns and a couple of places where you were in the air for twenty feet or so and some hidden, sharp drops. He had borrowed a helmet, but had neglected to get himself long racing skis and now, looking at the course, he regretted it. He knew he would regret it even more later. He had a late starting number and he watched intently as the men before him made their descent and noticed that the good ones hardly checked at all, taking everything full out. When his turn came and he skated off he knew he wasn’t going to check anywhere, either. He had never gone so fast and even with his goggles his eyes began to tear and he nearly made it to the finish line, where he knew Tracy was standing, watching for him. But just before the last schuss there was a bump that sent him into the air unexpectedly and he came down in a pinwheel, his ski tips digging into the snow. Luckily, the skis came off and he rolled downhill another fifty feet of snow, head over heels, before he came to a stop. He stood up quickly to show Tracy that he was unhurt, but he had to limp down the rest of the way because his knee had twisted in the fall.
As he approached where Tracy was standing next to the patrolman, the young man said, “Your husband is out of his ever-loving mind. I should never have let him talk me out of taking away his lift ticket.”
But Michael was grinning as he came up to her. “A marvelous run,” he said.
“But not for old men,” the patrolman said, his voice unfriendly, and turned away.
Michael looked after the man puzzledly. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked Tracy.
“By the time you were in the middle of the course,” Tracy said, “he said you didn’t know the difference between skiing and Russian roulette.”
Michael shrugged. “Kids. They think they know everything. I’m a safe old man. Now let’s go to a doctor and have him tape up my knee.”
He limped off, Tracy holding his arm, without watching the rest of the race. For the rest of the honeymoon he didn’t put on a pair of skis again and they had a fine time spending all day and all night together.
When they got to New York Michael finally moved into Tracy’s apartment. Except for an old leather chair that Michael liked to read in, he sold his furniture to a junkman. “Ten years too late,” Tracy said.
She turned out to be a good cook, and smugly satisfied with the place they were living in, with themselves and each other, they felt no need for anybody else and rushed home immediately after work to help each other in the small kitchen, eat on a table before the fire with a bottle of wine, spend the evening reading and comparing notes on what they had done during the day. When Michael was sent out of town on a job he tried to cut his trips as short as possible and called home every evening for long talks with Tracy over the telephone.
The euphoria of their honeymoon lasted until the day Aldridge was killed and she told him she wanted a child.
CHAPTER FIVE
The following Saturday morning he woke early. Tracy was still asleep and he dressed quietly in a pair of old corduroy pants and a windbreaker. But before he could get out of the room, Tracy woke and said, “Good morning.” He was on the other side of the bed and he could see her looking at him, observing how he was dressed.
“Good morning, darling,” he said and went over and kissed her. She moved her head quickly so that he just brushed her cheek. She smelled of sleep and faintly of perfume. “I’ll be back by the middle of the afternoon,” he said.
“Where’re you going?”
“It’s just. . .” he began.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “I know.” She turned so that her back was toward him, and covered her head with an upthrown arm.
“You have to understand,” he said, “I. . .”
“Don’t try to explain. I’ll see you later.”
He shrugged and went out of the room.
When he got to the field in New Jersey, the wind was gusting and the wind sock blowing, first in one direction and then another. McCain and his assistant, a lanky blond boy, were in the shed, drinking coffee. McCain looked up at him, without surprise, as he entered the shed. “Early today, aren’t you, Mr. Storrs?” McCain said. They had seen each other twice during the week, at the two funerals, but had said nothing to each other.
“I have things to do in New York this afternoon,” Michael said.
“I thought I’d just take a couple of nice little mediocre jumps and get back. Am I the only one this morning?”
McCain nodded. “The only one,” he said. “Trade’s been slow this week. And the weather’s not so hot. You sure you want to go?” “Sure.”
McCain got up slowly and after Michael had put on the jump suit and boots which he kept in a locker in the shed, and the lanky blond boy had helped him strap on the main parachute and the flat back-up belly parachute, they all went out to where the plane was still tied down next to the strip. “The wind’s tricky this morning,” McCain said, as he started the engine. “Stay well north of the field.” There was a stand of tall pines that bordered the southern end of the field and it was a standard warning each time McCain took anybody up. “It’s not a day to do anything fancy. Pull it at no less than three thousand. Understand?”
“Okay.”
McCain gunned the motor and they took off. The plane shuddered and bucked in the wind. Michael had felt sleepy and slow-moving all the way out from New York but now the cold slap of the wind coming through the open door woke him completely and he felt the old expectation, an electric sense, total alertness, the tingle of mindless, ecstatic, primitive pleasure, as the adrenaline started pumping.
At 7,500 feet, McCain gave him the signal and he went out. There was the great feeling first of immense, unguided abandonment to gravity, then of soaring exaltation as he hurtled through space, planing, swerving, supported by the rushing air, purposeful as a bird. His hand was on the rip-cord handle and he didn’t bother to look at the altimeter on his wrist and the stand of pines was getting closer and closer, now seeming to be rushing up at him, dark in the windy morning sunlight. It was with regret that he pulled and felt the jerk as the parachute opened above him and he pulled at the toggles to keep away from the stand of pines. He landed hard, with the wind throwing him over at the last moment, not twenty yards from the edge of the woods. He snapped out of the parachute harness and stood up, breathing deeply, sorry it was over, his mind and spirit drowned, overwhelmed, full only of flight.
