Come Winter

Two Mary Margaret

Semanee Valley was an island.

Not too distant from that sophisticated urban center from which Sandy had stolen the parka, it was nonetheless totally removed from it in tone and style. The area had been conceived of and designed as a self-contained town, a decision undoubtedly arrived at after taking one look at the existing shamble of buildings not thirty-seven miles away. Unlike many ski areas, there was no base lodge as such, but rather a collection of tastefully executed hotels and inns clustered about the highest mountain in the range, the mother of a family of lesser hills that surrounded it. Semanee Lodge was the biggest hotel in the valley, but the others were equally well-designed and excellently managed. The planners of the valley had connected the hotels, shops, restaurants, and discotheques with a simple grid arrangement of wooden sidewalks, redwood two-by-fours spaced to swallow the falling snow, illuminated by lamps that flickered with imitation gaslight. At night, the valley looked like the opening shot of the village in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. During the day, its architecture snuggled harmoniously against the spectacular background of Semanee Peak and its suckling brood — wood, stone, glass, nature in realized fantasy.

The snow which had started the night before in celebration of the winter solstice, continued into Friday morning, accompanied by the high winds that yesterday had been tumbling the chairs on the north face. We tried a few runs down from the midpoint on the southern side (unaccompanied by Foderman, who had not received the promised call from Schwartz, and who was either sulking, pouting, or weeping) and then decided to call it quits. It was three days before Christmas, and none of us had as yet done any shopping.

The stores in the valley were largely oriented to skiing needs, of course, but they offered a surprisingly large selection of other merchandise as well, ranging all the way from artsy-craftsy crap to hand-wrought jewelry and Indian rugs. The better to keep our gifts secret (even the tightest triumvirate keeps some secrets), the three of us split up and went our separate ways, arranging to meet for lunch in a place that served charcoal-broiled sirloins, baked potatoes and salad for a dollar and ninety-five cents, cheap at half the price.

The girl in green was looking at a pewter pot in the second shop I entered.

The bell over the door tinkled, I saw the girl, decided to leave, realized she had already spotted me, and wondered what I was afraid of. All right, she had seen Sandy swiping the parka. Let her prove it. I closed the door firmly behind me, and started directly up the aisle toward her. My dear old mother, when she was not worrying silly about my father crashing into a lamppost in a drunken stupor, told me again and again that the only way to conquer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune was to confront them. I was ready for that confrontation now. High noon in the heart of America’s vast snow country.

“Hello,” I said, “how are you?”

The girl in green seemed surprised by my boldness. She had undoubtedly decided that since she was the only witness to the multimillion-dollar robbery three days earlier, we desperadoes would forever avoid her, would spend the rest of our lives like Jean Valjean fleeting Javert. The initial surprise gave way to a quick grin that cracked hard and sharp across her face. She had nice teeth. Otherwise, she was a singularly plain girl, with a dumpling face and frizzy red hair and freckles spattered like specks of paprika across the bridge of her nose and her cheeks.

“Hey, hi,” she said.

“Been up there today?” I asked.

“Just one run.”

“Pretty miserable.”

“Ghastly,” she said. Her voice was a trifle grating, rising in inflection so that every sentence she uttered sounded like a question. “You guys are pretty good skiers,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“I watched you yesterday.”

“Really? We didn’t notice.”

“Who’s the fat man?”

“A friend.”

“Really? Is he Jewish?”

“What?” I said.

“Is he a Jew?” she said.

Her question, to say the least, was somewhat startling. If you are born into a certain New York socioeconomic strata, you don’t go around asking if people are Jewish. You just don’t. You dress British, and you think Yiddish, and sometimes you even contribute funds for the planting of trees in Israel. Several questions of my own came immediately to mind. As, for example: (1) How had she been able to guess, from her distant glimpses of Foderman, that he was Jewish? (2) How was she able to tell for certain that I was not Jewish, and therefore risk asking a possibly offensive question? and (3) What the hell difference did it make?

“He’s a Buddhist,” I said.

“He’s a Jew,” she answered. “Who are you kidding?”

“So?” I said.

“So?” she answered. She had a direct way of looking at a person, green eyes opened wide and unblinking. “He’s going to break his leg if he isn’t careful. He’s in way over his depth.” She paused, grinned, and said, “Or is that the idea?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“To break his leg,” she said.

“I still don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you know what I mean,” she said.

I really didn’t know what she meant We certainly had no intention of deliberately breaking Foderman’s leg, if that’s what she meant. We had made some jokes about it, sure. But fun is fun, and purposely setting out to break a person’s leg (the right one, no less, for the joke to be effective) was something beyond our engineering skill and beneath our sensibility. Anyway, Schwartz was already gone; the joke would be lost entirely if Foderman followed east without his accompanying mirror image. And besides, all our kidding had been done in private; unless this freckle-faced fink was blessed with extrasensory perception, how had she possibly reached the ridiculous conclusion that we were skiing with Foderman in order to hurt him? The entire concept was preposterous. I decided to change the subject.

“That’s a nice pot,” I said.

“It’s pewter,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“I admire the way you ripped off that parka,” she said.

I blinked.

“Real finesse,” she said. “Want to stick this under your sweater for me?”

“Stick it up your ass,” I said, and walked out of the shop.

It was snowing quite heavily, and the wind was murderous. From out of the vortex of spiraling biting miniscule flakes, there materialized a hairy, three-headed, shambling monster bellowing to the wind. My encounter with the girl had shaken me more than I’d realized; my initial instinct was to turn and run from this snow beast advancing inexorably in its own white cloud, roaring what seemed at first to be a message of doom. I froze to the sidewalk in panic. The creature lumbered closer, reformed itself in a shifting crystalline miasma, nucleus spreading and tearing apart into three separate hairy cells, still advancing. Squinting through the snow, I now recognized two boys and a girl, each wearing long raccoon coats, arms wrapped about each other, shouting, “Get Semanee!” at the top of their lungs again and again, “Get Semanee! Get Semanee!”, stomping past, almost knocking me off the sidewalk, and then moving off into the flying snow, merging again into a single marauding hair-covered animal, and disappearing entirely from sight as the last echo of their chant died on the wind. Immediately ahead of me now, emerging from the same dizzying tunnel that had spawned the first apparition, there appeared an amoeba-like blob threatening to swallow the valley, advancing on the sidewalk to assume discernible shapes — a half-dozen skiers bellowing, “Up Snowclad!”, all of them wearing buttons that read, “Get Semanee!”

The dawn came a little late.

When we’d first arrived and bought our lift tickets, we were each given buttons bearing the legend, “There is no Snowclad!” We learned later that Snowclad was a fiercely competitive resort some hundred miles to the north, boasting a higher elevation and a greater average yearly snowfall. These, then, were the outraged Snowclad people, here to defend their honor, making goddamn fools of themselves by parading in a snowstorm and bleating the ridiculous words “Up Snowclad!” and “Get Semanee!” What they intended to get was beyond me. The valley? The mountain itself? But onward they came, more and more of them, in pairs and in threes, in dozens and droves, completely filling the wooden walks of the town, wearing their childish buttons and chanting their fanatical slogans — “Get Semanee! Up Snowclad! Get Semanee!” — while the snow kept falling and the wind kept blowing and the end of the world seemed near.

I bought Sandy an exquisite cameo brooch with a profile as delicate as her own, and for David I found a white canvas, shag-lined, Swedish Army coat with dozens of huge pockets. I carried both gifts back to the hotel, and then went over to the steak joint to meet them. Sandy was already there, drinking a Manhattan.

“The streets are full of Mongolian ponies,” she said.

“I ran into them.”

“Goddamn idiots,” she said.

“I also ran into Miss Nemesis.”

“What’d she want?”

“She asked me to steal a pewter pot.”

“Did you tell her to flake off?”

“I did. She thinks we’re trying to break Foderman’s leg.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sandy said.

“Of course it is.”

“Why would we want to break Foderman’s leg?”

“Exactly.”

“More goddamn crazy people in the world,” Sandy said. “You know what those jackasses in the street are?”

“No, what are they?”

“Conforming nonconformists.”

“Thank you, Dr. Crackers.”

“Ja,” Sandy said, “dot’s right, don’t make fun. Conforming nonconformists. You tink they are free, Peter? Ah, no. Nein, liebchen. Their behavior is rigidly prescribed.”

KR: But why a sestina?

ME: I don’t understand your question.

KR: Well, to begin with, I didn’t know poetry interested you.

ME: It doesn’t.

KR: Yet you wrote a poem.

ME: I was just fooling around with one, that’s all.

KR: And you chose the sestina form?

ME: Yes.

KR: Well, that’s my question. Why such a rigid form?

ME: I thought it would be fun. If you’re going to try writing a poem, you might as well start with a challenge. Are you familiar with sestinas?

KR: I know a little about them.

ME: There are six stanzas, you see, each composed of six lines...

KR: Yes, I know.

ME: And the end words of the lines in the first stanza are repeated in different order in the next five stanzas. No rhymes. Just those six recurring words at the end of each line in each stanza.

KR: But in different order.

ME: Yes. Different in each stanza.

KR: And the order is a fixed one.

ME: Yes, it’s predetermined. I mean, that’s the form. You have to use the end words in the order prescribed. Otherwise you don’t write a sestina. It’s one, two, three, four, five, six in the first stanza, and then six, one, five, two, four, three in the next stanza, and so on.

KR: One might say the end words are repeated throughout in a fixed pattern of cruciate retrogradation.

ME: Thanks, smart-ass.

KR: I told you I knew a little about sestinas.

ME: You seem to know a lot about them. Aren’t you going to mention the three-line envoi at the end of the poem?

KR: Why does my knowledge infuriate you?

ME: I don’t like being put on, Doctor.

KR: I merely wanted to find out what your understanding of the form was.

ME: Do I pass the test? Do I understand it?

KR: You seem to understand it. Why did you pick this particularly inflexible mode of expression?

ME: I told you. It seemed like a challenge. Also, it’s repetitive and hypnotic, and anyway, go to hell.

KR: What was the poem about?

ME: The three of us.

KR: You and Sandy and...

ME: Yes.

KR: Then perhaps you chose the form so you could superimpose order upon a chaotic relationship.

ME: The relationship is not chaotic.

KR: How did you come upon the form to begin with?

ME: What do you mean?

KR: The sestina.

ME: I was looking up “sex” in the dictionary.

KR: Are you putting me on now?

ME: No, I’m putting you down. There’s a difference, Doctor.

“Where are you, Peter?” Sandy asked.

“Huh?”

“Did you hear anything I said?”

“All of it.”

“What’s bothering you? That girl?”

“I guess.”

“Forget her. She can’t touch us.”

The girl in green arrived at Semanee Lodge shortly before dinner that night. I was coming out of the bar, and was crossing the lobby on the way to my room, when I saw her standing at the desk. There were two pieces of luggage at her feet. I felt the way I’d felt earlier, when I saw the hairy apparition through the swirling snow; I wanted to turn and run. It was too late. She had seen me.

“Hey, hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said, and cautiously approached her. She was signing the register. She had luggage with her. She was checking into the goddamn hotel.

“You the welcoming committee?” she asked, and put the pen back on the registration card holder, and then smiled.

“Nope. Didn’t even know you were coming.”

“Neither did I,” she said. “I stayed here last year, but they were booked solid when I wrote in December.”

My heart was pounding. What are you afraid of? I asked myself. Nothing, I told myself. I was scared witless.

“I’ve been staying at the Inn,” she said. “And calling here every day to see if there were any cancellations.”

“I take it there was a cancellation.”

“Nope. Somebody checked out unexpectedly.”

“Schwartz,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“So here I am. Are you guys staying here?”

“Yes.”

“Well, good.”

“Yes, wonderful,” I said.

“That’s Room 207, Miss,” the desk clerk said.

“Would you have someone take up the bags, please?” she answered, and turned again to me. “Why don’t you buy me a drink?”

“I just had a drink.”

“Have another one.”

“I had another one, too.”

“Are you afraid of me or something?”

“Why should I be?”

“God knows. Shall I buy you a drink?”

“That might be better.”

“Why?”

“The other way sounds like blackmail.”

“Blackmail? What are you talking about?”

“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“The parka? Who cares about that? I’m trying to make your acquaintance, jerk.”

“Why?”

“I like your style,” she said, and looped her arm through mine, and grinned. “Okay?”

We studied each other. “Okay,” I said, and we walked toward the bar. I was still frightened. She made me frightened.

The bartender on duty was our old friend Robert the Rapist. “Hey, hi,” she said, apparently having made his acquaintance during her previous stay at the Lodge, and eager now to renew the doubtless fascinating relationship. Robert looked at her vaguely. “Mary Margaret Buono,” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” Robert said. “How are you, Mary Margaret?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“You’re back, huh?”

“I’m back,” she said. “I’ve got a dry-cleaning bill I’ve been saving for you.”

“Huh?” he said.

“What are you drinking?” she asked me.

“Scotch on the rocks.”

“Make it two,” she said to Robert.

“Nice to see you again,” Robert said, and went off to get the drinks.

“What’s your name?” she asked me.

“Peter.”

“Mary Margaret.”

“I gathered.”

“Nice to meet you.”

In the next half hour of conversation, I tried to analyze why I was afraid of Mary Margaret. (This is a very good thing to do when you are away from your shrink. To begin with, it helps you to understand yourself, and at the same time it makes you feel you don’t need a doctor at all. It is very beneficial. It is also difficult. It becomes even more difficult when you’re trying to do it while another person is filling you in on her life and times.) Mary Margaret was a marathon talker. She was also a pretty good drinker. I stopped counting after her fifth scotch. I think I also stopped listening, so occupied was I in trying to learn why she frightened me, while simultaneously trying to keep up with her phenomenal capacity for putting away the sauce. We both got pretty drunk in that next half hour. That’s the only way I can possibly explain my fear.

The first thing I considered in the analysis of my fear was her resemblance to Rhoda. But why should that have frightened me? Besides, whereas my first impression had been of a girl remarkably similar in appearance to Rhoda, closer scrutiny along the bar convinced me I had made not only a visual error, but a personality goof as well. Mary Margaret was as unlike Rhoda as two turnips in a cornfield. I rejected the Twin Sister Theory and continued to examine the nudging unconscious urge to get away from her before she somehow hurt me. In the meantime, we kept drinking scotch as though the barley supply were in imminent ecological danger.

“I’m twenty-four years old,” she said, “and I’ve got a B.A. in education from Hunter College, which thank God I’ll never have to use. I earn on the average of fifteen hundred dollars a week, most of which I sock away in the bank as insurance against the day my hands begin to wither. It’s a nice feeling, believe me.”

“Fifteen hundred a week,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

Occupied as I was with self-analysis and drinking, I could not at the moment pay any real attention to Mary Margaret’s peculiar problem, which at first glance appeared to be schizophrenia of the paranoid type, with accompanying delusions of grandeur. I listened nonetheless while she recited a touching Rags-to-Riches tale (Italian Immigrant variety) about herself and two brothers living in Queens with Mama and Papa in the shadow of the Triboro Bridge, Papa eking out a mean living as a cab driver, Mama employed as a file clerk with a Wall Street firm of lawyers, all of it changing the moment Mary Margaret hit it big. She was somewhat vague as to exactly how she’d hit it big, seeming a bit embarrassed about revealing the source of that fifteen hundred bucks a week. This led me to reconsider my earlier appraisal of Mary Margaret as blackmailer, and to analyze this concept in terms of my irritational fear.

The fact was that she had witnessed a crime, and that I could reasonably be considered an accomplice to that crime, having acted in concert with Sandy when she was ripping off the parka. In which case, should Mary Margaret decide to go to the police, there existed the possibility that David, Sandy, and I would be charged with larceny and spend the rest of our lives in prison, where David would become star soloist with the prison orchestra, and where I would learn firsthand how to treat the criminally insane, thereby realizing all my psychoanalytic ambitions. Sandy, meanwhile, would languish in the women’s section and become a notorious lesbian. My mother would bring me chocolates and cigarettes every other Tuesday, remarking on my prison pallor and asking if the food was good. Eventually, I would be returned to society after having paid my debt, severely chastened, old and stooped, marveling at the fact that a joint Russian-American-Chinese team had landed eighteen men on Jupiter just the day before. In my boozy state, the notion seemed more amusing than frightening. If Mary Margaret ever did turn informer, there simply was no way to prove that Sandy had actually stolen the parka. Who was to say she hadn’t bought it back in the city? Was a person supposed to save all her sales slips in the unlikely event some lunatic might one day accuse her of shoplifting? Preposterous. Then why was I frightened?

“My father used to drive only at night because there was more money in it — you know, the traffic’s lighter and the tips are bigger. He got held up six times in Harlem. The last time he was sixty-four years old. He got out of the cab with a monkey wrench, and chased that spade crook for eight blocks, finally catching him, and telling him if he didn’t return all the money and pay the cab fare as well, he was going to be wearing the wrench around his head for the rest of his life. P.S., the spade coughed up. I used to love his working nights. He’d get home for breakfast at eight in the morning, go to sleep, wake up at two, and then spend the rest of the day with me. I told all the kids he was a detective. He looked like a detective, you know? Well, his friends still call him Big Buono. Even now — hell, he’s almost seventy — he can lift a refrigerator six inches off the floor. Strong as an ox. I love that guy. I just wish he’d get over this hang-up he has about his sister.”

“What hang-up is that?” I asked.

“He thinks he killed her,” Mary Margaret said.

“Oh.”

“Actually, she died of scarlet fever, everybody knows that, it’s on the death certificate. But what happened was he’d gone for a walk with her the day before she took sick, and they got caught in a rainstorm, and then she came down with this fever of a hundred and four, and he figured it was because they got caught in the rain. Go tell him otherwise. He’s yay big and yay wide, his friends call him Big Buono...”

“Yes, you told me that.”

“But he still cries like a baby whenever he thinks back to that walk he and his kid sister took in the rain, and he tells anyone who’ll listen that if it hadn’t been for him, she’d still be alive today.”

As Mary Margaret prattled on about the possible real reasons for her father’s feelings of guilt (Had he, for example, seen his sister naked in the tub or copped a feel on the fire escape?) I considered the possibility that my own suppressed feelings of guilt were causing in me an unconscious clamoring for retribution, and that Rhoda (in the guise of Mary Margaret) satisfied this unfulfilled wish for punishment while simultaneously posing a threat that punishment might actually be meted, thereby causing extreme anxiety manifesting itself in the form of unreasoning fear — how do you like that one, Dr. Crackers? I rejected the possibility on the grounds that the resemblance to Rhoda had already been disproved, and besides, the whole guilt theory was Krakauer’s, not mine. So why was I afraid of Mary Margaret? I asked silently, as I tilted yet another scotch on the rocks.

“I thought all that would change when he retired,” Mary Margaret said. “I mean, a person can go crazy sitting in a cab all night with his own thoughts, don’t you think? Especially when he keeps blaming himself for killing a nine-year-old kid. So when I started making such big money, I told him he could quit the cab, that I would take care of him, he could go to ball games, he could smoke his guinea stinkers, he could do whatever he liked from now on, without having to worry about a thing. The idea was to get him to stop thinking about his little sister all the time. So do you want to know what he does now? Instead of sitting in the cab and thinking about his sister, he sits in the parlor and thinks about her.”

Mary Margaret shook her head. I, too, shook my head, but not in sympathy with her crazy old coot of a father. I shook it because I was still no closer to understanding why I considered her such a threat. She started to tell me about the eldest of her two brothers, something about him wanting to be a harness-race jockey (I think she said), another lunatic in a totally insane household — fifteen hundred bucks a week indeed! It suddenly occurred to me that Mary Margaret Buono was a call girl.

“Are you a call girl?” I asked.

“What?” she said, and burst out laughing. “Of course not,” she said. “Who would pay me?”

“Then how do you earn fifteen hundred dollars a week?”

“Some weeks even more.”

“How?”

“I’m a fashion model.”

I now knew why I was afraid of Mary Margaret Buono. Mary Margaret Buono, as I had suspected all along, was completely and totally out of her bird.

“A fashion model,” I said.

“Yes.”

(What do you model? I wanted to ask. Circus tents?) “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“Mm.”

“You’re thinking I’m not beautiful enough to be a fashion model.”

“Why on earth would I think that?”

“Because it’s true,” Mary Margaret said. “But take a look at my hands.”

I took a look at her hands. I am not an expert on hands, but I had certainly never seen lovelier hands in my life. From wrist to fingertip, from knuckle to joint, in length, width, girth, and depth, her hands were spectacularly beautiful. I fell immediately in love with her hands. I wanted to touch her hands and be touched by her hands, I wanted to sculpt her hands, I wanted to write sestinas about her hands, I wanted to go to bed with her hands. They did not seem to belong to her. You saw a pair of hands like that, and you expected someone tall and willowy and incredibly good-looking to be attached to them. You did not expect freckle-faced, pudgy, dumpy Mary Margaret to own those hands.

I once saw an old movie on television where a concert pianist had a terrible accident, and he lost his hands, and the surgeons gave him a pair of hands that used to belong to a strangler. So every time the pianist started to play Chopin, he got the urge to choke somebody. Looking at Mary Margaret’s hands, I had the distinct impression that the operation had been performed on her in reverse. She was really a lady wrestler or a roller-derby champ, and she had lost her hands in a six-car collision, and they had grafted the hands of a dead harpist onto her wrists.

“Those are some hands,” I said.

“They’re my fortune. Anytime you see a pair of hands on a television commercial or in a magazine ad, chances are they’re mine.”

“Those are really beautiful hands,” I said.

“Yes, they are,” she said, without false modesty. “I’m really impressed with them. I think I inherited them from my grandmother.”

“Those are really the goddamnedest hands I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“It’s funny I didn’t notice them before.”

“Lots of people don’t notice hands,” Mary Margaret said.

“I’ve got very good-looking feet,” I said. “But they’re nothing compared to your hands.”

“Well, thank you,” she said.

“I’d be happy to show you my feet sometime, if you’re interested.”

“I’d love to see them right this minute,” she said.

“In that case,” I said, and reached down and unzipped first the right fur-lined boot and then the left fur-lined boot, and then took off first the right sock and then the left sock, and got off the bar stool, and put my feet close together and said, “Voilà!”

“They’re extraordinary feet,” Mary Margaret said.

“It’s the arches,” I said.

“And also the way the toes are angled. There’s a very good gentle angle on the toes.”

“Yes.”

“I think I could develop a foot fetish for feet like those,” she said.

“They are beautiful,” I said.

“Does your grandmother have beautiful feet?”

“My grandmother is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s quite all right.”

“Did she have beautiful feet when she was living?”

“I never had the pleasure of witnessing my grandmother’s feet,” I said.

“The only reason I ask...”

“Yes, is because...”

“Yes, because my grandmother had beautiful hands, you see...”

“Yes, I know.”

“You’ve seen my grandmother’s hands?”

“Never. I have never witnessed neither her hands nor my own grandmother’s feet, may she rest in peace.”

“Peter,” she said, “I would like to propose a toast.”

“Just let me get my socks back on,” I said.

“What for? I love looking at your feet.”

“Yes, but I don’t want everyone in the place running over to kiss them. Now where’d I put...? Okay. Okay.”

“I would like to propose a toast to...”

“Just a minute, please.”

“Did you see The French Connection?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the scene where Popeye...”

“That’s Faulkner.”

“No, that’s The French Connection.”

“The scene with the corncob?”

“No, the scene with the feet.”

“Damn sock here doesn’t seem to...”

“Where he arrests this man...”

“Must be the wrong damn foot.”

“And asks him about his feet?”

“There we go.”

“Anyway, here’s a toast to...”

“Ooops, caught the little pinkie there.”

“Do you want to hear this toast or not?”

“Just let me get this other one.”

“What’d you say your grandmother’s name was?”

“Grandma.”

“Yes, mine too.”

“There we are, all tucked away. What’s the toast?”

“Here’s to picking feet in Poughkeepsie.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“I thought you saw The French Connection.”

“Yes, but dubbed in English.”

“Oh,” Mary Margaret said.

“You two are getting ossified,” Robert said.

“You still owe me for my dress.”

“What dress?”

“It cost me two dollars and fifty cents to have it dry cleaned.”

“Huh?” Robert said.

“Robert,” I said, “I think we need another round here.”

“I think you need a week in the drunk tank.”

“Robert’s from California,” Mary Margaret said.

“Two more of the same, please,” I said.

“Which is where he learned how to ruin a girl’s dress,” Mary Margaret said.

“Huh?” Robert said, and went off for the drinks.

It occurred to me that I still didn’t know why I was afraid of Mary Margaret. It also occurred to me that I wasn’t afraid of her any more.

In my room, I curled up for a short nap and almost missed dinner. It was ten minutes to eight when I shook myself from total stupor and discovered that seven fire engines were racing to a false alarm inside my skull, bells clanging, sirens blowing and engines roaring. I staggered into the bathroom, took two Bufferin, went back to the bed, and collapsed on it. At eight twenty-five, I went into the bathroom again, this time to throw up. Outside the bathroom window, several wild animals were clawing at the pane and bellowing to be let inside. The fire engines in my head went wailing away into the distance, probably en route to Spanish Harlem. I hunched over the bowl in misery, remembering a time long ago when my father (in one of his more endearing moments) came home of a New Year’s Eve and puked all over my bed. The smell of vomit had lingered in my nostrils till St. Swithin’s Day, after which it rained for forty days and forty nights in accordance with tradition. I flushed the toilet.

The bedroom had somehow become affixed to the turntable of an extremely large record player. I stood in the exact center of the room, where the spindle poked up through the hole in the record, and I watched everything going by at thirty-three-and-a-third while I listened to a tune that sounded curiously like the Stones doing Shostakovich. The bed went by, the door went by, the dresser went by, the bathroom went by, the windows went by. It certainly was snowing out there. I decided I would have to find the Manual/Reject switch or else throw up again. (When your father thinks he’s Ray Milland, you learn an awful lot about mice sticking their heads out of plaster cracks and being attacked by flying bats.) I had never before seen such an ugly bat with such gorgeous hands. Had I really exposed my feet to a passing subway train, thereby risking charges of indecent exposure, or had I only dreamt it? The windows went past again. It looked like one hell of a blizzard out there. The bed went past, and somebody knocked on it. “Who is it?” I asked, and watched the bathroom going by. “It’s me,” a voice said from the toilet bowl. “Who’s me?” I asked the snowstorm, and the dresser answered, “David. Open up.” I found the door on the third try, and discovered that by holding tightly to the knob I was able to go around with the room instead of having it go around me. “What the hell’s going on in there?” David asked, and I said, “Just a minute, please,” and debated whether I should let go of the knob with my right hand in order to grab the bolt in order to unlock the door, or whether I should continue hanging onto the knob and try unlocking the door with my left hand, a feat of ambidexterity that seemed light years beyond my capabilities of the moment. “Peter?” David said. “Yes, yes,” I said, and made a stab at the bolt with my left hand, missing, and decided to let go of the knob. The room began to revolve again. I grabbed the bolt with my right hand, seized the day as Chairman Mao and President Nixon had earlier both advised, unlocked the door, threw it open, and fell into David’s arms.

“Oh, man,” he said.

Considering my condition of not an hour before it was amazing that I could now sit in polite company around the acorn fireplace in the intimate lounge and discuss the possibility that by tomorrow we might be snowbound. I had taken a hot needlepoint shower at David’s insistence and then had dressed reluctantly for dinner, which I barely touched. Now we sat talking (or rather they sat talking) about the fury of the storm outside, they consisting of David, Sandy, and Foderman. Foderman was upset. Foderman was a pain in the ass, and he always was upset. He had still not heard from his medical sidekick and erstwhile vaudeville partner, and was afraid now that the storm might impair telephone service. Sandy suggested that he could always send a carrier pigeon, which Foderman did not find too terribly amusing. There is only so much you can say about snowstorms and delinquent telephone calls. I was about to suggest that if Foderman was really so concerned about Schwartz, he should pick up a phone and simply call his old buddy, but just then Mary Margaret wandered into the lounge and over to our exciting little conversational group. I introduced her to the others, and then sat back with my arms folded across my chest, listening and watching, grateful (in my present state) for the opportunity to serve as spectator and recorder, rather than participant.

“Buono,” Sandy said. “Is that Italian?”

“My father’s Italian,” Mary Margaret said. “My mother’s Irish. That’s where I get the red hair and the freckles.”

“I thought the word was ‘buoni,’” David said. “Ronzoni sono buoni.”

“That’s the plural.”

“What does it mean?”

“Good.”

“And are you good?” Sandy asked.

“When I’m good,” Mary Margaret said, “I’m very very good,” and smiled at Sandy. Sandy did not smile back. Mary Margaret looked suddenly bewildered.

“I once knew a neurosurgeon named Cativo,” Foderman said. “Dr. Benjamin Cativo. That means ‘bad’ in Italian.”

“No, that means ‘evil,’” Mary Margaret said.

“Same difference,” Foderman said, and shrugged.

“I once knew a doctor named Frankenstein,” David said.

“Irving Frankenstein?” Sandy asked.

“Michael Frankenstein.”

“On Seventy-ninth and Park?”

“No, in Transylvania.”

“That was Dracula, wasn’t it?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Oh, was it?” Sandy said. “Really?”

“What was Dracula?” Foderman asked.

“A vampire,” David said.

“You lost me,” Foderman said, and shrugged again.

“We were discussing mad doctors as opposed to vampires,” Sandy said.

“I sometimes think all doctors are mad,” Foderman said, and chuckled. “Me included.”

“Are you a doctor?” Mary Margaret asked.

“He’s a gynecologist,” Sandy said.

“If you’re ever in the neighborhood, look him up,” David said.

“Or vice versa,” Sandy said, and Foderman burst out laughing.

“Why do people always make gynecologist jokes?” he asked. “Has anyone ever heard a pediatrician joke, for example?”

“I’ve never heard a gynecologist joke, either,” Mary Margaret said.

“There are millions of them.”

“Tell one,” Mary Margaret said. “Please.”

“Spare us,” David said.

“Can you tell one, David?”

“I couldn’t tell one from a hole in the ground.”

“They all look the same to me, too,” Sandy said.

“They got a lot of rhythm, though,” David said.

“Especially in labor.”

“You’re laboring it, sweetie.”

“Hasn’t that been your experience?” Sandy asked.

“Hasn’t what been my experience?” Foderman said.

“Contractions,” Sandy said.

“It’s,” David answered. “Don’t. Aren’t. Isn’t.”

“Seriously,” Mary Margaret said. “Do any of you know a gynecologist joke?”

“Nope,” Sandy said, “But if you hum a few bars, I’ll fake it.”

“I’ve been to a few bars in my lifetime,” David said, “and I hated them all.”

“Bar none?”

“Bar one. Can’t miss it. Big ranch over near the mesa.”

“Mesa, mesa, come quick,” Sandy said, “they’s soldiers ober by de slabe quarters.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Foderman said.

But Mary Margaret knew. Mary Margaret suddenly caught the pattern. The intelligence sparked in her level gaze, flashed out of her eyes as fiercely hot as the beam of the Green Lantern’s ring. She leaned forward expectantly. She knew, and now she was ready to pounce, awaiting only the right opportunity. Sandy sensed her sudden knowledge, and her own electric-blue, twin-orbed radiation met Mary Margaret’s virid beam of light; the challenge had been hurled, and now it would be met. With something close to interest, I observed.

“It doesn’t look like we’ll get any skiing in tomorrow,” Foderman said, getting back to what he considered safe ground, a Ladies’ Luncheon monologue entitled Snowstorms I Have Known. “I remember one time at Sugarbush, it snowed for three days and three nights. We couldn’t budge from the hotel.”

“I remember once in Italy,” David said, “when it snowed in church in the middle of July.”

“Really?” Sandy said. “When was that?”

“The fourteenth century. I don’t remember it personally, of course, I was just a child at the time. But my mother recalled the incident to me. The whole family got caught in the snow, and I ruined my best rompers.”

“It snowed right inside the church?” Sandy said.

“That’s what happened.”

“What church was that?”

“Santa Maria Cosa Nostra,” David said.

“Did it snow hard?”

“Soft,” David said. “Ordinary soft snow. Your regular garden variety snow.”

“These two guys kill me,” Foderman said. “I never know what they’re talking about.”

Mary Margaret waited and said nothing. From downstairs, in the larger lounge, we heard Max and his cronies beginning their nightly musical onslaught. Sandy, impatient to get this over with, anxious to know whether what had shown on Mary Margaret’s face was truly recognition or merely something like anger or petulance, turned to her and said, “Do you speak Italian, Mary Margaret?”

“Nope,” Mary Margaret said, and abruptly stood up. “Anybody feel like dancing?” she asked. “Seymour?”

“Why, yes, I think I’d like to,” Foderman replied.

“See you,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled briefly, and led Foderman out of the room.

I wasn’t quite sure what had happened. We sat in silence, listening to the music from downstairs. Sandy was frowning. I had the feeling we’d been snubbed.

“Well, what do you want to do now?” David asked.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sandy said.

The Tiger Pit was one of the valley’s discotheques, a sawdust saloon serving booze, beer, hamburgers and home fries. We came out of the howling snowstorm into the howling amplification of a four-piece rock group blasting at a mass of humanity packed elbows-to-but-tocks. There was the smell of steamy garments, a huge open hearth blazing, a sign over the inner front door that read “No tiger in The Tiger Pit is hungrier than I” — a bastardization that undoubtedly caused old T. S. to revolve in his grave. The sound of the rock group was only slightly louder than the sound of the drinkers and dancers who, judging from the buttons on sweaters, parkas, and shirts, were all the Snowclad people in the world, assembled here to get Semanee and to get drunk besides. One crowd in particular stood out from the otherwise anonymous milling mass by virtue of its garb and its sheer decibel power. Lined up along the bar, singing and yelling a song that had nothing whatever to do with what the rock group was attempting to play, the men and women were dressed in male-female versions of the same basic uniform. The men were wearing green turtlenecks and ski pants, over which they had pulled on bright red swimming trunks. On the seat of each pair of trunks were the words “Merry Xmas” stitched in green. The women wore tight-fitting green leotards, right breast stitched in red with “Merry,” left breast stitched with “Xmas.” All, men and women alike, had bright Kelly-green plastic derbies on their heads. The song they were bellowing sounded like “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” The “Get Semanee!” button was everywhere in evidence, pinned to trunks, belts, turtleneck collars, leotard tops, even — in the case of a delicious blond girl — one buttock of her ripe little ass.

My initial inclination was to get out of there fast. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s an “In” group, especially when I’m out of it. But Sandy spotted an empty table, immediately pushed through the crowd (David and I following, numbed by the sound), took off her parka as she bullied her way across the room, and grabbed the table an instant before a couple of starry-eyed teeny-boppers reached it. Tossing her parka onto one of the chairs, she sidled in behind the table with her back to the wall, smiled pleasantly at the two fifteen-year-olds, and then signaled for the waiter. David and I sat. The two little girls looked startled and indignant.

“Yes?” Sandy said.

“That was our table,” one of the girls said.

“You’re too young to drink,” Sandy said flatly.

“We have I.D. cards,” the other girl protested.

The waiter arrived at the table together with one of the Green Derbies, who had apparently spotted Sandy from the bar, and was wasting no time establishing a beachhead. He was a very large person. From where I was sitting, I estimated his height at six feet two inches and his weight at two hundred and forty. It was almost as though a sequoia had grown suddenly out of the sawdust. I have always wanted to be able to face another man and have him realize in an instant that he had better not start up with me unless he is feeling suicidal. The Green Derby standing by the table communicated this message at once. His sheer bulk was menacing, even though he was quite pleasant-looking, with a square, clean-shaven face and blond ringlets spilling from under the plastic derby, which he now removed from his head and held at his waist as he bowed formally and politely to the table. The teeny-boppers were still standing by, deciding whether or not to wet their pants. The waiter held pad and pencil at the ready. We were all anticipating the big fellow’s speech. I was half-hoping a high-pitched squeak would come from his mouth. Grinning, slightly drunk, entirely ludicrous in his muscle-bulging turtleneck, red swimming trunks and green ski pants, he said in a Western drawl, “My name’s Bryan. Wanna dance?”

“Not right now, thanks,” Sandy said. “I’d like a beer,” she said to the waiter.

“They took our table,” one of the little girls said, pleading to Bryan as a higher authority, probably because he was the biggest grown-up around.

“Too bad,” Bryan said. “Whyn’t you go home and watch Sesame Street?” He pulled out the fourth chair, and sat opposite David. I was sitting across from Sandy, and the two little girls were still standing at my elbow.

“They took our table,” one of them said to the waiter.

“I’ve got one beer,” the waiter said impatiently.

“Make it three,” I said.

“Make it four,” Bryan said.

“I’m going to tell the manager,” the girl said.

“Go tell him,” Sandy replied.

“Okay if I join you?” Bryan asked.

“You already have,” Sandy said, and smiled.

“Big shots,” the girl said, and she and her friend flounced away from the table.

“I didn’t get your name,” Bryan said.

“Sandy.”

“Nice to meet you, Sandy. You’re a beautiful girl.”

“I’m Peter,” I said.

“I’m David,” David said.

Bryan greeted this unsolicited and volunteered information without much cheering or clapping. He leaned over the table, turned his back to me and his profile to David and addressed his next question (as he had his last) directly to Sandy, excluding both of us as effectively as if he’d built a wall of solid muscle.

“You staying here in the valley?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“At the Lodge,” David said.

Bryan glanced at him briefly, and then turned back to Sandy. “Where?” he said again.

“At the Lodge,” Sandy said.

“Must be an echo in this place,” David said, and Bryan glanced at him again, and again turned away.

“Where are you from?” he asked Sandy.

“New York,” I answered.

“New York,” David said.

“And you?” Sandy asked.

“Arizona,” Bryan said.

“Nice down there in Arizona,” David said.

“You ever been there?” Bryan asked.

“Never. But I hear it’s mighty nice down there.”

“Yeah, it is,” Bryan said.

“Mighty nice,” I said.

Bryan stared first at me and then at David. There was a pained, perplexed and uncomprehending look on his face. Not the faintest spark of intelligence flared in his humorless eyes; he was as stupid as an oyster. Immediately (because I’ve always enjoyed trying to fathom the laborious thought processes of the intellectually underprivileged), I began amusing myself with fantasies of what he was possibly thinking (for lack of a better word). It seemed to me that Bryan felt he had stumbled upon a pair of Martians and was now ponderously debating whether he should squash us flat or attempt to learn our language. As he continued to stare at us, trying to understand the tight little smiles on our faces, the forbidding postures (backs rigid, arms folded across our chests), the seeming foolhardiness with which we were exercising our territorial imperative and protecting our turf from invasion, something vaguely resembling comprehension glimmered in his eyes. Expanding his private Martian reverie, Bryan was now doubtless weighing the possibility that our weaponry was far more sophisticated than his own. Was it not entirely possible that we were carrying death-ray guns that could reduce him to ashes on the spot? How else explain our reckless challenge to his superior strength? Were we crazy or something? Ah-ha, Bryan’s eyes seemed to say. That’s it. If they’re not afraid of me, they’ve got to be nuts. And if they’re nuts, I don’t want nothing to do with them. (Duh, Bryan, very good, Bryan.)

Satisfied that he had tumbled to our secret, he promptly turned to Sandy again, one elbow on the table, grin widening as he prepared to launch into the second stanza of his seduction attempt, a tone poem that was interrupted by the untimely approach of the waiter. Sloshing foam and dripping perspiration, the waiter plunked four mugs of beer onto the tabletop and asked, “All on the same check?”

“Our friend here is paying,” David said.

“Are you? Gee, thanks,” Sandy said.

“Say, thanks a lot,” I said.

“Huh?” Bryan said, and the waiter handed him the check.

“How much do you weigh?” I asked Bryan.

Bryan, frowning, staring at the check, said, “Two fifty-three.”

“I guessed two-forty.”

“Give the man a kewpie doll,” David said.

“Listen, whyn’t you guys take a walk?” Bryan said.

“Snowing out there, Bryan,” David said.

“Get our little bootsies wet,” I said.

“I want to talk to the lady here,” Bryan said.

“Go right ahead.”

“Don’t mind us.”

“We’ll just sit here and drink our little beersies,” I said.

“Where’d you find these two guys?” Bryan asked Sandy.

“Are you a ski club or something?” David asked.

“What do you mean?”

“All the people in green derbies.”

“The hate are just for fun,” Bryan said. “We’re down from Snowelad for the race tomorrow.”

“Oh, are you racing?” I asked.

“No, but his motor’s running pretty fast,” David said, and Bryan shot him a warning look. I was, along about then, beginning to marvel at our audacity. Bryan was a very large person with a very small intelligence. Bryan was a dope, in fact, and I have always tried very hard to avoid contact with dopes. In my opinion, the dopes of the world are directly responsible and accountable for plague, pestilence, famine, warfare, racial strife, alienation, venereal disease, the high price of wheat, and the election of Richard M. Nixon. I have been known to cross deserts in the blistering sun rather than risk confrontation with a dope. So here we were in a sawdust saloon with a terrible rock group knocking down the walls, slurping beer and listening to a brainless jock pitching at Sandy while we sniped from the rooftops. What we were doing was dangerous. I began to realize just how dangerous it was, and felt a small tremor of excitement.

“... minute you came in the door,” Bryan was saying.

“Really? Why, thank you very much,” Sandy said.

“Whyn’t you finish your beer there, so we can dance?”

“Well, I like to sip beer slowly,” Sandy said.

“What do you do for a living, Bryan?” David asked.

“I break horses.”

“In half?” I said.

“Ever break a quarter horse in half?” David asked.

“You get an eighth of a horse that way,” I said.

“What I do is I take wild horses and break them to the saddle,” Bryan said.

“I wouldn’t do that for all the money in the world,” David said.

“Wild horses couldn’t force me to do that,” I said.

“It’s fun,” Bryan said, and once again dismissed us and turned to Sandy. “I’ll bet you’re a secretary or something back East,” he said.

“How’d you guess?” Sandy asked.

“Just knew it right off.”

“She works for the U.N.,” David said.

“No kidding?”

“That’s right,” I said. “She’s the Secretary General.”

“Generally in charge of the secretarial pool,” David said.

“Not to mention the beach,” I said.

“We’re trying to have a conversation here,” Bryan said, and glared at us. But the chatter was beginning to reach him; he knew we were putting him on but he didn’t know exactly how, and there was a vague uneasiness in his eyes. For a moment, I began to believe that the mild-mannered mathematicians of the world could actually triumph over the brutes and beasts without resorting to bear traps and boiling oil — but the odds changed quite suddenly. Bryan’s two friends were somewhat bigger than he was. Wearing the same green derbies and red swimming trunks over green ski pants and green turtlenecks, they materialized at the table and one of them said, “Howdy, Bryan, who’s your friend?”

“Hello, Duke. This here’s Sandy.”

“Nice to meet you, Sandy,” Duke said. He had straight blond hair and light blue eyes. His nose had been broken more than once, either in barroom brawls or rodeos.

The fellow with him, dark-haired with small brown pig eyes and razor nicks on his throat and chin, reached across the table, took Sandy’s hand, and said, “Let’s dance, Sandy.”

Sandy yanked her hand back. “I’m busy,” she said.

“What with?”

“With me, Hollis,” Bryan said.

“That right?” Hollis asked.

“No, that’s wrong,” Sandy said. “I’m busy with my friends.”

“These little fellers your friends?” Hollis asked. The pair of them, Duke and Hollis, were standing at the corner of the table between Bryan and me, and casting very large shadows indeed. Hollis grinned down at me, and said, “Any friends of Sandy’s is friends of mine,” and extended a thick, beefy hand. “I’m Hollis,” he said. “This here’s Duke.”

“I’m Peter,” I said. “That there’s David,” and took the extended hand, fully expecting to retrieve it all mangled and bent. But men who are confident of their power rarely display it in meaningless shows of strength. Hollis shook my hand like a proper gentleman, and then reached across the table and offered David the same open palm.

“Hello, David,” he said, “I’m Hollis.”

“Nice to meet you, Hollis.”

“My pleasure,” Hollis said. “This here’s Duke.”

“Howdy, David and Peter.”

“Howdy, Duke,” I said.

“Getting mighty crowded around here,” Bryan said.

“Now, that ain’t sociable, Bryan,” Hollis said. “Besides, these two gentlemen here was just now preparing to leave. Ain’t that right, boys?”

“No,” David said, “that ain’t right, Hollis.”

“Funny,” Hollis said, “I thought I heard you say you was going for a walk or something.”

“Bryan,” I said, “why don’t you and your friends go back to the bar and give us a chorus of ‘Silent Night.’”

“The silenter the better,” David said.

“Good night, boys,” Sandy said.

“See you around the pool hall,” I said.

“You got to be kidding,” Hollis said.

Yes, I thought, we are kidding. We certainly have no intention of starting up with you stupid cowboys. Holy Trinity aside, we recognize the full potential of your physical advantage, and are decidedly eager to avoid broken heads and bloody noses, not to mention whatever it is you have in mind for Sandy. We are kidding gentlemen. We have pushed this little charade a bit too far, and will probably have ample opportunity to regret our rashness during a long and painful hospital recovery. We are all kidding here (heh-heh), can’t you take a little joke, fellers? Whyn’t you all wander on back to the corral and break a few horses, huh?

“We’re not kidding,” I said. “Now shove off.”

The only time I ever received a beating in my life was when I was fourteen years old and called my father an irresponsible (or perhaps irrepressible) drunk. He took off his belt and beat me so hard I couldn’t walk for three days. He also blackened both my eyes with his fists. (Need I mention that he was drunk at the time?) Beatings are not much fun. Fantasies of being tossed around by Bryan and Company (perhaps even being buggered by them after they had broken all our bones) flashed through my head like the last images of a drowning man. I guess I expected Sandy to save the day. I don’t know why. I guess I expected her to say something or do something that would send these three hulking horse wrestlers back to the bar. But Sandy remained silent, and one look at her face (blue eyes wide, lips trembling) told me she was just as frightened as I. So who was going to save us? David? I looked at David. David was not going to save us.

Oddly, I began wishing Dr. Krakauer were there. Patiently but firmly, Dr. Krakauer would tell these three dopes that violence solves nothing. David and I, he would say to the cowboys, were just two fun-loving kids from Manhattan, out here to have ourselves a good time, certainly intending no harm to our western neighbors, farthest thing from our minds. Feelings of hostility, the good doctor would explain, were sometimes inexplicably present in chance encounters between strangers, but outward expression of such urges was contra-indicated and highly inappropriate. (That will be a hundred and twenty dollars, please. Forty dollars for each of you.)

The silence lengthened.

Dr. Krakauer did not appear on a winged couch.

Instead, from the door, there came an instantly recognizable voice, proving to my satisfaction that God is a woman.

“Hey there, Bryan!” Mary Margaret shouted. “How you doing, cowboy?”

Green parka wet with snow, face raw from the wind outside, red hair tangled and limp, she came toward the table with Foderman not a foot behind her, arms wide in offered embrace as Bryan, grinning, got immediately to his feet.

“Well, I’ll be shat upon!” he said, and lifted Mary Margaret off her feet in a fierce bear hug. “You’re back!”

“I’m back,” she said. “Put me down, you big ox!”

“You should be up at Snowclad,” he said. “Deader’n a doornail down here.”

“Not any more, it isn’t,” Mary Margaret said. “Hey, hi, Peter!”

“You know these guys?” Bryan asked, and blinked.

“Oh, sure, good friends of mine,” Mary Margaret said. “Hi, David, hi, Sandy. Who’re these two hulking monsters?” she asked, and poked her forefinger at Hollis’s bulging left pectoral. Hollis flinched, protectively covering his chest with both hands, like a virgin who’d just been molested on the subway.

Laughing, Bryan said, “That’s Duke and Hollis. Damn, it’s good to see you!”

“Let’s get a bigger table,” Mary Margaret said. “This is Seymour Foderman, from the Bronx.”

“Hello,” Foderman said, and smiled.

Our little party started in the back room of The Tiger Pit, at the bigger table Mary Margaret demanded. That was around eleven-thirty, when there were still seven of us. By a quarter to one, there were nine of us. It was a very peculiar party. It left us shaken and depressed, which is probably why Sandy, David, and I went to bed together afterwards.

Dr. Krakauer once hinted darkly that David and I in bed together with Sandy constitutes a symbolic homosexual act. Everything is homosexual to Dr. Krakauer. Shake hands with your minister, that’s homosexual. Pass the salt, that’s homosexual. I suggested to Dr. Krakauer that perhaps he had not personally resolved his own feelings of masculine inadequacy, and, true to form, he replied, “Perhaps not.” When I reported to Sandy that Krakauer thought she was a beard for a pair of fags, she unzipped my fly and blew me. (I did not report this incident to the herr doktor because he probably would have found it homosexual as well.) Good old Crackers. He should have been at the party. He’d have instantly committed both Foderman and Mary Margaret, who began revealing aspects of their personalities that had until then been almost totally hidden.

Foderman, I decided, was a masochist.

Mary Margaret, I decided, was a monster.

Alone together on a desert island, they might have effected a splendid marriage, Mary Margaret slowly whittling away, Foderman shrieking in ecstasy each time she approached him with a carving knife. But the presence of the Green Derbies (and later the two teeny-boppers) proved catalytic, providing for Foderman and Mary Margaret just the proper indulgent environment they both craved. Mary Margaret now had the audience of noted scientists necessary for the proper appreciation of her experiment. Foderman, strapped to the table without benefit of anesthesia, lifted his head and peered through the glare of the overhead lights, dimly aware of that same audience, and secretly pleased to be the prime object of their attention. Even later, when he lay there on the reddening sheet, sliced open from Adam’s apple to scrotum, he misunderstood the cheering and thought the applause was for his exposed guts rather than for the brilliant, mad surgeon who had performed the operation. As I said, it was a very peculiar party.

By way of openers (scalpel, please), Mary Margaret asked Bryan if they had any Jews down there in Arizona where he came from, and Bryan answered Why, sure, there’s Jews down there, why Barry Goldwater’s a Jew, ain’t he? Foderman nodded and said there were Jews all over the United States, and then smiled and said, “Though, probably, in lots of little southern and western towns, the people think we’ve got horns and a tail.”

“Nobody thinks that in Arizona,” Bryan said.

“Well,” Foderman said, and shrugged.

“Listen, how’d we get talking about Jews?” Mary Margaret said, and patted Foderman’s hand comfortingly, and then said, “Why don’t we order some drinks?”

A series of cross-conversations developed at the table, Bryan and Mary Margaret reminiscing about the good times they’d had here together last year, Hollis and Duke telling Sandy about the joys of living in the open and eating baked beans cooked over a small fire, and Foderman telling David and me that he had finally heard from the good doctor Schwartz, the call coming scant moments before he and Mary Margaret left the hotel. The result was a Robert Altman movie.

KR: I’m interested in this concept of yourself as the star of a movie.

ME: I never said that.

KR: You’ve repeatedly told me you have difficulty reconciling reality with fantasy.

ME: I said I sometimes feel out of it.

KR: Out of what?

ME: What’s happening.

KR: What do you suppose is happening?

ME: I don’t follow you.

KR: What do you suppose you’re missing?

ME: I still don’t follow you.

KR: If I understand you correctly, you think something’s going on behind your back.

ME: No.

KR: Then, what?

ME: What I said was that sometimes I walk along the street at night and see lighted windows in apartment buildings, and wonder what’s happening in those apartments.

KR: What do you suppose is happening in those apartments?

ME: How would I know? People are living in them, I suppose.

KR: And doing what?

ME: What do you want me to say? That they’re in there fucking?

KR: Are they?

ME: I suppose so, yes. And they’re also eating and reading and brushing their teeth and watching television and whatever the hell else people do in their own houses.

KR: But primarily fucking.

ME: No, not primarily fucking.

KR: Then, what?

ME: Talking.

KR: About what?

ME: I don’t know what.

KR: Try to imagine their conversation.

ME: No. I don’t know what other people talk about.

KR: What do you and Sandy and David talk about?

ME: Everything.

KR: I don’t mean when you’re talking code.

ME: Code? What code?

KR: The code you use when you’re together.

ME: We don’t have any code.

KR: I think it’s a code. The same kind of code little children use in imitation of a foreign language. Have you ever used such a code?

ME: No.

KR: Pig Latin? Or adding vowels or consonants to disguise true meaning? Like Pa-Peter Pa-Piper pa-picked a pa-peck of pa-pickled pa-peppers.

ME: That’s a great code. How’d you ever crack it?

KR: The children using it think it’s indecipherable to outsiders.

ME: Well, we don’t have any code like that. We talk straight English to each other.

KR: It’s more like a shorthand English, isn’t it?

ME: Yes, right. We know each other so well, we can cut corners. We don’t have to spell everything out.

KR: I don’t think you know each other at all.

ME: What’s that supposed to mean?

KR: I think you deliberately use this code of yours...

ME: I told you we don’t have...

KR: Very well, this shorthand English of yours...

ME: Right.

KR: I think you use it to avoid communication.

ME: Why would we do that?

KR: When’s the last time you had a real conversation with anyone?

ME: Yesterday.

KR: With whom?

ME: Sandy. On the telephone.

KR: She called from Bennington?

ME: I called her.

KR: What did you talk about?

ME: I wanted to know when she was coming down.

KR: You already know when she’s coming down. She’s coming down on December twelfth. Six days from now.

ME: I wanted to make sure.

KR: Do you always check her movements so closely?

ME: No, but we’re supposed to be leaving for Semanee on the sixteenth, and I just wanted to make sure everything was all set.

KR: Do you have trepidations about the trip?

ME: None. I’m looking forward to it.

KR: You’ll be missing more than two weeks here.

ME: I’ll survive.

KR: Will you?

ME: Come on, Doctor, cut it out. I’m not dependent on these goddamn sessions. I can function quite well without them.

KR: Good.

ME: You don’t believe me, do you?

KR: I do believe you. In fact, I’m pleased you think we’re making progress.

ME: I didn’t say that.

KR: Don’t you think we’re making progress?

ME: You’re the doctor, Doctor.

KR: I think we’re making progress.

ME: That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all week.

KR: Then, why do you respond to it with sarcasm?

ME: That wasn’t sarcasm.

KR: Perhaps not. Perhaps you’re only using code again.

“... going to be all right,” Foderman said. “In fact, he’s been invited to a party on New Year’s Eve.”

“Who’s that?” Mary Margaret asked, turning suddenly from Bryan.

“Schwartz,” Foderman replied. “My friend. The one who called me just before we came over here.”

“I admire the way Jews stick together,” Mary Margaret said conversationally.

“Well, it’s a necessity sometimes,” Foderman said.

“You never camped out, huh?” Hollis asked Sandy.

“Never,” Sandy said.

“Didn’t belong to the Girl Scouts or nothing?”

“Hated the Girl Scouts.”

“Because of persecution, do you mean?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Yes, certainly,” Foderman said. “When you’re forced to live in a ghetto...”

“What’s a ghetto?” Bryan asked.

“Knock, knock,” I said to David.

“Who’s there?”

“Ghetto.”

“Ghetto who?”

“Ghetto you ass inna here, Luigi.”

“I no ghetto the joke,” David said.

“What the hell’s a ghetto?” Bryan asked.

“You’re in your sleeping bag with them stars up there,” Hollis said, “and, man, you feel like a million bucks. You don’t need nothing else in the world. Just that fire to keep the wildcats off your back, and that nice warm bag, and them stars winking down. Ain’t nothing like it in the whole world.”

“Remember that night last year when we sacked out on the mountain?” Bryan asked. “And skied down just as the sun was coming up? Like to froze our asses off.”

“That was fun, that night,” Mary Margaret said. “Are you a good skier, Seymour?”

“I’m an Advanced Intermediate,” Foderman said. “Well, ask them.”

“Is he?” Mary Margaret said.

“He’s coming along,” David said.

“I had a bad day yesterday, I’ll admit...”

“Because your bindings weren’t adjusted properly,” Sandy said.

“That must’ve been it,” Foderman said.

“Maybe we can all ski together tomorrow,” Mary Margaret said.

“We’re heading back to Snowclad right after the race,” Bryan said.

“If this snow keeps up,” Foderman said, “nobody’ll be skiing tomorrow.”

“What time’s the race?” I asked.

“Ten in the morning,” Hollis said.

“Well, then, maybe just the five of us,” Mary Margaret said. “That okay with you, Seymour?”

“Oh, sure,” Foderman said. “If you can keep up with these three. They’re very good skiers.”

“Have you been over to the north face?”

“Not yet.”

“I’d love to take you there,” Mary Margaret said.

“We skied the north face a lot last year,” Bryan said.

“That’s mighty hairy territory over there,” Hollis said.

“You can disappear from sight there, and never be heard from since,” Duke said.

“What do you mean?” Foderman asked.

“That’s the only place I ever skied where I had the feeling I could fall off the mountain. You understand me? Not down the mountain, but off it.”

“Is it that steep?”

“It’s steep, all right.”

“The trails run clear around these deep canyons. You miss a turn, and that’s it, pal.”

“Aren’t there guard rails or something?” Foderman asked.

“Guard rails?” Duke asked incredulously, and burst out laughing.

“Now don’t get frightened, Seymour,” Mary Margaret said.

“I’m not frightened, I’m just curious.”

“There are places on the north face,” Hollis said, “where I swear to God the trail’s only as wide as your own two skis. You feel like a goddamn mountain goat hanging on with your toenails.”

“They’re trying to scare you, Seymour,” Mary Margaret said.

“No, no, listen, who’s scared?”

“You go over the edge of one of them sheer drops, and it’s not like a skier taking a fall, it’s like a mountain climber whose rope just snapped. You sail out into space, and you grab for sky, and if you’re lucky you get stopped by a tree or a boulder a mile below. By that time, it doesn’t matter no more because you’re busted in a million pieces anyway.”

“Sure you want to go over there, Seymour?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Why not?” Foderman asked. “I’m not scared.”

“I’m scared,” David said.

“Me, too,” I said.

“I got to tell you,” Bryan said, “I’ve skied most places in the world...”

“Oh, sure,” Mary Margaret said.

“You think I’m kidding you? I’ve skied Europe, I’ve skied Australia, I’ve even skied Chile. But last year on that north face, I had a lot of trouble keeping a tight asshole.”

“They’re telling you atrocity stories, Seymour,” Mary Margaret said.

“You think I don’t know it? It’s the old Army hypodermic routine. The needle with a propeller on the end.”

“You’re gonna wish you had a propeller on your end,” Duke said.

“And wings,” Hollis said.

“Well, I’ll give it a try anyway,” Foderman said. “Even without a propeller. What can I lose?”

“Your life,” Bryan said.

“Come on, come on,” Foderman said. “My life.”

“Seymour’s people are used to all sorts of danger and hardship,” Mary Margaret said.

“This ain’t the same as being taken to the ovens,” Duke said. “Here you got a choice whether to go or not.”

“They had a choice there, too, didn’t they?” Mary Margaret asked.

“What choice?” Foderman said.

“They could have refused.”

“How? How can you refuse to get in a boxcar when somebody’s holding a machine gun on you?”

“It’s a matter of how you choose to die.”

“No, it’s a matter of hope. If you get on the train, then maybe something will happen on the way. Maybe the war will end, maybe the train will crash, you’ll escape...”

“Bullshit,” Mary Margaret said.

“What would you have done?” Sandy asked flatly.

“I’d have refused to go,” Mary Margaret said.

“And they’d have shot you,” Foderman said.

“All right. At least, I’d have taken a stand.”

“For what? If they shot you, you were dead. You think it mattered to them, another dead Jew? Jews weren’t people to them. Listen, don’t get me started. This is a subject I can’t discuss unemotionally. All this business of what you would have done, what you wouldn’t have done. This was survival, they did what they could to survive. None of us here knows a thing about survival, so what are we talking about?”

“I know about survival,” Bryan said.

“All right, so you know about it. Let’s change the subject.”

“In the Army, I learned all about survival.”

“So did I,” Hollis said.

“Were you in the Army, Seymour?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Yes, I was in the Army.”

“See any action?”

“I was attached to a field hospital.”

“Ever kill anybody?” Duke asked.

“No. My job was saving people, not killing them.”

“Was your life ever in danger?”

“Never.”

“Then what do you know about survival?”

“I was dealing with survival every day of the week. A man comes into the hospital with his legs blown off and his intestines hanging out...”

“Please,” Mary Margaret said.

“I’m sorry, but that was an everyday fact of life. That was survival.”

“But not your survival.”

“The survival of another human being is my survival.”

“Seymour’s a doctor,” Mary Margaret said.

“I gathered,” Bryan said. “You a G.P.?”

“I’m a gynecologist,” Foderman said, and Bryan burst out laughing. “What’s so funny about that?”

“Just seems like a big change,” Bryan said. “From handling a man’s intestines to handling a lady’s privates.”

“I prefer it,” Foderman said with dignity.

“Who wouldn’t?” Duke said.

“Anyway,” Mary Margaret said, “do we try the north face or not?”

“Of course, we try it,” Foderman said. His face was flushed, and his pale eyes looked feverish. I had the strangest feeling he was about to cry.

“I’m not sure Seymour’s a good enough skier,” I said.

“He just told us he’s an Advanced Intermediate,” Mary Margaret said.

“I am,” Foderman said.

“Those sound like expert trails to me.”

“And Seymour’s no expert,” David said.

“I can manage, don’t worry,” Foderman said.

“They are expert trails, aren’t they?” I asked Bryan.

“Yeah, but he can probably handle them. All it takes is a little guts, that’s all.”

“How are you in the guts department?” Mary Margaret asked.

“I’m not afraid of the mountain,” Foderman said.

“What are you afraid of?”

“A great many things. But not the mountain.”

“What?”

“Pain? Suffering?” Foderman shrugged.

“You fall off that north face,” Hollis said, “you’re gonna know pain and suffering both.”

“I don’t intend to fall off,” Foderman said.

“Now, there’s a brave man for you,” Mary Margaret said. She raised her glass and said, “I drink to this brave man here.”

“Ain’t no such thing as a brave man,” Bryan said. “I learned that in the Army, too. All there is is cowards who learn how to live with their own fear.”

“I think you’re right,” Foderman said.

“Oh, are you a coward, Seymour?” Mary Margaret asked.

“In many ways, yes.”

“In that case, I drink to this coward here,” Mary Margaret said. “Here’s hoping nobody ever holds a machine gun on you and asks you to get into a boxcar.”

I did not honestly know how Mary Margaret had led the conversation back full circle again to the annihilation of Jews in Germany, especially after Foderman had expressed his aversion to the subject. I knew only that she was somehow equating gas chambers with mountains, intimating that if Foderman refused the challenge of the north face, his decision would be tantamount to stepping voluntarily (and cowardly) into an oven. But Foderman had already stated that he was not afraid of the mountain and that indeed he was ready and willing to try it tomorrow. So what the hell was she driving at? It further seemed to me that if Foderman skied the north face, he was placing himself in an extraordinarily dangerous position. I did not want to hurt his feelings (he seemed besieged enough already), but I felt it was necessary to try to dissuade him.

“Seymour,” I said, “I think you’d better reconsider.”

“Yeah, Seymour,” David said.

“Reconsider what?”

“The north face.”

“That’s already settled,” Foderman said.

“Seymour,” I said flatly, “you don’t ski well enough.”

“I’m an Advanced Intermediate,” Foderman said.

“You’re a notch above a Beginner,” I said. “And those are expert trails over there.”

“If you don’t mind, Peter,” Foderman said, “I’ll make my own decision, thank you.”

“Bravo,” Mary Margaret said.

“Mary Margaret,” I said, “I think you ought to keep out of this. He can hurt himself badly over there.”

“He can hurt himself crossing the street, too.”

“That’s not the same thing, and you know it.”

“I got to tell you,” Bryan said, “this is beginning to bore the ass off of me. I don’t care whether Seymour skis the north face or the Matterhorn. I’m interested in doing a little serious drinking and having a little fun. Now, whyn’t you just let him make up his own damn mind?”

“Right,” Mary Margaret said. “If he’s afraid of the...”

“I’m not afraid,” Foderman said.

“Then what are we arguing about?”

“I have no idea,” Foderman said. “The matter is settled.”

“Sandy?” I said.

Sandy, who had been mostly silent until now, looked first at Foderman, and then at Mary Margaret. Shrugging, she said, “It’s his funeral.”

“Exactly,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled.

It had stopped snowing by a quarter to one, when we came out of The Tiger Pit and headed up the street for Maury’s West, a joint allegedly owned and operated by a former Yale man who’d apparently lost his way. The wind had almost died, and the sky was streaked with scudding clouds, the tattered remnants of the storm. Hollis looked up, took a deep breath, and said, “This’s what it’s like out there in the open Sandy. All them zillions of stars dripping their shine on you. It’s just about more’n a man can...”

A snowball smashed into the back of his head before he could finish the sentence, knocking his Stetson into the street. He whirled with fists clenched, saw no one, said, “Now, what the hell?”, put his hands on his hips, and then heard muffled laughter behind one of the snowbanks. He went directly up over the top of the bank, digging in the toes of his boots, disappeared for a moment, and then came back into the street dragging two giggling girls whom I recognized instantly as the teeny-boppers whose table we’d usurped. “Look what I got here, Bryan,” he said, and Bryan turned from Mary Margaret and said, “Throw ’em back in the pond, Hollis. They’re too little.”

“We’re eighteen,” one of the girls said.

“Almost nineteen,” the other one said.

“Like hell you are,” Mary Margaret said.

“They look plenty big enough to me,” Hollis said.

“Where you looking, cowboy?” the first girl said, and grinned.

“All over, honey,” Hollis answered. “What’s your name?”

“Taffy,” she said.

“Mmm-mmm,” Hollis said. “And yours?”

“Annabelle.”

“Well, well,” Hollis said.

“That’s jail bait, Hollis,” Duke advised.

“Girls said they were eighteen, didn’t they?”

“They’re scarcely out of puberty,” Foderman remarked drily.

“Let ’em go, Hollis,” Bryan said. “Their mothers’ll be out looking for them.”

“We’re here alone,” Annabelle said.

“Our mothers are in San Francisco,” Taffy said.

“Well, well,” Hollis said.

“And we’ve got I.D. cards,” Annabelle said.

“Whose?” Mary Margaret asked.

“What difference does it make? We’ve got ’em, that’s all that counts.”

“I’m going back to the hotel,” Foderman said. “I’ll see you fellows in San Quentin.”

“Hey, come on, Seymour,” Mary Margaret said. “You’re my date.”

“I thought I was your date,” Bryan said.

“First come, first served.”

“I voluntarily relinquish all claims,” Foderman said. “Besides, if we’re going to ski the north face tomorrow...”

“Seymour, I absolutely refuse to let you go,” Mary Margaret said.

“Where’re we going?” Taffy asked.

“Just up the street here, honey.”

“To play jacks,” Foderman said, which was the second such zinger he’d hurled in the past few minutes. I was beginning to think it was possible he possessed a sense of humor.

“Seymour,” Mary Margaret said warningly, and walked directly up to him, and put her face close to his, and said, “If you leave me alone with this big ape here...”

“Listen to the ungrateful bitch,” Bryan said, and laughed.

“I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.”

“Taught her everything she knows,” Bryan said, still laughing.

“Is anybody holding?” Annabelle asked.

“Holding what?” Duke said.

“Grass,” Annabelle said.

“Oh, Jesus,” Sandy said, and shook her head. “If nobody minds, I think I’ll go to sleep, too. Come on, Seymour.”

“Grass?” Duke said. “Did she say grass?”

“Grass, Duke,” Mary Margaret said. “What the cows eat.”

“Grass?”

“Forget it, Duke.”

“Well, is anybody holding?” Annabelle asked.

Taffy, apparently bored with the conversation, decided to lift the proceedings to a higher level by making another snowball and hurling it directly at Hollis’s head. Hollis ducked the throw, and then scampered after her up the side of a twelve-foot-high snowbank left by the plows. Taffy whirled, put both hands on Hollis’s chest, and gave him a push that sent him sliding back down the side of the bank.

“King of the mountain!” she shouted. “Try to get me off!”

“Who’re your friends, Peter?” Sandy whispered.

“I thought they were with you,” I whispered back.

“When do we start finger painting?” David asked.

Bryan was running up the side of the bank, eager to answer this challenge to his manhood. No mere little slip of a thing was going to stand on top of that hill while Bryan the Breaker was there to knock her off. Bellowing the way he probably did at recalcitrant ponies, he seized her wrist, swung her around, and sent her flying head over teacups to the bottom. Taffy shrieked in ecstasy and fear. Annabelle, who’d apparently forgotten how sophisticated it was to ask if anyone was in possession of marijuana, danced a little excited jig in the snow. Bryan pounded his chest like King Kong on top of the Empire State, and bellowed, “Come on, you chicken flickers!”, and Hollis and Duke, responding predictably, raced up the hill to engage him in combat. There ensued one of those brief homosexual (goddamn that Dr. Crackers!) displays of masculine grunting, groaning, and grappling usually confined to the locker room and accompanied by buttocks-flicking whips of a wet towel, but here enacted on a high hill in the open air, thereby dignifying it as a contest of physical endurance. Boys will be boys. Bryan grabbed Hollis by the seat of his swimming trunks and the collar of his parka and tossed him down the hill summarily, Hollis laughing all the way to the bottom. Duke wrestled briefly with Bryan, caught him in a headlock, yanked him off his feet, twisted him around, and sent him tripping backwards, arms flailing, toward the plowed street, where the rest of us greeted his arrival without ceremony.

“Go get him, Seymour!” Mary Margaret said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Foderman answered.

“King of the mountain, king of the mountain!” Duke shouted.

“You afraid of him?” Mary Margaret said.

“No.”

“Then, go knock him off that hill!”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Mary Margaret said.

I thought Foderman would have at his fingertips at least a thousand good reasons for not going up that hill. But instead of replying, possibly confusing the hill with a boxcar and remembering the earlier image of an S.S. man holding a machine gun on a herd of submissive Jews, he merely shrugged and started up toward where Duke, legs spread, arms hanging at his sides like a gun-slick ready to draw, was waiting for him. Foderman’s technique for going up a hill was the same one he used for coming down a hill. He merely moved on a straight line, like a tank heading for a distant objective. Chomp, chomp, chomp, he chewed the hill level, grabbed for Duke’s ankles, pulled him over even as he himself rolled aside to avoid the falling timber, and then scrambled to his feet and claimed the summit before Duke rolled to a snow-spitting stop at the bottom. As Duke climbed to his feet again and stared up in disbelief at Foderman, Mary Margaret took Bryan aside and whispered something in his ear. Bryan nodded, grinned, and then went into an old-fashioned football huddle with his cowboy chums, arms intertwined, heads close together. At the top of the hill, Foderman waited apprehensively.

From three sides of the snowbank now, like the lead rifleman and twin grenadiers of an enemy patrol, Bryan, Duke, and Hollis started up in triangular formation, approaching Foderman, who stood looking down at them with a slightly bewildered expression on his face. He had taken the high ground without casualty and now found himself in the embarrassing position of having to defend a worthless piece of real estate against an army that had no more use for it than he had. It must have crossed his mind that this was a senseless battle in a war not of his choosing, and yet could he surrender without at least some show of resistance? Could he let them herd him into a boxcar and stuff him into an oven without protest? He clenched his fists in resolve. Short, stubby, breathless, barrel-shaped, he stood atop the ramparts of his mountain fortress, a pitiful, helpless slob awaiting the onslaught of a dedicated demolition team.

What happened next surprised me completely.

I had expected the three cowboys to toss Foderman into the air like a beanbag and then hurl him down to the street below. But instead, approaching from three sides to reach the summit simultaneously, they reached for his ankles, his legs, and his waist and, working silently and in concert, pulled his ski pants down to his boots, and swiftly retreated to the bottom of the hill. Foderman registered first surprise, and then what seemed to be relief, or even gratitude. They had not sent mortars into his castle keep, they had not used flamethrowers or grenades, he had not been routed, raped, or even ransacked. He was, in fact, still king of the mountain, however lacking in regality he may have appeared to the populace assembled below, his pants pulled down, his bare legs hanging out, and his undershorts blowing in the breeze. He didn’t seem to know quite how to cope with the indignity of his disarray. Bewildered, and a little chilly besides, he waited for some guidance from the people, some cue from the street below.

It was Mary Margaret who began laughing.

The laughter bubbled up out of her throat like a tainted underground spring, clear and cold and sparkling, but deadly to the palate. The teeny-boppers came in not a beat behind, shrilling like treetop birds, and Bryan, Duke, and Hollis belatedly brayed accompaniment until the entire valley seemed to reverberate with laughter that rose to the crest of the hill, where it completely engulfed Foderman. He hesitated. He still did not pull up his pants. A smile broke on his face, and a timid laugh escaped his lips, followed by a louder laugh, and then another. Clasping his hands over his head like a prizefighter who had just won the world’s championship, he nodded, laughed more heartily, and shook his wedded, scepterless mitts at all of us below. Bryan and Duke could barely remain standing. Each slapping the other’s back, they stumbled about drunkenly in the snow, and Mary Margaret’s chilling laughter broke on the air like falling icicles, and the teeny-boppers applauded, and Hollis threw his Stetson to the ground and jumped up and down on it, while Foderman stood with his hands over his head and his pants around his ankles, laughing.

I think the saddest sound I ever heard in my life was the sound of Foderman laughing that night.

We got back to the hotel shortly after one o’clock. Mary Margaret had elected to go on to Maury’s with the cowboys and the kids, and Foderman had finally managed to pull up his pants before frostbite attacked his extremities. He now promised to meet us at nine for breakfast, and went directly to his room. Alice was curled up in one of the big leather lobby chairs, with Helmut the drummer sitting on the arm of it and telling her how crappy the skiing was in America. She barely glanced at me as I followed David and Sandy toward the small lounge, where the action consisted solely of Mr. and Mrs. Penn R. Trate sitting by the acorn fireplace, heads together in apparent connubial bliss. Wearily, we went upstairs to Sandy’s room.

There was no question of us separating for the night, there was no need even to discuss it. All three of us were still confused and, yes, shocked, by what had just happened in the snow outside, and we felt the need to talk about it, sort it out and make some sense of it. Mary Margaret seemed a threat, and there was a need to reaffirm our contiguousness, a desperate urgency to touch again — touch minds, touch bodies, assure ourselves that we were still an inseparable, impervious, indivisible unit. Completely at ease in each other’s presence, we talked quietly as we got ready for bed, David sitting in one of the chairs to take off his boots, Sandy unbuttoning her blouse, I going into the john to pee, leaving the door open so I could hear the conversation and share in it.

“That’s the first anti-Semite I ever met in my life,” David said. “I thought they’d gone out of style.”

“Why’d he stand still for it?” Sandy asked.

“Because he’s a shmuck,” I said from the bathroom.

“She sure does take control of a situation, doesn’t she?”

“Listen, it’s a good thing she arrived when she did. I think we were about to get pulverized.”

“I didn’t know they grew them so big in Arizona,” I said.

“You going to be in there all night, Peter?”

“How’d you like Bryan not knowing what a ghetto is?”

“Hurry up, Peter!”

“All right, all right.”

I came back into the bedroom, and David, barefooted, went into the john. Sandy, wearing only her slacks, was studying one of her breasts in the mirror, her hand cupped under it.

“What’s this? she asked me.

“What?”

“This? Is it anything?”

“It looks like a little bruise.”

“Mmm,” she said. She looked worried.

“I don’t think it’s anything,” I said, and went to the bed and took off my boots and socks. “Why do you suppose she went after him that way?”

“She’s a Jew-baiter, that’s why,” Sandy said.

“You think that’s all?”

From the bathroom, David said, “Okay to use your toothbrush, Sandy?”

“What?”

“Your toothbrush.”

“Yeah, sure. But what’s she after? If she doesn’t like Seymour, why does she want to ski with him?”

“She’s a model, did you know that?”

“Who?”

“Mary Margaret.”

“What does she model?”

“Jock straps,” David said from the bathroom, and spit into the sink.

“Her hands,” I said.

“Yeah?” Sandy said.

“She’s got beautiful hands.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Peter, why don’t you go get us some pajamas?”

“What do we need pajamas for?”

“Gets mighty cold out here on the tundra,” David said, and spit into the sink again.

“Where’s your key?”

“On the dresser there. Near my wallet.”

“Are we really going to ski with them tomorrow?”

“Not with her,” Sandy said.

“You suppose she’s a good skier?” David asked, and came out of the bathroom.

“She’s very good. I saw her one morning.”

“You still here?”

“Why don’t you go get your own pajamas?”

“I’m barefoot.”

“So am I.”

“Is this anything?” Sandy asked, and showed David the bruise.

“Go ask Dr. Foderman.”

“Why didn’t he pull up his pants?” I asked.

“Maybe he likes them half-mast,” David said.

“Did you dig those shorts of his?”

“My father wears shorts like that,” I said.

“I’m surprised he wasn’t wearing garters.”

“Garters cause varicose veins.”

“Who told you that?”

“Scientific fact,” David said, and took off his pants. “Anybody mind if I open the window a little?”

“I thought you were worried about the tundra.”

“It’s unhealthy to sleep without a window open.”

“Is that another scientific fact?” Sandy said.

“Talk about shorts,” I said.

“Why? What’s the matter?” David asked, and looked down at himself.

“Are those silk?” Sandy said.

“No, they’re cotton and dacron. What’s the matter with them?”

“Very sexy,” I said.

“They look like silk,” Sandy said.

“They’re just plain undershorts,” David said.

“Just your regular garden variety undershorts,” Sandy said.

“I also like the color,” I said. “What color is that, David?”

“Blue.”

“Looks more like turquoise to me,” Sandy said.

Mincing, David put one hand on his hip, sashayed across the room, said, “I think they’re adorable shorts,” and then took them off and tossed them over the lampshade.

“Positively cunning little shorts,” Sandy said.

“Listen,” David said, “I can’t open this window until I get my pajamas.”

“Why don’t you sleep in your cunning little shorts?” Sandy said.

“Peter, go get my pajamas, will you?”

“Go get your own pajamas.”

“How can I? I’m naked.”

“Give him a robe, Sandy.”

“There’s one in the closet.”

“It won’t fit me,” David said.

“So go to bed and shut up,” I said.

“Will you open the window?”

“I’ll open the window.”

“After I’m in bed.”

“After, after,” I said.

“Okay,” David said, and pulled back the covers, and got into bed, and then tucked quilt and sheet up under his chin.

“Need your teddy?” Sandy asked, and took off her slacks, and went to the closet for a hanger. She folded the slacks carefully, draped them over the bar of the hanger, and was putting them into the closet when David said, “Close the door.”

“What?” she said, turning.

“The closet door,” David said.

“I think he does need his teddy,” Sandy said, and closed the door.

“Don’t want to let all them hairy things out of the closet,” I said.

“I just like the closet door closed,” David said.

“Closet door closed, window open,” I said, and went to the window and pulled it down about two inches from the top. “Anything else, sir?”

Sandy took off her panties, idly scratched her crotch, looked around the room as though trying to decide whether she’d forgotten anything, and then crossed to the bed and climbed in beside David.

“Anybody remember to put out the cat?” I asked, and took off my shirt.

“Note for the milkman?” David said.

“Porch light on for the kids?”

I hung the shirt over the straight-backed chair at the desk, and then took off my pants and undershorts. “It’s too cold in here with that window open,” I said.

“Leave it open!” David warned.

“Get the bathroom light,” Sandy said.

I went into the bathroom, turned off the light, decided I was thirsty, turned on the light again, and ran a cold glass of water from the sink faucet. “Anybody want water?” I asked.

“Milk and cookies,” David said.

I turned out the bathroom light, walked to the floor lamp where David had hung his adorable cunning turquoise shorts, turned that out as well, and then stumbled in the dark toward the bed, climbing in on the other side of Sandy.

“Mmm,” Sandy said.

“First time I’ve felt relaxed all damn day,” David said, and sighed.

“Careful,” Sandy told him “That’s where the bruise is.”

“Here?”

“Mmm. Yes. Be careful.”

“How’d you get that, anyway?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t take any falls, did you?”

“One. But I landed on my hip.”

“You think Seymour can manage the north face?”

“Hell with Seymour,” David said.

“Hell with them all,” Sandy said.

Now entertain conjecture of a time when creeping murmur and the poring dark fills the wide vessel of the universe. From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night, twin mercenaries skulk in quest of spoils on each small hill. Rosebuds blatantly explode beneath our stealthy finger treads. (It is sore, she whispers; gently, it is sore.) Soaring purple columns rise on either of her flanks; she climbs these spires with her hands, descends again, besieges and encircles them. Relentlessly she strokes with counterpoint precision, urging surrender, promising release, till sudden knowledge of pleasure postponed invites her to abrupt cessation. The wind rides hoarsely in, piercing the night’s dull ear, assaulting the now-abandoned field. So recently addressed, so hotly pressed to yield our hoarded lodes, we stand in blind rigidity and search the unreceptive dark, eager for engagement. Between us on the plain below, spread indifferently and loose, a passive white and golden mass invites our plunder. In tandem spearhead, we storm the waiting weald. Fire answers fire, and through the paly flames all metaphor expires. Now are military allusions consumed in triple holocaust. In the dark, in the silence, we play out our sextina.

It is David who presses lips to lips. Much lower, my hand explores her tangled isosceles. Her back arching, her crotch to David, buttocks to me, she opens all interiors. Mouth and vault are wet seducers, crying mutely to the blood.

For now, we are partners. It is my blood that echoes the pulse of her nether lips, stiffens and engorges me. She is wet at my urging alone. David’s tangled hold on her mouth, jaw gripped, only opens her to new exploration of her crotch.

It is here, at this tempestuous crotch, that Sandy reaffirms the secret blood oath we took five summers past, and opens wide remembrance, while promising lips swear allegiance to David and tangled memories twist on tortured sheets grown wet.

She turns her face to me, her mouth still wet with David’s kisses, my hand on her crotch where David stiffly probes. His thrust tangled in my fingers, I can feel the wild blood coursing through his gliding flesh. Her lips strike winter dead. The sun’s hot eye opens.

Acrobatically, she twists and opens her thighs to accept me from behind. Wet, unresistant, she proffers me her lips and I plunge deep inside her tilted crotch. David waits for her, stiff with his own blood. She lowers her mouth, hair and teeth tangled.

Our triple alliance is tangled, tender and fierce, gently cruel. It opens for us wide viaducts through which the blood can secretly flow, red and rich and wet. It joins us irrevocably — one crotch, one male member, one pair of thirsting lips.

Anonymous lips hopelessly tangled, Sandy’s crotch seems mine (or his) that opens. Wet confusion comes at last — thick as blood.

Spectator sports bore me to death.

Rising at the crack of dawn, the Valley instructors had laid out a slalom course on the slope immediately facing Semanee Lodge, flag-marked poles zigzagging down the left-hand side of the hill, the rest of the slope left open for those skiers indifferent to the thrills of outdoor competition. We decided to watch the race only because at breakfast we’d learned the big cats were still up on the north face, packing the trails, and that most of them would not be opened till midmorning. The race was scheduled to begin at ten o’clock. We finished breakfast at about twenty to, by which time a sizable crowd, buzzing and laughing and chanting slogans, had gathered at the base of the slope. The day was mild and cloudless, with hardly any wind. Foderman, excited and flushed, found a place for us close to the finish line, and said he was anticipating the race with great relish (hold the mustard and sauerkraut, please). We took off our parkas, sat on them, and watched one small Snowclad contingent as it draped a hand-lettered “Get Semanee!” banner over the entrance to the chair lift, unfazed by the heckling of Semanee supporters below. Face tilted to the sun, Sandy munched on a Baby Ruth (after having consumed four eggs and six slices of toast at breakfast). The smell of chocolate hovered on the air.

At ten minutes to ten, Hollis ambled over. He was wearing one of those white cloth markers they give racing contestants, looped and tied over the arms and shoulders, the black numeral “7” emblazoned across his chest. Taffy was following along behind him like a puppy who’d been taught a few new tricks.

“Hey, howdy,” Hollis said. “How’s the king of the mountain this morning?”

“Fine, thank you,” Foderman said.

“You guys should’ve come with us last night,” Taffy said. “We had a ball.”

“Sure did,” Hollis said, and smiled down at her. “Anybody see Mary Margaret around?”

“Nope,” Sandy said, and took another bite of her Baby Ruth.

“Are you in the race?” Foderman asked.

“Well, that’s what the number’s for, Seymour,” Hollis said.

“We’ll be rooting for you,” David said drily.

“I sure hope he wins,” Taffy said.

“Mm,” I said.

“I better get up there,” Hollis said. “I’ll see you later.” He took Taffy’s hand, and they both walked briskly toward the chair lift.

“Sweet couple,” David said.

“Love him, loathe her,” Sandy said.

“He’d better be careful,” Foderman said, shaking his head. “She’s just a child.”

It occurred to me that Rhoda had been at least as much a child that summer five years ago. I closed my eyes. The sun hot on my face, the scent of chocolate in my nostrils, the buzz of conversation swarming, hazily I thought of Rhoda. Poor Rhoda. Conscience of the world. I remembered her telling me once that she always had the feeling there was a party in progress to which she had not been invited. I did not know what she meant at the time. “The summer my mother died,” she had said, “should have been the last summer for me. I should have grown up fast and all at once, I should have come face to face with all the loss anyone ever has to experience. But each year, I seem to lose a little more, more and more each summer, until I want to shout ‘Leave me something, at least please leave me something,’ until I want to grab a microphone the way I did at Sandy’s house, and sing out louder than the noise, and thank everyone for listening, and then smile and tell them who I am, me, ‘My name is Rhoda.’ But I know, I know inside it isn’t any use, I’ll have to lose everything sooner or later, and I’ll join the others, yes, I’ll huddle with them in fear, and the party’ll end the minute I get there. That’ll be the last summer, Peter. Mine and maybe everybody’s. And I’m so afraid of winter coming.”

Well, sure. Loss of innocence. I mean, that’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she been talking about, well, fear of losing her virginity or whatever? I mean, that was it, wasn’t it? I mean, that much seemed perfectly clear. Or had she been trying to say something else, had I missed something? Join the others, huddle with them in fear, what did that mean? What others? What fear? Were David, Sandy, and I the others? And had it been her fear of us that allowed what happened in the forest to happen? But no, you see, because then, you see, I would have to subscribe to Krakauer’s theory that we had raped Rhoda, that we had forced ourselves upon Rhoda, that what had occurred was without Rhoda’s full consent and cooperation. And that would make us, well, bad guys, you see. That would make us villains. That would make us, you see, evil.

I am no expert on evil (the Arabs are expert on that, according to Foderman), but I can swear on my eyes that we intended no harm to that girl. Whatever happened to Rhoda wasn’t the same as deliberately going after somebody with the idea of hurting him, as for example the way Mary Margaret had gone after Foderman last night, with all that Jew stuff, and goading him into taking the hill, and then humiliating him that way. We never did anything like that to Rhoda. We liked Rhoda.

“Hello there, Seymour. I hardly recognized you with your pants on.”

I opened my eyes and looked up. Mary Margaret, wearing her customary green outfit, had joined the group and was even now unzipping her parka preparatory to spreading it on the ground. “Everybody ready for the north face?” she asked.

“Soon as the race is over,” Foderman said, and smiled.

“Maybe you two ought to try it alone,” Sandy said.

“Why?” Mary Margaret asked.

“I don’t want to be responsible for Seymour.”

“Responsible? What do you think’ll happen to him?”

“Who knows?” Sandy said. “His pants seem to keep falling around his ankles. That could be very dangerous.”

“I’m sure Seymour can keep his pants on. Right, Seymour?”

“Why’d you pull them down last night?” Sandy asked flatly.

“I didn’t,” Mary Margaret said. “The boys did.”

“Sure,” Sandy said, and nodded.

“Come on, come on,” Foderman said, “it was a joke.”

“That’s all it was,” Mary Margaret said, and patted his knee.

“I guess I have no sense of humor,” Sandy said.

“Me, neither,” David said.

“Would you have liked it better if those gorillas had thrown him halfway across the valley?”

“You saved Seymour’s life, right?” Sandy asked.

“Give her a medal,” David said.

“You don’t know those three guys as well as I do,” Mary Margaret said. “They can get mean as hell.”

“But not you, babe, huh?” David said.

“There isn’t a mean bone in my body,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled.

“Look, stop making a federal case out of it,” Foderman said. “There was no harm done. Let’s all go skiing together and forget it, okay?”

“Maybe they’re afraid of the north face,” Mary Margaret said.

“Gee, yeah,” Sandy said.

“Terrified,” David said.

“If you’re not afraid...”

“Jesus, you’re too much,” Sandy said.

“Then prove it.”

“I think you’re missing the point, sweetheart,” David said.

“What’s the point?”

“We don’t mind skiing the north face...”

“We just don’t want to ski it with you.”

“Get it?” David said.

“That’s rude,” Foderman said.

“Seymour,” I said, “what the hell’s the matter with you? She made a fool of you last night.”

“I didn’t feel foolish.”

“Then you are a fool,” Sandy said.

“It was a joke. What’s everybody getting so excited about?”

“You want to hear my appraisal of the situation?” Mary Margaret asked.

“No, not particularly,” Sandy said.

“I would like to hear it,” Foderman said.

“Good, then hear it,” Sandy said, and got to her feet. She picked up her parka, brushed snow from it, put it on, and was zipping it up when Mary Margaret said, “Is that the one you stole?”

“Yep,” Sandy said. “Coming, guys?”

“It seems to me,” Foderman said, “that you can at least allow her the courtesy...”

“No, let her go,” Mary Margaret said. “She’s afraid, can’t you see that?”

“Afraid of what?” Foderman said, bewildered.

“Afraid of me.”

The two girls were facing each other now, Mary Margaret still sitting on the ground, her face tilted, her eyes squinted against the sun, Sandy looking down at her. The exchange that followed was deadly and dangerous, a bitchy, catlike dialogue that I was sure would end in one of those hair-pulling, rolling-on-the-ground, spitting, biting, clawing contests that were all the vogue in grade-B movies before women began burning their bras and punching each other like mere men.

“Now, why would I be afraid of you?” Sandy asked sweetly. “You’re a lovely gentle person...”

“I am.”

“With beautiful delicate hands...”

“Then why don’t you like me?”

“Don’t force me to be blunt.”

“Oh? Were you being subtle until now?”

“Okay, Mary Margaret. I don’t like you because you’re a sadistic anti-Semite with a perverse sense of humor, okay? I think you’re out to hurt Seymour. I don’t want to be around when you do it. Now fuck off.”

“But that’s not why you’re afraid of me,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled. “Why won’t you admit the real reason?”

“You don’t listen, do you?”

“I listen. I listen very hard. Why are you afraid of me?”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Then, why won’t you ski with me?”

“I don’t like you.”

“Why not?”

“For the sake of the deaf, dumb, and blind,” Sandy said, “I’ll repeat what I said three minutes ago. You’re an anti-Semite, you’ve got a perverse...”

“Seymour doesn’t think I’m an anti-Semite.”

“Seymour wouldn’t know an anti-Semite from an Arabian pony.”

“We were just kidding around last night. Seymour knows that.”

“I don’t think you were kidding around.”

“Come on, Sandy, it was all a big joke.”

“I didn’t find it comical.”

“Then, maybe you’re right. Maybe you haven’t got a sense of humor.”

“Right, I haven’t.”

“Except for jokes that originate in your tight little corporation.”

“Right. You finished? I don’t want to miss the big race.”

“Why are you putting down the race? Because you’re not in it?”

“David? Peter? Let’s go.”

“Sure, call your dogs.”

“Don’t press your luck, Mary.”

“It’s Mary Margaret.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not. That was another put-down. Get my name wrong, and you reduce me in importance. That’s what you’re afraid of, Sandy.”

“Your name?”

“No. The fact that you can’t reduce me in importance. I don’t want to join your exclusive little country club, and you know it.”

“You haven’t been invited to join.”

“Of course not. There are only three members, and they run the admissions committee. You can’t let anybody else in, because they’re liable to find out you don’t have a swimming pool or tennis courts or lockers or anything but mirrors. It’s all a trick with mirrors, Sandy.”

“Then, why do you want to ski with us?”

“I don’t. The truth is you want to ski with me.”

“Sure. You go right on believing that.”

“And you’re afraid to. That’s the truth.”

“There’s nothing on the north face...”

“Never mind the north face. We’re not talking about Seymour now. You’re afraid of me, not the mountain. And it isn’t because you think I’m going to hurt Seymour. It’s because you think I’m going to hurt you. I’m going to get inside that phony little club of yours and bust all the mirrors.”

“Not a chance,” Sandy said.

“Try me,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled.

It seemed to me that Sandy had lost the argument. I had never before that moment felt any need to feel sorry for Sandy, but Mary Margaret had just shredded her to ribbons, and I sat on the ground with the sun on my face and looked up at Sandy and knew that if she grabbed for the bait Mary Margaret had just offered, she would only be admitting defeat. I saw this knowledge on Sandy’s face as well, and wanted to kiss both her cheeks and hug her close and comfort her. I waited for her answer, knowing what the answer would be, knowing Mary Margaret had left no choice but to accept the challenge, to prove to her for all of us that what we shared was not so fragile as to be shattered by a freckle-faced twirp with pretty hands. Sandy was trapped, we were all trapped; Mary Margaret had forced us into a position the way she had forced Foderman to climb that hill.

“We’ll meet you on the summit after the race,” Sandy said quietly.

“Fine,” Mary Margaret said.

The north face was cold and bleak and forbidding.

We stood on the level stretch of ground to the left of the unloading platform, waiting for Foderman and Mary Margaret to arrive at the summit, cursing the absence of a warming hut, shivering as each new fierce gust of wind blew snow ghosts into our faces. Lulled by the sunshine and balmy breezes on the other side of the mountain, we were unprepared for such a frigid assault, and improperly dressed for it. This was Vermont weather, ten below at the top, frostbite lurking if you stood still for more than a minute. Back East, we’d have worn a woolen shirt and two sweaters over our thermal underwear. We’d have zipped the linings into our parkas, put on wet pants over our regular garden variety ski pants, pulled slitted suede masks over our faces. Here in the glorious West, we trembled in our lightweight parkas, did windmill exercises with our arms, jumped up and down on our skis, blew on our hands, and decided that if Foderman and Mary Margaret did not show within the next two minutes, we were heading down without them. They arrived thirty seconds short of the deadline. The chair ride up had numbed them to the marrow, and we waited another five minutes for them to go through the same warming-up exercises we had just performed, while we grew colder and colder and more and more irritable.

It is dangerous to ski when you are cold.

Aside from the obvious physical disadvantage of tight muscles and aching toes and fingertips, there is a psychological disadvantage as well. When the temperature drops below zero and the wind adds its ferocity to the already biting cold, there is an urgent need to get down to where it is warmer. A skier who is cold skis faster than he normally would, takes reckless chances he would otherwise avoid, all in an attempt to escape those howling wolves chasing the troika. He knows only that if he remains where he is, he will freeze solid to the side of the mountain. So he will run over helpless babes and mewling kittens in his desperate headlong plunge down the mountain in search of warmth. None of which excuses Mary Margaret for deliberately breaking Foderman’s leg. She was cold, we all were cold. But she was an expert skier and could have avoided the accident.

The north face was everything Hollis had promised.

A full view of the difficult terrain on the chair ride up had been anything but reassuring. Wide fields of moguls blistered the sharp descent, each threatening mound looking like a concrete World War II pillbox in a frozen Maginot Line. Connecting links stitched their way brokenly across the face of the mountain, opened suddenly into icy chutes that plunged vertically into yet more fields of closely spaced moguls. The turns were abrupt and narrow, treacherously clinging to cliff faces so steep they could not hold snow, exposing instead jagged rock formations that had been thrust up out of the earth Christ knew how many centuries before. Most of the trails appeared windblown and glazed with ice, flanked with deep snow waiting in ambush to catch a tip or an edge. I said nothing to Sandy on the chair ride up, and I said nothing now as we prepared to ski down. I was very frightened. I had stopped worrying about Foderman because I was honestly more concerned for my own safety. I realized, of course, that his usual technique simply would not work on this enormously challenging terrain. But I only thought of this fleetingly. I was cold, and I was frightened, and I wanted to get down to the bottom as fast as I could.

Mary Margaret was a superb skier and an excellent guide. Since she had skied the north face last year, and was familiar with it, she quite naturally took the lead now, with Sandy close behind her, Foderman and David next in the formation, and me in the rear. Foderman, much to my surprise, skied with caution and control, adapting his bulldozing style to the exigencies of the situation, forcing himself to make frequent turns in answer to the demands of the mountain; he had to make the turns, in fact, or he’d have gone off into space and (as Hollis had put it) never been heard from since. We started down through a glade of pines through which the trail deceptively and lazily wound, coming out without warning onto a wide but extremely steep slope. Mary Margaret sliced the hill diagonally in an oblique traverse, neutralizing the fall line, gliding effortlessly down and across the face of the trail. Following her, it all seemed easy. Even Foderman had no difficulty, and I was beginning to think we’d make a good skier out of him before his stay at Semanee ended. Dogging her tracks, we reached an almost level stretch of ground partially covered with glare ice, skirted easily around the patch, carved wide turns around the bend in the trail, and came out onto a narrow passage clinging to the outer edge of the mountain with a drop on the left that fell away vertically to a jagged rock outcropping below. But Mary Margaret handled this with ease as well. The tails of her skis thrust partially out over the edge of the mountain, tips angled toward the wall of snow on her right, checking enough to control her speed but not enough to turn her or to stop her, she led us safely over the ridge and around a curve that opened onto the first wide field of moguls.

We were beginning to warm up a little, but none of us was eager to stop and bask in the sun, not with that wind still raging in over the top of each rounded mogul. Like mist rising over a fen, the snow shifted and swirled as Mary Margaret in green led the way down, again cutting the mountain in a gliding traverse, turning, traversing to the left, turning again, endlessly repeating the pattern until we reached a section of the trail protected from the wind by a gigantic spruce forest. We stopped there to catch our breath. I glanced into the forest. It was shaded and still.

“How we doing?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Good,” Foderman said.

“You’re a nice skier,” she told him. “Everybody else okay?”

“Fine,” Sandy said.

“You’re all nice skiers,” Mary Margaret said, and grinned broadly. There was in her voice a note of condescension, the patronizing tone a master uses to a pupil. Nor had we missed her pointed equation. Foderman was a nice skier, and the three of us were also nice skiers.

“The thing that’s gorgeous about this side of the mountain,” Mary Margaret said, “is the variety. You never know what’s coming up next. You’ll see what I mean. It’s really exciting.”

“I love it so far,” Foderman said.

“I knew you would, Seymour.”

“I really do love it.”

“Don’t get carried away, Seymour,” David said.

“He’s a nice skier,” Mary Margaret said.

“Yes, we’re all nice skiers,” Sandy said, letting Mary Margaret know she had caught the earlier appraisal of our skills, and blowing her nose to emphasize the point and to dismiss the slanderous comparison.

“Well, shall we go?” Mary Margaret asked.

The wind, lying in wait just beyond the edge of the forest, leaped across the trail as Mary Margaret led us through a deep crevasse. Walls of snow on either side of us rose to hide the sun, causing the temperature (psychologically at least) to drop another five degrees. I was beginning to understand what she meant about this side of the mountain. There was no way of handicapping it, no way of predicting responses to secrets it stubbornly withheld. There are mountains that become boring the second time down. The skier learns the trails, establishes a rhythm that nullifies their challenge, and then can ski them effortlessly. There was no doing that on the north face. The crevasse became a narrow catwalk that became another field of moguls that became an icy chute that became a shaded glade that became an open, sun-drenched, virtually flat plain. The challenge was continuous, the mountain refused to be second-guessed. I had the feeling it could be skied indefinitely without ever fully revealing its treasures.

We came across one of those tight little ridges Hollis had talked about, where the trail was barely wide enough to permit passage of both skis, and the outside drop was a sheer cliff surely leading to the very bowels of the earth. I navigated that precipitous ledge with dread certainty that I would fall off the mountain and be found below only months later, crushed and broken, when the Ski Patrol swept the trails during the spring thaw. We skied for what seemed forever on that sharply angled ribbon, Foderman hugging the side of the mountain, Sandy standing erect in defiance, I watching my outside ski for fear it would slip off the ledge and send me on my anticipated trip, David doing God knew what behind me. But at last the trail began to widen, and finally it opened onto a field of small, gently rolling hills, the far sides of which sloped gradually to the next small crests beyond. Mary Margaret, as she had done throughout, showed us the way to best enjoy this new terrain. She skied to the top of the nearest hill, jumped, soared six feet through the air with arms akimbo like a big green bird, landed on the downside, glided to the top of the next hill and jumped again, knees bent to absorb the shock as she landed, rising again to take the next crest and the next jump, as free of gravity as though she were on the moon. We leaped from hillock to hillock, exhilarated. It was on the next stretch of trail that Mary Margaret broke Foderman’s leg.

He had, until that time, been skiing like an angel, keeping his place in the formation, following not three feet behind the tails of Mary Margaret’s skis, fastidiously imitating each of her moves. Exuberantly, he took the jumps with each of us, and then — perhaps because he was so excited, perhaps because he was still cold in spite of all the leaping — regressed to his earlier downhill technique, and schussed the remainder of the field, passing Mary Margaret, taking the lead, and disappearing from sight around a bend at the bottom. Mary Margaret was immediately behind him, and I was behind her. I saw everything that happened. The mountain, in another of its surprises, unraveled a rather steep twisting trail some four feet wide, running through a V-like crotch bounded on both sides by angled walls of snow. Foderman, who should have known by this time that the mountain was secretive and perverse, went into the trail as if it were a continuation of the gently rolling field we had just come down. He was skiing far too fast, and was not skillful enough to check his speed in such a narrow passage. A simple snowplow check would not have worked here because he’d have had to apply pressure by bending sharply at the knees, tips pointed toward each other, and the spread heels of his skis would have struck the walls on either side of the trail, resulting in a certain fall. A better skier would have slowed himself by executing a series of short, sharp heel thrusts, exactly as Mary Margaret and I were doing. If Foderman had been behind either of us, he might have followed our example, imitated our moves, and been able to ski the passage with ease. But he was in the lead, and clearly at a loss, gaining momentum and speed, and faced with a sharp turn below which he could not possibly negotiate if he did not somehow slow down.

He resorted to a beginner’s device. He sat abruptly, his fat backside thudding into the snow. Sliding down the trail on his back, knees bent, skis flat on the ground, arms and poles up and away from his body, he might have been fine if his right ski hadn’t suddenly darted out from under him, the leg shooting straight up into the air. He slipped sideways across the trail, and the heel of the right ski came down hard, sinking deep into the soft snow adjacent to the sloping wall. He was now athwart the trail, head and shoulders against the left wall, elbows bent, left knee bent and left ski flat on the ground, right leg extended straight with the tail of the right ski anchored firmly in the snow. He looked rather like a railroad crossing, his leg effectively barricading the trial, his boot fastened to the ski. I suddenly remembered that Sandy had tightened the binding on that ski only two days ago, and I wondered if Foderman had since had it readjusted.

It was too late.

Mary Margaret was skiing toward him.

There were several things Mary Margaret could have done. She was an expert skier. She had been checking her speed all the way down the trail, and most certainly could have executed a stop now. Or she could have jumped over the barricade of Foderman’s leg; his foot, firmly bound to the ski, was no more than three feet off the ground. But she lowered her head instead, bent her knees, crouched into a downhill schuss position, and raced directly for Foderman where he lay helplessly pinioned athwart the trail. A moment before she crashed into his leg, I realized she was determined to ski through him.

His scream echoed off the walls of the narrow canyon. The force of their collision sent Mary Margaret into a somersaulting roll over Foderman’s body. Thrashing, flailing, she went skidding down the trail while Foderman lay screaming in agony, the splintered bones of his leg showing through the torn ski pants. He was still screaming when she rolled to a stop some twelve feet below him, unharmed.

Every Saturday night, at alternating hotels in the Valley, the Semanee ski instructors awarded bronze or silver pins to those of their pupils who had made the most progress during the preceding week. On this Saturday, the ceremony — further enhanced by presentation of bronze, silver, and gold medals to winners of the big race that morning — was to be held at Semanee Lodge, shortly after dinner.

The Lodge, I must say, had been decorated resplendently for the occasion and for the imminent holiday only two days off. While most of the guests were out skiing that afternoon (and while at least one of them was having his leg broken), the hotel staff had decked the halls with boughs of holly and had erected (you should pardon the expression) a giant Christmas tree in the lobby, glistening with pinpoints of light and hung with tinsel and balls (you should again pardon the expression). The mood was festive and gay as skiers from all over the Valley gathered in the large lounge to reward those among them who had performed admirably. Sandy, David, and I were depressed.

We had accompanied Foderman to the hospital, where we were informed by the resident orthopedist, a man who treated hundreds of ski injuries each season, that Foderman had suffered a highly comminuted, compound fracture of the tibia and fibula, none of which meant a damn thing to us until he explained it. Solemnly and dispassionately, the doctor said that the bones in Foderman’s right leg had been splintered into too many pieces to allow internal repair by operation. He would have to debride the skin wound, close it up, feed Foderman antibiotics intravenously (We were lucky to be on the scene, the doctor told us, because if there had been too long a delay in getting Foderman to a hospital, overwhelming infection and eventual loss of the leg would have been distinct possibilities), and put him in skeletal traction from some eight to twelve weeks, after which time he would be wearing a cast for anywhere from twenty-four to twenty-six weeks. In short, it was bad.

Leaving Foderman under heavy sedation, we had walked back to the Lodge with Mary Margaret, who tearfully insisted the accident was unavoidable. We told her exactly what we thought about that little piece of expiation, and removed ourselves from her presence the moment we got to the hotel. Now, as Hans Bittner checked out the microphone (“Vun, two, tree, testing”) and the band began setting up in the corner of the room where the awards were to be presented, I found myself thinking about Mary Margaret and wondering why she had deliberately crashed into Foderman’s extended leg.

It seemed to me there were only three possibilities worth consideration. The first of these was the undeniable fact that Mary Margaret was a bigot. Nor did it surprise me that a member of one much-maligned minority group should be able to hate a member of another minority group. When it came to hating Jews, for example, there was no one who did it as passionately as the black man. Ah yes, but couldn’t I maintain that Mary Margaret had risen above all that? Couldn’t I say that here in this wonderful land of opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, color (or anything but the accidental beauty of a person’s hands), Mary Margaret had been able to break through the cultural restrictions placed upon her crazy immigrant father, was now coining money hand over fist (so to speak), and therefore could afford to be more generous in spirit toward those less-fortunate minority-group members who were still merely gynecologists? I could say that, but I wouldn’t believe it for a minute. Mary Margaret hated Jews, and for all her buttering up of Foderman (“You’re my date, Seymour,” and “I knew you’d love it, Seymour”), she was entirely capable of turning him into a lampshade or a bar of soap at the drop of a yarmulke. Okay. So she had broken his leg because she hated Jews. Nothing personal, you understand. She had nothing against dear old Dr. Seymour Foderman that she didn’t have against any and all Jews. Foderman just happened to be handy when the moment came to exorcise that hatred. So splat went Foderman’s leg, “Oh my, I’m so sorry, I just couldn’t avoid the accident. He was sprawled all across the trail there, you know, I couldn’t turn, I couldn’t jump, I couldn’t stop, I simply had to run right through him. Can’t you see how distressed I am? Look at me. Can’t you see I’m crying?”

That was the first possibility.

The second possibility was something darker to think about, and it had nothing to do with prejudice. It had only to do with evil. There is evil, and there is evil; as Foderman pointed out, there is a vast difference between the death and the fever. It is one thing to be an Archie Bunker type mouthing adorable racial and ethnic slurs in a lovable guy-next-door fashion, but it’s quite another thing to be mean as cat shit, and to shatter someone’s leg merely because he happens to be a Jew. That, man, is evil. That is the death as compared to the fever.

I often sense when talking to Dr. Krakauer that he somehow feels Sandy, David, and I are evil. He’s never come out and said so in as many words, but a man who insists we committed rape would have to believe we’re evil unless he also believes rape is just another innocent American pastime. I won’t go into the long session (it seemed long) that Crackers and I had just before my departure for Semanee, but he said during that interminable fifty minutes that whatever the three of us shared was unhealthy at best and evil at worst. He didn’t say evil exactly. But he certainly intimated it. (Or perhaps not. Analysts aren’t supposed to make value judgments.) But he did say a lot about narcissism and about being able to excuse whatever ternary acts we performed because we enjoyed, in effect, the approval of the peer group, which peer group wasn’t that at all but merely a three-way reflecting mirror so that in reality we were enjoying only self-approval. He went on to say (dig this) that our relationship was a form of non-relating, and that we clung to each other so desperately because we were incapable of relating to anyone, least of all ourselves. In other words (and I repeat all this bullshit only to make a point about Mary Margaret), the highly personal relationship we thought we shared was really entirely impersonal.

But if Crackers really did believe we were evil, how did he account for the fact that none of us felt an iota of guilt about what we had done together with Rhoda? (Spare me a lengthy dissertation about the psychopathic personality, okay, Doc?) The truth was we did not feel guilty, we had done nothing to feel guilty about. Mary Margaret, on the other hand, had wept all the way from the hospital, and what were her tears if not an open admission that she had done something terrible, something unspeakably horrible, something in fact evil? She was crying because she felt guilty. And she felt guilty because not only was she a bigot, she was an evil bigot to boot.

Or (and this was the third and darkest possibility of all) perhaps she had broken Foderman’s leg in a misguided effort to please us. The three of us. Sandy, David, and me. I realized, even as I thought of it, that if I ever mentioned the idea to Crackers he would use it as evidence against me. He would say I was only trying to glorify the friendship by setting it above and apart from the puny, meaningless relationships other humans shared, thereby isolating us further from the peasants and enabling us to withdraw more completely into ourselves — which of course meant withdrawing more completely into a single self, narcissism again, ho-hum.

But wasn’t it a possibility? Mary Margaret had mistakenly believed from the very start that we were actively engaged in trying to break Foderman’s leg. Admiring our style, desirous of getting into our closed circle, wasn’t it entirely possible she had broken Foderman’s leg in an attempt to ingratiate herself with us? Like a cat bringing home dead chipmunks and laying them on the doormat? Had breaking Foderman’s leg been her way of meeting initiation requirements? Had she erroneously and crazily assumed we would applaud such a terrible deed?

The idea amused me.

It also frightened me.

It frightened me that it amused me.

Was I, in fact (and this was what annoyed me most about analysis), pleased that Mary Margaret had gone to such lengths to engage our attention, court our approval, and be accepted into our tight society? Was I really shocked and angry, or was I secretly delighted? Jesus, I thought. If I’m glad she broke his leg, then maybe we intended to break it all along. (“Vun, two, tree, testing,” Bittner said again.)

No.

We were not culpable. It was all right to consider Mary Margaret an amoral bitch, but it was all wrong to believe we had in any way encouraged her behavior. We simply had not. Sandy had told her frankly, bluntly, and perhaps cruelly, that we considered her a sadistic Jew-hater. We had made it plain we did not like her, we had told her we did not want to ski with her, and we had accompanied her this morning only to make certain she would not try to harm Foderman. Yes, Mary Margaret was the death, all right, Mary Margaret was that hairy stinking thing Foderman had described. But we were not about to be accepted as the fever, thank you. We were not about to think of ourselves as motivating forces, begging forgiveness as the lesser of two evils. Our temperature was 98.6, quite normal.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Bittner said, “we are so happy tonight to make the awards from our instructors for those skiers who have achieved according to their merits the most advanced in their classes on the slopes this week.”

“Mind if we join you?” Penn Trate asked.

“All the tables seem to be full,” Mrs. Trate said.

“Sure, sit down,” David said unenthusiastically.

“And, at the end, when we are finally giving out all the pins,” Bittner said, “we will have the extreme honor of presenting to the winners of the race this morning for the slalom, the honor of the Semanee bronze, silver, and gold medals.”

“I don’t believe we’ve formally met,” Trate said. “I’m John Hennings, and this is my wife Matilda.”

“Tish,” she said, and smiled.

“Her nickname,” Trate said, and smiled.

“Sandy.”

“David.”

“Peter,” I said.

“I understand your, friend had an accident,” Trate said. “Honey, do you want something to drink?”

“Yes, a little crème de menthe, please,” Tish said.

“Racked himself up pretty bad, from what I hear,” Trate said.

“Johnny, let’s not talk about ski accidents,” Tish said. “I get very nervous.”

“Tish is a beginner,” Trate said.

“He’ll be in traction for eight weeks,” Sandy said.

“So now,” Bittner said into the microphone, and winced as feedback pierced the air. Moving away from the mike, he said, “What the hell is that, huh?” and smiled at the audience. Max fiddled with the amplifier, and then Bittner came back to the mike and said again, “So now... ahhh, that’s better... so now, without further announcement, we will have presenting the awards for the Beginners’ classes, that’s groups 6A and 6B, Mr. Martin Hirsch, who you perhaps all know as the Silver Streak. Martin?”

Accompanied by a flourish from the band, Hirsch, grayhaired and suntanned, came up to the microphone and joylessly read off the names of the bronze and silver pin recipients. The skiers approached the bandstand like winners of the Academy Award, beaming at their friends, waving to well-wishers in the crowd. I fully expected them to make acceptance speeches in which they thanked their agents, their acting coaches, their hairdressers, and their trusty police dogs. Instead, clutching their coveted prizes, they walked proudly back to their tables, while the band played another brief flourish and the ski instructors stood and grinned along the wall.

“Hello, folks, would you care for something to drink?” Alice asked.

“Yes, a crème de menthe, please,” Trate said, “and I’ll...”

“On the rocks or straight up?”

“Straight up,” Tish said, and I could tell from the faint flush on her cheeks that she considered this somehow suggestive.

“And you, sir?” Alice asked. “Hi, Peter.”

“Hi, Alice.”

“I’ll have a Martini, very dry, with Beefeater’s gin and a twist of lemon,” Trate said.

“You busy later?” Alice asked me.

“Why?”

“Like to talk to you,” she said.

“Did you get that, miss?”

“I got it,” Alice said. “Okay?” she said to me.

“Fine,” I said.

“Anybody else?” Alice asked.

“Beer for me,” Sandy said.

“Beer all around,” David said.

“Shall I bring a pitcher?”

“Great.”

“I’m off at midnight,” Alice said, and moved swiftly away from the table.

“She’s awfully cute,” Tish said.

“Mmm,” I said.

“How’d your friend happen to hurt himself?” Trate asked.

“Please, Johnny,” Tish said.

“I’m just curious, honey.”

“Well, they can tell you about it later. Honestly, I’ve never met anyone so morbidly interested in ski accidents.”

“Builds my confidence, honey,” he said, and grinned.

“Now,” Bittner said at the microphone, “to present the awards for the classes 5A and 5B, we have someone you probably know best as the star violinist in our trio here at the Lodge, but who also instructs on the slopes in his spare time, Mr. Max Brandstaetter.”

Max took the microphone with professional aplomb and read off the names of the bronze and silver pin winners. Alice came back with the drinks. Leaning over me as she put them down on the table, she whispered, “Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” I said, and watched her swiveling off in dirndl and peasant blouse.

“She’s awfully cute,” Tish said.

The awards went on interminably. Max, finished with his presentation stint, wandered over to our table, and took a chair alongside David. At Trate’s insistence, I told him about Foderman’s accident Max asked David if he would care to play with the band again tonight. Sandy stared off into space as the pins were awarded to 3A and 3B. It was precisely at this point that Mary Margaret arrived.

It must have taken considerable courage for her to cross that room and join us at the table as though nothing had happened to our social contract. We had condemned her bitterly on the walk from the hospital, had bluntly told her she’d be lucky if we didn’t inform the local constabulary that she had flagrantly committed armed assault on a helpless victim, to which she had tearfully countered, “And suppose I tell about the parka?” to which Sandy had replied, “Shoplifting ain’t mugging in the park,” and Mary Margaret had blown her nose and said, “I keep telling you it was an accident!” and Sandy said, “You broke his goddamn leg!” and Mary Margaret said, “I couldn’t help it.”

So here she was.

“Hey, hi,” she said, pulling up a chair alongside Tish. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Mary Margaret Buono.”

“Means ‘good’ in Italian,” David said drily.

“I’m John Hennings,” Trate said, “and this is my wife Matilda.”

“Tish.”

“Her nickname,” Trate said, and smiled.

“I have a cousin named Matilda,” Mary Margaret said. “What’s everybody drinking?”

I noticed at once that she was flaunting her hands. She had put on a black, long-sleeved dress that served as a perfect backdrop for those exquisite white hands, and she used them now with supreme confidence that they were stars in a command performance — single hot spotlight, black curtain, introductory drum roll, and “Heeeeeerrrre they are, folks!” She had dressed deliberately for the occasion, I was sure, hoping we would be so entranced by the beauty of her hands that we would forget the ugliness of her spirit. Trate was captivated at once. Her hands came out of their basket like twin white cobras, and Trate watched hypnotically. Tish, secure in the allure of her own twin assets (ripely and bra-lessly contained in a scoop-necked halter top that looked like the undershirt Sonny Corleone wore in The Godfather), hardly considered a pair of hands competition, and went babbling on to David and Max about how nice it was to be spending the Christmas holidays far from the commercial hustle and bustle of a big town like Portland, Oregon. David made no comment Max did not know Portland, Oregon from Portsmouth, Virginia.

Sandy totally ignored Mary Margaret; as far as she was concerned, Mary Margaret was already dead. Blue eyes vacant, full mouth drawn tight, blond head erect, she disdainfully consigned Mary Margaret to that great big cemetery in the sky without so much as shedding an obligatory tear over her untimely demise. It was perhaps Sandy’s deliberate and premature burial that provoked the next attack from Mary Margaret. I am sometimes quite stupid when it comes to understanding attacks. I seem always to be guarding my front while a pincers assault is being mounted on both flanks. I thought at first that Mary Margaret’s attempt to control the conversational flow merely supported my earlier theory — she was somehow trying to impress us by exposing the least desirable aspects of her personality. I realized only later that I was deluding myself. However flattering and appealing the idea initially seemed, I became more and more convinced that Mary Margaret was motivated not by admiration but by envy. Which is why I’d been afraid of her from the very beginning. Mary Margaret was out to destroy us.

I do not mean that literally. I do not mean that she entertained actual thoughts of poisoning our drinks or slitting our throats while we slept. She wanted only to destroy our triple identity. (It occurred to me that in many respects she was quite similar to Dr. Krakauer, who in our last session had seemed hell-bent on forcing me into a denial of Sandy and David. I honestly don’t know why people are so envious of our unity.) Listening to Mary Margaret as first she flailed out at Max, and then took on the Trates, and then closed the pincers to reveal her true target, I became certain that she was, jealous of what we shared, furious that we would not allow her to join us or to separate us, and determined to get inside our phony little club and bust all the mirrors.

She started by drawing out Trate, who, as it developed, was not a corporation executive but a teacher in a small private school on the outskirts of Portland. Trate, flattered to think that anyone could be even slightly interested in the care and feeding of pubescent boys, launched into a learned (and boring) treatise comparing private-school to public-school education, reaching the conclusion (surprise!) that private schools were in every way superior to public schools, which was why he had devoted his life to teaching fine young boys in a healthy, challenging environment, God bless America, pass the apple pie, and for God’s sake don’t mention, busing.

“Yes, but what about homosexuality?” Mary Margaret asked.

“What about it?” Trate said.

“Isn’t it rampant?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Where? Do you mean in America?”

“No, I mean in private schools.”

“Oh, really,” Tish said.

“That’s a common misconception,” Trate said.

“That little boys are constantly being buggered in private schools?” Mary Margaret said.

“Now, really,” Tish said.

“We don’t have that problem in my school,” Trate said.

“Is it a sleep-away school?”

“It’s a boarding school, yes.”

“Then, how do you avoid the problem?”

“It simply doesn’t exist.”

“Do you believe that, Max?” Mary Margaret asked.

Max, turning away from his conversation with David, smiled and said, “I beg your pardon, I wasn’t listening.”

“We were discussing homosexuality,” Mary Margaret said.

“Ah, yes? What about it?” Max said.

“Do you have private schools in Europe?”

“Yes?” Max said, puzzled.

“Did you go to a private school when you were a boy?”

“No.”

“Then, I suppose you wouldn’t know anything about homosexual relationships between little boys,” she said, and looked Max square in the eye. To Max’s credit, he did not turn away.

“No,” he said, “I would know nothing about it.”

“There are homosexuals in Austria, of course.”

“There are,” Max said unflinchingly, “homosexuals everywhere.”

“My God, how’d we get into this?” Tish asked.

“I suppose it’s accepted more easily in Europe, though,” Mary Margaret said.

“I wish I knew where you’d picked up that idea,” Trate said. “I mean, about private schools in America.”

“From association with any number of pansies in New York City,” Mary Margaret said flatly, “all of whom had been exposed to homosexuality at very early ages in posh little private schools.”

“Well, in the East maybe,” Trate said.

“The intellectual East,” Mary Margaret said.

“I can only speak for my part of the country...”

“Where homosexuality is unheard of, right?”

“Listen, you’re rather rude, do you know that?” Tish said earnestly.

“I don’t mean to be,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled pleasantly, and opened her gorgeous hands in a fluid gesture that begged understanding. “I’m really interested in the topic. I’m sure Max is, too.”

“I am interested only in skiing,” Max said, and smiled, and shrugged.

“Well, you can’t ski at night,” Mary Margaret said.

Trate glanced sidelong and uneasily at Max, suddenly understanding Mary Margaret’s implication. Then, ashamed of his reaction, he quickly said, “Anyway, we’re not talking about sex between consenting adults in the privacy of their own...”

“I don’t know how we got on sex,” Tish said, and shook her head.

“We’re talking about, well, corrupting kids. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

“Who knows?” Mary Margaret said, smiling. “What are we talking about, Max?”

“I was talking to David,” Max said.

“What about?”

“As I said, skiing.”

“Max and I are old friends,” Mary Margaret said. “We skied a lot together last year.”

“Mary Margaret is a superb skier,” Max said generously.

“Are you an instructor, too?” Trate asked her.

“No, no,” Mary Margaret said.

“Mary Margaret is a model,” Max said. “Show them your beautiful hands, Mary Margaret.”

“A model? Really?” Tish said, suddenly interested, and immediately forgetting how rude she had thought Mary Margaret was.

“Her hands,” Max said.

“Why, of course!” Tish said. “They’re exquisite!”

“What do you do, Tish?” Mary Margaret asked, modestly turning attention from her own brilliant career and graciously bowing Tish into stage center.

“Me? I’m just a housewife,” Tish answered. “Do you do television commercials and everything?”

“Yes, everything,” Mary Margaret said in dismissal. “What do you mean, just a housewife? Lots of women’s libbers would take offense at that statement, you know.”

“Well, it’s what I am,” Tish said, and giggled.

“She’s a lot more than just a housewife,” Trate said, smiling approval.

“And now,” Bittner said at the microphone, “with your kind indulgence, I will read off the names of those contestants who placed in the top ten positions in the slalom, and end finally with the bronze, silver, and gold medal winners in the third, second, and first places. In the tenth position, Mr. Harry Fielder of New York City...”

Harry Fielder of New York City, beaming modestly, rose in place at his table and acknowledged the applause of the crowd and the extended paradiddles Helmut played on his snare drum.

“In ninth position, Mr. Hollis Blake from San Manuel, Arizona.”

“That’s Hollis,” Mary Margaret said.

“Hooray for Hollis,” David said.

“Nothing wrong with being a housewife,” Trate said, as Bittner tediously read the names of runners-up, and Helmut inventively unraveled a series of snare-drum rolls and the instructors grinned and shifted their feet. “Actually, Tish is quite active in...”

“Bed,” Mary Margaret said immediately, and Max burst out laughing.

“Well, there, too,” Trate said awkwardly. “But I meant to say she’s quite active in the social life of the school...”

“Has all the boys in for tea and sympathy, I’ll bet,” Mary Margaret said.

“Well, tea, anyway,” Trate said.

“No sympathy?”

“She’s very understanding of their problems.”

“And will they speak kindly of her in later years?” Mary Margaret asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know what I mean, don’t you, Tish?”

“No, I don’t,” Tish said, totally bewildered.

“Comfort,” Mary Margaret said. “Solace.”

“Oh, yes, certainly,” Trate said.

“Moral guidance.”

“Certainly,” Trate said.

“Right, Sandy?”

“What?” Sandy said, surprised she’d been addressed.

“Comfort and solace. For the boys. Isn’t that what a good friend should offer them? Moral guidance?” And here she spread her expressive hands wide in a gesture that unmistakably identified David and me as the boys she was talking about.

“And now,” Bittner said at the microphone, “we come to those skiers who from all over Semanee Valley and also from all over Snowclad where they came down from there to compete, those skiers who finished third, second, and first in that order and who it gives me great pleasure now to introduce their names and to award to them the bronze, the silver, and the gold medals. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, I give you now the three big winners.”

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, it was time to quit badgering the likes of Max and the Trates, time to quit wasting time with the also-rans. Instead, Mary Margaret had introduced the three big winners (namely yours truly and associates) and was now ready to award the bronze, the silver, and the gold artillery shells. A single glance from Trate informed me that Mary Margaret’s opening barrage had been on target. Belatedly, Trate understood the tea and sympathy reference, and realized Mary Margaret had been suggesting that his good wife Matilda the Tish was spending those long wintry campus afternoons doling out more than motherly comfort and solace while he was correcting term papers in the library, was in fact reassuring buggered little boys of their masculinity, guiding them morally by allowing them entrance to the sacred hidden storeroom and permitting them to gaze upon and fondle the Trate treasures, all in a good cause.

His sidelong glance was directed not accusingly at his beloved faithful wife, but wonderingly at me, a glance of the same species and genus he had earlier squandered on Max. He knew his precious blushing bride was above suspicion, and could therefore dismiss Mary Margaret’s campus fantasy as pure and simple nonsense. But he knew nothing at all about David or me, having first made our acquaintance this evening, and Mary Margatet had just referred to us as “the boys,” time-honored euphemism (even in Portland, Oregon) for pansy, fruit, or queer, and had broadly intimated that Sandy gave to us the comfort, solace, and moral guidance provided at certain exclusive private schools in the East, where white-sneakered, light-footed, limp-wristed students were in constant need of open-bloused bolstering of their male egos, schools where goddamn little fairies, in short, fooled around with the goddamn English teacher’s wife while he was out coaching the goddamn track team! Suspicion ran riot. First Max, now David and me! Trate must have felt suddenly surrounded by three flitting faggots. David bridled at once. If he had been carrying his flute, I was certain he would have rammed it down Mary Margaret’s throat, thereby exacting at least some measure of ironic justice, the punishment fitting the accusation, so to speak. But Sandy surprised me by bursting into explosive laughter, that clever, lovely, marvelous, darling girl.

“In third place, for the honored bronze medal,” Bittner said, “I happily announce Mr. Jonas Whelan of Austin, Texas.”

“I just thought of something funny,” Sandy said.

“Really? What?” Trate asked, eager to get away from a subject that was becoming more disturbing by the minute. The crowd applauded as Mr. Jonas Whelan went up to the bandstand to accept his medal. Sandy’s laughter trailed, and a radiant smile replaced it.

“Mary Margaret would appreciate this,” she said, and her voice held all the intimate promise of someone about to reveal a cherished secret to a dear and trusted friend. Hans Bittner, grinning, said, “In second place, for the silver medal, I am happy to call to the microphone, Mr. Andrew D’Allesandro of Yonkers, New York.” There was more applause as Mr. D’Allesandro shuffled modestly to the bandstand.

“This happened the summer before I met the boys,” Sandy said. “I was fourteen at the time.”

“I didn’t realize you’d known each other that long,” Mary Margaret said. Her initial surprise had given way to curiosity. She leaned forward expectantly now, arms on the table, green eyes faintly suspicious.

“Yes, I met them when I was fifteen,” Sandy said.

“How old are you now?” Trate asked.

“You’re not supposed to ask women their age, Johnny.”

“I’m twenty,” Sandy said.

“I figured about twenty-two or — three,” Trate said.

“Johnny, that’s even worse!” Tish said.

“What’d I say?” Trate said.

At the microphone, Hans Bittner said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pride that I announce the name of the gold medal winner in today’s race, and that is...” He hesitated, trying to build suspense, even though everyone had already read the names of the winners on the lobby bulletin board. “Mr. Arthur Greer of Pensacola, Florida. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Greer!”

Applause broke out from the crowd as Mr. Greer rose and walked briskly to the bandstand. Sandy waited for the applause to die, and then said, “The summer I was fourteen, my mother and I went up to Martha’s Vineyard. We...”

“I have been there once,” Max said. “It is very nice there.”

“Yes, it’s lovely,” Sandy said.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Trate said.

“We went there because my father had just left after seventeen years of marriage...”

“Left?” Tish said.

“Yes. Left my mother.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

“Are you an only child?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not so bad, then.”

“My mother has since remarried,” Sandy said.

“I’m so happy,” Tish said.

“But we were both sort of in shock that summer, and we went up there to get over it.”

“You will have to excuse me,” Max said. “I think we are ready for some music. David? Join us later, yes?”

“I’ll see,” David said.

Max clasped him on the shoulder in farewell, and went up to the bandstand, where his fellow musicians were waiting for him. Sandy suddenly laughed again, anticipating her own story, enjoying it in advance.

“It it that funny?” Mary Margaret asked.

“It’s pretty funny,” Sandy admitted.

“I’m dying to hear it,” Trate said.

“Then, keep quiet and let her tell it,” Tish said.

“Well, there was a party at our house one night,” Sandy said, “and everybody was drinking a lot, and the conversation got around to swimming, and somebody said that women were good endurance swimmers because they had an extra layer of fat on their bodies and could...”

“That isn’t true,” Tish said.

“Yes, it’s true, honey,” Trate said.

“I don’t know whether it’s true or not,” Sandy said, “but this person was saying that women are supposed to be able to stay in the water longer because of that extra layer of fat.”

“Where’d you say this happened?” I asked.

“Martha’s Vineyard.”

“It sounds familiar,” David said. “Have you told it before?”

“Maybe,” Sandy said, and again laughed. “I don’t remember. The extra layer of fat is supposed to protect women from the cold.”

“I could have used an extra layer of fat on the north face today,” Trate said.

“Hush, honey.”

“So the argument went back and forth and finally someone said, ‘Look, Joanna...’”

“Who’s Joanna?” Trate asked.

“My mother. Someone said, ‘Look, Joanna, you’re a fantastic swimmer, and you haven’t got an ounce of fat on you, why don’t you prove to everybody that it’s got nothing to do with fat, it’s only got to do with women being superior!’”

“We are superior,” Tish said.

“Quiet, honey.”

“When did you say this happened?” I asked.

“The summer before we met.”

“It still sounds familiar,” David said.

It did sound familiar. It was familiar. I remembered it now, and it wasn’t Sandy’s story, and it hadn’t happened the summer before we’d met, and it wasn’t even funny. It was Rhoda who’d told it to us one rainy afternoon, and it had happened to her when she was ten, and it was about the night her mother drowned trying to prove to a bunch of drunken idiots that she could swim nonstop to a sand bar half a mile offshore. Puzzled, I looked at Sandy. She laughed again, reassured me with an almost indiscernible nod, and said, “The grown-ups decided to have a race. This must’ve been about two in the morning, you understand, and most of... ”

“What were you doing up so late?” Tish asked.

“What?” Sandy said.

“You were only fourteen!” Tish said, shocked.

“Yes, but it was summertime. No school.”

“Still,” Tish said, and shrugged.

“In fact, there were a lot of kids still awake,” Sandy said, and I realized she was going to invent this as she went along, using Rhoda’s story as a springboard, and leaping off from it into Christ knew what uncharted waters. David suddenly remembered the origin of the story, too, and looked sharply across the table at Sandy, surprised, fascinated and, I was sure, wondering how she hoped to twist an essentially tragic event into something she had already advertised as funny. The suspicion in Mary Margaret’s eyes had given way to curiosity. She was genuinely interested in the outcome of the story, eager to know what had happened that night on Martha’s Vineyard the summer Sandy was fourteen. I was more interested in trying to figure out what Sandy hoped to accomplish. There was no question but that she was winging this directly at Mary Margaret, her eyes, her subdued laughter somehow promising a revelation only the two of them might share. I would have felt enormously neglected if I didn’t know Sandy better. She was after something. I watched and listened now as she pursued whatever the hell it was.

“The kids who were still awake ranged in age from twelve to fifteen, and since the grown-ups were...”

“That is young,” Tish said. “Twelve. To be up at two in the morning.”

“Quiet, Tish,” Trate said.

“Well, it is,” Tish said.

“Since the grown-ups were about to have a race, we decided to have a race of our own. The idea came from a little girl I despised — a thirteen-year-old whose name I’ve already forgotten. Iris? Irene? Yes, it was Irene.”

As I recalled the story, Irene was Rhoda’s mother, the woman who had drowned. Sandy seemed to be appropriating characters and plot, loosely reshaping both to suit the needs of a theme she had not yet revealed, a form of borrowing sometimes known as plagiarism. Apparently, she had decided to respond peacefully to Mary Margaret’s earlier provocation. If this, then, was an attempt at negotiated settlement, her story would have to make a point readily understood and accepted by Mary Margaret. Knowing better than to believe Sandy was in any way retreating, I began wondering how she could possibly transform tragedy into not only comedy but comedy that carried the additional burden of peace with honor. Or was she really seeking peace? As Katherine of France once remarked, “O bon Dieu! les langues des homines sont pleines de tromperies,” not to mention the tongues of women, too.

Fascinated, I listened intently as Sandy described the imaginary little brat named Irene, a girl who sounded very much like Mary Margaret. (This, then, was to be a parable of sorts. That long-ago feud twixt Sandy and the invented little monster was being related to illuminate the existing tension between Sandy and Mary Margaret.) It seemed that Irene, that darling little child, had irked Sandy from the beginning of the summer, taunting her, calling her names, embarrassing her in the presence of other children, once even revealing that Sandy wore a cotton training bra, how mortifying! On more than one occasion, surrounded by water as they were, Sandy had considered drowning (source material again) the horrid little creature, but had put such thoughts out of her mind as being beyond the capabilities of a mere slip of a fourteen-year-old. This night of nights, however, seemed to offer splendid opportunity for actually carrying out the foul deed, holding little Irene’s head under water while she gasped her last obscenity and then sank slowly from sight.

“What do you mean?” Tish asked, alarmed. “You mean you actually thought of murdering her?”

“Drowning her,” Sandy said.

“That’s murdering her.”

“I suppose.”

“I’ve never in my life hated a person enough to even dream of...”

“I was only fourteen,” Sandy said.

“Even so.”

“Emotions run high at fourteen.” She smiled at Mary Margaret. “We learn to control them when we get a bit older. Anyway, let me tell the rest of the story.”

“If you’re going to say you really did drown that little girl...”

“No, no, no,” Sandy said, and laughed.

“Thank God!”

“She said it was a funny story, Tish. Drowning somebody isn’t very funny.”

“I know, Johnny, but she also said she thought of it. She seriously considered it.”

“Let me finish, okay?” Sandy said.

“Well, go ahead,” Tish said reluctantly.

The band began playing just as Sandy started talking again, a Viennese waltz particularly unsuited to this supposedly hilarious tale she was tortuously unraveling.

“The grown-ups all got into their bathing suits,” she said, “and went down to the beach, leaving us kids alone together in the house. Irene began poking me in the belly, and telling the other kids I had a layer of fat around me...”

“What a horrible little child!” Tish said.

“And why didn’t we have our own little race to prove that I was a lousy swimmer even if I was obese.”

“Were you?” Trate asked.

“I was pretty fat that summer. I didn’t slim down until the following year. Just before I met the boys.”

I didn’t know which part of Sandy’s story was true and which was false any more, so I merely glanced at David, and he shrugged slightly, and both of us waited for the conclusion to this so-far hysterically funny tale based on an original underwater tragedy by Buster Crabbe.

“Naturally, all the kids thought it would be great fun to do what the grown-ups were doing, provided we didn’t do it on the same beach, and provided we didn’t do it in deep water. Then somebody... Irene, I think... remembered that the grown-ups had been drinking, and if we were about to do the same thing they were doing, we’d have to drink a little before going down to the water.”

“You sure knew some nice kids,” Tish said.

“Well, we were all very excited,” Sandy said. “It was two o’clock in the morning, and we could hear the grown-ups laughing down there on the beach, and getting drunk seemed like a very good idea to all of us.”

“Did you get drunk?”

“We did. That’s the point of the story.”

“I fail to see the point,” Tish said.

“She’s not finished yet,” Trate said impatiently.

“We took a bottle of scotch from the bar in the living room, and went down to a little beach about a hundred yards from where the grown-ups were laughing and yelling and having their race. We were all in bathing suits, and it was very cold, and I was beginning to shake all over. Irene kept poking me in the belly and saying somebody as fat as I was shouldn’t be shivering, and I kept thinking I was going to get her in the water and drown her.”

“Every time you say that...”

“Come on, Tish, they were just kids.”

“The fifteen-year-olds got bored and went off looking for boys. The twelve-year-olds took two or three swigs from the bottle and passed out cold. Irene and I sat sitting in the sand alone and drinking, she trying to get up the courage to go into the water, which we knew was freezing, and I getting up the courage to drown her. Around the bend in the beach, the grown-ups were having a high old time. We drank and we drank. Irene began to forget why she’d suggested the race. I began to forget I wanted to drown her. In fact, and this is what’s so funny about the story, in no time at all we discovered we had a lot in common and that we’d wasted half the summer fighting with each other when all along we might have been good friends. We ended up singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and staggering up the narrow wooden steps that led from the beach to the house, and passing out on the back porch. It was a great night. We were friends for the rest of the summer.”

“Sandy,” David said dead-panned, “that has got to be the funniest story I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“It’s a nice story,” Mary Margaret said quietly.

“I thought you’d appreciate it,” Sandy said.

“I don’t get it,” Trate said. “What’s so funny about it?”

“Are you still friends?” Tish asked.

“Who?”

“You and Irene.”

“No,” Sandy said quickly. “She drowned last year at Coney Island.”

Mary Margaret burst out laughing, slapping the tabletop with one of her delicate hands and almost knocking over the pitcher of beer.

“I don’t think that’s funny, either,” Tish said.

“Mary Margaret?” Sandy said, leaning forward.

“Yes, Sandy?”

“Want to ski with us tomorrow?”

“How do I know you won’t try to drown me?” Mary Margaret said, and smiled.

“No water up there,” Sandy said, and returned the smile.

“Then, I guess I’m safe,” Mary Margaret said.

ME: She was safe. I thought she was safe.

KR: What made you think so?

ME: We had moved inland. Away from the water.

KR: I don’t understand.

ME: There was no water in the forest, don’t you see? Rhoda was afraid of water. Her mother had drowned. We even had to teach her to swim.

KR: Were you afraid she might drown?

ME: No. Yes. I don’t know. But the sea was very rough that day, and I guess I was glad when she refused to come in the water with us. I didn’t expect anything to happen in the forest. I thought she’d be safe in the forest.

KR: But something did happen.

ME: Yes.

KR: Are you sorry about what happened?

ME: It wasn’t our fault.

Christmas Eve dawned grayly and chillingly.

I had rested badly, tossing and turning with my satchel-full-of-hair dream, and felt fatigued upon awakening. I might have slept better had I accepted Alice’s invitation of the night before, but by the time the three of us left the lounge at a quarter to twelve, I had no desire to talk to her (no less cater to her bizarre needs) and went directly to bed. A broken promise, as a sage once remarked, is like a broken leg.

Following Sandy’s lead, we were courteous and charming to Mary Margaret during breakfast. Sandy’s efforts to be friendly were all the more surprising since she normally was about as animated and talkative as a tortoise during the morning meal. This morning, however, she rattled on about the Trates and Max, and about how penetrating and directly honest Mary Margaret’s observations had been, even if she hadn’t much cared for the implication that David and I were queer...

“I was just trying to get a rise out of you,” Mary Margaret said.

Yes, but even allowing such childish motivation, Sandy felt that equating us with faggot preppies was going a bit far, although the parallel was probably lost on Trate...

“No, I think he got it,” Mary Margaret said.

The point being that if we’d been mistaken about Foderman’s accident, the sensible thing was to discuss it openly and correct any misapprehensions, rather than slinging mud at each other in the presence of outsiders, especially outsiders of their caliber.

“I hope you guys realize,” Mary Margaret said, “that it was an accident. I really did panic when I saw him spread across the trail that way.”

Since I was the one who’d most closely witnessed the collision, I felt compelled to point out to Mary Margaret that she had gone into a racing position, head down, knees bent, poles back...

“I was getting ready to jump over him,” Mary Margaret said.

“Then why didn’t you?” I asked.

“I told you. I panicked. I didn’t think I could clear his leg.”

“In any case,” Sandy said, “I think we all reacted too strongly. We shouldn’t have accused you, and you shouldn’t have retaliated the way you did.”

“I don’t really think you guys are fags,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled.

“I can offer empirical evidence to the contrary,” Sandy said, and smiled back at her.

“Is it settled, then?”

“It’s settled.”

“I mean, I hope it’s clear that...”

“Perfectly clear,” Sandy said.

“I want to make this perfectly clear,” David said.

Grinning, Mary Margaret said, “You know, I think we really can be friends.”

“Why not?” Sandy said.

“I’m so touched I could weep,” David said.

“You sure you two don’t want to be alone?” I said.

“Let’s go find some real live wires, Peter.”

“Let’s go find some real hot numbers.”

“They are so clever, ho-ho,” Sandy said.

In just such a cheerful mood, we left for the north face.

KR: Have you changed your mind about going west?

ME: No. What do you mean? Why should I have changed my mind?

KR: Then the trip is still on. As planned.

ME: Of course it is.

KR: I’ll be frank with you, Peter...

ME: Have you ever been anything less?

KR: I was hoping you wouldn’t go.

The top of the mountain was covered with low-hanging clouds that shrouded the unloading platform, obfuscating trees and terrain, touching our faces with cold, wet tendrils. The four of us stood in the shifting gray fog and debated taking the chair back to the bottom, rather than risking the downhill trails when visibility was so poor. Mary Margaret argued that she knew the mountain well enough to ski it blindfolded, and besides (as revealed on the chair ride up) the visibility was better just a little bit further down. She would take the lead, she said, and we could all follow in a line immediately behind her, tips to tails, until we got below the cloud cover. Please understand that none of us was in the slightest concerned about what Mary Margaret would think of our courage or skill; I mean, the hell with her, we weren’t up there to impress her. But a skier who rides to the top of a mountain is reluctant to admit he’s afraid to ski down; the embarrassment of choosing descent by chair instead is equivalent to what one might feel if he walked to the end of a diving board and then refused to jump into the pool. Mary Margaret had proved to us yesterday that she knew the mountain well. We had no reason to believe that, skiing in single file behind her, we would not be led safely to the bottom today. Besides, as she had pointed out, only the very uppermost portion of the mountain was in clouds; the terrain below was free of fog and could be skied with ease. We decided to trust her. As promised, she took the lead. Sandy was directly behind her, the tips of her skis almost touching Mary Margaret’s tails ahead. David was next. I was last in line.

ME: If this is going to be another lecture...

KR: I wasn’t aware that I’d been lecturing you.

ME: You just did a twenty-minute number on narcissism and self-approval and nonrelating and entirely impersonal personal relationships. Wasn’t that a lecture? Gee, I thought it was a lecture.

KR: What I’m about to say is not a lecture. You probably won’t enjoy hearing it, but it must be said anyway. I’d feel derelict, if I didn’t express my...

ME: How’d this get so serious all of a sudden?

KR: It’s been serious all along.

ME: You’re going to tell me I’m a schizophrenic, right? You’re going to suggest I be committed at once before...

KR: No.

ME: Then, what?

KR: I’m going to ask you to stay home. Let David and Sandy go alone. Let them go, Peter.

ME: I already told you I’m going with them.

KR: I think the trip could be dangerous for you.

ME: Dangerous? Don’t make me laugh.

I could barely see the tails of David’s skis. I could not see David himself, I could not see Sandy ahead of him, and I certainly could not see Mary Margaret in the lead. I had the feeling I was moving through one of those movie sequences (Yes, Dr. Crackers, I know, I know) where phony clouds produced by dry ice float up from below, shifting and swirling where angels fearlessly tread in the company of recently deceased heavenly candidates who can’t believe they’re really dead. The long black length of my skis appeared only occasionally through patches in the mist, my boots sometimes visible but most often not, the terrain itself effectively camouflaged in the rolling white and gray fog. Each shadow-less, shrouded, separate bump in the trail registered as a total surprise, the shock rumbling up into my knees, my balance constantly threatened. From below, Mary Margaret called encouragement and warning, “Easy, guys, we’re getting there,” or “Watch it, bad bump!” or “Keep loose, feel the terrain,” or “Trees ahead, stay close!” I had once read a newspaper article about a blind skier (yes, blind!) who used a seeing-eye dog to lead him down the mountain, the dog having a small bell attached to a collar around his neck. At the time, I made some wise-ass remark about the blind man being just your regular garden variety skier, but the dog being an absolute whiz. The story did not seem so funny to me now. Mary Margaret was our radar and our sonar, guiding us down and through the suffocating cloud, “Sharp left,” her voice reassuring, “We’re coming to some moguls,” her skill unquestioned, “We’ll traverse this, stick together,” her knowledge of the mountain totally reliable.

We stopped to rest by the side of the trail after we had crossed the field of moguls, huddling close as the fog swirled around us, an enveloping specter that seemed to have been summoned from some cold, dank crypt to which it was eager now to drag us.

“Everybody okay?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Yeah,” Sandy said briefly.

“We’ll be out of this soon,” Mary Margaret said. “The worst part is just ahead. Let’s stick very close together. Okay?”

KR: We’re making progress here, Peter, you’re coming to a better understanding of yourself. But I don’t think you yet realize how threatening the relationship between you, Sandy, and...

ME: I don’t find it threatening.

KR: It’s threatening because it keeps alive this concept of infantile omnipotence.

ME: I don’t know what that means.

KR: It means that together you feel you can do whatever you want to do and get away with it.

ME: That’s ridiculous.

KR: Isn’t that what happened with Rhoda? You destroyed her and then...

ME: Destroyed her! Jesus!

KR: Yes. You destroyed her, and you got away with it. There was no punishment, there was only reward — a tightening of the bond between the three of you, a confirmation of your omnipotence. Well, you’re not all-powerful, Peter. You’re three very troubled youngsters who...

ME: I don’t want to hear this.

KR: I know you don’t. I’d like you to listen anyway. Your occasional contact with the other two...

ME: Don’t call them “the other two!” We’re not accomplices! We have names!

KR: Have you?

ME: Yes. Sandy, David, and me.

KR: I didn’t hear your name.

ME: Don’t make it sound as if I don’t exist without them!

KR: I would like you to exist without them. Don’t go on this trip. The three of you together again for an extended period of...

ME: We’re always together.

KR: No. You see each other only occasionally, you nourish your conglomerate ego only enough to sustain it. It has, in a sense, been latent since that summer five years ago. I wouldn’t like to see it emerge again full-blown. Peter?

ME: I’m listening.

KR: Please don’t go on this trip.

ME: I’m going.

KR: Must we risk everything we’ve accomplished so far?

ME: Jesus Christ, what the hell do you think can possibly happen?

KR: The same thing that happened five years ago.

ME: Rhoda won’t be with us, Doctor. Remember?

KR: You’ll find another Rhoda.

ME: One Rhoda was enough, thanks.

KR: I would hope so. That’s why I’m begging you to stay home. I don’t think you can survive another victim.

ME: Well, this has all been very illuminating, Doctor. I’m certainly glad you decided to speed me on my way by suggesting that my friends and I are hatchet murderers.

KR: I suggested nothing of the sort. Nor am I concerned with your friends, who might do well to seek psychiatric help of their own. I’m concerned only with you. You’re my patient. If you act-out another of your...

ME: Here we go with the acting-out again.

KR: I hope not. Because this time you might destroy someone other than your intended victim.

ME: Who?

KR: Yourself.

We were on one of those treacherous trails that clung to the edge of the mountain, four feet wide, a sheer drop on our left. We inched down it slowly, checking constantly to regulate our speed. We could not see the chasm below; I didn’t know whether or not I was grateful for that. Mary Margaret, in the lead, kept shouting directions back to us. I was convinced (or at least I was praying) that once we got through this winding passage, we would be in the clear.

“Hold it,” Mary Margaret said.

Ahead of me, David checked sharply, eased up, and then slid to a gentle stop where Sandy and Mary Margaret were standing against the mountain wall. I followed his maneuver and joined them. Mary Margaret was taking off her gloves.

“My hands are freezing up,” she said. “Just a second, okay?” Tucking both gloves under her arm, she brought her hands to her mouth and began blowing on them. “I think this is the end of it,” she said. “There’s a glade just beyond the next turn, and then we’ll be out of the clouds. Everybody okay?”

“Why’d you break Foderman’s leg?” Sandy asked suddenly.

“What?” Mary Margaret said, startled. One of her gloves slipped from under her arm. She stooped to retrieve it, bending at the knees, looking up at Sandy in surprise.

“You heard me, honey,” Sandy said.

“I thought we...”

“Yeah, what’d you think?” David said.

Mary Margaret stood up immediately. The fog swirled around, hiding the cliff edge not three feet from where we were pressed against the wall of snow. “You’re kidding me,” she said, and grinned.

“Uh-uh,” Sandy said.

“You can tell us, honey,” David said. “You really did do it on purpose, didn’t you?”

“I already told you...”

“Yeah, but that was bullshit, wasn’t it?”

“I tried to jump over him...”

“No, no, no, honey, you’re a good jumper, don’t give us that.”

“I panicked.”

“Sure, you did,” Sandy said.

“That’s the truth,” Mary Margaret said. “Peter,” she said, “you know that’s the truth, don’t you? You saw what happened.”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw what happened. You skied right through him. You wanted to break his leg.”

“So what?” Mary Margaret said in sudden defiance. “Who cares about that silly Jew bastard?”

“We care about him,” Sandy said.

“We care a lot,” David said.

“We care enormously,” I said.

She was hurrying to put on her gloves now. I think she was afraid of us. I think she was afraid we might throw her over the edge or something. I think she figured this was some kind of kangaroo Nuremberg court that had found her guilty and was now about to punish her. Her green eyes were wide with fright. The whole thing was kind of amusing. I mean, what the hell, we weren’t going to shove her off the goddamn mountain! But her fear was exciting. I watched it flashing in her eyes, and I could hardly keep a smile off my face. She had the right glove on now, and was fumbling with the left, right hand clutching the woolen cuff of the other glove, gorgeous naked left hand thrusting into the fur-lined mouth, when suddenly the glove slipped from her grasp and fell to the snow an inch from the edge of the precipice. She hesitated before stooping for it, convinced that we would push her over the edge if she placed herself in such a vulnerable position. It was really funny. Her fear of us was really funny.

“Go ahead,” Sandy said, “pick it up.”

“You’ll freeze your sweet little hand,” David said.

“Listen, you guys,” Mary Margaret said. “Cut it out, will you?”

“Cut what out?” I said.

“Pick up your fucking glove!” Sandy said.

Slowly, cautiously, Mary Margaret bent at the knees and reached for the glove. It was difficult to see exactly what happened next because of the fog swirling around us. The whole thing happened very quickly, and it might not have happened if Mary Margaret had been standing erect. In fact, when you consider what an experienced skier she was, the risk she took was stupid, reckless, and dangerous. We were, after all, clinging to a narrow trail on the very edge of the mountain. She should not have crouched over her skis that way, clutching one pole stuck in the snow, and leaning out precariously with her free hand in an effort to reach that glove so close to the edge.

Sandy merely lost her balance. People often lose their balance, you know, and bump into another person, or lean against him, or fall against him, or get their skis tangled, or whatever. It happens all the time, and there are never very serious consequences. But Mary Margaret was all bent over, and leaning out besides — she simply shouldn’t have been trying to get that idiotic glove! And when Sandy lost her balance, her outside ski slipped from under her, and it hit Mary Margaret’s inside ski, and this slight contact, because of Mary Margaret’s position, was enough to set her in motion.

David grabbed Sandy’s parka just in time, pulling her back as she slid toward the edge, slamming her hard against the wall. But Mary Margaret was too close to the edge for us to reach and, hunched back in a sitting position over her skis, could perform no maneuver to stop her sudden forward lurch. “Jesus,” she said, and tried to stop herself by sitting completely, but by that time her behind was halfway over, her naked left hand still extended and clutching to the ski pole sunk into the snow, the strap looped around her wrist. “Jesus,” she said again, softly, and went over, pulling the ski pole with her. She made no sound as she fell. She did not scream, she did not call for help. She simply disappeared into the fog. The mountain was still. We stood pressed against the wall behind us, breathing harshly. David moved cautiously toward the edge, and Sandy whispered, “Careful.”

“Can you see her?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Mary Margaret!” I shouted to the mist below. “Mary Margaret! Mary Margaret!” and my voice echoed from the shrouded rocks, bounced from boulder to boulder as Mary Margaret herself must have done on her downward plunge, the name reverberating in the abyss, “Mary Margaret, Mary Margaret,” overlapping and dissipating, “Mary Margaret,” and then becoming lost completely in the fog.

“We’d better get the Ski Patrol,” David said.

“I’ll take the lead,” Sandy said, and we started down.

We went to see Foderman after dinner that night. He was lying in bed with his right leg in traction, a drug-glazed look on his face. I’m not at all sure he understood everything we told him about the accident. We explained exactly how it had happened. We explained the way Mary Margaret had leaned out dangerously close to the edge, and how Sandy had lost her balance and had almost gone over herself. We explained all of it. We told him, too, that the Ski Patrol had found her crushed and lifeless body sixty feet below the trail on a pile of jagged rock. She had broken her legs, her back, her neck, and the wrists of both beautiful hands.

When Foderman heard this, he nodded and whispered, “Good.”

The ski instructors came down the slope closest to the Lodge at ten minutes to midnight. It had begun mowing again, and we stood huddled together, our arms around each other, watching them as they started down from the top. They were all carrying flares held high over their heads. From where we stood, the skiers were invisible. We saw only the red flares glowing against the blackness, like lights on a Christmas tree, strung across the mountain in a curving line.

“Look at them,” David said.

“Hug me,” Sandy said, “I’m freezing.”

On the mountain, the instructors carved linked turns, the flares blazing in the wind. Snowflakes lazily sifted down from the sky. All was hushed.

“You’d never catch me skiing at night,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Scare me to death.”

“That’s what you’ve got a shrink for, man,” David said. “Get rid of all your fears.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be going back to him,” I said.

“Shrinks are for crazy people,” Sandy said.

“You crazy, dolling?” David asked.

“Who, me?” I said. “It’s Crackers who’s nuts.”

“Then let him go find a shrink,” David said.

“Hug me, hug me,” Sandy said.

The instructors were almost to the bottom now. The bells in the church steeple began tolling the midnight hour, the red flares spurted luminescent blood on the hillside. Our arms around each other, the snow gently falling, we watched the skiers gliding closer and closer, and listened to the bonging bells, and suddenly grinned and hugged each other tightly.

It was Christmas morning, and all was right with the world.