Dying for Chocolate

2.

I creaked my way back up to the third floor and gently shook Arch’s shoulder. No response. I tried again. A blue sweatshirted arm and balled fist reached out in protest. I sighed. The arm withdrew, pulled back to warm sheets like a turtle head to a shell.

The sweat suit was part of a stage. Arch wore them all day and all night. The parenting trick with this all-purpose wardrobe was occasionally to insist that there be a change—for example, from a gamey green set to a clean gray one. After his swim the previous night in the Farquhars’ heated pool, I had convinced him to put on the blue. This was to avoid an argument over clothes the first morning of summer school. Now I just had to get used to the idea of my child spending the day in his pajamas.

I said, “Time to get up, kiddo.”

“Oh, why, why, why?” said Arch as he stretched and moaned and burrowed beneath pillows and sheets. “Why do I have to get up?”

I said, “Summer school.”

He burrowed deeper. “I’m not going” was the muffled reply.

“Arch.”

“No, no, no, I’m never going. I hate that school. This is supposed to be my vacation. Go away.”

“You don’t even know anything about that school.”

He growled.

One problem with living in someone else’s house was that you couldn’t raise your voice when you needed to. Especially when the other residents were asleep. I leaned in close to where I thought his ear was.

“Arch,” I said softly, “you said you wanted to go.”

A few moments of silence passed. I knew him well enough to recognize when he was reviewing his strategy.

Then his voice was behind me. “Please, Mom,” my son said. “Please don’t make me.”

I whirled around. His actions had been completely noiseless. Now he giggled at my surprise. I said, “I wish you wouldn’t do that disappearing act when I’m talking to you.”

He squinted at me. His face was all white skin and freckles since he’d had his hair cut in a flattop. This new military-short haircut I put down to General Farquhar’s influence. But Arch was so thin and pale he looked like a young prisoner of war. I handed him his glasses.

“You are mean,” he said. He pushed his glasses into place and regarded me with magnified brown eyes. “None of those rich kids will like me. They all play tennis and have fancy parties and they never invite kids like me.”

“What kind of kid are you?”

He groaned, a deep guttural sound warning against further probing. He looked at the wall and said in a low voice, “Not cool. That’s what kind.” He turned away from the wall but avoided my eyes. He said, “I had bad dreams again.”

Before I could reply, he stumbled past me into the bathroom. I stared at the wall. The lush pink roses on the Farquhars’ cheery wallpaper stared back. A few mementos from our house—Arch’s new paraphernalia for magic tricks, his sixth-grade class picture, and a glass container of dice for his role-playing games—were propped up on shelves around the room, but they offered scant comfort.

Bad dreams.

I remembered the night three years ago, a year after the divorce was final, when John Richard had slashed my van tires, trashed my mailbox, and kicked in my front door. He was drunk. Arch was asleep and I had rushed into his room, blocked the door with a dresser and a desk, and screamed so loudly that John Richard left. John Richard had never harmed his son. Yet Arch still had faceless nightmares in which I died. Oh yes, the flimsiness of our house, compared with a week at the Farquhars’ palace, had shown Arch and me what it was to be not rich and not cool. But we were going to be all right. Safe, once Aspen Meadow Security finished with our old home. And soon the bad dreams would end.

“Listen, Arch—” I began softly when he came out of the bathroom. But words failed. “Look, I have to go over to Elk Park for that brunch. I’m going to meet Philip afterwards—” I stopped to check his face. He was rolling his eyes, a modest indication of his opinion of Philip Miller. I went on, “There are fresh blueberry muffins in the kitchen for you. Marla will be by. In forty minutes.”

He glanced at me ever so briefly, then pulled the rumples out of the blue sweat suit. He gave me the full benefit of his large brown eyes, so vulnerable behind the thick glasses. He said, “I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me.

Sprinkles of rain blew across the windshield of Adele’s Thunderbird just before the turnoff to Elk Park. Her car was the day’s transport vehicle because my VW van was undergoing a clutch transplant and would not be out of the shop until Monday. It would take twenty minutes to drive up Colorado Highway 203, which rises to eighty-five hundred feet above sea level, five hundred feet above Aspen Meadow. Blasted out of hillsides, 203’s few straight stretches are bordered by sheer drop-offs. I piloted the T-bird carefully around the mountains’ curves, then dipped with a little more speed into the high mead-owlands. The meadows burgeoned with the gold-green of lush mountain grasses and goldenrod, like green onions melting in a pool of butter. . . .

I clenched my teeth. Melted butter. As is served at the National Cholesterol Institute. How could someone say such a thing? Pierre hadn’t even gotten the menu right. For the Symphony dinner I had made deviled eggs. A long way from heavily sauced. The soup had been gazpacho garnished with avocado. The London broil was sliced thin with a variety of accompaniments, one of which was sour cream with horseradish. And he hadn’t even mentioned the steamed green beans.

What a simpleton! I braked to slow down around one of the road’s lethal curves. I was going to find this Pierre, whoever he was, if I had to picket the office of the Mountain Journal for a week.

Think about the scenery, I told myself. Calm down. Look at the mountains. People move here to get away from stress, remember?

The mountains, the meadows, Aspen Meadow, Elk Park—these had been cool summer havens for wealthy Denverites before the advent of interstate highways. This was one of the places I had hiked with Philip only last week. We had made it as far as Elk Park Prep, the stucco and tile-roofed villa that had begun as an elegant hotel early in the century.

How idyllic the school had looked when a brief snow shower ceased that Saturday afternoon. The electrified gate meant to keep out flower-and-shrub-eating deer had been left open. Philip and I trudged silently up the muddy winding driveway. We breathed air that was like milk. Steam from the snow melting on the red tile roof gave the school an ethereal look that reminded me of the southern boarding school I’d attended for five years. Up to last year, Elk Park Prep also offered boarding. Philip asked why I didn’t send Arch to Elk Park Prep as a day student, get him out of those large public school classrooms. Great idea, I said, I’d wanted to for years. If only John Richard would foot the bill. But my ex maintained I wanted Arch to go because I was an eastern snob at heart. Private school, I told Philip ruefully, was like money. You only appreciated it when you didn’t have it anymore. But how do you feel about that? he asked, ever the shrink. I said, How do you think I feel?

Now, as I swung the T-bird through the open gate and past the high stone wall with its massive carved sign, Elk Park Preparatory School, a shudder went down my back. It was as if an invisible camera were filming my entrance: Get that woman out of here! She’s plummeted from the moneyed class to the servant class! It was not until I had wound halfway up the long driveway that I realized I had not yet come to the turnoff marked “Deliveries.”

The switchboard operator and admissions officer, my ad hoc helpers, were bustling about the school kitchen. With the elimination of the boarding department, the large kitchen crew of previous years was only a memory. In fact, the other staff person at the Farquhars, an eighteen-year-old named Julian Teller, was a casualty of this recent final closing. He had been one of the last boarding students and was now one of Adele’s charity projects. Since Arch and I had taken up residence, General Farquhar had kept Julian busy putting together state-of-the-art gardening equipment and doing other odd jobs. Julian had only eaten with us once, although Arch dutifully reported that Julian said my leftovers were the best he had ever tasted. Unfortunately, I had not had the chance to get to know the teenager.

But Arch had. He adored Julian. What Julian did, Arch wanted to do, what Julian wore, Arch thought was cool beyond words. Of course I longed to point out to Arch that Julian was cool but not rich, which was why the teenager had to take a live-in job for his senior year in high school. But I didn’t want to appear too preachy. And Julian was giving Arch diving lessons in the Farquhars’ pool. In the absence of Arch’s old neighborhood pals, Julian could at least be a friend.

I slipped on my apron and returned my concentration to cooking. A local restaurant had canceled out of doing the annual brunch only the day before. The headmaster had called me in a panic. Of course, I never said no to business. I had pulled sausage coffee cakes out of the freezer, then hastily prepared cheese strata and brought the cakes and the strata to the school. I had called Elizabeth Miller, who was not only Philip’s sister but also an excellent baker, and asked her to make half a dozen of her heavenly macadamia-nut coffee cakes.

My two ad hoc helpers had remembered to place the strata in the oven. The smooth egg-and-cream layers were beginning to bubble around lakes of melted English cheddar. We laid out thick slabs of bacon, made the coffee, and put the breads and sausage cakes in to heat. I was about to head out with the fruit when the switchboard operator announced that someone was waiting for me in the dining room.

I put the first batch of cantaloupe baskets on a large tray and swung through the doors to the vast space of the formal dining room. The darkness from outside loomed large through tall wavy-glassed windows. Three rows of crystal chandeliers shone brightly on polished cherry tables and cream-colored walls. How unlike Arch’s public school cafeteria it was. There, whenever there was going to be a meeting that included a fund-raising pitch, classroom banners with messages like We Can Do It! shrieked from every available inch of wall space. Here, all was elegance, with only a hint of what was to come from a slide projector and screen. Elizabeth Miller’s head poked out from behind the screen. She gestured at her array of cakes.

“Thanks for coming early,” I said to her head of golden hair that was so frizzy it always put me in mind of cartoons dealing with electrical sockets.

Elizabeth greeted me with a sideways smile and a toss of the head of frizz that revealed five-inch-long dangling silver earrings. She walked toward me in the toe-first stride favored by women whose only shoes are ballet slippers. Her casual outfit—black leotard, tights, midcalf-length Danskin skirt—clashed with the formal surroundings. But this was typical. Elizabeth Miller’s persona was more along the lines of Tinkerbell hits thirty.

“You can’t tell a soul I made these.” Her smile revealed slightly crooked teeth.

I said, “Your secret’s safe with me.” Elizabeth owned Aspen Meadow’s one remaining health-food store. She didn’t even sell white flour.

“Will we have a chance to visit before this thing begins? Once the headmaster starts his money pitch I just want to escape.”

I said, “I’ll bet.” The health-food store was not doing very well. The last time I’d been in for dried papaya, Elizabeth had tried to convince me I needed a fifty-pound bag of millet. When I told her she should switch to carrying gourmet items, she looked at me as if I’d suggested sex with an extraterrestrial.

Now she said, “Honestly. I have to pay for this meal, half of which I won’t be able to eat. Sorry, Goldy, nothing personal. It’s just that I’m into high-performance vegetarianism, and you know champagne kills brain cells.” She pointed one of her toes in front of her. “I just come to this thing to see friends. But, God! I hate to listen to six new ways we’re supposed to raise money for something the school just has to have. I end up leaving on a guilt trip. Have to unstress with coleus-leaf cocktail and chamomile tea for the next two days.”

“You could always give them a bad check,” I offered as I placed the last cantaloupe down with a flourish.

She said, “Not a bad idea,” and then regarded me with big blue eyes that reminded me of her brother’s. “Have you heard from Philip?”

I told her that I had and he would be late. I said, “Anything I can help with?”

She said, “No,” without conviction.

“Everything okay?”

She nodded. “Just fine.”

Now Elizabeth was pretending to center a cantaloupe. She said, “Did you have to cook a lot for this meal?”

“I made a multitude of goodies. Have the strata. It features high-performance cheddar.”

Silence.

I had a lot of work to do and could not visit when the guests’ arrival was imminent. Whatever it was Elizabeth wanted, I wished she’d get to it.

“Goldy—” she began. She tilted her pixie face, then pressed her lips together.

Something told me she was not here to talk about the school, or the food, or even to complain about the headmaster. I said, “Why don’t we sit down?”

“Oh, no,” she said as she bent down close to inspect one of the cantaloupe baskets. From the kitchen came the inviting smells of bacon and coffee. I knew I had to get in there and so did she. She said, “It’s just—”

“Just. . .”

“Oh,” she said with a grin, “I’m worried about Philip. I think he’s getting in over his head with some of his clients. I mean, are you all close enough to talk about this stuff? You know.”

People always say, You know, when you don’t have a clue. You know . . . fill in the blank. You know. . . make this easier for me by not having to say it.

The space of the dining room was intimidating. I leaned toward her in a confidential manner. “You mean,” I said, “does he tell me about his clients? Or are we sleeping together? Because the answer is no to both.”

She shrugged and said, “Oh no, that’s not what I was asking. You know.”

I still didn’t. I said, “You mean, like are we close enough to be thinking of getting married?”

She was relieved. She closed her eyes and gave a little shrug, as in, You brought it up.

I said, “We aren’t. Satisfied?”

“Well, you see . . .” she said with more hesitation, then stopped.

I thought, Spit it out, Elizabeth.

She went on, “I just need to talk to you, to him I mean . . . and I didn’t know what his plans were.”

I said, “I don’t know what Philip’s plans are beyond coming here for brunch. If you want to talk about health food with him, he’ll be here. If you want to talk about health food with me, I’ll be in your store later to shop for this dinner I’m doing tomorrow night. Now be a good vegetarian and come into the kitchen with me to see if the bacon’s done.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Bacon! I can’t even stand the smell—”

But she was interrupted by the first gaggle of aging preppies laughing with forced hilarity as they pushed through the carved doors of the dining room. It was the kind of laugh that said, We’re not too old to have fun. Suddenly it was too late to check the bacon or anything else. I lifted the first bottle of champagne from the ice chest and began to open it.

I whispered to Elizabeth, “Do me a favor. Pop into the kitchen and get one of the staff; I’m going to need help here. Then sashay over to your buddies and act sociable so they don’t start on the fruit. I’ll be around with the champagne.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, distracted again. She shook her head; the earrings swung like Christmas ornaments. “Just. . . please let me talk to Philip myself.”

“Elizabeth,” I said, “he’s your brother. Whatever’s bothering you, I think you should talk to him about it yourself. You know?”