The Day After Tomorrow

45

COMPARED TO the boisterous reception at Kloten Airport, the dinner for Elton Lybarger was genteel and intimate, with guests taking up four large tables around a dance floor. More than an entry into an entirely new world, it was the setting Joanna found extraordinary, “ even incredible. In the private ballroom of a lake steamer leisurely exploring the shoreline of the Zurich-see, which the deep Alpine Lake Zurich overlooked, she felt as if she had become a character in some dazzlingly elegant, turn-of-the-century play.

Seated next to Pascal Von Holden, dashing and resplendent in a deep blue tuxedo and starched white, wing-tip shirt, Joanna was at a table for six. And although she smiled and made polite conversation with the other guests, paying attention as best she could, it was all but impossible for her to keep her eyes from the country-side they passed. It was the time just before sunset, and to the east, above a picturesque village with rambling villas built down to the water’s edge, high wooded hills rose . straight up to vanish into the magnificence of the Alps, the setting sun striking the snow on the uppermost peaks and turning them a golden rose.

“Sentimental, yes?” Von Holden smiled, looking at her.

“Sentimental? Yes, I suppose that’s a good word. I would have said beautiful.” Joanna’s eyes held Von Holden’s for the slightest moment, then she looked back to the others.

Next to her was a very attractive and obviously very successful young couple from Berlin, Konrad and Margarete Peiper. Konrad Peiper, from what she could gather, was president of a large German trading company and Margarete, his wife, had something to do with show business. Just what, Joanna wasn’t exactly sure, and it was difficult to ask her because most of her time was spent sitting back from the table talking on a cellular phone.

Seated across from her were Helmuth and Bertha Salettl, brother and sister. Both, Joanna guessed, were in their seventies, and had flown in that afternoon from their home in Austria.

Dr. Helmuth Salettl was Elton Lybarger’s personal physician, and Joanna had met with him four of the six times he had visited Lybarger at Rancho de Piñon in New Mexico. The doctor, like his sister now, had been somber and austere, saying little and asking only a few pointed questions regarding Lybarger’s general health and regimen. The fact was that although she dealt daily with the rich and famous who came to Rancho de Piñon to recuperate secretly from anything from drug or alcohol addiction to face-lifts, she had never encountered anyone like Salettl. His presence and entrenched arrogance frightened her. But she’d found as long as she answered his questions and acted professionally, everything would be all right because he would never be there for more than twenty-four hours.

Two tables away, Elton Lybarger sat talking with the plumpish woman who’d smothered him with kisses and called him “Uncle” at the airport. His .earlier fears about his family seemed to have faded, and he looked relaxed and comfortable, smiling and acknowledging the well-wishes of the others, who, during the course of the evening, stopped by to take his hand and say a few personal words of encouragement.

Next to Lybarger was a heavy-set and plain-looking woman in her late thirties, who Joanna learned was Gertrude Biermann, an activist for the Greens, a radical environmental peace movement, who seemed to take great pleasure in interrupting Lybarger’s conversations with others to engage him in talk herself. As the evening progressed, Joanna wished she wouldn’t be so insistent, and even considered going to her and mentioning it, because she could see Mr. Lybarger was beginning to tire. Why he would have a dowdy political activist as a friend was something that plucked Joanna’s interest. The idea seemed so incongruous with Lybarger and the rest there who seemed to represent some form or other of big business.

Holding court at the third table was Uta Baur, touted as “the most German of all German fashion designers,” who, after first being feted at trade fairs in Munich and Düsseldorf in the early seventies, was now an international institution in Paris, Milan and New York. Pencil thin, and dressed all in black, she wore little if any makeup, and her hair, cut almost to the scalp, was white blond to the roots. Were it not for her animated gestures and the sparkle in her eyes as she talked to those at the table with her, Joanna might have taken her for a female version of the grim reaper. She was, as everyone there knew and Joanna later found out, seventy-four years old.

Standing back, near the entry door, were two men in tuxedos who had earlier been in the dress of chauffeurs at the airport. They were lean, short haired, and seemed to be constantly watching the room. Joanna was certain they were bodyguards of some kind and was about to ask Von Holden about them when a waiter in lederhosen asked if he might take away the remains of her supper.

Joanna nodded gratefully. The main course had been Berner Platte—sauerkraut garnished liberally with pork chops, boiled bacon, and beef, sausages, tongue and ham; at five foot, four and twenty pounds overweight, Joanna had been carefully watching her diet. Especially of late, since she’d begun noticing most of her bicycle racing friends were just this side of emaciated and fitted nicely into spandex. Middle, top and bottom.

Privately, and discussed with her only true friend, her Saint Bernard, Henry, Joanna had begun watching crotches. Male crotches of the bike racers.

Joanna had grown up the only child of pious and simple parents in a small west Texas town. Her mother had been a librarian and almost forty-two when Joanna was born. Her father, a letter carrier, had been fifty. Both had assumed, the way only such parents can assume, that their only child would grow up to be like them— hardworking, grateful for what they had, average. And for a time Joanna had done just that, as a Girl Scout and member of the church choir, as an ordinary student getting by in school, and, following the lead of her best friend, applying to nursing school after twelfth-grade graduation. Yet plain and dutiful as she seemed and even viewed herself, inside Joanna was rebellious, even quirky.

She’d had her first sex when she was eighteen with the assistant pastor of the church. Horrified afterward, and certain she was pregnant, she fled to Colorado, telling everyone, friends, parents and assistant pastor included, that she’d been accepted to a nursing school affiliated with the University of Denver. Both were inaccurate—she had not been accepted to nursing school, nor was she pregnant. Still she’d stayed in Colorado, worked hard and become a licensed physical therapist. When her father became ill she moved back to Texas to help her mother care for him. And when both parents died, literally within weeks of each other, she’d immediately packed everything and gone to New Mexico.

On Saturday, October 1, one week before the homecoming dinner for Elton Lybarger, Joanna had turned thirty-two. She had not made love, nor been made love to since that night with the west Texas assistant pastor.

A sudden round of applause followed two waiters across the room as they brought in a large cake over-flowing with candles and set it in front of Elton Lybarger. As they did, Pascal Von Holden put his hand on Joanna’s arm.

“Can you stay?” he asked.

Turning from the festivities at Lybarger’s table, she looked at him. “What do you mean?”

Von Holden smiled, and the creases in his sunburned face turned white.

“I mean can you stay here, in Switzerland, to continue your work with Mr. Lybarger?”

Joanna ran a nervous hand through her freshly washed hair.

“Me, stay here?”

Von Holden nodded.

“For how long?”

“A week, perhaps two. Until Mr. Lybarger is physically comfortable at his home.”

Joanna was completely taken aback. All evening she’d been looking at her watch, wondering when she would get back to her room to pack all the gifts and trinkets for her friends, which Von Holden had helped her purchase in their tour of Zurich that afternoon. When she would get to bed. What time she would have to get up to get to the airport for her flight home the following day.

“My d-dog,” she stammered. The idea of staying in Switzerland had never occurred to her. The concept of spending any time outside her own self-made nest was all but overwhelming.

Von Holden smiled. “Your dog will be cared for while you are away, of course. And while you are here, you will have your own apartment on the grounds of Mr. Lybarger’s estate.”

Joanna didn’t know what to think, how to respond or even react. There was a round of applause from Lybarger‘s table as he blew out the candles and again, seemingly from nowhere, the oompah band appeared and played “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Coffee and after-dinner drinks were served along with squares of Swiss chocolate. The plump lady helped Lybarger cut his cake, and waiters brought pieces of it to each table.

Joanna drank the coffee and took a sip from what was very good cognac. The liquor warmed her and felt good.

“He will be uncomfortable and unsure without you, Joanna. You will stay, won’t you?” Von Holden’s smile was kindhearted and genuine. Moreover, the way he asked her to stay made it seem it was he, not Lybarger, who was encouraging her. She took another sip of the cognac and felt flushed.

“Yes, all right,” she heard herself say. “If it’s that important to Mr. Lybarger, I’ll stay, of course.”

In the background the oompah band struck up a Viennese waltz and the young German couple got up from their table to dance. Looking around, Joanna saw other people get up as well.

“Joanna?”

She turned and saw Von Holden standing behind her chair.

“May I?” he askèd.

A broad smile unintentionally crossed her face. “Sure. Why not?” she said. She stood up and Von Holden drew back her chair. A moment later he led her past Elton Lybarger and out onto the floor among the others. And, to the outlandish strains of the oompah band, he took her in his arms and they danced.