Snow moves past the windows in silent spirals on another screen, flickering in the illumination of spotlights on each corner of the lodge. There is an inverted sense of outside being inside, as though those lighted panes of glass, stretching from floor to ceiling, with their flashing swirling broken ribbons of snow form the outer walls of another building, the room within and beyond bright with streaking white, while we, Alice and I, are outside watching. There is life in that house. I long to be inside that house where snowflakes dance.
Daisy petals flutter by, Sandy’s quilted skirt flaring out from her long legs as she and Foderman waltz past to Helmut’s pounding three/four beat. On the accordion, Volkmar is playing something I know, a song I heard when I was a child, but which I cannot place. I hear Sandy say, “Oh, Seymour, how you dance!” and he laughs and whirls her away, and I still cannot remember the song, though Volkmar is playing it again from the top, something, something. I swing Alice around and we oom-pah across the floor, close to the table where the Trates are listening intently to something Bittner is telling them.
We are tight on their faces, the screen here has exploded in close-up. There is a frightened expectant look in Mrs. Trate’s eyes, as though Bittner is about to tell her something she is already determined not to believe. Penn Trate sits at crewcut attention, every bristle on his close-cropped skull alert and listening, eyes drilling Bittner’s face. There are state secrets being exchanged here, Bittner is telling them that the prime minister is at this very moment being held prisoner in the cellar. Beads of sweat stand out on Bittner’s forehead, rivulets of sweat run down his finely chiseled cheeks and into the collar of his turtleneck shirt. His eyes brighten. He pauses, says something effectively concise, and Trate bursts into laughter. Mrs. Trate flushes a bright crimson, and Bittner slaps the table and throws back his head in appreciation of his own dirty joke. In very tight close-up, Trate’s hand closes on his wife’s in promise. I dance by with Alice and press against her, and wonder what is happening in that brightly lighted other room hung with glowing white streamers.
They are sitting at the bar, David and Max. They have ordered steins of beer, and they clink the glasses together now, and Max slurps the foam from the top of his glass, and puts his arm around David, and laughs again, Alice is fitfully rubbing her breasts against me. Mr. and Mrs. Trate rise from the table, where Bittner is still laughing, and come out onto the floor and begin waltzing delicately and beautifully. I am oddly touched by their unexpected grace. I feel somehow they should be dancing not here in this room to this melody from childhood I cannot remember, but there instead in that brilliant room beyond. Sandy and Foderman have moved to a distant corner, the screens are multiplying geometrically, my field of vision, my conscious grasp is fragmenting into a thousand splinters.
Dizzily we waltz while Alice insistently tells me she works here, I’d better take it easy, her breasts exploding against me like midnight suns. Foderman has his hand on Sandy’s knee, she covers his hand with her own exactly the way Trate covered his wife’s hand not two minutes ago on another screen. At the bar, David and Max have ordered two more steins and again Max slurps the foam off, dipping his tongue into it, and Sandy laughs in bright contralto from across the room while the Trates dance by and Alice moves in with her crotch and the music stops and the movie ends.
The nightmare begins only later.
I close the satchel as soon as I realize there is human hair in it. The hair is black and thick, it seems alive, it seems ready to leap out of the bag at me. I snap the bag shut and look at the bus driver, who is laughing. I rise and pull the cord, and walk swiftly to the back of the bus. Everybody on the bus is laughing now. I get off and stand on the sidewalk.
The city is empty.
I am the only person alive in the city.
It is very windy, and scraps of paper are blowing along the streets. I walk for miles and do not see a single soul. The wind is very loud, and when I call out to see if anyone else is alive, my voice cannot be heard over the wind.
I am walking in Central Park. There is a girl sitting on a bench, unbuttoning her blouse and licking her lips. She is wearing bright red lipstick. She seems retarded. She keeps licking her lips and unbuttoning her blouse, opening it finally over tremendous white breasts. The tips of her breasts are painted with red lipstick, like her mouth. She opens her legs, and I can see thick black hair under her skirt. I try not to look.
A man appears suddenly on the bench beside her. He whispers something to her in a foreign tongue. The girl begins laughing. The man lifts her skirt. I try to move away, but I am frozen to the path. I try not to watch what they are doing, but it is impossible to turn my head or lower my eyes. The girl is still laughing, her head thrown back. The lipstick on her breasts has smeared, and she looks as if she is bleeding. I am sure she is in pain, but she continues to laugh.
That is the nightmare.
A person’s dreams never seem frightening to anyone but himself.
We were eating breakfast at eight o’clock that Wednesday morning in a small sun-drenched room off the main lounge, the mountain outside dressed in pristine bridal raiments, posing like a virgin before the sky above and behind, stretched as taut as a photographer’s blue seamless. We always ate a good breakfast because sometimes we skied right through lunch. Sandy, especially, ate like a truck driver. Slender, fine-boned, delicate, sometimes even fragile-looking, she could put away four eggs and a dozen sausages with ease, meanwhile devouring six slices of buttered toast and drinking a half-gallon of coffee. Her concentration while eating was stupefying. She did not speak, she did not look up from her plate, she became a polished chrome piece of machinery, ball-bearinged elbow working arm and hand to shovel food into grinding mouth, phenomenal. Hunched over her plate in white sweater and blue jeans, stolen blue parka draped over the back of her chair, she worked busily at demolishing the remnants of her meal, reaching and grabbing and chewing like Henry the Eighth, and didn’t even notice Foderman when he approached the table.
“Well, well,” Foderman said, “good morning to you all.”
David, smoking a cigarette, looked somewhat fatigued after his night of revelry with the ski-meister cum violinist. “Good morning,” he said briefly.
“Ready for the north face?” Foderman asked, and pulled out a chair and sat opposite Sandy, who merely grunted and reached for another piece of toast. “How are you this morning, Sandy?”
“Fine,” Sandy said, chewing.
“That was some very nice playing you did last night, David.”
“Thank you.”
“I enjoyed myself enormously.”
David nodded.
“I’ve already had breakfast and seen to Manny’s needs,” Foderman said. “He’s getting a little crotchety, talking about going home already.”
“Can’t blame him,” I said.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Foderman said, “I really need this vacation. If Manny goes back East, I may just stay on.”
“How long had you planned to stay?”
“Till New Year’s. What’s today’s date?”
“The twentieth.”
“That gives us another what? Ten, eleven days? I can use them, believe me.”
“There,” Sandy said, and shoved away her plate, and stretched her long legs under the table, her buckle boots colliding with Foderman’s. “Have you got another cigarette?” she asked David.
“Help yourself,” he said.
“Help yourself to cancer,” Foderman said.
Sandy dismissed the comment with a small tolerant shrug, shook a cigarette from the package, and lighted it.