“I have a patient this very minute dying of terminal cancer at Montefiore Hospital,” Foderman said.
“Please, I just finished eating,” Sandy said.
“It’s not a joke,” Foderman said. “You can get killed a lot easier with what you’re holding in your hand there, than coming down the worst trails on this mountain.”
“I’ve come down the worst trails on this mountain, and I’m still alive,” Sandy said, and exhaled a stream of smoke.
“That’s exactly my point,” Foderman said. “Smoking is a lot more dangerous than skiing.”
“Besides,” David said drily, “you haven’t come down the worst trails yet. The worst trails are on the north face.” He looked at Foderman meaningfully, perhaps hoping to see him turn pale with fright.
“Take my advice, Sandy,” Foderman said.
“Satan, get thee behind me,” Sandy said.
“Sure, sure, it’s a big joke,” Foderman said, and shook his head. “You should have to visit her every day of the week. You’d change your mind about smoking, darling, believe me.”
“All right, all right,” Sandy said, and stubbed out her cigarette.
“Good girl,” Foderman said.
Both David and I looked at her in surprise. We were not accustomed to such acquiescence.
“What’ll you give up next?” David asked. “Booze?”
“Pot?” I said.
“Screwing?” David said, and Foderman blushed.
“Who’s for the slopes?” Sandy asked, rising.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” David said.
“Okay, so here I am. Peter?” she said, and then turned to Foderman. “Seymour?”
“Anytime you’re ready,” he said.
“Anytime you’re ready, C.B.,” I said, but Foderman didn’t know the joke. The whole thing was getting to be a joke. None of us knew whether Foderman could ski fresh powder, and here we were accepting his invitation to accompany us on the north face. I kept waiting for Sandy, or David, or somebody (maybe even me) to say, “Look. Seymour. Buddy. The north face is pretty hairy and maybe we ought to try it on a day when we won’t be up to our hips in powder, farshtein, Seymour? It’s a different technique, Seymour. Let’s wait till the trails are packed a bit, okay?” But no one said a word (not even me) and we clomped out of the breakfast room and down to the ski room, where we buckled our boots and put on our parkas and picked up our skis and poles and then went outside.
God, it was gorgeous.
I felt as if I were walking into that room I’d seen through the windows last night. There was no wind at all. The air was still, the mountain was hushed except for the distant sound of lift mechanisms, and far away on the access road the jingle of snow chains on a solitary automobile. We walked in silence, the four of us, skis angled onto our shoulders, poles dangling. At the base of the T-bar servicing the baby slope, we dropped our skis, dusted off the bindings, scraped thick caked snow from the bottoms of our boots with the baskets of our poles, and then stepped into the skis.
“Seymour,” Sandy said, “let’s take a few runs to warm up, okay? Before we try the north face?”
Foderman, crouched over his skis, fastening the safety straps around his ankles, said, “What you’re really saying is you want to see how I ski before we go over there. Am I right?”
“Don’t try to put anything past old Seymour,” David said.
“Am I right?”
“We’re only concerned for your safety,” Sandy said.
“Have you ever skied powder?” David asked bluntly.
“Powder shmowder,” Foderman said. “I’m an Advanced Intermediate.”
“Mm,” David said, and blew his nose.
“Well,” Sandy said, “there is a difference, Seymour. Since the trails on this side of the mountain’ll be packed before they get to the ones on the north face, why don’t we plan on spending the morning here? Okay?”
“You’re the leader,” Foderman said, and stood upright, and put on his mittens, and clapped his hands together.
The first thing he did was fall off the T-bar.
A T-bar, as I once tried to explain to Dr. Krakauer, is one of the machine-powered devices used to lift skiers to the top of a slope. T-bars, J-bars, and Pomas all pull a skier up the mountain. A chair carries him up. (If he is not careful, a basket carries him down.) The J-bar looks like a J, with the upright stem attached to a strong narrow wire in turn attached to an overhead cable supported by spaced stanchions and running over greased wheels. You lean against (but do not sit upon) the short tail of the J, with your skis flat on the ground in a packed snow track, and the machine literally pulls you up the mountain. A T-bar is similar to a J-bar, except that it is designed to accommodate two skiers, who lean side by side against the crosspiece of the inverted T, and are likewise pulled up the mountain while they chat about snow conditions and temperature and how long the lift lines are. A Poma is a flat metal disc attached to a strong narrow wire, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like the J-bar, it is designed to pull just a single skier, the difference being that you lean against a Poma by putting the metal disc between your legs and up against the crack of your behind. If you are not careful getting on or off a Poma lift, it can carry away your family jewels, provided you have any.
In giving my brief lecture to Dr. Krakauer, I explained that the T-bar, J-bar, and Poma lifts have always seemed to me the most dangerous in any ski area, despite the fact that they usually service novice slopes. Chair lifts are much easier to use (although they seem to strike terror into the hearts of beginners), and gondolas are the easiest of all, but these generally go only to the highest reaches of the mountain. Now Foderman, anxious to prove that I was after all the seer of the uphill ascent, promptly fell off the T-bar. He was riding up with Sandy, and he almost pulled her down with him, but she managed to keep her balance, and then yelled back at Foderman to get out of the track since David and I were coming up on the bar immediately behind and were faced now with the choice of running into Foderman or jumping off into the deep snow on either side of the lift. Foderman, lying athwart the track in a hopeless tangle of poles and skis, glanced anxiously over his shoulder as David and I approached. We were midway between the loading station and the top, so the chances of an attendant stopping the lift by pressing his emergency button were totally nil. Inexorably, like old age, we crept up on Foderman while Sandy kept shouting for him to crawl out of the track. Foderman was not about to do any crawling. Panic-stricken, goggles askew, woolen hat precariously perched like a yarmulke on the back of his head, one ski in the air, the other twisted behind him, the straps of both poles looped over his right wrist, he looked back at us so plaintively that we’d have been something more heinous than puppydog murderers had we not immediately abandoned ship and dumped ourselves into the snow. Which, of course, we did, David to the right of the track, I to the left. The bar behind him now cleared of immediate danger, Foderman sighed in relief and then came to the startling realization that yet another pair of skiers was approaching on the next bar, and another pair on the bar behind him, and so on ad infinitum. Faced now with impending disaster on the scale of the Titanic, with women and children jumping over the side everywhere, Foderman recognized he had better get himself out of the way fast. Scrambling, clawing, flailing to the accompanied dulcet cries of the approaching skiers, he finally rolled out of the track not an instant too soon.
“Hello there, Seymour,” David called.
“Hello, David,” Foderman called back sheepishly.