She spends almost two months running from herself. Then she wakes up in a Barcelona hotel with a vicious sangria hangover, and she can’t even say what country she is in, or how long she has been there, or why she continues to leak tears even in her sleep.
When she arrives in Switzerland, late September rains have transformed the highland roads into rivulets of fading autumn colors. She finds a waitressing job in Zermatt’s top hotel. That lasts until the maître d’ makes it plain there is only one way she will be allowed to stay.
She moves to a bar at the base of the Valais glacier, the local hangout for ski instructors and Matterhorn guides. She meets the Swiss version of a cowboy, a rancher from the Ticino province, with smooth Italian ways and eyes like electric night. She lets him get her drunk and do whatever he wants. But he does it only once, and he leaves immediately after. There are a couple of others who try, and she no longer sees any reason to put up a fuss. But something they find in her leaves them unable to stay the night, or return, or even speak to her the same way afterward. What it is exactly, she can’t say. From her side, the moment they begin their moves, the Dutch backpackers’ drug seeps out of some secret recess deep at the center of her being, and turns her utterly numb. The only sensation she can recall afterward is watching the smoke rise and stain the eternal night.
By the start of the high season, she has been adopted as an unofficial mascot by the local ski troop. They all compete to teach her, all save the ones who have been with her for a night or an hour. They name her Schwisterli, little sister in Swiss German, and they find her absolutely fearless. They take her down the most difficult black slopes long before she is ready. She learns by falling and rising and falling again. They share with her the thrills of following the international slalom circuit, of racing supercharged bikes on snowbound Alpine roads, and of drinking thimblefuls of espresso spiked with Pomme, the fiery Valais apple brandy. And they protect her from any outsider who might otherwise try their wiles on the lovely white-blond apparition with no past and few words and a gaze like shattered sapphires.
Toward the end of the season she sends a letter off to Georgetown University, requesting that they postpone her place and scholarship for a further year. She makes a halfhearted attempt to describe her European experiences in a positive light, then halts when the effort to look back makes her sick to her stomach. Georgetown responds so swiftly it almost seems as though they have been expecting her letter, saying the place is still hers, but not the money.
The next step is the easiest of all.
When the month of spring mud announces the end of the winter season, she packs her bags and accepts a ride to London. Some of the instructors are headed for the international nightclubbing circuit. Once the high snows melt and the skies clear, they will return as mountaineering guides. Until then, they are tall, muscled, young, and rippling with good Swiss cheer.
Their first night in a new club off Piccadilly, they introduce her to the international elite. The talk follows a tragically familiar path along beaches with clubs-Majorca, Sardinia, Rhodes, Lanzarote. This time, she enters the scene with eyes wide open.
The next night she returns on her own. And the night after. She accepts an ecstasy tab from someone, then follows him up to the dance floor. A while later he realizes she is neither dancing with him nor hearing his shouted comments. She does not even notice his departure. In fact, she is not dancing to the music at all. She is too busy writhing to the thoughts that glide about her brain like eager snakes.
Maybe she is inherently bad. This fact would certainly make sense of what otherwise is just a set of random events that direct her life. Maybe there is a dark and tainted portion of herself that rules supreme. All she can say for certain is, looking inside means confronting a colossal bleakness. Depression and a vague self-fury hover just beyond her vision, always eager to clutch and smother. She opens her eyes, surveys the flashing lights and the thunderous din, and reflects that maybe this is where she has always belonged.
By the time she returns to the group, she has decided it is time to stop fighting the inevitable, and give herself over to the game.
She spends four months doing whatever comes her way. Her looks and availability draw the attention of the flash crowd. The fact that nothing seems to impress her only makes them want to shower her with more. An older man gives her champagne and coke and diamonds and a ride to Capri in his private jet. He lasts eleven days. The diamonds are sold and the funds placed in her account. Why she saves the money at all, she has no idea. Georgetown becomes just another myth somewhere beyond the game.
Another player draws her into a modeling agency. Her blond beauty and utterly detached air perfectly suit the current mode. She spends the next three months allowing herself to be flown and painted and dressed and positioned and photographed. The girls and boys in this arm of the game are the same, only more elegantly so. They speak the empty chatter. They make swift little liaisons they pretend are important, at least for the moment. She becomes part of a crowd that hails one another in airports and clubs and studios with excited greetings and a desperate need to find the familiar wherever they go.
In early December she returns to Zermatt. Things are the same, yet different. Calls from modeling agencies keep coming in, taken at the café because she does not bother to connect her apartment’s phone. The Alpine guides pretend that she is still one of them, yet they are all preparing for a departure she refuses to accept.
Finally she leaves for a modeling gig in Geneva, just one day. But that leads to a studio in Zurich, then the runways in Milan and Paris and Brussels. And before she knows it, April is dawning, and a million miles away the highland snows are gone.
Over the next five months Kirsten Stansted travels twice around the globe.
One night in early September, the agency puts nine of them into a suite. Kirsten can’t care enough to recall either the clothing line or the magazine, even the city. They go to some club. A handsome young man and a beautiful young woman resume a romance they have started somewhere else. Only in the limo taking them home, the woman discovers that the young man has been with another. And the young man discovers the woman is taking this far worse than expected.
The next morning Kirsten is awakened by a chorus of screams and the sight of the young woman sprawled dead in her bathroom.
After the police finally depart and the agency’s lawyer makes them sign forms nobody bothers to read and the hotel expels them and they are off to another day’s gig, one of the other women consoles the handsome young man by saying, “Don’t blame yourself. She forgot the first rule of this game, is all.”
The next morning, Kirsten leaves for Washington.
After her confrontation with Sephus Jones, Kirsten brought in her gym bag with the change of office clothes and showered in the upstairs guestroom. Marcus had said nothing when she had deposited her makeup in the big home’s unused bath. But his silent pleasure had been so vast she had grappled for days with a renewed urge to flee. How could she tell Marcus that he was someone else’s perfect catch? Especially when she remained so viciously at war with her own desires.
She returned downstairs to be confronted by the crumpled envelope resting on the front hall table. She could still feel the man’s lightning jab into her pocket, the roughness of his fingers on her thigh. She debated calling Marcus at the Raleigh courthouse to tell him … What? That New Horizons remained an enemy? That she had finally decided it was best to return to Washington? She sighed her way into her desk at the rear of Netty’s office.