“You know,” Faith says, “I remember once a long, long time ago, my dad and I and your mom went out in the woods and cut a tree for Christmas. We didn’t buy a tree, we cut one down with an axe.”
Jane and Marjorie stare at her as if they’ve read this story someplace. The TV is not turned on in the room. Perhaps, Faith thinks, they don’t understand someone talking to them—live action presenting its own unique continuity problems.
“Do you want to hear the story?”
“Yes,” Marjorie, the younger sister, says. Jane sits watchful and silent on the green Danish sofa. Behind her on the bare white wall is a framed print of Bruegel’s Return of the Hunters, which is, after all, Christmas-y.
“Well,” Faith says. “Your mother and I—we were only nine and ten—picked out the tree we desperately wanted to be our tree, but our dad said no, that tree was too tall to fit inside our house. We should choose another one. But we both said, ‘No, this one’s perfect. This is the best one.’ It was green and pretty and had a perfect Christmas shape. So our dad cut it down with his axe, and we dragged it out through the woods and tied it on top of our car and brought it back to Sandusky.” Both girls are sleepy now. There has been too much excitement, or else not enough. Their mother is in rehab. Their dad’s an asshole. They’re in someplace called Michigan. Who wouldn’t be sleepy?
“Do you want to know what happened after that?” Faith says. “When we got the tree inside?”
“Yes,” Marjorie says politely.
“It was too big,” Faith says. “It was much, much too tall. It couldn’t even stand up in our living room. And it was too wide. And our dad got really mad at us because we’d killed a beautiful living tree for a selfish reason, and because we hadn’t listened to him and thought we knew everything just because we knew what we wanted.”
Faith suddenly doesn’t know why she’s telling this story to these innocent sweeties who do not need another object lesson. So she simply stops. In the real story, of course, her father took the tree and threw it out the door into the back yard where it stayed for a week and turned brown. There was crying and accusations. Her father went straight to a bar and got drunk. Later, their mother went to the Kiwanis lot and bought a small tree that fit and which the three of them trimmed without the aid of their father. It was waiting, all lighted, when he came home smashed. The story had always been one others found humor in. This time the humor seems lacking.
“Do you want to know how the story turned out?” Faith says, smiling brightly for the girls’ benefit, but feeling defeated.
“I do,” Marjorie says. Jane says nothing.
“Well, we put it outside in the yard and put lights on it so our neighbors could share our big tree with us. And we bought a smaller tree for the house at the Kiwanis. It was a sad story that turned out good.”
“I don’t believe that,” Jane says.
“Well you should believe it,” Faith says, “because it’s true. Christmases are special. They always turn out wonderfully if you just give them a chance and use your imagination.”
Jane shakes her head as Marjorie nods hers. Marjorie wants to believe. Jane, Faith thinks, is a classic older child. Like herself.
“Did you know,”—this was one of Greta’s cute messages left for her on her voice mail in Los Angeles—“did you know that Jack hates—hates—to have his dick sucked? Hates it with a passion. Of course you didn’t. How could you? He always lies about it. Oh well. But if you’re wondering why he never comes, that’s why. It’s a big turn-off for him. I personally think it’s his mother’s fault, not that she ever did it to him, of course. By the way, that was a nice dress last Friday. Really great tits. I can see why Jack likes you. Take care.”
At seven, when the girls wake up from their naps and everyone is hungry at once, Faith’s mother offers to take the two hostile Indians for a pizza, then on to the skating rink, while Roger and Faith share the smorgasbord coupons in the Lodge.
Very few diners have chosen the long, harshly lit, rather sour-smelling Tyrol Room. Most guests are outside awaiting the Pageant of the Lights, in which members of the ski patrol descend the expert slope each night, holding flaming torches. It is a thing of beauty but takes time getting started. At the very top of the hill a giant Norway spruce has been illuminated in the Yuletide tradition, just as in the untrue version of Faith’s story. All of this is viewable from inside the Tyrol Room via a great picture window.
Faith does not want to eat with Roger, who is hungover from his gluhwein and a nap. Conversation that she would find offensive could easily occur; something on the subject of her sister, the girls’ mother—Roger’s (still) wife. But she’s trying to keep up a Christmas spirit. Do for others, etc.
Roger, she knows, dislikes her, possibly envies her, and also is attracted to her. Once, several years ago, he confided to her that he’d very much like to fuck her ears flat. He was drunk, and Daisy hadn’t long before had Jane. Faith found a way not to specifically acknowledge his offer. Later he told her he thought she was a lesbian. Having her know that just must’ve seemed like a good idea. A class act is The Roger.
The long, echoing dining hall has criss-crossed ceiling beams painted pink and light green and purple, a scheme apparently appropriate to Bavaria. There are long green-painted tables with pink and purple plastic folding chairs meant to promote an informal good time and family fun. Somewhere else in the lodge, Faith is certain, there is a better place to eat where you don’t pay with coupons and nothing’s pink or purple.
Faith is wearing a shiny black Lycra bodysuit, over which she has put on her loden knickers and Norway socks. She looks superb, she believes. With anyone but Roger this would be fun, or at least a hoot.
Roger sits across the long table, too far away to talk easily. In a room that can conveniently hold five hundred souls, there are perhaps fifteen scattered diners. No one is eating family style, only solos and twos. Young lodge employees in paper caps wait dismally behind the long smorgasbord steam table. Metal heat lamps with orange beams are steadily over-cooking the prime rib, of which Roger has taken a goodly portion. Faith has chosen only a few green lettuce leaves, a beet round, two tiny ears of yellow corn and no salad dressing. The sour smell of the Tyrol Room makes eating almost impossible.
“Do you know what I worry about?” Roger says, sawing around a triangle of glaucal gray roast beef fat, using a comically small knife. His tone implies he and Faith eat here together often and are just picking up where they’ve left off; as if they didn’t hold each other in complete contempt.
“No,” Faith says. “What?” Roger, she notices, has managed to hang on to his red smorgasbord coupon. The rule is you leave your coupon in the basket by the bread sticks. Clever Roger. Why, she wonders, is Roger tanned?
Roger smiles as though there’s a lewd aspect to whatever it is that worries him. “I worry that Daisy’s going to get so fixed up in rehab that she’ll forget everything that’s happened and want to be married again. To me, I mean. You know?” Roger chews as he talks. He wishes to seem earnest, his smile a serious, imploring, vacuous smile. This is Roger leveling. Roger owning up.
“That probably won’t happen,” Faith says. “I just have a feeling.” She no longer wishes to look at her fragmentary salad. She does not have an eating disorder and could never have one.
“Maybe not.” Roger nods. “I’d like to get out of guidance pretty soon, though. Start something new. Turn the page.”
In truth, Roger is not bad-looking, only oppressively regular: small chin, small nose, small hands, small straight teeth—nothing unusual except his brown eyes are too narrow, as if he had Ukrainian blood. Daisy married him—she said—because of his alarmingly big dick. That—or more importantly, the lack of that—was in her view why many other marriages failed. When all else gave way, that would be there. Vince’s, she’d shared, was even bigger. Ergo. It was to this particular quest that Daisy had dedicated her life. This, instead of college.
“What exactly
would you like to do next?” Faith says. She is thinking how nice it would be if Daisy came out of rehab and had forgotten everything. A return to how things were when they still sort of worked often seemed a good solution.
“Well, it probably sounds crazy,” Roger says, chewing, “but there’s a company in Tennessee that takes apart jetliners for scrap. There’s big money in it. I imagine it’s how the movie business got started. Just some hare-brained scheme.” Roger pokes at macaroni salad with his fork. A single Swedish meatball remains on his plate.
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Faith lies, then looks longingly at the smorgasbord table. Maybe she’s hungry, after all. But is the table full of food the smorgasbord, or is eating the food the smorgasbord?
Roger, she notices, has casually slipped his meal coupon into a pocket.
“Well, do you think you’re going to do that?” Faith asks with reference to the genius plan of dismantling jet airplanes for big bucks.
“With the girls in school, it’d be hard,” Roger admits soberly, ignoring what would seem to be the obvious—that it is not a genius plan.
Faith gazes away again. She realizes no one else in the big room is dressed the way she is, which reminds her of who she is. She is not Snow Mountain Highlands (even if she once was). She is not Sandusky. She is not even Ohio. She is Hollywood. A fortress.
“I could take the girls for a while,” she suddenly says. “I really wouldn’t mind.” She thinks of sweet Marjorie and sweet, unhappy Jane sitting on the Danish modern couch in their sweet nighties and monkey-face slippers, watching her trim the plastic rubber-tree plant. At the same moment, she thinks of Roger and Daisy being killed in an automobile crash on their triumphant way back from rehab. You can’t help what you think.
“Where would they go to school?” Roger says, becoming alert to something unexpected. Something he might like.
“I’m sorry?” Faith says and flashes Roger, big-dick, narrow-eyed Roger a second movie star’s smile. She has let herself become distracted by the thought of his timely death.
“I mean, like, where would they go to school?” Roger blinks. He is that alert.
“I don’t know. Hollywood High, I guess. They have schools in California. I could find one.”
“I’d have to think about it,” Roger lies decisively.
“Okay, do,” Faith says. Now that she has said this, without any previous thought of ever saying it, it becomes part of everyday reality. Soon she will become Jane and Marjorie’s parent. Easy as that. “When you get settled in Tennessee you could have them back,” she says without conviction.
“They probably wouldn’t want to come back by then,” Roger says. “Tennessee’d seem pretty dull.”
“Ohio’s dull. They like that.”
“True,” Roger says.
No one has thought to mention Daisy in promoting this new arrangement. Though Daisy, the mother, is committed elsewhere for the next little patch. And Roger needs to get his life jump-started, needs to put “guidance” in the rearview mirror. First things first.
The Pageant of the Lights has gotten under way outside now—a ribbon of swaying torches gliding soundlessly down the expert slope like an overflow of human lava. All is preternaturally visible through the panoramic window. A large, bundled crowd of spectators has assembled at the bottom of the slope behind some snow fences, many holding candles in scraps of paper like at a Grateful Dead concert. All other artificial light is extinguished, except for the Yuletide spruce at the top. The young smorgasbord attendants, in their aprons and paper caps, have gathered at the window to witness the event yet again. Some are snickering. Someone remembers to turn the lights off in the Tyrol Room. Dinner is suspended.
“Do you downhill,” Roger asks, leaning over his empty plate in the half darkness. He is whispering, for some reason. Things could really turn out great, Faith understands him to be thinking: Eighty-six the girls. Dismantle plenty of jets. Just be friendly and it’ll happen.
“No, never,” Faith says, dreamily watching the torchbearers schussing side to side, a gradual, sinuous, drama-less tour downward. “It scares me.”
“You’d get used to it.” Roger unexpectedly reaches across the table to where her hands rest on either side of her uneaten salad. He touches, then pats, one of these hands. “And by the way,” Roger says. “Thanks. I mean it. Thanks a lot.”
Back in the condo all is serene. Esther and the girls are still at the skating rink. Roger has wandered back to The Warming Shed. He has a girlfriend in Port Clinton, a former high-school counselee, now divorced. He will be calling her, telling her about his new Tennessee plans, adding that he wishes she were here at Snow Mountain Highlands with him and that his family could be in Rwanda. Bobbie, her name is.
A call to Jack is definitely in order. But first Faith decides to slide the newly trimmed rubber-tree plant nearer the window, where there’s an outlet. When she plugs in, most of the little white lights pop cheerily on. Only a few do not, and in the box are replacements. This is progress. Later, tomorrow, they can affix the star on top—her father’s favorite ritual. “Now it’s time for the star,” he’d always say. “The star of the wise men.” Her father had been a musician, a woodwind specialist. A man of talents, and of course a drunk. A specialist also in women who were not his wife. He had taught committedly at a junior college to make all their ends meet. He had wanted Faith to become a lawyer, so naturally she became one. Daisy he had no specific plans for, so naturally she became a drunk and sometime later, an energetic nymphomaniac. Eventually he died, at home. The paterfamilias. After that, but not until, her mother began to put weight on. “Well, there’s my size, of course,” was how she usually expressed it. She took it as a given: increase being the natural consequence of loss.
Whether to call Jack, though, in London or New York. (Nantucket is out, and Jack never keeps his cell phone on except for business hours.) Where is Jack? In London it was after midnight. In New York it was the same as here. Half past eight. And what message to leave? She could just say she was lonely; or that she had chest pains, or worrisome test results. (These would need to clear up mysteriously.)
But London, first. The flat in Sloane Terrace, half a block from the tube. They’d eaten breakfast at the Oriel, then Jack had gone off to work in The City while she did the Tate, the Bacons her specialty. So far from Snow Mountain Highlands—this being her sensation when dialing—a call going a great, great distance.
Ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing. Nothing.
There was a second number, for messages only, but she’d forgotten it. Call again to allow for a misdial. Ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing …
New York, then. East Fiftieth. Far, far east. The nice, small slice of river view. The bolthole he’d had since college. His freshman numerals framed. 1971. She’d gone to the trouble to have the bedroom redone. White everything. A smiling and tanned picture of herself from the boat, framed in red leather. Another of the two of them together at Cabo, on the beach. All similarly long distances from Snow Mountain Highlands.
Ring, ring, ring, ring. Then click. “Hi, this is Jack.”—she almost says “Hi” back—“I’m not here right now, etc., etc., etc.,” then a beep.
“Merry Christmas, it’s me. Ummmm, Faith.” She’s stuck, but not at all flustered. She could just as well tell him everything. This happened today: the atomic energy smokestacks, the plastic rubber-tree plant, the Pageant of the Lights, the smorgasbord, Eddie from years back, the girls’ planned move to California. All things Christmas-y. “Ummm, I just wanted to say that I’m … fine, and that I trust—make that hope—that I hope you are too. I’ll be back home—at the beach, that is—after Christmas. I’d love—make that like—to hear from you. I’m in Snow Mountain Highlands. In Michigan.” She pauses, discussing with herself if there was further news worth relating. There isn’t. Then she realizes (too late) she’s treating his voice mail like her dictaphone. There’s no revising. Too bad. Her mistake. “Well, goodbye,” she sa
ys, realizing this sounds a bit stiff, but doesn’t revise. With them it’s all over anyway. Who cares? She called.
Out on the Nordic Trail i, lights, soft white ones not unlike the Christmas tree lights in the condo, have been strung in selected fir boughs—bright enough that you’d never get lost in the dark, dim enough not to spoil the mysterious effect.
She does not actually enjoy this kind of skiing either. Not really. Not with all the tiresome waxing, the stiff rental shoes, the long inconvenient skis, the sweaty underneath, the chance that all this could eventuate in catching cold and missing work. The gym is better. Major heat, then quick you’re clean and back in the car, back in the office. Back on the phone. She is a sport, but definitely not a sports nut. Still, this is not terrifying.
No one accompanies her on nighttime Nordic Trail 1, the Pageant of the Lights having lured away the other skiers. Two Japanese were conversing at the trail head, small beige men in bright chartreuse Lycras—smooth, serious faces, giant thighs, blunt, no-nonsense arms—commencing the rigorous course, “The Beast,” Nordic Trail 3. On their rounded, stocking-capped heads they’d worn tiny lights like coal miners to light their way. They have disappeared immediately.
Here the snow virtually hums to the sound of her sliding strokes. A full moon rides behind filigree clouds as she strides forward in the near-darkness of crusted woods. There is wind she can hear high up in the tallest pines and hemlocks, but at ground level there’s none, just cold radiating off the metallic snow. Only her ears actually feel cold, that and the sweat line of her hair. Her heartbeat barely registers. She is in shape.
For an instant she hears distant music, a singing voice with orchestral accompaniment. She pauses to listen. The music’s pulse travels through the trees. Strange. Possibly it’s Roger, she thinks, between deep breaths; Roger onstage in the karaoke bar, singing his greatest hits to other lonelies in the dark. “Blue Bayou,” “Layla,” “Tommy,” “Try to Remember.” Roger at a safe distance. Her hair, she realizes, is shining in the moonlight. If she were being watched, she would at least look good.