Etta at Night

It's not often that I resent beauty in a woman, but I resented it in Etta Fleger-Hollmann, and please don't forget the hyphen. She was about 30, mein hostess of that ritzy Kitzbühel weekend; she moved in a black ski-pants-and-sweater outfit which, without trying or stretching at all hard, defined lazy grade-A curves; her cheekbones were the kind that don't ripen so sensuously until a woman is beyond her 20s; her blue eyes hit yours at a direct and yet noncommittal angle; she had the loose black mane and haphazard bangs that usually go with a very young face but which here added up to a total effect that was annoyingly close to excellent.

Why annoying? I don't really know. Perhaps because she looked like an expensive doll with a gratuitous not for sale sign on her. Perhaps it was the hair, which was a good deal every which way and obviously hadn't been combed since the morning; snow crystals were still glinting in it as she, stinging-fresh from the ski slopes, led us to our rooms.

Or maybe it was the antlers that got me. There were antlers everywhere in the chalet. Ordinary young stag antlers in the hall downstairs; bigger antlers in the corridors; and real showpieces where you had more leisure in which to admire them: in the dining room a 16-pointer shot by a Prince Hohenlohe at the Flegers' Bavarian shoot; in the den, horns of rare huge ibex assassinated by heraldic names like Schwarzenberg and Liechtenstein. And in each of the bedrooms at least one giant 18-pointer struck down by a Hapsburg while he was a guest at a Fleger estate. Every trophy was marked by an ivory plaque that identified killer, victim and the place of the killing, and all these mannerly murders added up to a message: Sir, you are in the presence of old, big, important money.

But it wasn't just all those horns. I had been through some many-antlered weekends before. No, it was the absent-minded ease with which my very pretty hostess, Etta Fleger-Hollmann (get the hyphen), owned all that wealth. She threw it away even as she pointed it out. She tossed off a quick tour, from the white Siberian tiger brought in by a Fleger uncle and now brightening the floor before her bedroom fireplace, to those silver stirrups given to a Fleger by the Kaiser himself. She was so efficient and perfunctory about it all, didn't even bother with the ritual complaints about the-trouble-of-keeping-up-the-place-for-the-mere-six-weeks-in-the-year-one-can-use-it.

No, I had the feeling that at any moment she might take a chewing-gum wad out of that well-shaped mouth (a mouth whose upper lip was just a shade too short, so that it remained open in some preoccupied and pretty reverie)—take out the gum at any moment and smear it on any of the Hapsburg antlers or on any of the three servants curtsying along the carpets or, for that matter, even on Slim and me.

For make no mistake, we were trophies, too, the trophies of that particular weekend, and I felt she cared no more, no less about us than about the several hundred other displays in the house.

"This is our artists' floor, gentlemen," she said with her Oxonian rather than German English, smiling a slender smile. And sure enough, there were just two rooms on this third, attic floor; one with a brush painted on the door and a skylight in the ceiling—Slim's; the other with a quill on the door and a modern Olivetti typewriter built into an old oaken table—mine. Here we were bagged and tagged for the weekend, The Artist and The Writer.

"Isn't it a gas?" Slim said. He had arranged the weekend and was proprietary about it.

"Dinner eightish?" said Etta Fleger-Hollmann, and I saw as she left that three ice crystals remained still unmelted in the black mane, that's how fast and proficient her welcome had been.

As I unpacked, I realized another thing that was bothering me. The dates on those antler plaques progressed much too placidly from the Thirties into the Forties and Fifties. The Third Reich and the loss of the War hadn't made the aim of the Flegers or Fleger guests any less deadly. They had kept on enriching the decor steadily through the unpleasantness. It intrigued me so much that I burst in on Slim shaving.

"What's the Fleger racket again?" I asked.

"Santa Maria!" Slim said. "You don't know? Woolens. Any time a German buys a sweater, the Flegers get richer. Been like that for forty years."

"The Wehrmacht must have bought a lot of sweaters," I said.

"You bet," Slim said. "And her old man was the first post-War Heinie with a private plane."

"They didn't have any denazification trouble afterward?"

"Not a thing," Slim said. "Nada. See, the Flegers had a cop-out Jew. How do you like your room?"

"Fine," I said. "A what?"

"Some Jewish kid they were hiding. Even fed him kosher, sort of, right through the War. That Jewish cat testified his head off in Forty-six. The Flegers keep coming up with things like that."

"Kosher?" I said.

"I tell you," Slim said, "the Flegers do something, they swing. And the kid was retarded, too, the kind the Nazis would have killed right off the bat."

"You mean they kept him all those years as a kind of insurance?"

"Still do. He's working for them in Munich or something. You know there's a sauna on the first floor? Only one in Kitzbühel."

"No kidding," I said and went back to shave myself.

• • •

That evening I did an odd thing. I had no idea how they dressed for dinner and felt no desire to ask. So I put on a dark-brown shirt, a black bow tie and my brown tweed jacket, which added up to a sort of beatnik tuxedo and was therefore sure to be wrong. The chalet was so infallible, it could use a little fault.

But I couldn't make my point. When I came down, there was no black-tie decorum to violate. Slim had decked himself out in a Tyrolean loden suit. The others were in formal après-ski, meaning vicuna sweaters knotted around Pucci-shirted shoulders, and mein hostess Etta Fleger-Hollmann was the same as before, minus the ice crystals, plus a flawless, careless, unutterably genuine string of pearls. The same slender smile bent her lips as she introduced me. It made my beatnik tuxedo look au fait, the right picaresquely profound getup for the Big-Time Cultural Columnist of the Big-Time News Weekly. Voilà, I was more of a trophy than ever. I neatly matched Slim, who had just become the great pop muralist of our time.

There were only six of us, a small but mutually accomplished menu. I was served up to a blue-haired old literary princess who was translating Restoration comedy into German and who was just dying to hear from me whether it was true that Henry Miller was writing a novel about underground movies. Slim's neighbor was France's leading lady publisher of art books, who, it turned out, had once been very close to Picasso; she and Slim were, in a word, perfect grist for each other's mill. Mein hostess' partner was a handsome young man with a calfskin face, named Matthias, the downhill champion of Austria.

The funny thing is, I immediately sensed that, contrary to what you'd assume, there was nothing between Etta and the champ. In fact, I felt there was nothing between her and the rest of us. That is, she did pat Matthias on his arms, which were bare because his shirt sleeves were turned up at the elbows; glacier-browned, golden-haired forearms presented the way a woman presents a socko décolletage. She patted the décolleté muscles and said Matthias was responsible for the regular hours kept by the girls in Kitzbühel, they went to bed early because Matthias had to be up at eight for training—at which there was laughter; just as she said (passing me the Gothic saltcellar) never mind anyone trying to be witty tonight, even if everybody were George Bernard Shaw I'd still write a devastating column about the dreary level of Kitzbühel conversation—more laughter; and just as she said, pointing to Slim, that she was so happy to have him for a guest while she was still in a position to feed him—after her husband got through paying him for the dining-room mural he'd do next year, they would only be able to afford pretzels for dinner—and lots of laughter.

Oh, she did all that, ribbed us flatteringly, pleased everyone with the importance of his neighbor, chitchatted in that Oxonian English, but wasn't there at all. I mean, so much was held back under the bangs. She withdrew once she had set the mechanics of the dinner party going, rewound it now and then with an apt remark, but on the whole averted herself into a direction that baffled.

Sometimes, though, I caught her as she absent-mindedly got hold of a few obstinate hairs on her forehead and tried to smooth them down into bangs, as if she'd just seen herself in an invisible mirror, seen herself and some other equally invisible presence. She smoothed the bangs down hard while her short upper lip opened even farther and a tiny, perversely virginal tongue peeked out with the effort—then intercepted my glance and offered me dessert.

And that rankled, man. I wanted her to really see me. I wanted that darling of fortune to really pay attention. I suspected she had never paid attention to Germany's interesting recent history either, had been so luxuriously oblivious to it all—and found my gambit.

"I meant to ask you," I said. "I understand you knew Hitler in person."

The ski champ unconsciously covered half his forearm, and the princess foundered in the midst of an André Gide anecdote. But she wasn't rattled.

"Oh yes, once I had to give him a bunch of roses when I was a little girl."

"How was that monster?" the princess said, abandoning Gide.

"Pleasant," she said. "He kept on patting me. I expected him to give me candy."

"Oh no!" Slim said. "That's too much! Give me candy!"

"He did give me an inscribed copy of Mein Kampf," mein hostess said.

"This is worth a great price now," the ski champ said.

"The next day I traded it in for an autograph of the Duke of Windsor," said Etta, and there was great laughter and brandy and then they all went out to the night piste.

Slim had told me in advance about the night piste. The Fleger estate included acreage that curved from their own ice rink upward, up some 2000 feet toward the Kitzbühler Horn peak. Slim tossed back the curtains of the observation window and showed it to me. I saw a fine descent blindingly floodlighted in yellow, a splash so brilliant that it expunged the rest of the mountain.

"Gringo," Slim said, "it's the only private night piste in the world."

At the Flegers' you apparently had a quick run down between after-dinner brandies. It was slightly more strenuous but also a healthier and much more glamorous thing than being pushed into a swimming pool. I realized that you had not really done the Alps unless you (continued on page 180)Etta at Night(continued from page 88) could say, incidentally, "Hey, that was pretty good spring snow at the Flegers' last night." The very cachet of it rang out in the little cries with which the rest of the party buckled on their ski boots.

I excused myself with tiredness: I'd arrived from New York just a few hours ago. Slim had a convenient slipped disk which made him a full-time après-skier. He and I pulled up armchairs to the window and watched our friends ghost-black through the snow as the private ski lift pulled them up the slope.

But she kept rankling me. Unlike most Germans, she hadn't even bothered to become defensive about the Third Reich. The Führer was just another celebrity with whom to rewind a party.

"How'd the Flegers get away with all that Hitler stuff?" I asked as we watched. "Not just because of the cop-out Jew?"

"Her old man didn't become a Party member," Slim said. "Not till the War, and that's when he started working with Allied intelligence."

"All the real clever Nazis did," I said.

"Gringo," Slim said, "this is the cleverest clan in the world. El viviendo fin."

El viviendo fin is Spanish for the living end. Old Slim used Spanish hip as a reminder that he'd been Diego Rivera's tavern companion and chief disciple. For some reason, maybe because we went to college together, there was a certain rivalry between Slim and me. Last year I'd wangled him a very classy invitation at St.-Moritz. This winter he was tit-for-tatting me in Kitzbühel. But, truth be told, I was annoyed with him only on account of her.

"Look at them come down," Slim said.

They came down indeed, through the harsh crystalline yellowness. Ye French art publisher slow, stodgy, knock-kneed; ye literary princess with several attempts at style, interrupted by sudden armthrashing incertitudes; ye champ weaving and wedeling in a graceful snow universe all his own; ye hostess sure and sinuous, a decorative lace kerchief fluttering from her pocket, her face still not paying any heed, not even to the snow; and in front of them all, carving out the piste, a man I hadn't seen before, a wiry, tall, light-haired bloke.

"Who's that?" I asked.

"That's the night-piste man," Slim said. "That cat does nothing but run the lift and be available at night. That's why he's got no color on him."

It was true. The fellow's long, thin face was quite pale among the bronzed figures swarming behind him.

"Isn't money nice?" Slim said. "Any time you can't sleep, two A.M., five A.M., the night cat's there. He'll work the lift and ski you down."

They were quite close now, the yellow demons, swishing down out of the night. I felt I was too weary to face them. Suddenly it was too much: the night-piste man, the antlers, the flight from New York and the drive from Munich, the cop-out Jew, the prospect of too much Henry Miller from the literary princess, too little attention from mein hostess. I asked Slim to convey my excuses.

"Segura cosa," he said, "sure thing. Sleep tight. Hey, and tell St.-Moritz about the night-piste bit."

That's when it came to me that Slim had tried with Etta and had come a cropper and perhaps wanted me to try and come a cropper, too.

"Good night, old boy," I said.

• • •

At Kitzbühel you're nowhere if you're white. A deep tan is your citizenship certificate and without it you can't practice any of the civic virtues like drinking, seducing or even skiing. You actually feel indecent on skis as long as you're pale. So I went up to the Hahnenkamm very early the next morning after a not particularly good night's sleep. And the first thing I spotted outside the aerial cableway station was mein hostess. I didn't care for her to see me like that, ashen-nosed like her night-piste man and puzzled in the knees. But there she was. Alone, not traveling in a tinselly, chattery, pastel-colored gaggle like most skiing matrons, but all by herself in sleek sober black except for the white kerchief.

"Ah," she said, "you deserted us last night."

"Good morning," I said. "I didn't think you'd notice."

"But you are very noticeable. You are so pale. I will show you the southern slopes that will make you brown fast."

And she was off, and I behind her. She skied with those languorous swivelings and hip rhythms easy as breathing which made you think, irritatedly, that she never had to learn, never ached her way from snowplow to stem turn, but relaxed from the first into a sovereign slalom. It was really the nonattention-paying business again. She took no heed of those wicked little bumps, the sudden bluffs, the athwart trees, the treacherous ledges of ice. On the contrary, all obstacles arranged themselves around her for her convenience, so that she could waft oblivious through the fine golden blue.

Sometimes she seemed almost as exhausted as I. But while I panted secretly she'd sprawl straddle-thighed into the snow for rest; she'd make love to the whole mountain for a few abandoned seconds before rising refreshed and swishing forward keenly as though we'd just started the day.

I was grateful when we stopped to lunch at the Bichlalm hut. We drank spiced hot Glühwein and munched parsley sausage, chatting about how a few weeks of skiing spoiled the rest of the year for you; spoiled me for the cocktail-corroded one-upmanship of the Manhattan treadmill, spoiled her for the leaden social duties of a German ambassador's wife in an unair-conditioned Latin-American country.

Throughout such fairly conventional ski talk, I noticed it again: her lightning-fast forays out of—and right back into—the proper manner. Only it became more open now. She'd get crumbs of black bread on her sweater and brush them off impatiently so that the resilient breasts beneath diddered, or she'd suddenly get thirsty for soda and bite the soda straw a moment before sucking it—all this interspersed with a cool, sardonic account of how she'd discovered on her one trip to New York that shopping there was really a status contest among Manhattan matrons for the best fitting rooms at Bergdorf Goodman. But I watched each time for the sweet lapse, for that flash of secret susceptibility, that glimpse of heat which lived on the inside of her too-short upper lip.

I had a sudden vision of a Latin-American peon with a villainously hairy chest warming her bed. It wasn't a literal suspicion. But I knew she let something or somebody happen to her which infiltrated and undermined that carapace of outer grace. To explore the thing further I began to talk to her in German, of which I have a fair command. And I discovered that when she spoke, the guttural growl, which is at the base of German speech, melted away. In fact she had, off and on, the faintest Latin-American intonation. It turned the hardness of Teutonic consonants into round and roseate marble. Somehow she absolutely got away with being Deutsch. She did something—practiced some insidious secret—which undid my prejudice completely. And when we got back into English, she even fell from her Oxonian perfection into some charming inversions. "You do indeed ski very well!" she protested when I wondered if she'd put up with me after lunch as well.

She put up with me, but I lost her all the same, to a brief fog that overtook us at the Kitzbühler Horn just as she skied several hundred yards ahead of me. By the time it lifted, she was gone.

The rest of the afternoon was a search. A long sunset started, dropping colors on the hills. I combed them for her. I cast my ski trails like a huge net over those waning hours and caught no less than three black-clad ladies with white kerchiefs fluttering from their pockets—all of them impostors, none of them her. The wrong faces sat so mockingly on the right silhouettes.

At five I came back to the chalet—to be defeated again. She was in the hall. I thought there'd be a great reunion following the afternoon's separation. But there was only a brief, smooth "How nice. You didn't get swallowed by an avalanche!" There were her introductions to two new guests. And that, brother, was all. Last night, she said, had been dinner at home; tomorrow night would be dinner at the literary princess'; but tonight was "the best night, your night off." She threw me a fine smile with her too-short upper lip as she vanished toward her private quarters: "Do enjoy yourself! Good night!"

It was quite a final though highly burnished kiss-off. She even provided the potential enjoyments—I mean the two new guests. A couple of young German divorcées sat before the fireplace drying their nail polish. They were stopping at Kitzbühel for a night or two and offered the backs of their hands, à la Continental, to Slim's and my lips. But they were also quite Americanized, launching into psychoanalytic revelations about the failure of their ex-husbands' parents, and then leaned back with their cocktail glasses, expecting to be repaid in kind.

I knew those two weren't compulsory. They were just there like the night piste was there, to have a try at if desired. Well, I didn't desire them. And I didn't understand my hostess. After sprawling in the snow like that before me; after brushing the bread crumbs off her sweater, bosom all ajiggle—after all that, she just left me to those chirping nail driers.

It was rather intolerable. I excused myself and went straight upstairs, after her. And had some luck. I cornered her in the corridor as she brushed past, without make-up, barely out of the sauna, looking like a wet blue-eyed madonna, which made the evening's loss all the more poignant.

"I meant to ask you," I said, and I didn't mind being abrupt, "I meant to ask you all along, I understand your father protected a Jew during the Nazi thing?"

"Yes," she said. "We were lucky in saving him."

"He's alive today?"

"Oh, I imagine very much." She smiled. It was a measure of her veneer that she managed not to lose a fraction of composure at this awkward ambush of mine. She stood in the corridor, little drops blackening the carpet as they ran down her white ankles which showed, pink on white, the imprint of the skiing boots. She squashed a towel against her moist hair so that it stood up every which way, and smiled the smile of a perfectly coifed woman, a witch in wild-wet flower, cool, yet steaming with nakedness under the silk peignoir.

"You see," I said, "I'm so interested in this because I wish your family had taken care of some of my uncles like that."

"Ah, you are Jewish?"

"Yes," I said, "half."

I had fired it at her to jar her, to make her pay somehow, in a way that I felt she hadn't paid for being German, or for the War, or for learning to ski so well—and also to make her pay attention to me. But I realized, even as I said it, that I was flinging the pathos of Jewishness at her, something I hadn't done for years. Nor am I half; I'm full.

"Well, then you are interested in this subject," she said. "Let's talk about it sometime."

"Yes," I said. "Sometime tonight. Perhaps dinner."

"After we are both cleaned up. After eight?"

I almost said, "Fine, thanks," to her, which would have given away that that was what I'd been after: It was for the sake of her dinner company that I'd thrown my Jewishness at her feet.

So I said, "Fine," period, made a glib see-ya motion and did what I hoped was an amble up the stairs.

By that evening I knew she had someone, maybe right there in the village. I sensed it despite the finesse with which she protected herself. When I came down for cocktails at eight, she had arranged the evening—through some fast telephoning, no doubt. An Italian with a diabolic little goatee appeared. She let him kiss her hand for just an instant longer than I liked. Then he scooped up the two chirpy divorcées together with Slim. Avanti! and off they were in a low-slung sports sled on a moonlight ride to the next village.

Etta and I went to a local restaurant, the explanation (backed by my exhausted face) being that I had to be fed a nice and restful dinner. But nice and restful wasn't exactly what I'd call that dinner. The restaurant featured a hot zither that could marry a waltz to a frug; also a decor combining baroque milk buckets, baronial paneling and El Morocco lighting; an aroma compounded of Ma Griffe, virile ski instructors' armpits, molten wax from candles, and the piping-hot spice of goulash. The place was full of people whom she knew. As they passed us their social cries made me get up four times during each course.

On the one hand, this was annoying. On the other, it had a certain value. The tentative envy with which the men shook my hand, the extra notch to which the women upped their female radar as they smoothed down their sweaters and surrendered their rings to my lips—it all added up to a sort of puzzlement. Their "How do you do?" was really a translation of "What? Not the Italian?" or "Are you the one?"

She had someone. Everybody in Kitzbühel seemed to sense it. But she covered herself so well. She was so damn good. She could make an entirely offhand joke about the diabolic Italian ("Some of the ladies here call him 'Carissimo Grant'") which increased both my suspicion and my puzzlement. To table-hoppers she could address a "Hello, darling" that was cordial yet so definitely omitted an exclamation point that each darling knew it was time for him to go back to his own table five seconds later. Turning to me, she could, with the same precise nuance, suggest the imminence of an intimacy that was never realized or offered. We never even talked too much about the cop-out Jew, though I tried.

"You were going to tell me," I said, "about the fellow your father kept hidden during the War."

"Oh yes," she said. "That was exciting."

"Was it dangerous for you?"

"Poppa and his secretary and myself, we were all who knew about him."

"And could you really bring him up kosher?"

"Kosher?" she laughed. "In Germany? During the War? No, but he knew Hebrew and we smuggled in some Hebrew books and all that."

"Quite a responsibility for a young girl."

"He once taught me some Hebrew words," she said, smiling, stroking her single strand of pearls. "It was thrilling."

"Like a thrilling toy?"

"Oh, hello, darling," she said at the approach of still more friends and still more radar focusing on my face.

I tried not to let go after the darlings passed. "Where is he now?" I asked.

"Him?" she said. "Poppa gave him a job. He got so used to us. You should have heard him cry when Poppa died."

"Touching," I said.

"He was a little bit of a retarded child, you know."

"So I understand," I said.

"Ah?" She smiled. "You know? You really studied us."

"Sure," I said, "on the theory that someday you might give me a nice job."

"Why, did somebody have to hide you?"

"Who knows?" I said. "I'm a Jew, aren't I?"

It didn't quite wipe out the bathos left from the earlier occasion, but it made her laugh again. She was the first German I'd ever met who wasn't the least bit self-conscious about the subject.

"I will give you a job now," she said. "You must teach me some more new American dances."

The zither had gotten fruggy again. We danced a lot, too much for my taste, because my weary legs got wearier still. Later on, though, came a tango. We danced more quietly, more closely. Of a sudden I felt she was treating me like her mystery lover's brother; her flesh engaged mine at shoulder and thigh, but not with the self-conscious caution that implies the possibility of surrender—no, rather in a kind of tactile meditation, as though my shoulders were the deputy of another and as though she (her face dreaming against my neck) transported herself toward fulfillment elsewhere.

"Good night," she said, back at the chalet. "I have my two divorced friends coming to my bedroom for—how do you say it in America?—for girl talk."

"Good night, goddamnit," I said. And I didn't mean the smile with which I said it. The evening had come to demand a climax between us; she cheated me of it by running upstairs. To make things worse, Slim and his divorcée arrived a moment later, the divorcée making for the stairs, too, with a tittered salutation, Slim pouring himself a cognac and throwing some logs on the fire—all by way of enormous self-satisfaction.

"Hey," he said. "Did you get yours?"

"Did you?"

"Hombre!" he whispered. "First time in my life in a sled. And she said afterward she did it because the mountains are beautiful." He laughed. "Were the mountains beautiful for you and Etta?"

"Slim," I said, "what's Etta's kick?"

"You mean you smelled it already?" He laughed again, but this time truly happy. "You struck out, too?"

"She wouldn't be a Lesbian," I said. "Would she?"

"Jesús María!" He got into a better and better mood, warming his back against the fire. "You are supposed to tell me! I had my hopes pinned on you, man! I thought you'd be the guy to crack her!"

"There's a hang-up someplace," I said.

"The hang-up," Slim said, "the hang-up is that she never hits the sack with the kind you'd expect, like you or me. You know what it was like down in Mexico? The most electric broad south of the border—and I couldn't even get to first base! It's ridiculous, right?"

"Sure, it's ridiculous," I said, not to satisfy him, but to make him go on.

"And forget her husband," Slim whispered. "Just a bald Kraut. It's something here. She's eating her heart out for it. She can't wait to get out of South America in winter. Christ, she sprained her ankle or something this fall, some tennis nonsense—you wouldn't believe all the doctors she ran to, just to get fixed up for Kitzbühel in time."

"That Italian?" I said.

"The dago with the beard?" Slim said. "He's been driving me nuts, too. But I thought you'd clear that up. What do you think I imported you for? I thought you were a specialist, old boy."

The door opened and the second divorcée came in, just full of this very same Italian. He had—imagine this!—sung her half of Carmen in jazz tempo! It made her vonder very much vhy she ever bothered with non-Latin men at all! ... She pushed Slim provocatively out of his fireplace position, wiggled her tightly flowered behind into the warmest spot and brushed me with a playful glance. I looked at the smug cones in her sweater, at all that blatant sexual kitsch, and wondered, too: why Etta, the most Teutonic woman in Kitzbühel (who else had given flowers to the Führer?), why Etta was at the same time the least German, so very graceful in bearing and in tongue. What did that Etta-bitch do to get away with it?

I said good night and went to sleep.

• • •

Or rather tried to. The question pursued me, jabbed through my closed eyelids. I tried to think of Venice, for which I decided to leave the following noon. I had no intention now of staying another day. I tried to think of Venice, Venice which I loved and whose image should have gentled me toward sleep. But I couldn't drop off altogether. I couldn't get beyond dozing. The wind rose: flakes trembled against my window. After what I thought was half an hour, I gave up and looked at my watch. It was five A.M.

Suddenly I was mad at my insomnia. I wanted to crush it out on the night piste. Now my legs felt not only not tired, they felt positively vengeful. I wanted to run up and down the slope till I was good and ready to drop off. She wouldn't keep me from the few hours of sleep I needed for the drive south; she was not going to spoil my trip to Venice.

I got up and threw on my ski things. A card on my night table listed the chalet's various phone extensions, including one for the night man if you wanted him to turn on the ski lift. But I didn't care to bother with him. More precisely, I didn't care to be bothered by anybody. I longed for pure, radical and therefore unsociable exhaustion.

The antlers on the wall stabbed toward me as I went down. Outside, the snowflakes gamboled with derisive grace under the yellow floodlight, a ballroom of chill crystals tinted half-pearl by a pinch of dawn. In fact, the act of snowing seemed as rich and defeatingly artful at that hour as the chalet itself, and the whole slope became a mysterious extension of the house as I walked the few steps to the night man's hut nearby.

Attached to it was a lean-to whose door stood open. As far as I could make out in the dark, it contained the lift motor—just what I was looking for. But I couldn't find the light switch, much less the lever that set the lift going. The only thing visible was a window that looked into the inside of the hut.

And so that was where I went. That was where I found her. It wasn't easy, but I picked her out instinctively in the shadows, my eyes composing and defining shapes even before they realized what they saw. She lay on a simple cot. But her presence itself was less astonishing—maybe something had primed me for that—than the way she lay there. She lay half bent on her side in a chaste white shift that covered her arms to below the elbow. She lay there like a little girl, hair splashed across the pillow in a naïve headlong black mop, none of the hostess sophistication left on her face, nothing of the accomplished lady or the diplomats' minx; only a happy, a candy-happy satisfaction that opened her upper lip trustingly as she breathed. Her right arm was flung across the empty bed space by her side.

I followed the direction of that arm and saw the night-piste man. He stood by the window that gave out to the east, to the lower side of the slope. He swayed forward and back slightly, the white fringes of his Jewish prayer shawl swinging as he moved, glimmering like slivers of snow in the half-light and reaching down almost to his ski boots. The phylactery stood out black on his forearm and on the inside of his upper arm. And I had a mad impulse to break down the door and shake him by the shoulders. To yell at him not to lend her his bed each winter so that she could relieve herself of the past in it, not to give her a Jewish cop-out bed in which to fornicate herself, thrillingly, into pureness.

My shoulder was already poised against the door. But then I saw how his mouth moved slowly, in the tranced slowness of a man with a veil across his brain, some sort of maybe sainted flaw. And since saints cannot be communicated with but are there to be used, I used him, too. The sight of him made me no longer want her. Suddenly I was cured. I was full of an enormous exhaustion.

Without a glance back, I walked out and picked my way back to the chalet.