“My voice is my voice,” she said. “If you don’t like it, Peter, you know exactly what you can do.”
“It doesn’t sound like your voice.”
“Whose voice does it sound like?”
“My cousin’s.”
“Which cousin?”
“The one with throat cancer.”
“Peter, that’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Speak up, I can’t hear you when you whisper.”
“Do you realize I’m calling long distance?”
“It sounds like you’re calling from a long long distance.”
“Do you want to go to Semanee, or don’t you?”
“I’ll ask David.”
“When?”
“I’ll be seeing him tonight.”
“Okay, ask him,” she said, and hung up abruptly.
I met David for dinner at O’Neal’s, across the street from Lincoln Center, where he played every Wednesday night with the Chamber Music Society. He was dressed for the performance, wearing black dinner jacket and tie, blond hair combed sideways and casually across his forehead, shirt front studded with the Schlumberger set I’d given him last Christmas. He looked freshly shaved and talced, resplendent in black and white, and he made me feel like a shabby bum, even though I was wearing imported Italian pants from Bloomingdale’s, and a crew-neck sweater that had cost me forty dollars of my father’s hard-earned loot. Come to think of it, I always felt shabby in David’s presence.
He had stopped lifting weights immediately after The Summer of Rhoda (as Dr. Krakauer in his inverted Teutonic way was fond of describing it), but those years of jerk-and-lift had provided him with a trim body that required very little care and maintenance, somewhat like a concrete lawn painted green. I don’t think he washed any more often than I did, but he always looked so goddamn clean and neat. It was discouraging. At twenty-one, my face had finally grown into my nose, which doesn’t mean it had shriveled up and been sucked into the nostrils to disappear entirely from sight, but only that it had finally filled out enough to disguise what I’d always considered a fairly prominent proboscis. My acne had cleared up, too (good steady fucking from various sources works wonders, I am told by noted dermatologists), and I usually felt very comfortable with my appearance, typical example of red-blooded young American manhood — except when I was with David, at which times I felt like a shlump. One indication of the solidity of our friendship was the fact that I could tolerate his clean good looks without vomiting. If there is anything I normally can’t stand, it’s somebody who’s better-looking than I am. Not to mention more talented. David, that rat, had been a great flute player (or flutist, or flautist, or whatever) even when he was just a kid at Music and Art. But he had gone on from there to Juilliard, and then had landed the chamber music gig, and was also playing here and there around the city in various symphony and studio orchestras, making a small fortune doing what he liked best in all the world. Me? I was breaking my ass in pre-med at N.Y.U. because do you know what I wanted to be when I grew up? A psychoanalyst like the mad butcher of Ninety-sixth, the world-renowned Dr. Krakauer.
“Where the hell is Semanee?” David asked.
“In the heart of America’s vast snow country,” I said.
“Is it a good area?”
“According to Sandy, it’s terrific.”
“Can we get rooms?”
“If we move on it right away.”
“When does your Christmas vacation start?”
“On the fifteenth.”
“And Sandy’s?”
“The twelfth.”
“I have a concert on the eighth of January,” David said, “but nothing between now and then.” He bit into his hamburger, nodded, and said, “I think it might be fun. What do you think?”
“I think so, too.”
“Is Sandy still dating that jerk from Rutgers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because like, man, if she intends bringing along excess baggage... ”
“No, she said the three of us.”
“Just the three of us?”
“I think so.”
“Can you find out for sure? When will you be talking to her again?”
“I’ll call her when I get home.”
“If it’s really just the three of us, I’d like to go,” David said.
“I’ll find out. By the way, she’s trying a new voice this week.”
“What happened to the French accent?”
“She decided it was phony. You should hear what she’s got now.”
“Crazy girl,” David said, but he was smiling affectionately.
So there we were at Semanee Lodge at the base of Semanee Peak eight days before Christmas, watching Emmanuel Schwartz pole-vaulting across the room on his new crutches. He was wearing on his round face the somewhat sickly, apologetic, guilty smile worn by anyone who’s ever had an accident on the slopes, and he was wearing on his left leg the badge of his dishonor, a cast that ran from his toes clear up to his hip. Someone had already scribbled “Poor Manny!” on it with a red marking pen, but aside from that the cast was as pristine white as the sheepish grin that curled up under Schwartz’s nose, its opposite ends disappearing into apple-red cheeks.
He was, this Schwartz, a round little man all over. I supposed he was in his early thirties, moon-faced, partially balding, with sloping shoulders and a pot belly, buttocks like bowling balls, fat little hands and thick thighs (the one we could see, the one without the cast), waddling forward on his crutches, grinning his silly smile in his open red-cheeked face, a man of curves angularly hobbling across the room toward the fireplace where the three of us sat toasting our feet.
“Something, huh?” he said, by way of openers.
David seemed totally absorbed in the scientific discovery that steam was rising from his socks, and Sandy was reading Story of O in tattered paperback. The main burden of conversation fell to me.
“Yes, really something,” I said.
“I wanted to thank you,” Schwartz said, easing himself down into a chair opposite me, and then propping his crutches against the fireplace wall. “You’re the people who went for the Ski Patrol, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“I wanted to thank you,” Schwartz said.
“Don’t mention it,” I said.
“I had no right being on that trail. Much too difficult for me.”
David looked up from his socks and said, “Well, a lot of fun in skiing is the challenge.”
“Oh, yes,” Schwartz said.
“A man’s reach should always exceed his grasp,” Sandy said, without so much as glancing up. She had abandoned her Breathless Whisper the moment we arrived at Semanee, probably because it didn’t carry too well across the hills and dales, and whereas her voice was low-pitched now, it was at least her normal speaking voice, thank God.