“So do I,” Foderman said. “I like to beat the lift lines.”
“We thought we might try the north face tomorrow,” I said, hoping to put the fear of God into him.
“I’ve been dying to try the north face,” Foderman said.
“Mostly expert trails over there,” David said.
“I can come down any trail on the mountain. I came down the Nosedive at Mansfield. You think there’s anything here I’m afraid of?”
“We wouldn’t want you to break your leg, Dr. Foderman,” Sandy said.
“Seymour,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to break any leg.” He paused, smiled, and then said, “Okay? Shall we try it?”
Sandy studied him for several moments. Then she returned his smile and said, “Sure, Seymour. Let’s try it.”
It was raining on Tuesday morning, and so we were spared the ordeal of leading Foderman down the treacherous (or so we had heard) north face. I had spent another restless night tossing and turning with The Rape of Rhoda, as Dr. Krakauer calls it, he being wrong on two counts: the dream is not about Rhoda, and Rhoda wasn’t raped. I think I’ve read just about every piece of literature available on rape, and rape victims, and the psychology of the rapist, and the attitude of the police toward rape, and if what happened in that forest five years ago was rape then I am Jack the Ripper and David is Bluebeard. I keep telling that to the Ninety-sixth Street Sage, but he never listens. I sometimes think he sits behind me and knits. Once, I think I caught him taking a quick five-minute nap.
ME: Sandy and David both agree. I mean, we haven’t gone into a goddamn reconstruction of it, word for word and action for action, but we certainly talk about it every now and then, and it seems perfectly clear to us that no one did anything to Rhoda she didn’t want done. She shouldn’t have been drinking beer, to begin with, she never could drink, and she said she hated the stuff, so why the hell was she drinking it? And she wasn’t crippled, you know. Nothing prevented her from getting up and walking out of the woods on her own two feet, if that was what she wanted to do. So why did she stay? Sandy says it’s because she smelled what was coming, and was excited by it, and maybe even provoked what happened, incited us to, you know, do what we did. I mean, we were all as innocent as she was, none of us had had any appreciable sex experience. That’s a very excitable age, you know. I was just sixteen that summer, you know. I don’t suppose you were ever sixteen, but you may have read Aichhorn on adolescence and gotten a secondhand impression of what it’s like to be young.
KR: (Silence)
ME: Have you read Aichhorn?
KR: (Silence)
ME: Dr. Krakauer?
KR: Yes?
ME: Have you?
KR: Certainly.
ME: Certainly what?
KR: Certainly, I have.
Sly old fox. Forty dollars an hour, and he sits behind me with his knitting, napping while I natter. Never did admit he’d been catching forty winks, which at those rates was a dollar a wink. Well, maybe he hadn’t been sleeping at all, maybe he’d been pulling the old Mute Analyst gag. But if he had been sleeping, it was his own fault. He was the one who insisted we go over the rape (or whatever it was) ad nauseum, as if it had been the trauma of my life, instead of just a normal adolescent experience, a loss of innocence, so to speak. I was as bored with it as he was, but I didn’t sleep on his couch, and I didn’t expect him to doze off while I was backtracking at his request. If Rhoda lost her innocence that summer, it was time she had. For everything there’s a season, man. A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. Rhoda had been planted well and deep. (Sandy’s a girl, and she ought to know what a girl feels and thinks, and she says Rhoda enjoyed it.) So there was Krakauer, trying his best to pluck up what had been planted, and snoring away on my time besides. It burns me up every time I think about it.
There are some skiers who will ski in any kind of weather. Hailstones can be coming down out of the sky, pots and pans can be falling on their heads, never you mind. Down the mountain they come with moronic grins on their faces, braving the elements, telling themselves they’re having a gay old time out there getting hit in the face with all kinds of shmutz. Sandy, David and I may have been sex-crazed rapists, but we were not insane enough to go up on that mountain during the monsoon season. Cognizant of the fact that the snow might all be washed away by dusk, we prayed briefly (but devoutly) for a blizzard-inducing drop in temperature, and then called for a taxi and prepared to spend the rest of the day in town.
Town.
Visualize (if you must) a one-street metropolis set into the crotch of two sloping hills. Conjure a haphazard collection of boxlike buildings made of cinderblock and concrete, the flaking wooden trim uniformly painted green. On one end of town was the local garage, with a yellow tow truck backed in against a high wall of snow and a mechanic in grease-stained coveralls standing just inside the open overhead doors, staring out at the rain. At the other end of town was the diner: aluminum sides and rain-snaked windows, a white 1964 Cadillac parked below an orange neon sign that sputtered INER. Between these, a dozen stores and shops were strung out along the main drag, their windows dressed with holiday tinsel and crap — MERRY CHRISTMAS in red and green on a sagging string, SEASON’S GREETINGS with the tops of cardboard letters mounded with cardboard snow, the bottoms dripping with cardboard icicles. Real icicles hung from copper drains as green as the town’s unanimous trim; real snow was banked along the sidewalks, rapidly turning to slush, caked with soot from a train that chugged along a siding behind the stores, the tracks angling away and disappearing into the mountains. Mean-looking men in Stetsons, jeans, and boots walked silently through the pouring rain, their hands in their pockets, their heads ducked low. That was town.
We went through it in five minutes, dodging from doorway to doorway. Standing on the corner of Forty-second and Broadway, we peered out glumly at the rain.
“Well, what do you want to do now, Marty?” Sandy asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you want to do?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” David said. “What do you want to do?”
“How about some Christmas shopping?”
“What’s today?”
“The nineteenth.”
“Six more shopping days left.”
“What would you like for Christmas, Peter?”
“Peace on earth.”
“Be realistic.”
“A Mercedes 280-SL.”
“What color?”
“I was going to get him one,” David said. “Now you spoiled the surprise.”
“I’d like a new parka,” Sandy said.
“What’s the matter with the one you’re wearing?”
“I didn’t say I needed a new parka, I merely said I’d like one.”
“Shall we shop around?”
“With such a wide selection of boutiques, we’d be foolish not to.”
Sandy has always maintained, and I believe she’s right, that you should never steal anything if you really need it or want it. Dr. Krakauer thinks Sandy is a psychopath. I think Dr. Krakauer is a nut. (He has never, by the way, dared to call me a psychopath, because that’s the day I’ll walk off into the sunset, thereby causing the abrupt termination of the Dr. Conrad Krakauer Endowment Fund.) The only time I ever stole anything was when I was in the sixth grade at Ethical Culture. The thing I stole was Mrs. Kingsley’s hairbrush. I don’t remember what I did with it.