I never liked to dance, and Flora was one of those women who clutch their partners as if to cut off any possible movement to escape. It was hot in the room and infernally noisy and my flannel blazer was heavy and too tight under the arms and I was swamped in Flora's perfume. She also hummed amorously into my ear as we danced.
'Oh, I'm so glad we found you,' she whispered. 'You can't drag Bill onto a dance floor. And I'll bet you're a great skier, too. You move like one.' Sex and all other human activities were clearly inextricably entwined in Mrs Sloane's mind. 'Will you ski with me tomorrow?'
'I'd love to,' I said. If I could have chosen a list of people whom I could suspect of having stolen my suitcase, the Sloanes would have been far down at the bottom.
It was after midnight, with two bottles of champagne gone, when I finally managed to call a halt. I signed the check and escorted the two ladies upstairs to where their husbands were playing bridge. Sloane was losing. I didn't know whether I was glad or sorry. If it was my money, I would have wept. If it was his, I'd have cheered. Aside from his friend from Greenwich, there was a handsome, graying man of about fifty at the table, and an old lady encrusted with jewelry, with a harsh Spanish accent, like the cawing of a crow. The Beautiful People of the International Set.
While I was watching, the handsome, gray-haired man made a small slam. 'Fabian,' Sloane said, 'every year I find myself writing out a check to you.'
The man Sloane had called Fabian smiled gently. He had a charming smile, almost womanish in sweetness, with laugh wrinkles permanently around his liquid dark eyes. 'I must admit,' he said, 'I'm having a modest little run of luck.' He had a soft, husky voice and an accent that was a little strange. I couldn't tell from the way he spoke where he came from.
'Modest ! ' Sloane said. He wasn't a pleasant loser.
'I'm going to bed,' Flora said. 'I'm skiing in the morning.'
'I'll be right up,' Sloane said. He was shuffling the cards as though he was preparing to use them as weapons.... I escorted Flora to her door. 'Isn't it comfy,' she said, 'We're just side-by-side?' She kissed my cheek good night, giggled, and said, 'Night-night,' and went in.
I wasn't sleepy and I sat up and read. I heard footsteps about a half hour later and the door to the Sloanes' room open and shut. There were some murmurs through the wall that I couldn't make out and after a while silence.
I gave the couple another fifteen minutes to fall asleep then opened the door of my room silently. All along the corridor, pairs of shoes were placed in front of bedroom doors, women's and men's moccasins, wing tips, patent leathers, ski boots, in eternal sexual order. Two by two, entries to the Ark. But in front of the Sloanes' door, there were only the dainty leather boots Flora Sloane had worn on the train. For whatever reason, her husband had not put out the brown shoes with the gum soles, possibly size ten, to be shined. I closed my door without a sound, to ponder the meaning of this.
10
'I'm worried about my husband,' Flora Sloane said to me. We were having a drink before lunch, seated in the sunshine on the terrace of the Corveglia Club, among the maritime Greeks, the Milanese industrialists, the people who were photographed beside pools at Acapulco, and the ladies of various nationalities who preyed on them all. Flora Sloane, who obviously had not been what has in other times been called 'gently reared' and who lapsed, when excited, into a language and an accent you might expect to hear from a waitress in a diner in New Jersey patronized almost exclusively by truck drivers, was completely at home here and accepted all attention or deference with regal aplomb. I, on the other hand, felt like a man who had just been dropped behind enemy lines.
The temporary membership had cost me a hundred and twenty francs for two weeks, but where the Sloanes went I had to follow. Not that Sloane himself was very much in evidence. In the mornings, according to Flora, he was on the phone back to his office in New York for hours on end and in the afternoon and evening he played bridge.
'He won't even have a tan when we get back to Greenwich,' she complained. 'People won't believe he's ever seen an Alp.'
Meanwhile, I had the honor of leading Flora Sloane down the bill and buying her lunch. She was a fair skier, but one of those women who squealed when she came to a steep bit and constantly complained of her boots. I spent quite a bit of time kneeling in the snow, loosening the hooks, then tightening them again after three turns. I had refused to be seen in the red pants and the lemon parka I had found in the suitcase and had bought myself a sensible navy blue outfit. At great expense.
At night, there was the inevitable sweaty dancing and the champagne. Madame Sloane was becoming progressively more amorous, too, and had a nasty habit of sticking her tongue in my ear while we danced. I wanted to get into the Sloanes' room and search it, but not that way. There was a choice of reasons for my coolness, not the least of which was the total lack of all response to any sexual stimulation, dating from the moment I had realized that my seventy thousand dollars had disappeared. Money was power. That I knew. It had not occurred to me that its absence involved impotence. Any attempt at performance on my part, I was sure, would be grotesquely inadequate. Flora Sloane's flirtatiousness was trying enough. Her derision would be catastrophic. I foresaw years of psychiatry ahead of me.
My efforts at detective work had been pathetically useless. I had knocked at the Sloanes' door several times on one pretext or another in the hope of being invited in so that I could at least take a quick, surreptitious look around their room, but whether it was the wife or the husband who responded, all conversations took place on the threshold, the door just barely ajar.
I bad opened my door every night when the hotel slept, but the brown shoes had never been in the corridor. I had begun to feel that I had been the victim of a hallucination in the train compartment - that Sloane had never worn brown shoes with gum soles and never had a red wool tie around his neck. I had brought up the subject of the confusion of luggage at airports these days, but the Sloanes had shown no interest. I would stay the week, 1 had decided, on the off chance that something would happen, and then I would leave. I had no idea of where I would go next. Behind the Iron Curtain, perhaps. Or Katmandu. Drusack haunted me.
Those miserable bridge games.' Flora Sloane sighed over her Bloody Mary. 'He's losing a fortune. They play for five cents a point. Everybody knows Fabian's practically a professional. He comes here for two months each winter and he walks away rich. I try to tell Bill that he's just not as good a bridge player as Fabian, but he's such a stubborn man he refuses to believe that anybody is better than him at anything. Then when he loses he gets furious at me. He's the worst loser in the world. You wouldn't believe some of the things he says to me. When he comes up to the room after one of those awful games, it's nightmare time. I haven't had a decent night's sleep since I came up here. I have to drive myself to put on my ski boots in the morning. By the time I leave here, I'll be a worn-out old hag.'
'Oh, come now. Flora.' I made the awaited objection. 'You couldn't look like a hag if you tried. You look blooming.' This was true. At all hours of the day and night, in no matter what clothes, she looked like an overblown peony.
'Appearances are deceiving,' she said darkly. 'I'm not as strong as I look. I was very delicate as a child. Frankly, honey, if I didn't know you were waiting for me downstairs every morning, I think I'd just stay in bed all day.'
'Poor girl,' I said sympathetically. The thought of Flora staying in bed was delicious, but not for the reason that Flora herself might have believed. With her off the hill 1 could give back my rented skis and boots and never have to go up the mountain again that winter. Even with the welcome discovery that my eyes served me adequately when skiing, after Vermont the sport had no joys for me.