Chapter 10 Storm Rules
The storm came in during Ruhe, which felt like bad manners.
One minute the afternoon quiet hour had the mountain hushed and still, robes and silence and the spa pretending the world didn’t exist. The next, the sky over the far ridge had gone the color of a bruise, and the wind hit the building like a shoulder, and the lights flickered, browned, came back dimmer.
By four the cable car had stopped running.
By five the road below was closed, the kiosk woman no doubt counting change at no one.
By six we were cut off, a lit ship in a white sea, and the spa became, in the space of an afternoon, a snow globe.
Marlene ran it like a captain.
She didn’t panic, which I’d expected, but she also didn’t hide it behind the desk.
She moved through the building giving orders that were really reassurances, and at one point, in the front hall, with at least four people listening, she put a hand on my arm and said, “Herr Keller will keep us warm. He’s the only reason we have heat at all, and he’ll be the reason we keep it.
” It was a simple operational fact. It landed differently than that, on Bianca’s face, and Poppy’s, and even, I caught, on Greta’s, and Marlene knew it landed differently, because Marlene knew everything that happened in her house, and she said it anyway and turned away before anyone could read her.
The generator failed at eight.
The mains had finally given out, the storm taking the line down the valley, and the house dropped to emergency lighting and then the generator, which ran for nine minutes and died, and the temperature in a building full of wealthy women in robes began, immediately, to drop.
The fuel line had frozen and cracked at the joint.
I found it in the storm-lashed boiler house with a torch in my teeth, wind screaming through the gaps, Poppy beside me in a borrowed parka relaying tools and keeping up a steady patter to settle her own nerves, and Bianca holding the lamp steady with both hands, her face stripped of all its usual mischief, the cold turning her breath to fog.
“Talk me through it,” Poppy said, handing me the wrench I’d asked for before I asked. “If we freeze to death I want to understand why.”
“Joint cracked. Diesel’s gelling in the cold. I need to splice past the break and lag the new section so it doesn’t do it again in an hour.” I worked with numb fingers, fast, because cold makes you stupid and stupid makes you slow. “Hold the light lower. There. Don’t move.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Bianca said, to herself more than to me, both hands cupped around the lamp, holding it steadier than I’d ever seen her hold anything. “Tell me it’s going to be fine.”
“It’s a cracked line, not a cracked block,” I said. “A cracked line is a Tuesday. Hand me the PTFE tape, the white roll, by your knee. Poppy, I need the heat gun off the wall, careful, the cord’s frayed, hold it by the body.”
Poppy passed it across without a word, her usual fire-alarm clatter gone quiet in the cold and the dark and the screaming wind, and I warmed the gelled fuel back to liquid an inch at a time, and cut out the cracked union, and spliced in a new section from the spares I’d insisted Marlene let me order my second week, the order she’d approved with one dryly arched eyebrow and a remark about a man who stockpiles fuel unions, and which was, right now, the only reason a building full of people wasn’t about to start freezing in the dark.
It took twenty minutes that felt like two hours.
I spliced the line, bled the air, lagged the new section with foam and tape and a length of old pipe insulation so it wouldn’t gel again before dawn, and primed the pump by hand, the lever stiff with cold, forty strokes, fifty, until the fuel caught and pulled through.
The generator coughed, caught, coughed again, and held, dropping into a steady roar, and the lights overhead flickered and came up steady gold, and somewhere above us a building full of people exhaled all at once, a sound you could almost hear through the floor.
“You,” Poppy said, through chattering teeth, with enormous feeling, “are the best money this place ever spent and I am including the donor budget in that.”
Ute served schnitzel by candlelight in the great hall like a war hero rationing the troops, and the storm raged on the glass, and something happened that I hadn’t seen happen yet: everyone came down to one room and the hierarchy melted.
The guests came down too. Marlene allowed it, the road being closed and the usual rules being a luxury of normal weather.
Greta ran absurd parlor games like she’d organized a hundred midsummers and meant to run this one too: a guessing game with napkins over faces, a thing involving everyone’s worst holiday, a charade of “the cable car” that Poppy performed with such physical commitment she nearly went into the fireplace.
She got even the stiffest guest laughing, a tight grey-haired widow from the garden wing who’d not made a sound all week and who turned out, three glasses in, to do a devastating impression of her own ex-husband.
Simone turned out to be terrifying at cards.
She read the table like a balance sheet, took everyone’s matchsticks with grim executive efficiency and a small, real smile when she won, and when Poppy accused her of counting, Simone said, “Of course I’m counting, it’s a game with countable elements, what are the rest of you doing,” with such genuine bafflement that the table fell apart.
Ute moved through it all refilling plates without being asked, planting a fresh schnitzel in front of me twice, and once, passing, set a single extra dumpling on Greta’s plate and said only, “For the small one,” and moved on before Greta could thank her.
And Marlene, one glass of wine in, leaned back and delivered a single bone-dry observation about a guest’s bluffing that was so unexpectedly funny the room treated it like a comet, a thing that might not come again in a lifetime, and she looked faintly alarmed at the size of the laugh and then, for a flicker, pleased, and reached for her wine to have something to do with her hands.
I sat at the edge of it with a plate of Ute’s schnitzel and watched the institution turn, for one storm-bound evening, into something with the exact shape of a family, and I thought: this was the thing no glossy photograph of the place would ever catch.
The hall emptied toward midnight. The guests drifted up to bed.
And Greta, passing me on her way out, paused, and put a hand on Bianca’s arm, and said, in her low warm voice, “The Bath House is open. Alumna’s privilege, when the road’s closed the house rules go to sleep.
I’m too full of baby to do anything but float and watch, but I’d like the company.
” She smiled, serene, shameless, perfectly clear.
“And I think you two have somewhere you’ve been wanting to put that storm energy. ”
“Greta,” Bianca said, grinning, “are you asking to watch?”
“I’m asking to float,” Greta said. “Watching is just where I’ll be facing.” She rested both hands on her belly, eyes dancing. “Pretend I’m not there. You’ll fail. It’s better when you fail.”
Two grinning sentences and it was settled, which was how most things got settled up here.
The mineral pool in the Bath House was candle-lit and warm, steam rolling off the water, the storm hammering the high glass and making the warmth inside feel stolen and precious.
Greta settled herself on the wide warm ledge at the shallow end, a towel and zero shame, her pregnant silhouette gold in the candlelight, an audience of one who counted as three.
Bianca peeled out of her wet swimwear with theatrical patience, taking her time for the ledge, the top first and then, with a wink at Greta, turning around to take the bottoms off facing away so the ledge got the full view, narrating because of course she narrated, the most shameless woman at Silberquell performing for the warmest.
“This,” she announced to Greta, “is how you take your time. The old way was to rush. We don’t rush anymore.” She backed into the water and turned, sank to her chest, and waded to me with that wicked languid sway.
I lifted her, hands under the heavy curve of her ass, and she wrapped her legs around me for a moment, kissing me slow and wet, then reached down between us and wrapped her fist around my cock and guided the head of me to where she was slick and open and lowered herself onto me on the broad submerged bench step.
Slow. Water-slick. We both groaned as she took all of it, the warmth of the water and the scalding tight grip of her cunt swallowing me at once, and she settled there a beat, seated full, my cock lodged deep inside her, every arch of her back aimed deliberately at the ledge.
“She’s watching,” Bianca breathed, beginning to ride me slow, grinning. “Tell me what she’s doing, meu bem, I can’t see.”
“She’s smiling,” I said.
“She’s commentating,” Greta corrected, from the ledge, and she was, low and warm and devastating in that sweet unhurried lullaby of a voice, half filth and half a midwife’s clinical precision, narrating the scene back to us like a woman reading a recipe she loved.
“Look how she rolls her hips, not up and down, around, that’s the trick, that’s the thing the books don’t teach.
She’s not chasing it. She’s letting it come to her.
Oh, that’s lovely. Slower, Bianca, you have nowhere to be, the road’s closed. ”
“You hear the boss,” Bianca laughed, and slowed, grinding down on me in slow circles, the water sloshing warm against the marble. I held her thick hips and helped her move, watching the water bead and run off her shoulders, and Greta’s voice wove through the steam like a third pair of hands.
“Tell him what you want,” Greta murmured. “He likes to be told. I can see it on his face.”