Chapter 25 The Guest Book
The season ended as the snow did, in pieces, melting off the high faces a little more each day until the mountain underneath came through.
The cohort wing got deep-cleaned and closed, the suites stripped and shrouded, the panorama windows where Simone had watched a dawn break her metronome shuttered for the off-season.
Greta’s postcard arrived from Malm?, an ultrasound photo on the back of it and a smiley she’d drawn and would deny drawing, and Ute installed it on the kitchen wall at exact eye level and stood under it with her arms folded, daring anyone to comment, and nobody did, because nobody was brave enough and everybody was glad.
Poppy went down to the village for stamps, and brought back the only piece of news the mountain ever gets, which is what the village thinks of it.
“The kiosk woman,” Poppy reported, hanging up her coat, “counted my change without looking up, like always, and she said, all innocent, ‘Good season up there, was it?’ And I said it was a fine season. And she counted out the last of the coins and she said, still not looking up, ‘They say the new Kurschatten works wonders.’” Poppy mimicked the flat village delivery to perfection.
“The new Kurschatten. They know, Adam. The whole village knows there’s a new one.
They’ve always known. They just never, ever say.
” She hung up her scarf. “It’s the most discreet village in Europe and it knows everything that happens on this mountain before we do. ”
The waiting list, when Poppy pulled it up to plan next season, was eleven months deep.
She read me the early names cheerfully enough, the widows and the heiresses, the usual climb of the desperate and the wealthy.
And then she got to three names near the top of the new intake, and she stopped, and she put the tablet face-down on the desk, and she said, “I’m going to need to sit down to read these three to you, and I’m going to need you to not make a face,” and she sat down, and she read me three names, and I made a face, and she said, “I told you not to make a face,” and neither of us said anything else about it, because next season was next season and this one wasn’t quite finished.
Marlene and I walked the empty guest corridor that evening, in step, as we did now, colleagues and conspirators and the other thing we didn’t have a word for yet, planning the next season the way I imagine married couples plan a renovation, which is to say with a great deal of disagreement conducted entirely in fondness.
“We can’t take all three of those bookings in one cohort,” I said.
“We can and we will, the deposits alone…”
“Marlene, three women who can’t be in the same building as each other without it making the papers…”
“Which is precisely why they’ll pay what they’ll pay to be in a building where they can’t be photographed at all.” She gave me a sidelong, dry-eyed look. “You worry about the boilers, Herr Keller. I’ll worry about the guests.”
“Someone has to worry about the man doing the worrying.”
“I do,” she said, lightly, not breaking stride, and that was as much as either of us said about it in the corridor, which was a great deal.
The Eva problem was managed, not solved, which Marlene was honest about at the kitchen table, the house’s true parliament, six people and coffee.
“I’ve deferred her program request to next season’s intake assessments,” she said.
“Politely. Indefinitely. It buys us time and gives her nothing to write, because a deferral isn’t a denial and a denial isn’t a story.
” She set down her cup. “But understand what we’re dealing with.
She has no proof. She has a fake cycle chart, a camera roll full of herbal wraps, and a deferred booking, and she has, somewhere under all of it, the right instinct and the patience to wait for it.
” She looked around the table. “The most dangerous thing this house can do now is be interesting. So we are going to be extremely boring, for as long as it takes, and we are going to watch her, and we are going to wait for her to make the mistake she hasn’t made yet. ”
“She’s made one,” Poppy said, and produced the binder.
It was new. It was thick. It had tabs, color-coded, neat, a counter-surveillance operation in a three-ring folder, and the tabs were Yuki’s work, unmistakably, the opposites cartel turning a snoop into a research project.
“The word she swallowed on the steps,” Poppy said, flipping to tab one.
“‘Write.’ Guests don’t say write. And tab seven.
” She didn’t open tab seven. She just tapped it, and looked at me, and the switchblade was nowhere in her face for once, just something steadier and far more dangerous folded away underneath it.
“Tab seven’s not ready yet. I’m still building it. But it’s going to be ready.”
Then Marlene closed the wellness wing for the night, for what she announced over the house system, with a completely straight face, as an annual maintenance review, the least subtle wink in the history of European spa management, and the staff appreciation night began.
It was simple, in the end. The pool and the sauna and Ute’s feast laid out on the deck, the lamps turned low, the house empty and ours, the betting-pool fund formally donated to “staff wellness,” which prompted Poppy to point out, reasonably, that “we ARE staff wellness,” which prompted Ute to bring out more wine.
There were gifts, and there were roasts, because that’s what a family does.
Bianca had framed my old “training record,” the one she’d graded passed with distinction, and presented it to me like a diploma, and made a speech about my hands that lit Yuki’s ears red and made Ute leave the room.
And when it came round to me, I gave Yuki the thing I’d been carrying in my pocket for a month, the single missing piece from her alpine meadow puzzle, the one I’d quietly pocketed weeks ago so the puzzle could never be finished without me, and I watched the careful architecture of Yuki Tanaka’s face come apart over one cardboard puzzle piece in her palm, because for Yuki the small exact gesture was the entire vocabulary of love and I’d just spoken a whole sentence of it.
Then somebody splashed somebody, and Poppy issued a dare, because of course she did, and the robes came off by referendum, and the negotiation that followed was the foreplay, every woman in the room claiming her lane at once in the lamp-lit steam.
“I claim first,” Bianca announced, already in the water. “Seniority. I decoded him before any of you knew his name.”
“There’s a roster,” Poppy countered, “and rosters are binding, I’ve checked, I make the rules about binding…”
And Yuki, with no expression at all, produced from somewhere a folded rotation chart, an actual document, drawn up in her precise hand, with all four of their names on it and time allocations and a fairness algorithm, and the entire house collapsed, because of course Yuki had made a chart, Yuki would have made a chart for the apocalypse.
It went round-robin, in the warm water and the low gold light, and the thing I’ll say about it, the thing that mattered, is that nobody disappeared into anybody.
Each of them stayed exactly herself, all the way through, four distinct women in one warm room and not a drop of jealousy anywhere in it, because the house had built itself, all season, around the simple fact that everyone was on the schedule and the schedule had room.
Bianca opened, because tradition and because she’d never once waited her turn in her life.
She climbed astride me on the broad pool steps in the warm shallow water, reached down to guide the head of my cock to her and lowered herself onto it with a long satisfied groan that echoed off the tiles, taking all of me until she was seated full, loud and ceremonial and joyful, riding me slow at first and then not slow at all, working her cunt up and down my length, the water pouring off the curve of her, the heavy sway of her tits at my face, the chamber acoustics doing their work as they’d done all season.
She narrated it all to her audience, because Bianca narrated everything, told them exactly how full he made her feel and exactly how good he was and exactly what they had to look forward to, and she finished with her head thrown back and her cunt clenching tight around me and her voice ringing off the lamplit stone.
Then she lifted off me, breathless and beaming, kissed me hard, and handed me off like a hostess passing a dish around her own table, with the line I would hear in my head for years after: “Pace yourselves, meninas. He’s load-bearing. ”