Sleeping Beauty (21 page)

“Not this time, Ellie. I'm too busy.”

“I haven't told you which weekend.”

“I'm busy on all of them.”

“Listen, you called me, remember? I detect a need for a friendly ear. I could use one, too, in fact; we haven't sat up all night talking for years. Do I have to hire you to get you here for a visit?”

“What does that mean? You and Sam again?”

“Still. Yet. Always. It doesn't ever go away; we sort of simmer all the time and once in a while we boil over.”

“But you haven't mentioned divorce for a long time.”

“I think about it. But it's such a hassle—well, who knows that better than you? All our houses and cars, and two boats, and the antiques and the art . . . my God, we're in such a tangle of
things.
And I don't want to force the kids to go trotting back and forth all the time, but he'd have to see them, he's really good with them when he's around, which isn't often, but he talks about quality time and how do I know that's not enough? The kids like him a lot.”

“So do you, I think.”

“Most of the time. Sometimes I even love him. Other times I hate him. Maybe it goes with the territory. How can anyone like another person all the time? It doesn't make sense. So I guess we'll probably stay married. He's happy and I don't see what I'd gain by it—I mean, I'd most likely find somebody just like him and move to an apartment a few blocks away that looks exactly like the one I'm in now, and my kids would be in the same private school, and I'd be having lunch with the same ladies for the same good causes, and the only thing that would change would be the guy in my bed and they're all interchangeable, you know, after the first two or three months—so no, we probably won't get a divorce.”

“I'm sorry,” Anne said after a moment. “The last time we talked you sounded happier.”

“I probably was. A lot of times I am. But last night I started thinking about the Haight—can you believe it, after
all these years—and I was wishing I could just have one day, maybe even an
hour,
of the
hope
we had then. Remember? We really thought the world could be whatever we wanted it to be—beautiful and loving, with everybody sharing and being free and
caring
about each other. So I've been feeling melancholy and then you called and I dumped on you. Sorry about that. Anyway, I
am
happy. I fit in here a lot better than in the Haight; this is what I was brought up for. There's a lot that's good in my life and I know it; I just . . . oh, damn it, Anne, there's just so much that I
miss.
It doesn't matter how long ago it was, I still miss it.” There was a silence. “Don't you? Even a little bit? I know, I know; you told me you don't think about the past. But doesn't it sneak up on you once in a while?”

“Yes. And I do miss parts of it. I miss the way you and I ran to the park and nobody could catch us. And I miss the way a bunch of us would sit on the steps singing and feeling together, like a family.”

“I went back there about a month ago, right after I bought you your mirror. Don Santelli is still there; isn't that incredible? Poor guy, he's kind of lost; sort of an aging hippie. He told me he hates himself because he's just as bad as his parents, just as locked into a routine. It doesn't matter what the routine is—theirs was respectability and his is drugs and avoiding work—he always wanted to be free and spontaneous and he doesn't feel that way anymore. And he doesn't have any hope, either. He knows the future won't be any better. It was the most depressing thing I've done for a long time. So much for trying to go back. You were right, Anne; we had to get out. I didn't want to admit it, but it's true. But I still think about it. Tell me about you.”

“I have a client coming—”

“Tell me about him.”

“He's a screenwriter who has a wife and three children and a racing sailboat and he's just turned fifty and is terrified he's getting old. So he found a twenty-two-year-old model who makes him feel he can run the world—she asks his advice on everything, including her clothes and her
hairdresser and what she should have to drink—and they've been in Aspen and Tamarack and Europe and now he wants to marry her.”

“Why?”

“I asked him that. He says he needs stability and courage. I said he'd need those to get through the divorce; his wife wants to strip him of everything.”

“She should; he's abandoned her—”

“Well, she's got a guy, it seems; a twenty-eight-year-old chef—one of the hottest ones in town. She doesn't want to get old, either. Staying young is everybody's obsession out here, and marriage doesn't have much to do with that.”

“You hate it, don't you?” Eleanor asked.

“Marriage? No, I think it's fine for anybody who wants it and is willing to work at it. Ellie, I have to go; the screenwriter will be here any minute. When are you coming to LA again?”

They talked for another minute, then Anne put down the telephone, feeling better. They were as different as friends could be, but they had stayed in touch for eighteen years and still turned to each other when they needed what Eleanor called a friendly ear. Anne knew that Eleanor had many friends; she herself had no one else. Never again, after leaving Haight Ashbury, had she been able to let down her defenses and warm to another person. When she talked to Eleanor, she felt she loved her, and perhaps could love other people, too, someday. She wanted to believe that. And talking to Eleanor always helped. Once again she was in control of her feelings.

But who did the most talking? Anne thought with amusement. Who really needed comforting? She smiled. It usually happened that way; Anne listened; the friend or client talked. No one except Eleanor knew anything about her—and Eleanor didn't know much—because she never talked about herself. Once she had wanted to, but by now reticence had become so deeply ingrained in her, and was so much a part of her public image, that she never thought of confiding in anyone, and no one asked her to. For this morning, it was
enough that Eleanor had been there when she called, that there had been someone at the other end of the wire. That was all she needed.

“Anne,” said her secretary from the doorway, “they're waiting for you in the conference room.”

“I'm ready,” Anne said, and gathered up the files on her desk. The day had begun.

*   *   *

Ethan walked the streets of Tamarack every morning before breakfast, feeling the sun settle in his bones and ease the stiffness in his joints. He was almost alone at that hour; the shops had not opened, the joggers were at the other end of town, on the trail along the river, and almost everyone else, residents and tourists alike, still slept. Only the street cleaners were out, washing the dust from the cobblestone central mall and the commercial and residential streets surrounding it, so that, briefly, the town gleamed wet and shiny beneath the cloudless sky.

It was Ethan's favorite time. He walked down the middle of the streets, ignoring the modern buildings and huge new houses being built on all sides, imagining himself in the Tamarack he had first seen more than forty years before, when goats ambled along its dirt roads and Main Street was lined with tiny turn-of-the-century miner's cottages and a few frame storefronts. That was right after the Second World War. He'd been on a driving trip through Colorado and on a whim, drove over a spectacular pass to see what was on the other side.

He found a crumbling town in a narrow valley: a silent shadow of the past. Sixty years earlier, the valley had rung with the voices and laughter of eight thousand people served by saloons and churches, brothels and smithies, a school, a row of mercantile stores, a grand opera house, and a hotel with a lobby decorated in fringed velvet and brocades. But the real business of the town was silver. Miners dug tunnels beneath the mountains in vast honeycombed networks that reached down as many as twenty levels, into the core of the earth, and wound back and forth two or three horizontal
miles. Smelters worked day and night, a train brought in supplies and took out the ore, and children went to work in the mines in their early teens.

Then, in the last decade of the century, Congress passed a law making gold America's official coin.

In that moment, silver became almost worthless. The owners of the mines shut them down; the miners moved out. The brothels and shops and the school closed. The churches were locked. Tamarack slept.

By the time Ethan drove over Wolf Creek Pass and into the town, not quite a hundred people were there, living in the sagging miner's cottages on Main Street. One gas station was open, a general store with a post office in the back, and the Lodestar, a restaurant with a counter and five tables and a scarred linoleum floor. A few rooms in the old hotel—those with windows and floors intact—were open. The opera house had burned and then been looted over the years by people passing through the valley until only the shell remained, with glints of gold leaf shining amid the blackened ruins like the nuggets that had lured the first miners over Wolf Creek Pass. Under the mountains, the mining tunnels were flooded or had collapsed into rubble. Dust swirled in the streets until winter came and the snow piled ten feet deep.

But what Ethan saw were the surroundings: lush green forests and alpine meadows, carpets of vivid flowers, the play of shadows at sunset that turned the ranges of hills gray and blue, violet and deep purple beneath a flaming sky, and the towering peaks of the San Juans, every ridge and crevice sharply outlined against the saturated-blue sky or shrouded in mist on a rainy day, their slopes brooding and mysterious. He saw the way the town nestled in the valley between the two long ridges of Tamarack Mountain and Star Mountain, the way rivers tumbled through long clefts of other valleys and met in the town. He breathed the dry, fragrant air and felt the headiness of the altitude; he listened to the silence and the birds, and he knew he had never seen a place as beautiful or as peaceful in his life.

That day, his first in Tamarack, he bought a house, one of a few three-story, ornamented Victorian mansions left behind by the mine owners and bankers when they returned to New York and Chicago. And then, as he went back again and again, and became convinced that this was the place where he wanted to live forever, he bought the hotel, the opera house, dozens of miner's cottages, empty lots in town, and then land around the town and entire ranches in the valley, and finally the abandoned mining claims on the north-facing slopes of Tamarack Mountain, because some friends had returned from skiing in Europe and told him they thought it was a sport that might catch on in America.

He created The Tamarack Company, a subsidiary of Chatham Development Corporation, with himself as president, and then he began to bring Tamarack back to life. He built an airport and a small ski area; he remodeled his house; he restored the hotel, built a row of stores on Main Street, converted the largest brothel into a bakery and restaurant, and built a movie theater.

And then, with the help of friends in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, he threw a huge, summer-long party, with a touring symphony orchestra that played in a meadow, a folk-music festival, and a series of lectures on books, movies, and politics by the greatest names in the world who were willing to come to Tamarack for a day, a week, a month. It was the party of the century, and no one wanted to miss it. Tamarack was launched.

From that summer, though Ethan tried to hold it back, it never slowed down.

In less than ten years the town had a new city council; a ski area; music, film, and jazz festivals held in an arts center on the edge of town; seminars open to the public with world leaders debating the great issues of the day; an art colony for painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, and writers; hiking, horseback, and bicycle trails; and five hundred full-time residents.

And then, “That's enough,” Ethan said. It was the paradise he had dreamed of: a retreat for all those who, like
himself, had to live most of the time in the bustle and dense air of large cities. He sat on the mall, four cobblestone streets in the center of town, and gazed with pleasure at the wild mountainsides visible from everywhere in town; he bicycled the length of the valley, past long rail fences bordering fields of hay and grazing horses, red barns, and snug farmhouses surrounded by vegetable and flower gardens; he became part of the easy flow of life in the town, its slow days and casual attire, and the spontaneous get-togethers at bars and impromptu barbecues where everyone mingled—plumbers, carpenters, waiters, bankers, musicians, politicians, heirs to great fortunes, and corporate executives—all together, indistinguishable in jeans and flannel shirts.

“It's enough,” Ethan said. “Not one more house, not another store, not another concert or film or ski run. It's perfect as it is.”

He knew that was impossible; nothing could stand still and live. But to keep it as close to perfection as he could, he made sure the mayor was always his handpicked choice, and he used his influence with the city council and county commissioners to control development in the town. Ethan had definite ideas about architecture, the height and depth of buildings, roofing materials, landscaping, even the color of the paint, and every structure had to be approved before it could be built. That way, he said, everything in the town would be harmonious. And it would stay small.

But Tamarack grew. It grew slowly until Ethan was almost seventy, when he finally handed the presidency of Chatham Development Corporation to Charles, and moved to his mountain paradise. But he was not retired—he could not imagine being retired—and because he was a developer who had to develop, he looked at Tamarack and found it ready to grow.

“Controlled growth,” he told the city council. “This is what we're going to do. Expand the airport; we'll get bigger jets in here. Triple the ski runs and chair lifts on Tamarack Mountain; I've got an expert from Switzerland designing
them. More trails for cross-country skiing and bicycling; they're being laid out by a fellow from New York. Permanent buildings for music, film, dance, and theater; an outdoor band-shell for popular concerts and the jazz festival; a small campus for the world-issues seminars. We'll need more lodges, more shops, and a parking garage. Those are all in the works. You just watch: Tamarack is going to become finer in every way. But underneath we won't change; we'll stay small and comfortable, not ostentatious, still a laid-back place where we all like each other and work and party together. We'll grow, but we'll grow the right way.”