The Runaway Wife (13 page)

B
ELLS. RINGING IN HIS EARS. HIS THROAT WAS
parched. Knives twisted in his stomach. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. Or the last time he'd seen the sun. Where was he? What day was it? Why was he still trying to pry the whiteness from the sky? To wrench himself free from it. The smell of snow.

Jim checked beside himself for the owlet. He was in a bed. Dry, warm sheets. His body ached, his shoulders, his legs, his feet. He could feel his feet! Beneath the hunger pains, a vague, unpleasant sensation spread inside him, the empty echoes of a thousand dank, cold caves. Loneliness.

Sunlight penetrated the room through the white lace curtain. Why was the curtain drawn? He would let the sun in. Sitting up, he reached to pull back the curtain.

He lifted himself out of bed and limped into the bathroom down the hall. The wonder of a bathroom! He looked at himself in the mirror. He'd grown a beard. He spotted a furrow between his brows that he'd never seen before. The skin on his cheeks was red and dry and chapped.

It consoled Jim that Calliope had been wrong. The village that Calliope thought was an afternoon jaunt down the valley had taken him a full day and half a moon-filled night to reach. Marked by dizzying cliff walks—vertical descents that he'd had to maneuver on his backside and using two dangling metal ladders, the last of which he'd dismounted in the dark—it hadn't been an easy hike.

He shut his eyes and saw Calliope walking ahead of him. He watched her elegant ankles and her long, slim calves, and he heard her laughter in the wind, like stones skimming the surface of a placid lake.

Betrayal.
No matter how hard Jim tried to convince himself that he could never have made the descent with Calliope in his arms, he knew deep inside that they could have prevailed. She would have encouraged him, one step after another. After all, she was Calliope, the muse.

But she would have been required to register at the hospital, or he would have had to do so for her. She would have had to reveal her closest kin. The news would have traveled quickly. The helicopters would have been assigned a new destination; the press would have been smacking their lips for fresh gossip.

It would have been better never to have found her, to
have returned empty-handed to Gstaad. “Sorry,” he would have said to the sisters. “As you failed to find her, so did I.” In any case, she would have been forced from the chalet by the pilots. Or would she have eluded them and hiked undeterred to Anzère? With pneumonia? More likely, she would have entranced another, smarter, hiker.

Jim needed to know how she was. Where was his knapsack in this tidy room of this tidy inn that a Good Samaritan had led him to in the middle of the night? He felt for his wallet in his back pocket and was relieved to find it. He removed two soaked five-hundred-euro notes, his credit card, his insurance card, and his driver's license. He also found a crumpled, wet business card embossed in peach-colored ink with
Éditions Gallimard
and below it, the name, Helene Castellane, hdcgallimard.fr. On the back of the card, he noticed some words written in blue ink that had blurred together and were indecipherable. But hadn't it been Thalia, not Helene, who'd given him her card? Heaviness filled the empty spaces inside himself as he turned the card over in his hand. His mind was playing tricks on him. Or perhaps the sisters had been colluding, having fun with him, the naive American. Bait and switch. Sleight of mind and hand. Thalia flirts with you but gives you her sister's card.

His knapsack. Where was it? It contained his passport, his phone, his life! He stumbled around the room searching for it futilely, then lay back in bed. He had a dim memory of slipping down the slick mountain face in the darkness. Now he remembered. His knapsack had snagged on something, a
jagged mountain edge. Knowing that his passport was in it, he had tried with all his might to free it. He'd finally decided that he had no choice but to slip out of it. At the time, fearing that he would slide down the mountain to his death, it had seemed a small thing. He hadn't lost his life, but he
had
lost his identity, and his connection to the world. He'd also lost track of time. His new job. Again, he asked, what day was it?

He swept his wet Windbreaker from the nearby chair to check the pockets. Instead of his passport, he found the book Thalia had given him. He remembered placing it in his jacket pocket after seeing Calliope off, after . . . his
betrayal
. He'd planned to try to decipher the French words and take some solace from them as he walked (
ha!
) down the mountain.

The small book was soggy and torn in places, and many pages were stuck together. He opened to the page with the sprig of heather—miraculously still there—and the spine nearly broke.

He spoke the line, “Remember, I wait for you forever.”

Desperately, he felt for the maroon velvet ribbon in his jacket pocket, but recalled that he had lost it along the way. He smiled to himself when he found instead one of Hamlet's feathers. Jim was grateful to the owlet for sparing Calliope the misery of his dying in her arms.

HE STOOPED TO DESCEND THE LOW-CEILINGED
stairs into the small, empty, wood-lined reception area. He
placed the heavy room key with its leather tassel onto the desk and stepped into the cool mountain air. A bearded man in a wool cap talking on a cell phone strutted past him down the cobblestone street. Schoolchildren in uniforms ran ahead of him. The town was too sweet for his mood. It was an everything-in-its-place kind of Swiss town; if you shook it, confetti snow would flutter around it like in a snow globe. Jim felt too tall; he did not fit into its miniature dimensions.

He stopped a pedestrian, an elderly woman using a cane.

“Would you please tell me what day it is and where I am?” he asked in English.

A little translation, a few gestures, a curious glance, and an unspoken suspicion about his sanity later, and the answer was given: Sunday, September 7th. He was in the town of Lauenen, in the Swiss Alps. If he hightailed it to Geneva by—no—there was no way that he would make the international flight to JFK that afternoon. He had no passport!

He would need to get an emergency passport in Geneva. He would research the details on the Internet that day. Also, he had unfinished business: he couldn't leave Europe without knowing that Calliope had found safety and medicine.

He gazed up at the green hillside sprinkled with timber houses and, above that, at the mountains that dominated the vista from the main street. He counted eleven peaks. It was like a view into the mouth of the planet: eyeteeth at the front, molars and wisdom teeth at the back. How many hundreds or thousands of mountains rose behind these, beyond his vision?

Ambrose had described “hiker's high,” the euphoria that climbers experience when they feel they are in the reach of the clouds. He'd also warned Jim that descending into a valley could bring on bouts of depression, even in the most experienced hikers. In Lauenen, closed at one end by a mountain and opening at the other end onto a large lake now filling with fog, a feeling of oppression lodged itself in the back of his throat. The perfect flowers planted in large pots, the way the people looked so confined in their clothes, the fences around the small houses and small, manicured grass plots: everything seemed contained and manmade and dull, compared to the wide-open skies and sharp peaks of the Wildhorn. No one seemed to notice that life was moving like the mountain-fed river beside the paved sidewalk—swiftly and beyond reach.

In a small Internet café, he used his credit card to pay for a seat at a desktop computer. He entered the names “Calliope and Yves Castellane” in the search engine and scrolled through a dozen photographs of the couple. He stopped at an image of Calliope on a stretcher. Her lovely face was wan; her eyes were closed. She was Juliet, carried aloft from the Capulet tombs. In the photograph, a helicopter loomed in the background.

“
GRETA GARBO FRANÇAISE
” was the headline. Another: “
I WANT TO BE ALONE
.” Another: “
WIFE OF PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RESCUED FROM THE ALPS IN CRITICAL CONDITION
.” He studied the photograph of her husband, a slightly overweight but handsome man. He was gray at the temples, with brown
eyes, a strong, slender nose that oddly resembled hers, a chin that jutted out like a rock outcropping, and a broad forehead that looked higher due to his receding hairline.

No mention in any of the articles of an American named James George Olsen. According to the press, Madame Castellane had experienced an unusual “
contretemps
,” a turn in the weather during her vacation in the Bernese Alps. There had also been a “
contretemps dans leur mariage
,” foul weather in her marriage. Another photograph showed Yves Castellane, “the politician who had promised ‘exemplary behavior' in his quest for the presidency, on a scooter departing from the local hospital in the 17th arrondissement in Paris, where he was visiting his baby daughter by his mistress, a Russian model.” The writer described how the presidential candidate's shiny Ferragamo shoes in the shabby neighborhood had given away his charade.

In the leftist rag
Libération
, a journalist suggested that Madame Castellane's discovery of her husband's clandestine affair and child had sent her into the Alps. But this was France, where the populace was more tolerant of their politicians' peccadilloes. Still, the online news intimated that French women voters' opinions were changing about what was acceptable and that Castellane's support among the female electorate could erode—that is unless his wife of twenty-seven years excused his behavior as out of character and did the proverbial “stand by his side.”

Castellane's party, the Union for a Popular Movement, carried 51 percent in the polls. The candidate had his anchor
on the right; immigration was his major issue: “Without border controls, there is no nation.” His triumvirate platform: reduce taxes on businesses and the wealthy, reduce the number of public-sector employees, and reduce illegal immigration by 50 percent.

Jim checked his e-mail, hoping for news from one of the sisters. He and Thalia had exchanged cards. He searched “thalia” and received six results. The first was dated the day after his and Ambrose's departure.

“Jim, I know you won't receive this until you return to Gstaad, but I wanted you to know that it was a delight, the night that we met.”

The second: “My sisters and I are wondering whether you are having success bringing our mother down from the mountain. By the way, I got great reviews in
Dahlia
, the play in which I'm the lead. Reviewers said I was a ‘
provacatrice
'!”

The third: “Where are you, Jim Olsen. We're beginning to worry. Have you come down the mountain yet with our maman? I am hoping that you are well. Call my cell as soon as you're back. By the way, I was awarded the part of Ophelia in the new
Hamlet
playing at the Athénée Théâtre starting in December.”

The fourth e-mail: “We have heard that it has been snowing in the Alps, and we worry about our mother's and your safety. Where are you? I feel like I'm typing into a vortex. We hear nothing from you! Please come down!”

The fifth: “Father said that the helicopter pilots saw you
and Mother, but that you fled from them. Is this so? Please come back with our mother.”

The last, from yesterday:

“You must be in Gstaad by now. Our mother is in critical condition, still in intensive care at the hospital. She was barely conscious when they landed. WHAT delayed your return? She refuses to speak. Even to me! What happened in the mountains? What happened? We are confused and dismayed, and we need answers from you.”

There was a slew of messages from Ambrose, as well.

“Jim, have you fallen off a cliff? Do you know that we've had search parties out for the two of you? Your mother has been calling me, sometimes twice a day. You owe me for that, pal. Sall calls every other day. If you are still in Europe, come and stay with me in Paris, but let me know as soon as possible.”

JIM MADE THE EXECUTIVE DECISION TO START WORK
on Monday the 15th, a week after his official start date. He would call Jay Wolfe and apologize for the delay, which had been caused by Alpine weather conditions. On his way back to New York City, he would pass through Paris. His itinerary for the following morning: Lauenen to Geneva, where he would try to attain an emergency passport. Hopefully, that would take no more than an afternoon. He would catch a flight from Geneva to Paris and arrive Monday evening.

He e-mailed Thalia: “I plan to be in Paris tomorrow
evening. Would you be free to meet me for a drink? I will confirm arrival time.”

In the quaint Swiss town, he ate a hearty breakfast. He bought new clothes and a cell phone, accoutrements necessary to conform and integrate.

From the terrace of an empty café, he called his parents. It would be cocktail time in Chicago. When his mother answered the phone, despite the static on the line he heard her take a deep breath. And then she dug in. What a relief it was to have the Atlantic Ocean between them.

“Yes, I will be back in the US soon,” he said. “Yes, I know. Ambrose. Did he? Yes. I don't know when. Climbing in the Alps. Ambrose was supposed to tell you all that. Longer than expected, yes. I did not expect snow. Not sure what the temperature is here. No. I would say forty degrees, maybe warmer. Yes, early snows. I'll let you know when . . . No, no. Yes, they know. I think I still have the job. I know you worry.” The energy was draining from him. “Where's Dad?”

Most probably in the basement. His mother carried the portable phone everywhere she went in the house.

“I'd like to talk to him,” Jim said loudly. “You've never had a problem interrupting him before. Please put him on the line. I'm calling from Switzerland.”