“You had long hair,” he said.
It took a moment for Jeff to process what he’d heard. To understand everything contained in those four words. Above all—he was caught. He didn’t know how to respond. Francis smiled fully now, watching Jeff. How long had he known? Since the night with the cigars? Had Francis brought him here just for this? To pull the plug on the life he had managed to build for himself?
Jeff locked his vision on his knees, on his and Francis’s knees. He could feel the older man’s eyes on him, observing coolly what he had set off in Jeff. He had lit the fuse and blown out the match.
Another rumble, and the gondola doors popped open with a blast of cold air.
Francis stepped out, skis in hand. Jeff considered riding the gondola to the bottom, getting to Chloe before Francis could, telling her he loved her, grabbing his passport, and disappearing into Europe. And then? He was at a loss.
“You coming or what?”
Jeff rose, his legs jelly, and stepped out. The gondola’s machinery whirred in his ears, far away. He willed himself to put one foot in front of the other.
Outside, Francis dropped his skis to the snow and stepped into his bindings with two solid clunks. Jeff did the same, shackling himself to the two boards.
“You’re not going to believe this run,” Francis said cheerily.
Jeff searched his face for any residue of what he had said on the gondola, but his look was neutral, betraying nothing. He lowered his mirrored ski goggles into place, leaving Jeff with only his own diminished reflection.
Francis set off, his skis neat and parallel and seemingly obeying his every whim. Jeff trailed behind, alternating between a snowplow and moments when he let the skis go straighter, accelerating to keep up. The slope was gradual but consistent, challenging for Jeff. He was again breathing hard by the time he got to Francis, who had stopped, seemingly not having exerted himself at all.
“You all right back there?” Francis didn’t wait for an answer. He took off as soon as Jeff reached him.
The air felt thin. Jeff struggled to catch his breath. What the hell was Francis up to?
Then there was the matter of the mountain. Jeff didn’t know one run from another, couldn’t read French, wasn’t familiar with the symbols on the signs, signs that were hardly visible through the snowfall. He wasn’t exhausted, not yet, but he hoped the run wasn’t going to get much more difficult. What he didn’t know, what he, reasonably, had not understood, was that they hadn’t reached the run itself. That awareness came moments later, when he caught up to a stopped Francis yet again. The slope dropped precipitously ahead and disappeared out of sight. There was no other way down.
“Voilà! Epaule du Charvet.” Francis grinned.
Jeff felt a wave of nausea. The impossible descent in front of him made it clear that Francis’s purpose in dragging him up the mountain was to torture him before blowing his life to smithereens. To torture and humiliate him, the kid, the upstart, the young man in whom Francis supposedly saw so much of himself.
Jeff couldn’t go straight down the mountain. That would be suicide. Even his deepest snowplow wouldn’t help him here. The only sane approach would be a slow traverse, back and forth across the face. Deliberate and slow. He refused to give Francis any satisfaction. He started off skiing across the face at a slight angle, hardly making a dent in the altitude, and soon found himself at the edge of the run. He had to turn around and go the other way, but if he pointed his skis downhill, even for a moment, he would wind up flying down the slope, out of control, unable to stop. He sat in the snow, raised his legs in the air, and rotated his skis so that they were now pointing back across the slope. He raised himself to standing with the help of his poles. He tried a slightly steeper angle across the run this time, gaining a bit more speed. Then, out of nowhere, he hit a bump, a hard mogul concealed under the fresh powder, and fell, landing on his hip, then sliding on his belly, head first, trying to slow himself with his skis, one of which came off. Once he was stopped, wet and cold and in some pain, he crawled back up to the ski and tried to figure out how to get it on again. At that moment, Francis sprayed him with a fan of snow, stopping just below him.
“Need a hand?”
Jeff didn’t respond. He got his boot back in the binding and rose to his feet. Francis tore down the slope, his knees like shock absorbers, bouncing from invisible mogul to invisible mogul, until he was out of sight.
Alone on the piste, cold and wet and exhausted, his hip throbbing with pain, Jeff seethed. The landscape was so white and vertiginously steep that it seemed less that the snow was falling than the earth was rising to meet it. He had to get down the mountain. He made several more traverses, fell a few times—gratefully shedding altitude while unceremoniously sliding downhill on his bottom—and made his way, eventually, to the foot of the slope, where he found Francis waiting.
“Take all the time you need,” he said.
Jeff gave no reply. Francis dropped the sarcasm, like a cat giving its mouse a respite before going another round.
“Let me give you a tip, seriously. You can ski down this mountain. You just need to commit to your turns. It’s a hopping motion, more or less.” He demonstrated it in place. “This next section is slightly more challenging, but it’s got a long runoff. If you find yourself accelerating out of control, just bend your knees and point the skis downhill and hold on. You’ll stop eventually.”
Now Jeff saw that they were only on a short plateau between two steep parts, the next one curving around to the right, and, as with the previous one, disappearing down out of sight. Below and beyond was only white and gray, no sign of the end.
The run narrowed, the traverses shortened, and Jeff had to reverse direction more often. To avoid putting weight on his injured hip, he tried to turn around while standing and almost ended up headed downhill. He couldn’t understand how anyone could enjoy this. It was pure agony, wanting to be at the bottom, wanting to be home. But what bottom, what home?
Francis whistled from up top. He whipped down the run, skis parallel, bouncing off the hidden moguls as before. Jeff watched the technique while also recognizing its irrelevance to his own efforts. Francis was showing off, rubbing it in, leveraging the humiliation. He breezed past Jeff as close as he could without taking him out, not uttering a word on his way past.
Jeff stopped his traverse, swinging his poles to try to regain his balance from Francis’s fly-by, and fell softly into the face of the mountain. By the time he righted himself again, Francis was a dark form in the middle distance, perched on the side of the run, catching his breath.
What if, Jeff wondered, he pointed his own skis down the slope now? Could his knees absorb enough of the shock of the moguls? Could he bomb the hill, blow past Francis, emerge victorious? He traversed twice with this possibility in mind, testing slightly steeper angles, his skis pulsing up and down. No, any faster and he wouldn’t know how to stop.
Francis started down again, and Jeff couldn’t help but be struck by the speed and beauty of his skiing, knowing that never in his life would he be able to ski like that, to respond to the terrain so deftly, intuitively, and to maintain that uncanny sense of balance, as if his head was on a gimbal. Francis was in rhythm with the slope, a master of control, sustaining a steady beat, even as he accelerated down the mountain. Was he trying to make the runoff?