Then Francis lost his rhythm completely, the moguls punishing his body until one sent him careening into the air. He came down hard, his legs crumpling under him, and tumbled in the snow.
Jeff focused on getting himself down the mountain. He returned to his traversing. Soon he came to Francis, splayed out where he went down, head downhill, his legs still connected to his skis. Jeff couldn’t see whether his eyes were open or closed behind the mirrored goggles.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
There was no response.
“I’ll get help,” he said.
He continued down the mountain, traversing back and forth, back and forth, Francis’s fall playing on a loop in his mind. He would summon the ski patrol as soon as he got to the bottom.
59
Jeff raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say, That’s it.
“You got help?” I asked.
“I told myself many stories about what happened on that mountain. Countless plausibilities. What I thought might have happened. I told myself I’d done the right thing, heading down to fetch the ski patrol. But I knew. I refused to acknowledge it, even to myself, but when I saw him go down, a part of me knew immediately what had happened. He didn’t wipe out so much as collapse. All tension gone from his muscles. Like someone had cut the marionette strings.”
“His heart?” I asked.
“Ski patrol went up with a snowmobile and a litter. A small group of skiers had stopped. By the time they reached him he’d already been covered by a dusting of fresh snow. He looked like someone who had succumbed to the elements on Everest.”
“You couldn’t have saved him,” I said, trying to offer comfort.
“That’s kind of you to say. It might even be true. But the fact remains that I didn’t try.”
60
He looked at me, as he neared the conclusion of his story, a story I was still trying to wrap my head around, a story he seemed to have told off the cuff, unrehearsed, spontaneously upon finally meeting an ideal audience—though whether ideal because I knew him long ago, when his heart was good, as he had put it, or, as I had come to suspect, because I was someone who might transform his account into a kind of (I hate the term) roman à clef for the consumption of an invisible horde of anonymous readers, their combined consciousnesses constituting a kind of archive into which his narrative could settle, no longer trapped in his head, no longer susceptible to his mortality, or perhaps for those who would recognize him despite the changed names, who knew him and thought they knew his story, to redeem him in their eyes, or to confess to them indirectly, to justify himself or satisfy his critics, I couldn’t be sure—he looked at me, tired perhaps from talking, from spending the better part of the day in an airport lounge, from drink, he looked at me in—how else to put it?—supplication.
61
After he’d summoned the ski patrol, he said, he waited. It was a long time before he heard anything. He kept an ear out for any news coming over the radios. He didn’t speak or understand French, so he couldn’t tell what was being said, but at one point one of the men holding a radio closed his eyes and shook his head. That was when Jeff knew what he already knew. Francis was gone. The same anomaly in his heart that had caused him to nearly drown in the ocean that morning long ago had struck again in a moment of overexertion.
Something the doctors hadn’t been able to figure out earlier, because, he found out later, Francis hadn’t divulged to them his habitual cocaine use.
An ambulance wailed its patently European wail and pulled up nearby. The ski patrol emerged from the gray mist with the litter behind them, bumping along in the snow, carrying Francis’s bundled body. Jeff could see on their faces that there was no hope.
The medics went through the motions, loading Francis onto a gurney and sliding him into the back of the ambulance. For a moment, the sight of the paramedics and the gurney, the memory of Francis’s form, obscure in the distance, made Jeff feel that he was living an echo of the rescue on the beach, and that this morning marked the end of something begun that morning, a dilation, opened by Jeff, in which Francis had been given the chance to live his life a little while longer. He hadn’t saved the man’s life, only postponed his death.
His mind brimmed with these formulations as he tried to avoid thinking about what he’d done, or, more accurately, not done. As he tried to avoid, too, the overwhelming feeling of relief that his secret would never be exposed. Fortune had favored the blameless.
He found Alison and Chloe at the chalet in their sweats, drinks in hand. They’d been snowshoeing. They’d had a snowball fight. Nature was working on them as Francis had predicted. Mother and daughter were making the best of things. Chloe greeted Jeff with a warm smile, then remembered that she was supposed to be angry with him. He wasn’t sure how deep it went, how long it would have gone on if what had happened hadn’t happened, but her grievances would soon seem petty and insignificant in the face of what was to come, a brush fire with an A-bomb dropped on it.
He had no idea how to tell them. Francis was dead. Jeff hadn’t confirmed it, had only walked away from the ski patrol office back to the chalet, alone. But he was sure. What could he say?
“There was an accident. You’d better call the hospital.”
A fusillade of questions from both Chloe and Alison.
“I don’t know, he fell. Ski patrol came.”
Where? they wanted to know. How?
“Epaule du Charvet,” he said.
Chloe looked at him in confusion. “He fell on that run? How do you know? Were you with him?”
Jeff nodded.
“He took you on that run? No way were you going to make it down that in one piece.”
“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “Maybe that was the idea.”
Alison was on the phone by then, speaking in French, repeating Francis’s name into the receiver. Color drained from her face and she was silent.
“They told us to come to the hospital. They can’t say more.”
“What does that mean?” Chloe asked. She turned to Jeff. “Was he all right when you saw him?”
“I’m not a doctor,” he said. “I got help as quickly as I could.”
Chloe started to cry. Jeff hugged her, and she did not push him away.
62
The canonization started immediately. Francis was remembered for his generosity, his eye, his being the best father anyone could ask for, his being an exacting and shrewd businessman, his having made careers, his stamina, his being Alison’s “rock,” his sense of adventure, his indefatigable curiosity, his mentorship, his support of artists famous and obscure, his aid to the museum community, his patronage, his vision for the future of galleries and contemporary art in America, his not-always-popular-but-always-correct decisions, his legacy, his ability to throw a good party, the list went on.
Naturally, nobody mentioned his infidelities, his treachery, his tendency toward domination and humiliation, his utterly mercenary approach to most art, his yelling, his firing people on a whim, his inability to or lack of desire to recognize the inner lives of others, his avarice, his all-around tendency to make miserable the lives of those closest to him.
Chloe’s anger toward her father transformed into a sharp and ongoing regret that he had died during a period when she wasn’t speaking to him. The irreversibility of this struck her as cosmically unfair.