While he showered and dressed, she ordered him breakfast, and while he ate in front of a morning talk show, she answered e-mails.
The base of the mountain was only a few blocks away, and the air was pleasantly warm. They walked slowly, like an elderly couple, looking into shopwindows and making fun of the theatrical cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats, a woman’s silk gown embroidered with a large sequined saguaro cactus.
“It looks like a trident phallus. I don’t think even Dolly Parton could pull that one off,” said Soren. He seemed to be in a good mood; maybe the mountain air had a healing effect.
Tommy bought their tickets, and they sat on a bench beside the platform where the cable car would pick them up. They were the only people waiting. Looking up the daunting slope, Tommy could see two pairs of hikers on foot, following the dirt track beneath the cable line.
She put on her sunglasses and watched the descending glass pod in a quiet trance. Capturing the sunlight in prismlike flashes, it looked like a giant iridescent beetle. When it pulled up beside them, the doors slid open, and six people got off, including two children who started racing down the flight of steps to the street, their parents yelling at them to stop, slow down, wait! Soren was watching them, silent. Tommy repressed the knee-jerk urge to read his mind, to make herself feel guiltier than she already did about wishing she were with Morty, even back in the airless Gold Rush Salon, grinning relentlessly at strangers, coping with the bottomless bureaucracy of Morty’s juggernaut success.
No other passengers showed up, and they rode to the top without comment. Tommy wondered if Soren’s eyes were closed behind his sunglasses. His head was inclined against a window, as if he were riveted by a single view rather than the widening panorama of the village tucked snug in its luxurious valley below.
When they got off at the top, they had to walk around an impressive stack of long white florist boxes, each tied with a pink ribbon. There must have been fifty. A slender young man in a blazer and tie paced alongside the boxes, talking on a cell phone in an agitated tone. Pinned to his lapel was a gold name plate. Phillip. From his seethingly enunciated dictates, it was obvious that he was a wedding planner and that someone was actually going to get married in this lofty spot, sometime later in the day; also, that someone else had fucked up.
“Where are the vases?” he said, each word a threat. “I need them by noon or it will not be pretty.”
Tommy and Soren walked on in the prescribed direction, toward the deck with the promised view, reaching over the mountain range, its summit shrouded with snowdrifts even in June.
Soren spoke for the first time since they had boarded the gondola. “Some people are planning a wedding, some a funeral.”
“Soren, you’re doing all right. You’ve got to be positive,” said Tommy.
“Sweetheart, I am positive. That’s my problem. Do you know there’s actually a magazine for us corpses-in-waiting? It’s called Poz. Sounds like a magazine for dogs and cats, doesn’t it? But no. I see it at my doctor’s office. He gets that plus Popular Photography plus People. How alliterative of him, right? And his first name is Peter!”
Tommy laughed.
“But who do you think is actually going to pick up that magazine in a room full of strangers? I mean, we can look around and figure out who’s there for the same reason we are—nobody’s fooling anybody—but still. I have no desire to look at articles on, what, how to keep my Mediport in tip-top shape? How to minimize estate taxes for my loved ones? How to avoid getting fired for being in a terminal way?”
“You aren’t terminal. You can’t think like that.”
“Tommy, dear Tommy, don’t go all Pollyanna on me, please.”
“I’m just—”
“Stating the facts. Keeping hope alive! Good for you.” He quickened his pace and walked out in front of her, toward the railing with the informational plaques, the you-are-here maps. A father was posing his wife and five children against the vista, getting ready to take a picture.
But then, without so much as a cursory glance at the view, Soren turned toward the restaurant. Tommy couldn’t tell if he wanted her to follow. Just inside the door, he held it open and looked back. “I’m getting a hot dog—or whatever excuse for nutrition they serve up here. You want something? Or are you planning to join the jolly McMormons over there?”
They chose an indoor picnic table next to the window on the side of the mountain view.
“Sit,” Soren said. He insisted on going up to order the food. He came back with French fries and a paper plate of corn chips under a pool of fluorescent orange cheese.
“Dig in,” he said. “Sometimes this is what does the trick for me these days. A carbohydrate orgy. The only kind in which I may indulge at this stage of my life. A shame, considering specimens like our friend Phillip out there, guarding his lilies.”
After wiping cheese from his lips, he cringed dramatically and said, “Oops. Wrong company.”
Tommy made no comment. She couldn’t tell if Soren was trying to amuse her or to pick a fight. She ate a few fries. They had a wooden texture and tasted as if they’d been reheated several times. But her mouth was full when Soren said, “If I weren’t sick, if I’d been healthy as a horse these past few years, you’d be gone, wouldn’t you.” He still wore his sunglasses, so Tommy couldn’t see his eyes. “You’re taking care of him so he can take care of me.”
It took her a blessed moment to chew and swallow the terrible fries. “I thought about leaving,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you, one way or the other.”
“I don’t believe that, but never mind,” said Soren. “Anyway, I sort of dare you to stay through what’s to come. As Luscious Phillip said about his missing vahzes, it will not be pretty.”
“Soren…”
“Tommy, you can’t hide how little you like me. Though why should you?”
Was he actually trying to drive her away—or maybe, if she could stop and think of him more kindly, trying to “liberate” her? Was there a perverse generosity in this confrontation?
“I could say the same of you,” she heard herself say.
Soren shook his head. “Not the same. You were there. You had it in for me from the start. You like to pretend you don’t run the show. But”—he raised his hands, greasy palms outward—“I am forced to admit that I’m grateful you’ve stayed.”
She could say nothing to this. She could hardly thank him, and it was too late to protest his assertions—and pointless. Soren might be vain, but he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t blind. She said the only honest thing she could: “I do not run the show.”
He pushed the remainder of the nachos toward her. “Let’s agree to disagree on that.”
Dutifully, they spent a few minutes admiring the view. And when the gondola arrived at the summit from its latest ascent, they had to wait for two large cardboard cartons to be unloaded by the wedding planner and a lackey.