Lewis rolled around her. “Argue with me,” he said. “I’ve been so fucking bored. I can’t find anyone who’ll agree with me for the right reasons.”
Later, when he was lying in a lukewarm tub, creating his own steam, she asked him questions: Who had really cared for him? (A nanny, his sisters.) What had he liked when he was a boy? (His dogs, drawing maps, women, reading.) He’d been kicked out of Andover for one of those things, finished up at a military academy, done well at Columbia.
Dulcy watched him turn the spigot with his toe. “Why did you come here to begin with?” she asked. “And why did you come back after the first time?”
“I didn’t really want to be anywhere,” Lewis said. “I stopped to see Samuel on my way to Butte for some interviews, and the room was cheap and so I left bags when I made a run down to Denver for a different story. The town was so strange and pleasant. People are holier than thou everywhere, but this place had a sense of humor.”
“You’re cherry—picking,” she said. “You really swan around, thinking nice things about the citizens?”
“Honest things,” said Lewis. “But I understand your sarcasm. Don’t you want to lie down again?” he said. “I’m not so hot anymore.”
She did, though he was. She hiked the windows, and they climbed back in bed. She didn’t think of pitying Lewis since spending nights with him, despite his sweats and his miserable childhood, despite running her fingers over his ribs.
“Why don’t we marry?” he asked. “Marry me.”
“I like having a secret,” she said. “Having a lover, and no one the wiser.”
“Lover,” he said. “All right.” The wind gusted through the open window, blowing his clippings around, but he had an arm clamped around her. “Why Dulcinea? Did your father read Don Quixote?”
“Yes,” she said.
“It’s better than asking why Leda or Cordelia.”
“Yes.” She turned on her side and watched the tips of his eyelashes, batting off sleep and some greater weariness. He was too thin. She shut her eyes.
“Dulcinea,” said Lewis. Another gust and they turned away from the window together, spooning against each other, thinking about wind, windmills.
Summer (June 21 to September 20)
June 29, 1170, Aleppo and elsewhere, 100,000 dead.
July 8, 1730, Valparaiso, unknown. 300—mile wave.
July 13, 1605, Qiongshan, Hainan, China, 3,000.
July 21, 365, Crete, 20,000. A wave to Alexandria.
August 8, 1303, Crete, 10,000. The same.
August 12, 1042, Palmyra, 50,000.
August 12, 1157, Syria, 20,000, largest in a sequence.
August 13, 1868, Arica, Chile, 25,000. A wave.
August 17, 1668, Anatolia, 8,000.
August 26, 1883, Java, 100,000; eruption of Krakatoa.
August 31, 1886, Charleston, 60.
September 5, 1694, Puglia, 6,000.
September 10, 1509, Constantinople, 10,000.
—from Walton Remfrey’s red notebook
chapter 19
The Sky-Blue Book of Summer Daydreams
?
Late June was the time of arrivals in Montana, of tourists and ballet troupes and suspect royalty. People who kept grand sporting camps or bred horses, local bigwigs’ wives who wintered in the East and deigned to visit only when the average daytime temperature reached sixty, wealthy fishermen from England and Germany, who didn’t entirely understand the pattern of thawing and flood, and had to seek out still-clear spring creeks while the café au lait river raged on. European wilderness enthusiasts, oil-well con men, logging crews, union organizers, vast clotty herds of sheep and cattle heading for early market by train before the summer heat could kill the load.
The women of the Sacajawea Club, sultanas of their world, had been galvanized by scandals, stabbings, canings, executions, and a flood. Now the world had gone flat, and the proverbial mud was drying. It was hot, and they arrived at the meeting with great rings under their arms; they forgot the handkerchiefs they’d stuffed up as they drank, and by the end, the inside of their blouses by the wrists were wringed with damp crumpled cloths and melted cornstarch and soda. The arrivals were a relief—mysterious, or reassuringly cyclical, or fizzily open—ended. Local rumors were the same old thing: Eugenia’s husband was again expected to visit, Mrs. Woolley had broken it off with her chauffeur, Rex’s lawyer had managed to hunt down the man who had sold him nothing in Gardiner, and both Samuel Peake and Lewis Braudel seemed to be spending their nights away from their rooms in the Elite.
“You can’t believe that nasty piece of work Irina,” said Vinca Macalester. “They probably both turned her down, and she’s having her revenge. But I heard a different rumor: Eugenia’s husband is dying. A friend who lives in Provo heard something about a heart attack.”
“Hard to die if you don’t exist,” said Margaret. “Do you think they’re even still married?”
Dulcy had been thinking the same thing, but Margaret surprised her. Now they fell silent because Eugenia had just entered the dining room: she was showing off her new cook, and her shellpink silk dress made her seem like the single largest item in a room of beefeaters. After a winter of dormancy, she’d had every inch of the hotel scrubbed and spruced; after months of accepting Gerry’s drunken body as drapery in her hallways and apparently in her auntly bed, word was that she’d sent him home to his empty house, and that he’d once again sobered up. “He’s dry drunk now, and mean,” said Samuel. “This is when the drunks of town should hide.”
Dulcy began to understand that Eugenia’s pattern of lassitude and furious action was a kind of seesaw: she stayed still as long as she could, then burst into action, then fell quiet again and stored up a fresh batch of worry. Now she was her own volcano, and her flossy hair and pearls billowed as she handed out the new menu. The chef was from Europe, very exciting , but Dulcy wondered if Europe meant one of Irina’s cousins. The waiter used sign language to steer her toward safe appetizers, but he was hint-free about the main course. Now, as he delivered their plates and she peered down at a beige pile, she was sure she’d been right.
Leonora Randall was having pale food, too: scallops in a cream sauce, with mushrooms and baby onions. “Lovely, isn’t it?” Eugenia asked, sticking to wine. Margaret, profoundly nice, and lucky in her choice of chicken, said it was all delicious, and Vinca, who was pregnant again, said she didn’t have much of an appetite, and Dulcy said the effort was promising.
“You wound me, dear,” said Eugenia. “Have you even noticed the new awning?”
Dulcy and the others had mostly noticed that Gerry Fenoways had entered the room, and was walking straight toward Eugenia, who had her back to the door. He looked leaner and years younger. He greeted them all now as if he’d never not been perfect, but what was his alternative? He put a proprietary hand on Eugenia’s cushioned shoulder, and she looked up at him as if he were a spider on the ceiling and she was judging the distance for a swat. “My dear,” he said, “I need to have a brief word with you.”
“Well, Gerald, I’m entertaining. Perhaps in the morning?”