The Runaway Wife (9 page)

First archery, then beekeeping, now singing? Was he, like Hercules, required to use skill, talent, and ingenuity to prove his worthiness? Would she then consent to accompany him down the mountain? Or was she baiting him solely for her amusement?

“I don't sing.”

“Did you just say you don't sing?”

She tilted her head so her hair fell over her eyebrow, the way it did in the photograph the sisters had given him, and then translated for Gabriel. Gabriel laughed, and she laughed, too.

“You say that as if it's a religion,” she said, coughing and laughing again.

“Laugh all you want,” he said. “I haven't practiced since elementary school.”

She threw up her hands and laughed again. “Does one need practice to look out of one's eyes?” she said.

Addressing the sky, she asked, “
What
have you sent my way?”

As a young boy, Jim had participated in the school chorus; he sang in the shower, where his voice sounded good and where his mother or sister couldn't hear him or
tell him to stop. During school plays he volunteered for the offstage jobs, stage manager and lighting technician. Grateful to remain in the dark, he enjoyed guiding and shining the lights over the faces of the kids who were the stars. And here was Gabriel, in full adolescence, belting it out, despite the fact that his off-pitch voice cracked over and over again.

“Does no one sing where you come from?” she asked.

Neither she nor Gabriel heard his response, as the two were scampering up the mountain toward the chalet. He followed them through a sunburst of white flowers that he hadn't noticed earlier. He heard her cough again and realized that he'd been listening for it, registering its frequency and depth. He would use her illness as a reason for them to depart the following morning. He had already missed his flight that day, and it was too beautiful to leave.

T
HAT AFTERNOON, WITH HIS BACK TO THE WARM
Alpine sun, Jim plucked weeds from the soil of the thriving vegetable garden of Calliope Castellane.

“
Pas mal
, not bad,” she said, standing over him and cupping a tomato with her palm. “We'll have a
dîner magnifique
tonight. But first, a swim.”

She was calling to him and laughing and throwing off her clothing as she darted ahead like a deer down the hillock. Her white shirt whipped Jim in the face; then came her riding pants, then her black-and-pink lacy underwear, all smelling of lavender. Her undressing was as natural as water flowing down a riverbed. Her skin was a pigment in the natural landscape, tanned an even gold. Jim collected what fell
in his path as he ran behind this woman, now wearing only her boots, the laces flying behind.

When he reached the lake, she was in the shimmering ripples, beckoning him in. He removed his clothes and walked gingerly among the sharp rocks lining the lake. How had she maneuvered such terrain so quickly? She dove and resurfaced like a seal and appeared at his side, and guided him to a sandy path into the lake. The frigid water soothed the itching that he now experienced instead of pain on his hand, arm, and lower shoulder.

“Doesn't it feel divine?” she said, her face bright above the shimmering.

“Yes,” he said. “Your lips are blue.”

“So are yours,” she said, laughing and diving again.

When he could no longer feel his extremities, Jim swam to the shore and called to her to dry off with him. When she finally emerged, he found himself unable to look away.
Thalia's mother
, he repeated to himself, as if in reminder. In the bright sun, her slim, tanned body looked half of her forty-nine years. When he offered her her shirt, he noticed that she was trembling from head to toe and her teeth were chattering.

Instead of putting on the shirt, she carried it to a flat granite slab and lay down in the sun, as if taking her place on a towel at a beach. Jim lay beside her. The sun felt like it had weight.

“Jim,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow and then coughing into her hand.

“Yes?”

“Now is a good time for you to tell me your story.”

“What story?”

“
Your
story, of course,” she said. “Of who you are.”

“No,” he said.

She sat up, hugged her knees, and looked at him as if in wonder, then laughed. Her nudity was as natural and easy as the wildflowers in the field nearby. Sally turned away every time she undressed, as if he might be disappointed by what he glimpsed. But Sally had a beautiful body! What was it that made a person modest? Calliope was as free as anyone he'd ever met. Her freedom was inspiring. He followed her eyes to gaze into the endless blue sky.

“Your story,” she said.

“Why do you need my story when we're in your fairy tale?”

She turned quickly to look at him, her eyes narrowed.

“Where Calliope,” he continued, “doesn't have a cough, and she'll reside in the Alps for a summertime that extends into a year. You
do
know that snow is predicted, and that we're leaving tomorrow morning.”

She laughed. “Give me another name if I'm in your fairy tale . . .”

“Calliope is perfect,” he said.

“No, it isn't!” She leaned back on her hands. “I reject it. Calliope the muse, or rather the concubine—”

“Inspiring people is a gift—”

“Not a gift: a curse! I'm wilting under the weight of others' egos. My childhood bedroom at Bellerevoir was covered wall-to-wall in murals of the nine Greek muses. Those paintings now hang in the corridors of our house in Paris. When my daughters were born, I named them after muses: Clio, muse of history—and how amusing, she's a natural historian. She still prefers history books to any other kind. Thalia, the muse of comedy—et voilà, she's my outspoken actor, though more dramatic than comedic. And Helene: Helene is the muse of centuries, of course, the woman who inspired the Trojan War. How I regret their names! I wish I'd named Helene Eleanor, after the most powerful woman in the High Middle Ages, queen consort for more than fifty years. Yes, Helene would be fit for such a part.”

She coughed and looked as if she would cry.

“You've distracted me with me. Nice job, Monsieur Jim. Now tell me your story, so I can properly name you!” she said.

“Only if you accompany me back to the Cabane tomorrow morning,” he said.

She closed her eyes and did not speak for some time.

“Perhaps,” she finally said, “if you tell your story, I'll consider doing what you wish.”

A weakening in her resolve . . .

“We'll leave tomorrow morning.”

“Your story!”

“It's not much of a story,” he began, “even if I speak in the presence of a muse.”

She did not respond. She could have been sleeping; she was that still.

“I left my family at eighteen when I went to college, hoping never to return. I went to business school, worked in the summers at an investment bank with few opportunities to see the light of day, was hired by the same investment bank after I graduated, worked in the investment bank for six years with few opportunities to see the light of day, climbed my way up the ladder to managing director, was planning to marry a woman whom I loved and who I thought loved me, was fired from my job during the recession because I was dispensable when I had thought I'd been indispensable, and was fired by my fiancée, who found me dispensable as well. Then I found another job, less money, lower rank, that starts next Monday, which is why I have to leave tomorrow morning, no matter what, and with you. Et voilà, as you would say, that's my story.”

She frowned and reached for her shirt.

He'd disappointed her. From her shirt pocket, she plucked out what looked like a fluffy ball of cotton.

“I collected these owl feathers this morning,” Calliope said, holding them out to show him. “I knew they'd be useful, but I didn't know for what. Watch this.”

She rolled the feathers into two balls and pushed them into her ears.

“I can't hear.
Now
tell me your story.”

He squinted and watched a cloud pass quickly, high above.

“I have all day,” she said.

“I was born—”

“Everyone who tells a story is born!”

“I thought you couldn't hear.”

“I could hear
that
. I can't hear much, though.”

“I was born in Illinois,” he persisted.

“I should wear these all the time,” she said languidly, touching the white feather balls. “My hearing is too acute.”

She coughed into her arm.

“Okay, I'll make it easier,” she said. “Tell me who
I
am.”

“I don't know who you are.”

She sighed dramatically. He was a worthless adversary.

“You're compelling, intriguing,” he began. “You're fully alive. Fully aware of your surroundings, though not of the coming snows . . .”

He felt like a poacher as he stole a glance at her. She was in rhythm with everything around her: her inhalations were the passing of the clouds overhead, her skin the movement of the wind rippling on the surface of the lake. The sun made her eyelashes look golden. He spied a drop of water on her chin.

“When I met you,” he said, looking up at the sky, “it was as if my boat had capsized, and I'd hit freezing water. I slipped into an unknown world and stopped breathing.” He thought of his waterfall dousing with Valasian. “But then,
as if by a miracle, I popped up and gulped the fresh, watery air.”

“Your story begins,” she said, smiling.

AND THEN SUDDENLY THERE IT WAS: THE RUMBLING.
The slicing. The buzzing.

“Let's go,” she said, standing, coughing into her arm. She struggled into her shirt and ran along the rocks to the place where they'd discarded their clothes and boots. He would never get used to the speed at which she did things, her lightness.

She perched on a rock ledge and was dressed in seconds. It seemed as if she were always waiting for him, waiting for him to understand, for him to follow her, to wake up, to sing, to tell a story, now to pick his way among the sharp rocks to where she stood. They raced past the waterfall up the hill, through the freshly weeded garden, into the shadow of the chalet; the chopper rounded the mountain peak above the lake just as they dashed inside.

“Your husband?”

“His pilots.”

“How can they
not
suspect this charming little chalet, with its orange pom-pom curtains in the windows and your telltale ribbons?”

“It's tough to land anywhere around it . . .” she said, breathing heavily and then coughing into her elbow.

From the covered doorway of the chalet, they watched the chopper approach.

“They've tried to land on my stargazing rock over there, but it's not big enough—here, take this basket—and there's a seven-hundred-foot drop on the other side. Those clever Benedictines, finding this insurmountable peak . . .”

“But the lake—”

“To land on the lake would be challenging for even the best pilots.” She led him into the garden. “The mountain juts out there, can you see?” she said.

“Yes. Why can't you convince your husband to leave you alone—”

“You don't know him.” The copter veered to the west. “Their daily hour-long search is over.” She sighed. “They're returning to their master, like puppets on a string. How well I know their drill.”

The buzzing of the helicopter waned in the distance. She walked into the garden, knelt, and peeked under a thick undergrowth of leaves. She pulled one, then another shiny purple eggplant from the vine. He carried the basket to her.

She looked up at him with brimming eyes. “We'll have ratatouille tonight.”

She dipped from plant to plant, filling the basket with ripe tomatoes and zucchinis. He helped her pull beans from a vine strung up on hooks along the wall of the barn. On the way inside the chalet, she stopped at the rose-decorated threshold. The clouds had passed from her brow.

Nothing could interrupt this gentle, unassailably lovely moment.

For some reason, he bowed. The last time he bowed might have been to a dancing partner—no doubt taller than he, late bloomer that he was—at the dreaded Miss Marsh's Dancing School, where his mother circled the dance floor, inspecting manners.

In response, Calliope curtsied.

I
T STARTED AS A PURR, LIKE THAT OF A LARGE CAT,
then swelled to a lion's roar. Jim was sifting the residue from the honeycomb when she ran up to him, clutching her wooden spoon stained red with ratatouille. Calliope had been wrong. The search party had not called off its pursuit for the day. Perhaps the pilots had spotted them running along the lakeshore. The grinding sounds from the rotor blades intensified as they watched the copter make a beeline for them.

“The lake! They've returned, with an amphibious helicopter. They must have seen us. Quick. Stamp out the fire. I'll hide our ratatouille. About a mile up, there's a cave from which we can watch them.” She turned, spoon still in hand. With her other hand, she lifted from a corner of the room
a hammer and a bunch of long, thick nails. “Board up the front door with these. We'll leave by the barn door.”

She was the general, a tactician who had been planning her exit strategy for months.

“Leave the owlery open.”

The green-and-gray chopper, a spotlight at its tail, hovered over the lake. Jim stamped on the fire and covered the last embers with a thick gray blanket that she threw to him. She hid the pot of ratatouille under the floorboards in the place where she'd found the Benedictines' wine.

“Meet you in the garden,” she said, darting into the barn.

Jim quickly boarded up the chalet door, as instructed. In the garden he found Calliope throwing her bow and quiver of arrows onto her back. She carried an owlet in the palm of her hand.

“He was the only one left! 'Amlet. Allez!” she yelled over the stuttering of the helicopter.

At first he thought she'd named the baby owl Amulet, for protection or good luck. But after she repeated the name again, he remembered that she'd named the feathery ball in her palm after Shakespeare's Danish king.

They sprinted into the open and down a path to the edge of a forest. They passed a sea of wildflowers, a sheet of colors that he would not have imagined possible. Earthbound rainbows.

Once they'd doubled back to reach a higher path, they were sheltered by the shadow of the forest. Her bow and small pouch of arrows swung back and forth on her narrow
back. In the green sweater that she had thrown on before their departure, her beige pocketed vest, her loden green riding pants, and her boots, she could have been mistaken for Robin Hood.

An eerie silence fell. They peered out from the edge where the forest ended.

“I preferred the noise,” she whispered.

He heard the muffled sound of Hamlet's hooting in the pocket of her vest.

They approached a slick rock face. “The risk is that there's only one way to get up and down. If they find us, we'll be cornered. But the cave is dark and deep, and it stinks of rotting. These men won't have the stomach for it.”

The mountain face was steep and disfigured with indentations and crevices, so toe- and fingerholds were easy to find. He followed the sound of Calliope's coughing above him. Once he'd climbed to the flat surface above, he saw her leaping over what looked like a wide chasm. She hadn't stopped to pause, as he did now, at its edge. Calliope took risks like a person with nothing to lose. He planned his jump with more calculation.

“I see them.” She was out of breath when he joined her at the edge of the cave. From her quiver of arrows, she pulled out her canister of water. With an eyedropper, she satisfied the restless and mewing owlet. An eyedropper!

“Over there,” she said, nodding her head in dismay at the two men who were climbing the hill toward the chalet in the distance.

“They're pulling the boards off the door. You could have done a better job, eh? They'll see my curtains, my ribbons, the preparations for dinner. They'll take photographs; my husband will know then, for sure.” She turned her face away to muffle a cough in her elbow.

“It was such a lovely place to live.” Her face was transformed in sadness, her youth stolen.

“We were leaving tomorrow morning anyway, remember? No matter what, it would have been impossible to weather the winter up here.”

“Please don't say the word
impossible
. ‘In Français, impossible is not possible.' An old French adage. How can you talk about winter when my head is swimming with wildflowers? Have you ever seen so many?”

Like a wilted wildflower refreshed by the lightest rain, she sprang back to life.

“Early September in the mountains,” she added, sighing, “is the season when Earth has won, and the award is this massive garland of congratulations.”

“Look,” he said, pointing.

The men were skirting the border of the chalet. As she predicted, they were taking photographs and barking into radios.

“After they leave, we'll gather our things and hike to Anzère,” she said. “It's a darling Swiss town on the path to the Iffigsee. I visited once as a child.”

“They're carrying something.”

She squinted. “One of my curtains,” she said.

“They're coming in our direction,” he said.

A breeze stirred the feathers of the sleeping owlet in her hand. He'd forgotten about the small creature.

“That path leads to Gabriel's house, and I've instructed Gabriel, and also Valasian, many times to tell them that I have taken up residence in Lauenen, the town below.”

“But the ratatouille—if they find it, they'll know you're nearby.”

“I trust my friends. And don't forget, we have the cave's nasty smell on our side, and that skull,” she said.

“Skull?” He turned and caught sight of a white object just inside the mouth of the cave. He crouched down. It was so small; it must have belonged to an animal, or a child.

“According to my grand-père,” she said, “these caves were formed in the Pliocene or Miocene Age, three to four million years ago.”

Jim moved away from the cave opening. He would be sick from the smell. Rotting cheese was an apt description.

“One winter,” Calliope continued, “Grand-père took me and my brother to the ice caves of Eisriesenwelt in Austria. Maybe”—and she looked him over as if she were looking at him for the first time—“yes, maybe one day one of my daughters will take you to see the ice formations. They are nature's living masterpieces, as they change shape constantly, drip, drip, drip.
That
is a place where the art
belongs
. Don't art museums sometimes feel like graveyards?”

He heard a fluttering sound inside the cave and turned
his head. The opening reminded him of the pupil of an eye, drawing in the light.

“Come away.” She touched his arm lightly and guided him to the edge of the cliff, facing west. He was relieved to feel a breeze in his face.

HE'D HEARD THE TERM
ALPENGLOW
,
BUT THIS WAS
the first time he'd witnessed it. The enormous bowl of the sky was lit from below by the amber light of the setting sun. The few snowfields nestled inside crevices in distant peaks glowed a deep mauve.

The men were back in view. She leaned on the mountainside and stroked Hamlet's feathers as they watched them.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked her. “Why are you hiding, running away?”

“Get a divorce, you say. You don't know my husband.”

“No, but . . .” How could a woman of such competence feel so trapped?

“He's running for political office.”

“It's 2008. You can protect yourself.”

At the corner of the cave, she began to part the thick webs. Her nose was red and her cheeks were flushed.

“Do you think I haven't already tried to extricate myself from his web?” She shook her head, then suddenly threw back her head as she laughed. He loved when she did that. It was like a fresh start to everything.

“
Web
, an apt word; they're everywhere up here in these caves. Look,” she said, laughing, “they're in my fingers, my hair. Help me, Jim! I'm stuck!”

He slid the viscous strings of web from her hair. One caught on her shoulder and he gently lifted it from her shirt. She continued to move through the webs.

“My husband thinks he can disguise his webs of manipulation. If he doesn't wake me at all hours of the night to persuade me to stay—the exhaustion technique—he'll spread a cloak of charm so thick around me that I won't be able to move. He'll laugh with me, at me, seduce me, punish me, curse me, diminish me, intimidate me, confuse me, distance himself from me to the point that I don't exist for him (what I call the Gulag treatment), make me think I'm crazy so that I can't trust myself, scare me with his physical strength—all of this, interchangeably, inexhaustibly, until I lose myself again and again to him. He's a master, like that big spider up there, waiting for the fly to stop for just one moment . . .”

She placed the owlet on the cave floor and began, with one of her arrows, to strike at the webs, pulling them down one after another.

“In a moment of clarity,” she said, coughing, “after all those endless years of battling, of trying to make him see things from my perspective, I realized that this person, my husband, had
no
conscience, and that no matter what I said or did, nothing would change him or his mind. He is more immutable than this mountain.”

She closed her eyes as if it hurt to keep them open.

“If I go back to him now,” she continued, “he'll charm me yet again, into my addiction. I'm a junkie—is that what you call it? A junkie for his evil. Evil! You might think that word is too extreme, but it's not. Being up here in the clear mountain air allows me to see things as they are. If I return to him, which I will not, I'll be preserved in formaldehyde as Yves's pretty political spouse, or rather, as he says to me tête-à-tête, his ‘stupid
fucking
idiotic wife.'”

She paused and pointed southwest. Valasian was aiming an arrow at a steinbock with large antlers. He missed, and the herd dispersed.

“Valasian is a great shot. He doesn't usually miss. He's distracted. That sound—do you hear it?” she asked, turning deeper into the cave.

He detected a low rumble that sounded like the New York City subways when they pass underneath the pavement.

“It's like a heart throbbing, like the cave is alive,” she said.

Jim had lost sight of the two men, but now he spotted them on the ridge below.

“They're talking to Gabriel,” she said. “Gabriel will be asking them for a ride in the helicopter. Gabriel, tell them what we practiced, that the bell-tower chalet has been abandoned for years and that a French lady went down to the town of Lauenen.
Shhh, mon petit hiboux.
”

“How far to Anzère from here?” Jim asked.

“Not more than four days if we go at a good pace.”

“And to Lauenen?”

Ambrose and he had started their hike from Lauenen two and a half weeks ago. “Lauenen is only a six hour hike away; that's where they should look first, if they believe Gabriel.” Gstaad, if he remembered correctly, was a short bus ride from Lauenen.

“So the Cabane des Audannes is closest, half a day's hike as you told me when I arrived?”

Her eyes fluttered.

“Yes, but . . . I'd rather go to Anzère.” Her eyes were fixed on the men. “Yves expects me to retreat to the Cabane. He's paid off— Wait,
shhh
—
Merde
,
it's not possible! They're headed in our direction.”

She drew him back from the ledge of the cliff. “They'll see us,” she whispered. “Come, into the cave.”

THEY NAVIGATED THROUGH A DENSE ARCHITECTURAL
mesh of spiderwebs, shaking the sticky silk threads from their fingers as they went. A blue-black bat flitted outside the cave and disappeared.

Calliope took his hand in hers and pulled him into a far corner of the cave. Hamlet hooted and hissed.

“I can't, won't, believe that Gabriel failed to tell them I was in Lauenen,” she whispered.

Gabriel had shot Jim enough jealous glances for Jim to guess that the adolescent boy would rather Calliope be
discovered by her husband than spend any more time alone with Jim. The stench inside the cave seemed alive—or recently dead, rotten or rotting.

They heard men's voices.

“
Shhh
,” she whispered to the hissing owl.

The men called out to each other in French. Jim couldn't understand. The owlet hissed loudly. Did it smell the bats or the pilots?

The men paced the terrace ledge outside the cave.

“Regardez ce vieux crâne,” came a voice. Look at this old skull.

“Madame,” they laughed. Calliope poked Jim in the ribs.

Jim turned his eyes away from the glare of the flashlight that hit the cave floor not far from them.

“Comment il empeste dedans ici. C'est fétide!” How it stinks in here. It's disgusting.

He felt her fear, a trembling within her disciplined stillness. Her body was clenched, ready to spring if necessary. He guessed that she was calculating how quickly she could reach her bow.

She suppressed a cough. The owlet hissed. Jim held his breath.

“Écoutez,” one man said. Listen.

Calliope's hair fell against his arm as she moved her hand to stroke the little bird. The owlet hissed again. Calliope coughed again, loudly this time. It was impossible the men hadn't heard.

Then it came: a shrill screeching sound combined with
a thundering from deep inside the cave, louder and louder. Calliope was so still. Was she breathing? The noise erupted from the black hole of the cave behind them, and Jim jumped back instinctively, pushing Calliope against the cave wall, shielding her. A thick black mass of bats—that's what they were—flew over their heads as if it were one monstrous creature, thumping and flapping and blacking out the cave's entrance. Its shape resembled a stingray with cyclopean wings.