Summer's End (30 page)

The next morning she was at the rink, lacing up her skates.

The rink was light and airy, occupying a glass-covered courtyard space in the center of a large office complex. She and Henry and Tommy owned it. Throughout the year several other coaches rented ice time to give lessons, but in August and the first two weeks of September no one used it but them.

Henry and Tommy were already at work. Oliver, their coach, was standing on the ice, watching them, his arms folded. Amy pulled off her skate guards and stepped out onto the ice. The other three skated over.

“How was Minnesota?” Henry reached her first.

“Very nice.”

How small he seemed. He was easily five inches shorter than Jack. Yet he was one of the largest of the male skaters.

“Gretchen said you'd be in today.” Tommy was slightly out of breath. He'd already been working hard. “We've missed you.”

Tommy was genuinely small, only two inches taller than Amy.

She wished that she could tell them. They were her closest friends.
Hey, I met someone, guys, and I slept with him. It was great, it was magic
. But things would be too hard to explain.
But he's also my dad's new wife's son, which makes him sort of my stepbrother except that he doesn't seem like a brother, although his sister, she does seem like a sister
.

Amy wasn't sure she herself understood.

Oliver eyed her arms and shoulders. He was always worried about her upper-body strength. “How much conditioning do you think you lost?”

“Not much. I pumped water and paddled a canoe.”

“Okay.” That was all the greeting Amy was going to get from him. “You two”—he pointed at Henry and Oliver—“more of the same. And, Amy, I suppose you know what to do.”

“Warm up.”

 

At their lunch break they talked about ideas for new programs. Or at least Oliver, Henry, and Tommy talked. Amy looked through her mail and listened. She had not had a single idea while on vacation. She noticed Henry looking at her suspiciously. Of all of them, Henry was the most ambitious, the most competitive.

Oh, I could make you really suspicious
, Amy thought.
None of you liked it all the other times I got involved with someone. If you didn't like those men, what will you think of Jack?

They would have liked him just fine. Jack would not have wanted to get tangled up in her career. He would not have wanted to produce her shows, arrange her publicity, or manage her money. He would have been perfect.

Would have been.

“Did your dad give you any music?” Tommy asked.

Amy shook her head. “He just got married. He's had other things on his mind. But I've probably got twenty, twenty-five tapes that we've never used. I can listen to them tonight.”

She worked for another hour and then spent much of the afternoon at the beauty salon, getting a haircut, color, manicure, facial, and the long-overdue bikini wax. She returned to the rink for another workout—this was why they had their own rink, so they could have ice time whenever they wanted. At eight in the evening she returned home.

Her condominium building was across the street from the rink. She owned a three-bedroom unit on the top floor. It was full of ivory upholstery and burnished copper pillars. Professional designers had decorated it, of course. Everything in Amy's life was taken care of professionally. A maid service cleaned the apartment for her; the doorman and the front desk received packages and held her mail; the ground-floor deli fed her. Gretchen, in an office across the street at the rink, made travel arrangements, scheduled doctor's appointments, and took care of the bills.

She kept the tapes her father sent her in an antique Swedish pine pie safe. The tapes were nothing like a final piece of music. Occasionally Hal did the roughest of edits, but usually the music would come without introductions or closures. Sometimes he would simply play the melody on the piano. Other times he would talk over the music—“If you bring down the percussion here, Amy…”

Most of the tapes she was listening to now, she remembered having heard. She remembered why she had decided not to use each piece, and in general she still felt the same way. But every so often a tape would start and
she wouldn't remember it. She wouldn't remember having heard it—although she had, her initials and a date were on the box—and she couldn't remember why she had rejected it. There were five or six such tapes, music that she couldn't remember hearing.

She listened to them all again. What did these pieces have in common? Why hadn't she remembered them?

There was something about the tempo of all of them. Some were fast and some were slow, but there was a similarity, something she didn't have a word for. Amy closed her eyes, trying to see if she had an image instead of a word.

It wasn't an image, but a color—red. One piece was the deepest, smokiest burgundy. Another was fiery. A third was light and clear, a glassine filter. But all were red, the color of vitality, strength, aggression.

And sex. Red lights, scarlet women, flushed faces. That's what these were about—sex. Temptation. Longing. That's why she couldn't skate to this music. That's why she hadn't even remembered it. She hadn't understood what it was about. Despite her previous relationships, she did not know very much about sex.

She did now.

Could she skate to this music? Could she, sweet little Amy Legend, express herself sexually?

Why not? So what if it wasn't like anything she had ever done before? Jack wasn't like anything she'd ever done before. Maybe things weren't going to work out with him, and maybe things wouldn't work out with this music, but why not try? She didn't have to be little and sweet forever.

 

She was the first one at the rink in the morning. She had put all five pieces on a loop, and she cued them up for
endless replay. She had no plan. She would simply listen to the music and skate.

This was why she had trudged through the biting wind one day so many years ago and skated into the middle of a hockey practice. This was why little girls everywhere begged their parents to get up before dawn and drive them miles to the rink. This was why people gave up their friends, their families, their childhood, even in some cases their health…because when you were on the ice, the speed and the grace, the beauty, it caught you and trapped you.

This too was magic.

Amy could tell that she was skating differently, using her arms in different ways, and she wasn't sure if the lines she was creating were beautiful, which was usually something she could feel immediately. But that was all right. This music would work. She knew it.

She rarely liked other people's sexy programs. They usually seemed thin and insincere. “The competitors are getting too young,” the judges and skating officials would grouse, and so the coaches would try to make them seem older. Schoolgirls, compliant and obedient, were sewn into tight costumes and told to skate like temptresses, their hands stroking down their bodies. They did as they were told and understood none of it.

If you're just doing what you're told, then sex isn't about sex. It's about power
.

Sex was another way of relating to a person, another way of getting to know him.

The music played over and over with a little pause as the tape rewound to its beginning. She deliberately avoided any of the conventional sexy moves—the eyes glancing back over the shoulder, the fingers tracing along the collarbone.

Sex isn't about showing off your body. Sex is about sharing your body
.

The music was settling into her bones. Eventually, she knew, her body would take these pieces in, enfolding them into her auditory, her neurological systems, until it would seem that the music was not coming from a loudspeaker but from within herself, and it would surprise her that if she stopped skating, the music would play on. In her best moments she could no longer distinguish between external and internal, between stimulus and response. It was all one.

She skated on, already putting together a few rough sequences. Suddenly she heard clapping. She turned toward the sound. Tommy, Henry, and Oliver were standing at the boards. They had been watching her.

“Okay,” Oliver drawled, “who is he?”

She was getting her point across. “No one important,” she answered.

She didn't mean that, but she didn't want to have to stop and explain.
He's not important to you
, that's what she meant.
He's not going to change anything for the three of us
.

But he had changed everything for her.

“If someone was making me skate like that,” Tommy said, “I wouldn't call him ‘no one important.'”

He was right. Even if she never saw Jack again, he would always be important. “Then I should have said ‘no one you know.'”

 

Morning after morning Amy woke early. She would brush her teeth and come straight to the rink, unlocking the door, turning on the lights herself, working by herself. The programs were starting to take shape. At least four
were going to work out, maybe even all five. It was extraordinary; nothing like this had ever happened to her before, so much creativity, so many new ideas. It had never been so easy before. Henry, whose standards were absurdly high, was quietly approving. Tommy was openly, cheerfully, generously envious.

This was why she had always wanted long hair. She had wanted to feel more sexual. Long hair was wild and romantic, uninhibited and exuberant. Short hair was practical, orderly, and professional. Of course, hair was only a symbol. Probably the best way to feel sexual was to have a sex life…which for one brief, shining moment Amy had had.

There was still a tremendous amount to do. She spent hours in front of the mirror in their ballet studio working on her arm movements; each turn of her wrist had to be studied from several angles. Every day she spoke to Jeffrey, the man who was developing the musical arrangements. That was hard, arranging the music, because there were so many choices, so many different things that could be done with a melodic line. You had to think about every note, every bar.

She often sent her father copies of arrangements they were working on, but there was no point in doing it while he was at the lake. It took a couple of days for anything to get to the lake—Federal Express did not deliver there—and then it took another three to get his response back. By then she and Jeffrey would have changed everything seven times.

She had to sketch ideas for her costumes and approve the final designs. She had to talk to the companies she had endorsement deals with to find out what they wanted her to do this fall. She had to pose for new publicity stills and
sign stacks of photos. She had to lift weights. She had to try out new blades. She had to answer mail, return phone calls, get new clothes. There was always something to do.

 

Jack was running out of things to do. He stained the rails of the fence that ran along the road and replaced two rotting posts. He reroofed the main cabin biffy. He built better benches for the sauna. He dug a hole in the ground three feet wide and eight feet deep, and constructed a circular pull-up shelf to fit in it. At the end of the summer Hal could lower his cans of paint and tubes of glue down into the pit, and maybe they wouldn't freeze over the winter as they always had when left in the garage.

When it was too dark to work outside, he worked in the log cabin. He rehung the exterior doors so that the screen door wouldn't clip the back of whatever woman was standing at the sink. He niched little recesses into the interior wall between the bedroom and the living room, and installed shelves for a woman to store her toiletries. He repositioned the gas lamp that hung on the wall behind the beds.

Then because he couldn't think of anything else to do and because the real problem with the cabin, what Amy—and the others too—didn't like about it, was how dark it was, he got Hal's permission and cut four rectangular holes in the roof to install skylights.

 

“The skylights,” Gwen gushed. She was in town to do laundry and had called Amy. “You wouldn't believe what a difference they make. The log cabin is so light now. You'll love it.”

“But I thought Dad and Ian were worried about skylights leaking in the winter.”

“Jack says that they are very well made now. A number of the other cabins on the lake have them, and they haven't reported any problems. Next year we're going to have him put some in our cabin too.”

“Why are you waiting until next year? That doesn't sound like Jack, putting off something for a whole year.”

Gwen laughed. “It doesn't, does it? That's my doing. Hal and I don't want to put up with the mess. And Jack is leaving on the thirteenth. We don't leave until the twentieth, but he's going early. He wants to give us some time alone.”

Jack was leaving the lake August thirteenth? Amy fumbled in her skate bag for her Day Timer and flipped through the pages. She was supposed to be in San Antonio on August fifteenth for her costume fittings. She couldn't do that. What if Jack came?

She called JoElla in Texas, asking if she could come on the twelfth instead. The seamstress gulped and spoke slowly. “Okay…I guess I can have them ready by then.”

Amy winced. JoElla was going to be sitting up late night after night to have Amy's costumes ready three days ahead of schedule. But she had to be in town on the fifteenth. Jack might come.

She was back from Texas on the morning of the thirteenth. He didn't come on the thirteenth. Of course not. Even he wouldn't have driven all this way in one day. And he didn't turn up on the fourteenth. Or the fifteenth either.

She asked the man who drove the Zamboni machine how long it would take to drive from Minneapolis to Denver.

“It's about nine hundred miles,” he guessed. “And the route's not bad, 35 to 76 to 80, interstates all the way and nothing to speak of in the way of cities. So I'd guess sixteen, seventeen hours of driving time, not counting stops.”