Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (7 page)

“Hi,” Tara said, not looking up from what she had spread across the floor to read.

Michelle did look up. “You look sick,” she said. “You’ve been looking sick all week. Maybe you ought to check into the infirmary.”

“We’re thinking of checking into a health club,” Tara said. “Look at what we found in the mail today. ‘A New Body for the New Year.’ Don’t you just love it?”

“I’d love to have a new body,” Michelle said. “Six inches taller and twenty pounds thinner.”

“The rumor’s all over campus that Dr. Bandolucci got hold of one of these and now she’s going to give a big lecture on the tyranny of slenderness. Can you imagine?”

“Well,” Michelle said, “nobody could convict Martha Bandolucci of being oppressed by the tyranny of slenderness.”

“Martha’s always being oppressed by something,” Tara said. “I keep waiting for her to start talking about how the shape of the banister rails in Woolsey Hall reflect the patriarchal obsession with reifying the female—”

“Oh, my God,” Michelle said.

“All those dykes over at the Women’s Revolutionary Caucus are going to be up in arms about it, too,” Tara said. “They’re probably going to picket. I’ve been telling Michelle we ought to sign up for this thing just to show the flag for real women.”

“Don’t call yourself a real woman,” Michelle said. “You’ll end up getting us both in trouble for saying unnice things about homosexuals.”

“I want to say unnice things about everybody,” Tara said. “That’s what I’m going to do as soon as I get out of here. I’m going to become the first female Howard Stern. I’m going to trash the world and get paid for it.”

“Howard Stern makes a lot of money,” Michelle said.

Christie sat down in the red beanbag chair and leaned over to pick up the brochure Tara had been reading. It was a full-color, first-rate professional production with the picture of a long-lined woman on the front flap that looked vaguely familiar. Christie tried to think of where she might have seen a picture of this woman before, but couldn’t.
Magda Hale’s Fountain of Youth Work-Out
, the smaller type said. That didn’t ring a bell, either.

Christie dumped the brochure back on the floor. “Is that something that’s going on in New Haven?” she asked them.

“The studio’s up on Prospect Street,” Michelle said. “I go by there every once in a while when I do tutoring at the Hispañola Center.”

“She’s got one of those half-hour shows on cable, too,” Tara said. “I think she’s kind of famous. She’s supposed to be I don’t know how ancient, except it never shows on her, if you know what I mean.”

“It sounds more like California than New Haven,” Christie said.

“According to the brochure, they’ve got studios in California.” Tara stretched her legs and yawned. “It’s just the usual thing, Christie. Eat right. Exercise right. Do what you’re told to do and your life will be different. It’s all a pile of crap.”

Michelle giggled. “It’s just that this pile of crap is getting a big push from an advertising agency, and they’re having a kind of after-Christmas sale where you can get cut rates if you sign up now. I’ve been telling Tara that we ought to go. Really. We could use something to get us motivated. We could use something to help us lose a little weight. We aren’t going to do it on our own.”

“I don’t want to do it,” Tara said. “I don’t want to succumb to the tyranny of slenderness.”

Christie leaned over and picked up the brochure again. Magda Hale looked twenty-six, not ancient. The models on the inside were all tall and thin and blond, if they were women, and muscular and sexy, if they were men.
Diet and
e
xercise are the keys to freedom
, the text on the inside read.
Freedom from fatigue. Freedom from aging. Freedom from disease and early death
.

Christie folded the brochure into its original thirds and smoothed it out on her knee. Someone had smeared popcorn butter on it.

“I might be interested in something like this,” she said carefully.

You would have thought she had just expressed an interest in human sacrifice. Tara narrowed her eyes. Michelle got suddenly interested in stray threads on the carpet.

“What would you be interested in something like this for?” Tara asked. “You don’t need to lose weight. You’re too thin as it is.”

“You’ve been losing a lot of weight lately,” Michelle said. “And you haven’t been eating the way you used to.”

“I’ve been eating as much as I can,” Christie said.

“So maybe you are sick,” Michelle said. “Maybe you really should go talk to somebody at the infirmary.”

“We were thinking maybe you’d gotten one of those eating disorders,” Tara said bluntly. “I mean, okay, so you’re not refusing to eat. We’ve seen you eat. But maybe you’ve started throwing it all up when you’re finished.”

“Have you ever seen me throw anything up?” Christie asked. “We head for the ladies room together half the time when we’re out. Have you ever seen me throw up anything but too much beer?”

“That’s what I told her,” Michelle said.

“I’ve just been tired lately, that’s all,” Christie said. “And I’ve been a little depressed. Over things with David, and you know, that junk. And things with my father. Which haven’t been going well. As usual.”

“Oh,” Michelle said.

“I wouldn’t go home for Christmas if I could think of a way to get out of it.” Christie suddenly realized that this was true. “I don’t want to see my father. I don’t want to see David. I keep trying to come up with an independent study project I’d have to do a lot of work on, but I haven’t been able to talk anybody into anything. Didn’t that thing say it was going on for the week between Christmas and New Year’s?”

“That’s what it said.” Tara wasn’t really buying this. Christie could tell. “ ‘A New You for the New Year.’ I wouldn’t want to be a new me. I like the old me.”

“That’s just advertising hype.” Christie brushed it away.

“I wish it wasn’t just advertising hype,” Michelle said. “I’d love to be a new me. I’d love to have it all together for once. If you really want to go, Christie, I’ll come back after Christmas and go with you. It might be fun.”

“They wouldn’t let you stay at the college,” Tara said. “You wouldn’t have any place to sleep.”

“There are hotels in New Haven,” Christie said.

Tara got up off the floor. “I think this is a terrible idea,” she told them. “I can’t believe either one of you is considering it. It costs five hundred dollars just to go up there, never mind what meals and room are going to run. And what for?”

“Maybe we just want to take some time out and bounce around for a while,” Michelle said resentfully. “Why do you have to make an issue about everything? You make fun of the Women’s Revolutionary Caucus, but you’re just as bad.”

“I’m not just as bad,” Tara said. “I’m just talking common sense.”

Christie got up off the beanbag chair and wandered over to the common room window. Like the window in her bedroom, this one looked out on the quad. The quad was deserted.

“It’s just talk anyway,” she said. “We haven’t actually done anything yet. Don’t get all worked up about it yet.”

“If I don’t get all worked up about it now,” Tara said, “it will be too late to get all worked up about it later.”

Christie put her hand up and rubbed it against her left breast. She couldn’t feel the lump through her sweater and her other clothes. It was as if it had dissolved, which was just what ought to happen to it. Maybe, if she went into her room and lay down on her bed and felt herself against her bare skin, it would be gone.

“I think we ought to do it,” she said firmly, and then she heard her voice slide into the mechanical singsong that had been the voice of her thoughts for a week. “I think we ought to take control of our lives and fight the good fight against fatigue, aging, disease, and early death.”

Michelle giggled.

Tara blew a raspberry. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Give me a break.”

S
TELLA MORTIMER HAD BEEN
working when Tim Bradbury brought the new instructor in, and she was still working half an hour later, when there were sounds in the hallway to tell her that the new instructor was not having an easy time settling in. Stella did not find this surprising. She had been working at Fountain of Youth, on and off, for fifteen years now. She always found it very uncomfortable when she had to spend the night at the Fountain of Youth house, instead of going home to her own small apartment near the cemetery and the Yale Co-op. Of course, the house was not uncomfortable in a physical sense. Magda had been born poor and only become rich in middle age. Like everyone else Stella had ever known with that kind of history, Magda liked her luxuries. Somewhere along the line, the house where Magda lived and did her work had been gutted and completely remodeled. The bathrooms were large and tiled and color coordinated in pastels. The bedrooms were large and color coordinated, too, but for those Magda preferred deeper, more soothing hues. Then there was the kitchen, a high-tech fantasy. It had two conventional ovens and two convection ovens and three microwave ovens and a whole countertop lined with different kinds of food processors in different sizes, so that anyone who wanted to could make anything they wanted to without being inconvenienced by inadequate appliances.

In Stella’s own apartment out by the Co-op, the kitchen was a tiny galley space with only one conventional oven and no microwave at all. Her living room was smaller than the office she worked in at Fountain of Youth. Her bedroom was a loft space she was going to have to do something about soon, because now that she was in her sixties she was getting a touch of arthritis in her knees and having a hard time climbing the ladder. When the loft space went, she was going to mourn it. She had been sleeping there since she first decided to settle in New Haven, back in 1978. She’d had her first and only real love affair on the platform bed she had installed under the row of windows that looked out on her backyard. It wasn’t until the love affair was over that she had realized that her backyard was a mass of weeds and broken concrete. Beyond it, there were vacant lots and the listing hulks of wood buildings left to rot. Like the rest of New Haven, like Stella herself, this view had been getting old in secret, wearing out, giving in to time. Stella Mortimer had no patience at all for the Fountain of Youth philosophy. She thought it was ridiculous to try to stay young when you weren’t young anymore. She thought it was positively evil to punish yourself just because your skin had started to sag. Her skin was sagging and her hair was gray and her solid little body showed the thickening of menopause without complaint—but she thought she was better off than Magda, who was crazy.

The film that was running through her viewer was all wrong. It had shots of light in it and bursting air pockets on the edges. Half of it had been shot from the wrong angle. It was supposed to show a straight-on shot of Magda leading a class of instructors in a kick-jump dance. Instead, it showed feet and legs and seldom got much higher than that. When it did get higher, what tended to appear was Magda’s face, bloated and blue looking. Stella reached around the side of the viewer and found her pack of Merit cigarettes. She was the only person at Fountain of Youth who was allowed to smoke on the premises, and she always felt guilty when she did it. That was another reason she would like to be home. In her own living room, she could smoke cigarettes and drink wine at her own pace. She wouldn’t have to face a situation like this with nothing to take the edge off the frustration.

Stella bent over the viewer again. There were still shots of light. There were still air bubbles. There were still odd shots taken from odder angles, telling her that Robbie Boulter, their cameraman, had not been paying attention. Stella sat back again and said,

“Shit.”

On the other side of the office, Faith Keller, Stella’s assistant, looked up from the table where she was pasting up dummy mechanicals for a new brochure.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Having a bad night?”

Like Stella, Faith was an older woman who had once led a more interesting life. You could read it in the lines on her face. Stella pushed herself away from the viewer and attacked her cigarette in earnest.

“I keep telling Magda she shouldn’t hire young men,” Stella said. “Not for camera work. Not if she’s in a hurry. Their hormones get working and they forget about what they’re doing.”

“Did he make a mess of it?”

“Leg shots,” Stella said darkly. “Ass shots. It’s incredible.”

“He’ll be all right by the end of the week, though,” Faith said. “It’s like working in an ice cream store when you really like ice cream. I did that once.”

Stella tried to imagine Faith working in an ice cream store. She couldn’t. Faith was one of those tall, thin, wispy women who seemed to have been born to float.

“I know he’ll get better,” Stella said, “but in the meantime we’re in a hurry, and this film is unusable, and we’re going to have to shoot this dance all over again. I think Simon’s being very shortsighted to put all the money around here into advertising. Advertising isn’t going to help him any if he puts out a shoddy product.”

“You’re the one who’s putting out the product around here,” Faith said. “You and Magda. Neither one of you ever does anything shoddy.”

“Neither one of us is getting any sleep lately, either,” Stella said. “If you want to know what I really think is stupid, it’s having Magda lead the dances on this tape and front the tour at all. She’s over fifty, I don’t care what kind of shape she’s in. She’s going to get out to Omaha or Kansas City and break an ankle, and then what are we going to do?”

“She won’t break an ankle. She takes very good care of herself. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Bring your body to the Fountain of Youth. Eat right, do the right exercises, and you can stay young forever. Magda is certainly a great advertisement for it.”

“If she’s lit right,” Stella said.

Faith turned back to her mechanicals. “You shouldn’t spend so much of your time worrying about this kind of thing. Get your job done and go home. Try to relax a little. I can pick up the loose ends. I know how much you hate to get stuck here overnight.”