Sleeping Beauty (52 page)

In his office, he called Keith, in Tamarack. “Nothing new,” Keith said. “They're about done with the reservoir, another week, maybe. The ditch was fixed a long time ago; you knew that. The EPA's holding hearings in January. We've got two weeks to go till Thanksgiving, and it's been snowing for a week so everybody's happy. That's it.”

“That's all? It's been over a month since we talked.”

“Listen, this town is dead. It's between seasons, remember? The most exciting thing that's happened in a couple months is that I had dinner at Gail and Leo's a while back.”

“You didn't tell me that.”

“I didn't learn anything you didn't already know. I had a little chat with your niece. Great bod, but what a cold fish. She didn't seem to like me much.”

“Why not?”

“How do I know? I told you: she's an iceberg.”

“Did she say why she's there?”

“I didn't ask. I was trying to find out about the company.”

“And?”

“I didn't get much. There was this little act going on between Leo and Josh to keep changing the subject.”

“He was there?”

“He's around a lot. He was in Egypt in October; since he came back he's in Tamarack every couple weeks. Usually with your, you know, niece. Let's see, what did I find out. Anne says she isn't moving to Tamarack, in case you wondered. Gail feels bad about her daddy; she knows things are terrible for him and she'd like to help, but she's not about to help him sell The Tamarack Company. Ethan's dream, she called it, and now theirs. She gave a good speech. Something between a sob and a raised fist.”

“What?”

“I said—”

“I heard you.” Vince's eyes were thoughtful. Since when was Keith a sharp observer with a clever tongue? He'd been hiding behind that stupid-asshole act—and Vince hadn't caught on. Watch him, he thought suddenly. “What else?” he asked.

“Leo thinks nobody'll buy the company because it's in a mess. That was maybe sounding brave in front of his kids; he's a lot more worried than he says. But he's talking big. The reservoir'll be open in a week or two; the skiing'll be good—the mountain's got a twenty-inch base already—and the EPA's keeping quiet until January and maybe for good; who knows? Your niece got the newspaper publisher to write an editorial about getting every fucking survey done on Tamarack starting with the dinosaurs, and she's got a local lawyer going to a judge to get an injunction so nobody can do a cleanup until the town's had time to, you know, study all of it. She's a first-class agitator, you know that? Vince? You still with me?”

“Go on.”

“Well, so they're yelling for all the surveys and the EPA's waffling, like it takes time to get everything together, you know. Maybe it's too much trouble; you could probably like find out; you're right there. So maybe they'll drop it. Which
means Gail and Leo could like tell the family to wait for spring, see what kind of a season they have. They've spent over a million bucks so far, on the reservoir and trucking in water and running extra ads saying everything's hunky-dory, and there's a pile of lawsuits against them, but they probably could, you know, ride it out if the season is good. Leo already said they'd put off improvements and expansions, and cut the staff.”

There's more, Vince thought; he's holding something back. “What else?”

Keith's voice became casual. “Oh, just something Leo said. He said he wouldn't compromise on maintenance. And he means it. But when things are tight, who knows?”

The son of a bitch, Vince thought. He found himself reluctantly admiring Keith. He kept an eye on everything, looked everywhere for possibilities, did what he was told, and didn't ask questions. But beside his admiration, the clang of warning he'd heard in his head a few minutes earlier sounded again. Watch him. Much too smart for his own good.

“Nothing else,” Keith said. “I'll let you know if anything else comes up. You'll be there, right?”

“I'll be out of the country for a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving. Then I'll be here.”

“Keeping our allies in line?”

“Something like that.” He hung up, annoyed at Keith's prying. It was all right at Gail and Leo's when he was doing it for Vince, but it was not all right when he did it with Vince. He was a nosy kid with a sharp eye, and he wouldn't know a damn thing about Vince except what Vince wanted him to know. He certainly would not know that Vince was going to Europe on his honeymoon.

“Senator,” said his secretary, standing in the doorway, “you told me to get you out of here by two o'clock so you could catch your plane.”

Vince stood up. “Thanks.” He pulled on his coat. “I'll see you in Denver in three days. I can't get married, you know, unless my staff is there.”

“We'll be there, Senator. We're looking forward to it. It's
so good of you to include us, and to pay our way . . . we want you to know we're very grateful.”

Vince nodded. “If Ray Beloit calls, tell him I'll meet him at the airport. If Sid Folker calls, tell him I'm expecting him to meet my plane. The wedding will be in his house, so you can reach me there if I'm not home.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary said, and Vince realized he had told her all this before. Why was he acting like a nervous kid, about to get married for the first time?

He wasn't nervous; he was filled with exhilaration. This was the real beginning of the presidential race. He still had the Senate race ahead of him, but he had no doubt he would win it. He was already looking past that, and that was why he was getting married to the perfect woman, the perfect partner: sweet tempered, pretty enough, wealthy, well connected, and busy with good works. Every American's dream of a perfect first lady. And when she looked at Vince with adoring eyes, she became his dream of a perfect wife.

Why not? Vince thought, settling into his limousine. If you wait long enough, everything comes to you.

H
e called for her at eight, and when she opened the door to the white cocoon of her apartment and smiled at him, saying, “Welcome back,” he was so glad to see her he instinctively took her hands in his. She pulled back, of course; had he taken a moment to think about it, he would have been able to predict that she would. Angry with himself, and with her, he followed her into the living room where wine and hors d'oeuvres were on the glass coffee table.

But she was glad to see him. He sat on a white couch while Anne stood before him, pouring the wine. She wore a short dark-blue silk dress that fit closely and showed off her long, elegant legs; her dark hair was loosely brushed back, framing her face. She seemed quite content to let the silence linger, so Josh thought about her, and the look in her eyes as she had greeted him. Warm, welcoming, glad to see him, a little bit surprised. Surprised, he thought; she hadn't expected to be glad. Or to be as glad as she was. But then she pulled away.

We'll have to talk about that, he thought. Sometime soon. And of course she knows it.

“Does coming back early mean success or failure?” Anne asked as they sat on the couch.

“Success.” He raised his glass in a silent toast. “At least, possible success. We found the entrance to a corridor leading, we hope, to somebody's tomb. Whether it's our
pharaoh's corridor or somebody else's we won't know for a month, maybe two; it'll take that long to dig out the debris.”

“From what?”

“Earthquakes or flash floods. We'll know that, too, when we get farther in and see the damage to the pillars and walls. I have slides; they'll give you an idea of the setting.”

“You have them with you?”

“Yes, I picked them up on the way here, but they can wait.”

“No, I'd like to see them now. How wonderful; I didn't think you'd have them so soon. Would you mind?”

“No, of course not.”

“I'll get the projector.” She jumped up and went to the other room, returning almost immediately with the projector and tray. She was nervous, or perhaps, Josh thought, she had become nervous since that look of surprise flashed in her eyes. “If you want to put the slides in . . .” She handed him the tray. Josh felt her discomfort, and wondered at it. Silently, he filled the circular tray and gave it back to her, watching as she fit it into the projector. She reached behind her and switched off the lamp, and they were in darkness barely relieved by the faint glow of a small lamp across the room. Anne pushed a button, the slide fell into place, and a large scene sprang to life on the wall at the end of the room: the vast expanse of barren rock cliffs and shadowed sand dunes of the Valley of the Kings. Anne drew in a sharp breath, leaning forward. “How magnificent,” she breathed.

Josh contemplated her rapt profile. “Why?”

“The scale, the sheer overwhelming size of it. It's the reason I love the mountains: that special kind of beauty that's so massive and elemental, and enduring. It makes it possible to believe in eternity.”

“It's why I keep going back,” Josh said. “If I didn't have work there, I'd have to invent some.”

“But you have the mountains, too.”

“They're a little more human; there's life in them. You'll have to see the desert; it's wonderful and terrifying at the same time. It's as unforgiving a landscape as you'll find anywhere, but it draws people back again and again. It's a
little like the dark side of our selves; harsh and cruel, but perversely attractive.”

Anne's eyes were fixed on him. After a minute, she shook her head. “That's a long way from the beauty I was talking about.” She pushed a button to advance the next slide.

For a few minutes, the cool, white living room was transformed to a brown and gold landscape of rough textures and blinding light. Anne could feel the waves of heat that rippled over the dusty bodies of the workers hacking at the rock; she could almost feel the gritty sand between her teeth, and hear the clang of steel on stone. She was still leaning forward, drawn into the exotic scene that almost surrounded her. I'd like to be there, she thought. I wish I'd been there when these pictures were taken.

Josh described each slide, his deep voice relaxed, but with a kind of passion that made it seem he was actually leading Anne through this world she had never seen. He told her about Hosni—“the best supervisor anyone could ask; a self-taught Egyptologist who knows more than a lot of the experts; and the only man who excavates in white pants and never gets them dirty”—and named the workers, whom he had known all the years they had been searching for Tenkaure's tomb. At that his voice became more charged with the excitement of what would come next. “They'll dig out the corridor—fairly quickly, unless they find paintings on the ceiling and side walls; then they slow down to a crawl, doing hand work—and Hosni will call me when they get to the first door. That usually leads to a large, square room with another door in the far wall; beyond that is a passage with other rooms leading off it. The air is heavy, and hot; it feels old, as if nothing could live in it. But we've seen tombs with wheat placed beside the pharaoh, to help feed him on his journey to the next life, and it sprouted, in that dark, sealed place, before dying for lack of water. It's a wondrous thing, that tenacity of life; more elemental than any emotion. Except love, I suppose, because that's a synonym for life.” He paused. “We don't have any idea how many rooms there might be, or how big they are; we do know that the last room always holds the sarcophagus, with the mummy in its
coffin, inside. If we're among the truly blessed, it's there now, waiting for us; the stone lid of the sarcophagus, waiting to be lifted . . .”

Anne was caught in the spell of his words and the intensity of his voice. “I'd like to see it. And touch it. And feel the air . . .”

“We can arrange that,” said Josh. “You really should be there; a camera only hints at it. There's one last slide.”

Anne pushed the button. The stone steps filled the lighted area, with a woman's fingers spread out on one corner. “Carol's hand,” Josh said. “The friend who loans me art books; I mentioned her to you. She's still over there; she was more excited about the dig than I thought she'd be. That's the last of them.”

I wish it had been my hand. I wish I'd stood there, next to him, and looked at those steps and imagined what lay at the bottom of them.

“They're wonderful slides,” she said. “For a while it felt very warm in here.” She turned on the lamp behind her. They blinked in the light and smiled at each other. Anne's nervousness returned, and she turned her attention to removing the slides from the tray and returning them to their small yellow boxes. The memory of her pulling from him so abruptly when he arrived gnawed at her. She had turned a simple greeting into a complicated maneuver, and that was not like her. It should have been quite casual; he had only been gone a little more than a week. But it had felt longer, and she had been so glad to see him, and that had taken her by surprise. How had she let Josh become such a part of her life that eight days seemed a long time? I'll have to think about it. And we'll have to talk about it if I want to keep seeing him. Not tonight, but sometime soon.

But they did not. They saw each other only occasionally. Anne had taken two new clients early in October and had even stopped going to Tamarack. Josh took two brief trips that fall, and his days and nights were taken up with his classes and meetings with students, committee meetings at the museum, writing, and talking by telephone to Hosni, who, so far, had nothing to report. Then, at the beginning of
December, he invited Anne to a dinner to benefit the Museum of the Ancient World.

The dinner was in the museum, with cocktails in the interior courtyard, with its gardens of herbs and flowers from ancient times, sculptures from Rome and Greece, a blue-glazed faience hippopotamus from Egypt, and small, squat pre-Columbian figures in glass cases along the walls. It was the first time Josh and Anne had been seen together in Los Angeles society.