Roundabout

"I have another private lesson this morning," he said. "Why don't you shower and I'll take you home to get a change, then..."

"Then what, Aaron? Pick me up tonight? Take me home again? Do it all over again tomorrow?"

He shook his head. "What?"

She looked away. "I don't know how you do it, Aaron. This wall you've built around your heart. You give and you give and you never feel. You never let anyone give anything back, and every time you give your wall gets bigger and stronger."

He looked away, looked out the window at the mountain, at where Terry was yesterday, at where he let go of the dream a second time.

"Aaron? Are you afraid to fall in love? Is that it? Is that why you give and give and give? Is that why your wall is so strong?"

He turned back to her, looked at her eyes, and he nodded his head. "Yes," he said. "That's right. That's exactly right."

"Will you let me in?"

"I could try, Shirley, but I don't want to hurt you."

"So don't. Let me in, let love in."

"Is that what you want?"

"It doesn't matter what I want right now, Aaron. It's what you want."

He leaned in and kissed her again. "Alright. Could we go slow? Take it slow for a few days, see where this takes us?"

She looked at him, at the ever growing wall around his heart. "Sure, Aaron. That's what we'll do. Take it slow." She went to the shower and washed off, then put on her old clothes.

"Smoothie?" he said, handing her the glass, and she took it, sipped it tentatively before she drank it down. "Not bad," she said. "Ready?"

"Sure."

They drove over to the employee quads and he helped her in. "I'll wait for you. Out in the truck," he said, then she looked at him.

"That's alright. You go on."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, Aaron, I'm sure. Seeya later."

"Okay," he said, nodding his head, not understanding anything, least of all women. "Later."

He parked in the employee lot by the airport again, rode the shuttle into town and walked up to Pepi at the ski school desk.

"I still have their skis here," she said, "that private lesson from yesterday. Did she tell you what to do with them?"

"I'll take them this afternoon," he said. "What do I have today?"

"Oh, you're gonna have fun today," she said, handing him the reservation form with the client's name on it.

"Wow. I used to love her movies..."

"She asked for you, you know. You have a reputation, I guess."

"Do I?" He looked at his watch, then at his phone.

A call from Houston. He hit the call back button.

"Texas Heart Institute. How may I direct your call?"

"Sorry, I think a Terry Russell called me from this number..."

"Just a moment, please..."

The phone went silent, then began ringing again.

"Surgery waiting?"

"Terry Russell, please. Aaron Goodman calling."

"Just a moment..."

"Aaron? Aaron, is that you?"

"Terry, how's Tom?"

"Oh, thank God. I'm so glad you called..."

"Terry? What's happened?"

"Happened? Oh, Tom's fine. They cleaned out one of his carotids, replaced a valve, the mitral valve, I think. He was pretty sick I guess."

"How're you doing?"

"Aaron, listen, I haven't been able to stop thinking about you, about everything. I know life is full of doubt, doubts about everything, but something became clear to me yesterday. Feelings. My feelings for you. Something happened. It's like you became the center of my universe, and I've never felt such clarity in my life, not ever..."

"Terry? What are you thinking about...? What about Tom? Aaron and Didi? What about not believing in love?"

"Aaron? Tell me to go away and I will. Tell me to come to you, and I will. Do you understand what I'm saying? Just tell me, tell me what to do!"

He stood there in silence, stood on the edge of the precipice. "Terry, think about what you want. What you really want. I'm off tomorrow and Tuesday. If you decide to come, I'll be there. You know I'll always be there."

He hit the end button and the words came to him: Twenty four before my love you'll see...

She would be there, at last...they would finally be together...

+

Quarter 'til nine...gotta run now...

Skis ought to be okay...shit, didn't take the boots home...

Cold...wet...oh, so tight...too much salt...feet must be swollen...

She'll come. I know she'll come...

Betty McCall? God, she was so cute? How many movies did she make? Before she quit?

Oh, hell, people are staring at her, and she's wallowing in the attention...

"This is going to be an interesting day..."

+

He walked up to the private lesson corral, called out her name and people laughed. Like who wouldn't know Betty McCall...

She walked over to him, looking him over all the way. "You're Aaron?"

"I am. And you must be..."

"God, you're even cuter in person. I may have you for lunch."

He laughed. "Well, let's get away from here, up on the mountain," he said as he took her skis and led her to the gondola building. Soon they were headed up the mountain, the gondola car cold and damp.

"How much skiing have you done," he asked.

"A little, twenty years ago. I had to take lessons, for a movie I was in."

"Oh? So now, what can I help you with up here?"

"My boyfriend likes to ski. He has a house up here, and he wants me to ski with him when he comes here."

"I see. Well, we'll see if we can't do that, then. Are you cold?"

"Freezing!"

He reached over, zipped up her jacket, tucked her gloves inside her jacket's sleeves and pulled her pant's snow-cuffs down over her boots...'like taking care of a three year old,' he said to himself.

"Thanks," she said. "It's been a while..."

"Pretty unforgiving environment, Miss McCall."

"Betty, please."

"So, who recommended me, if you don't mind me asking?" She rattled off names he'd heard before, other actresses he'd taught over the years, but he thought she reeled off names like lines in a play... all sincerity on the surface, maybe, but he wasn't sure what lay under that surface. Malice? A vacuous non-life? He couldn't tell, but so many of the actors and actresses he'd met over the years had been serial pretenders, content to look like skiers, he laughed at the memory, rather than actually being skiers.

And for some reason his mind brought Shirley into sudden, sharp focus. 'Am I content to look like I love people, to act the part of loving someone,' he thought, 'rather than actually loving?"

The simple choral refrain Paul Simon hummed in the movie Shampoo filled his mind...and he wondered if that's all he was. He could never have Terry so he filled the void with empty promises and noncommittal committals. Was his life as simple as that?

"You seem lost in thought this morning," McCall said. "Rough night?"

He looked at her, looked in her eyes. "I was thinking about my life," he said softly. "How someone reached out to me last night, someone quite lovely, really. About how I couldn't make the leap, I couldn't let go of all the fear. In the end, I think, I couldn't let go of my loneliness."

The actress seemed stunned. Stunned that someone, anyone, would utter a simple truth to her, confide in her, trust her. Not play her for the fool. She saw pain, simple, honest pain, and it touched her.

"We get used to playing a role, over and over," she said, and he looked at her lips as she spoke, trying to gauge the sincerity of the gesture in her words, "and I think we do so because somewhere along the way we're programmed to. We follow that script all our lives, we don't know who wrote it but it's the only script we have, so we follow it over and over again. Maybe it was our parent's script, maybe it's in our genes, or maybe there's a puppeteer up there and we're all dancing when he pulls our strings. Whatever it is, we can't seem to break loose. I think it takes something big, something colossal and life affirming to break free of the script."

"Do you feel this way too?"

"Do I? Hell, there's not a day goes by where I don't feel like I'm drowning in my life's script. Like it's something I can't escape, or break free of. When every new relationship feels like a fresh start, then it becomes one more train wreck looming in the night. One more in a series. I gave up, finally. I just hang on, like I'm just going along for the ride..."

"Yet you feel like something big could...?"

"Yeah, it's always right around the bend; like it's out there, somewhere, just waiting for me to find it. I think if I stopped believing in that I'd die." She laughed, looked out the window. "So, what the hell kind of ski lesson is this? You should be paying me for this stuff!"

"Sorry. Something about last night, this morning, is messing with my head."

"Yeah? So, who's the girl who did this to you?"

"Sorry?"

"The one who got away? The girl who broke your heart?"

"I saw her yesterday. First time in nearly thirty years. She was with her kids, her husband had a heart attack up at the Sundeck and had to be airlifted out of here. We connected somehow, in all the madness."

She looked at him, he could see she felt sorry for him.

"Anyway, I was thinking about that movie, Shampoo..."

"Warren Beatty, Julie Christie? Yeah, that was a slice of life," she mused.

"That refrain, you know, the one Paul Simon did?"

"Haunting. I hear that version and I hear death, the death of the sixties. Like Nixon, I guess, marks death in the movie. He marked the final death of idealism in America -- just as certainly as Oswald's bullet marked the beginning of that death."

"Version?" he said. "What do you mean?"

"Have you listened to Silent Eyes, on Still Crazy After All These Years?"

"I don't remember it."

"It's a vocal rendition, but the mood is there, sort of. But I like the version in the movie more. Soulful, I guess, is how that feels. Loss, mourning, infinite longing."

He nodded. "I felt alive yesterday. Maybe for the first time, in a long time. Only right now I can't tell if I felt that way because of seeing a friend from my past, or trying to reach out to the girl I was with last night."

"If I had to guess, I would say the girl from your past. You look like you want to reconnect with that feeling. The past. My concern is always that's a part of the script that got broken a long time ago. Maybe we want to finally see how it plays out? Maybe because we don't know how it might have played out, and that's a big question to us? Maybe it wouldn't have been as good as you wish it was, but who knows...maybe what you found last night is what's scaring you?"

"Yeah, I don't know," he said as the upper gondola building came into view. "Well, looks like we're here. You ready for this?"

+

Now where the hell did that come from?

Felt like a confessional. Just fucking weird...like I was in church...

Her eyes? The way she looked at me?

It's like she was looking in my soul. Looking right through me...into my deepest fears.

How? How could she do that? Know so much?

Hell, she's an actress! She puts on layers of bullshit so deep no one can see through it all.

Oh, no. She's shivering...

+

"Are you alright? Need to go in for some hot cocoa or something?"

"No, I think I just need to get moving..."

"Okay," he said as he got his skis on. He watched as she struggled with her's, then bent down to cock the bindings and guide her boots in. "Step down hard," he said when the first one locked-down, then he moved to the other ski. "Okay, I think you're ready."

"I feel nervous," she said. "Shaky..."

"No one watching but me, and I'm here to help, remember?"

"Yeah, right."

"Head down there," he said, pointing to the Copper trail sign, thinking about Terry when he did. "I'll be right behind you."

She pushed off, got right into a beginners snow-plow and made a few halting, grinding turns, her arms flailing, her legs stiff, rigid with fear. After the third turn she crumpled and went down, cussing as she fell, and he stopped by her downhill side and offered his hand. "Betty? Are you sure you want to do this?" She refused his hand, sat on the snow looking like a three year old -- lower lip pouting, arms crossed, fuming at the world...

"Aaron, I am absolutely positive I don't want to do this, but I have to. Jack's coming out in two weeks, and I'm going to be good enough to get down this goddamn mountain by then. And you're the one who's going to get me there. Got it?"

"Okay," he said as he bent down to get her out of her skis, "But first, we're going to the lodge and get you warmed up, and we're going to talk about skis, and skiing, then we'll come back out."

"I'm not going to argue with that!" she said as she took his hand, and when she was standing on her own she looked in his eyes, took his face in her hands and kissed him gently. "Thanks. I'll try not to be such a pain in the ass."

"Come on. Hot cocoa beckons!" He carried her skis, skated along beside her, put their skis in the rack then walked inside with her. She took the table Tom had been at yesterday, and she looked out the window at Aspen Highlands across the valley.

"Did you have breakfast this morning?" he asked, and she shook her head. Her hands were shaking a little too, slight tremors, really, then he saw a Medic Alert bracelet on her wrist. "Type 1 or 2," he said as he looked at her color.

"Pardon?"

"Diabetes? Type 1, I'm guessing."

She nodded her head. "That's right."

"And you haven't eaten?"

"Maybe I should have some orange juice," she sighed as their waitress walked up.

"Maybe so. The make a great egg white omelet here too. Maybe some smoked salmon with that?"

She nodded.

"Make that two, with a couple of cranberry-orange muffins, two OJs and some hot cocoa."

The waitress walked off, smiling at Aaron as she left.

"You're very perceptive," McCall said.

"Do you have a death wish?" he whispered.

"Sometimes, yes. I did earlier today, anyway."

"Tell me about Jack."

"Oh, he's been coming up here forever, kind of a local, I guess. I met him a few months ago, and he invited me up for Valentine's Day."

"So, you're together?"

"Oh, heaven's no. I hope after that weekend we will be, though."

He nodded understanding, thought about her script and if she knew she was setting herself up for failure again, but he saw her watching his eyes, and suddenly felt like she was reading his mind...or maybe, he thought, that's what separates the good actors and actresses from the mediocre...their ability to read moods and react quickly to changing realities?

"That must sound so shallow," she said, "after what we just talked about."

His phone chimed, and he excused himself, said he needed to check his messages as he pulled out his iPhone. One from Shirley, one from Terry. He opened Shirley's first: "Sorry about this morning. I was feeling confused, rejected. I had such a good time last night. Hope we can do it again sometime. L"

He smiled, shook his head, then opened Terry's: "Tuesday morning at 8:35 on United." Like he was playing poker, he replied "okay" then shut down the phone and pocketed it.

"Ah, that was the one you were waiting for, wasn't it?"

"You're very perceptive too, Miss McCall," he said, grinning.

"Good news, I take it?"

"Hopeful, Betty. Hopeful."

"That's the best there is, Aaron. Nothing better than hopeful."

"So, about that death wish?"

"I felt like a fool standing out there this morning. All those people pointing and staring, all those people who've been skiing all there lives...and then there I was. I can't make three turns without falling on my face. I'm an actor, not a pretender, but standing out there? I felt shabby. Like the biggest pretender that ever lived."

"Everyone's a beginner," he said, grinning, "in the beginning." Cocoa and muffins arrived, and he pointed. "Eat."

"Yes, Master!" she said, feigning subservience. "I shall obey, Master!"

"Goddamn!" he said, smiling broadly. "You know, you're cuter now than you were twenty years ago..."

"And you're so sexy I got weak in the knees when I first saw you."

He chuckled. "Right."

"Oh, Aaron, laugh if you want, but I'm dead serious."

"Well," he said as he looked her in the eye, "you'll never learn to ski if we take that trail. Now, drink that cocoa before it cools down."

They ate and talked 'skis and skiing' for an hour, then he took her back outside. It was sunny and warmer, the snow was softer now too, more forgiving as he helped her back into her skis.

"Okay, remember what I said about a ski's sidecut? About how if you get the ski on edge it will almost turn on it's own..."

They worked the rest of the day, stopping only for a snack mid-afternoon, and by three thirty she was exhausted, almost shaking -- but she was skiing, and she was happy. By the time she was at the gondola station she was almost ecstatic...

"That's the endorphins," he said. "You'll feel good for another hour or so, then the pain will set in. Thighs and calves first, but by evening your abs will be screaming. Where are you staying?"

"The St Regis."

"Okay. Get to your room, get cleaned up. See if you can get a massage lined up, and get a smoothie of some sort...bananas, you need lots of potassium or you're going to have leg cramps all night long. Careful with the hot tub thing. That'll just dehydrate you more and make the cramps worse..."

"Jesus, Aaron, you make it sound like hell!"

"Betty, you did great today, but you used muscles you haven't used in years, and you're going to feel it tonight, but even more so in the morning. Now, I'm off tomorrow..."

"No, Aaron...I was counting..."

"I was going to say, if you feel up to it in the morning just call the ski school, tell them to call me and I'll come in."

"I have a better idea. Why don't you stay with me tonight..."

"Because Jack wouldn't like that, and neither would you."

She sighed, a theatrical sigh, and then she swooned, putting her hand to her forehead: "Oh Rhett, whatever shall I do?"

"Frankly, Scarlett, I think you need to work on your impersonations tonight!"

"Oh, Ashley, fiddle-de-dee!"

"Massage, hydrate and potassium! Remember that and you'll be fine."

"Don't you have a card or something? So I could call you in the morning?"

"Sorry...sure..." He fished in a pocket, found his wallet and handed her a couple of cards. "You'll get the ski school at that number, but tell them the extension and they'll connect you."

She frowned. "I can't have your cell?"

"What's yours?" She gave it to him and he dialed the number. "Now you have it."

She smiled. "What are doing tonight?"

"I'm going home and going to sleep. You wore me out today." He turned and started to leave.

"Aaron?"

He turned to her, saw the smile in her eyes.

"Sleep well," she said.

He nodded his head. "You too," he said as he looked at his phone, seeing a new text from Shirley. "I'm at the shop," it read. "Could you stop by?"

He looked at his watch, shook his head and walked over to the rental shop; he looked in the window, saw her at the counter and sighed.

She looked up, saw him standing there and waved; he waved back and went in.

"You look beat," she said, "like someone really wore you out last night."

"Yeah? Well, that's life in the big city. Did you need help getting home?"

"If you're free, sure."

"I can do that. When do you get off?"

"Now. Let me get my things."

When they were on the bus she leaned her head against his shoulder. "I'm sorry about this morning," she said again, and he nodded.

"What are you sorry about?"

"I guess I wanted you to ask me to move in or something," she said. "I just felt so close to you last night, I guess I wanted more. I don't want it to end again, ya know?"

He knew.

They got off at the employee lot and he cleared some snow of the windshield after he got her belted in, and when the engine was warm he got back on 82 and came to the roundabout. He thought about the direction he should take and in the moment he turned off and made his way back up to the quad, back to her apartment, and he helped her in then said goodbye.