Snowy Nights in Aspen

In those days we got dining room chairs, as well as other items, from the dump. This was in Aspen. The grocery store was in the basement of the opera house and ran charge accounts. Houses, most of them from the mining days, were selling for five figures.

It was the 1960s. The town still had a vague air of destitution and most streets were unpaved. It was a ski town, a kind of legend even then. I had a house near the Meadows with two bedrooms and a small brick basement, the bricks unmortared. In the winter the snow came down, almost horizontal as it swept past the windows, heavy and white, unending, like silent applause. In the fireplace, logs, which in early autumn we had virtuously cut and split, were burning with a furious sound. It’s hard to think of a feeling of greater well-being: storm without, fire within. What was going on in the rest of the world? It little mattered. The porch was buried in snow, the skis leaning against the wall. People were coming to dinner.

It seems, looking back, to have been the dinners. They were countless. Friends, and sometimes their friends, people from out of town, people met skiing. There were dinners when the candlesticks fell over on the sideboard and the frame of the mirror caught fire. Nobody noticed until flames were running up the wall. There were triumphant dinners and dinners that were simply disasters, when the meat was like cardboard and Gordon Forbes’s passionate daughter threw it on the floor—by unfortunate coincidence the potatoes were underdone that night.

There were dinners when marvelous things were said, confessions and opinions that would never have come forth but for the company and the wine, and dinners when guests, in need of a little fresh air, went out and were discovered, after an hour, sleeping on the woodpile.

Somewhere along the way we began to jot down a few lines as a reminder of who had been there and what was served, mainly to avoid repeating the menu, and over time there crept in brief comments, a record, like notes one might make in the margin of a book.

Thus were created The Annals, Robin Fox dramatically reciting Swinburne, Lorenzo unexpectedly appearing, as if at the opera, in a fur-collared coat—that was the night when the exotic-looking wife of a painter was the sexual star of the evening. She had high cheekbones and arched eyebrows. She had been to France, she said—it seemed to have a special meaning.

Leafing through the notebook in which all this was written, one comes across loose pages and others that are water- or wine-stained, difficult to make out. But there is also a strange feeling, almost of accomplishment, in thinking of bygone evenings—no matter what else, life has been lived. Names I have forgotten are there, and others I simply don’t recognize. “Four bottles of Bordeaux,” is one succinct entry and beneath it, “Spaghetti carbonara like glue.” There were five at the table that night, and the couple later got divorced. It happened in an odd way. The husband had had a long affair which he knew his wife was aware of and was causing her unhappiness. He was very fond of his mistress but decided the marriage came first and one day announced to his wife that it was over.

“What’s over?” she said.

“Me and Maya.”

“You and who?” his wife said.

Many nights, apparently, there was poker, not the grown-up kind but congenial games, the value of hands sometimes written out for women who had never played or who had forgotten. “The Judge was losing and left early,” is an entry. He eventually left town as well, but the memory of him is vivid. He was squire-like and cordial, but could be abrupt and unyielding. In younger days he’d once jumped from a window to end it all, in love and rejected, but the window was only on the second floor.

On another evening advances of more chips from the bank were being written for convenience on the label of a bottle of wine. Tom Hubbard had been losing and several times he, as well as other players, had replenished their chips. Weary and having lost yet another pot, he inquired plaintively, “Is there any room left on the wine bottle?”

There is someone’s unattributed description of the sensuous life in Cuba before Fidel. Perhaps we were smoking cigars. “In Havana,” it reads, “the woman takes the cigar in her palms and warms it over a lamp. Then she dips it in a decanter of dark rum and rolls it again. Then she puts the end in the flame of the lamp. The man takes two puffs . . .” I try to imagine who was delivering this alluring account. Was it Abigail, Portia, Krista-all—names I cannot attach a person to—or the orchestra conductor or former lieutenant governor? Nor can I identify the minister on the evening when there was written only, “Man of God got drunk.” Irene was there that night. She was young and from the South, attractive to both sexes and with the most knowing smile imaginable. She’d been married once briefly, to a man named Thorndike. The reception, she liked to say, lasted longer than the marriage.

Did we ski the next day? There is no telling. In my memory it is more often after a day of skiing, filled with that matchless, almost lightheaded exhaustion, that we sat down to dinner. The talk was of runs and gear, of the snow on Powderhorn that was more perfect than it had ever been. The temperature was just right, cold, about twenty degrees, and no one had been down it; the tracks we made were a declaration of happiness.

I wonder why, unrelated to anything else, I find Joe Fox’s six rules for being the ideal weekend guest. Fox was a senior editor at Random House. He had been the editor for a book of mine but more notably had edited Truman Capote, Philip Roth, and Peter Matthiessen as well as others. A Philadelphian through many generations, he had certainly been to great houses. From that February evening, there are these unexplained but most likely unimpeachable rules: 1) Never arrive too early 2) Bring a gift the hostess will love 3) Stay to yourself for at least three hours a day 4) Play all their games 5) Don’t sleep in the wrong bed 6) Leave on time.

The days of winter and skiing are perfect days. If asked to explain why, I can only say, somewhat helplessly, because one loves them. The fire in the evening, the fatigue and ease, the lack of guilt at having spent the day in no more than pursuit of pleasure, and finally the warm, convivial dinner. Abbodanza. If leaders of enemy peoples could ski together, much hardship could be avoided.

One night just after Christmas someone brought a houseguest, a young Japanese. He was probably perplexed by the customs but being, as it turned out, the son of a former prime minister of Japan, he was both socially adept and polite. He sent a thank-you letter which still hangs, framed, on the wall in the kitchen. Somewhat faded, it reads, “It was very nice to know you. Thank you very much for inviting me for a great dinner. I enjoyed your cocking very much.” The slight misspelling which makes the letter a classic is the writer’s. Courtie Barnes, who read it a few weeks later, remarked admiringly, “Incredible we could have gone to war against such a charming people.”

In the beautiful winter, on snowy nights, the people are all like that.

Colorado Ski Country USA

1997–98