John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Charlotte Turner had been very pregnant-she was about to have her first child-when she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for East of Bangor , at the Academy Awards in March 2000. Danny and his dad had watched Charlotte accept the statuette. (Patrice was always closed on Sunday nights.) Somehow, seeing her on television-from Toronto, when Charlotte was in L.A. -well, that wasn’t the same as actually seeing her, was it? Both the cook and Danny wished her well.

It was just bad luck. “Bad timing, huh?” Ketchum had said. (If Joe had died three months later, it’s likely Danny would have already gotten Charlotte pregnant. It had been bad timing, indeed.)

JOE AND THE GIRL HAD TAKEN some of the same courses in Boulder-she was a senior at the university, too-and their trip to Winter Park together might have been a belated birthday present that Joe decided to give himself. According to their mutual friends, Joe and the girl had been sleeping together for only a short time. It was the girl’s first trip alone with Joe to the ski house in Winter Park, though both Danny and his dad remembered her staying at the house for a couple of nights over the last Christmas holiday, when a bunch of Joe’s college friends-girls and boys, with no discernible relationship with one another (at least that the cook and his son could see)-were also camping out at that Winter Park house.

It was a big house, after all, and-as Charlotte had said, because she was closer in age to Joe and his pals than Danny and Dominic were-it was impossible to tell who was sleeping with whom. There were so many of them, and they seemed to be lifelong friends. That last Colorado Christmas, the kids had taken the mattresses from all the guest bedrooms, and they’d piled them in the living room, where both the boys and the girls had cuddled together and slept in front of the fire.

Yet, even with such a mob of them, and amid all the taking turns in the showers-it had surprised Danny and his dad that some of the girls took showers together-it was the cook and his son who’d noticed something special about that girl. Charlotte hadn’t seen it. It was for just the briefest moment, and maybe it meant nothing, but after Joe died with the girl, the writer and the cook couldn’t forget it.

She was pretty and petite, almost elfin, and naturally Joe had made a point of telling his father and grandfather that he’d first met Meg in a life-drawing class, where she’d been the model.

“One look at the girl doesn’t suffice-it isn’t nearly enough,” the cook would tell Ketchum, shortly after that Christmas.

It wasn’t just because she was an exhibitionist, though Meg clearly was that; as had been the case with Katie, Danny had seen for himself the first time, you simply had to look at Meg, and it was almost painful not to keep looking. (Once you saw her, it was hard to look away.)

“What a distraction that girl is,” Danny said to his dad.

“She’s trouble,” the cook replied.

The two older men were making their way along the upstairs hall of that Winter Park house. The wing where the guest bedrooms were was a curious L- shaped addition off that hall-so architecturally strange that you couldn’t pass the junction without at least glancing at the guest-wing hallway, and that was why Danny and Dominic noticed the slight commotion. Then again, their heads might have turned in that direction at the piercing shrieks of the young girls’ laughter-not an everyday occurrence in the lives of the cook and his son.

Meg and another girl were emerging from one of the guest bedrooms, both of them wrapped in towels. Their hair was wet-they must have come directly from a shower-and they ran awkwardly in their tightly wrapped towels to the door of a different guest bedroom, the other girl disappearing into the room before Meg, who was left alone in the guest-wing hallway, just as Joe came around the corner of the L. It all happened so suddenly that Joe never saw his father or grandfather, and neither did Meg. She saw only Joe, and he clearly saw her, and before she slipped inside the guest room and closed the door-to more shrieks of laughter, from within the room-Meg had opened her towel to Joe.

“She shook her little titties at him!” as the cook would later describe the episode to Ketchum.

“A distraction, indeed,” was all Danny had said at the time.

It was what Charlotte would have called “a throwaway line”-a reference to any extraneous dialogue in a screenplay-but after the accident that killed Joe and Meg, the distraction word lingered.

Why hadn’t they been wearing their seat belts, for example? Had the girl been giving him a blow job? Probably she had; Joe’s fly was open, and his penis was poking out of his pants when the body was discovered. He’d been thrown from the car and died immediately. Meg wasn’t so lucky. The girl was found alive, but with her head and neck at an unnatural angle; she was wedged between the brake and the accelerator pedal. She’d died in the ambulance, before reaching the hospital.

What had led Joe and Meg to cut two days of classes in Boulder, and make the drive to Winter Park, at first seemed pretty obvious; yet two days of new, nonstop snow wasn’t the prevailing reason. Besides, it had been a typical late-March snow, wet and heavy-the skiing must have been slow, the visibility on the mountain treacherous. And from the look of the ski house in Winter Park -that is, before the cleaning lady rushed in and made some attempt to restore order-Joe and the girl had spent most of their time indoors. It didn’t appear that they’d done much skiing. Perhaps it had no more significance than most youthful experiments, but the young couple seemed to have made a game out of sleeping in every bed in the house.

Naturally, there would remain some unanswerable questions. If they weren’t in Winter Park to ski, why had they waited until the evening of the second day to drive back to Boulder? Joe knew that after midnight and before dawn, the ski patrol was in the habit of closing U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass, whenever there was any avalanche danger; with such a heavy, wet snow, and because it was the avalanche time of year, possibly Joe hadn’t wanted to risk leaving before light the next morning, when they might still be blasting avalanches above Berthoud Pass. Of course the two lovers could have waited until daylight of the following morning, but maybe Joe and Meg had thought that missing two days of classes was enough.

It was snowing heavily in Winter Park when they left, but there was next to no ski traffic on U.S. 40 in the direction of I-70, and that highway was well traveled. (Well, it was a weekday night; for most schools and colleges that had a March break, the vacation was over.) Joe and Meg must have passed the snowplow at the top of Berthoud Pass; the plowman remembered Joe’s car, though he’d noticed only the driver. Apparently, the plowman hadn’t seen the passenger; perhaps the blow job was already in progress. But Joe had waved to the plowman, and the plowman recalled waving back.

Only seconds later, the plowman spotted the other car-it was coming in the other direction, from I-70, and the plowman presumed it was “a goddamn Denver driver.” This was because the driver was going much too fast for the near-blizzard conditions. In the plowman’s estimation, Joe had been driving safely-or at least slowly enough, given the storm and the slickness of the wet snow on the highway. Whereas the Denver car-if, indeed, the driver was from Denver -was fishtailing out of control as the car came over the pass. The plowman had flashed his lights, but the other car never slowed down.

“It was just a blue blur,” the plowman said in his deposition to the police. (What kind of blue? he was asked.) “With all the snow, I’m not really sure about the color,” the plowman admitted, but Danny would always imagine the other car as an unusual shade of blue-a customized job, as Max had called it.