Fountain of Death(85)

“You haven’t just injured yourself once,” Jimmy Fleck explained to her that morning. “You’ve injured yourself over and over again and you’ve never done anything about it. Your legs are about to disintegrate. This must have been going on for months, for God’s sake. Didn’t you ever notice you were hurt?”

Well, yes, Magda thought now, looking at herself in the mirror as she dressed for her last class of the day. She had noticed that she was hurt, if by “hurt” Jimmy Fleck meant to say “in pain.” She had noticed the pain quite frequently. She had simply assumed that it was, well—

(getting old)

something unthinkable, something she didn’t want to deal with. It seemed impossible to her, after all the work she had put into this, that she would end up just like everybody else. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to work hard. You were supposed to give it everything you had. You were supposed to get what you’d worked for. There was no room in Magda Hale’s life for inevitability.

The pills were lined up on the vanity counter around the sink, thirteen of them, too many to take all at once. Magda had gotten them the easy but expensive way. When Jimmy Fleck had refused to give her a prescription for more than ten (“people get addicted to this stuff, Magda”) she had simply gone down to the Green and said in a rather idle voice that she wished she had some. The whole transaction had taken less than five minutes. She had gotten real pills, too, not substitutes or placebos. She had brought one of her own pills along for comparison. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to go on getting them this way. She would be in too much danger of being caught. She would have to find a doctor who didn’t mind handing them out.

Magda picked up two of the pills, put them in her mouth, and swallowed them straight, without water. She swooped the rest of the pills into her cupped left hand and put them into the bottle the prescription Jimmy had written for her had come in. She felt a little dizzy. These were not the first pills she had taken this morning. She was taking too many of them, and not just because when she didn’t take them she was in pain. She liked the feeling they gave her, the flying floating feeling, and the way she was never worried

(getting old old old old old)

about anything. It was even better than falling in love, because it didn’t make you pick at yourself all the time, wondering if the other person was going to love you back.

“You’re going to have to give up the high-impact aerobics,” Jimmy Fleck had told her. “That’s the only solution to this. You’re going to have to give them up for at least six months and maybe forever. If you don’t, you’re going to cripple yourself.”

Someone had come in through the bedroom door: Simon. Magda put the pills away in the medicine cabinet and checked herself out one more time in the mirror. She had her hair pinned up in the way most likely to come down in a tangle of wisps and sweat halfway through the dance. The customers liked to see their Fearless Leader really getting knocked out by her own workout. It made them feel that they were getting what they paid for.

Magda adjusted the top of her leotard and the legholes, too, so that they didn’t bind. Then she got up and went into the bedroom.

Simon was standing at the window with the curtains drawn back, looking at the backyard.

“I talked to that Gregor Demarkian person a while ago,” he said.

“Did he want something in particular?” The pills were beginning to work. Magda felt positively lightheaded. She sat down on the side of the bed and began to put on her workout shoes.

“He wants to have a meeting here tomorrow morning at ten o’clock,” Simon said. “A big meeting with a whole bunch of people in it, including some of the students in the beginners’ class.”

“The students? But the students couldn’t have been involved in Tim’s murder. They didn’t even know him.”

“You can’t be sure of that, Magda. Tim was local. The students are local. Maybe they all knew him.”

“I suppose.”

“Maybe it’s not Tim he’s thinking about now. Maybe it’s Stella. They were all in the house when Stella died.”

“I keep forgetting that Stella is dead,” Magda said. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t watch it all on the news the way I did with Tim. I think I must have been depressed. I slept through he whole thing.”

“You haven’t even lived through the whole thing yet, Magda. Maybe Mr. Demarkian will have some answers tomorrow morning. I’m a little nervous about the effect of all this on the tour.”