Murder at the Spa (3 page)

Rising from her seat, Charlotte tossed her plastic glass into a trash basket and headed across the esplanade to dinner.

2

Charlotte began her Rejuvenating Plan with breakfast on the veranda. It consisted of half a grapefruit, a low-fat bran muffin, and a cup of peppermint tea. The grapefruit and muffin weren’t so bad—she seldom ate much for breakfast anyway—but the peppermint tea was a sorry substitute for her morning coffee. The night before, she had taken dinner in her room and gone straight to bed. Breakfast was to have been her first chance to look over the other guests. She had wanted to see if there were others of her advanced years. But the dining room was deserted. Although it was only eight, most of the guests were already out on the esplanade. In front of the High Rock Pavilion, a group of sweat-suited figures of indeterminate age and sex was doing aerobics under the direction of an energetic blonde in a pink leotard. A recorder blared a fast-paced disco tape, to which the sweat suits pulsed, bounced, and dipped. Another group jogged in strict military formation around the esplanade behind a young man with bulging biceps. Strict military formation, that is, except for the three fatties who lagged behind, alternately lurching forward in determination and falling back in distress. Charlotte didn’t smile; she would be happy not to be the only one bringing up the rear.

After breakfast, Charlotte headed toward the lobby, where she was to meet her personal exercise advisor, Frannie LaBeau. Frannie was a thin blonde with metal-rimmed granny glasses. As Charlotte’s personal exercise advisor, she explained, she would be responsible for overseeing Charlotte’s spa stay. She would review Charlotte’s program daily, making adjustments and suggestions. Charlotte thought this sounded vaguely despotic. She wondered if a black mark would be entered against her name if she didn’t do the required number of push-ups. In fact, her impression turned out not to be far off the mark. The first event on her schedule was a two-part Fitness Appraisal. The first part, Frannie explained, would be a physical evaluation, the results of which would be fed into a computer along with information from Charlotte’s preadmission physical. The second part would be a computer interview, the subject of which would be her health habits. From this data, the computer would calculate her biological age (as opposed to her real, or chronological, age). “Hopefully,” said Frannie, “your biological age will be younger than your chronological age.”

Frannie explained most of this as they walked across the esplanade. Or rather, Charlotte walked. She had a long leggy stride, as forthright as a man’s. Frannie kind of lurched, her body convulsing with the effort of moving a leg that was withered to a thin spindle. It was the kind of disability that had been common before the polio vaccine, but Frannie was too young to have had polio. Charlotte wondered: a birth defect, muscular dystrophy? On the foot of the withered leg, she wore an orthopedic shoe whose sole was built up to compensate for the shortened leg. But even with the shoe, she walked with a limp, swinging the leg forward stiffly in a kind of choppy rhythm, like an exaggerated dance. They were headed toward the spa quadrangle, which was entered via a set of low steps flanked by wisteria-covered pergolas. The steps, which Frannie managed with a surprising degree of sprightliness, brought them face-to-face with the Hall of Springs, an imposing brick building with a hipped slate roof. To either side stood the two other buildings of the spa: the Roosevelt Bath Pavilion and the Flexner Health Pavilion. The symmetry of the design was completed by a reflecting pool in the center of which stood a graceful bronze sculpture of an Indian maiden filling a gourd at High Rock Spring, and by the open-air colonnades linking the three buildings, giving the quadrangle the contemplative feel of a medieval cloister.

From the steps, they set out across the quadrangle toward the Health Pavilion, startling the peacocks that strutted proudly at the edge of the pool. Entering under an entrance portico whose pediment was adorned with a bas relief of Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health, they found themselves in a lobby, which, with its two-story rotunda, its massive Doric columns, and its glossy black-and-white-tiled marble floor, reminded Charlotte of the lobby of the Bowery Savings Bank on East Forty-second. In the center stood a fountain from which High Rock water flowed continuously. A pair of elliptical staircases led to the second floor. At the stairs, which were steeper than those at the spa entrance, the rhythm of Frannie’s stride was broken. After pausing to grip the brass banister, she proceeded to slowly and tortuously make her way to the top. Reaching the top, they proceeded down a corridor to the Diagnostic Room, a mirror-lined chamber the size of a classroom, in which twelve stations were laid out, each marked by a large red number on the wall. At each station, a different fitness parameter was measured—height; weight; blood pressure; chest, hip, thigh, and arm measurements; and so on.

For the next hour, Frannie put Charlotte through her paces, prodding and measuring with the brisk, impersonal efficiency of a sergeant at a Marine induction center. After the basic measurements came the cardiovascular stress assessment: after being wired with electrodes, Charlotte was asked to pedal hell for leather on something called an ergometric lifecycle. Next came the skin fold analysis, in which the unsightly folds of flesh on the undersides of her upper arms—her bat wings, Frannie called them (somewhat indelicately, Charlotte thought)—were gripped between the menacing pincers of a set of jawed calipers. Then came the pulmonary analysis, in which she had to blow into a balloonlike contraption called a spirometer. And so it went—grip strength, stress profile, flexibility, posture analysis, musculoskeletal assessment. As she made her way from station to station, Charlotte was assailed by words that conjured up a frightening image of degeneration: dowager’s hump, which, thank God, she didn’t have; bunions, which she did. Sagging breasts, liver spots, chicken neck—what grim specters of the grave Frannie didn’t invoke, Charlotte readily imagined for herself. She found it all mildly disturbing. The state of her flesh wasn’t a subject to which she ordinarily gave much thought. She preferred to banish it from her consciousness in the same way that she disguised her bat wings by wearing long-sleeved dresses.

While Frannie fed the results of the physical evaluation into a computer, Charlotte was directed to a cubicle where she spent the next half hour being questioned by its nosy mate. The green characters that appeared so impersonally on the screen demanded answers to intimate questions about her sex life (none) and her bowel movements (regular), as well as to less intimate ones about her smoking, dietary, and drinking habits. Next came a series of stuffy questions about her fitness goals. What would she like to accomplish most? What did she consider her area of greatest weakness? Where would she like to be in five years? The answer to that question was easy: alive and kicking, which she was coming to view as an accomplishment in itself.

She now sat in the office of the spa administrator, Anne-Marie Andersen, awaiting her “personal consultation,” in which she would be presented with the computer’s verdict. The walls of the office were hung with photographs of mountain peaks. They were pyramid-shaped and ridged, domed and saw-toothed, sheathed in ice and strewn with rocks. Seeing them, Charlotte remembered that Anne-Marie was a mountaineer. In fact, she had been the leader of the first all-female team to climb some Himalayan peak or other. Several of the photos were of the blonde who had been leading the aerobics class, whom Charlotte concluded must be Anne-Marie. In one, she was standing atop a snow-covered peak, an ice ax raised in triumph to the sky. In another, she was sitting with a fellow mountaineer on a narrow ledge, their sleeping bags wrapped around their dangling legs. Others showed her camping on alpine glaciers or crossing raging torrents on flimsy rope bridges. If the photographs were meant to be intimidating, they were. Charlotte wondered what the intrepid mountaineer would have to say in judgment of an over-the-hill movie star with a weakness for manhattans and marzipan.

Anne-Marie was familiar to Charlotte by reputation. Charlotte had often heard Paulina speak of her. She was a Swede whom Paulina had discovered at the famous Bircher-Benner Clinic in Switzerland, where she was working as an exercise instructor. Paulina had hired her away to supervise the exercise programs at the two-hundred-odd Langenberg salons around the world. Since joining the Langenberg organization, she had gone on to become a celebrity in her own right. She was the author of several books extolling the virtues of exercise and good nutrition, which, breezy in tone and replete with common sense advice, had been very popular. Another book recounted her adventures as leader of the all-female mountaineering team. In addition, she had played a large part in the creation of the spa. It was Anne-Marie who had drawn up the guidelines, chosen the treatments, hired staff, and purchased equipment. In beauty industry circles, she was widely regarded as Paulina’s confidante. Although it could never be said of Paulina that her decisions were subject to any judgment other than her own, to the extent that she required a sounding board, it was Anne-Marie who served that function.

But any image Charlotte might have had of Anne-Marie as a less-than-feminine body cultist were dispelled by her appearance. She was muscular—compact would be a better description—but far from masculine. In fact, she was the kind of radiant, tawny-skinned blonde who had earned Scandinavian women their reputation for beauty. Although she looked thirty—an impression fostered by her round, rosy cheeks and her short, boyish haircut—Charlotte suspected she was at least fifteen years older.

Taking a seat, Anne-Marie introduced herself and told Charlotte how happy Paulina was that Charlotte was finally visiting the spa.

Charlotte made the appropriate replies, all the while eyeing the green-and-white-striped computer printout that would tell her whether her name was entered in the debit or the credit column of the giant ledger in which second helpings and late-night parties were recorded by a merciless celestial hand.

Anne-Marie chatted on about the spa: that it wasn’t a fat farm or a clinic, but a holistic center that dealt with the entire individual—physical, mental, and spiritual—and that its goal was to provide guests with the tools to overcome bad health habits. “We’re what’s called a permissive spa. We don’t demand that our guests attend classes. We don’t post monitors in the dining room. These are futile exercises: what good do they do if our guests go back to stuffing themselves with chocolate chip cookies the minute they get home?”

She paused for a reply. But Charlotte had no answer to the chocolate chip cookie question. Why not go back to stuffing yourself with chocolate chip cookies the minute you got home? She knew a lot of chocolate chip cookie eaters and candy bar eaters and potato chip eaters (to whose ranks she belonged) who had led long, happy, and productive lives.

Anne-Marie continued. She spoke in earnest tones: “We believe the way to conquer bad habits is to restore the broken link between the inner self and the body. Most of us exist only from the neck up.” She held her hand out palm down beneath her chin. “We feel alien in our bodies. It’s our aim to help our guests restore the connection. But not by setting rules—if we try to fight our bad habits, we only create conflict, which leads to anxiety and depression—but by purifying and conditioning the body through exercise and nutrition. Through exercise and nutrition, we can create the kind of spiritual atmosphere in which our bad habits will give
us
up.” Leaning back, she smiled brilliantly. She was one of those blondes who are all teeth and hair.

“That sounds like quite a trick,” said Charlotte. She also thought it sounded vaguely heretical, as if doing push-ups and drinking carrot juice were somehow the key to spiritual salvation.

“I think you’ll find that it works. We’ll see in nine days, won’t we?” She smiled again, and then passed the computer printout across the desk. “I expect you’re anxious to find out how you did.”

“Yes,” replied Charlotte. She had the odd feeling that the printout would divine her fate, like tea leaves in an empty cup or the pattern of cracks on a heated bone. She donned her eyeglasses; they were reading glasses with tortoise-shell frames that gave her a professorial air.

“At the bottom,” said Anne-Marie, pointing with a long, tanned finger.

Charlotte scanned the rows of figures. “Forty-nine?”

“Yes. Are you surprised?”

No, Charlotte thought.

It was true that she was as adept as anyone at lying to herself: the five or six cigarettes that were really half a pack, the one or two glasses of wine that were really three or four. But when it came right down to it, she knew what the score was, and that it was a pretty good one. She had her gauges: her mirror, her scale, her joints—the watchdogs that reproved her for her excesses and congratulated her on her restraint. What did surprise her was how smug she felt, as if the computer really was prescient. She wanted to believe in the infallibility of the bookkeeper in the sky who said she was entitled to an extra thirteen years for good behavior. But she also knew he wasn’t as punctilious as the Anne-Maries of the world would have her believe. It was her experience that he was as prone to foolishness and whimsy as anyone else. His ledger was apt to be full of errors and omissions: debits in the column of the health food devotee, credits in the column of the chocolate chip cookie binger. She put people who believed they could forestall death by drinking carrot juice in the same category as people who believed that everything will go right for them if they go to church every Sunday. They were both in for a rude awakening.

She handed the printout back. “Not really,” she replied.

“The guests who are older than their biological ages rarely are. It’s the ones who are younger who are shocked.” She turned her attention back to the printout. “You have at least one area where there’s room for improvement. Can you guess what it is?”

“The cocktails,” replied Charlotte.