The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [121]
“Mr. Lybarger’s nephews,” he said with a smile. “They were studying at East Germany’s College for Physical Culture until it closed after unification. So they came home.”
Both were extremely polite, had said, “Hello. Very pleased to meet you,” and then they’d run off.
Joanna had wondered if they were training for the Olympics and Von Holden had smiled. “No. Not Olympics. Politics! Mr. Lybarger has encouraged them in that since their youth when their own father died. He thought then that Germany would one day reunite. And he was correct.”
“Germany? I thought Mr. Lybarger was Swiss.”
“German. He was born in the industrial town of Essen.”
At precisely seven o’clock, family and guests sat down to dinner in the formal dining room of the Lybarger estate, which Joanna had learned was called “Anlegeplatz,” embarkation point. Meaning that from there one might leave but would always return.
Joanna had come back to her room after an extended workout with Mr. Lybarger to find a formal dinner gown, picked out and fitted flawlessly, simply from a photograph of her, by the famous designer Uta Baur, to whom she’d been introduced briefly on the lake steamer the night before and who, it turned out, was a guest at Anlegeplatz. The dress was long, tight-fitting; and instead of compromising her ample figure, it complemented it by tightening and accenting. Designed to be worn without undergarments, thereby avoiding a line or bulge caused by tight elastic, it was deliberately risqué and elegantly erotic.
Black velvet, it closed several inches below the throat and had a woven, feathery pattern in gold that ran from the back of her neck across her bosom and down the other side, as if it were some kind of sleekly fitted boa. At the shoulders, a perfect nuance, hung the smallest golden tassels.
At first Joanna was reluctant. She had never expected to wear anything like it. But she had brought nothing at all dressy, and at Anlegeplatz, dinner was formal. So she had little choice but to put it on. When she did, she was transformed. It was magical. With makeup, and her hair in a French knot, she was no longer the cherubic, ordinary-looking physical therapist from New Mexico but a stylish and sexy international socialite, who carried herself with grace and panache.
The grand hall that was Anlegeplatz’s dining room might have served as the set for some medieval costume drama. The twelve guests sat in hand-carved, high-backed chairs facing each other across a long, narrow dining table that could easily seat thirty, while half-a-dozen waiters saw to their every need. The room itself was two stories high and made entirely of stone. Flags with the crests of great families hung from the ceiling like battle standards, imparting the sense that this had been a place of kings and knights.
Elton Lybarger sat at the head of the table, with Uta Baur directly to his right, conversing with him in her animated style as if the two of them were the only creatures present. She was dressed entirely in black, which Joanna later learned was her trademark. Knee-length black boots, skintight black trousers, and black, single-breasted blazer, closed only by its button at the breast plate. The skin on her hands, face and neck was taut and iridescent, as if it had never been touched by sunlight. The cleavage of her smallish breasts, pushed upward by an underwire bra, was the same milk white, lined with surface veins of light blue, like tiny cracks in fine china. Under her extraordinarily short white hair the only accent was her plucked eyebrows. She wore no makeup or jewelry of any kind. She made a statement without it.
The dinner itself was long and leisurely and, despite the other guests—Dr. Salettl, the twins, Eric and Edward, and several people Joanna had been introduced to but didn’t know—Joanna spent most of it talking with Von Holden about Switzerland, its history, its rail system and its geography. Von Holden seemed to be an expert, but he could have been talking about the dark side of the moon for all the difference it