Anna corrected her. “I’m the only person who’s lived in Zürich more than a few months.”
Mary picked up the roast and signaled with her elbow to a bowl of salad. Anna took it and followed her into the dining room. “I’m so glad we met,” Mary offered. “Let’s do something after class next week. It doesn’t matter what. I’m happy to have someone I can talk to. Tim, too, it seems.” Mary gestured toward the den, where Tim and Bruno leaned forward in their seats. Bruno used the coffee table as a writing desk and jotted on a confetti-edged piece of paper ripped from a spiral notebook. Anna guessed he was giving financial advice. Mary called out, “Soup’s on!” and Max and Charles raced down the stairs. She called again for Victor and Alexis. They had been squabbling over whose turn it was to play the game.
Max was in the kitchen, underfoot. “Darling, please get out of Mommy’s way.” Max danced around. “Mommy!”
“What’s it, dear heart?” Mary dodged her son as she carried a pitcher of water into the dining room.
“Charles told a secret!” Anna glanced at Charles, who cowered next to the doorjamb, looking mortified.
Mary also noticed Charles’s distress. “Max, if it’s a secret then you can’t even say that. Okay? Go wash your hands.” Max grabbed Charles and they both sped off to wash up.
Anna wanted—almost desperately—to know what the secret was.
“YOU ARE KEEPING SECRETS from me,” Doktor Messerli accused.
Anna asked her if she realized that bank secrecy was a twentieth-century Swiss invention.
“There’s a difference between secrecy and privacy.”
“Yeah? What is it?” It was a defensive response.
Doktor Messerli shook her head and wrote something in her notebook.
ABOUT FIVE MINUTES BEFORE the end of Friday’s class Anna had looked up from her notebook to see Archie staring at her from across the table. He raised an eyebrow. Anna caught the tacit invitation. She made a face that she hoped he understood meant We’ll talk about it after class. Five minutes later, after Roland ended his lesson, after Anna assured Mary once again that she knew how to get to their house and yes, they would be there on time, after Mary finally left for her train and the rest of the class dispersed, Anna turned toward the trams at Sternen Oerlikon and without any verbal assent led Archie to the number 10. They boarded together.
Anna sat by the window watching the gray streets of the city grate past them as the tram sluiced south toward downtown. It was a monochromatic day. It matched her mood.
They had just passed the Irchel campus of the University of Zürich when Archie leaned over, put his lips very close to Anna’s ear, and in a dirty whisper said, “I want to fuck your mouth.” Anna responded with silence. He waited a beat and then said it again. “When we get to my flat I’m going to fuck your mouth. Do you hear me?” At Milchbuck, two nuns dressed in dark slate skirts and matching mid-length veils boarded the tram and took the seats directly in front of Anna and Archie. Anna reddened underneath her clothes. Archie ignored all lines of decorum. “You like it in the ass? You want me to shove my dick into your ass?” One of the sisters shifted in her seat. Archie snorted. “I’m going to pound your ass with my fat, hard cock.” Anna wondered if the nuns spoke any English.
The closer the tram came to Central, the more explicit the details of their impending fuck became. I’m going to fuck you in the ass. I’m going to stick my finger in your ass. I’ll shove you to the wall, Anna, I swear it. I’m going to bend you over my table and wipe your pussy with my face. The second nun turned around but looked past them. Archie grinned. Anna couldn’t tell what was getting him off—the dirty talk, the belligerent nature of its script, or the audience of others overhearing them. She didn’t know him well enough even to make a guess.
Archie kept on when they got off the tram. I’m going to lash you to the bed frame. Knot your wrists. Tape your eyes closed. Shove a rag in your mouth. They walked at a clip, Archie steering Anna through the crowd like a husband, his palm at her back on an angle as he guided her from behind. I’m going to suck your clit until it’s plump like a plum, woman. By the time they got to Altstadt whatever he wanted to accomplish began to work. Anna was in on the arousal, her pulse was high, and she was starting to go light-headed, nearly ready to let him do everything he swore he would.
But it was all and only talk. That day’s sex was straightforward, if renegade. By the time they got to his apartment, they were both so flustered that neither bothered to strip out of their shirts—Archie didn’t even remove his jacket. He fell back on the couch and pulled her onto his naked lap. She straddled him and he coaxed her open with his thumbs. Anna was sopping; Archie slid in easily. He grabbed her hips like handles and pistoned her forcibly up and down. She didn’t realize how tightly he’d been holding on until the next day when she was in the shower and saw the little purple bruises where his fingers had dug in.
“You’re hurting me.” It was a statement; she wasn’t protesting. Archie grunted in a way that Anna took to mean he was almost done, which he was. He pulled out so quickly that he nearly shoved her off of him. He came hard, on her belly. There was blood on his cock. A lot of blood, and all of it a shiny shade of red, the color of a stop sign, a flashing hazard light. “Christ!” It was everywhere. On his cock, her thighs, his lap, the couch. It glistened in her pubic hair and rolled past her knee in a line halfway down her calf. “Shit.” The blood shook Archie from his orgasm. They didn’t have a towel so he took off his sock and gave it to her. “I’m sorry,” Anna said, near tears.
Archie laughed lightly as Anna mopped herself. All violence in his voice had been replaced with a jovial, practically chummy friendliness and concern for Anna’s welfare. “No apologies—I’m the one who should be sorry.” He winked. “Didn’t mean to split you open.” He winked again and broke into a rascal smile. It was the wrong wink at the wrong time. Anna’s expression said so. Archie homed in on her distress. “You’re all right, yes?” Anna shook her head yes, sniffling. This had happened before, rough sex jarring the blood and spongy tissue loose at just the right time of her cycle. It wasn’t exactly his fault. The period would have come anyway, but likely not that afternoon and most definitely not on his couch. “No need to be embarrassed.” Archie was trying to be kind. He didn’t need to be. Anna found it condescending. She wasn’t embarrassed at all. Why would he even think that? But she was something. What it was, she couldn’t yet name. She sniffed again and swabbed her thighs with the sock. Archie ticked his head toward the bathroom. “Go take a shower. I’ll make you something to drink. That’s a good girl.”
Anna gathered herself, her clothes, her purse, and fumbled into the bathroom, the sock between her legs and blood now streaking the inside of both thighs. She found a washcloth on the towel rack and a tampon in her purse. She cleaned up quickly, dressed, and told Archie she didn’t have time for a drink. “I have to go,” she said, but she was already almost out the door. She’d left the washcloth and the still-bloody sock in the sink.
“EN GUETE!” BRUNO SAID before the first bite was taken. Mary asked him what that meant and Bruno explained it was Swiss for “bon appétit.” Mary was an excellent chef and her dinner was well received by all. The conversation remained friendly and upbeat. Tim mentioned to Mary that Bruno had given him investment advice.
“Oh, good!” Mary’s voice rang sincere.
Bruno smiled deferentially. “This is what I do. It is my job. I am glad to help.”
The children behaved well, though Victor momentarily reverted to pouting; he hadn’t wanted to play with a girl. He hadn’t wanted to come at all. Anna frowned at him and Victor took his usual sulky defense and muttered something about having a mean mother and ordered her to stop looking at him.
“Victor.” Bruno’s voice carried a warning in it and Victor responded with a near inaudible Yessir or Jo, Anna couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Bruno was agreeable enough that night to defend her. She was gratified. Max and Charles laughed at
a series of in-jokes and distractions, behaving like the best of friends. Alexis sat and ate. She wore a blankly compliant expression. Biddable but frigid. Not exactly passive, but not exactly not. Anna recognized the expression and felt a pulse of compassion. I know this girl, Anna thought. I’ve been her.
“THE FACE ONE WEARS as an adult is a mask that’s cut to fit in her youth.”
There are many kinds of masks, Anna thought. Theater masks and Halloween masks and surgical masks and fencing masks and diving masks and wrestling masks and ski masks. Welding visors and face cages, blindfolds and dominos. And death masks.
The Doktor continued. “Every mask becomes a death mask when you can no longer put it on or take it off at will. When it conforms to the contours of your psychic face. When you mistake the persona you project for your living soul. When you can no more distinguish between the two.”
THE S3 JERKED SHARPLY as Bahnhof Dietlikon came into view. It was the architecture of the track and it happened every time the train from Stettbach pulled in. It didn’t matter how often it occurred; it always startled Anna. Anna was in a window seat, resting her head against the glass when the train made its usual sudden move. She bumped her forehead, gave a yelp. A teenage boy sitting across from her sniggered. He had a mean, rude face. They locked eyes for an uncomfortable three or four seconds before his Handy rang and he broke the gaze. He answered it, got up, and moved to a different bank of seats. Of all the events in the last hour, it was this that embarrassed Anna most.
Anna stayed on the train. When she left Archie’s apartment she’d been gripped by an indulgent desire to do something she’d always wanted to do but never took the time for: to ride the full length of a line, both ways. In this case, to Wetzikon, the S3’s eastern terminus, then back the way she came to Aarau, the city at its western end, before returning to Dietlikon. The trip would devour the afternoon. I don’t know why. I just want to. Does it matter? Anna sassed herself. She phoned Ursula from Stadelhofen, apologized, and told her she’d forgotten that she’d scheduled an extra analysis that afternoon and promised she’d make it up to her any way she could. It wasn’t entirely a lie; Doktor Messerli said it once, twenty, a hundred times: Analysis happens whether the analyst is present or not. The dinner with the Gilberts wasn’t until that evening. Anna had time.
The sex had left her agitated. No, Anna thought, vulnerable. No woman watches herself bleed without being reminded that there’s little but skin and a collection of thin vascular membranes holding her together. And the bright, basic daylight made the blood all the more startling. It hadn’t embarrassed her. It had exposed her. Archie’s precoital prattle hadn’t helped. It unsettled her, how easily she buckled under his insistence, his commandeering whisper. But vulnerability’s a magnet that always attracts assault. Some weaknesses beg to be seized.
Anna spent the train ride caught in alternating cycles of self-seeking, self-seething, and silence. The metaphor wasn’t lost on her. Passenger. Passive. I am not the engineer of my life. On track or off. It’s what I’m trained in. Anna could not help but smile at these very apt puns.
In their most recent analysis Doktor Messerli pressed Anna to consider the source of her passivity. What did Anna think lay at the root of the problem? Did Anna know? Had she ever thought about it? Anna had tried to lie. Of course I’ve thought about it. But she hadn’t. Not really. It was just something she knew about herself. That was it. What more was there? The Doktor called her out, told her no, she hadn’t thought about it, neither deeply nor superficially. For, if she had she’d see what the Doctor saw.
“Passivity isn’t the malady. It’s the symptom. Complicity is but one of your many well-honed skills. When it pleases you, you are quite practiced at defiance.” Anna took the statement as an affront and, as if to diffuse the truth of the Doktor’s conclusion, accepted it without rebuttal. Childish, she knew, but gratifying in the moment. By the time Anna’s train reached Wetzikon she realized that was exactly the kind of manipulating Doktor Messerli was accusing her of. It wasn’t passivity at all. It was an iridescent scheming, a mannequin made up to resemble a timid, yielding woman. “Where did this come from, Anna? What might have caused this?” Anna said that she was afraid she didn’t know.
“That’s exactly right. You are afraid,” the Doktor said, and then she said no more.
IT WAS AN ALTOGETHER enjoyable evening at Tim and Mary Gilbert’s house in Uster.
Until.
Mary left the table, then returned carrying dessert. Tim asked Anna how she was finding the German class. Anna said, “It’s fine, it’s good, it’s helpful, I’m learning.”
Mary took her seat. “Anna is Roland’s A-plus number one student, Bruno. Everyone listens when she talks. Some everyones more than others, wink, wink.” Mary looked at Anna and winked on her own cue. It grated Anna how Mary spoke aloud the words “wink, wink.”
“What’s this?” Bruno asked.
“Have you not told him, Anna?”
Anna shook her head and said to Mary that she didn’t know what Mary was talking about. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mary.” Anna employed a steady, breezy voice.
“Don’t be so modest.” Mary spoke to Bruno in the manner of an aside. “Anna has an admirer.”
No, Mary, Anna thought.
“Ah, is that right?” Bruno asked. His voice glinted briefly of suspicion. Anna was the only one who noticed it. “So who is it then that admires my Anna?”
His Anna. Anna told him that she still didn’t know what Mary meant.
Mary tee-heed in a way that, given other circumstances, might have been considered dainty. In the moment, Anna found it hollow and babyish. “His name is Archie and it’s adorable how he follows her, sits next to her in class. He even waits for her and walks her to the tram every day after school.”
“The tram?” Bruno had a question in his voice. Trams don’t run to Dietlikon. There would be no reason for Anna to take a daily tram.
Anna interjected. “Train. She means train.”
“Oh anyway. The man is smitten, Bruno. If I were you, I’d watch out!” Mary wasn’t being garrulous. She was playing.
No, Mary. No, no, no, no. But it was too late.
Mary continued. “Oh, and ha, ha, he’s good-looking as well, isn’t he, Anna?”
Anna’s heartbeat splintered and in that instant of an instant, Anna panicked and was terrified that the entire evening was a setup intended to out her as a liar, a cheat, a whore.
Anna reddened. Tim interceded on her behalf. “Mary, you’re embarrassing our guest.”
Mary punctuated her joshing with an earnest smile. Bruno’s own smile was blithe. Anna didn’t trust it. “So,” Mary asked. “Who’s ready for a piece of cake?” The children (Alexis included) chimed in unison a ravenous “Me!” and the adults mm-hmmm-ed. Mary sliced into an iced lemon pound cake and served a thick piece to each of them.
“Merci vielmal,” Bruno thanked her, and everyone began to eat. “Mmm,” Bruno savored. “Sehr gut!”
And so the evening unfolded, the laughter continued, and the banter went on. Bruno gave more banking advice and in thankful return, Tim invited Bruno and the boys to a ZSC Lions game. Bruno waved his hand—Tim needn’t do that—but in the end he accepted the invitation with grace. Mary poured coffee and the children were dismissed and asked once again to play upstairs. By anyone’s measure the dinner party ended as successfully as it had begun.
But Anna had seen it when it happened. How the air between her and Bruno had tightened when Mary spoke aloud the words “smitten,” “good-looking,” “admirer,” “tram.”
I will pay for this, Anna thought.
When it was time for the Benzes to leave, hands were shaken and unspecified plans made for a “next time.”
“See you at the game next week,” Tim called to Bruno and the boys.
“See you in class on Monday,” Mary sang out to Anna.
Max waved to Charles, who waved back. Victor and Alexis parted with
out ceremony, and the Benzes traveled home. The boys nodded off during the drive.
The air was strangled. Anna attempted conversation. “That was nice, wasn’t it?”
Bruno grunted. “Who’s Archie?”
Anna spoke carefully. “Oh. No one. A man in our class. He’s fond of me I guess. Mary says, anyway. I hadn’t noticed.”
“I see.”
It was a shorter ride returning than going, and soon the Benzes were home. It was nearly ten when Bruno turned onto Rosenweg, swerved sharply into the driveway, and snapped off the engine. “Wacht auf,” he barked over his shoulder as he got out of the car. The boys were sleepy and they dragged their feet. Bruno shut the car door firmly. Anna noted with small relief it wasn’t a slam.
Anna called after him as he unlocked the house: “We forgot Polly.” Bruno motioned the boys inside and pointed them up the stairs, to bed. Anna closed the car door and chased him up the front steps.
“Bruno?”
Bruno mumbled something that Anna understood to mean Walk over and get her yourself.
The direct walk from their front door to Ursula’s was two minutes long, if that. Anna had no incentive to hurry. She took a winding, oblique route that led her in the opposite direction up the hill behind her house. It was a path she often traipsed; she knew it well. During the day it was clogged with Nordic walkers and people exercising their dogs. At night, it was empty and the open fields seemed haunted. The feeling was cryptic. On the hill Anna felt disconsolate, isolated, and renounced. I am blanched by the moonlight, she thought. A revenant in a pauper’s graveyard.
“DO YOU BELIEVE IN ghosts?” Anna asked Doktor Messerli.
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you.”
ANNA FOLLOWED THE PATH until she reached a bench at the crest of the hill. This hill, this bench, the middle of many, many nights—Anna couldn’t say how many times she’d wandered up the path just to sit. In the rain, in the snow. On weekends or in the middle of the week. During nights of abject despair. On nights when the air was crass or unemotional. When the horrible ache of loneliness bit her on the neck. When the landscape and its hurt heart had its way with her. This was her bench. The bench she came to sit and cry upon. A yellow Wanderweg sign pointed in the direction of the woods. Behind the bench, a fenced-off acre that penned a farmer’s cattle. That night, the cows were in the barn and Anna was entirely alone. Every several minutes and from just over a kilometer away, Anna heard a night train juddering down the tracks. Where is it going? Who’s inside? Is she asleep? Is she sad? It always surprised her how clear and close the trains sounded even from the top of the hill. I can feel it. A woman on that train is sad.
Hausfrau: A Novel Page 6