Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  “Perhaps I should have invited you. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.” He waves a bottle in my direction. “Some wine?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You’re sure?” He pours himself a glass and takes a gulp. “Not even to keep me company?” Shoulders hunched, arms held away from his sides as if his armpits are wet, it’s obvious that he has been drinking.

  I ask him if he has eaten.

  He looks at the floor, ruffling his hair. “Only crisps.”

  We decide on a take-away.

  He rings a Thai restaurant and orders. When the call is over he asks me whether I have ever been to Thailand. “I know nothing about you,” he says, not waiting for the answer. “Nothing.” His face opens in wonder. He seems to find his ignorance exhilarating.

  “I’m nineteen,” I tell him. “There isn’t much to know.”

  “Nineteen? I forgot. I was thinking you were older.” He drinks more wine, emptying his glass. “All the same. I’m sure things have happened.”

  It’s Adefemi who I see just then, on a wet night in May. We’re sitting on his faded pink sofa, my hands in his. I’m telling him how much I love him. But he’s my first, and I’m still young, and so I have to leave. I was seventeen when we met — he was four years older — and though I adored him from the first I always knew he couldn’t be the only person I ever loved. It’s the timing that’s all wrong, I tell him, not the feeling. He looks down at my hands. Nods slowly. Rain falling in the courtyard, both of us in tears.

  “I’ve changed my mind about that drink,” I say.

  “Good. I’m glad.” Klaus fetches the bottle and a fresh glass. “How was your day?”

  “I slept for most of it. I was tired.”

  Klaus fills my glass almost to the brim. “Were you out all night?”

  “Yes. I had to meet someone. I didn’t know it would take so long. I thought I’d be home much earlier.”

  He notices that I said “home,” and his face glows briefly, but he doesn’t realize how little the word means to me. It can be earned in a matter of moments.

  I walk to the window with my drink, stopping when I’m close enough to feel the cold coming off the glass. I can see my own reflection; I’m made of shadows. The living room floats behind me, areas of bright gold suspended in the darkness, like a ghost ship or a distant galaxy. I see Klaus approach. He thinks I haven’t noticed. He thinks I’m looking at the view.

  “When we met in the café,” he says, “on Giesebrechtstrasse, you told me that no one knows you’re here …”

  “That’s right,” I say, but I don’t turn round.

  “Is that really true? No one?”

  “Yes.”

  He moves into the space directly behind me, a second presence, inked in, opaque. He’s so close that I can feel the outer edges of his force field. I imagine tentacles or stamens. They are clammy, pulpy — the color of polenta.

  “Have you any idea,” he murmurs, “how seductive that is?”

  Wie verführerisch das ist.

  At that moment I experience a sudden craving for Adefemi, like someone running a finger up the middle of me, but on the inside. I’m sure things have happened. I face back into the room.

  “On that morning in the café,” I say, “you talked about privacy …”

  “Did I? Yes, I suppose I did.” He sighs, then turns heavily away and slumps down on the sofa. Switching the TV on, he stares at the screen with a sullen intensity.

  “What’s seductive,” I say, “is not the fact that no one knows I’m here. It’s the fact that I’m living the way I want to live — or rather, I’m getting closer to the way I want to live.”

  “I’ve no idea what that means.”

  “You’re part of it. In a way, you’re the most important part. You’re where it all began.”

  He looks up at me. Though he still doesn’t understand, he senses the veiled compliment.

  The doorbell rings. The take-away.

  “I’ll get it,” I say.

  Returning, I unpack the cartons.

  “More wine?” Klaus appears to have sobered up.

  “No, not yet.”

  I fetch plates, forks, and paper napkins from the kitchen. Even rejected, Klaus remains polite, and I’m not sure I don’t despise him for it. I’d almost rather he tore my shirt off and pushed me down onto the sofa. At least that would be honest. I picture my buttons skittering across the floor like chips of ice.

  He’s ignoring me again. He’s trying to punish me. It’s not easy for him, though. Deep down he’s hoping I will change my mind. He keeps channel-hopping, settling at last on a crime drama.

  “I love crime,” he says.

  I watch with him and find myself enjoying it more than I expected to. Down-at-heel tower blocks, rainswept motorways. Characters with stringy hair and bad complexions. Kitchens, ashtrays. Guns.

  Even before the end Klaus is asleep, one arm laid across his upper body, a half-finished green chicken curry next to him. I tidy things away, then stand by the sofa, looking down at him. His chest rises, falls. The air rumbles in and out of him. Without waking, he reaches up and brushes at his face. What’s supposed to happen here?

  /

  For the rest of that week Klaus is on his best behavior, as if he knows he went too far and is trying to make amends. On Friday he asks me out to dinner. He takes me to a restaurant on Schlüterstrasse, a few minutes’ walk from his apartment. The girl at the next table has skin that is pale and luminous, and her long neck rises out of a clingy gray wool dress. With her is a man who has rolled up the sleeves of his jacket like an eighties pop star.

  I ask Klaus if he finds the girl attractive.

  “Not particularly.” He signals to the waiter. “The man looks Russian,” he says. “You often get Russians in here.”

  I smile. When I called Cheadle on Thursday, as arranged, he told me he was meeting some Russian friends in a Vietnamese restaurant on Saturday, and that I was welcome to come along.

  “I have to go out tomorrow evening,” I tell Klaus.

  “Is it the same person you saw before,” he says, “when you were out all night?”

  “No. This is a different person.”

  “For someone who doesn’t know anyone, you know a lot of people.”

  I laugh at that.

  During the meal I hardly take my eyes off Klaus’s face, not because I’m becoming interested in him, but because I’m trying to determine whether or not he has outlived his purpose. A word I noticed in Farewell to an Idea shimmers in my head like a neon sign. EXITLESSNESS. In the book it’s attributed to the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, who wrote about “the exitlessness of life.” This is what I have to guard against. This is the danger. Is it enough, for instance, that in taking me to the Konzerthaus Klaus has inadvertently introduced me to J. Halderman Cheadle? Is that where my future lies, with a shabby, fifty-something American expatriate? Or should I be focusing on Oswald Überkopf? One thing is certain: as comfortable as it is in the penthouse on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, I should think about moving on. It’s September 20, and my father will soon be flying back to Rome. Though he has never heard the name Klaus Frings, I don’t feel I can afford to stay in one place for too long. I need to muddy the scent. And the fact that I have acquired a new name, an identity Klaus knows nothing about, suggests I have already left him behind, and that he is having dinner with a previous incarnation, a discarded chrysalis, a cipher.

  Back at the apartment Klaus offers me a Jägermeister, then pours himself a tumbler, half of which he knocks back when he thinks I’m not looking. Encouraged by my attentiveness at dinner, he is working up to some kind of declaration. He has an eager clumsy quality that I find touching.

  I settle on the sofa, my legs folded under me. “Why don’t you come out and say it?”

  Klaus replaces the top on the bottle. “Say what?”

  “You want to go to bed with me.”

  He looks over his shoulder, startled. I feel I might hav
e drunk too much but I can’t stop.

  “You want to sleep with me,” I say. “You want to fuck me —”

  “Don’t.”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “It’s too brutal, putting it like that.”

  “How would you put it, then?”

  Klaus walks over and looks down at me. He seems older than me, but not wiser.

  “It’s true,” he says.

  He takes my hand and pulls me to my feet, then embraces me awkwardly, his face buried in my hair. I see him reflected in the plate-glass window, enormous and dark and stooping over me. One person devouring another.

  Straightening up again, he leads me past the gray painting, across the hall, and down the corridor. I have already seen his bedroom. I explored the entire apartment on my first day, while he was out at work. I have even used his bath, which is round and deep, like a Jacuzzi or a well, and covered with tiny turquoise tiles. I know that his sheets and duvet are maroon, and that he keeps his boxer shorts on shelves, in neat ironed piles. He drains his drink in a single hurried gulp as he follows me into the room.

  I put my glass down next to a book on Fabergé and lie back on the bed. Sitting at my feet, he removes one boot, then the other. He handles them as if they’re objects of great value, like the jeweled eggs he has been reading about. Why am I thinking of sleeping with him? No, wait. That’s the wrong way round. If I don’t sleep with him, there will be a sense of incompleteness. This tenuous, artificial relationship, which I have fabricated out of nothing, seems to require it of me. It’s partly my desire to see it through to its conclusion — going to bed with Klaus is an end, not a beginning — and partly the need to clear the way for whatever might come next.

  He places his glasses in their case, then closes the case with a crisp snap. At that moment I have the feeling I won’t be able to go through with it. He isn’t the kind of man I’m used to or have ever thought of sleeping with. When he turns away to hang his jacket on the back of the door I take off my tights and skirt and slide beneath the covers. He strips down to his boxer shorts, his body larger and whiter than I imagined it would be. The maroon sheets don’t help.

  After it’s over, I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, my pubic bone bruised from where he ground himself against me, trying to force an erection. The fact that he couldn’t get it up doesn’t bother me. In a way it’s a blessing. Since I wasn’t excited to start with I’m not left feeling frustrated. I sense possible orgasms, but they glide far below the surface like fish in deep water, incurious, unruffled.

  “Sometimes, the first time,” he says in a low voice, “if a person’s very beautiful —”

  “It doesn’t work?”

  “Yes.” He grimaces. “It doesn’t work.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe tomorrow …”

  If what he says is true I suppose his failure is a compliment. I wonder if it also happened with Valentina. The first time.

  He asks whether he can read to me. I can hardly refuse him. Putting on his glasses, he reaches for a book. “Do you know Heinrich Heine’s work?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He reads a poem about love being more precious than the pearls in the sea, and another poem about a man cutting his soul into pieces. He reads a poem about a girl with a frozen heart beneath white branches. After fifteen or twenty minutes he looks at me and asks if I’m all right.

  “That was lovely,” I say, “but I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to my room now.”

  “Of course.” All of a sudden he sounds serene, as if I have returned him to ground that is familiar and safe. It occurs to me that he might be relieved. “Here.” He passes me a black silk kimono.

  “Thanks.” It feels cold and slippery, and I shiver as I put it on.

  Back in my room I remember reaching between his legs and trying to make him hard, but his penis was small and slack and rubbery like the bit left over when you’ve tied a knot in a balloon. Even when I took it in my mouth it wouldn’t stiffen.

  “What would you like me to do?” I asked. “Is there something special?”

  His eyes were closed, and his face twisted in a kind of agony. “Nothing. It’s all right.”

  He turned over in the bed and began to run his hands over my body. Though I knew he was attempting to arouse himself I felt, oddly, as if I were being searched. The silence in the room was pointed, critical. We couldn’t seem to move beyond the confines of our bodies.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  Outside, the wind has risen, and I’m conscious of being high up, on the top floor of a building. Only the terrace is above me, Japanese in its simplicity. The empty glass globes gleam on the table; the stems of bamboo stir. To the northwest, on the horizon, are the tall chimneys. Smoke leaks across the sky like ink in water. Like calligraphy. I think of all the people below me — reading, drinking, talking, making love — then I curl up on my side and face the wall. After a few minutes I drift backwards and downwards, sinking into a place that has no color, no light.

  /

  Not long before chemotherapy began my mother cut her hair off with the kitchen scissors. She did it in the living room, in front of the mirror with the varnished frame. I tried to stop her. You’re making mistakes, I cried. It doesn’t matter, she told me, laughing. It’s going to fall out anyway. I didn’t understand — I had no idea of what was coming — but she made it easier by turning it into a game. The golden hair on the floor resembled an illustration from a fairy tale.

  A few months later I walked into her bedroom and found her lying on her back with her eyes closed. Only her head showed above the covers. It was the middle of the day. The sky in the window was patchy and gray, rain threatening. Rome in the winter, the river breathing its damp vapors into the city. All the old, sad stones. Her hair was gone by then. Her eyebrows too. She looked fragile, ethereal. Half erased. A baby bird, an alien. A ghost. My throat ached at the sight of her. I love you so much, I whispered. She wasn’t aware of me. She didn’t even wake.

  There were good times after that, moments of almost hysterical elation, the brightness of forgetting. Then something would catch in me and I would remember what the future held. Like the statue of the winged woman in the Tiergarten, and those clouds gathering behind her, loaded, black …

  I was with her when she died. It was the evening of May 12. My father was in the kitchen with my mother’s sister Lottie, who had flown over from England. He had opened a bottle of wine and laid out olives, artichokes, prosciutto, and fresh bread. To keep our strength up, as he said. I couldn’t eat. Instead, I sat by the bed, my mother’s hand in mine, the sky above the Vatican warm yellow streaked with red, like the flesh of a peach. The usual sounds rose up from the street — plates being stacked, a church bell tolling, a motorbike. I wasn’t conscious of my body, only my hand holding hers. I was walking along a beach. On one side tall grasses fenced me in. Bleached to a pale, sugarcane yellow, they tapped and clicked in the offshore breeze. Off to the right was a brooding ocean, the waves explosive, the dark blue farther out flecked savagely with white. The sand beneath my feet was cool and slightly gritty. I don’t know where I thought I was. Puerto Rico, perhaps. Or Nicaragua. No place I had ever been. My mother was drawing breath, with long gaps in between, each intake arduous and harsh. As I walked on that imaginary beach I remained aware of her breathing, regular, relentless — hypnotic. But then the sounds ended and I realized that the last breath I had heard had been her last, though I hadn’t known it at the time, having expected to hear another, and then another, having become accustomed to the rhythm, not having been able to accept, or even contemplate, the possibility of silence. It had been like being on a train and watching the telegraph poles flick by, the wires rising and falling, linking one pole to the next. You watch the poles, you’re always waiting for the next one, and then suddenly they’re gone. There’s nothing in the foreground, nothing to focus on. The view that was always there is all there
is. Gaping. Empty. I stared at the veins on the back of her hand and thought about the blood slowing down. Once it stopped, it would never move again. She would never talk to me, or stroke my hair, or drive me to unexpected places. I buried my head in the duvet, and my body was returned to me, shaking uncontrollably, and cold.

  /

  “The way I see it,” Cheadle says, “you could use some support. Some backing.”

  We are sitting at a corner table. It’s Saturday, a fortnight since I landed in Berlin. The restaurant walls are yellow and the air smells of lemongrass and coconut. The light is operating-theater bright.

  “Here’s the thing.” The American hunches over, his head wedged between his shoulders, no neck apparent. “How about I adopt you?”

  I’ve heard a few propositions in my time but never anything like this. A devious smile creeps onto his face, not because he’s joking but because he knows he has wrongfooted me.

  “Adoption of adults,” he says airily, “it happens all the time. In Japan, for instance. To give the person in question better prospects.”

  “Better prospects?” I consider his plastic raincoat, his dented face. His wild, wispy hair.

  “We’d have to do it legally. Everything kosher. There’ll be forms to fill in. Depositions. Affidavits. Whatever the fuck the word is.”

  I look past him, into the restaurant. The other customers are mostly people in their twenties. People leading normal lives. Apartments, jobs. Relationships.

  “You only met me twice,” I say.

  Cheadle finishes his whiskey, then reaches for his beer. “Sometimes you’ve got to go with your instincts.”

  I could hardly disagree with that.

  “Who’s the guy you were with the other night?” Cheadle asks.

  “That was Klaus.”

  “You sleeping with him?”

  “Not really.”

  “ ‘Not really.’ ” Cheadle chuckles.

  “He’s been very generous,” I say.

  “I bet he has.” Cheadle signals for another whiskey. “So anyway, you want to become my daughter?”