by Paul Theroux
She was dressed in her tweed skirt and thick sweater, her boots wet from her walk from the station; and her fatigue made her seem lovelier, a look of bored and weary dignity that gave her loftiness and grace.
"Did you make a booking?" she asked.
"Yes. At the Orangery."
"So it's going to be a slap-up, then?" she said approvingly, in the language we shared.
"With all the trimmings."
"Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?" Jutta asked, as she did before she lit up in the house or the car ever since I had given up smoking eight years before. I was struck this time by her politeness in always asking.
"No, go ahead," I said. I refilled our glasses and we drank again.
"We mustn't get tipsy or we won't appreciate our food," she said in her mocking nanny tone, and she sipped her champagne and smoked and regained her look of serenity.
"I've had such a busy day," I said. "Last-minute things."
Jutta's expression said nothing and seemed composed, but I knew what a tumult it masked.
"I managed most of them, but when I tried to call Wolfie on that Trinity phone number there was no answer." I drank some more champagne while at the same time feeling deceitful that I had sneaked half a glass and feeling that this cheating had nullified our toast. "In Germany some students have phones in their rooms."
"Life is ever so much better in Germany," Jutta said. "And there's our poor little Wolfie stuck at Cambridge."
People like us, intimate and loving, were seldom literal, and spoke in code, and so the simplest, lamest ironies were fond and funny.
She drew her glass away when I swung up the bottle to fill it again.
"Don't. If we haven't drunk it all, we'll have some for later."
I did not protest that it would be flat by then. I was reassured by the hope in her using the word "later."
"And I know when I've had enough," she said, and laughed as she always did when she was consciously quoting one of her mother's nagging mottoes. "Let's be off."
She then got a slender knife from the drawer and stuck it into the bottle of champagne, its blade just penetrating the wine.
"That'll keep it fizzy."
I helped her on with her raincoat that was still damp from her walk from the station, and I got a pang when I saw the worn patch at the edge of the collar—the seriousness of work clothes, her stoicism, it was all so solemn; and nothing made me sadder than her frugality, because it seemed so brave and futile.
So I hugged her, to console myself, and she accepted the embrace at first, then resisted—stiffened, almost fending me off.
"That's enough of that."
She led the way through the foyer, and passing the chair next to the telephone on its small table, the stack of envelopes, she said, "What's that?"
"Christmas cards."
"Of course," she said, her voice going small.
I went to kiss her cheek in the doorway, and she drew away, lifted her cheek to deflect the kiss, making my kiss seem like something insincere, almost a betrayal. I thought she was going to cry again, but instead she snorted and clapped her gloved hands.
"I hate January," she said.
There was no snow, only the cold rain that had fallen on the city, giving it the pasty gleam of boot polish, and a clear sky, tattered clouds rushing under the stars, and above it all a blackness. The wind harried the branches of the leafless plane trees at the edge of the common, and for once I regretted the cold and the blackness and the damp streets and the foretaste of frost in the air.
"What is it?" Jutta asked. She always knew when I had something on my mind.
"I was thinking: bad weather in a place always makes me remember."
"Yes. Whenever I think of Singapore I remember the flooded culvert on Bukit Timah Road," she said. "Or the way that sun faded everything we owned."
"We were so poor," I said.
"What did it matter?"
"I hated it. Taking the bus. Being frugal. Feeling like a victim."
"God, you sound so pathetic!"
She punched my shoulder and I laughed, and we held hands and walked across the common, stepping around the puddles, passing under the tall iron lampposts, and the skeletal hawthorns, and a wooden-slatted bench that had been wrecked by vandals. The restaurant, the Orangery, was on the south side of the common, and on this weekday night in January it was less than half full. Steam had condensed on the plate-glass windows and it was drafty, a chill in the air, the way all large rooms seemed to me in the winter in London.
"Would it be all right if we sat over there near the radiator?"
"Absolutely."
"Nice to see you again, sir," the waiter said to me, showing us to the table I had indicated.
He left us with a menu and the wine list, and after he had gone, I said, "When I worked at a restaurant, that was something we were taught not to say. 'Don't recognize the man. Don't say his name if he's with a woman. Maybe he told her his name was Smith, and you just called him Jones. Maybe he's with his wife tonight and told her he'd never been here before.'"
"That's paranoia."
"It's politeness. And it's saved some marriages."
Jutta looked rueful, she went quiet. Then she said sharply, "Have you ever been here with anyone else?"
"No."
"You can tell me the truth, Andreas. What difference can it make now?"
"That's the truth," I said.
It was, and it bothered me that it did not matter anymore to her. A stranger would have guessed that she was looking at the wine list. I knew that she was not reading anything, not looking at it, just brooding in a sudden mood of gloom.
"I hate it when you say my name like that. It sounds so hostile."
"More paranoia," she said.
The waiter had appeared behind me, making me glad that I had not said anything awkward. I was thinking: I don't want to remember everything, especially of this, and I realized, while I was regretting that we were here at this meal, she was regretting it too, and that was what she was thinking when she seemed to be staring at the wine list.
"Something to drink?" the waiter asked.
"A bottle of champagne," I said. "The Veuve Clicquot will be fine. Number twenty-two."
Jutta said, "Are you sure you want a whole bottle? They have halves of the Laurent-Perrier."
"I'm sure," I said, not to her but to the waiter, who hurried away mumbling with insincere servility that came out sounding pompous.
"You'll have to drink the lion's share."
"As the only lion here, that is the most natural thing for me to do."
The waiter brought the bucket first and then the bottle, and he made a production of wrapping it in a napkin and easing out the cork with his thumbs. All of it was meaningless ritual after that—the pouring of a mouthful, the tasting, my saying, "Fine."
"Celebrating?" he said, as he filled the glasses.
"Yes," I said.
"No," Jutta said.
Smiling in confusion, he went away without taking our orders, and a moment later reappeared, apologizing, and recited the night's specials.
"How do you know that sticking a knife into a bottle of champagne keeps it fizzy?" I asked her.
"Stabbing anything keeps it fizzy," she said. "You of all people should know that."
I said, "How about splitting the bouillabaisse?"
On the menu it said: For two persons.
"I'd rather not," Jutta said, and it sounded as if she were reproaching me by asserting her independence.
"Leek soup and quail for me," I said to the waiter.
"I'll have the kipper pâté and the eggplant."
I said, "When it comes you can say, 'I'm the stuffed eggplant.'"
She smiled a little but became serious again and said, "So what are we celebrating?"
She seemed angry, and I began to regret that I had urged her to drink champagne at home, fearful that she might cry, or even shout. I shook my head so as not to excite her. Anything I sai
d in reply might be regarded as a provocation.
"Those weren't Christmas cards," she said. "I know what they were. Change-of-address cards. I'm right, aren't I?"
"Please," I said, to calm her, and then: "Let's talk about something else."
"There is nothing else. I hated those cards."
"There's nothing odd about moving, darling."
"Don't call me darling."
"OK. If you promise not to call me Andreas."
I looked around the restaurant to see whether anyone was listening and in a way to gauge what would happen—who would witness it—if, as I feared, Jutta might stand up and howl at me. Lowering my gaze and sinking in my chair, making myself seem small and harmless, even insignificant, perhaps pitiable, I held my breath. And then I drank some more champagne, keeping silent.
She said, "Don't worry, I'm not going to freak out."
She knew exactly what I had been thinking. The waiter approached with our first course. I let him set out the plates, holding my breath, and then I said in the lightest way I could muster, "So how was work today?"
"There are moments when I feel that nothing is real but evil, nothing true but pain." Then she smiled in a haunted and horrible way.
"Oh, God," I said. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. Jutta, are you that unhappy?"
"No. I was quoting," she said. "That's Monkton Milnes, Lord Houghton. He was Sir Richard Burton's patron and, poor old fellow, he got pretty depressed at times. I was editing a program about him today."
The moment passed, though the quotation stayed in my mind as indescribably bleak. Jutta was still talking in an animated way. "Burton was a bit like you, actually. Banging around the world. Always writing, interested in everything, a dab hand at languages and arcane lore. A History of Farting, if you please. The Arabian Nights. A selfish beast, too."
"Still, he discovered the source of the Nile."
"No, he didn't. John Harming Speke did. You didn't know that?"
"I forgot. That's right. There was a kerfuffle and Speke committed suicide."
"It might have been an accident," Jutta said. "You'd better listen to the program."
"I definitely will. Burton hated inconveniences but he enjoyed hardships. I can relate to that, as the jargon has it."
'"He was my god,' Isabel said. Maybe I should have been more like her," Jutta said. She smiled at me. "Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"Isabel."
"Isabel who?"
"Isabel necessary on a bicycle?"
When I laughed she seemed to grow sad, and then began working her knife through her pâté with more force than was necessary. "No," she went on, "I am not a doormat," and slashed again at the pâté. "Did you do anything about putting the car in my name?"
"I sent the papers by registered mail."
"What about the house insurance?"
"Navin said he'd send the forms. He said it's no-fault insurance."
"That's what we should have had from the beginning," she said, and then, "But it's no one's fault."
I said, "It doesn't seem possible that Navin was at our wedding."
"And still alive. The Africans must be dead—that funny little clerk, and your housegirl, Veronica. She stole flowers and put them all over the house."
"Not for the wedding. She did that when you first visited my house. She was trying to placate you."
"It's the old servant fear in Africa. As soon as the bwana gets married, the mem sacks all his servants."
"But you did fire her."
"She was very dirty. There were cockroaches in the kitchen. And that reminds me. In the typescript you had me saying 'bloody.' I want you to change it."
"It's fiction."
"I never say "bloody'!" Her sharp voice rang in the restaurant. No one looked up, but her raised voice caused a silence and a sense of people listening hard.
"Of course I'll change it," I said quickly. "Do you remember that Englishman who came and said, 'Why, this Kraut's married an English rose'?"
Jutta smiled, remembering, and then said, "Let's not talk about the past. It just makes me sad."
"How do you think Wolfie will do on his finals?"
"You'll miss them. You're really letting him down that way."
"I can't take his finals for him."
"You know what I mean."
I realized that I had been protesting dishonestly. I was being evasive. We both knew that.
"I'm sorry."
She frowned. "Sarig," she said. "Old English. It means sad."
"Sorry is the name of this country. Sorry is what you say to the person who just stepped on your foot. I've never heard the word spoken so often. I'll bet there's a village in England called Sorry. I'll bet there's a local product—jam or a local wine. Sorry Jam, Sorry Champagne."
"Are you drunk?" Jutta asked. "When I was at Cambridge, Wittgenstein gave us a whole lecture on sarig and its variants."
And through a haze of wine I saw her in the lecture hall in Cambridge, in the famous snowy winter of 1947, watching Wittgenstein through her National Health specs and writing in her notebook, so serious in her black gown, hard up for money, scrimping to get by, anxious and lonely, because her whole life lay ahead of her—all this. It was a pathos I found unbearable.
"Why are you crying?" she said, shocked at my tears.
"I was thinking of you at Cambridge. Those stories of how you had to be so frugal. Your cold room. The disgusting food."
"It wasn't so bad," she said, and the idea that she was being brave made it all worse for me.
"The past is so sad," I said. "All that innocence."
"Please, Andy, you're blubbing. People will see you."
The worried way she said that reassured me of her sympathy and kept me sobbing softly, snuffling, the tears flowing fast. She took her napkin and dabbed at my face.
"I get so unhappy when I look back and think of how hopeful we were. Nothing is sadder than that. Just two little people. We had so little—we were starting with almost nothing. Once I found a pair of your shoes. You must have had them a long time ago. They were cheap ones and all worn out. I held them in my hands and cried the way I am doing now. The sight of them tore at my heart. Why does the past seem so bleak?"
She held my hand, more like a mother than a lover, taking charge of the hand, but softly, and I was comforted.
"You're being a little melodramatic, Andy."
"Marrying you was the best thing that ever happened to me," I said, and licked at my tears.
"That's sweet of you to say. But please let's not talk about the past."
"I don't remember bad things in our marriage, only good things."
"It doesn't matter," she said.
Her eggplant arrived, and my quail, and when the waiter had made his little bow and withdrawn, Jutta poked at her plate.
"I can't eat a thing. What a wicked waste."
"Have some bread. Otherwise you'll get drunk."
"I think I'm drunk already."
She twisted the bread with her fingers, ripping the crust, pulling it apart. Seeing that I was watching her, she became self-conscious and offered me some, and I took it like communion. She did not eat any. She sipped her wine and she relaxed, easing herself back, one shoulder higher than the other, and she smiled.
Instead of eating, we drank more of the champagne, drank faster than the waiter could keep our glasses filled, and so I kept snatching the bottle from the bucket.
"We should have come here more often."
"There are so many things we should have done more often," I said. "And some not at all."
"I don't want to think about that."
"More wine?"
"Shan't. Won't. I know when I've had enough." As she spoke she was rooting in her handbag, shuffling the contents.
"I'm paying," I said. "That was the agreement."
"No," she said, still searching in the bag. She began to cry, a sudden gust, her face crumpling, her look of panic replaced by one of
utter misery. Her tears flowed as she dug among a hairbrush and a compact and a clutter of tickets and pens. They were the tears I had feared all evening, and they were piteous, and she said in a voice aching with grief, "Oh, God, I've lost my credit card!"
"Let me look," I said, and took the bag, and clawed through it, so sad to see all these worn objects, the scratched compact, the broken purse, the hairs snagged on the bristles of the brush, the smears of ink on the ballpoint pens, the tickets that were used, punched, clipped, and out-of-date, all those trains to work, all that effort. And she sat helpless, weeping, while I searched, and she still looked sad, even after I found the card.
We quarreled a little over the bill again, and I reminded her of what we had agreed, and I gave the waiter my card. When he returned, he said, "I wanted to ask you the last time you were here whether you're the writer."
"I'm the writer."
"I envy you. That's the life I'd like. I love traveling myself. I've been all over Europe, but I suppose that's not really traveling by your standards. Any more trips planned?"
"I don't know."
Jutta said to the waiter, "He means yes."
Outside the restaurant, I said, "I wonder if that waiter saw me crying."
"I'm sure he did." She walked a few steps, then turned to me and said in a breathless, gossipy voice, "Andreas Vorlaufer, the famous writer, was at table eight last night, blubbing."
That made me laugh, and that laughter saved everything. Her mockery was like proof that there was nothing she could say that would offend me. We understood each other perfectly, without having to be gentle. There was something unshakable, indestructible that bound us together.
"And so was his wife," I said. "He must have made her cry."
Jutta's laugh delighted me, and we crossed the common under the lamps, saying nothing more, just holding each other to keep from slipping, because we were both drunk, and the temperature had dropped. There was ice on the footpath, the shallow puddles had frozen. Side by side, steadying each other, propping each other up, we made our slow way home through the night, which was hard and dark and clear, ice crystals on the footpath and frost in the grass, and even the stars and the cold cloud-smudged moon seemed like aspects of this black, frozen city.
Entering the house, stamping to warm our feet, I had a proud, almost exalted sense of fulfillment, for the house was large and solid, ten rooms piled on four floors, crammed with furniture and paintings, and the sharp odors of floor wax and brass polish and the lingering aromas of burned candles and leather bindings and exotic carpets seemed to give it greater substance, the suggestion of trophies, the accumulation of almost twenty years of love and work, this whole heap from the revenue of my writing, all of it risen from a thin trickle of ink. Yet there was a shadow over it, which was partly the hour of the night, and my mood: I felt an anticipation of emptiness, as though I had just entered my own tomb.