Logorrhea

by John Klima

  He chuckled. “Well, how nice.”

  We ate salad and steak and drank more champagne. Barton talked about actors and directors, how awful they all were. Andrea and Grete hardly spoke. I made little grunting noises of surprise and approval whenever it seemed necessary, but mostly I focused on drinking champagne. My gaze kept drifting to Andrea while Barton talked, because there was something familiar in the angle of her nose and in the shape of her lips hiding beneath the mask of lipstick, and in her eyes.

  Later, sitting on the couch with Barton while Grete cleared the table and Andrea slipped off somewhere to get some bottles of wine, I learned the secret that had been kept from me, and that had I been more observant I would have easily discovered on my own.

  Barton ran his hand up and down my leg, and when I pushed him away, he said, his voice a vicious whisper, “What do you want then? Him?”

  I stood up without quite hearing what he had said. Andrea walked into the room then, a bottle of red wine in either hand.

  “He’s the one you want, isn’t he?” Barton said. Andrea stopped. She set the bottles down on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  Andrea said, “Gilbert’s being boorish. Just ignore him.”

  “Gilbert’s always boorish,” I said.

  Barton stood up, unsteadily but successfully, and grabbed Andrea in an embrace. He thrust his hand beneath her dress. “It’s still there,” he said. Andrea pushed him away and he fell backward, tripping over the side of the couch and banging his head on the coffee table. He lay on the floor, blood from a gash in his forehead pouring over the wooden floor. Andrea ran to the bedroom and closed the door. Grete stood behind me. “I’m sorry,” she said, and together we lifted Barton up onto the couch and covered his head with a towel.

  “Just go,” Grete said to me. “He’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.”

  I didn’t see Grete and Anders for another week. Nor did I see Andrea. I forced myself to go out during the days, even during early mornings, because the thought of walking the streets at night nauseated me, and often I went to sleep just as the sun slipped low enough in the sky to drench the city in shadows. The bustle of the market at morning comforted me, the noise of voices and the air filled with clashing, mingling scents of meat and fruit and flowers and people. I ate bread and cheese and apples, I drank beer, I avoided the cafés. I sat at a window in my apartment and watched people walking outside. I wrote notes about them on scraps of paper, imaginary portraits—a man with a tattered top hat became a secret agent seeking codes in long-forgotten books hidden in the dust of little shops; a woman with a child wrapped in a shawl in her arms became a mother widowed in the war and still in mourning; a man with a vague face and brown clothes became a movie star from another country. In the little stories I wrote about them, every person on the street was somehow lost and somehow lonely.

  I was drinking one last bottle of beer when I heard a gentle knock on the door. I ignored it at first, but then there was another knock, gentle still but more insistent. I heard Anders’s voice call my name. I finished the beer. He opened the door.

  “Hello?” he said. “Haven’t heard from you for a while.”

  I made some sort of meaningless movement, a nod or a shrug.

  “I’ve wondered how you are,” he said. “I’m sorry about what happened with Gilbert. I know you don’t like him, and I’m sorry we invited him, but we thought, I don’t know…”

  “You thought it would be fun to play a joke on me.”

  “No,” Anders said. “There was no joke at all.”

  “Gilbert getting drunk and insulting me was not a joke? Andrea was not a joke?”

  “Andrea is not a joke.”

  “A little performance, then?”

  “No,” Anders said. “Not a performance. I wanted to talk to you about that, and I meant to tell you earlier, but it didn’t feel right yet, and then…I don’t know. I don’t always have the best judgment.”

  “I don’t understand anything that you’re saying.”

  “Andrea is me, Edward. Andrea is more me than Anders is.”

  I am ashamed to admit it now, but I laughed. I was exhausted, a bit drunk, confused, and I laughed. Anders pursed his lips and looked away from me. After a moment of stillness and silence, he walked out of the room without closing the door.

  Grete and I go to dinner at a basement restaurant where a year ago she helped the owner choose the colors of paint for the walls. Everything is bright: bright reds and yellows, bright green trim along the floor and ceiling and windows. The owner is a young man with a limp and a missing eye and blond hair cut so short he looks bald when he is not standing directly in front of us.

  We eat a salad and drink water and white wine.

  Before our dessert arrives, Grete says, “I am ill. I have cancer.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’m told I have about a month to live, perhaps less. My husband died in the war. We had a daughter, but she was with him. I don’t have any possessions to speak of, most of my paintings will be taken care of by the galleries, and the owner of the main gallery will serve as my estate agent. But I would like you to arrange my funeral. If you are willing.”

  I cannot speak. I want to say, Yes, of course. I want to say, I will do whatever you need. These are things I should have said to people in the past, and I know I will not get many chances to say them to anyone else during what’s left of my life. But I cannot speak.

  “I know it is a terrible thing to ask,” Grete says. “I do not ask because I want you to write a poem. I do not want a poem. At the funeral, I want to be remembered not merely as myself, but as the woman who loved Anders. I want him to be remembered. And Andrea, too. By someone who can remember them both, and with joy.”

  My fingers slide across the edge of the table, feeling the sharp angle.

  “Can you remember us all? With joy?”

  I weave my hands together and hold them in my lap. I whisper my answer. “Yes.”

  “Wait—Anders!” I stood at the top of the stairs and called down to him. He stopped and turned. “I’m sorry,” I said, as loudly as I could, the words like cinders in my mouth.

  We sat in my room and drank gin. I turned on a small lamp, and in the shadows I could see both Anders and Andrea in his face.

  “I am performing tomorrow night,” he said after we had talked about Grete and Barton and the time when Andrea had first walked down the street in daylight, terrified of being laughed at, but instead gaining friendly smiles and responses from merchants and shopkeepers of, “Can I help you, miss?” and “Miss, would you like…” A slowly rising comfort with the self that had been so long hidden, so long hurt.

  “Performing?”

  “At a nightclub. I will be Andrea. Singing.” He smiled sweetly, then covered his smile with his hand.

  “Are you embarrassed?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Happy. Because you’ll be there, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course I will.”

  He leaned forward and gave me a soft kiss.

  Back at the apartment, Grete shows me some of her new paintings. They are small, because she still has trouble finding large canvases that she can afford, but she says she has enjoyed painting in miniature, it suits her personality now. The paintings are not much larger than postcards. They are more figurative than the paintings of hers I knew from before, the paintings that brought her some fame in certain circles. These are gentle paintings of women in long, flowing dresses, women with hats that cover their eyes, women dancing in the rain.

  It is a cold night in the city, a night with a sky of slate. Grete lights candles throughout the apartment instead of turning on the lights. We sit together on the couch.

  “Who introduced him to Hirschfeld?” I ask.

  “Barton, actually,” Grete says. “Gilbert had been to the Institute, had met Hirschfeld a few times. He always said there was more to it, tried
to play up their friendship, but the one time I talked to them together, Hirschfeld barely seemed to know him.”

  “I was not horrified when Anders told me.”

  “I know.”

  “He thought I was. He thought I was angry because of the procedure. But that wasn’t it.”

  “I know,” Grete says, and rests her head on my shoulder. Soon, she is asleep. The little flames of all the candles flicker and the room shimmers with shadows.

  In the nightclub, everything was either bright or dark, and most of the brightness huddled near the stage, where Andrea stood in a sparkling blue dress and sang soft songs in a breathy voice, popular tunes of the day, songs that began with innuendo and finished with melancholy, their last notes trailing off as the little pianist bent low and held the keys down until long after the melody had drifted away and the light on Andrea had faded into smoke.

  She performed there many times, and I went to every performance. Barton went to some, as did Grete, but both soon grew tired of it, and Barton, thankfully, returned to England.

  During the third or fourth week she had been performing, Andrea said to me after the show one night, “Wasn’t the audience wonderful? I’m afraid I’ll never get to sleep. Let’s go for a drink!” And so we ended up at a little bar a few blocks away, a place where actors went after finishing their work, and we drank gin and laughed about the hunger in the eyes of the audience each night, and we tried to forget all that was going on around us.

  “Let me take you home for once, Edward,” she said as we found our way out of the bar.

  “You shouldn’t walk back alone,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine. It’s not far at all.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Oh shush,” she said, and we strolled toward my apartment.

  “Won’t you offer a lady a nightcap?” she said, and I ushered her inside and poured her a bit of whiskey, which was all that I had.

  I had recently bought an old phonograph, a beastly large thing that amused me as much for its unwieldiness as for its music. Andrea put a record on and began to dance to it. She pulled me off of the chair where I was sitting and I danced with her. “Isn’t this marvelous?” she said, and kissed me.

  “Don’t walk home alone tonight,” I said as the song came to an end.

  “What are you so afraid of?” she said.

  “It’s not safe at night now.”

  “It’s not safe at all anymore.” She sat on my bed and I sat beside her. “When you look at me, do you see a man pretending to be a woman, or do you see…something more?”

  “Don’t worry about what I see,” I said. I tried to kiss her, but she stood up. She pulled hairpins out of her hair and let it fall down below her shoulders. She grabbed an old shirt of mine that was sitting on the floor by the bed and wiped her face with it as if she were trying to wipe off her skin as well as the rouge and mascara and eye shadow. She unzipped her dress and stepped out of it. She removed her underwear.

  I sighed and stood up. I touched her arm and let a finger wander up her chest to her neck, her chin, her cheek. “You have,” I said, “the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.” She looked away.

  I gave her some of my clothes, and she put them on. Anders stood there with tears in his eyes. “Will I be safe now?” he said.

  “You can stay here if you’d like.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m exhausted, I don’t know what I’m…I’m sorry.” He picked up Andrea’s clothes and walked out into the night.

  Grete asks me to call her doctor. She is not feeling well. She has no strength or appetite. The doctor arrives and talks with her in a light and cheery voice. He is a small man with a giant mustache. He takes me into the kitchen and tells me she should be in the hospital. I tell him she does not want to be in the hospital, that she wants to die here. He says she will die soon.

  While Grete sleeps, I look through the papers she has given me. Mostly they are contracts and old bills and various legal documents, but among them is a letter from Anders, probably the last he wrote:

  My dearest Grete,

  Never doubt that I loved you. A complicated love, yes, but the greatest love of my life. I owe you my life. The one regret I have is that I could not be the husband you deserved. The one good thing about being born into the wrong body was that you became my wife. We have a new world ahead of us, and as excited as I am by it, as much as I have wanted it for years and years and years, there is a tinge of sadness, too, because I know that, in some way or another, I am leaving you behind. Never forget me, as I will never forget you.

  Pleurant, je voyais de l’or—et ne plus boire—

  All my love,

  Anders

  I stopped going to the performances, and I avoided Anders. He left a note under my door asking me to meet him in our favorite park at noon the next day.

  I arrived late, but he was still waiting. He stood beneath a tall tree and smoked a cigarette.

  “If this were a melodrama,” he said, “I would ask you if you hate me.”

  “Why should I hate you?” I said.

  “I don’t know. But suddenly you disappeared. I thought you must be angry.”

  He offered me a cigarette, and I took it. He lit it with a silver lighter.

  “Tell me about you and Grete,” I said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “Do you have the regular relations of a husband and wife?”

  “Sexual relations, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “What about Barton? Did you have relations with him?”

  “No, of course not.” He laughed contemptuously.

  “Why of course not?”

  “I’m not a homosexual,” he said.

  “Neither am I.”

  “Then why are you angry at me?”

  I began to walk away, but he grabbed my arm. “Edward, I wanted to talk to you because I want to tell you about a doctor I have met, and what he has told me.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Yes. Who can help me.”

  “How?”

  “There is a procedure. It will give me the body that is natural to me. Andrea’s body.”

  I pulled away from him. I ran away from him.

  I stopped. I covered my face with my hands. People probably walked past, but I did not notice them. Eventually, I recovered myself. Anders remained where I had left him. He leaned back against the tree, his face covered with tears. I went to him and embraced him. “I don’t want you to be Andrea,” I said, even then horrified by how selfish I sounded, how much like a child.

  Grete lies in her bed, swaddled in blankets, her eyes open, but foggy. She no longer speaks.

  “Do you remember going to Venice with Anders?” I say to her. “He said it was to celebrate what was going to happen, to celebrate Andrea, but you also knew it was to say good-bye to him. I was angry when you went. I wanted to go with you, I wanted to share that moment, all those moments you got to have with him. I was so distraught that I didn’t understand how awful I was being. I thought I could convince him to save himself. I didn’t think about you at all, Grete. I didn’t think about you as it was happening. I hurt so much. I wrote him letters. Long letters, sometimes more than one a day. All he sent back were a couple of postcards. You both seemed so happy when you returned, so refreshed and healthy. I hated you then. I thought if you didn’t exist, perhaps something different would happen. I blamed you for what I thought he was doing to himself. Killing himself. During the whole time you were in Venice, I imagined one thing after another, fantasies of the life he and I could have together. I thought he would make me strong. I thought we could explore the world together, go hunting in deserts, sleep on the sidewalks of strange cities, without cares and without sorrow. I lived the life of a sleepwalker. I wandered the streets and talked to him, whole conversations I wanted to have wit
h him, all the while everyone looking at me like I was a madman. I wanted to show him America. I wanted to bring him to New York and introduce him to all of my friends, the friends I had abandoned. I could get him work on Broadway and in the movies. I knew I could. I wanted to. I wanted nothing so much as to help him and to make him happy. I wanted him to look at me and smile and laugh, I wanted him to be grateful, because then I would know I had done something worthwhile in this life, I had helped someone, and they loved me, they could love me, and me alone. I was so desperate for someone to love me and only me that I couldn’t see what effect this was having, I was blind to how much I wished for, how much I hoped for. I imagined moments when we could sit together, just the two of us, on beaches or in beautiful hotels, sharing moments no one else would know about. That’s all I wanted, Grete. Moments only he and I would know about.”

  She closes her eyes. All the while I am talking, I think, You mustn’t talk, you mustn’t remember, you must stop talking, stop remembering, you must stop….

  After he returned from Venice, Anders came to see me. I asked him if he had gotten my letters, and he said he had.

  “I’m worried about you, Edward.”

  “About me? How can you worry about me?”

  “You have built up some idea of me that I don’t understand,” he said. “You have imagined me as something, someone…I don’t know.”

  I took his hand. “Please,” I said, “don’t say anything.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, but I have to speak. You are trying to box me into being someone I’m not. You are pushing our friendship toward something unnatural, something beyond what it would be if you would relax and let things happen as they will happen. I begin the procedure next week, Edward, and that will change everything.”

  I let go of his hand. I turned away from him. “Please don’t do it,” I said.

  “I have to do it. It is all I want in the world.”

  “Anders—”

  “Anders is dead. Don’t talk to me about Anders anymore.”