She needs a distraction, since “Conny’s party” won’t stop running in her head. First scene: Leonie embracing a horrified Connie, fending off Connie’s drunken, rapid-fire comments, and kissing her warm cheeks, which glowed red above the rhinestone-studded T-shirt her fellow teachers had given her: “I’m 35! Please help me cross the street!”
“Thank you so much, Conny—it was really a great night! But I’m going to sleep elsewhere. I’m going to have some South American literature read to me. I’ll call you!” Before Conny could reply she’d turned and waved behind her. Guests were draped on the barstools and couches of The Hexle, in two AM poses. Most clutched Tannenzäpfle beers and drank straight from the bottle with visible enjoyment. “Mystify Me” drifted from the speakers. Some raised a hand to her as she left, others smiled. She felt fantastic: her neon-blue zigzag skirt swung against her boots, and a tight sweater stretched over her beating heart and expectant breasts. Her tweed coat and overnight bag swung casually over her shoulder. Inside the bag was her Snoopy T-shirt—perfect for Conny’s fold-out couch. But she had pretty underwear—apricot pink, aprinkot, suited her. She giggled. Then Leonie stepped out of the bar and into the October night: cobblestones, timber frames, students on their way home. A few turned as she passed—it’s a kind of magic. The bells in the collegiate church tower chimed the hour. The man walked three paces behind her like the English prince consort.
The Volvo’s windshield has begun to fog over. Leonie rifles through her purse, finds a dried-out piece of pretzel and a pen, then a paperback. She takes it out. The man on the cover has one hand in his jacket pocket. The other holds his coat, which hangs over his shoulder. He looks pensive, almost sad, but expectant at the same time. Black hair flipped back, dark brows—a real Latin lover. Leonie opens the book. “For Leonie—best of luck! Enchanted to meet you, Tobias.” She smiles, then stuffs it back in her bag. The earring is still missing. “When you lose something, you must pray to St. Anthony.” Even the kindergarten teachers knew that much. Her grandmother had one in her change purse—tiny and black in a little vial, hardly longer than a finger-joint. Leonie shakes her head and lets the magnetic latch of her purse snap closed.
A door bangs outside. Janet leaves the kindergarten, dressed in an eggplant-colored down parka. She puts her fur-trimmed hood up over her dyed-blond hair and struts down Sonnenbergstraße, presumably en route to a weekend of shopping, fucking, and television. She’s barely twenty-five, unencumbered, without a care in the world. Leonie is glad she doesn’t turn around. She’s sweating and her face is pale in the rearview mirror, the corners of her mouth drooping. She sees crow’s feet and wrinkles in her forehead, traces of a hangover. It’s your own fault, slut. Simon, you asshole, why didn’t you come?
The Hexle, in Tübingen’s historic district, had a cozy corner table. Leonie sat there with a glass of white wine in front of her, surrounded by Conny’s sister and some other women. They toasted and chatted: children, job, vacation spots. The guy who suddenly slid his chair over and began talking to Leonie was wearing a turtleneck sweater and ostentatious glasses. A pseudo-intellectual, all in black. “Who died?” Leonie thought automatically. The ad agency that Leonie’s bank sometimes works with employs people like him. Creative types who think they’re wildly superior to the suit-wearers, though they probably make half as much.
The man—short, compared to Simon—made a theatrical gesture in the direction of the bar. The second half of the Wednesday match flickered on the TV above it: VfB Stuttgart versus Hannover 96; a group on barstools were watching—moaning and wringing their hands. In the last half hour, Leonie’s eyes had also repeatedly wandered in the direction of the screen. She particularly liked Gómez and Cacao and, like Simon, was euphoric over VfB’s recent success.
“Soccer bores me to death.” Behind the rectangular glasses, his eyes were brown. He moved slowly and surely, had nice teeth and thinning hair, which was styled without any embarrassing attempts to cover the bald spots. “What would you rather talk about, world literature?” Leonie asked, giving him what she hoped was a scornful look. “What’s wrong with soccer?” “Nothing, it just puts me to sleep.” The beginnings of a paunch showed under his soft sweater. Carefully, he set his beer next to Leonie’s wine, along with a bowl of bar snacks. He feeds himself well, the little couch potato, she thought, stretching her exercise-toughened legs with satisfaction. “I really shouldn’t eat this stuff, but it tastes so good, and the birthday girl did specifically say: Party like there’s no tomorrow.” He turned his chair and sat down on it backwards, his legs spread. Always has to be different. Leonie scooted a bit to the side, but he smiled and pushed the pistachios and peanuts toward her: “Have some—you can really afford it.” His admiring look pleased her, she couldn’t help it. She smiled back, crossed her legs, and fished a drop of Chardonnay from the corner of her mouth with her tongue. After introducing himself as Tobias, an old friend of Wolfgang’s, he really did start in on literature, on a book he thought was so great that he just had to give it to Conny—he had even brought another copy to read in the hotel. “Julio Cortázar is a South American author, and he’s written some wonderful stories. I did a big profile on him for his birthday at the end of August, and then I was hooked.” He wore a silver ring with a triangular design on his right hand, which Leonie found every bit as silly and pretentious as his glasses and pointy black leather shoes. She was irritated by the ring’s ambiguity. It could be anything: a token of commitment between gay lovers, a memento from a vacation in Mexico, a wedding ring. Everything about Leonie is obvious at first glance: brand-name clothes, designer handbag, wide gold wedding band. Am I too easy to read? Am I simple?
“I never read,” she said loudly, hoping the sentence would provoke dismay. But Tobias just grinned, shook his head, and kept talking: “In Cortázar, the fabric of reality tears, as if under some hidden strain. Humans and monsters exist side by side. He often writes about children: how they play, how they dress up, build ant farms. A man turns into a salamander, an Axolotl. Delia, a modern-day witch from an apartment block in Buenos Aires, kills her fiancé with despair and poisoned chocolates. ‘The moon fell flat on the whitish insides of the roach, its body stripped of its leathery shell, and around it, mixed with the mint and marzipan, were bits of its feet and wings, the dust of its ground-up carcass.’” As he spoke she noticed the fullness and darkness of his voice. He sounded like a radio announcer, or an actor. “When you read Cortázar, you feel like you’re on vacation—everyone is drinking maté and anise liqueur and reading the Última Hora, everyone sits on the patio with watermelon, listening to the cicadas. You’d like it.” Tobias’s eyes gleamed, and against her will, Leonie was curious. He talked more about Cortázar, who had a beautiful, intelligent wife named Aurora, before he left her to be a bearded hippie in Paris with another woman.
A roar from the bar told Leonie that her team had won again. She thought briefly of Simon, who had kicked the sideboard after a depressing game against Bayern München a few years ago and bruised his middle toe. Tobias set a new glass of wine in front of her. He looked at her until she lowered her eyes with a laugh. “I haven’t flirted in ages, especially not with a woman who admits to not reading.” Leonie pushed the hair off her forehead. “It’s not like that. I read. Trade journals, magazines, and Geo. Those are interesting. But books, made-up stories—they bore me. They remind me of school.”
St. Anthony fails. Leonie pulls her hand out of the crack between seat cushion and seat back. Crumbs and a pacifier, but no earring. There’s no point. She has to go home. She turns on the Volvo and threads the car into the Friday-night traffic, drives down Sonnenbergstraße. At the intersection with Dobelstraße she makes a wrong turn and glides past the laundromat, “estd. 1969,” the Spanish restaurant, and the Bethesda hospital, toward downtown. The orange rectangle of the old orphanage is peaceful in the sun’s slowly dwindling light. Behind it the thick towers of the castle and the uneven spires of the collegiate church form a humble sk
yline.
Tobias is writing a book about Stuttgart. He told her about it yesterday. “I wanted to call it ‘The Faceless City’ at first, since the war robbed it of its beautiful face. A brutal sort of facelift. Now it’s just a practical place, easy to drive through. On streets that were actually designed by the Nazis. And all the new houses look like blocks—blocks of concrete in every conceivable color and shape—tiny boxes and big boxes piled on top of each other to form towers. But then suddenly there will be something old between them, like a forgotten decoration—a sandstone building with an ornate façade, a castle, a church tower.”
Tobias told her that the city had once been an important center of chocolate manufacture—“So many chocolate factories in one city; imagine how it must have smelled!” He talked of Rudolf Steiner’s wild life with the table-turners and necromancers in Berlin, before he used Emil Molt’s money to construct cornerless buildings in Uhlandshöhe, of the idyll in Neckarau before it was industrialized. Leonie knew little of what he told her. She contributed a bit about the black-breasted demoness from the church in Heumaden, which he already knew about, of course. She re-applied her lipstick in the bathroom. She wanted to please, and brought up her favorite TV show: Desperate Housewives. “Those are stories too. It’s not as slapstick and silly as most soaps, and not so conventional. It’s much more oblique, sometimes even dark. Anyway, it’s really good—I can’t exactly say why.”
A solid line of cars rolls down Charlottenstraße. Leonie merges in and crosses Olgaeck. She doesn’t want to go home. Maybe she could go to the cleaners? She has no desire to pick up Simon’s chemical-smelling suits, she has no desire to do anything for him. She turns around in front of King Wilhelm’s Palace and drives back up Charlottenstraße. The lights are all red. Pedestrians crowd through the ugly passages of the Queen Olga building. Discount bakeries, discount pharmacies, discount clothing stores, between which an optician, a framer, and a shop selling crystals fight for survival. People often hold their hands against the shop window, hoping to absorb some of the aura. The number 15 streetcar wheezes out of the tunnel and honks at some pedestrians who are blocking the tracks at the intersection. It always comforts Leonie to see the last of the old Stuttgart streetcars—a wobbly yellow caterpillar with flags on the driver’s cab. She doesn’t know when it will finally be retired to make room for the box-shaped light rail. She turns on the radio. Madonna’s arrogant voice: Like a virgin, touched for the very first time, and your heart beats, next to mine, like a virgin. If only Madonna had been playing at The Hexle yesterday—then Leonie would only have gotten aggressive, instead of sentimental.
But it had been Spandau Ballet. She had to tap her feet, hum along: This is the sound of my soul, always slipping from my head. My love is like a hard prison wall, why do you make me standing so . . . “If this preppy music makes you move, we have to dance.” Tobias put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him. It didn’t feel wrong. Conny was dancing with Wolfgang. Their eyes met as they turned and she shook her head. Leonie looked away.
Just before the technical school building, she turns onto Constantinstraße. The dome is covered with a wire net to protect the verdigrised decoration from pigeons. The high-rises on the corner reach toward the sky like oversized juice boxes. Leonie drives around the litter-filled green space with the recycling bins. To the right is a parking garage with a blue neon sign over the entrance. Stairs lead up to a small car dealership. A few sports cars sparkle behind the showroom windows. Simon always stops, but the girls tug him onward. She sees the brightly-lit bakery, framed by nondescript post-war buildings. Blocks, so many blocks. Yellow posters are stuck on the display windows: “Christmas pastries are here!” In front of the bakery is a large, bare tree. In the summer it shelters plastic tables and chairs—they sell homemade ice cream. They came here as a family once. The girls’ faces were smeared with the unchanging age-old flavors: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate. They closed their eyes and bored their tongues into the cold sweetness, leaf-shadows on colorful shirts, dusty sandaled feet. Nearby, steps run down to Olgastraße. The gray concrete stroller tracks run alongside the flat steps. Lisa loves to walk down them, balancing with the help of the railing. She’s never stumbled. Constantinstraße rises steeply, only to drop away and offer Leonie a wide panorama: two rows of old buildings in the twilight, straight as an arrow. Leonie squeezes her eyes shut.
Tobias’s hotel room in Tübingen was uncomfortable. They had only turned on the bedside lamp, so they wouldn’t have to look at the unctuous Neckar landscapes, the nubby green curtains, and the slipcovers. Leonie sat Indian style on the broad bed, strangely indifferent to the fact that the man could see the hole where her little toe poked out of her teal tights. She felt carefree, safe, familiar. Tobias untied his shoes and kicked them into the corner under the television, rummaged in the minibar, surfed through the nighttime TV shows. “First soaps, then Cortázar. Everyone gets a little of his favorite!” They drank vodka and kissed. He took off her tights and stroked her legs, unshaven for the winter. The little copper-red hairs stood on end; he kissed her ankle, her instep, then his hands wandered higher and paused of their own accord, at the same instant that Leonie said, “Stop.” She fled to the window seat. She could sit there comfortably and stare out into the darkness.
What if Simon called Conny? Simon, who was watching the girls. Suddenly she was completely sure he’d come home on time. He’d made the hated bedtime cocoa tasty: “Drink up, or your bones will get crumbly like butter cookies.” He’d gotten them into their fleecy pajamas and fished all the little clips out of their hair. With dead certainty, she knew he’d chosen their favorite book for a bedtime story, one which Leonie was so bored by she could no longer stand to read it: “Owl lays back onto her pillow. The moon shines through the window. And owl is not sad any more.”
There’s hardly any traffic on Constantinstraße. Leonie drives slowly, braking at the crosswalks. The beautiful naked lady sits in the fountain. The day’s last light makes her white limbs glow against the gray granite base. Her head is lowered, as if in shame. She’s probably gotten into some kind of trouble too. Her body bends carelessly forward, as if she’s just been nestling against someone behind her—someone who’s saying inappropriate things, things that don’t go with a few drunken kisses, a longing touch, a boner under jeans. The parks department has already turned off the water. Lisa and Feli can clamber around in the empty basin again.
A tree grows below the fountain; the sky above is bluish yellow. A boy leans against the tree, smoking. A plastic bag rests between his legs. Dirty-blond hair spills out from under his hat. Leonie recognizes the candy-moocher from Halloween. A nervy son of a bitch. His head is lowered, like the fountain beauty, the fountain slut. Like her, he doesn’t look up—he seems pensive, invulnerable, impenetrable. Did Simon pick up milk? Leonie stops in front of Nâzim’s and puts on her hazards. A huge bouquet of lilies in a vase stands before a backdrop of golden lights; behind it the store is dark with people shopping for the weekend. Tote-bag-Hanna pushes through the door. Mattis follows slowly, his face chalk-colored under his black-and-red Spiderman hat. She walks in front of him, her steps surprisingly long for such a small person. He moves like an old man. Fists jammed in his pockets, he shuffles down the sidewalk. Hanna stares straight ahead. Leonie drives on—she has no desire to wait in the store, listening to stories of lactose intolerance, puking, complete blood count. Seriously, I have my own intolerances.
There’s a parking space right in front of the house: a small mercy. The street-side windows are bright: kitchen, dining room, living room. Warm yellow squares beam from the windows. Leonie feels sick.
She slept on the bed, Tobias in the armchair. Aside from tights, shoes, and jacket, they didn’t remove any more clothes. She awoke near morning from a deep, schnapps-induced sleep filled with bad dreams: Simon, naked in the bedroom, a plaster apple breaking out of the ceiling decoration, falling on his head, and cracking like an egg. The display on the clock
radio read 6:30. Tobias was slumped in the chair, his head fallen to the side. His mouth hung half open. The sleep of the dead, it looked like. She knew the look from Simon, who sleeps so deeply that he doesn’t hear the alarm and flails around when Leonie shakes him: “Leave me alone! Jeez, I’m coming!”
She crept into the bathroom, took a quick shower, and brushed her teeth, avoiding her own eyes in the mirror. Suddenly he was behind her, his hands on her stomach, a human belt of plump fingers.
Simon’s hands are long and bony, the skin cracks easily when it gets cold. He doesn’t like to use hand lotion. “What, am I gay or something?” He’d stood behind her and held her during both her pregnancies. The pain kept her from sitting or lying down, she ran to and fro in the overheated delivery room, kneeled on the stool, groaned and cursed. Simon’s hands were damp with sweat and she gripped them, trying to escape the pain by passing it on to him. Tobias has children too. Two little boys—twins, born on the first of May this year. “Workers’ Day: and it suits them. They’re sweet things, but they wear me out. My wife breastfeeds them, and she can do two at once. Football carry, we call it. Their heads are the balls, one under each arm, with their feet poking out behind. It’s a funny sight.”
She turned, and they looked into each other’s eyes. “I have to go, or I’ll be late to work.” He hugged her. “Drive safe. And don’t forget: Reading is good for you!” He held out the Cortázar. “I’m sorry I don’t have any wrapping paper. And I scribbled all over it, for the article.” She quickly swept her stuff into her toilet bag, disgustedly noticing traces of toothpaste, like bird shit on the fake marble sink, and Tobias’s stubble: a little piece of wire in every pore. Yesterday’s alcohol cut into her stomach, sharp and sour. She skipped the hotel breakfast. These are my salad days, slowly being eaten away.
She gets out of the car and lifts her bag out of the trunk, leans her head back to feel the cold air on her throat. She knows it’s flushed with red blotches, the telltale sign of her panic, worse even than a hickey. The sky has grown dark. Suddenly Leonie sees the clouds, whitish-gray puzzle pieces with irregular edges, speeding toward each other. The only remaining patch of blue is behind her, over the woody hills near Degerloch, and it’s growing dark, turning purple and shrinking. A gust of wind blows a few tiny snowflakes against her hot cheeks: they’re grainy, like sand. She lowers her head and rubs her eyes with her sleeve.
Shorter Days Page 16