The next day she found a job in a bar with beer-sodden floors. Schoolboys with rouged cheeks and perfumed wrists unbuttoned the pants of middle-aged bankers in the back booths. One day she brought the bill to a fiftyish gentleman, slack-jawed with lust, squeezing a boy.
When Charlotte took the job at Café Rilke, she feared she'd run into Max. Artists met here to argue about Dada and expressionism. Else Lasker-Schüler read her poems aloud.
One morning, Charlotte was standing at the mirror when her mother's reflection appeared behind her.
"Your father and I—"
Charlotte tied the starched apron strings at her back.
"You're a waitress, and—"
"And—? I'm an artist who supports herself by serving coffee."
Her mother's eyes bore down on her.
"You've turned down an education at the Handelsschule. You said no to a respectable career."
Charlotte licked her fingers and formed curls next to her ears.
"Your father has struggled so hard to reach his position in the city government."
"Is filing letters better than cutting a cherry tart into eight slices?"
Her mother's shoulders sagged under her daughter's unconventional attitudes, but Charlotte knew that stapling papers and looking for a husband behind the filing cabinet was not for her.
Balancing a tray and smiling for tips, she was still an artist. In her imagination, the part of her being that grew even under pinched circumstances, she collected impressions, arranged shapes, and mixed colors. Walking to the academy, she held her chin high, a habit from the days when she'd still believed her mother.
Sophie Charlotte, think of yourself as royalty. Your father sits at the right hand of the mayor of Berlin.
Ten years ago, he'd written one dictated letter on City of Berlin stationery. Poor Papa.
The early morning coal smoke ranged from light gray to slate gray with blue at the edges. Burning coal blended its fumes with the smell of baking bread. Bells at the top of the door jangled when Charlotte entered the café. Last night's smoke hung stale on the plum-colored drapes. Lulu, electric curls framing her head, swabbed the ashes off a round marble table.
"Pigs made a mess of the place again," she said, waving a gauze cloth at the tobacco-brown wallpaper.
Charlotte nodded toward a man seated at a table by the window. But Lulu kept on chattering about the customers, picking up beer glasses from the floor of the telephone booth. Her father was a trolley conductor who'd suggested Lulu work as a waitress because of the nice uniform. Her mother sold tickets at the UFA films. On her day off, Lulu liked sitting up front on the trolley, laughing at the passengers.
Now she waved her cloth at a young man with a beard. A serious-looking young woman with spectacles and no make-up sat at his side. They were the kind of people Lulu called degenerates, unlike Lulu's boyfriends, who overflowed with life juices.
Every afternoon, I ached for him. We did it in the coal cellar, standing up. Fast—with all that homework we had.
Beer glasses in the crook of one arm, Lulu joined her at the back counter.
"Did you hear about the blind ones—bunny and the snake?"
Trying to shush her, Charlotte spilled coffee on her apron.
"Bunny says 'let's feel one another and tell what we are.' Snake feels bunny. 'Ears and a little tail. Furry. You're a bunny.' Bunny feels snake. 'Long and cold with no balls. You're an artist.'"
Lulu neighed with laughter. Charlotte eyed the door. Two unshaven young men entered. One held the hand of a woman with helmet-shaped hair.
Lulu rolled her eyes.
"Dead peckers—too many books in the lap," she said, rubbing a lipstick butterfly off one of the glasses.
An arm went up for coffee. He wore a tweed jacket and a soiled shirt. He could have been Max but wasn't. Charlotte carried out a tray with a coffee pot and three cups. She lingered over filling each cup, slowly wiping the spout of the pot with a hand towel before filling the next cup, then leaned in between them to listen.
El Greco's bodies are sickly green—like withered leeks.
The woman looked up when Charlotte laughed.
The door opened. The sun backlit the new customer, a man surrounded by dust and loose threads. Max. Pressing the tray flat against her side, Charlotte glided toward the back. She watched him hang up his jacket. Underneath he wore a fine woolen sweater.
He looked around. Smiling, he walked quickly toward her. He took her arm and whispered in her ear.
"The gallery? Remember?"
Charlotte stepped back, perspiration in her armpits, blood hot in her cheeks. He moved closer. The pot slipped in her hands. Coffee drops smarted her skin. She should say no. He'd only make her feel ignorant. But something stirred in her.
"Four o'clock," she said.
"Gallery steps." He led her to his table.
As his friends looked up, she pictured a million waitresses falling on their faces before gentlemen. Her mother had been right. She should have learned to type.
"Sophie Charlotte, a colleague from the academy," Max announced to his friends.
Nodding like a marionette, she felt their eyes on her, burning her. They introduced themselves, but she couldn't focus on their names. Before they were done, she began walking backwards to the kitchen.
Lulu looked gloomy as a cobweb. "Slumming with the degenerates?"
Charlotte refilled the coffee pot. She wouldn't tell Lulu about the art gallery.
Your Breasts are Your Best Credentials
Charlotte's trouble with her mother began when she was 14. Hormonal and itchy, she'd spent homework time drawing bats' wings and birds' feet. After that, she and her mother drank cocoa before her father returned from the bureaucracy, joyless and exhausted. "I'd like to go to art school," Charlotte said. Her mother reached across the table and took her hand. "Nice long fingers, perfect for—"
"Piano? I don't like music."
"No. Typewriter."
Charlotte jumped to her feet. "I hate you."
"How dare you talk to me like that." Hands on hips, Charlotte said it again. And again. The floor side of her mother's slipper stung her cheek, intensifying her desire to cross her mother and attend art school.
In art class, the other students threw sponges or stabbed their thumbs with protractors and played with the blood that dripped onto the paper while Charlotte strained to catch the teacher's words.
Don't just paint what your eyes see but what your imagination contains.
Addicted to Plato's ideal foot or hand, Charlotte wasn't ready for that lesson yet. Tongue between her teeth, she examined her palm, turning it over then sketching the square little fingers. Next she painted her father's thick red fingers, her mother's thin, blue-veined ones, the flesh-wrapped twigs that passed for hands on the pianist at Bernstein's.
Her art teacher held the paintings at arm's length.
"You want to be a painter?"
She nodded.
"Don't. You'll end up as a teacher."
His nose was red from a cold, and a half moon of dandruff covered the lower part of his glasses' frame. He was like her parents—part of the opposition that she had to defeat.
Walking home in the November rain, she kicked the wet leaves and planned how to do feet, hands, noses—how to capture what everybody saw. This included folds in a dress and dents in a toothpaste tube.
She painted the hair-thin lines in the sweet violet's petals, then closed her eyes, imagined the color of its smell and painted that. She depicted her father asleep on the couch as a series of under chins in shades of pink folded on his chest. She stacked the paintings behind the bed and the drawings among her clothes, smudging her white underpants with charcoal.
***
The day Charlotte turned eighteen, she found tissuewrapped gifts on her place mat in the morning. Under her fork was a newspaper clipping—Join the next class. Imperial School for Secretaries. Crushing the advertisement in her hand, she smiled at her mother.
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"I'll become an artist."
Her mother frowned. "Be independent—learn to type."
"People who type think they're independent. They just end up with some man."
"What's wrong with that?"
"I want to live without a man—just paint."
Something inside Charlotte's mind stepped back from the words and stared. Had she really said that?
The next day, she showed Lulu her application and portfolio.
"My father knows the director of admissions at the academy," Lulu said. "He sits behind the driver's seat on his tram every morning."
"So what kind of man is he?" Charlotte asked.
"Very proper, wears a silk scarf at his neck."
"So?"
"People who wear silk scarves are very sensual. They pretend to be studying your drawings and thinking about paperwork, but mentally they're stroking your thighs."
All those tram rides had muddled Lulu's brain. Still the prospect of meeting the director of admissions made Charlotte nervous. People got into the academy through connections, and she had none. Her drawings were good, but if she had to beat out the daughter of a countess or a bank manager—what would make the difference?
Lulu knew.
"Drawings are important, but your breasts are your best credentials."
She walked in a semi-circle around Charlotte, eying her breasts until Charlotte's cheeks burned.
"Or your legs. Wear a short skirt. Keep your knees apart. Think of your body as a package of promises."
Evenings, Charlotte's mother read from the telephone book the names of typing schools. But mornings, Charlotte was at the café, waiting for the call. Finally it came. The voice of the admissions secretary was like chipped ice.
"Your interview will be tomorrow morning at nine."
Charlotte hung up and turned to Lulu.
"They'll never accept me."
"Make them."
On the day of the interview, Charlotte got up early. She took off her nightgown, studied her breasts. One was even smaller than the other. Time to hook up the brassiere she'd bought in a tart shop on the Friedrichstraße. The saleslady had sucked in her cheeks.
Shows the outlines of your nipples.
Charlotte's sweater was one size too small. It belonged to Lulu's teenage sister. She hooked Lulu's wide mesh stockings to her garter belt. Next came the short skirt, a little tight at the waist. She recalled Lulu's advice.
Breathe in a slow, relaxed manner. But let him hear it.
Tottering on high heels, she practiced breathing. In and out. If she failed, she'd have no choice but typing at the Berlin Handelsschule.
The secretary took her coat and opened the door to the director's office. The woman's sharp look traveled on cats' claws down her back. The room was drafty. Good. Her nipples would pucker.
The director, a lumpy man in baggy pants, extended a hand. His glistening nose was his most prominent feature. But he wore no silk scarf.
That damn Lulu.
He gestured for her to sit in a large, comfortable chair. Her application lay on the small table between them. He propped her portfolio against his chair. Charlotte sat down, folding her legs, showing a little thigh.
He bowed his head and stared at her application. "So you want to attend the academy?"
She crossed and uncrossed her legs, then remembered to part her knees. But they were concealed under the table. "I've always loved art," she said, leaning forward.
He reached for her portfolio. She rubbed her knees together, but couldn't make the sound Lulu had mentioned. Soon her drawings of hands and feet were spread across the table.
His brown eyes shone. "You seem focused on particular body parts."
"Oh, those are just for practice," she said. "I can also do elbows, shoulders, knees."
He looked at her. Charlotte panicked. He was preparing to reject her. Crossing her hands over her chest, she felt her breasts shrivel. In the expanding silence, she heard Lulu's voice.
If he hesitates, take one of his hands, place it on your breast. Put the other one between your legs. Once his fingers are inside, force him to admit you.
He leaned back in his chair and brought his fingertips together over his chest.
"I've read your application carefully."
NO was climbing up into his throat now. This was her only chance. She turned sideways in her chair and slid forward. He glanced at her thigh and blushed. At least she'd distracted him from rejecting her. She pushed her chair closer, arching her back, and opening her legs slightly.
He raised an eyebrow.
The door opened, and the secretary leaned into the room. Looking past Charlotte, she handed the director some papers. He glanced at Charlotte. "I'm afraid I must turn my attention to some other matters. I want to welcome you to the academy."
He rose to his feet and cleared his throat. Pearls of sweat studded his forehead now.
"One thing—when you come to class, just wear something comfortable."
On the way out, she stopped in the bathroom and rubbed the crimson color from her lips. Her nipples stood out hard and clear in the cold air from the bathroom window. She buttoned her coat up to her throat and ran all the way to Lulu's.
Her friend opened the door before Charlotte rang the bell.
"Well?"
"It was just like you said. He had two fingers inside me before he said yes."
Lulu narrowed her eyes in disbelief.
A Taste of Anisette
The honeyed sound of a saxophone spilled out of a doorway. A knee moved languidly to the music. Hallo Sweetie, a voice beckoned. Glimpsing a high-heeled shoe and a fishnet stocking, Charlotte quickened her pace, but Max grasped her arm, made her stop.
"Did you see her?"
"Of course," she said, flushing under the woman's hard gaze.
"I mean really see her?"
Charlotte looked again.
"See how the light lands on her hair. Blue and purple. Mix the colors in your head now."
The woman opened her legs and raised her middle finger towards him.
"Can you paint her essence?" he asked.
"I'd have to run home and start painting without taking my coat off," Charlotte said.
"That's just it."
The woman's mouth formed an angry lipsticked hole. "Move along if you don't want a fuck."
Max nodded politely then turned to Charlotte. "Primary colors are much more convincing for flesh tones than pink."
"Asshole," the woman said.
On Museum Island, they mounted the broad staircase towards the statue of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm. His horse pawed the air, bursting out of the Corinthian temple above them.
Inside, Max stopped at a painting by Vermeer van Delft, placed his fingers inches from the canvas and traced the light's journey.
"Follow it from the kitchen tiles to the woman in the courtyard."
Charlotte noticed the charcoal under his fingernails. How would it feel to run her fingertips down the joints of his hand to the tiny hairs on his wrist? Could she paint this new feeling? They studied a sulky young woman drinking from a glass, a man at her side. How to paint the warmth of his body?
Max pranced forward.
"See how the light illuminates the folds in his cloak here. But his other side has an entirely different color. Let's say the window isn't there. Just a flickering candle on the table. What color would the girl's dress be?"
Charlotte noted how the light played on the soft wool of Max's sweater.
A woman stroked her pregnant belly while her husband stared into the distance, his hand not so much holding hers as providing it with a place to rest. Lonely together, Charlotte decided.
A pearl necklace caught the light from the window, and Charlotte felt the warmth on her neck. Examining how Cupid's thick fingers caressed Aphrodite's ripe breasts, and Baby Jesus' tongue licked Mary's full pink nipple, Charlotte felt pinpricks of pleasure. Was that what he meant? Feeling the color, the texture, the light
on your own skin?
Later, they sat in a café at Potsdamer Platz. The door swung open. This time the brownshirt was shaking a can of coins.
"For Germany."
The man at the next table reached into his pocket. Max rose, took a newspaper from one of the hooks, and began to read an editorial, moving his lips. The brownshirt was at his elbow now, staring at him hard, all the time shaking the can. Ignoring him, Max continued reading.
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