The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “I’ve already planned dinner: spaghetti with tomato sauce and anchovies. There’s even some fresh basil and garlic and parmesan in the fridge, and two bottles of white wine. Most impressive, Thomas. I will move in.”

  We kissed again. Then, ridding ourselves of the breakfast tray, we slid back beneath the sheets and were once more entwined within moments. Desire at its most pristine has an insatiability that is both intoxicating and happily berserk. The need to be constantly tactile was only matched by the equal need to constantly declare our love for each other with the sort of epithets that were both absurdly romantic and absolutely genuine. Thinking back on that first day together, what now strikes me so forcibly is how I was using an amatory language that I had always sidestepped—because, if you have never fallen madly in love, even the expression “madly in love” can be dismissed by most sardonic metropolitan types like myself as mawkish. But when you cross that frontier, you find yourself saying “Ich liebe dich” so often that you have to wonder: are you trying to reassure yourself that this extraordinary place in which you’ve found yourself is actually real, that this sort of happiness has genuine tangibility?

  Petra was clearly thinking the same thing. Later on in the afternoon, after we had fallen asleep again for an hour or so, I awoke to find her sitting up in bed and looking down at me—as I had done at her in the middle of the night.

  “Hi there,” I said quietly, reaching out for her nearby hand. “Everything okay?”

  “I keep asking myself . . . can this be? Is this real?”

  “I wonder the same thing myself.”

  “And I keep asking some supreme being—who’s clearly never listened to me in the past, as he knows I’m rather skeptical about his existence—please, please, let this last. Let this always stay the way it is right now.”

  “Why shouldn’t it? Nobody else is pulling the strings when it comes to our life together.”

  She bit her lip, looking sad.

  “Did I say the wrong thing?” I asked.

  “Have you had much luck in your life, Thomas?”

  “Luck? By which you mean . . . what? Born in Manhattan? Never wanted for anything materially? I suppose in the great scheme of things, it’s been a fairly lucky existence to date. Especially since I get to lead the life I want to lead.”

  “Well, luck has been something that has often seemed to sidestep me. There have been times when I’ve thought: why so much trouble, so much difficulty?”

  “Like what sort of difficulty?”

  “The thing is, when you haven’t had much in the way of luck, you begin to think that if anything good comes into your life, it has to be taken away.”

  “It doesn’t, and it won’t be.”

  “Promise me that.”

  “Of course, I promise you that.”

  She buried her head in my shoulder and again held on to me tightly.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “And thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being you.”

  “But you still don’t know me, Thomas. I could turn out to be an impossible woman, a nag, a bitch.”

  “Now stop trying to sell me on your good points.”

  “Please always make me laugh when I get too serious, too dark.”

  “With pleasure.”

  “And never vanish on me.”

  “I would never do that.”

  “But you have in the past, yes?”

  “Guilty as charged. But the truth is—and I’ve never admitted this before—I have always been looking for an excuse to stand still.”

  “We’re crazy, you know that.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because we are saying all these big things to each other after a single night together.”

  “I find that rather wonderful.”

  “You’ve honestly never felt this way before?”

  “Never. And you?”

  “There was a marriage. But it was . . . well, not this. Not what I feel now. But what am I feeling now? Madness. A wonderful madness.”

  “There is nothing wrong with this sort of madness.”

  “As long as it lasts.”

  “It will, my love, it will.”

  Sometime toward sunset, we took a long shower together—soaping each other up with sensual slowness, kissing constantly, clinging together under the cascading water. Then we dried each other and got dressed, and lounged on the sofa, opening the first bottle of cheap Pinot Grigio and smoking cigarettes. Petra browsed through the twenty or so records I had bought since moving in.

  “So you like all this jazz of the fifties. And you like Beethoven quartets. And Bartók. And Bach played on the piano. And lots of Brahms, which means you must have a melancholic streak. And two Frank Zappa albums, just to prove that you actually live in the 1980s. But no other new music. No Clash, no Sex Pistols, no Police, no Talking Heads . . .”

  “All of whom I like.”

  “All of whom I worship—as I’ve only discovered them all in the last year. But I’m not criticizing your taste. It’s just all a bit refined. All very New York intellectual. I’d like to see New York.”

  “That’s easy to arrange.”

  “Now it’s me getting ahead of myself here. I should be more reserved, more diffident. My mother used to tell me that when I first got interested in boys. Do not let them know you’re interested in them. Always play distant and coy.”

  “And did you?”

  “I tried to but did so very badly. I don’t like roles. And I don’t like being coy. It’s not me. But nor is being the great romantic. Until now. But we are getting off the subject of you.”

  “Why don’t you choose a record?” I said.

  “Okay, Brahms. The clarinet trio. But you have to continue telling me about your father.”

  She pulled out the record—an old Benny Goodman recording—and put it on the turntable. The record player was just that—an old-style Victrola encased in a box. I’d bought it fourth-hand in a nearby junk shop for fifteen marks and the proprietor even threw in a set of spare needles for the tone arm.

  “I am impressed,” Petra said.

  “By what?”

  “By the fact that you don’t have an elaborate stereo system.”

  “I wouldn’t mind one. But as I am living on a budget . . .”

  “And this book you are writing. What will it be about?”

  “Berlin, I suppose. But I won’t know that until I actually begin to write it. Which I won’t do . . .”

  “. . . until you leave Berlin?”

  Petra placed the record on the long rod that could house up to four LPs. Then she pressed the requisite lever, the disc dropped down with a decisive thud onto the turntable, and the tone arm automatically positioned itself over the edge of the record and lowered itself into the first groove. After a few moments of the usual kachenk-kachenk the opening wintry chords of the Brahms began to play.

  “I’m not planning to leave Berlin,” I said.

  “Sorry, sorry. That must have sounded like a loaded question.”

  “The only way I’d now leave Berlin is if you were leaving with me.”

  She reached over and kissed me.

  “I like the fact that you can know that after one day.”

  “I knew that the moment I saw you.”

  “As did I, as frightened as I was of it all. The prospect of happiness . . . it can be daunting. You’ve read Graham Greene?”

  “I think everyone who travels and writes about it loves Graham Greene.”

  “There was a statement in The Heart of the Matter that hit me so hard when I read it about a year ago that I underlined it three times: ‘He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness—the sense that is where we really belong.’”

  “That is so damn good—and the reason why Graham Greene is Graham Greene. And it kind of sums up my parents. But when you read that . . . ?”

  “I thought to myself: can I ever find myself in a place outside of
sadness?”

  “Was that before or after you came over?”

  “Just before. But . . .”

  She let the sentence die, indicating yet again that we had reached a frontier in the conversation—in that subject—which she wasn’t ready to traverse. So I simply put my arms around her and said:

  “You don’t ‘belong’ in that place anymore.”

  We cooked dinner together, collaborating on the spaghetti sauce, agreeing to differ on the number of garlic cloves we should add to the sauce (I was in favor of five, Petra was certain that any more than two would overwhelm it), but concurring that the anchovies lifted the sauce out of the mundane and gave it a necessary kick. I offered to run to a small Italian grocer’s a few streets away and buy a baguette to go with the meal, but Petra said:

  “I don’t want you away from me tonight, even for five minutes. Don’t worry. I won’t always be so clingy. But grant me that one little wish.”

  “Of course,” I said, simultaneously wondering if there was a man in her past life who told her he was going out for a packet of cigarettes and simply never returned.

  The sauce was a collaborative success. As the pasta boiled in the big pot, I lit candles and uncorked the second bottle of wine while Petra grated the parmesan and dimmed the lights. And yes, all these small domestic details—the way the candlelight illuminated her in silhouette as she brought the cheese to the table, the discussion about what was the right texture for al dente pasta, and (this was most intriguing) the artful manner in which Petra turned two paper napkins into origami—still stay with me, remaining as vivid in my mind’s eye as if it all transpired just a few days ago. Is that the lingering effect of happiness—the fact that even the most minor details linger in the memory decades later?

  “You are a woman of many talents,” I said, as Petra created two multi-winged and very elegant birds out of two very ordinary pieces of paper towel.

  “It’s a little pastime of mine, this origami. Actually it’s something of a private compulsion—which began around four years ago when I was working at this state publishing house in East Berlin and found a book on origami by accident in a pile of rejected texts. It had been published in the Bundesrepublik—Do It Yourself Origami—and had been tossed aside by some editor who decided it wouldn’t pass the ideological purity test. So I snuck it home and spent weeks studying it. Paper was something of which there was never a shortage in the GDR—and I used copies of Neues Deutschland to practice my origami. We had so little in terms of pretty things—the GDR aesthetic never being one to embrace beauty—that the origami was, I came to conclude, an attempt at cheering things up, trying to make an artistic little object out of very basic materials. I got so good at it that Jurgen insisted I do a private exhibition of my ‘pieces’ at our apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. We must have had at least fifty people in our little place and all my ‘sculptures’ were bought. Of course, we charged negligible sums—four or five ostmarks, less than one deutsche mark per piece. But the exhibition meant a great deal to me. I’d been living around all these writers, all these artists—and, finally, something I made, something genuinely creative, was recognized by my peers.

  “And now I must be the only person in Kreuzberg who can turn a napkin into a Japanese folding rendition of a swan. Mind you, so many of my friends in Prenzlauer Berg picked up these weird talents due to the starkness of life over there. I knew the best abstract painter in East Berlin—Wolfgang Friederich—who was also an expert at repairing toilet cisterns. His own cistern in his apartment had broken down. When he couldn’t get a state-sanctioned plumber for weeks, he simply took the whole apparatus apart and worked out how to make it functioning. After that, word spread that Wolfgang was the man to call if your toilet wasn’t working. He must have been doing thirty house calls a week, pocketing five ostmarks a time. More than one hundred and fifty marks a week—the same pay I was making a month as a translator. Not that I ever begrudged him the money. Five ostmarks was a small price to pay to get your toilet fixed—and Wolfgang could get to you in an hour after calling him.

  “Of course, he was eventually denounced for profiteering and was taken away for a while. But the man—besides being the de Kooning of East Berlin—really knew his toilets.”

  “Bon appétit,” I said, ladling the spaghetti and sauce onto our plates. “Our first proper meal together.”

  “With thousands more to come.”

  “Absolutely.”

  She raised her glass.

  “To us.”

  “To us.”

  We talked nonstop all that evening—about everything. Our childhoods. The teachers we liked and despised in our respective schools. The first dance we ever attended. The first person we ever kissed. The curious position of being an only child with parents who had fallen out of love with each other. What was most intriguing about this conversation was the way we both had experience of bullies and shrill homeroom teachers, and the shame of being the wallflower at some dance, and the growing realization that ours was not a happy family. But when it came to cultural references—the films we saw growing up, the books we read, the fashions we tried to ape—we found ourselves in separate universes. What struck me most forcibly was just how isolated and cut off Petra was from an entire world of seemingly nonideological material: like the films of Hitchcock and Bergman and all the French New Wave, or the vast majority of Western pop music. When it came to the realm of the material—the realpolitik of an ultra-consumerist society versus that of a Communist world where there was no such thing as mercantile choice—what fascinated me was how fashion still counted for a great deal in Halle; how Petra’s mother made a faux-denim jacket for her daughter out of some Romanian wool that she dyed a deep blue, embossing it with steel buttons “so it looked almost like a Levi’s jacket that Mother saw in some Western film. All my friends at school asked me where they could buy this jacket, it was that wonderful.”

  The conversation flowed with an ease, a fluency, a pleasure, that was just dazzling. We were so eager to exchange details of our lives before now—so fascinated by how, despite the massive geopolitical difference of our upbringings, we shared such similar perspectives on everything from the inanity of religion, to the dreariness of most hyperintellectuals, to the primacy of storytelling in fiction, to a tendency to cry at “good sentiment” (Petra’s expression) like La Bohème, and an equal belief in the pantheistic pleasures of the great outdoors . . . though Petra informed me that she had never seen mountains before in her life.

  “Well, the Alps are only a few hours by train,” I said. “Ditto the Dolomites. So we’ll have to organize a week off for you very soon and jump a Trans Europe Express down there.”

  “But it will all cost money.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “I will pay my way.”

  “All the subject of future negotiations.”

  “No negotiations,” she said. “Only unconditional surrender to my point of view.”

  “So you are a secret Stalinist.”

  “What I am is happy.”

  “Well, here’s something that I hope will make you happier,” I said, reaching into a side drawer of the kitchen table and pulling out a key.

  “Move your stuff in tomorrow,” I said, sliding the key over to her.

  She stared down at it for a very long time.

  “Are you that sure already, Thomas?” she finally said.

  “Absolutely.”

  Another long pause during which I could see her biting down on her lip, her eyes filling up.

  “You are a wonderfully mad man. And yes, I will move some things in tomorrow.”

  “That’s very good news,” I said, also understanding that the term “some things” also was a gentle hint to me not to push her too far too fast.

  “Oh God, look at the time,” she said, glancing at her watch, then showing me the dial. It was one thirty-three in the morning.

  “And look at the ashtray.”

  It was brimm
ing with the twelve or so cigarettes we had smoked over the last few hours.

  “And look at the two empty bottles of wine.”

  “Not to mention the half bottle of schnapps we’ve drained,” I added.

  “Why don’t I feel drunk?”

  “Guess.”

  She stood up and came over to me, sitting down in my lap, arms around my neck.

  “When I wake up in a few hours, do you know what I am going to think? The world is now a different place. And the worst thing about waking up this morning will be knowing that I will be away from you until after sunset.”

  “It will be a very long wait for me, too.”

  We fell into bed a few minutes later, falling asleep in each other’s arms. The next thing I knew the alarm by the bed was ringing. I glanced up and saw that it was just after nine. As I hit the off button with my hand, Petra reached over and pulled me toward her.

  “Work can wait another hour.”

  As we made love, we never once looked away from each other—my face above hers, our mutual gaze constant and bottomless, our bodies moving with a shared rhythm that was so natural, so passionate.

  “I want to start every morning with you like this,” she whispered to me as we clung to each other afterward.

  “I could live with that,” I said, smiling.

  I got up to make breakfast while Petra showered. The coffee just finished percolating as she came into the kitchen, her face freshly scrubbed, her hair still wet, looking at the set table, the bread and cheese on the wooden cutting board, the glasses of orange juice, the espresso cups at the ready.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good morning. And do you know what I kept thinking while in the shower?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Luck has finally decided to pay me a call.”

  FIVE

  LUCK HAS FINALLY decided to pay me a call.”

  Some hours later, sitting on a park bench in the Tiergarten, that sentence—and, specifically, Petra’s beautiful enunciation of those nine words—took up occupancy in my head and wouldn’t go away. Because I knew she was speaking for both of us.

  So this is what it’s like.