The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  But I knew his home address, as it was typed on the title page of his essay. As I passed the Heinrich Heine checkpoint—my entire body drenched from the constant sleet—I couldn’t stop thinking all the time about Thomas, and the fact that Johannes was sound asleep just moments from where I now stood. Those two thoughts became so overwhelming that I suddenly found myself running, my gait unsteady due to the wetness of the pavement, the lateness of the hour, all the vodka I’d drunk, the emotional havoc of the evening, the fact that as I turned the corner onto Mariannenstrasse I began to run headlong toward his front door, deciding that as soon as he opened it . . .

  It took around three minutes for him to come downstairs. He looked as if he had been asleep. But his eyes grew wide with wonder and (yes) relief when he saw me there.

  “I’m cold,” I said, falling into his arms. As he held me, I whispered: “Never let me go.”

  * * *

  I wrote the above immediately upon getting to my apartment this morning. I took a risk I never took in the past—retrieving the journal from the basement during daylight hours, so I could get everything else down before heading to work and then (thank God) back to Thomas’s tonight. I’ve closed the blinds in my room, so no one can see me writing. As soon as this entry is finished, back goes the journal to the cellar—and out I go to work.

  But first . . .

  I don’t know what time it was when I reached Thomas’s front door. All I know was that it was cold and I was shivering, but so determined to get there, to tell him that I loved him, to fall into bed with him, to ask him to never let me go.

  As soon as we were upstairs, we were in bed within minutes. And when he was inside of me for the first time . . . again, I just knew that this was the man of my life. I’ve never experienced such extraordinary intimacy (it’s the only word for it) before. Yes, there was a guy I saw for two years at university—a law student named Florian—with whom sex was rather wonderful. However, there was no love between us. But that first time with Thomas—it was all about love. As were the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth . . . I lost track of how many times we made love, how often we pulled each other into bed. I do know that, over and over again, we kept saying how much we loved each other, kept our gazes locked on each other, a real overwhelming sense of certainty always there. At some point that first night, before finally falling asleep, I apologized profusely to Thomas for running off earlier in the evening. He was so kind about it, so understanding, that I easily fell asleep in his arms.

  When I awoke it was morning. Thomas must have been up before me, as all my once-wet clothes had been hung up to dry on the radiators. My love was fast asleep in bed. Sitting up beside him I simply spent several long, wondrous minutes looking at him, stroking his hair, watching the rhythm of his breathing, thinking how handsome he was, wanting so much to have a life with him, vowing to myself to somehow find a way out of the situation with . . . no, I don’t even want to mention his name here.

  I got up and had my first proper look at Thomas’s apartment. So clean, so airy, so organized, so simple, but urbane in a way I’ve only seen in magazines. Yet there’s no expensive furniture, no big stereo or television (in fact, no television at all). But the walls are very white, all the furniture has been stripped down to the original wood, and everything seems exactly in place. Looking around—noting how all the dishes and glasses and books and records were so carefully ordered and stacked on their respective shelves, how his clothes were all hung on wooden hangers in his closet, how his shoes seemed polished and never run-down—my first thought was: he did tell me his father had been a military man. But I also sensed that this need for order was a form of self-protection—the same self-protection he found when he was allowed to go to the library for the first time (God, how that story has stayed with me). I found myself loving him for that—and feeling such a kinship there, too. For we had both experienced the sort of sadness that comes from strange families and never having connected with anyone before. This is why I couldn’t help but think: the gods have, for the second time, smiled on me. The first time was the birth of Johannes. And now . . .

  As I went into the kitchen and began rattling around his fridge, his cupboards, his larder (all very well stocked—my word, he is so organized), I found myself doing something that I last remember doing at home with Johannes: humming.

  I think it was a song by Schubert—“An die Musik”—which Jurgen (I’ll give him credit here) introduced me to. I put coffee in the percolator. I set the table and laid out bread and butter and honey and orange marmalade and anything else I could find. Then, out of nowhere, Thomas was beside me, kissing me, pulling off the bathrobe I had discovered hanging near the shower, pulling me back into bed.

  This time was even more intense, more charged and erotic than before. And we talked again about how this was all so revolutionary (the exact word used) for us both . . . how we would not allow this to fail or come asunder . . . how it was the greatest surprise either of us had known.

  We never left the apartment. I briefly met the Turkish lover of Thomas’s landlord—and then heard the fantastic story of this man named Alaistair who was gay and a heroin addict and whom Thomas nearly found dead and got him rushed to hospital and saved his life (though he was modest about all that—and about the fact that, with Alaistair’s lover, he’d redecorated his studio which had been awash in blood). I talked a bit about my marriage and how empty it was. We made our first proper dinner together—pasta with an anchovy and tomato sauce, and he even had real parmesan in his fridge. I showed him my minor talent for constructing origami figures. And we talked and talked and talked. That was almost as electric as the physical passion we shared—the fact that our conversation (all in German, at his insistence) flowed not just easily, but with the same sort of intensity and brio and, yes, delight that underscored everything else about us.

  I have to say that yesterday was perhaps the happiest day I have ever experienced. Because, and I understand this now, I never really knew love before this moment. Never knew it at all.

  Then, out of nowhere, he asked me to move in. Handed me a key and told me to bring my things over. I was so bemused, yet also so overwhelmed, by this that all I could say was, “Are you sure?” When he reassured me he was, I told him I’d bring some of my stuff by . . . again, my caution getting to me. But there was also a silent fear that if I gave up my room . . . which I now wanted to do immediately . . . Haechen would somehow find out and that would be the beginning of the end of things.

  But the important thing was: I would now be living with the man I love. Just a few days ago I was contemplating a plunge from a high building. The capacity for horror in life is counterbalanced by the possibility of the wondrous.

  I dreaded having to go to work today. I never wanted to leave Thomas’s apartment, Thomas’s bed. I can’t abide the thought of stopping in at Der Schlüssel tonight to find the card that Haechen has left me, informing me where I have to fuck him next. I dread having to spend lunchtime clandestinely photographing documents in the basement of the station. I must find a way out of all this. I must find a way of not allowing any of this to destroy the incredible gift of loving and being loved by Thomas.

  We woke early today and made love slowly, and with such incredible deliberateness, that we could never take our eyes off each other.

  “I want to start every morning like this,” I told him afterward. And he assured me that we always would.

  Before I left to face a world I so didn’t want to face, I told Thomas how lucky I knew I was. And luck—as I have discovered—is the big existential variable in life. It can come your way. It can totally sidestep you. Even when Johannes was born I still had to deal with the fact that I was with a man who didn’t care for me—who didn’t want to share the responsibilities and the pleasures of being a parent. Now I’m with a man who tells me he wants to share everything with me. The question now for me is: can I finally accept happiness? Can I deem myself deserving of it? Can I hold on
to it? Can I not push it away, not let it go?

  * * *

  It’s been several weeks now since I’ve written here. That’s largely because I haven’t been home much. I moved in half my things the day I made the last entry. And since then . . .

  Happiness.

  I said something about all that to Thomas recently. “Happiness exists,” I told him. For the first time in my life I’ve actually begun to trust it. Before then I always thought happiness was, at best, a double-edged thing. The wonder of a son like Johannes and the distress of a mess of a husband like Jurgen.

  But now, with Thomas, there’s a real sense of being part of a shared project. Of wanting the same things. Of being each other’s best friend.

  Day after day I cannot wait to get home to him. I want him inside me all the time. I want his arms encircling me as I fall asleep. I want to be sitting across from him at our kitchen table—yes, I just used the pronoun “our”—talking with him nonstop. I love talking books with him, and going out to the cinema with him, and simply having a domestic life with him. We also look after each other—whether it be Thomas doing all my laundry most weeks or me always bringing him a coffee in bed most mornings before I head off to work. I love these little shared kindnesses. Just as I love his decency, his sense of wanting the best for me, for us. I’m lucky, I tell myself daily. So lucky.

  * * *

  Alaistair finally came home from the hospital today. I’d heard so much about him from Thomas—and, of course, did see Mehmet on the few occasions when he stopped by—that I was naturally intrigued to learn what this larger-than-life character was actually like. Thomas told me that since his near-death assault, he’d been off heroin and was now coming home clean. He also warned me that he had a real edge to him and was probably in a “profoundly misanthropic state,” given his lack of drugs.

  But what surprised me immediately about Alaistair was that when you scratched away his world-weary veneer, he was so gentlemanly, so amusing, so smart. He obviously thought the world of Thomas—and not just because he saved his life. I liked him immediately and also found his courage admirable. I’d heard about how the paintings he’d been working on had been wrecked by the man who tried to kill him. Yet Alaistair got down to work again a day or so after being released from the hospital. Every morning when I would come downstairs, heading off to work, I would stop to look at the three paintings he now had “in progress.” Thomas was right when he told me before Alaistair’s return: “He is a truly wonderful painter.” Seeing the nascent (I love that word) beginning of these new canvases (as Alaistair was adamant that he was not re-creating the destroyed paintings), I too couldn’t help but think that Alaistair had an ability to play with color and dimension and notions of light in a manner so astonishing that it actually humbled me. Thomas can write wonderfully. Alaistair is so gifted, such a natural. What do I have to show for myself?

  A few days after first meeting him, we happened to run into each other on the street as I was returning home from work. To my surprise he invited me for a beer. Once seated at a table he talked a bit about the fact that “his friend” Mehmet no longer wanted to see him, that it was definitively over, and it was bothering him far more than he expected. He then said something rather extraordinary to me:

  “I am not one who trades in romantic hyperbole. But I want you to know: you are the best thing that has ever happened to Thomas. I also know he just adores you. So I do hope that the two of you can keep your nerve and see how bloody rare this is.”

  Bloody rare. Of course, I had to write that down—as he said it in English. I looked it up afterward in a dictionary. It is a reference to a style of cooked meat—red on the inside to the point of appearing rather blutig. But it also means exceptional, uncommon, singular. Synonyms I like.

  Bloody rare. That’s us.

  * * *

  An insane thing happened tonight. Thomas insisted (in the nicest sort of way) that we go see one of his favorite films—Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It was playing at the Delphi. A wonderful film. Very cynical. Very knowing. And I loved the fact that this native German speaker—a Viennese who made his start as a journalist and screenwriter in Berlin, then emigrated to the States—so assimilated the American sensibility yet still retained that sardonic Berlin worldview. You could see his mordant take on American corporate life, but also his humanity when it came to the fact that even people with small lives have complicated personal stories. I loved the film, loved seeing it with Thomas, kept thinking how wonderful it would be if we lived together in New York, how I could find a translating or teaching job, how we could get an apartment together, how perhaps we could have a child—and maybe that would diminish some of the pain that . . .

  No, that pain will not diminish. It will always be there—a stain that never washes away and continues to color everything.

  But, perhaps, I could come to learn to live with the stain. Perhaps I had no choice. Perhaps I knew this all along. Perhaps Thomas—and the life we could have together—was the antidote that would, at least, allow me to live with the ongoing grief of it all.

  But still. I was in a buoyant mood after the film.

  And then, out of nowhere, Pawel approached us. He was going into the cinema we just left—and his eyes grew wide when he saw us. I could tell that he’d been drinking. He smirked at us and made some nasty comment about how he thought that dissidents had no talent for the clandestine. Thomas told him to stop. But Pawel persisted. And when put down Thomas’s writing I called him a shit. That’s when he said I was nothing but a mediocrity who . . .

  But before he could finish the sentence Thomas punched him. Very hard. In the stomach. He doubled over. And we left in a hurry.

  I was so shocked, so amazed, and—all right, I’ll admit it—so pleased that Thomas defended me like that. And I told Thomas that, though I was relentlessly private at the office, if word got out about us I’d tell everyone the truth: this is the man I love.

  Of course, I went to work on Monday, expecting everyone at the station to know about what had happened—as Pawel was a notorious gossip and would have retailored the story to make it seem like Thomas had hit him out of nowhere. But Pawel called in sick for several days. When I saw him next he acted as if nothing had happened, just passing me by with a terse “Good morning.” Not that he had ever tried anything since Monica had confronted Wellmann about his treatment of me. But from that moment on, he was distant, coolly polite, and completely professional with me.

  Bullies are always cowed when challenged. Or punched.

  * * *

  A terrible, terrible thing happened yesterday evening. I went to my usual rendezvous with Haechen. As soon as I was in the door, he grabbed me by the arm and shoved it so hard up behind my back I started to scream. That’s when he told me that if I screamed again he would break my neck. And he informed me that he knew all about my relationship “with the American.” I felt panic course through me. He kept pushing my forearm higher toward my shoulders, using such force that I was certain he was going to snap it.

  “Did you really think you could keep all this from me?” he hissed. “Did you, you cheap little bitch?”

  I was crying so hard I couldn’t speak. That’s when he threw me on the bed, threw up my skirt, tore off my underwear, and . . .

  He had his hands on my neck throughout. It was over, as usual, quickly. After he came, he punched me hard in the stomach. I curled up into a ball, sobbing so loudly that language was impossible. But I could hear him saying:

  “You actually deserve to have your face rearranged. But that would leave noticeable marks. Still I have reported your profound insubordination—yet another of your treasons—to our friends over there. They are not pleased. Of course, this completely compromises any possible reconciliation with Johannes.”

  “I’ll stop seeing him,” I whispered through the sobs. “I’ll do anything you ask. Just please let me . . .”

  “Redeem yourself?”

  I nodded.
<
br />   “Why should I trust you?”

  “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. And gotten everything you’ve demanded.”

  “That is true. But you have also become involved with an American—and tried to hide this from me. As you surely realize by now, it is our business to know everything.”

  “I know that.”

  “So I also know that you are rather smitten—in fact, in love—with this American. But how deep is your love for your son? Are you willing to sacrifice him for your American writer?”

  I shook my head.

  “That was the response I was hoping for. By the way, I am not going to make you drop your American lover. Not yet. But you are going to make him useful to us.”

  * * *

  I wandered around after all this. I wanted to go and tell Thomas everything. Surely he would understand. Surely his love for me would . . .

  No. That would be asking too much of him. His sense of betrayal would be enormous.

  But now I also knew that Haechen—or somebody working for Haechen—was shadowing me everywhere.

  What do I do here? What moral course of action do I take here?

  There’s no way out. I am about to lose everything.

  * * *

  Thomas was out for the evening at a concert. I got home. I threw away the remnants of the underwear that Haechen had torn off me. I took a long, hot shower. By the time Thomas walked in I had managed, as always, to shove everything I was feeling (the rage, the fury, the fear) into that dark room in which I only dwelled. I took Thomas by the hand immediately and pulled him into the bedroom. We made love. I was so overwrought, so wound tight, that I seemed to be even more fervent than usual, screaming when I came. Afterward I curled up in a corner of the bed, wishing I could confess it all to Thomas. He put his arms around me and asked me what was wrong.

  Everything.

  But I said not a word. I just told him I loved him, then shut my eyes and feigned sleep. Sleep, however, never arrived that night. At one point I got up, went into the kitchen, poured myself a glass of red wine, smoked several cigarettes, and finally came up with a solution to my checkmated life. The moment that I chose to execute this plan would have to be the right one. Everything else would have to be in place before I made the move I would make. Because that move would be irrevocable. I would have to bide my time—doing all that was asked of me—until that certain moment arrived.