Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  “Your English is so good.”

  “It should be, I’ve been studying it since I was eight. Then when I was eleven I had the choice between French and Latin.”

  “Which did you choose?”

  “French, of course. Latin is a dead language.”

  Jack imagined how Latin might have died. Daggers in the back like Caesar. A slow, painful death of some degenerative disease. A jealous rival lover, Italian perhaps, shot Latin in its vernacular! Of course, it would have to be the last option. Italian, that usurping language! Once all Romans spoke Latin, and now in Rome, they all speak Italian. God, he hated usurpers. Siegfried was probably kissing his mother right now!

  Jack opened the door for Hannah. Her blond curls caught the night air and rustled just a bit. She passed by him, so closely that her body brushed him.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes. I’m not used to drinking so much beer. I don’t know how you do it,” Jack admitted.

  “Well, our mothers drink beer when we breastfeed as babies, so we are all weaned on it!”

  Jack would have laughed if he could. But her mouth was suddenly on his. Not gently, but with purpose. She had pulled him closer by the arm so that his body fell toward hers. Then, there it was — lips, mouth, tongue pressing, exploring, demanding. He felt her hand move up his trouser leg to find his crotch, where his hard-on affirmed his attraction.

  “You want to go back to our apartment?”

  “You have your own apartment?”

  “Of course. Sabine and I are here studying, so we got a flat together.” Hannah started laughing as she wrapped her arms around him in an embrace, pushing her body into his. My God, she was like a cat in heat.

  “But, I am only here for another day. This is so fast.”

  “If you are only here one more day then it has to be fast.”

  “What about Sabine?”

  “She’s a big girl, she knows how to get home. Either she will bring someone home or she may join us.”

  Jack was as panicked as he was aroused. What could be the worst-case scenario? He makes a fool of himself, he doesn’t know what to do, he cums too quickly. But if any of those things happened, he was leaving in a day, anyhow, and would never have to see them again. What happens in Hamburg, stays in Hamburg.

  “I love your eyes,” she said. “Like David Bowie.”

  “Yes,” he replied, wondering if she was aware that the left eye was a fake.

  Hilda understood why he had arranged a night out for Jack. She knew Siegfried wanted their last night there to be spent together, talking about old times and remembering a time before Jack. A time when she existed as an individual, unhampered by progeny. Did painters or writers feel like that sometimes? That as much as they loved their finished work, whatever they produced defined who they were while the limitations of expectation closed in all around them.

  Hilda didn’t know why she thought about writers and painters so often. She never aspired to be either, although she did take first place in a national poetry competition once. So, then, what did define her? She had no vaulting ambitions, no great feats she wanted to accomplish before she died. There was no bucket list that she referred to, striking off experiences as they happened. Very North American, that. Her husband had a bucket list. She wondered if sleeping with Miss Argyle had been on it.

  Miss Argyle. Her second. No, her replacement.

  It wasn’t the affair that bothered her. It was to be expected. Twenty years, a man has to get a little bored and want another flavour. Hadn’t she been bored herself? Hadn’t she imagined other lovers and had her own fantasies when she was left alone to pleasure herself? No, it was something else that ate at her. The times they could have gone out, and didn’t. The times they could have had a laugh, and didn’t. The times they could have sought out joy in each other, and didn’t. It had nothing to do with him fucking Miss Argyle. It had to do with the fact that the things he had been denying her, bit by bit over the years, those inconsequential little things, were the things he so easily gave to another woman. She had no problem sharing some intimacy, but that it was withheld from her and generously shared with Jean Argyle was the thing that ate away at her ego.

  Ego. She knew it was all about ego. It had to be because she asked all those questions: Was she prettier? Was she funnier? Was she sexier? Did she do things that Hilda would not do? Hilda had to laugh because with that always came the memory of her grandmother, her omi, on her mother’s side. She had adored her when she was a child, not realizing how very embarrassing she was until her teens.

  “See that ugly Mädchen there?”

  “Ja, Omi?”

  “Do you know why that handsome man is with her?”

  “Nein, Omi.”

  And then her omi would get all conspiratorial, motioning for Hilda to come closer so she could whisper, but never quietly enough, “Because she takes it up the arschloch.”

  It was many years before Hilda even knew what that meant, but, one thing she did know, because her omi had told her, was that it wasn’t something to be done. It was not clean. And besides, only ugly girls had to do that. Hilda knew that her reputation as a beauty depended upon never doing something as unclean as taking it up the arschloch.

  John only attempted it once. His pecker exploring and poking around, missing the usual spot and pressing gently there. Hilda wondered if it was a mistake because he’d had too much to drink. She reached behind to redirect him, but he moved back, pressing a bit more. It was only when she verbally said no that he ceased to try and they never spoke of it again.

  Miss Argyle was pretty. She was lovely and perky and full of life. Surely she didn’t have to do that sort of thing. Or did she? Imagine that! A sex-crazed seductress at night in the bowling alley and then Miss Prim-first-grade-teacher by daylight!

  Hilda went downstairs to the hotel bar to wait for Siegfried. A change of scenery might clear her head from her relentless thoughts. John was gone, no longer a part of her life. It was time to move on. And it made no difference now whether or not Jean pleased him with unclean sex when she would not. Too late to start that kind of thing now.

  Perhaps all men liked nasty sex. Dirty talk, fantasies, and the pushing of boundaries. Perhaps the first blush of love, where each partner wants to consume the other, became boring the moment sex became a marital activity, or worse, a marital obligation. Not that she bored of the same old, same old. She liked the intimacy of having her husband inside her, moving in her and her enveloping him. She didn’t really need the conversations he seemed to like about sharing her with other men or having a woman join them from time to time, just for a bit of fun. She saw sex as an enjoyable bodily function. No mysteries. No imagination needed. Simply a joining of bodies in a physical act. Two individuals coming together and then letting the winds of heaven dance between them once again. It was no different from enjoying a meal with someone. It was as natural as anything else the body needed and required. So what was she to do now without an outlet for what her body needed and required?

  She knew that Siegfried was a fantasy, a projection of everything she missed without the reality of everything she had purposely left. German men were blunt, telling the truth when a little white lie, as they say in America, would be just as good. For instance, when a German man loves you and you ask him, “Do I look fat in this new dress?” a German would easily say, “Well, you have put on a few pounds over winter,” while a North American would say, “You look beautiful in whatever you wear.” God, could she possibly endure that level of honesty again?

  But look at what guile had brought her! Her eyes were so shielded that she never saw the betrayal coming. Confident in the protection of tactfulness, how was she to see the bulldozer that would flatten her existence, levelling twenty years of what she had built until, like an old building replaced, one could only wonder what really was there before the destruction.

  Oh yes, Miss Argyle was a goer, all right. Weren’t all schoolteachers, with their “Y
ou’ll do it again and again till you get it right” motto?

  Hilda ordered a drink: Pernod and water. She carefully combined the two, watching the pastis effect, enjoying how the two seemingly clear liquids created a white, milky cloud when combined. Yes, that is how it is. Two things seem to be one way, but then together, blended, they become something else, for better or worse, except that for better or for worse does not mean forever.

  “I rarely drink Pernod, that milky thing it does really creeps me out!”

  Siegfried had slid in beside her on the next seat without her noticing, so preoccupied she was in distracting herself from her thoughts.

  “Why?”

  “Because, well, it is silly …”

  “No, tell me,” Hilda insisted.

  “Because it reminds me of the milkiness that comes with age or with blindness in the eye. It often means the eye must be removed. Now I know that is good for my business, but I do find it very sad.”

  Hilda pushed the glass away. A moment before it had been so enticing. Something that she would never have at home. The country demanded more substantial, more honest drinks like beer and cider and wine. Not something that filled the glass and changed its properties, creating a white, floating, creamy … Oh, mein Gott, she thought, how the drink looks like floating semen!

  “I think we should go. Maybe walk somewhere and have something to eat.”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  It was a temperate night with a definite breezy warm breath of air all around them. How carefree this weather was. How undemanding! No coats. No scarves. No gloves. Perfect. Siegfried took her by the elbow and steered her in the right direction.

  “Why do you like me? I am not special. I have no great accomplishments, no big dreams. I am not a carefree modern woman.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he responded.

  “No, I am serious.”

  “Because you always have hope and you never give up. Because you embrace the big challenges and the little wonders. And because you make me laugh.”

  “How do you know I don’t give up? I am giving up on my marriage.”

  “His choice, not yours.”

  “Yes, but I am not fighting for it.”

  “For that I am glad. I will tell you something. When you were a girl, I used to try to teach you to stand on your head. You could not do it. But you practised and practised and on my side of the wall I could hear your feet hitting the wall before you fell over, again and again. And that is when I knew you were special.”

  They stopped walking. People passed by them. Siegfried pulled her closer by the elbow until they were touching and he looked at her face for what seemed a very long time, as though he were etching every feature into his memory. And then he lifted her chin with one finger, moved his face nearer to hers, and kissed her mouth. It was simple, sweet, and predictable. Exactly what she needed.

  “If you didn’t try so hard, if you could just do that headstand, I would not have loved you all those years ago.”

  Hilda stepped away from him. Stepped off the sidewalk and onto a sliver of grass in front of an old walk-up five-storey apartment building. It seemed to her that every window was watching as she tucked in her knee-length skirt and squatted. First a tripod position, hands shoulder-width apart on the ground, between her squatting knees. Then she put her head between the hands, making sure her elbows were bent like a ledge. One knee on each elbow, and, there, she balanced a moment before contracting her stomach and squeezing her thighs and her buttocks while she straightened first her back, then took one then the other knee off the elbows. Straightening, straightening, balancing, concentrating, until she was, surrounded by people, standing on her head in the middle of Hamburg. Legs in the air, skirt blowing away. And there was clapping and whistling. Even Siegfried must have been clapping. But then she wavered a bit and knew it was time to come back down. She tried to catch her balance at the last moment, but she fell just the same. And Siegfried was there to catch her.

  “Superb,” he said, his arms around her in the grass. “How could anyone not love you?”

  Jack awoke with a start, his surroundings completely unfamiliar. There were nice sheets over him, and a fluffy duvet with flowers on its cover. Pillows all around him, as though he were a baby and he needed to be barricaded in so he wouldn’t fall off the bed. He shut his eyes and the room moved and swayed. His head could not keep pace with the imagined movement, so he stretched his leg out and put his foot on the floor to steady himself. Better. Slightly better.

  Where were his pants? He threw off the duvet. Indeed, he was completely naked, except for his underwear. He looked around the room. No sign of his shirt. No jeans. But his shoes were neatly lined up at the edge of the bed.

  He could hear a voice reinterpreting the actual words to Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Knock Three Times.” There was a confidence in the voice, even when the word feeling was substituted by ceiling. But who was singing? Surely not Hannah, so it had to be Sabine. Had he spent the night with her and didn’t remember any of it? He reached down and felt his crotch. A morning erection defied his hangover. I’m alert, I’m perky, I’m rarin’ to go!

  “I vant you, I vant you,” another voice joined in. Surely that wasn’t the backup lyrics. This was all wrong. The song, the two girls, the lack of clothes, and his early-morning erection. Damn. How embarrassing!

  “Hello!” he called out.

  Wafts of fresh coffee were teasing him awake. Ah, that would be so nice. Hot coffee, a little cream and sugar.

  “Ah, the prince awakes!”

  The two girls came into the room. Bright and beautiful, with freshly cleaned faces and daytime clothes on. No sign of the party girls from the night before. These were now transformed young women, committed students, with appropriate buttoned shirts, jeans, and softly draped sweaters, the arms tied at their necks.

  “Umm … where are my pants?”

  “No worries, we are washing them. And your shirt.” Hannah smiled.

  “Why?”

  The girls started to laugh and Jack felt awkward, vulnerable in his white Stanfield underwear. How boring was that, white Y-fronts? Boring and oh-so Canadian. Why couldn’t he have that carefree attitude he saw amongst these European students? Drink and party, maybe even fuck all night, then just carry on the next day without worry or commitment. Sit in corners, arguing politics or literature. Well, he would have to learn something about those subjects, wouldn’t he? And everyone spoke English. Why didn’t he speak another language? Well, French. He had some French, coming from Canada. But it wasn’t real French. Not conversational. How many times did he have to repeat “Henri est un enfant terrible”? He spent year after year, looking at the Leduc family poster, with the children and the house and the little dog, Pitou, repeating the familiar phrases about the Leduc family as the French teacher pointed at the cartoon family and all he could think was, What was the thing that Henri did that labelled him un enfant terrible? Had Henri gone home with two horny German girls only to wake up unaware of the night’s activities? Perhaps it was his older brother, Jacques, who was the real enfant terrible. Jack is a horrible child.

  “Don’t worry, nothing happened, you weren’t up to it!”

  “No, not up at all. Not like now!” Sabine looked down, toward his underwear.

  “Oh, leave the poor boy alone! He is probably hungover,” Hannah chided, handing Jack a much-needed coffee. Perfect. Just the ticket, as they say.

  “You Canadians don’t know how to drink beer?” teased Sabine.

  “We do …” Jack stammered, more a weak protest than a statement.

  He had to believe them, that nothing had happened the night before and for that, he was relieved, not because he wouldn’t have liked a story of his first conquest to take home with him, but because he would like to remember the details of his first time. No story. No memory. A promise of magic and then all vanished. Poof! Too much to drink and what came of it? Not confidence, not jacked-up courage. Just disgrace. Two
beautiful girls, stripping him, leading him to the bed and then what? Tucking him in? Or worse. God, they were washing his clothes. A flash of kneeling before the toilet, their strange toilets with the presentation ledges instead of the simple bowls like at home, and retching, over and over again, until the contents of his stomach were emptied. A pull of an overhead chain and swoosh, the presentation platter was efficiently cleared.

  “We cannot stay and play with you — we have a lecture to attend.”

  “That’s okay. Have to get along … my mom is probably worried.”

  Oh, God, did he actually say that? His mom? Really? Jack was feeling more embarrassed by the minute.

  “Perhaps you should call her. Let her know you are okay. Sabine, go get his clothes, they should be dry by now.”

  What a debacle! He could never imagine having an opportunity like that again. If there was fate at work, or divine intervention, then he could only hope that at least the gods were entertained. Not the Greek gods of thought, myth, and philosophy but the dark gods of this place. Norse gods. Loki, Tiwaz, Frigg. Yeah, Frigg, because his luck was a friggin’ joke. Always had been. Gareth would never have gotten so drunk. Gareth was well-balanced, after all.

  “You can let yourself out when you go. The door will lock itself!” Hannah’s voice was cheery, with no judgmental tones whatsoever.

  Jack took his clothes from Sabine, still warm from the dryer. He slid his legs into the pants, pulled his shirt over his head.

  “Thanks so much for this, and I am so sorry about last night.”

  But they were both gone, and Jack was leaving later that day.

  SIX

  GARETH HAD HIS EAR to the wall. His mother was talking, as usual, recounting her day as they waited for the heaviness of sleep to overtake them. This time was theirs, the stolen moments at the end of the day belonged to just them. No responsibilities, no burdens, no clients or patients or even kids. Well, at least that is what they thought, but Gareth was present, though unseen, on the other side of the wall.

  “Oh, Mark, no one told those girls the truth. They showed up wanting answers about their mother. I mean, it had been a few years. What was I to say?”