“No, you cannot give up your life there.”
“My life is with you. And you love this house.”
“I do love this house. And I love you.”
Jean polished off her second slice, wiped the cream from her mouth, and got up to go, but before she waddled very far she heard John’s engine starting up and the crushing sound of tires on gravel.
“He’s gone. He can be such a prissy-pants sometimes.”
“He can indeed! And he’s your prissy-pants now! I’ll drive you,” Hilda offered. And she wrapped up the last of the cake for Jean.
Jack found it strange to be sitting with his boyhood friend in the apartment his stepfather owned. His memory of it was that it was so much larger and more exotic, but five years of travelling throughout Europe had made him accustomed to high ceilings, heavy wooden doors, and spiralling staircases. The expansive rooms that had intimidated him in his teens now seemed commonplace. Months in Warsaw, Bucharest, and Budapest had given him a different perspective on architecture. Hamburg was, for him, an odd place. So much had been rebuilt after the war so that modern glass and steel stood in contrast to the old, masculine buildings of stone and brick. Siegfried’s building was old, formidable, but no longer as intimidating to him as it was when he was a child.
“I have come for you to check my eye and maybe even make me a new one,” he joked, putting on a bad German accent.
Gareth was surprised to see his old friend there. Surprised and uncomfortable. How many times had the thought that they were perhaps living each other’s lives crossed his mind? His brother, Tristan, would have loved for Gareth to share an interest in cameras, which Jack did so easily, usurping him as a brother. And Jack, who had once stayed in the apartment as Siegfried’s guest and a client.
“So how would you like to buy this apartment?” Jack blurted out immediately.
“Pardon?”
“Siegfried asked me to come and talk to you. He has to sell the apartment because my dad is being priggish to my mom and, as always, Siegfried is trying to make everything right for everyone else. God, it must be hard for him to sell it.”
“I’m an apprentice. He doesn’t pay me much. And I stay here for free.”
“You’re hardly an apprentice anymore. Besides, he’s giving you the business, so you’ll be making decent money. So here is my idea …”
Jack moved about the space as though he owned it. Knowing where the coffee was, and the schnapps. He hadn’t been there in almost eight years, but he held a perfect memory in his mind, as though every room had been fastened to his brain in a photographic image. Gareth could see that the years of monocular vision had made his friend all the better at retaining the memory of how things looked. It was as though the fear of losing his other eye taught him to hold everything he could see in a memory. Just in case.
“Slivovitz or schnapps? Ooh, peach! I could make us Fuzzy Navels!”
“Sure.” Gareth shrugged, already imagining how difficult it would be to have to move. He could stay with Sabine, he supposed. They were still friends, although the relationship had become awkward after Clara had shown up unannounced. Sabine, though fully dressed, had emerged from the bedroom that evening with the sleepy-eyed look of someone who had just fucked her brains out. Clara had just stared at her, her pale eyes darting back and forth as they took in Sabine’s strong and healthy body, her mane of hair, her confidence, and her overt sexuality.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Sabine had asked.
Clara then made awkward apologies for coming unannounced, all the while shifting her weight from one foot to the other. It seemed to Gareth that her eyes had begun to vibrate as intensely as they did in her childhood.
“Don’t be shy. Come sit down. I will make some Kaffe.”
Gareth had wanted to slink away, make himself small, so small that the women could just bat him back and forth the way cats do, playing with half-dead mice. There he was, dying slowly, while Sabine was turning him into a plaything.
“Do you live here?” Clara had found the courage to ask.
“No, no, I am just a neighbour. I was just over, being … neighbourly,” Sabine had said with a laugh.
And after a coffee and the usual, although not revealing, conversation about how Gareth knew each of them, Clara excused herself, saying that she had an early performance the next morning.
The next morning, Gareth had gone to the university where, Clara said, she was performing. But they had been there two days earlier and Clara had already left town.
Jack listened to Gareth’s story, wanting every sordid detail. He couldn’t believe that Gareth was sleeping with Sabine!
“Of course, it’s been almost ten years since our night,” Jack blurted out.
“What? You slept with Sabine?”
“Not exactly. Besides, it was her roommate I liked. What was her name?”
“Hannah?”
“Yes, Hannah! What happened to her?”
“I think she married a psychiatrist or something and moved to Frankfurt.”
“Oh, that’s a shame.”
Jack was looking at all the books Siegfried had collected over the years. Mostly hardcover. And then there were paintings and furniture and dishes. He couldn’t imagine having to pack it all up. And do what? Ship it all to Canada? Put it into storage?
“Here is the thing. The future is Europe,” Jack proclaimed.
“Says you. I am thinking that I should go home.”
“Bullshit. You don’t have a gallery willing to show your work in Canada, and even if you did, who’s collecting? Besides, they make acrylic eyes there! You would have to train all over again to be an ocularist in North America. But one-eyed people will come from all over the world for your eyes, because Germany is still known for its glass eyes. And you are the ocularist now.”
It was true. All of Siegfried’s rantings about plastic eyes over the years had made it very clear that to be in the American Association of Ocularists, Gareth would have to make acrylic eyes. He could never do that. It would be a betrayal.
“You know, when I first arrived, Siegfried took me to see the Elba River and said, ‘Look here! The Vikings came up this river in 845 and destroyed Hamburg. Charlemagne built that beautiful castle to protect the city against them. But they are very tricky, those Vikings. Very tricky.’”
“Oh, I know, those American Vikings with their plastic eyes!” Jack mimicked Siegfried, “Barbarians, smashing all those beautiful glass eyes! Imagine!”
“But you know, they were stock eyes, though. Not custom.”
“Still, pretty brutal. Anyhow, want to hear my plan?”
Jack showed his hand. Explained how he could be a stringer for the Toronto Star, but he really needed one foot in Europe and one back home.
“Mark my words, we are on the brink of history in the making. And it is going to happen here. In Europe. And I think it will happen in Germany.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“I’m not quite sure, but I have a hunch. Look, first there’s the EU, then there is Gorbachev, and he wants to bring the Soviet Union into a more modern world. There are protests amongst the young and people want more than what they have. They want more autonomy. They want more freedom. They want more choice. It’s happening right across Eastern Europe. So my guess is that East Germany is next. But as I said” — he touched his glass eye — “it’s just a hunch.”
“How does this hunch affect me? And more important, where am I going to live?”
“Right here. We can buy this place together. Not put it on the market. Siegfried was going to give you the business, anyhow, and he was going to leave me twenty-five percent of this place. We use that money as our down payment.”
“I doubt we could get a mortgage.”
“Well, I am a citizen. I did that through my mom, but I have no credit to speak of. But you could marry someone German so that you are legit here and together we buy this. It is an amazing apartment. Three bedrooms.
A place for you to paint. Your business downstairs.”
After a few more Fuzzy Navels it was decided. Gareth would marry Sabine, who always wanted to live in the apartment, anyhow, and Jack would use it as home base, coming and going. Hilda’s home would be secured so that they could all go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was the perfect plan.
“Call her.”
“Who?”
“Sabine. Call her and propose tonight.”
Gareth picked up Siegfried’s line and called. Her voice was thick with sleep, gravelly.
“Allo?”
“Hey, Sabine?”
“This better be good, it is two in the morning!”
Jack motioned for him to continue.
“Want to come over?”
“Thought we weren’t doing late-night, impulsive sex anymore.”
Gareth blushed. He looked over at Jack. All was well; after all, he had no idea what she might be saying on the other line.
“Okay, I will be there in fifteen minutes.”
“She’ll be here in fifteen minutes,” he repeated to Jack.
Jack wondered if she would even remember him, the shy but aroused boy whom they had to care for when his youth made a fool of him. Still, they could have a good laugh over it now. Time and distance can turn humiliation into humour.
“I’ll get it,” Jack announced, rising from the armchair to answer her knock.
To him she looked as exotic and sexy as he remembered. Age had only improved her. The cynical sophistication that she wore like a borrowed dress in her early twenties had become a second skin as she approached thirty. Anything rehearsed and measured had become intrinsically a part of her so that every gesture and move now seemed organic.
“Guten Abend. Remember me?”
“Ja, of course, I always wondered when you would come back. I heard that Siegfried married your mother so I assumed I would see you again. But it has been — what? Ten years? What happened to your eye?”
“What do you mean?”
“They were two different colours before. Now they are boring.”
“Well, hardly boring.”
“I mean the same. Like everyone.” Sabine shrugged.
Gareth sat, waiting to be included. Were they going catch up the whole ten years, detail by detail?
“You know it’s a fake eye, right? That’s how I met Siegfried, as a kid. I have three that I change up. Today I was feeling like matching. But I still have my Bowie eye.”
“So then you can switch them at whim?”
Gareth was getting impatient. Childhood feelings started to boil up, unexpectedly and inexplicably. It seemed it was always about Jack’s eye. Every shared class ended up with Jack getting better marks because of the eye. And Tristan, who never openly used his eye to gain favour, found it easier to bond with Jack than with him. It was as though Jack had replaced him as a brother and Tristan had replaced him as Jack’s best friend. Now the woman he’d been sleeping with wasn’t even acknowledging him. Hadn’t she gotten out of bed with the aim of having sex with him? Now it was all about Jack. Jack, Jack, Jack. It had always been about Jack.
“Well, they aren’t wigs, Sabine. They are prosthetics. Some people lose sight of that,” Gareth informed.
“Yeah, some people lose sight, Gareth.” Jack smiled pointedly at his friend.
Sabine thought that it was all hysterically funny.
“Someone get me a drink, and then let’s go through that drawer right there and see how Jack looks in all the different eyes!”
The only eyes in that drawer were the ones that Siegfried had made year after year for himself. The others were all still at the oculary. Only Siegfried’s had been transported to the apartment. But that didn’t stop them. Jack removed his hazel eye and reached for the crystal-clear blue eye of Siegfried’s youth.
And all around him were dying soldiers. Mud. And flashes of gunfire. And blood.
Jack took the eye out, placed it back into the drawer.
“No, it’s a bad idea. Besides, they don’t fit properly.”
“Aw, you should have let me see it first!”
“I’m tired,” Jack said. “Shall I just sleep in Siegfried’s room?”
“Yeah, perfect.”
Sabine moved over to where Gareth was sitting on the armchair. She straddled his legs and sat on his lap.
“So, you woke me up from a deep sleep. You better be up for some sex now.”
“Not really. I drank too much.”
“I could go sleep with Jack, then?”
Gareth shrugged.
“I know you’re jealous.”
“A little.”
Sabine took his hand and led him to his room. She loosened the tie on her wrap dress and it fell away from her. She really was beautiful. Everything about her pointed upward. Her breasts, full with dark nipples that seemed to flip upward toward the ceiling. Her high and round bum. Even the ski jump of her nose seemed to suggest that there was a heaven and that heaven was up toward the sky. She crawled under the duvet and motioned for him to join her.
“Don’t worry. It’s just a friend-fuck. It’s not like I’m expecting you to marry me,” she said.
He joined her and made slow, half-drunk love to her until sleep overtook them both.
And then, he dreams of her. A woman with long red hair, strands of seaweed clinging to her tresses. She is at the water’s edge. With wildflowers in her arms. She turns and sees Gareth. She looks so very sad. She turns her back on him, walks into the water.
Gareth got up. He walked about the apartment. It was great there. He loved the apartment, but it wasn’t his forever home. It was just a temporary chance to run away from his responsibilities and to shirk off expectation.
“Jack? Jack?” He softly knocked on Jack’s bedroom door.
“Yeah,” a sleepy voice replied.
“I can’t do it. I don’t love Sabine. It’s your idea, why don’t you marry her?”
“I can’t. I’m in love with your brother.”
Gareth stood quietly, staring at his best friend in wonder.
“Well, aren’t you going to say something?”
“No. I’m relieved, actually. All this time I thought you’d replaced me. Guess I got that one wrong,” Gareth admitted. He could feel a weight lifting. Jealousy, resentment, even guilt seemed to loosen its grip.
“Yeah. I guess you did.”
Tristan stretched across his bed, his hand reaching to the cool, empty spot where Jack had been only a day before. How he came and went and, in those times between, Tristan felt that his existence was just a dream. A period of waiting until Jack, so full of stories and news, would re-emerge, breathing life into their squat of an apartment.
Tristan sat up and looked about the room. It hadn’t really changed since they were both students, when Jack slept in the living room on a pullout couch. But then, that one time when Jack had too much to drink and Tristan gave him his bed for the night with a bucket by his head, just in case. After that, Jack pretty much moved in with him, without fuss. No tsunami, no earth-shattering adjustments, just the slow growing together and hesitant exploration of two young men who already knew each other too well. Jack had already killed for him, what other proof of love could Tristan need? The body was given long after the pact was made.
Tristan looked at the room they shared and knew that somehow their surroundings had not changed as they had. So down came the cheesy movie posters of his youth. He was careful as he untaped them and rolled them and put them into his closet. There was, surprisingly, no sadness. He would soon enough have his own posters, with his own name written on the bottom.
The empty rectangles stood out, though, with paint faded around them and cracks on the walls where the posters had been. There would have to be a paint job, some plaster in the cracks, and new decor.
Tristan opened the bottom drawer of Jack’s dresser, where favourite photos were kept. He rifled through everything from destruction to nature to fashion shots. He
sorted them, looking for three, a triptych, that would work together. Surely Jack wouldn’t mind. Here an expanse of water, looking from the cliffs into a moody Lake Ontario, with light bouncing off the water like a mirrored playground. Here the faces of Mexican children in an orphanage outside of Tijuana, looking into the lens of the camera with curiosity and without hope, and here a candid shot of the Live Aid Concert taken in London a few years earlier, crowds of people all together. Photos Jack had taken, in black and white, to be framed and displayed in their shared room.
Before he closed the drawers he took out the file with the word TWINS scribbled across it. He knew what was inside but opened it, anyhow. There they were, over a decade younger, the albino twins. The beginning of Bleach and the start of everything. Tristan stared at them, in their haloed glory. It was the night they had competed at Massey Hall and he and Jack were there to witness them. To capture them. How each of their lives had changed. He closed the file and wondered if they could ever know the truth. Then returned it to the bottom of the drawer.
TEN
SIEGFRIED HAD FULLY PLANNED to sacrifice his past in Germany for his future with Hilda in Canada, but Jack had found a way around it all, suggesting he buy the apartment from him, with his neighbour Sabine. Siegfried’s favourite things were sent to him, bit by bit, but he had let the rest go. There was no longer a hold on him. Germany was now far away. He hadn’t even been there for two years. Now here he stood, in a land of hot summers and cold winters, with a big sky, and nature creeping up to his doorstep, thankful to be with the woman he loved.
“I will bring in the last Brussels sprouts and make us some coffee and cake. I’ll call you when it’s ready.” Hilda kissed his cheek, gathered up their last harvest, and went inside. How he loved her!
His life as an ocularist also had little hold on him now. This new land had given him his successor, his heir, Gareth, and he couldn’t be prouder of him. He had learned everything he could and then, when there was no more for Siegfried to teach him, he went on to experiment more with hot glass, creating more details and nuances than Siegfried could ever imagine. Yes, Gareth was the ocularist now; he had passed that torch to him. How lucky he was!
Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack Page 27