by Erika Rummel
She shrugged. “Nobody gives a fuck about requisitions and allocations right now. The old guard is on the run. When the revolution is over, we’ll see who gets to live where. I won’t go back to the Orbans.”
When he saw that she was determined to stay, he asked her for one of her poems. “As a souvenir,” he said. He meant as a talisman, something to hold on to since he couldn’t hold on to Livia.
“You are a sentimental shit,” she said, but she gave him a poem. “Don’t read it now,” she said. “There is no time.”
He threw his arms around her and tried to kiss her, but she turned away. He thought he would remember that moment forever, that last awkward embrace, but when he arrived at Andras’ place and saw an old man in a cracked leather coat get into the driver’s seat of a van, he forgot everything. He started running, slipping on the pavement, kicking up slush and yelling Andras’ name. His shout stopped the movement of the old man’s arm, displaced all thoughts of Livia, and even wiped his aunt’s face from memory. The only thing that stayed in his brain was his chance to get away. As he passed the front of the van, he saw Andras’ mother sitting in the passenger’s seat frowning down at him, and Andras waving to him from the back, shouting, Get in. The old man wrinkled his brow and looked at Zoltan darkly, but he did not prevent him from climbing into the back and hunkering down with Andras and his sister. They sat wedged between boxes and kitchen stuff, holding on for balance to each other and to battered suitcases as the van moved out into the street. Zoltan reached into his pocket and pulled out Livia’s poem. Three lines.
“Freedom is everything.
A revolution.
Coming into my own.”
“What have you got there?” Andras said. “A love letter?”
He snatched at the paper, but Zoltan elbowed him away.
“An address,” he said. It was true. On the reverse, he had written down Leo Auerperg’s address and phone number. “Someone in Vienna, a friend of my aunt’s.”
“You got a contact in Vienna?” Andras said. “You lucky bugger!”
They reached the outskirts of Budapest and the open country. They passed people pushing bicycles or strollers piled with possessions. They saw, through the square window in the back of the van, others lugging suitcases or carrying bags slung over their shoulders, and where the road curved, tanks, army trucks, armed infantry carriers. They saw farm buildings with shattered windows and gaping holes in the walls, remnants of barricades…
HE SAW NANCY coming out of the house, crossing the lawn, creating a force field that swallowed his Hungarian memories and replaced them with the image of the moment, Nancy dressed in Birthday Beautiful, a white linen dress that deepened the innocence in her eyes. He gave her a smile of appreciation, but for some reason Nancy did not smile back.
“Has David left?” she asked.
“Gone home to read Derrida,” he said lightly.
Nancy gave him an uncertain look. “All that talk about philosophy,” she said.
She is worried, he thought, because of what I said to David earlier on about the Cereta/Laura mix-up. That’s what’s dampening her mood. But you have to start somewhere, and David is bound to find out one day that he was tricked into holding Cereta’s hand for a couple of weeks. He may find out very soon if Cereta gets in touch with him and spills the beans. Or if Laura decides to confess now that they were seeing each other. At least, that’s what Nancy told him. David had looked pathetically happy when they toasted the illusion of happiness. Zoltan felt sorry for the man. He wanted to pat him on the back and say: Listen, David, I know. Reality is a bitch, and life is complicated, but hey! Lighten up. Take it one day at a time. You are going out with Laura now? Good. Enjoy.
“Ready?” he said to Nancy, and without waiting for an answer steered her across the backyard to the gate.
“I’ve been thinking, Zoltan,” she said, putting her hand on his arm, slowing him down. “We should be more honest with each other.”
Sounds like the beginning of a confession, he thought. What can Nancy possibly have to confess? And how did we get here from there? He tried to connect Nancy’s confessional voice to what came before — the two of them sipping Dom Pérignon by the swimming pool, the unveiling of the Liebermann, David coming over, their toast to illusion. What was Nancy’s point of reference?
“I thought we were honest with each other,” he said. All those sliding doors and secret passages he had come through to present Nancy with the Liebermann! She had no idea how hard he worked to please her.
“I mean…” she said and trailed off.
I should ask her about those apologetic elisions one day, he thought, and find out exactly what those half-sentences mean.
They were standing in the driveway. She had stopped beside his car and was waiting for him to open the door.
“Let’s walk,” he said. “It’s only a few blocks. I like the fact that there are places here you can walk to. Unlike my neighbourhood, which is all strip malls and four-lane highways.”
“That’s the nice thing about Santa Monica, isn’t it? All those little boutiques and cafés. They remind me of Vienna,” she said.
Okay, he thought, we’ve sailed past the honesty question, but perhaps we should return to it and talk about the degree of honesty we can afford without making each other unhappy.
“I’m thinking of taking German lessons,” Nancy was saying, “so I can talk to people the next time I’m in Vienna. A course at the Goethe Institute perhaps. I always let Max do the talking for me. I depended too much on him, I think, but he liked it that way.”
Zoltan raised his eyebrows. Was Max, that dear and perfect man, coming off the pedestal? “You mean he kept you dependent?”
“Not in any negative sense,” she said, flustered. “It’s just that Max liked to take charge, and I was such a child when we got married. Eighteen. Nobody gets married at eighteen anymore. All my friends warned me off at the time because Max was twice my age. He was sooo old.” She dragged out the syllable and smiled. “That’s how we thought of anyone over thirty.”
“Perhaps you were looking for a father figure.”
He put a tease in his voice to let her know it was just a talking point, the analyst playing analyst, but she picked up on it eagerly.
“Yes, that’s what I wanted, a mentor, someone to provide me with guidance. My own father was too mild-mannered, you know, too polite to correct anyone.”
“Maybe you were the perfect daughter and didn’t need correction.”
“I was a good child, yes,” she said and smiled up at him. It wasn’t ironic. Nancy wasn’t capable of bent talk.
“And then you grew up,” he said, “went through a belated teenage rebellion and slept with me.”
“I’ll never forgive myself,” she said earnestly.
“You have long ago forgiven yourself, Nancy. That’s why you are still sleeping with me.”
“Oh, but that’s different,” she said. “We are both free now. And I wish you wouldn’t put it so crudely.”
Yes, why was Nancy putting up with a schmuck like him, who put things so crudely? What a comedown after Max, who spoke the refined language of diplomacy and had inherited his father’s aristocratic bearing. Mind you, life in California was erosive. Even Max was not entirely immune to its levelling effect and subsided into communal pleasantness toward the end of his life.
They got to the boardwalk. Nancy reached up to protect her perfect hairdo. “I should have brought a scarf,” she said. “It’s always blustery down here. Where are we going anyway?”
“I’ve made reservations at the Casa del Mar.”
“Oh good,” she said. “I hope they’ll seat us by one of the windows, so we can watch the sunset.”
“We can watch the sunset from here,” he said. “We’ve got lots of time.” He bent down and unlaced his shoes.
Sh
e watched him, disconcerted. “We aren’t going to walk in the sand, are we?”
“What’s the use of living a block from the beach if you don’t get your feet into the sand?” he said.
She looked down at the delicate straps of her sandals and at her cranberry red toenails and back up at him for a solution to her dilemma. “But I can’t walk on the sand like this.”
“Why not?” he said. “Just take off your sandals.”
She slipped them off and gave him a look of patient love. See what I’m doing for you? She reached for his hand as they waded through the mounds of soft dry sand. When they reached the water’s edge, she started in again on the topic of their adulterous affair.
“Your conscience never bothered you, Zoltan?” She had to raise her voice over the pounding surf.
It was a murky question he didn’t want to look into. Not because he didn’t want to acknowledge his guilt but because he couldn’t tell whether he felt any. In any case, remorse wasn’t productive. He had written The Rescue as an appreciation of what the Auerpergs had done for him — that was enough atonement if atonement was needed. But wasn’t his affair with Nancy a kind of rescue as well? Her delivery from the prison-like cocoon of her marriage to the halfway house of his arms, her final release into the wilderness pending. So, was there a need for bad conscience, or not? It was one of those situations when he missed Livia, the old Livia, the interpreter of his feelings, who would have settled the question of guilt in a flip second. But why raise the subject of adultery now when Max’s death had made it obsolete?
“I don’t know whether I have a bad conscience,” he said. He realized the disclaimer sounded phony, especially coming from an analyst.
Nancy picked him up immediately.
“How can you say you don’t know?” She leaned in close. “You don’t want to admit it.”
He gave her an amused smile. It was an amusing twist to their relationship, this attempt of hers to analyze him. It should be the other way round, shouldn’t it?
“How can you be sure?” he asked.
“You aren’t that difficult to read, you know.”
Maybe Nancy had hidden talents. He had never considered her as a reader of his emotions.
“You and Jerry,” she said. “Especially Jerry. I could usually tell what was on his mind.”
“Then why did you come to me for help?”
She thought for a moment. “Because it is your field of expertise, and Max was of no help at all. He was in denial. That’s why I turned to you.”
“But you didn’t take my advice.”
“I know. I thought you were too liberal when you said it all had to come out, but you were right. I realize that now. There was nothing we could do about Jerry’s orientation. Nothing.”
She gave him a stricken look. Jerry had tasted the forbidden fruit and driven them all out of the Garden of Eden. It was the end of her perfect family. Thank God for sunsets. They remained eternally beautiful. Nancy stopped and drew an admiring breath.
She took Zoltan’s arm, and together they watched the sun drop into the sea, West Coast style, with a blaze and sudden loss of light. Only the Ferris wheel on the pier remained, a spinning halo, an afterimage of the sun, tiny green lights blinking on and off.
Nancy’s dependence on Max. Bad conscience. Jerry. “And how does all this tie in with your new quest for honesty?” he said.
“Oh, but I didn’t mean...” It was the start of another of her oh but half-sentences, only this time she got past the hyphen. “I meant, honesty up to a certain point.”
“The point where it becomes ugly?”
“Yes, maybe that’s what it is. I want to close my eyes to ugliness. There were a lot of things Max and I never talked about because they were too, you know, too…”
Ugly, she meant, but he refused to complete the sentence for her.
“It would have been better to talk before Max had the stroke and everything became so complicated,” she said, and gave him an exhausted look. “But let’s go up to the restaurant. I hate shouting into the wind. And I probably look a fright.”
I guess we’re through with the honesty topic, he thought, and it’s back to nice and easy.
Dusk had robbed the Casa del Mar of its third dimension and turned it into a movie flat, the ideal set for a Great Gatsby scene. Zoltan didn’t think he was up to it, but this evening was for Nancy, and she could easily slip into the Daisy role. She wasn’t as careless as the Fitzgerald character, but she had that golden girl quality, and was living in a pink cloud.
They took the Art Deco staircase up to the restaurant. All the tables on the window side were taken. But it didn’t matter, Nancy said. There was nothing to see now that the sun had set.
The ocean had gone a deep midnight blue, and she looked melancholy. Thinking of Max, post-stroke?
No. Halfway through the hors d’oeuvres, Nancy eased into the subject of birthdays. That’s what made her melancholy. Too many birthdays. Elision points before segueing into more pleasant thoughts. The Liebermann painting. What a lovely present.
“And, by the way, Stanley thinks the transaction between Leo and Eva had no legal force whatsoever.”
“You consulted Stanley about the Liebermann painting?” Surprising initiative. Nancy was nearing emancipation, getting ready to be released into the natural habitat of American society. He felt almost sorry that his rescue efforts had been so successful. He would have liked to keep her close a little longer.
In any case, Nancy said, she had no more qualms about the Liebermann business now that she knew Leo had offered the painting to Zoltan. It was all in order, wasn’t it? What a relief. But. She had one more question.
“He offered you the painting, and you declined. But was that the end of your conversation? You know, Zoltan, I think you are holding something back.”
Bingo. How many more days to full emancipation?
“And you think we need to be more honest with each other?”
“More open, I mean. Talking of Leo, for example.”
“Why don’t you start us off?” he said. “Because I’m not sure where we are headed.”
She sighed. Was the assignment so difficult? Should he have asked her an easier question?
“I was always a bit afraid of Leo,” she said. “He had something imposing about him, or what’s the word I want? Regal? I think it was all those generations of Auerpergs going back to the Holy Roman Empire. That’s why I’m asking. What did you think of Leo? You’ve never told me about the time when you came to Vienna and stayed with him.”
Vienna 1956, again. A tricky time. When he had lost the interpreter of his feelings.
“There isn’t much to tell,” he said. The reluctance in his voice carried across the table. Nancy looked at him attentively. She was on the alert now.
“Maybe it wasn’t a happy time for you,” she said, “but Leo helped you out, didn’t he? He took you in for a while. He saw you through university. I thought you’d put that into The Rescue, that he was your benefactor, I mean, but you don’t say much about your relationship with Leo.”
Of course, she couldn’t guess the reason for his reticence — that he didn’t know what sort of relationship it was. He was helpless without Livia, without a guide, blind, tapping a white cane to sound the depth of his emotions.
“I didn’t think it was relevant to the purpose of the pamphlet,” he said. “And I’m not sure I have a great deal to say about Leo. He and I were never close. His charity wasn’t a personal thing. It was more like a duty to society.” He thought of Leo’s face, a handsome mask, an expression of ennui perfected over generations. Every gesture, every look was designed to keep him in place, to keep him at a distance.
He could see that Nancy wanted something more. “I guess that doesn’t answer your question,” he said. He put on his funny pompous voice, the one he used
to put patients at ease when he touched on an uncomfortable subject. Only in this case, he needed to put himself at ease. “Okay. Full disclosure. In the spirit of our new motto — let’s be honest with each other. I haven’t talked much about my relationship with Leo, because I can’t tell how I felt about him. I have no emotional memory.”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t understand. What do you mean you have no emotional memory?”
“It’s a blind spot, a flaw in my makeup. I find it hard to say what I’m feeling now. And I can’t remember what I was feeling then.”
Nancy looked uneasy, and he was afraid that the disclosure had been too much for her, that he had said the wrong thing at the wrong time, putting obstacles into the path of their relationship and of Nancy’s flight to freedom. There was a pause while the waiter cleared away their empty plates and served the next course. He thought Nancy would take advantage of the pause and veer off topic. But she stayed on track. Perhaps she had been on track all along, and it was he who couldn’t see the thread, the connection between honesty, father figure, and Leo.
“That’s odd,” she said. “I mean about your blind spot. It explains a lot, though. Why you never say you love me, for example. Maybe, you can’t tell. But don’t they…I mean, psychology is your… Isn’t there a way to overcome that?”
“A coping mechanism? Yes. I relate my experiences to others and listen for an echo, a clue to my feelings. That’s how I process life. Or else, I rely on other people to extrapolate my feelings and play them back to me.”
“But why haven’t you told me before?” Nancy said. “I could have helped you.”
Helped him identify his feelings?
“I know exactly what you are feeling, Zoltan,” she said. “Now, at this moment at any rate. I don’t know how you felt about Leo in fifty-six. But right now, you are feeling pressured. You don’t really want to remember Leo. I suppose you didn’t like him, but it would be so helpful to me to know why. So, please…”
“I don’t think it was a matter of dislike. He baffled me. When I arrived in Vienna and told him that Eva had died, he put me through a kind of interrogation. He practically gave me the third degree. He asked me: ‘What exactly did she say when you last saw her?’”