Duet
Page 17
“He is in finance.”
“Yes. He was good in school in Argentina.”
“Argentina?” she said aghast. “He never mentioned Argentina.”
“We left after the war. He went to the best schools there. Then…he came here…”
She nodded.
“He went to the best schools here,” she said. “Yale. University of Pennsylvania.”
“Ah,” his father said. “That he did by himself.”
He did? she thought. He never mentioned that. Well, now all the skeletons are going to come out, whatever they are.
“I still, I still don’t know where you have come from, ” Duet said. “From Argentina?”
“No, no, that was years ago. I have come from the Sudan. Khartoum, to be exact.”
“The Sudan?”
“I went there after my daughter grew up. I am a doctor for poor children.”
“Does he know that? I didn’t know that Oskar has a sister.”
“Oskar knows nothing about the Sudan, my dear, he knows nothing. That is why I have come. I realized that unless I did come, he would always only know nothing. It is wrong. We were wrong to turn our back on him. “
She looked confused.
“He will explain everything to you at some point I am sure,” Dr. Tremba said, standing up, putting a hand on her. She saw that same command that Oskar had. “Maybe I should rest now.”
“Yes of course, and I will arrange for you two to have dinner alone tonight.”
“Thank you.”
“And your wife, where is she?”
“Oskar does not know this, but his mother has been dead for over a year. “
“Oh God. That’s terrible.”
“Well they were not close. So don’t worry. Gertrud was not that forgiving a person. “
Forgiving of what? she wondered. And why was Oskar needing forgiveness? What about Dr Tremba’s fucking father?
Duet acted as if Dr Tremba dropped by every day. She took him down to what used to be Oskar’s son’s room and prepared the bed for him. And then she came upstairs and went out on Oskar’s magnificent balcony and looked out over New York. Before she called Oskar, she looked over the beautiful buildings and thought, this is magic. Her body could not be healed, but maybe Oskar’s heart could be, maybe the father is coming with some good news for Oskar. Or at least the start of a relationship between Oskar and his past. And that, in itself, might be a magnificent beginning.
She told Oskar that she was going to meet Sally for a movie and dinner. He and his father should be alone. Oskar acquiesced. “Give the dogs to the dog walker overnight,” he said. “I can’t concentrate on all this with them running around.”
“Okay.” And she picked up her cell to call.
It was around 10 pm when she got home. Oskar was sitting with a scotch in his blue chaise longue watching the fire. He looked uncharacteristically sullen.
She came in and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t respond. No hand back. Another man would say “Hi honey, how was the movie?” He was looking at her as if she was a stranger.
“Where is your father?” she asked.
“He’s gone.”
“Gone? Already?” She sat down.
He was silent.
She poured herself a port. Went and sat by the fire. “What did you think about his working in the Sudan?”
“Very admirable. He must be guilty about something,” he said.
She smiled. “Did you have a good talk?”
He leaned forward but kept his eyes on the fire. “You have to understand Duet, my family threw me out. Years ago. Banished me. Exiled me. In a way it was very Napoleonic!”
“Yes I learned that.”
“So my father’s antics are not of much interest to me.”
“Why did they throw you out?” She had to ask, although she felt it was a futile question.
He looked at her. “I’m sure my father will tell you, if you meet again. He liked you.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Alright. You know I am very sexual. Always have been. Probably always will be. As a boy, I slept with my twin sister. My double, Duet. I am a duet too. Interesting isn’t it?”
“You have a twin?”
“Yes.”
She swallowed. Another double. She had never owned up to Daisy’s telling her about his grandfather. “A lot of interest in twins and duplications in your family,” she said wryly. “Maybe we should go to Vegas and bet on twos,” she added with a touch of panic in her fragile laughter, just a slight tinge of hysteria which quickly subsided.
“My sister got pregnant when she was twelve and she gave the child away,or shall we say my parents gave the child away. The child was not a twin. Apparently, the baby was a girl adopted by farm people in England. I was banished as the aberrant shame I am for the family. My grandfather, you know, was related to Ribbontrop, so it did not appear seemly to keep me around.”
She looked up at him and was glad to see he was being sarcastic.
“I didn’t think seemliness was such an issue in those days,” she said. “A lot of much worse behavior was going on all over place. Children make mistakes, by the way. You know, Paula had the same story. Of course, her parents did not banish anyone—“
“They were not German aristocrats.”
She was living with a German aristocrat? How sickening.
“We are not you know the German aristocrats who tried to bring Hitler down.”
“Yes,” she said, “I surmise that.”
They were on the tip of the truth, she felt. But what truth? The shrink intimated it was a fictitious hospital. A fictitious doctor. But she did not have a fictitious aberration.
“My father didn’t want to stay longer. He was unnerved here, apparently.”
“Why?”
“Because young Madonna, the Belgian cook, looks like my sister.”
She looked at him and then resorted to what she always did when she was frightened by him. She pursed her lips and kept quiet.
“I’m so sorry,” she said softly.
“About what?” he asked defiantly.
“About all this unhappiness.”
“Well at least it is not what Freud called, ordinary unhappiness.”
“No,” although she was beginning to wonder. Aberrations were beginning to seem quite normal in and around her.
Twenty seven:
It was a cloudless sunny day, and the unobstructed gaiety of it made her happy. She went over to the Mahler Society with some new piano sketches she had written when Oskar wasn’t home. She remembered a piano teacher telling her that she had to give a performance and her husband was there and when he looked at the program, he was terrified for her. He thought she didn’t know the music because he had never heard her practice.
Duet waited in the large drawing room.
Maurice came in and sat down. “You should have told me you had a boyfriend.”
Why on earth should she have told him that? She lives with a man who doesn’t tell her anything about himself and she is supposed to give private information to a stranger?
“I became quite overcome with you,” he said. “I don’t meet women with your talent or sensitivity every day. I wanted something to happen between us --”
“You have a wife—“
“So what?” Maurice answered. “Maybe I would have left her for you. Love is not something you control.”
She thought about how much Oskar and she did control it.
“The thing is,” he said, “I fell in love with you.”
She just stood there, stymied about what to say. She looked up at the framed photo of Gustav Mahler for help. None forthcoming.
“Your boyfriend seems like a nice guy,” Maurice said. “I saw you with him at that Sibelius concert.”
“Ah,” she said, looking at his small intense eyes, and distressingly, she found herself thinking of a rodent.
“What does he do?” Maurice asked.
She didn’t know if it would be impertinent to bring up her music right now.
“I brought –“ and she held out the sketches.
He nodded. “Okay. Play them.”
She did so, well aware of his anger. She was another Delilah, tempting him, and then discarding him, as if he was worthless. Duet thought her music with them was now all a doomed effort.
“Very good,” he said curtly, when she finished. But there was feeling in his words, and she had to admire him for that.
“Would you do me a favor?” she asked, still seated on the piano bench.
“What?”
“Would you, with your legal scouring mind, look up the existence of a certain hospital outside Vienna? During the war. It has to do with my family. A shrink told me it doesn’t exist, but my grandmother claims to have been there. Also…look up this name, if you don’t mind. Dr Gerhardt Tremba, in the war.”
She’s opening up, Maurice thought. God knows what she’s talking about but this may be the clue to her. This may be how she finally emerges.
And, being the successful lawyer he was, he immediately pulled out a yellow pad from his nearby briefcase and began making notes.
It amused her that his vanity was such that he did not even wonder why she wouldn’t have asked her lawyer boyfriend, Oskar, to look into this. Maurice hadn’t given it a thought.
On her way back from the Mahler Society, it started to rain but that didn’t stop her from walking through a street fair. People were milling about, stunned, maybe at all the goods on display. She walked by the little canvas setups for back massages, a kiosk to sign up for the Daily News, children’s t shirts with New York or Obama printed on them. She found herself unable to not be pulled towards the perfume vendors and ended up buying herself Boucheron perfume for $20. It was a perfume Daisy liked. She also bought herself and Oskar some peonies. She chose purple ones that had not yet opened. She was taken with how they were destined to blowsily open, almost as if they were drunk, only to live the shortest of lives.
Her cell phone rang.
She brought it to her ear, wishing the city would just for once be quieter. It was her mother. “Duet, honey, Daisy has died. She just died. It was painless, dear. She stopped eating and drinking over the past few days. We wet her lips and then she became unconscious and finally she took her last breath. The doctor said she was quite a fighter, she just kept on breathing, but she couldn’t eat. And then…”
Duet started to tear up. “The funeral?” she asked.
“Tomorrow darling. You don’t need to come.”
“Of course, I’m coming. I’m even speaking,” Duet said.
Speaking at what? her mother wondered. No-one but us will even be at the funeral.“Okay good. Fly out tonight.”
Oskar was appropriately understanding when Duet got home, uncharacteristically gentle by not teasing her, and listened as she repeated Daisy’s rather banal ending. As Oskar sat there, handsome as always in his dark blue t shirt and jeans, she felt glad that she had met him. What if she hadn’t? Never mind that meeting him set off a mystery for her to solve, even one of simply trying to understand him, but now he would be the only man she knew who knew her grandmother, or rather had seen her. It would extend the memory of her grandmother just a little.
That night they had dinner and she actually talked about the market. She had nothing left to say about her own life. Only she kept looking at Madonna as she served dinner, and didn’t see a resemblance between Oskar and the girl. Was this all too messy for her? Should she just run away and start over? Find David and go to what seemed predictable. Or go to Maurice, even, with his intense passion for her. No, that wouldn’t happen.
The next morning she flew out from Kennedy in time for the funeral.
The day was cloudy, with the trees in the cemetery swaying rather dramatically in the breeze, and there they were, just the three of them, her mother, father, herself, a rabbi who did not know her grandmother and two young gravediggers. Duet was stunningly struck by how small her family was. No friends. How odd. She knew part of the reason was Daisy herself, unlikable in her refusal to be gracious, patient, involved with another.
Duet looked over at her mother who did not shed a tear. Her father stood at ease with an air of stoicism. Daisy had never been warm to either of them. Even Duet found herself standing there with questions, rather than sentiments.
And yet, she knew, as she stood there, that the fate of her own life, with her bizarre build, was tied up with Daisy. She just wasn’t sure if it was as simple as Daisy had put it.
She looked back over to her mother who seemed to be staring out into the distance in the cemetery and thought that it wasn’t Daisy who had been in denial, but Michelle. Duet made a vow to herself standing there, that as a gift to Daisy, as an act of rebellion, against what they had done to all of them, she was not ever going to be in denial or frozen.
She felt her blackberry buzz. She pulled it out and it was a message from Oskar. “Good luck with what you’re going through. And look in the left hand pocket of your suitcase. I left you something.”
She smiled. He was with her.
That evening when her parents were discussing how remarkable Daisy was, smart, independent, (now they seemed to see only good in her, Duet noticed), she snuck upstairs to her suitcase. She unzipped the pocket and found some tissue paper. She opened it and there was a delicate gold necklace. She unraveled it and on the thin chain was the horizontal 8 in gold that Dr Dazin had drawn. She laughed and then put it on herself. It actually looked good on her and shimmered with the reflected light of the lamps.
She texted him, “Thank you. Very creative, O. Now I even like my configuration.”
He texted back, “I like it too, and the woman who has it.”
My God,she thought, he is capable of being loving.
When she returned, thrilled that she finally did have a new life of her own, one starting her own family in a way, Oskar turned out to be suddenly more distant than he’d ever been. She couldn’t understand it. He had sent the text, but then how difficult is it to text?
He did not try and make love and when she spoke to him, he mostly grunted responses. None of the smoothness and wit of the past year.
“Are you annoyed with me for some reason?” she asked, in the morning when he was making espresso. She fiddled around nervously next to him, as if she was a child, looking out at the city from his windows. She kept fingering the gold necklace she now wore daily.
“No,” he said, but added nothing else.
“You seem preoccupied,” she added.
“Is this the third degree?” he asked.
“Yes, why are you being so aloof?”
“I am not aloof, this is the way I am,” he said.
But she watched carefully and when Madonna served them dinner that night in the glittering dining room which always seemed like an open jewel box, he only smiled at her, not Duet. He had Madonna sit and eat with them and all their conversation reverberated around Madonna’s schooling and boyfriends. But Duet couldn’t help but notice that when Duet mentioned a book she was reading about a much older man and a young woman, Madonna’s eyes smiled at Oskar.
She sipped her wine and thought, I don’t want to live being suspicious of someone. Of course he might long for a normal body. On the other hand, she remembered how Oskar used to say, “I am never going to find anyone else like you.”
But a man loves you for you, not your vagina. Although there were plenty of psychoanalysts, she knew, who would argue that.
Oskar seemed to spend his time, when not playing tennis or working, reading fitness magazines; magazines, in other words, about the perfect physique. The perfect Aryan? she wondered. He was himself obsessed about his abs, his new exercises to be tautly in shape. He took up drinking strange concoctions of fruits and nuts and juices and herbs
. Acai juice was a central theme in his regime. Something he heard Sumner Redstone drank to stay eternally young.
At dinner with friends, he would rub her arm where he thought it was too heavy. When she put on a new dress, he made no comment.
When they were getting ready for bed, he said disdainfully, “You do wash both of them don’t you?”
Where was the Oskar she had fallen in love with?
“What is going on with you, Oskar?” she said, brushing her teeth. “What is bothering you?” And, in a flash, she knew. He did not want a freak, he had tired of her novelty. She had always known this would come back to haunt her.
“Don’t worry, Oskar. You won’t have to put up with this much longer,” and rather than being curious at her statement, he just left the room to take his fourth shower of the day.
She couldn’t sleep. She could hear the wind howling outside their window. It was always amplified by a tall building. “Oskar, are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Yes.”
“Your grandfather, I think, was a Nazi doctor in Austria.”
Silence.
“He did experiments on twins. About doubles. Fooling around with dna.”
“Where is this going?” he asked.
“I thought you should know –“
“Know what?”
“Should know that Daisy recognized you as the grandson of the doctor who tampered with her. And that might be why…”
Silence.
She continued. “He was interested in experiments related to doubles.”
Silence. She knew Oskar, if nothing else, was not missing any connections.
She waited for some words. He lay there, still, and finally he gave his response: he simply turned his back to her.
“Nothing to say?” she asked.
“You want me to make a reparation? Is that it?” he said nastily.
“No. I want you to just speak in a human tone.”
“I don’t know why you expect that from me, given my own dna. It’s not in my chromosomes, Duet. Human behavior is not.”