On the Edge

by Markus Werner

  I didn’t doubt for a second that Loos had lifted the veil, that his reconstruction and interpretation were right. I hated him. I hated him because he forced me to slap my forehead and admit that I was blind as a bat about Tasso’s motives. I also felt something like jealousy, as if Loos had taken possession of my best friend, stolen him from me posthumously. “You’re right to knit your brows, Thomas,” said Loos. “I could be wrong. Don’t tell Magdalena about my theory. She’d convince herself it was true and fall into a double distress after a year and a day. She’d probably see in retrospect that she had painfully come to terms with something that was not at all what she thought it was. Then she’d have feelings of shame and guilt about the dead Tasso because she had failed to believe in him despite the bad light he appeared in. How is she now?” “Really well. She’s married again and just recently became a mother.”

  “And how’s the other woman?” “What other woman?” “The one with the nerve problems, the one you once ate with here.” “Oh her,” I said. “I have no idea. We haven’t seen each other since the break-up. How do you come to mention her?” “Very indirectly,” Loos said. “Unless I’m mistaken, she’s the only woman besides Magdalena who, as far as I can tell, has played a role in your life—you haven’t told about any other.” “That just has to do with the place we’re in, that reminded me of her. She was no more important to me than others, which isn’t to say that I was indifferent to her. By the way, though, I don’t think of you as a man who has any interest in flings and affairs.” “May I know what brings you to this conclusion?” “You ask that? The ardent champion of the so-called great love!” “Thomas,” said Loos, “love doesn’t need to be championed any more than the sun. What has been granted me, undeservedly, has sometimes seduced me into pitying all those who in the absence of sunlight huddle round a portable heater. And now that my sky is clouded over, I could use one myself, but I don’t know how to deal with them. My interest, however, is great. What I can’t handle and therefore don’t know arouses my curiosity. Only too much! You were speaking warmly just now—use your momentum, tell the layman and philistine about your affairs.” I glanced at my watch and said, “You speak in the plural, but I’m afraid the time is too short for more than one.” “Then you’ll just have to limit yourself. The agony of choice I can’t spare you.” “Good,” I said, “is it all right with you if I stay with the bundle of nerves I’ve mentioned several times already?” “That’s up to you. The main thing is that I learn something from it.” “I don’t know what this case can teach you.” “I just told you: how someone deals with a portable heater.”

  “All right, then,” I said, “I’ll start at the beginning. It certainly isn’t as interesting as your story about the dogs, but still appealing enough. The first phase is unquestionably the most appealing thing a relationship has to offer. There is nothing more exciting, more arousing, than gradually feeling your way into a relationship with a new woman! With looks, with words, and finally, if it crackles, with the play of hands and all that follows. I have an addict’s craving for this crackle, but it seldom outlasts the early phase, and gradually gives way to a scrunch. Yes, yes, I know—you have another picture of it thanks to your experience. I have your sketch of the ladder still in my head. So then: I live in the outskirts of Bern, very close to a shopping centre that has a small park with a children’s playground in it. There are also benches there and a splashing fountain. And one evening, after I had done some shopping, I saw a man standing at the fountain who was grinning idiotically and waving something back and forth in the water. I sat on a bench and watched him in amazement. He kept grinning and waving his object in the water. A woman came over, sat on the other end of the bench, and likewise watched. The man noticed our interest and seemed to enjoy it. Finally he took the thing out of the water and held it for a while under the stream from the pipe. I saw now that it was a set of dentures. The man fixed us with his gaze, opened his mouth wide, set the dentures in, and walked off grinning all the while. We looked at each other, the woman and I; she smiled, I laughed. She had a pretty, even beautiful face, and her almost black hair, which she wore cut short, offset its paleness. She wasn’t my type, really—I go more for blondes and sporty women that I can play tennis with. Nevertheless I started talking to her, because I really don’t have a choice. She said little, but her body language certainly didn’t betray unapproachability. I made a few casual generalisations about the rare form of exhibitionism we had just been allowed to witness. She seemed to find me very funny and thawed out to such an extent that I ventured to be bold and direct and asked if she would have an aperitif with me to celebrate April 1st. She asked if that was an April Fool’s joke. “No, utter seriousness,” I said. She smiled, looked at her watch, and hesitated. Then she said, as if to herself, “Why not, actually?” And these three words she repeated again when I asked, after the Campari, if we could see each other again. My next question, however—whether I could carry her off to a nice restaurant—she answered with a no and set our rendezvous for the children’s playground, at the same time the following week. With complete self-assurance she assumed the role I like to play in such cases, that of the master of the where and when. That she did so irritated me somewhat, but more than that it charmed me, for during the days of waiting I pictured the moment when the mistress of the situation would start to go weak at the knees. Incidentally, over our aperitifs I had learned as good as nothing about her, not even her first name, which made her all the more appealing to me. And there was a third attraction: I prefer more mature women, and she was that. She was somewhere close to forty, I estimated, an age at which women, in my experience, become maximally ripe for enjoyment.”

  “Just a moment,” said Loos, “I have to make a note of that expression, although.…” He took his notebook out, but wrote nothing and stuck it away again. He pointed to his left forearm and said, “The allergy.” And in fact I saw a few red bumps and asked him if he found the expression offensive. “Applied to apricots or cheese, absolutely not,” he said, “but just go on, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” “Nor I to allergise you. In any case, she was wonderfully ripe, and my thoughts were orbiting daily round her and her appearance, which is usually taken as a symptom of being in love. But I was probably as little in love with her as the hound that follows the scent of the deer to the exclusion of any other thought. And yet I noticed, as I neared the playground for our appointed rendezvous, that my heart was knocking in my chest, something that had long stopped happening to me. She was already sitting on the bench, smoking, and was looking at the swing near the fountain with such spellbound absorption that she didn’t notice me till I sat down beside her. Her greeting was disappointingly cursory, and when I asked her how she was, she put her finger to her lips and signaled with her head toward the swing. A little girl was sitting on it, and beside her, leaning against the post, stood her presumed father buried in a tabloid and giving the swing a push from time to time. It wasn’t clear to me why this should be so remarkable that I had to keep still. ‘Yes, it’s sweet,’ I said finally. ‘No, doctor, it’s depressing’ she said. To my astonished question, how she knew that I had a doctor’s title, she said only that there were phonebooks. She had therefore occupied herself with me, that was a good sign and every bit as encouraging as her lips. They had not been not made up at our first chance meeting, but now they stood out dark red.

  “We drank Campari again. She seemed relaxed. To my question about the circumstances of her personal life she said, without being brusque, that she suggested we give up investigating each other’s lives. Her profession was the only thing she divulged: she was a caregiver in a home for the handicapped. I couldn’t help asking, despite her suggestion, whether she was married. She gave a slight nod. It suited me that she was married, I felt freer that way: it was more challenging and aroused my lust for conquest, so to speak. In addition, I clearly sensed—I’m not exactly without instincts—that something about me appealed to her. But after an hour—I
was just about to ask her if I really had to go alone now to get something to eat—she stood up and said, ‘In a week?’ ‘Couldn’t it be sooner?’ I asked. ‘In a week. I’m sure you know where.’ She had me so much on tenterhooks, she had brought me to such a pass, and I doubt she was at all conscious of tactics, that I was much more intensely preoccupied with her the following week than I had been in the previous. Maybe I really was in love at this point, but I remembered Tasso’s adage: ‘Being in love is happiness of the soul, with the sensual appetite in a wholly decent accompaniment.’ Mine wasn’t decent; it was, I admit it, tyrannically dominant.

  “Now I rigorously abbreviate. The third time everything was different. She seemed rejuvenated, buoyant, as high-spirited as a girl. She wasn’t sitting on the bench when I arrived, she was sitting on the swing and greeted me with a beaming expression. Then she drank water from the pipe, saw a bird feather in the fountain, and fished it out. ‘Come,’ she said and walked over to the sand heap in the corner of the playground. Now she’s going to build a sand castle, I thought. But she did something else, she used the quill to write the name VALERIE in the sand. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve made it exciting. For two whole weeks you’ve condemned me to dreaming about a woman I knew only as Mrs. Bendel.’ ‘You could have just asked me,’ she said. ‘I asked you twice,’ I replied, ‘you apparently didn’t hear it.’ ‘Let’s not fight about it,’ she said, ‘because I’m hungry.’ ‘OK,’ I said, very pleased, ‘I’ll go get a taxi.’ ‘Don’t say OK, please, I hate that imported expression.’ ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Are you going to find fault with my nose next?’ ‘Show!’ she said. I dutifully lowered my head. She inspected it and said, ‘It’s OK.’

  “Over dinner—we ate Chateaubriand and drank a wonderfully spicy Chambertin—I asked her why she was suddenly so changed, so light and cheerful. ‘To suit you better, and because yesterday and tomorrow don’t weigh me down for once.’ ‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘It’s the same with me, and not for once, but most of the time.’ ‘I know, I know. I saw that from the first. A loose bird doesn’t have to “out itself.” ’ ‘Good,’ I said, ‘then it will hardly surprise you if I ask you to come to my place for a little while.’ She hesitated and considered it, then said, “Why not, actually?’ She stayed until two in the morning, and I can tell you, it was like a dream.”

  “Oh God,” Loos said, “how free you all are!” “You are too,” I said, “and as a mature protector type, you could have as many women as you do fingers, any time you wanted, and young ones too.” “Yes,” said Loos. “ ‘Free I am, and nothing seems more worthless to me.’ The gloomy words aren’t mine, but they describe me perfectly. But this by the bye. How was she in bed then?” I looked at Loos uncertainly. The question didn’t fit him, which is why I thought he asked it to make fun of me and my heroics, but perhaps also to test my level of taste and discretion. With a certain ill humour I said to him that I didn’t have the impression that the answer would interest him. “You’ve put exciting fare on my table,” he said, “but you want to deny me the dessert?” I laughed and said, “All right then, from man to man, she was fantastic, she was—how shall I say?—passionate in a strangely reserved way, cried out with her mouth gagged, so to speak. Is that good enough?” “Completely,” said Loos. He drank, choked, coughed, and then asked with a throaty voice, “How did the affair go afterwards? How did it end, and why?” “I’d like to take a rest now,” I said, “and listen to you again.” “Just as you like, but you have to help me: where did I stop?” “Hard to say. The last thing you told me was how you and your wife got together with the help of two dogs. But that was more of an excursus, you had actually stopped before that in the history of your wife’s illness.”

  “Right, yes, with the astrocytoma. When I told her that astro comes from the Greek astron and means star, while cytus, Latin for cell, comes from the Greek kytos which is like hollow or cavity, she smiled dreamily and spoke no more about a swelling or a tumor but about a star in her skull cavity or simply about her star. ‘My star,’ she said from then on, and not ‘my tumor.’ And since she at times was a little extravagant, she would also say that a star could never be her enemy. And it even seemed actually—I’ve hinted at this—as though she looked death in the eye not stiff with fright, but somehow almost tenderly. For a while I was afraid that she might refuse to have an operation, which she fortunately did not do, severely tormented as she was by her symptoms. They didn’t know, by the way, whether the tumor was benign or malignant—that only the operation could show, which was described to us as very promising, because of the favourable position of the tumor, and in the best case would not entail follow-up treatment with radiation or chemotherapy. In the not very long waiting period I took care of all household matters and read all Bettina’s wishes in her eyes. The latter was nothing new, but the former certainly was. I bought myself a cookbook without her knowing it, a vegetarian one of course, and studied it in school while the pupils where doing their work. I made a list of the ingredients, bought the necessaries, and surprised my wife almost every evening with some small gourmet menu. Of course, her appetite was slight, and mine as well, since my constant anxiety about the worst, the truly unimaginable, seemed to narrow both my windpipe and my esophagus. It was not a great time, and yet it was. We still had ourselves, we were one. I was relieved and happy when I saw Bettina reading a book with the title A Hundred Steps to Happiness. It showed me that she hadn’t closed herself off, that she was still oriented to life. At the same time it made me wonder why she consulted a book like that for advice. Apart from her present suffering she had always been happy. Even with me. Perhaps not always, of course—happiness isn’t a steady state, is it? Otherwise we wouldn’t feel it. It’s lack of happiness that seems to be the steady state. But the point is, she was reading that kind of book, and yet could say to me out of the blue that she wanted no grave decorations, especially no wreaths or so-called floral tributes with pine cones and the like. We seldom had differences of taste, and certainly not in this matter, and yet it took away my power of speech when she said that. Now for the first time, we switched roles. I was the pessimist practising confidence and adopted positive thinking, while her vision grew ever darker, and though she never complained or surrendered to anxiety, she was utterly fatalistic. She would probably die while under the knife, she said, though she had been informed that such deaths were rare even with this ticklish kind of surgery. The fatality rate for this type of operation was not even as high as two percent, yet my wife insisted that she was in this group. When I asked what prompted this belief, she said, ‘The star wants to remain in me, it will defend itself.’ That’s all she said; more I could not get out of her.

  After that everything went well, very well even. They spoke of an ideal case, because, first, the team of surgeons were able to remove the whole tumor from the large brain and, second, the tissue sample showed that though the tumor wasn’t altogether benign, it was, as the doctors put it, still benign. And there were no complications after surgery, so that we could say without exaggeration that Bettina was cured. I visited her as often as I could and held her hand. She hardly spoke, she was infinitely languid or lackluster, and I attributed this to the fact that she was so often in tears and that she didn’t have the energy to express joy and relief whether with words or with her shrouded glances. “You’ve been given back to me as a gift,” I told her and was troubled that her hand remained practically lifeless in mine.

  “When I returned home after hospital visits her emptiness passed over into me. I sat around without purpose, and because I was incapable of busying myself with anything meaningful, I watched television for hours, receptive to the stupidest drivel, and was afraid of going to bed. My sleep was superficial, little more than a half-sleep from which I was sometimes jolted awake by words of love I was murmuring in my sleep or by the mere name Bettina, which I’ll say in passing I always loved because it sounds so downy soft. Twelve years is a long time, and when you’re suddenl
y lying alone in bed, it’s as if you’ve lost your own self, as if you can’t yourself breathe because the other’s breathing isn’t there. And yet I don’t think we ever became props for each other, because props you take for granted and use them unconsciously. Dull habit, which I admit often creeps into marriages and can lead to a state where you hardly look at each other, had—who knows why?—spared us. Whether you believe it or not.”

  “Why shouldn’t I believe it?” “Well, I know what you think of marriage,” Loos said. “You’ve expressed yourself on that clearly enough, telling me about your clients’ standard sigh: ‘The thing has gone dead.’ And you will also have heard the phrase outside your practice, in the context of your escapades, from those same married women who fall for your charm because they’re in a dead relationship—from this Amelie you just told me about, for instance. So you’re continually confirmed in your belief about the perversity of marriage.” “In the first place, her name wasn’t Amelie, but Valerie, and in the second, she never disparaged the relationship she was in, never used it as justification for her behaviour, at least not with me. She never spoke of it at all, as often as I tried to entice something out of her. She said virtually nothing about her husband, and much less anything negative, which made me a little jealous—as did the thought that she could keep sleeping with her musician as if nothing had happened. Because I did learn that he was a musician, or more exactly, a cello teacher. Also that his name was Felix. So you see that you chose a bad example, though I admit that you’re partly right. I have in fact met women who start complaining about their marriages and their deficient husbands after the first kiss. But that’s a warning signal for me. When a marriage is failing and then another man comes into the picture, the woman starts gathering courage to make the leap, in the belief that he will be the safety net to catch her if she falls. That’s not my role. I refuse to be thought of as a serious alternative. What I want is a playful scuffle and I don’t hide that from any woman, and if she nevertheless begins to cling, then I break it off. And incidentally, in my experience, it isn’t just unsatisfied, unfulfilled women who can be led to temptation. I have observed a different and not at all uncommon phenomenon both as an outsider as well as sometimes within my own experience, a phenomenon I welcome. Women who are in good hands and feel very secure in them often seem to need something different. They love their husband as calming influence and feel the marriage as a refuge, an emotional mainland that they want to keep standing on. And yet something is missing. And yet the open sea, restless and unpredictable, exerts a strong power of attraction over them. What speaks against a stimulating swim with a hint of danger in it? Actually nothing, as long as the mainland stays within sight. Do you see what I mean? The hot water bottle is reliable and radiates a comfortable warmth; more romantic and crackling, by contrast, is a fire.”