Good Things I Wish You: A Novel

by A. Manette Ansay

  “Oh, I meant to tell you,” he said. “I finalized vacation plans for Heidi and me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Dad’s summer place the first week. Dan and Kelly are coming, too, with the kids. After that, I’m taking her to a reenactment in North Carolina. We’ll camp out, if she’s into it, but a friend of mine’s renting a room at a hotel, so we can always crash there, if we need to.”

  “Perfect.”

  In my living room, formerly our living room, Cal sat on my couch, formerly our couch, while I made coffee the way he liked it: boiled on the stove, thick with cream.

  “You’re seeing somebody, aren’t you?” he said as I carried in the steaming cups.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re ready to take off as soon as I pick her up. Then you’re late coming back.”

  “I was late tonight,” I said, trying hard not to sound defensive, “because I was working with someone who’s helping me with translations for the book. Twenty minutes. And I called to let you know I was running behind.”

  Still, it was twenty minutes he and Heidi sat in the driveway, Heidi staring at the locked front door of her own house. Offer him a key, I thought. The words were on the tip of my tongue.

  “Why don’t you just admit it? You’re seeing this guy, right?”

  “I didn’t even say he was a guy.”

  “Why can’t you be honest with me? At least we were always honest with each other.”

  “We were always honest,” I agreed.

  “Well, I’m seeing someone,” Cal said, picking up his coffee. “She’ll be at the reenactment. She’s the one renting the hotel room. Oh. You put in cream.”

  “You don’t take cream anymore?”

  “I watch what I eat these days.”

  “You look good,” I said truthfully.

  “So what’s he like, this translator? The one you’re not seeing?”

  I shrugged.

  “Rich, I suppose. Probably an attorney. Everything your father always wanted.” His tone perfectly poised on the line between joke and accusation.

  “He isn’t an attorney. He likes to read. He’s interested in classical music.”

  I was sounding like America now, and Cal deserved something better, didn’t he? I struggled to find something honest to say. Something generous and healing.

  “Sometimes he reminds me of you,” I said. “The way he likes to talk about things. The way he likes to debate.” The way he holds himself aloof. In a moment, I’d say that, too. So I said, “But what about you? Your girlfriend, I mean. Tell me what she’s like.”

  Even though I was looking right at him, I never saw it coming. Cal put down his empty cup.

  “She is absolutely nothing like you. Do you think I would make the same mistake twice?”

  There are things between men and women that do not change.

  Of course they were lovers, Clara and Brahms. How could I ever have thought otherwise? Who else but a lover retains the ability to wound the other person with such passion, such precision? And who else but that lover has the capacity to heal what he or she has done?

  I only want to ask you not to transform people into an enthusiasm, through your own, which they will afterwards not understand. You demand too fast and impassioned an acceptance of the talent that you cherish. Art is a republic. You should make that more your principle. You are much too aristocratic…Do not assign a high rank to one artist and demand that smaller ones should regard him as superior…Do not consider my folk songs [translator’s note: it seems he has enclosed them] as more than the most sketchy studies…

  —Brahms, in a letter to Clara, 1858*

  Dear Johannes, of course you do not see or hear that when I talk about you with others, I truly do not do it in exaltation. Yet that I am often mightily gripped by your rich genius, that you always appear to me as someone upon whom the heavens rain their most beautiful gifts, that I love and adore you for so many glorious things—that this has taken deep root in my soul, this is true, dearest Johannes. Do not try to extinguish this within me by cold philosophizing—it is impossible…Why should you wish, by your coldness, to kill the beautiful confidence which allows me to tell you anything? You have already done so, for regarding your folk songs, I am afraid to tell you the happiness most of them have given me…

  —Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1858†

  I recently read something about enthusiasm in a letter that Goethe wrote to Schiller…where he is saying with a certain reservation, carefulness, etc.: “I always have the feeling that when writings and deeds are not talked about with loving concern, with a certain biased enthusiasm, little is left of them, they are not worth mentioning…Pleasure, happiness, and partiality are the only truths that bring forth reality.” When Goethe is saying this, should I not feel above your reprimand?

  —Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1858*

  I am sorry I did not write to you about the Hungarian dances [author’s note: which Brahms sent to her], for you know how I like to please you. I only refrained because I feared that you might say something unkind to me, as you have often done in similar cases before. You know, without my telling you, how hard it must have been for me, because it would have given me the greatest joy to write to you about them…

  —Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1858†

  When I first got the news of the unfortunate reception of your concerto I straightway sat down to write to you. I felt that a kind word would be a solace to you. But then I was afraid that you would answer me shortly and that I should feel offended…. Did you not try the Serenade at all? If you had played this first, your victory would have been certain, because it is a much clearer work.

  —Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1859‡

  30.

  ONE WEEK PASSED BEFORE Hart called again. “We had talked about flying the ASK,” he said. “If you are still interested.”

  “Hello to you, too.”

  “You are angry.”

  “You are complicated.”

  “I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too.”

  The private club consisted of three gliders packed into a small, flat-roofed shed, a dented Porta Potti, and a weather-warped picnic table protected by a sun-beaten canvas. We had to call in a tow pilot from the county airport, two miles away, but the lift was good and we were up for two hours, gliding twenty-five hundred feet above the Everglades, cutting from cloud to cloud until we reached the coast. Yellow ocher water hugged the beach, then darkened as it deepened, enriched with cobalt blue. There were white-rib-boned breakers, luffing sails. The dissipating wake of a speedboat dividing around a hard-knuckled reef. Sand sharks migrating along the shoreline, finger-shaped shadows just a few feet beyond splashing tourists; kids on surfboards; a black, paddling dog. We began to thermal, making tight, dizzying circles within a warm column of air. Soon we were joined by black-headed vultures, open-winged, rising beside us. But by the time we reached five thousand feet, it was nearly five o’clock.

  “Better head back,” Hart said.

  “Already?” I said.

  “Unless you want to land out on the beach?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He’d been uncharacteristically quiet all day. Or perhaps I was the one lost in thought, looking down at the drained and drought-stricken land, such a contrast from the ocean’s motion and light. Two weeks from now I’d be in Germany, and when I thought about all I had to get done before I went, I wanted to put my head in my hands and weep. Other than attending Friederike’s concert, I hadn’t made any firm plans, and even the concert felt tenuous, connected as it was to Hart. Who knew if we’d even be speaking once another two weeks had passed? I wanted to see the Robert Schumann house in Zwickau, but I hadn’t figured out how I’d get there. I had a vague idea about visiting Bonn and Düsseldorf. Maybe, if there was time, heading south to Gersau. Poking around Lake Lucerne. Staring up at the Rigi.

  “Tell me again when you’re leaving for Eu
rope,” Hart called back to me.

  I was no longer surprised by how frequently he responded to my thoughts as if I’d just spoken. There were, I supposed, explanations.

  “The fourteenth. A few days after you.”

  “You can stay with me in Leipzig if you’re interested. I have been offered the apartment of a friend.”

  I stared at the back of his head. “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “If this is a good idea.”

  “You need a place to stay. I have a place to stay. Now who is being complicated?”

  Back on the ground, I helped him roll the ASK—lighter than the Blanik—into the shed, and then we sat on top of the picnic table, drinking Gatorade as the sun shaped itself into a molten ball above the horizon. The fields around us were planted in squash, but the crop was small, wizened. Here and there, tattered blossoms caught at the light, flashes that reminded me of fireflies. A killdeer called, fluttering, in the dust.

  “I will meet you at the apartment,” Hart said, as if there’d been no break in our conversation. “There are trains from the airport; it is easy. You can have a little nap, if you need one, and then we’ll take the tram to Ingelstrasse. Maybe stop for a bite to eat first, if there’s time.”

  “What if I just meet you at the concert?” I suggested. “You’ll be spending the day with Friederike, right? She won’t want to share you with a stranger.”

  “In some ways, I am equally a stranger.” Hart leaned forward, pinched a mosquito from my arm.

  “Come on, you talk to her all the time. Besides, you just saw her in London.”

  “For the first time in over six years, yes.”

  I thought I’d misheard him. “What did you say?”

  “It is true.” He wasn’t looking at me. “The last time I saw her, she was ten years old.”

  The sun slipped closer to the horizon’s edge. Flat strips of clouds haloed Miami, a tapestry the color of industrial waste: neon purple, electric orange, lavender, mottled green. I tried to imagine not seeing Heidi for one year. For one month. The two weeks I’d be in Germany without her already seemed like an unspeakable loss.

  “You will want to visit Zwickau, I imagine,” Hart continued. “Perhaps Düsseldorf and Bonn. Friederike is interested in this as well, so I’m thinking it is best to rent a car. At the end of the week, she goes to music camp in Zurich. If her mother agrees, we’ll drop her off there, and then you and I can go on to Lucerne, take a ferry to Gersau. There’s a glider club nearby as well. We could fly a little way into the Alps.”

  The warmth of his shoulder had found my own. I leaned back against it, expecting he’d pull away. But he put his arm around me like a man claiming a decision, held me awkwardly, determinedly, as the sun dropped below the edge of the field. Together we stared at the poisoned sky, listening to the sounds of night insects and, in the distance, I-95. I felt as if I were being embraced by—not a stranger, exactly—but someone I knew very slightly: a bank teller, a crossing guard, a checkout clerk at the grocery store.

  “What is it you’re not telling me?” I asked.

  Suddenly the air was clammy, cool, the way skin feels after fever. I hadn’t even realized I was shivering until Hart pulled a rumpled shirt from his flight bag, draped it loosely, kindly, around me. With that gesture, he became himself again. His arm around me lightened.

  “Certain things,” he said. “As, I suppose, there are things you do not tell me.”

  31.

  “HE’S MARRIED,” ELLEN SAID. “Or gay.”

  We were sitting beside her backyard pool, where her twelve-year-old niece, Mabel, had been entertaining Heidi for the past two hours: giving her underwater rides, teaching her to cannonball, spinning her in circles on an inner tube.

  “Nope,” I said, reaching for my lemonade. “And nope.”

  “How often do you see this guy?”

  “Depends on…” I nodded at Heidi.

  “How often do you talk on the phone?”

  “Every day. Your point?”

  “But you’re not dating. It’s not serious.”

  “He’s helping me with the book.”

  “Your book. Why is he being so helpful? And when does he have time to do all this reading? Maybe he’s not really a doctor. For all you know, he doesn’t even work.”

  “He had a stack of mail in his car one time, all of it addressed to Dr. Hempel. And once, when I called him about something, he said he was at the lab.”

  “What lab? Where?”

  “He said he couldn’t talk because he was balancing a stack of slides.”

  “Slides of what?”

  “Monkey brains.”

  “Really?”

  “How should I know? Look, Ellen, it just doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. You matter. What are his feelings for you?”

  “Murky,” I said. “Is that a crime?” But my eyes filled with tears, and I hated myself for this, hated myself for being drawn into a conversation I didn’t want to have. “I know you think he’s using me, but I’m writing about all this, so you could say I’m using him, too. Or maybe there’s a kinder way to look at it. Maybe we’re helping each other somehow.”

  “Sweetie,” Ellen said. She put one cool, ringed hand to my cheek. We waited, and after a moment I said, “I’ve seen where he lives, does that reassure you? Beachfront condo. Direct ocean view.”

  “From the master bedroom, too?”

  I gave her a look that made both of us laugh, so it was okay again, even though it wasn’t. “I wouldn’t know. We just stopped by to grab a book. But from the looks of the living room, Viso-Tech does just fine.”

  “So then why won’t he talk about it? And what’s this big secret with his daughter?” The girls had clambered up out of the pool, breathless and wrinkled and dripping. “Can we have something to eat?” Mabel asked, leading Heidi across the patio toward the cabana. Ellen nodded, lowering her voice. “C’mon, he doesn’t see her for six years? Maybe he A-B-U-S-E-D her or something.”

  “Please.”

  “You’re always with this guy. I hardly ever see you anymore.” She poured herself more lemonade, her pretty face flushed, brooding. It was true that I hadn’t been home much lately, but it was also true that when I did call, she didn’t call back either. She was spending lots of time doing volunteer work at a women’s shelter. She’d started jogging, evenings, with her sister. As far as I knew, she hadn’t gone out with anybody since Dancing Man. “Before you go, I want you to write down his full name and the name of his company. I’m going to plug him into our system at the bank, see what I can find.”

  “Ellen.”

  “Meanwhile, when you do sleep with this guy, use an industrial-strength condom.”

  I glanced at the cabana. The girls were scooping ice cream from the well-stocked fridge into colorful plastic bowls. “I’m not going to sleep with him,” I mumbled.

  “You said he was cute.”

  “I said he was handsome.”

  “Why not, then? If the situation arises.” She laughed bitterly. “And trust me, it will. It always does.”

  What I said: Absolutely nothing. Because what was there to say?

  The master bedroom also overlooked the ocean. The bed, king-size, was checkerboarded with books: fat medical texts, novels, trade journals, biographies. Before he slept, he read for hours, devouring information, remembering every word. I could have told him, then, what I’d been writing. But I didn’t. The one thing he didn’t want to know was my heart.

  “I envy you your passion,” he’d said, the first time, the sliding doors open to the sounds of the sea. “Once, I loved my research, I think, the way you are loving your writing. Now I am a dead man, I must warn you.”

  “You don’t seem dead to me.”

  “You mustn’t get attached to me, Jeanette. I am a dead man. I am like a stone.”

  32.

  JUST BEFORE HE LEFT for Germany, Hart came to my house for d
inner. It was the first time he’d entered my other life, my real life, the life in which I worked and wrote, visited my parents, raised my daughter. He set the table and tried to chat with Heidi, who regarded him suspiciously, and with uncharacteristic reserve. He ate, without comment, the overcooked chicken and green beans. He looked strangely ordinary. Small. Afterward, he cleared the table and washed the pans while I gave Heidi her bath. “When is that man going home?” she whispered as I tucked her into bed. When I tried to step away, she gripped my arm with a strength that startled me. “Don’t go,” she said, tears spilling sideways into her ears.

  Half an hour later, I came out of her room to find Hart at the piano, paging through her music. “She’s already playing Bach?” he said.

  “Just starting. Yes.”

  “She is cute.”

  “Thanks.”

  “She looks nothing like you.”

  “Thanks again.”

  He asked where I wrote, and when I took him down the hall to my study, he looked up at my treasured Gaela Erwin self-portrait and let out a little mock shriek. “A man must have a drink after such a shock,” he said, settling himself on the love seat, and before I could tell him that I usually—okay, never—let people into my work space, we were sitting together, drinking wine, select chunks of the manuscript spread between us as I hunted for places where I needed a line in German or French:

  Kann ich denn nicht mit dir kommen?

  Il faut que je te laisse.

  And then we were talking about the Schumann children: Emil, who died in infancy; Julie and Felix, who succumbed to tuberculosis; Ludwig, who was committed to a mental institution where he died, like his father, of undiagnosed causes. Ferdinand became addicted to morphine, leaving Clara to support his wife and seven children. Clara’s two oldest daughters, Marie and Elise, along with their youngest sister, Eugenie, fared better, at least in physical ways, but it was to Marie and Marie alone that Clara would turn, throughout her lifetime, as both daughter and friend. The other children were provided for in every practical sense, but they were raised by servants, boarding school teachers, and eventually—the youngest, at least—by Marie. Clara saw them on holidays plus a few weeks each summer, if then.