She wonders if he is waiting for her to object and say that he was a wonderful father but she cannot find words that will ring true. She also wants to tell him that Jonas is a very upbeat boy, only not when his father is around.
Fortunately they reach the restaurant.
“I’m going to have a huge jug of margaritas,” Hans says.
She smiles at him. “Does that mean I have to get my own jug or can I have some of yours?”
“You can have some of mine,” he says and he flashes her a grin she has not seen in a while and he tosses invisible hair out of his eyes.
He places their order and they study the menu.
The waitress returns quickly and places the enormous pitcher on their table and Hans pours the drinks.
They both down a few glasses quickly and soon the food is unimportant. They order hamburgers and she and Hans giggle at everything and the world seems silly and harmless and the night is endless and there is not a single adult responsibility in sight.
A show starts in the restaurant and a young woman dives into a huge floor-to-ceiling margarita-shaped glass and pole-dances in and out of the water.
Watching a nearly naked girl with her husband at her side excites Melusine and she feels optimistic about the evening. “This is such fun,” she says and her skin is flushed and she has a healthy colour from the sunshine of day.
Hans leans towards her and kisses her lightly on the brow. “Yes,” he says, “it really is.”
They eat dinner and finish the jug of margaritas and Hans asks Melusine if they should get another one.
“Hmm, no, I’ll have a cocktail, instead of dessert. Something sweet.”
They order a final round and wait.
The water-girl pole-dancing show has gone on three times since they’ve been there and each time Melusine finds herself sitting closer to Hans, with her hand on his leg, or caressing his back. She has never been this forward with him. She is bordering on downright promiscuity.
But he does not object and he leans towards her and he looks young again in her eyes, powerful, popular and sexy just like he did when she met him.
They take a cab back to the Desert Rose Resort and Melusine lets her skirt ride high up her thighs and she encourages Hans to caress her, even teasing his fingers to the edge of her panties.
Hans makes sure he dry swallows a Viagra on the way when Melusine isn’t looking.
They arrive at the hotel and clumsily find their way to the room and their bed, shedding clothes along the way.
Melusine is running her hands over Hans’s body, thinking oh, he feels so thin, and his skin is cold, so paper-thin and dry. She is reminded of the finest of her phyllo pastries; baked, they’re almost powdery — so breakable and brittle.
Once again Gunther creeps into her mind and she can taste a decadent profiterole; the thick luxurious pastry exploding in her mouth with rich Bavarian cream and real chocolate drizzle. She forces thoughts of Gunther and pastries away and is startled by the realization that this is the first time she has seen her husband naked. He has always been so fastidious, going about his washroom routines in private, even shaving behind closed doors.
She explores his body and he is long, lean and hairless. She is groaning with desire and even he is moaning out loud with the sweet joy of discovery.
He runs his hands over her legs, gripping her buttocks hard and he feels for her breasts. But no! Her breasts are too large, much too large. Kateri would never have had such large breasts, such sexual breasts, such womanly mammaries. These breasts have suckled and fed; they are no longer pure.
No! He cannot think about his sister now as this will lead to certain catastrophe and he stops touching Melusine’s breasts and returns to the safer area of her smooth flat stomach, not letting his thoughts stray.
Melusine can wait no longer. She lies down on the bed and pulls him on top of her.
His penis is hard and engorged and she grasps it but Hans once again thinks of his sister and how she would never have done so unseemly a thing as to clutch a man’s penis with such unbecoming hunger and he feels himself shrinking.
He quickly forces himself inside Melusine but it is too late, he is losing his erection.
In desperation, he holds his breath; he goes silent but she is still making too much noise.
He wants to tell her that it’s better when it’s quiet, that it’s better when it’s dark and you fall back into that place where you become one with your orgasm and nothing else matters, nothing else exists.
Before either of them knows what’s happening, he has one hand around her neck and the other across her mouth. He cuts off her air, his hand big enough to cover her mouth and her nose. And he is pushing down on her neck harder and harder and he is getting harder again, and he closes his eyes and pumps himself inside her and he is about to come when he feels a blow to the side of his head that sends a ringing in his ears and flashes a blinding light behind his eyeballs.
He falls off the side of the bed and both he and Melusine lie dead still, both of them quietly horrified.
The room is dark except for the eerie pink light reflecting from the Tropicana hotel across the way like a muslin curtain of Turkish Delight.
Hans gets up and crawls towards his clothes.
Melusine lies there naked, unmoving. Her eyes are huge, frightened.
He does not look at her.
He buttons his shirt and zips up his fly. He sits down on a chair and pulls on his socks, then his shoes. She hears his shoelaces snapping against the leather as he ties his laces tightly, precisely. She realizes the familiarity of this sound, of Hans snapping his laces, getting the knot and bow just so. He stands.
Every sound is so loud in the booming silence of everything they cannot say. He picks up his jacket and leaves without a backward glance.
She hears the door close, not exactly quietly, and she sits up.
She has no idea what happened except that her husband tried to strangle her while they were having sex. Does he hate her that much that he wants to kill her? Does he wish that she were dead?
She gets off the bed and runs a deep hot bath, sitting on the edge while the water fills the tub. She bites her lip and frowns.
She does not know what to think.
9.
THE NEXT DAY, Melusine tries to put the night with Hans behind her while she waits for Gunther.
She is glad, in the morning, to see that her neck is unbruised, although her skin and larynx feel tender.
She tries to make sense of what happened. She recalls a passage from Malina, in which Ich talks about the throttle marks on her neck but at the time she had read it, Melusine had thought the woman was referring to the stranglehold of doomed love that had her by the throat, but perhaps it had been some practice of lovemaking with which she was unfamiliar.
Melusine thinks about Ich’s instant love for Ivan, her married lover, and how she, Melusine, had always found the story unconvincing; what woman would fall in love so wildly with a man, and so quickly? Unbelievable! And yet, here she is waiting for Gunther, sitting on the same bench as the previous morning, looking at the same pink oleander flowers, at the same very green, very fake grass, and at the vivid cobalt sky; it all looks the same but everything has changed.
Her heart is beating like a schoolgirl’s and her armpits are sweaty. Good thing she had doubled up on her deodorant. And she had selected her underwear with care, feeling foolish and excited at the same time. She is wearing the shortest dress in her collection to show off her legs to their best advantage and she chose her sexiest sandals, dubious footwear given that they were going to explore rocks in the desert.
In her excitement, she skipped breakfast and her stomach makes loud gurgling sounds and she tries to hush it by breathing deeply and slowly. She checks her watch and she wonders if she should go inside and grab a coffee but what if she misses Gunther?
Her thoughts drift and she cannot help but wonder where Hans went. She had thought he would come b
ack eventually but he did not. She had also thought perhaps, that as a good wife, she should have waited for him in the room all day but she could not do it.
Instead, she showered as carefully as if she were going on a date and she even put on the slightest trace of make-up. Not so much that Gunther would notice, well, hopefully not, but just enough to increase her allure.
Increase her allure. She mocks herself, sitting there, waiting, with her sweaty armpits and her dry mouth and her tumbling noisy stomach.
She tucks her hands under her thighs and leans forward, lost in thought. She hears a car horn and she looks up and sees Gunther waving from a nondescript white rental sedan.
“Cool car,” she says, opening the door.
“I would’ve got you a Mustang, but they were all gone. Did you have breakfast?”
She shakes her head and makes up an excuse. “No. I didn’t even get a coffee. I was going to but there were too many people.”
“I didn’t have anything either. We can stop off somewhere and get ourselves some pancakes or something.”
“Sounds lovely,” Melusine says politely, but she couldn’t care less about eating. She’s wondering if she is attracted to Gunther simply because of her confused emotions and she asks herself if she would have been attracted to anybody who had come along? Or was it specifically him that she was attracted to? And was she really attracted to him or just attracted to the idea of attraction? All at once, she feels exhausted.
Gunther gets them onto the highway. His window is open and the air is blowing in noisily. “We’ll find somewhere to eat along the way,” he shouts. She nods and suddenly feels a wave of claustrophobia; she wants out, out of the car. She cannot be here, trapped with this stranger, going off into the middle of nowhere. She eyes the door-handle of the car and thinks of leaping out but car’s moving too fast. She tells herself that she can run away from him as soon they stop for breakfast; she can get a cab back to the hotel regardless of the cost. She stares at Gunther wild-eyed through her sunglasses but he doesn’t notice, he is trying to find a radio station that will work.
“Static, country and western, eighties pop,” he says, finally giving up. “Melusine, you’re very quiet. Are you okay?”
“Fine. Yes, I’m good, just tired I suppose. I had an odd evening last night with my husband. I think he might be having a nervous breakdown.”
Gunther laughs. “Aren’t we all? What did he do?”
She shakes her head. She cannot tell him. “Nothing specific, it was just a general thing really. Very general. Funny, I look at my son. He thinks life is so straightforward and for him, at eighteen, it is. And yet, for us, the older we get, the more complicated it gets. Why did we think it would get easier?”
“Blame the fairytales,” Gunther says. “They all stopped with ‘and they lived happily ever-after.’ No one ever told us what that would look like. We weren’t armed.”
She smiles for the first time that day, a real smile. “You’re very right. They didn’t. Maybe they should have ended their stories with ‘and they all lived on and on and on, fighting battles, going to war, getting married, getting divorced, losing their fortunes, growing old and finally dying.’ But who would have wanted to read that? That’s just depressing.”
“Yes, but those aren’t the only possible endings. They could also have said they had children and grandchildren, feasts and celebrations, increased their fortunes, won wars and loved until the grave while having fantastic sex along the way.”
Melusine thinks about her own inherent lack of optimism and how her gloom had gone quiet during the years of Jonas’s upbringing, gloom that had recently elbowed its way back into her life. She was three years away from the age when Ingeborg had died and although she could not really imagine wanting to die, she sometimes felt as if life itself was a death sentence of sorts.
Before Jonas was born, she had spoken to a doctor, wanting to know if she was suffering from depression but she left the appointment convinced that she was just more philosophically aware than most people, and more given to profound, darker thoughts.
She looks at Gunther. She does not want to let herself get in the way of their day and she resolves to be more cheerful.
“Are you okay without the air con?” he asks. “I know it’s hot but I hate the tin can cold of air con but if the heat’s too much for you, just say so.”
“I’m fine, don’t worry,” she looks around. “We’re going to be hard-pressed to find any kind of food places, it’s like we’re in the middle of nowhere.”
There are brown hills on either side of the highway and not a road or town in sight.
Gunther groans and Melusine leans toward him. “I hope you have gas,” she says.
“Comes with a full tank,” he replies, sounding discouraged by the lack of pancake houses en route.
They drive for half an hour and Gunther spots a road.
“I’m taking it,” he says, swinging to the right. “We must find food.”
She laughs. “You have no idea where this goes. It could get us more lost than ever.”
“We’re pioneers,” he says, “unstoppable explorers, driven forward, or in this case, west, by our hunger. Our hunger, not for land but for pancakes and fried eggs and oh, I’m so goddamned hungry.”
“You’re making it worse by talking about it.”
“You’re right. So did Hans go to his conference this morning?” He asks the question casually and Melusine wonders how to lie about the fact that Hans did not come home at all.
“As a matter of fact, we argued and he rushed out of the room around two a.m. and didn’t return.”
He turns to look at her. “He didn’t come back?”
She shakes her head. “He didn’t come back. I know what you’re thinking, that maybe I should have stayed at the hotel to wait for him, or maybe put out a missing person’s report but I didn’t think I could.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Gunther says and he scratches his head. “It’s not like there’s a shortage of hotels. He must have stayed elsewhere.”
“I guess I should have gone to the conference centre and tried to find him this morning,” she says and Gunther looks at her in alarm.
“No.” He’s emphatic. “There’re too many conferences and you’d never find him.”
The previous night, out of idle curiosity and keen to see if there was any mention of Melusine’s husband, Gunther had googled all the current conferences in Vegas and optometry was not listed. But he does not want to tell Melusine that. “Listen Melu, people do crazy things in Vegas, but I’m sure he’s fine.”
“Fine but doing crazy things? Besides, Hans doesn’t do crazy, he never has.” Her stomach flutters at his casual and intimate shortening of her name but she doesn’t mention it. She hopes he’ll say it again.
“Everybody does crazy,” Gunther says. “That’s another thing the fairy tales don’t tell you. Everybody does crazy but only the kind that makes sense to them and no one else. Oh my god, look, there’s a McDonald’s! In the middle of nowhere too.”
“Well, it might once have been a McDonald’s,” Melusine says. “It looks like it’s been closed forever.”
Gunther looks ready to weep at this news. He pulls up close to the building and sees that it is true; the McDonald’s has been shut for a while. It is an old place, without the signature golden arch logo. It has two single, curved arches, one on either side of the restaurant, and the whole setup is like an old-fashioned gas station from the fifties. It is heavily boarded-up and in a bad state of disrepair.
“Look at that sign. Burgers were fifteen cents,” Gunther says with reverence.
He leans back and closes his eyes. Then he sits up straight. “Melusine, can we take a moment to explore? You never know what photographs I could get here.”
“Fine by me. I’d love to stretch my legs. We’ve been driving for nearly two hours.”
“Are you serious? I hope I haven’t got us lost. I’m not great with maps,” he
says, and she smiles.
“Now you tell me!” She gets out the car and stretches, arches her back and yawns. “This fresh air feels great. And I love this insane heat.”
Gunther, meanwhile, is loosening a board across a window. He tugs, gets the window open and peers inside.
“This is fantastic!” He runs back for his camera bag. “It’s falling apart, it’s a McDonald’s after the apocalypse, when there’s nothing left and the bomb’s gone off and everybody’s dead and they find this retro time capsule…”
“I’d hardly call McDonald’s retro,” she laughs.
“Wait ’til you see inside this one. Hang on, I’ll go first and help you in.”
“Let me get my purse,” Melusine says and he grins at her.
“Sure,” he says, teasing her. “And I’ll lock the car while we’re at it. Melu, we’re out in the middle of nowhere, who’s going to steal anything?”
She shrugs. “Okay, I’m ready, let’s go inside.”
They climb in and their eyes take a moment to adjust to the dim light. Gunther sees that a few of the wooden boards are coming loose at the far end of the room and he pulls them off, allowing the sunlight to stream in, which illuminates an old-fashioned counter with all kinds of equipment for making milkshakes and fries.
“They actually made all this stuff from scratch,” Gunther says, awed. “Melu, do you have any idea what all this stuff would be worth on eBay?”
She shrugs and dusts off a stool. “It’s very cool, I’ll give it that,” she says. “It is a time capsule, you were right. But I wonder who built it out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Gunther sets up his tripod. He adjusts his camera, changes the settings, flips switches and grunts with concentration while muttering to himself. He has apparently forgotten his hunger.
Melusine gets up to explore behind the counter. She leans forward and says in a sexy voice, “And what can I get for you, young man?”
A Glittering Chaos Page 8