by William Boyd
She was baffled at first, but then remembered he was quoting from his own courses, something she had heard in his classes.
“—where you slowly cool down and eventually extinguish. The point is you need not plummet,” he said carefully. “There are different laws in different atmospheres, freer movements, freer dynamics. It need not be rigid.”
“Loose continuity,” she said. “I remember.”
“Precisely,” he said with a smile. “There’s a choice. Rigid or loose continuity.” He tapped her arm lightly. “Do you know, I think I may be interested in buying your rug.”
Spencer tightens the final bolt and crosses the street to join us on the opposite sidewalk. Mr. Koenig, Mrs. Koenig, Spencer and me. It is almost midday, and the sun is almost insupportably bright. I put on my sunglasses and through their green glass I stare at the Koenigs’ mini-diner.
Mr. Koenig turns away and takes a few paces, his finger held under his nose as if he were about to sneeze. He comes back to us.
“I love it, Miss Velk,” he says after apologizing for the few private moments he has needed. “I just … It’s so … The way you’ve done those jutting-out bits. My God, it even looks like a sandwich. The roll, the meat … So clever, so new. How it curves like that, that style—”
“Streamline moderne, we call it.”
“May I?”
He puts his hands on my shoulders and leans forward and up (I am a little taller) and he gives me a swift kiss on the cheek.
“I don’t normally kiss architects—”
“Oh, I’m not an architect,” I say. “I’m just a designer. It was a challenge.”
Gudrun never really knew what happened (but this is what I think, I’m sure it was like this), as the stories changed so often in the telling, and there were lies and half-lies all the time. The truth made both guilty parties more guilty and they thought to absolve themselves by pleading spontaneity, and helpless instinct, but they had no time to compare notes and the discrepancies hinted at quite another version of reality.
Gudrun climbed the last block from the station and quietly opened the door of the apartment on Grenz Weg. It must have been a little before eight o’clock in the morning. She had gone a few steps into the hall when she heard a sound in the kitchen. She pushed open the door and Tobias stood there, naked, with two cups of steaming coffee in his hands.
His look of awful incomprehension changing to awful comprehension lasted no more than a second. He smiled, set down the cups, said “Gudrun—” and was interrupted by Utta’s call from her bedroom. “Tobias, where’s that coffee, for heaven’s sake?”
Gudrun (to this day) doesn’t know why she did what she did. She picked up a coffee cup and walked into Utta’s room. She wanted Utta to see that there was to be no evasion of responsibility. Utta was sitting up in her bed, pillows plumped behind her, the sheet to her waist. Tobias’s clothes were piled untidily on a wooden chair. She made a kind of sick, choking noise when Gudrun came in. For a moment Gudrun thought of throwing the hot coffee at her, but at that stage she knew there were only seconds before she herself would break, so, after a moment of standing there to make Utta see, to make her know, she dropped the cup on the floor and left the apartment.
Two days later Tobias asked Gudrun to marry him. He said he had gone to the apartment on Saturday night (his wife was away) thinking that was the day she was returning from Sorau. Why would he think that? she asked, they had talked about a Sunday reunion so many times. Once in his stream of protestations he had inadvertently referred to a note—“I mean, what would you think? a note like that”—and then, when questioned—“What note? Who sent you a note?”—said he was becoming confused—no, there was no note, he had meant to say she should have sent him a note from Sorau, not relied on him to remember, how could he remember everything, for God’s sweet sake?
Utta. Utta had written to him, Gudrun surmised, perhaps in her name, the better to lure him: “Darling Tobias, I’m coming home a day early, meet me at the apartment on Saturday night. Your own Gudrun …” It would work easily. Utta there, surprised to see him. Come in, sit down, now you’re here, come all this way. Something to drink, some wine, some schnapps, maybe? And Tobias’s vanity, Tobias’s opportunism and Tobias’s weakness would do the rest. Now, darling, Tobias, this question of Marianne Brandt’s resignation …
In weary moments, though, other possibilities presented themselves to her. Older duplicities, histories and motives she could never have known about and wouldn’t want to contemplate. Her own theory was easier to live with.
Utta wrote her a letter: “… no idea how it happened … some madness that can infect us all … an act of no meaning, of momentary release.” She was sad to lose Utta as a friend, but not so sad to turn down Tobias’s proposal of marriage.
I say goodbye to Spencer as he sits in the cab of his crane looking down at me. “See you tomorrow, Gudrun,” he says with a smile, to my vague surprise, until I remember I had asked him to call me Gudrun. He drives away and I rejoin Mr. Koenig.
“I got one question,” he says. “I mean, I love the lettering, don’t get me wrong—‘sandwiches, salads, hot dogs’—but why no capital letters?”
“Well,” I say without thinking, “why write with capitals when we don’t speak with capitals?”
Mr. Koenig frowns. “What?… Yeah, it’s a fair point. Never thought of it that way … Yeah.”
My mind begins to wander again, as Mr. Koenig starts to put a proposition to me. Who said that about typography? Was it Albers? Paul?… No, Moholy-Nagy. László in his red overalls with his lumpy boxer’s face and his intellectual’s spectacles. He is in Chicago now. We’re all gone, I think to myself, all scattered.
Mr. Koenig is telling me that there are fifteen Koenig mini-diners in the Los Angeles area and he would like, he hopes, he wonders if it would be possible for me to redesign them—all of them—in this streamline, modern streamline sort of style.
All scattered. Freer. Freer movements, freer dynamics. I remember, and smile to myself. I had never imagined a future designing hot dog stands in a city on the West Coast of America. It is a kind of continuity, I suppose. We need not plummet. Paul would approve of me and what I have done, I think, as a vindication of his principle.
I hear myself accepting Mr. Koenig’s offer and allow him to kiss me on the cheek once more—but my mind is off once again, a continent and an ocean away in drab and misty Dessau. Gudrun Velk is trudging up the gentle slope of Grillparzerstrasse, her suitcase heavy in her hand, taking the shortcut from the station, heading back to the small apartment on Grenz Weg which she shares with her friend Utta Benrath and hoping, wondering, now that she has managed to catch an early train from Sorau, if Tobias would have some time to see her alone that afternoon.
ALSO BY WILLIAM BOYD
“A pitch-perfect story of love and redemption
… as moving as it is entertaining.”
—The New York Times
THE BLUE AFTERNOON
Sprawling between three continents and two historical eras, William Boyd’s lushly atmospheric novel opens in Los Angeles in 1936, when architect Kay Fischer is approached by an elderly man named Salvador Carriscant, who claims to be her father—and who insists she accompany him to Lisbon in a search for the great lost love of his life. Suspenseful, stylishly written, and teeming with historical detail, The Blue Afternoon is a triumph.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize in Fiction
Fiction/0-679-77260-X
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
WILLIAM BOYD
William Boyd is the author of ten novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of essays and criticism, and twelve screenplays that have been filmed. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. He lives in London and southwest France.
www.williamboyd.co.uk
Books by William Boyd
A Good Man in Africa
On the Yankee Station
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
School Ties
The New Confessions
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
The Destiny of Nathalie X
Armadillo
Nat Tate: An American Artist
Any Human Heart
Fascination
Restless
Bamboo
Ordinary Thunderstorms
BOOKS BY WILLIAM BOYD
ARMADILLO
To his colleagues, Lorimer Black, the mild-mannered insurance adjuster, is known as the guy who has it all: the sleek suits, the enviable status. But when Lorimer arrives at a business appointment and finds his client hanging from a pipe, his life spirals out of control. His car is blowtorched after he investigates a fire at a luxury hotel. He becomes the fall guy of a colleague who puts the company in the red and the victim of a vicious attack by the possessive husband of a mysterious actress. As Lorimer becomes entangled in a conspiracy that involves everyone he knows, his own past comes to light.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70216-7
THE BLUE AFTERNOON
This lushly atmospheric novel opens in Los Angeles in 1936, when architect Kay Fischer is approached by an elderly man named Salvador Carriscant, who claims to be her father—and who insists that she accompany him to Lisbon in a search for the great lost love of his life. En route to Portugal, Carriscant, a former surgeon in the war-torn Philippines, tells Kay the story behind her secret parentage. Set against the sultry blue afternoons of Manila in 1902, his is a tale of grisly murders, ghastly medical rivalries, and an illicit passion that will consume Carriscant’s life and his daughter’s imagination.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77260-6
THE DESTINY OF NATHALIE X
and Other Stories
With these eleven startling, exotic, and deliciously inventive new stories, Boyd charts the euphoria of love, the anguish of loss, and the gnawings of ambition across several countries and the expanse of the twentieth century. From a tourist who returns to his hotel room to find a countess amorously awaiting him, to a couple who meet once a year in Lisbon to indulge in erotic delirium, Boyd’s characters are unforgettable. Shimmering with meaning, The Destiny of Nathalie X compels us to consider how we thread our experience into narrative.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76784-8
FASCINATION
One of the most beguiling storytellers on either side of the Atlantic delivers a luminous new collection whose fourteen stories are a series of variations on the theme of love—and its shady cousin lust. In “Notebook No. 9,” a film director’s journal becomes an unintended chronicle of his deepening and ruinous obsession with a leading lady. In “A Haunting,” a well-behaved English architect feels the chill onset of an otherworldly visitation that will shatter his family and career. In “Varengeville,” an unhappy young boy, neglected by both his father and adulterous mother, finds an unexpected friend in an elderly painter. Wise, unsettling, humane, and endlessly surprising, Fascination lives up to its title on every page.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7849-3
A GOOD MAN IN AFRICA
In the small African republic of Kinjanja, British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job. His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success. But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front-runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment. After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3002-6
AN ICE-CREAM WAR
In 1914, in a hotel room in German East Africa, American farmer Walter Smith dreams of Theodore Roosevelt. As he sleeps, a railway passenger swats at flies, regretting her decision to return to the Dark Continent and to her husband. On a faraway English riverbank, a jealous Felix Cobb watches his brother swim, and curses his sister-in-law-to-be. And in the background of the world’s daily chatter swirl rumors of an Anglo-German conflict, the likes of which no one has ever seen. As the sons of the world match wits and weapons on a continent thousands of miles from home, desperation makes bedfellows of enemies and traitors of friends and family.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70502-1
THE NEW CONFESSIONS
In this extraordinary novel, William Boyd presents the autobiography of John James Todd. From his birth in 1899, Todd was doomed. Emerging from his angst-filled childhood, he rushes into the throes of the twentieth century on the Western Front during the Great War, and quickly changes his role on the battlefield from cannon fodder to cameraman. When he becomes a prisoner of war, he discovers Rousseau’s Confessions, and dedicates his life to bringing the memoir to the silver screen. Plagued by bad luck and blind ambition, Todd becomes a celebrated London upstart, a Weimar luminary, and finally a disgruntled director of cowboy movies and the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70503-8
ON THE YANKEE STATION
These fifteen beguiling stories are populated by unlikely heroes who, desperate to redeem their unsatisfying lives, turn to fantasy as their sole escape from life’s inequities. Stranded in an African hotel during a coup, an oafish Englishman impresses a stewardess with tales of an enchanted life completely at odds with his sordid existence. In “Hardly Ever,” a Scottish boy impresses his friends by recounting with prurient elaboration his awkward courtship of a local girl. In the title story, a sadistic American pilot in Vietnam underestimates the power of revenge when he relentlessly persecutes a member of his maintenance crew.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70511-3
STARS AND BARS
A recent arrival to Manhattan, Englishman Henderson Dores believes the move has given him a new lease on life. With a plum position as a fine art assessor and a chance to reconcile with his ex-wife, Dores is eager to trade his British reserve for the impulsive nature of Americans. But when Loomis Gage, an eccentric millionaire, invites him to Georgia to appraise his small collection of Impressionist paintings, Dores’s plans take an abrupt turn. Stranded at a remote mansion after his car wheels mysteriously disappear, Dores is received by the bizarre Gage family with nausea-inducing food, dubious information, and ludicrous death threats.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70501-4
ALSO AVAILABLE
Any Human Heart, 978-1-4000-3100-9
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