Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  Anna answered the first question. “At a party.” This was the bland truth. They met at a party of a mutual acquaintance. Drunken groping followed on that very same night. And even now, despite differences both petty and consequential, the lusts upon which they founded their love still thrummed near the surface of their skins. The second question required some circumnavigation. Mary waited on Anna to continue. “Well, he’s handsome, and responsible …” Anna dodged the question by trailing off. Mary nodded deeply. “And,” Anna sighed the sigh of resignation, “here we are.”

  “As simple as that?” Mary asked. Anna blinked. “How did he propose?”

  “In an orchard. In Washington.” They walked a few steps forward. “We were on a trip.”

  “How romantic!”

  It should have been, Anna thought. For any other pair of lovers it would have been. A few months after they met, Anna and Bruno moved in together. A few months after that and while on vacation and walking through an apple orchard near Wenatchee, Bruno turned to Anna and said, “I think you would make a good wife for me. I think I want to marry you.” It was spur-of-the-moment and matter-of-fact. The idea crossed his mind and he spoke it aloud in the same way he might announce that he’d be up for seeing a movie. There was no ring. A thousand round, ripe apples looked on from above. I agree, Anna thought. I would make a good wife. I would mostly make a good wife. And Anna loved Bruno. Was in love with Bruno. Was in a version of love with Bruno. Inasmuch as she understood it, Anna felt confident enough to name what she felt for Bruno to be love. The sex was good and in those days that mattered as much as anything else. Anna said yes. They married two months later.

  Anna felt the crush of dry grass beneath her shoes. Polly Jean fussed intermittently. “Charles!” Anna cried out. “You’re too far away—come back!” Charles couldn’t hear and didn’t turn around. Anna yelled for Victor to catch up to his brother. When he did, Charles looked back and he waved. “He’s always doing that.”

  “Riding off?”

  “Not paying attention.”

  “Ah, a butterfly chaser! His mother’s son!” Mary giggled.

  Bruno’s proposal may have been matter-of-fact, but Anna said yes without hesitation. The orchard air was peaceful. The sky was promising. The apples introduced the possibility of joy. She remembered them all: Honeycrisp, Honey Sweet, Golden Supreme, Ambrosia, Sunrise, Gala, Fortune, Keepsake. Their names so improbable, the queer potential of happiness foretold by each. Yes, Bruno, I’ll be your wife. They held hands on their walk back to the car. At the end of the path, Anna stopped to pick a black pearly pebble from a pile of lackluster others. She buffed it on her shirt and cached it in her pocket. Anna had carried that pebble with her since. It rattled around in her coin purse against the change.

  One day while Stephen was in the bathroom Anna pilfered a blue linen handkerchief from his sock drawer. It was embroidered with initials that weren’t his. It might have been his grandfather’s. She felt bad, but only for a bit. Like the pebble, she’d carried it in her purse since the day she took it.

  I think you would make a good wife for me, Bruno had said.

  But that’s not why Anna said yes.

  She said yes because she couldn’t imagine a man more suited for her than he.

  “MEN DON’T USUALLY HAVE affairs because they are lonely or want emotional connections. For a man, the reason often reduces to simply this: the challenge of the seduction.” Anna had told the Doktor about Edith and Niklas.

  “What about women?”

  The Doktor looked sympathetically and directly into Anna’s eyes. “I’m worried about you, Anna.”

  THE CONVERSATION WITH NIKLAS continued, pained though it was. Niklas had lived in Switzerland for less than six months. He peppered Anna with questions. He asked about day excursions from Zürich, specialty shops for foodstuffs, where he might buy a mountain bike. He was chatty and curious. Anna tensed. He was much too young for Edith. Much, much. Niklas worked for Otto. How flagrant of her. It was an unexpected instance of correctness. It swelled in Anna’s throat. Christ, what a hypocrite I am, Anna thought.

  But even hypocrites have moments of clarity. Anna could live with the hypocrisy. It was the clarity she couldn’t dodge.

  NEAR THE END OF their walk that day, Anna and Mary herded the children into a café near the Schiffstation and across from Greifensee Castle, a twelfth-century tower house. They ordered orange sodas for the boys, coffees for themselves, and Anna pulled out a small container of animal crackers and placed two on the snack tray that snapped onto Polly’s stroller. Polly picked them up and began banging them against the plastic. They crumbled into immediate bits. “No, Polly.” Anna grabbed two more cookies and put one near Polly Jean’s mouth. Polly took the animal cracker in her chubby fist and tapped it against her lips as if to eat it, then smashed it, like the others, on the tray. “I give up.” Anna handed over the remaining cookie. Sometimes that’s what Anna did: she just gave up.

  Mary offered sympathy. “Oh, they’re like that sometimes, you know. Willful. Girls, I think, especially.” Anna would have to think on that before she agreed.

  When the drinks came Anna reached for her wallet. “No, no—I’ve got this,” Mary said and Anna backed down. Mary carried a large, unwieldy purse. When she reached inside the bag for her wallet, she tipped it and some of the contents fell out, including a travel-sized container of hand sanitizer that landed in Mary’s lap and a paperback novel that fell to the ground. “Oh shoot!” Mary reached for the sanitizer as Anna nabbed the book.

  “His Illicit Kiss?” Anna was amused.

  Mary blushed. “Just something to read on the train.” Anna thumbed to a dog-eared page and read a paragraph aloud. “Her stubborn fingers sought the flesh under his shirt. His pleasure was evident. ‘I want you,’ she purred as she stepped even farther into his space. She gyrated her hips against his groin and the protuberance between his legs caused her to sigh, knowing that soon he would be atop her thrusting and moaning in the agony of desire …”

  Mary yanked the book away. “Anna, the children.”

  The children were absorbed in their own childishness. They weren’t listening. “Protuberance? Why are you reading this?” Mary put the novel back into her bag and sighed. “Oh. Because. You know.” Anna shook her head in a way that meant both yes and no. Mary tried to explain away her embarrassment. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t settled down. So soon I mean.” The admission shamed her. “I missed all my chances to be … more sensual.” Anna’s heart dropped for her friend. Mary hooked her bag on the back of her chair. “But. It doesn’t matter because I did settle down and I am incredibly happy and I would not trade this life for any other. So, I read these. It’s a small indulgence against … I don’t know what.”

  Anna knew what. “I’m sorry, Mary.”

  Mary pretended not to hear her. “And anyway. These books? They’re full of nonsense.”

  “How so?”

  “They all end happily. The heroine gets everything she wants. An amazing job. Loads of success. Fame, money. She’s always beautiful and her fella is the man she’s dreamed of all along. An absolutely perfect life.” Mary’s wistfulness was palpable.

  “Wow. If only.” Polly Jean gurgled and kicked against the stroller, scattering cookie crumbs everywhere.

  “I know, right?” Mary blew on her coffee, then took a tentative taste. Anna drank hers hot. It hurt her mouth, though she pretended it didn’t.

  BECAUSE SHE HAD NOTHING else to do with either her hands or her mouth, when Niklas Flimm asked Anna if she wanted another drink, she said, Yes, please. A half minute later, Anna held a fresh glass of wine. That second glass of wine turned into a third. And three glasses of wine turned into a whiskey and by then Anna was drunk.

  Anna and Niklas were still on the patio. Bruno was inside, drinking and telling stories to his friends. Edith looked through the glass back door occasionally, Anna assumed, to make sure that Niklas wasn’t trying to pick her up as well. She tried
to assure Edith with her body language that was in no way possible. Niklas and Anna were running out of things to say. “So Edith is good friend?” he asked.

  When drunk, Anna’s tact and civil elegance were the first of her social skills to flee. They were usually replaced with the same kind of gadabout forthrightness Edith was known for. Anna wore a sloppy, rickety grin. “What I heard is that Edith is your good friend!” Her drunkenness made her irrepressible.

  Niklas smiled with slightly narrowing eyes. “She tells you.” His voice was even. He wasn’t demoralized. She hadn’t disconcerted him.

  “Don’t worry,” Anna was quick to add. “I’ll keep your secret. I’ll keep it.”

  “I’m not worry.”

  Past that, Anna had nothing to add. They stood there a minute longer in silence. Anna spoke. “I’m going inside. It was nice talking to you.” Anna slurred her words. The tipsy was catching up to her. She left Niklas alone on the patio.

  Anna wasn’t so drunk that she couldn’t walk straight. She walked just fine. Finer than usual, in fact. The alcohol had given her swagger; with every forward step she ticked her hips side to side like a clock’s pendulum and wondered who, if anyone, watched her as she passed. In the Hammers’ bathroom, she glossed her lips and finger curled the strands of hair that had worked their way loose from the clip. She gazed into her own eyes like a lover would. I look glassy and mischievous. Somewhere between the whiskey and the wine, a switch had flipped.

  When she left the bathroom, she sidled up to Bruno and put a hand on his shoulder. Bruno looked up, saw that it was Anna, then returned his attention to the conversation. Anna sat on the arm of the chair in which he was sitting and leaned into him and whispered in his ear. “Let’s go home and fuck.”

  Bruno looked to her once more. He chortled. “I think you’re drunk.”

  Anna’s smile was cagey. “I am. Let’s go home and fuck anyway.”

  A handful of seconds ticked past during which Bruno considered her proposition. He locked his eyes on hers. How long had it been? A month? Two? Anna made so much love of late that she couldn’t keep track. Bruno’s assent was silent.

  “Let’s go,” Anna said.

  “DO YOU KNOW THE German word Sehnsucht?” Anna shook her head no. “It means disconsolate longing. It’s that hole in your heart out of which all hope leaks.” Anna became queasy with dread. Doktor Messerli sensed this. “Anna,” she consoled, “it only feels hopeless. It doesn’t have to be.”

  Doesn’t it? Anna answered silently.

  BRUNO AND ANNA BADE slapdash goodbyes to Edith and Otto and all the other guests and drove home quickly. Anna let her hand glide up her husband’s thigh. Bruno made a hard, hot groan. Anna bit his ear, sucked the lobe. I want you to fuck my mouth, she said. Fuck my mouth then shove your cock in my ass. Bruno kept his eyes to the road but sped up all the same. I want you to scrub my pussy with your face, Bruno. I want you to suck on my clit until it’s as fat as a cherry. When they got to the house he pulled in fast and parked the car at a crooked angle. This was something he never did, too regimented and square cornered he was. They began undressing before they even fully stepped inside. Jackets were abandoned in the boot room. Anna cast her shoes and dress aside in the entryway. Bruno’s shirt fell away in the hall. There, Bruno grabbed Anna’s arm above the elbow and pulled her roughly into the bedroom behind him.

  There were freshly washed and folded clothes on the bed. Bruno swept them to the floor and shoved Anna to the mattress without ceremony. Anna let down her hair and tossed the clip toward the nightstand, where it bounced and then slid right off. She reached for the waistband of her pantyhose, the back fastening of her bra—she was too aroused to decide which she’d take off first. Stop, Bruno commanded. I will undress you. Anna complied limply as Bruno unzipped his pants and pushed them along with his briefs down his legs.

  God, he’s so fucking handsome. Anna allowed herself this swoon. I forgot how handsome he was. Even for a Swiss man Bruno was tall; at a slouch he stood six foot four. His eyes were hazel—yellow and brown like a tiger’s-eye jewel. His chest was broad and beautiful, silken and downy. The hair on his head, the hair on his body the rustic brown of fresh-turned soil. His forearms were veiny, strong like a carpenter’s. His nose, more Aryan than Alemannic, ran straight as a taut line of string from its bridge to its tip. His were the features of an aristocrat; he was the physical heir of another era. And his cock. Anna loved Bruno’s cock. Of all the cocks belonging to all her lovers past or present, Bruno’s was the largest. Erect, it was nearly as long as a dinner knife and as big around as the face of a man’s pocket watch. Uncut. Precision straight. It was obscene, aggressive, and in just a minute it would split her apart. Anna had never been able to slide more than half of it into her mouth. Her orgasms were painful, exquisite affairs.

  Bruno spread her legs. Anna, still drunk, wanted nothing more than to lie there and let his will overpower her. Her knees fell open as Bruno climbed between them, entered her, then slammed his cock in and out of her as hard as he could. After two, three, four minutes of this he pulled out entirely and flipped Anna onto her stomach. He hitched her pelvis to the edge of the bed, knelt on the floor and pushed her legs each to their own side before burying his tongue inside her. Anna moaned, sighed, bucked her hips against his face. But she didn’t come. Bruno shoved her forward on the bed and forced her knees underneath her. Anna started to lift herself up onto her hands but Bruno barked No and with his left hand he pushed her shoulders down, even as with his right, he positioned his cock to enter her again. Anna allowed herself the ecstasy of powerlessness. Of all her men, it was only with Bruno that this could be fully accomplished. Of all her men, Bruno was the most threatening. Bruno pushed so deeply into her that Anna felt like she might split into halves. Anna growled. Bruno moved his left hand to the small of her back and reached his right around her and found her clit with his fingers. He twiddled it, flicked it, pinched it. “I’m gonna come,” Anna rasped and reached back with her own hand and pushed his away. Bruno took hold of her hips, fucked her harder than he had in years. Anna’s orgasm called forth Bruno’s. They stiffened, flushed, first called out each other’s names and then the name of God, before collapsing in a singular, satisfied cry.

  When it was done, Bruno let the weight of his body press Anna between him and the bed. They remained that way until Bruno’s cock stopped pulsing and it softened enough to fall out on its own. When it did, Bruno rolled off her and onto his back. Anna turned her head to look at him. Bruno, empty of energy beside her, stretched his body out its full length and capped the motion with a shiver. By the light of the dim but undeniable moon, Anna saw what passed for a smile on Bruno’s face.

  “Bruno,” she whispered. “What’s the purpose of pain?”

  “This is pillow talk?” Bruno yawned. “Go to sleep, Anna.” Anna asked him again. She wanted to know. Bruno took several breaths before answering. Anna thought he’d fallen asleep. “Pain is the proof of life.” His voice was unguarded. “That’s its purpose.” It was a more satisfying answer than Doktor Messerli had given her.

  “Bruno,” Anna pressed. “Do you love me?” He answered Anna’s question with a snore.

  12

  THE POSTANALYSIS LETDOWN IS OFTEN PALPABLE. AS IN THE aftermath of sex, you are tired, spent, and for the moment relieved it’s over. You leave the analyst’s office aware of your singularity and your solitude alike. It’s you who lives in the prison of your skin. No one gets the afterglow they want. Everyone dies alone. Analysis is a process. The process is a slow procession. It is a cortege.

  Vhat are yooo sinking? Doktor Messerli had asked.

  Anna shook her head. There was nothing she wanted to admit thinking of. The session was almost over. Anna stood, rubbed her neck, and stretched herself in several directions. “My back hurts. I’m tense. That’s all.” Anna bent to gather her things and leave.

  Doktor Messerli rose and followed her to the office door. “Even the loveliest shoulders can
bear but so much.”

  ANNA WAS STILL DRUNK. She couldn’t sleep. Bruno never had this problem. He was an easy sleeper. In sleep, he died to the world. That’s what lovemaking did to him. But sex often made Anna restless and insecure. The consequence of sex is always doubt, she thought. With greater intimacy came greater doubt. When Bruno fell asleep Anna was alone. The white noise of worry kept her awake.

  Anna rose and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and her boots. She didn’t bother with underwear or socks. She found her coat in the hallway where she’d stripped it off an hour earlier and pulled it on as she left the house. Where can I go? Anna felt trapped no matter where she was. Even at the end of such an evening as this.

  In the darkness she traipsed the familiar path behind the house. She passed a rotting barn and the back units of an apartment complex. A motion-detecting light flashed on. The sudden spark of brightness startled her, as it always did. She looked across the sunflower field to the newer houses south of Loorenstrasse. Most were fully dark, but a window here and there was softly lit. Where am I going? Anna had nowhere to go and no reason for the going. Everywhere I go is nowhere. This was true. But her own ennui annoyed her and so she dismissed it.

  The sky was so clear it shone. Anna crested the hill and sat on the bench at a curve in the path. Her bench. One of the most familiar things to her in all of Switzerland. She gazed at the autumn constellations and wished she knew their names. Above her hung the moon. I have nothing to say about the moon, she said to herself and in saying that she had nothing to say, somehow said something. She watched the red blinking lights of three airplanes at varying altitudes blip across the dark star-spotted field. Anna was accustomed to airplanes. They lived only a few kilometers from the Zürich airport. She always watched for movement in the skies. In the seventies and ten kilometers away in Bülach, a man named Billy Meier told everyone that spacemen in honest-to-god flying saucers came to visit him. He had hundreds of pictures of so-called proof. Anna had seen the photographs on the Internet. The image was familiar—an empty, pastoral scene, a metal dish poised in a way that toyed with perception and pending from wires that while invisible surely must exist. Anna, having spent nine years considering the words “alien” and “alienated,” took to Billy Meier’s story. And almost six years earlier in Bassersdorf, the town immediately north of Dietlikon, a Crossair flight crashed four kilometers short of its runway. Pilot error. Anna remembered that night. She’d heard a terrible noise and ran outside. She could see nothing in the dark. Bruno read about it in the next day’s paper. There were pop stars aboard the plane, though neither Bruno nor Anna recognized their names. And so Anna scanned the vault of sky above her, searching for signs. She found none.