Mary announced she’d brought board games. Edith groaned from the station she’d assumed on the couch, and Anna shot her a stare she didn’t look up from her cell phone to see. Nancy’s position was sympathetic and she said she’d be up for playing, if other people were. Mary arranged the choices on the coffee table. Life. Risk. Trivial Pursuit. Sorry. Even the board games pointed a finger at Anna. She caught Archie’s eye and mouthed Please leave. Archie blinked against her request and in turn mouthed In a bit. Anna responded by retreating into the kitchen.
A minute later, Mary joined her. “There you are! You’re missing all the fun! If I didn’t know better I’d say you were trying to avoid your own party.”
“Mary,” Anna spoke with exasperation. “I told you I didn’t want a party.”
Anna opened the refrigerator. Inside, a layer cake so large that the refrigerator’s upper shelves and everything that rested upon them had been removed so the cake could fit. Where’s my salad dressing? Where’s my mustard? I want to know where my mustard is. Anna shoved the door closed. The fridge made a dramatic rattle.
“Are you mad, Anna?” There was a tremor in Mary’s voice. Anna didn’t want to hurt Mary’s feelings. She had little choice but to inhale the whole affront. “No, Mary. Not at all. It’s a good surprise. Thank you.”
“WHAT ARE YOU GOOD at?” the Doktor asked one afternoon.
Anna scanned her memory, attempting to recall the last time she’d been asked, if ever. She gave a catechumenal answer, born of repetition and praxis.
“I don’t know,” Anna replied, and both women understood this to mean I’d prefer to not talk about it.
The Doktor pressed. “I’m not letting you off this hook,” she said, then crossed her legs and arms and leaned back in her chair as she settled in for the protracted wait that prefigured any conversation with Anna that required initial coaxing. The windows were closed and the room was damp and clammy. The Doktor redirected. “Okay. Let’s try this one. What is it you like to do? Whether you’re good at it I don’t care.”
I like to fuck, was Anna’s on-the-spot response, though she kept it to herself. Instead she squinted and bit her lip and tried to think past the fucking as the Doktor waited for her to answer.
“When I was younger”—Anna drew a pause, emphasizing “younger” as if it were key that a then and now distinction be understood—“I liked to sew.”
The Doktor clapped her hands together once. “Finally! An admission!” The levity came off as inconsiderate. “Now. Were you good at it?”
Anna hadn’t sewn in years. The last time she pulled out her machine—Where was it now, anyway? The attic? The basement?—Victor was an infant and she still had the determination necessary to cultivate a certain kind of home life. Anna told this to the Doktor.
“And why did you stop?”
Anna mumbled a response along the lines of a lack of time and energy.
“And what’s keeping you from sewing now?”
The answer remained intact. “Time. Energy.” She was empty of both. She offered freely to her men all her free hours. She stored up no stamina for herself.
(Anna had never considered the correlation, but as they sifted through this part of Anna’s past the parallels were evident and the correspondence clear: I’ve traded sewing hems for sowing hims. Anna grinned on the inside. There was comedy here. Clarity, too. Bias. Pattern. Seam. She could have simply told the Doktor that she was good at word games, and that would have been true, too. But that confession would have wrung out another one: that her wittiest moments were her slyest and most often they served her in the way the ink serves the octopus. Smoke screens, she hid behind them. Dart. Edge. Bolt. These days, needle had become need. A pleat was now a plea. But Anna startled herself as she thought through this. In this case, these weren’t clever comebacks or coincidences. There were the bad, bald facts, and they aligned exactly.)
“Did your mother teach you to sew?” The Doktor’s question snapped Anna back into the room. When Anna didn’t immediately respond, the Doktor asked again. This time, the inquiry forced a dimming memory forward. Anna was young. Six or seven. She could no longer say. The afternoon in question had been as hazy as was her current recollection of it. That afternoon. It had been late enough in the day that when the light cut through the window it hit the room at an angle and the air’s dust and floating motes appeared as playful and lovely as tiny flakes of snow. Anna’s mother was stationed at her sewing machine, a now-obsolete Singer she’d inherited when her own mother died. She was crafting pillows for the sofa from the most beautiful velveteen fabric Anna had ever seen before or since—soft as down, it was the color of burgundy wine still in its cask. Anna, in tandem, sat in all seriousness on the floor at her mother’s feet and busied herself over the body of her teddy bear, fitting soft, purple remnants to its form with safety pins. Later, Anna’s mother took her on her lap and together they stitched those scraps into a tiny skirt, Anna’s hands atop the fabric and her mother’s hands on top of hers guiding both through the motion of the needle’s piston punch. When Anna’s father came home from work he kissed his girls and asked about their day. There was a roast in the oven and the air whirred with the steady, supple buzz of the ancient Singer and an indeterminate tune Anna’s mother was fond of humming. It was a benevolent afternoon. But the fact of that day had long dissipated. In its stead, a metastasized wistfulness that, if she dwelt too long on it, devoured Anna with despair. Of course her mother taught her how to sew. And it made her just as sad as almost anything else. A pleasant husband. A darling daughter. A faithful wife. What a happy home.
“Can you tell me a little more?”
Anna could, but didn’t.
“Anna, have I never asked? Where did you grow up?”
She had asked. Anna had dodged the question. Anna ran her fingers through her hair and tousled it, as if the act would shoo the memories away. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
It was one of the few times Anna disagreed with the Doktor openly, to her face and aloud. Most other contentions took the form of lies. “No. It doesn’t.” Where you were is never as relevant as where you are. Anna fully believed this.
TO ANNA’S RELIEF NO one wanted to play games, so the suggestion was forgotten and the party lumbered on. Archie still hadn’t left. Anna wondered if Bruno knew he was there. She had no doubt he remembered his name. Fifteen minutes later everyone crowded into the den and sang “Happy Birthday.” Ursula brought in the cake. Anna was half blush, half fume. Please go home, Archie. Please go home, Karl. Please go home everyone. Anna couldn’t breathe. There were too many people in the room. Archie kept far away from Bruno. This was a mercy. Anna ate half a piece of cake and went outside. She’d been to more parties in the last three weeks than she had the entire year. She was tired of watching people stand around rooms and talk.
David was standing in the driveway smoking his pipe. Anna was disappointed. She’d hoped to be alone for just one minute. The air had turned very chilly very quickly after the sunset and Bruno and his friends hadn’t come back outside once the cake was served. Instead, he’d taken them into the basement for a reason that didn’t hold water (to show them this or that, Anna wasn’t listening closely when he said it). She could hear them, though, and see their silhouettes through the tempered glass of the basement window. Anna knew her husband. His motive was transparent and entirely Swiss: he didn’t want to interact with anyone he didn’t already know. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Anna averted her eyes and looked back to the basement window, flush with the ground, and thought of Doktor Messerli and labyrinths and mazes, the symbolism of the mumblings of subterranean shadows. David shrugged gently as if to say This is your house, I am your guest, there is no interruption here. Anna shrugged back at him and sat on the porch steps. She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t have anything to say.
David smoked and paced and whistled an ominous tune in a minor key that Ann
a had heard before but couldn’t place. When he began to speak, it was apropos of nothing and directed at no one. “The French, we are expert at many things. Food and philosophy. Wine. Desire.” David winked and Anna smiled thinly. “But the best lovers are so often the worst liars, Anna. It’s a universal law.” David offered a single sagacious nod and said nothing further.
IT WAS A DREAM Anna wrote down but didn’t share with Doktor Messerli: I am in a room of absolute darkness. I fumble as I walk, unsure of the ground beneath me. I hold my arms in front of me, searching for something to grab on to. I touch a wall and it gives under the pressure of my hands. It’s like the wall of an inflatable castle, the kind you rent for a child’s birthday party. Except the more I press on it, the more it gives until eventually I break through. On the other side of this dark room is a new, bright, other, outside world. I am at the Zürichsee. The water is intensely blue. It’s the bluest water I have ever seen. There are swimmers, boaters, sunbathers on the shore. And the sky, too, a stupefying azure. I have moved from absolute darkness into absolute light. I have stepped into a numinous world. It is amazing. I am amazed. And yet it isn’t my world. I do not belong. I was safer in the blackness. But the wall’s been broken, and the darkness is gone. I can’t return to its safety. I am prisoner to the consciousness of this light.
15
ANNA WAS READY TO SKIP MONDAY’S GERMAN CLASS. SHE didn’t want to see anyone. She could say she’d planned a day of leisure for herself, a trip to the spa, whatever. It was her birthday, she could do what she wanted. But she hadn’t planned anything and the prospect of staying home alone depressed her more than the idea of facing the class made her anxious. And Mary had made Anna promise she’d let her take her out to lunch. It would be a disappointment if Anna canceled. So to Oerlikon Anna went.
She hadn’t slept. She lay in bed the entire night, the day’s events tumbling in her head like clothes in a dryer. It had been a day of revelation. I brushed against happiness and I liked how it felt and I want to feel it again. When the last guests left Bruno drove the Gilberts home. Anna waved goodbye through the kitchen window. The boys were upstairs, playing quietly. Polly had been asleep for an hour. Bruno wouldn’t be home for at least forty-five minutes. She had the house effectively to herself. There was ample space and time for her to think.
She’d heard what David had said. It is dangerous to keep secrets. And she hadn’t been keeping hers very well. She ticked through a mental list. Edith hinted. David intimated. Ursula’s voice, on several occasions, had intoned suspicion. Margrith had even seen her in Kloten. She’d thought she’d been strategic and cautious. She’d been nearly proud of her discretion. That’s the problem, Anna thought. She could hear the phantom voice of Doktor Messerli: Hubris is every heroine’s assassin.
Anna didn’t need a walk up the hill or a cry on her bench to figure this out. No more affairs, she thought, and never again. When Bruno returned from the Gilberts’ they made love. It was fun, pleasant, pleasurable sex. They came together. Quietly. Kindly. It was a respectable and ceremonial way of starting over, Anna decided. No more. Never again.
All through the night she worked on a plan. She would be active, not passive. She would invest herself fully in the day-to-day life of the home. She wasn’t planning to can figs or cross-stitch wall samplers (though thoughts of redecorating the bedroom occupied a good half hour of her sleeplessness), but the vow she made was this: To my family I give the entirety of myself. My time, my talents, my attention. I’ll distract myself from the sex with which I distracted myself from the sadness of my life by fully living my life. How circular! How … Jungian! Doktor Messerli would be thrilled at the turn of Anna’s inner events. Perhaps it’s even time to tell her everything. Anna came to, then backed away from, then approached with tentative caution that conclusion once again. This cycle occurred the entire night.
Anna arrived at school early and waited for Archie outside Roland’s classroom. When he got there she pulled him aside.
“I want to talk.” Anna had intended to stand on as little ceremony as possible, but there was no privacy in the hall outside the classroom, and while there wasn’t much she planned on saying, Anna preferred not to advertise herself. Archie waited for her to continue but Anna shook her head. “Not here.” She rubbed her temples and thought for a moment. “Mary’s taking me to lunch at the zoo. Meet me in front of the zoo at one thirty.” The drama was ominous. She didn’t mean for it to be. Or she didn’t think she did, which isn’t at all the same thing.
Far less theatrical, however, was the untangling of her entanglement with Karl. Anna had sent him an SMS before Bruno came back from taking the Gilberts home: I’m sorry. We have to stop. Bruno. Kids. Everything. Okay? She wasn’t exactly sorry and the quizzical “Okay?” at the end of the text served only to soften the blow. Not even a minute passed before the response came through. Jo. I bring it. “I bring it” was a stretch, even for Karl. Anna finally worked out that he meant to type I get it.
ANNA AND STEPHEN RARELY arranged to meet except to have sex, though once they met each other at Friedhof Fluntern, near the zoo. Anna had suggested it. James Joyce was buried there. It was a Zürich landmark. She’d never been.
It was mid-January and a light snow had fallen the night before. Anna had just dropped Charles off at Kinderkrippe when she ran into Ursula on the street (how often this seemed to happen!). She told her mother-in-law that she was on her way to return some books to the downtown library. If Ursula doubted what Anna did during her time in the city, she never challenged her. In any case Anna had several stories on hand: I went to see Edith. Or: Went to buy spices at a specialty shop. Or: There was a film not playing anywhere else. Lies thin as gauze but in a pinch they would have to do.
Stephen was indifferent. “Why not?” he said as if one way or the other, he had no opinion. This was a tendency Anna didn’t realize she didn’t like until the affair was over. Friedhof Fluntern is situated in a grove of trees on the Zürichberg, the mountain that lies exactly between Dietlikon and the city. Could she have climbed the trees, Anna would have been able to see her house.
They walked to the grave without talking. Anna had read Joyce in college, though beyond “famous Irish writer” she couldn’t say much. The grave was easy to find. It was marked by a statue of the author in thought. There was snow in his lap. His wife and his son were buried next to him.
“Hey,” Anna said, her voice fully mischievous. “Let’s do it here.”
Stephen looked up, faced her, and then returned his gaze to Joyce’s grave. “That’s about the most inappropriate thing I’ve ever heard.” A moment passed, then Stephen pulled his coat tighter around his body. “Let’s go. It’s cold.” Anna followed after him, dragging her feet through the snow.
MARY HAD MADE RESERVATIONS for two at 12:15 at the Altes Klösterli, a traditional Swiss restaurant close enough to the zoo to hear the elephants. The first trip Anna made into Zürich by herself was to the zoo. It was her third or fourth week in the country. The household was falling into order bit by bit. Anna had found an English-speaking obstetrician. Ursula radiated helpfulness and took Anna marketing and showed her the town and painted the nursery with her. Anna breathed into those early days. Her eyes bounced upon all she saw. Every road led to possibility.
She’d been into the city before, with Bruno. He took her on a single slapdash tour that ended with him giving her a map and a ZVV pass and telling her that she was on her own (a truer prophecy would never be spoken!). “Go explore!” he said. Anna wasn’t usually an explorer. But things were running so smoothly and happiness seemed potential if not plausible. And if ever there’s a time to move beyond one’s boundaries it’s when one has, literally, moved beyond them. Anna took the challenge. Where would she go? What would Anna do? Window-shopping on the Bahnhofstrasse? A visit to the art museum? The knife museum? The clock museum? For her first outing alone, Anna chose the zoo.
The day was beautiful but blistering. Pregnant Anna moved slowly
through the gardens, took pictures of the animals, relaxed at the café, and drank one lemonade and then another. She felt a surge of self-satisfaction. She made plans inside herself to stop on the way home and buy peaches for a pie. She thought ahead to the evening and a box she’d not yet opened in which was packed a black silk nightgown that she thought but wasn’t sure she hadn’t grown too big for. But self-satisfaction is a dangerous conceit. Anna was too pleased with herself. When she left the zoo she took the right bus but rode it in the wrong direction half a dozen stops before she realized her mistake. Then she got off at an inconvenient intersection and had to walk for blocks before she found a tram stand. And when the tram came, she took that, too, in a direction she didn’t intend. Eventually she landed at Bahnhof Wiedikon, where, seeing her in tears, a woman (whose limited English vocabulary unfortunately matched Anna’s equally inadequate German) sat with her and together they puzzled out a way for her to get home. The going home was the easy part; the S8 ran through Wiedikon. All Anna needed to do was to ride the (correct) train all the way to Dietlikon. It was almost impressive, how she managed to traipse so far across the city, so accidentally. The cleverness Anna had allowed herself to feel dissipated in an instant.
It was the beginning of the end of Anna’s confidence.
ANNA, ON FOUR OCCASIONS since his departure, had taken the S8 to Wipkingen, disembarked, and walked to Stephen’s apartment on Nürenbergstrasse as if nothing had changed. The first time she did this was the day after he left. She went to the door and rang the bell and when no one answered she pretended it was because he was at the market or the laboratory. Other times, she’d stand in front of the building and feign a phone call or check her watch as if she’d told someone to meet her there. Anything to lend legitimacy to her lingering. She would walk slowly around the block. She would close her eyes and imagine that it was a month ago, eight months, a year. Yesterday. The last time she’d done this, Polly Jean was seven months old. What had provoked the trip? Anna could barely recall. The house was noisy. Bruno was cold. Ursula had scolded me for something I’d done. I wanted to return to the scene of the crime. I wanted to return. She left her sons with their grandmother and took Polly Jean into the city and rolled her stroller past Stephen’s apartment. And here is where we invented you, Polly Jean. It was an indulgence she allowed herself, this reveling in her stagnant, inalterable past.
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