Retrograde

  At the doctor’s office, she gives the receptionist her insurance card and hobbles into the adjacent waiting room. She still feels sweaty and somehow distorted, as if she were a blurry picture someone had pasted into this crisp, clean room with its empty wooden chairs against the wall, its untouched magazines laid out in a fan across the coffee table. There’s no window in the waiting room, but the bright overhead lighting gives the impression of sunlight.

  This isn’t like the other appointment, she reminds herself. Bones are bones, either broken or not, and there are no secrets in mine. Anything the doctor asks will be about concrete facts: how long she’s had the casts on, how her arm and leg feel.

  The nurse comes for her before she’s gotten up the courage to disturb the elegant arrangement of magazines. He offers her his arm and leads her down a short, silent corridor. This must be the off-season for broken bones: too early for ice, too late for the reckless accidents of summer.

  In the examination room, the nurse sits behind a small desk with a laptop after depositing Helena in a creaky chair. He asks general questions about her health, and then about her injuries: how she got them, when, where she was treated. He has a bland, unlined face that could be twenty-five or forty, and hair cut so short she can’t make out the color.

  After he’s filled out the necessary forms on the computer, he excuses himself and goes to get the doctor. Now that the effort of getting herself here is over, now that there’s nothing to do but wait, Helena feels wearier than ever. She could slip off to sleep right here, head against the wall, the back of the chair creaking slightly under her weight. She closes her eyes. She must’ve slept even less than she thought these past few nights. Certainly, Joachim fell asleep before she did; she heard that subtle shift in his breathing, opened her eyes just wide enough to catch the tell-tale parting of his lips. Nothing keeps you awake like pretending to sleep.

  She feels a deep, primal resentment against him, blaming him for her weariness, as if he’d snatched the sleep away from her, taken it for himself. And a more rational kind, wondering why he didn’t bring her here himself, why it doesn’t occur to him to take her to a doctor unless she asks. He shouldn’t have picked her up from the hospital if he wasn’t going to take care of things like that. It’s not like he did her such a big favor; if he hadn’t come, she would’ve gone to stay with her parents and seen half the doctors in town just to be on the safe side. They would’ve watched movies and sat on the porch feeding the birds, spent a few weeks catching up. It would’ve been restful and healthy to recover that way, without all this confusion about a relationship she got over years before.

  She opens her eyes, feels the glaring whiteness of the room, the stillness of it, around her but not soaking in, not penetrating the dark chaos within her. Did she ever really get over it? Why was she alone for all those years? He surely wasn’t. Of course he hasn’t said so, but he must’ve had all kinds of women around in that time. Even in their break of just a few months, he managed to pick someone up. But that’s not the point now, no need to think about that other woman, her clammy hand closing on Helena’s wrist. The point isn’t whether he was alone, but why she was.

  Did she still love him? What she feels for him now is too difficult a question to ask herself when the doctor could come in at any moment. But did she still love him, all those years when she was alone? When she looks back, it seems she barely thought of him, but he must’ve always been there in the back of her mind, an unfinished thought and a problem she never solved. You never think about the white walls of your apartment, but they’re there around you all the time. Maybe the problem was that she never really allowed herself to think about Joachim.

  At first it was hard not to, but she forced herself. In the beginning, at Magdalena’s, she was a wreck, but then she had the new apartment and the new job to distract her. She went to Ikea and to tumbledown antique shops in her neighborhood; she took long walks with her headphones on so she wouldn’t have to think. In the evenings, she watched movies or read books so there was no room for anything else, and when she got up in the morning, all she thought about was doing well at her new job. It was all she allowed herself to think about.

  She made new friends, saw less of the ones who’d seen her through her separation, and kept the groups strictly separated. She never mentioned that she had a husband. When he came up, she said simply “my ex,” because that’s all he was, an X, something she’d crossed out of her life. Mostly she avoided telling stories that he played a role in.

  The door opens and she tries to compose her face, and then her thoughts, to answer the doctor’s questions. But it’s only the nurse again. He apologizes for the delay—how much time has passed?—and says that the doctor wants them to take new X-rays first. As he helps Helena one door further down the hall, she imagines that the doctor isn’t here at all, that it’s all some kind of trick, dragged out one minute at a time. After all, that’s what her life outside of this practice turned out to be.

  She feels something like dizziness that has nothing to do with her physical balance, and forces herself to concentrate on holding first her arm, then her leg, still between two navy blue partitions as the nurse takes the X-rays.

  This time, the wait for the doctor isn’t long. The nurse leaves with the X-rays and returns a few minutes later with a heavyset blonde woman, about Helena’s age, who’d look more in place on a milking stool or behind the counter of some old-timey inn. Dr. Ahnen says that Helena’s bones have healed and the casts probably could’ve come off a few days earlier.

  “You’ll have some swelling in your foot and ankle for quite some time, but that’s normal. You’re going to have to be careful, of course.”

  Half of Helena listens carefully to all the things she should and shouldn’t do with her arm and leg, nods at the appropriate intervals, but the other half has already left the doctor’s office even before her casts are off, is speeding away. Yet, in spite of her rushing thoughts, when she limps out of the office, one arm and one leg so pale, hairy, and loosely fleshy they no longer seem a part of her, she has no idea where to go.

  She shuffles over to the next bench and sits down. She takes out her phone to check the time and sees that she has another message from Doro: “Heard you called in sick. What’s going on?”

  She calls Doro and tells her about the doctor with no idea what else she plans to say until it comes out of her mouth. “Hey,” she says, “do you think you could put me in touch with Tobias?” She pauses. “Again?”

  “Of course.” For whatever reason, Doro sounds relieved.

  • • •

  Helena’s heart pounds as she listens to Tobias’s phone ringing, but slows once he picks up. She doesn’t recognize his voice. It could be any male voice with the faint relics of a Bavarian accent, an expectant “hallo” and a last name she doesn’t recognize. She should’ve had Doro call him. You don’t always have to make things harder on yourself.

  “I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Helena.” She starts to add, “I’m a friend of Doro’s,” but it isn’t necessary.

  “Helena!” Now his voice is warm with an enthusiasm she wishes she could share. “I’m so glad to hear from you! Doro told me about your accident, must’ve been right after I saw you last. How are you?”

  It feels like being mistaken for someone else. “I’m okay,” she says. “I just got my casts off.”

  She lets him go on for a couple minutes, listens to his relief that she’s okay, his barely concealed excitement about this call. Funny that she could make someone this happy without knowing who he is.

  She says, “I’d like to see you again.”

  “How about tonight?”

  They arrange to meet in Joachim’s neighborhood, but she hangs up disappointed. She was so sure he’d ask her to the same café, do everything like before, until it all somehow clicked back into place. End things the way they started. Somehow. Except that it would only be a blind date on her end.

  She did
n’t tell him about her amnesia or Joachim or any of it, but maybe Doro already has, either directly or through the series of relationships connecting them. He didn’t mention it, but then what would he have said? Maybe asked whether she remembered him.

  Even with the cast off her leg, she doesn’t have the energy to drag herself back up all those flights of stairs. Or to be in that apartment right now.

  She makes her way back to it, but only opens the front door of the building long enough to shove her crutch in and let it fall against a wall. It doesn’t really matter whether someone steals it now.

  The door falls closed behind her and she keeps walking, although what she wants most is to sit down and not move for a good long time. It’s frustrating to feel this weak, to have to force herself to take such small, slow steps in order to keep moving at all.

  She wants to stop at the closest coffee shop, the one she pictured escaping to a few infinite weeks ago, but when she reaches it, it’s empty and the sign has been removed. She heads toward the café where she’s meeting Tobias in a couple of hours. It’s just as well. Why drag herself around again, when she can collapse right where she needs to be? Just collapse and wait.

  A few yuppie parents, dragging their toddlers to and from the playground, give her funny looks. Is she that disheveled or is it her slow, deliberate shuffle, like something out of a zombie movie? She should’ve held onto her crutch. Then everybody would think, Oh, that poor injured woman, and not What’s wrong with her?

  It doesn’t matter. The stares pass her by, and after all, these aren’t her neighbors, this isn’t her neighborhood, and in a way this isn’t her life, isn’t even her. Just somebody passing through somebody else’s life. Even if that somebody is the person she was a few years before.

  In the café, she exaggerates her limp so other patrons make way for her instead of staring, and collapses on a brocade chaise longue that’s seen better days. The place is already pretty full—emaciated hipsters drifting in and out of the smoking room, tourists hunched over laptops on antique schoolhouse tables, stay-at-home parents treating themselves to coffee and cake, absentmindedly rolling strollers back and forth with one hand. The throbbing in her ankle is like heat and a low drone all around her, occasionally rising to drown out the other noise. She rolls up one leg of her jeans and examines the contrast between the dark swelling and the pale skin around it.

  It’s a lot of time to kill without a book, but she has a couple of things to do before Tobias gets there.

  First, she flags down the heavily pierced rockabilly waitress, who tells her to order at the bar until Helena points out her injured ankle. Then she has to wait for her latte to arrive, position it carefully on the unstable 1950s kidney table, and rummage through her purse for her phone.

  And then she has to call Joachim.

  He misses her call and calls back, so that’s a little more time past.

  “Are you okay?” he says, instead of hello.

  “Yeah, everything’s okay. I just wanted to let you know I got an appointment with an orthopedist, but she could only see me this evening so I probably won’t be back when you get in.”

  “When’s the appointment? Should I come take you?”

  “No, no, you’d never make it in time.” She cups her hand over the phone to keep out the potpourri of voices, espresso machines, and chairs scraping across the decaying wooden floor. “I’m already in a taxi. I just wanted to let you know.”

  “Do you want me to pick you up afterward?”

  His attentiveness fills her with a mixture of guilt and fury: How can she lie to someone who cares so much, and why did he only start caring so long after the fact? “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll let you know. Bye!”

  He’s already started to say “I love you” when she hangs up.

  She extends her left arm to its utmost length to pull a newspaper off the rack behind her by its wooden handle, and again she feels a strange thrill of recognition. But she knows she’s been in this café many times, with and without Joachim. Was it something in the paper? Something she saw out of the corner of her eye? Nothing jumps out at her as she scans the headlines, and the feeling doesn’t return.

  It was so easy to lie to Joachim, so easy to believe in what she was saying. It might as well have been true. Was that the way—is that still the way—he feels lying to her? The necessity excusing everything, making a lie plausible, even to the one telling it. She feels closer to him in this complicity, and then abruptly, unbearably distant: They’re always deceiving each other, never on the same end of the lie. There is no understanding between them.

  • • •

  She’s bored and hungry an hour before Tobias arrives, and then clammy and shaky as the time gets closer, the newsprint sticking to the palms of her hands. She knows from his eagerness to meet her that she made a good impression the first time, but she doesn’t know how. In a way, Tobias is a time traveler—he already knows what the future looks like after they meet, and she still has no idea.

  Worse still, she doesn’t know what she felt the first time around. There was no time to confide in anyone, no time to give anyone a quick review of the date, before her accident. But whatever she felt must’ve been strong enough to take her mind off the traffic lights.

  She still expects to recognize him until someone taps her on the shoulder and she looks up into the pleading smile of a tall man with unkempt blond hair and the beginnings of a beard.

  “Helena, it’s me,” he says. Her confusion must be apparent.

  “Oh.” She shifts toward the headrest of the chaise longue to make room for him. He puts out one hand as he sits to keep from coming into contact with her extended right leg.

  “Must’ve been a pretty bad accident,” he says. “How’d it happen exactly?”

  So there’s that to talk about, at first, repeating the facts they told her at the hospital. And then he excuses himself and goes to the bar for two glasses of red wine, and by the time he comes back, she’s pulled herself together enough to ask whether he heard about her memory loss.

  He didn’t. So then there’s that to talk about. He smiles whenever he looks at her, which is almost constantly, except to wince when she tells him the details of each injury. The attention is flattering and she likes the patient, peaceful way he sits and takes the information in, likes his hearty laugh when the conversation permits.

  “So I can make all the same jokes I did on our first date,” he says, “and you’ll still laugh?”

  “Did you make a lot of jokes?” It’s strange to talk about a common past with someone this new to her. She does feel a certain ease in his presence, but she can’t be sure whether that’s familiarity, or only a natural sympathy between them. In a way, it doesn’t matter. They know each other now.

  “I have no idea,” he says. “I was so nervous that I couldn’t think what I was saying.”

  “Why’s that?” she asks, because she knows she’s supposed to. It’s kind of a line but she doesn’t mind it, coming from him.

  “I guess I didn’t expect you to be so beautiful.”

  She feels herself blushing, though she saw that coming a mile away. He’s blushing, too, red in the face like a lumber-jack who just felled a day’s worth of trees. To fill the sudden silence, he tells her where they first met—that bar, that night with Joachim, that pang of not-quite-remembering—and that they both got there too early.

  “It was a million degrees out, and we were both hiding inside like we didn’t want to meet each other at all.”

  “Maybe we didn’t.”

  Another shared laugh, and then she wonders how long this can go on before she has to tell him about Joachim. It’s a question she puts off answering, one she lets Tobias’ deep, soothing voice drown out. He tells her anecdotes about growing up in Freising, just up the river from Munich, his work as an architect, and his bad dating experiences since his divorce.

  She realizes or decides that she likes him. It isn’t the usual process of fal
ling for someone—it’s too self-conscious. Rather, she realizes that she must’ve liked him the first time they met, that he’s the sort of person she’d choose to continue seeing. The clarity of this knowledge seems almost cynical, but it can’t have felt that way originally. She would’ve been excited rather than relieved. She would’ve looked forward to hearing from him and seeing him again, been eager for the future. Now, without even thinking about where she and Tobias will go from here, she already feels that this is the end of something.

  I married too young, she thinks. Or, if not that, I married too—something. Too completely, too recklessly. I married so that there wasn’t enough of me left after.

  She tells Tobias more about herself, observing her own growing awareness that this is a man she could be with, and be happy with. It doesn’t matter whether she will be. The possibility is there, and that says it all: She could be the woman who loves Joachim, and she could be the woman who loves Tobias. She is both women, right now, without loving either of them. Is that all love is, recognizing the possibility between yourself and someone else?

  There’s a lull in the conversation, and he takes their glasses back to the bar. It’s funny to think that she can see him now, see him any number of times, and go back to Joachim unchanged, the same person she was when she went out. For the first time, she understands how people cheat, not in clumsy, accidental affairs like Joachim’s, but routinely, coldly—the way she once believed he’d betrayed her. It isn’t something she wanted to know, especially not about herself.

  When Tobias comes back with two more glasses of wine, she says, “I haven’t even told you the strangest part of the story.”

  JOACHIM

  Joachim wakes with a start when he hears a door close. The room is dark and it takes him a minute to realize he’s on the sofa, not in bed, and then another to remember why. Helena. The doctor. He was supposed to be up waiting for her call, ready to pick her up. He must’ve drifted off. It was such a long day. He feels for his phone but it’s lost somewhere in the sofa cushions. He has a crick in his neck.