by John Wray
The bedroom at the back was the barest of all. I crossed its freshly waxed floor to a window that faced a high wall of bamboo. Its sill was as sterile as everything else, but I found a cocktail napkin (Bemmelmans Bar at The Carlyle) wedged between the window and the frame, with a scribbled note along its inner fold. It took me a moment to decipher the scrawl:
NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS
1 NO lying
2 NO biting
3 NO travel thru time
“What have you found back there, Walter?”
“Nothing,” I said, pocketing the napkin. “Any more stops on the tour?”
“Only the grand finale.”
The bathroom, with its overflowing medicine cabinets and terry-cloth toilet-seat cover and heap of scaly-looking couture in the bathtub, was the only room that seemed lived-in. The clothes in the bathtub looked oddly compressed, and I felt a dark thrill, a tingle in regions unmentionable, when I realized you’d used them for a bed.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Three years this Thanksgiving. What do you think of the decor?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Haven. I don’t know how to answer that.”
“I had a fight with the Husband,” you said matter-of-factly. “The Husband took my furniture away.”
“Is that what that truck’s for, outside? Van Gogh Movers?”
You shrugged. “He hardly needed them, really. They just took everything upstairs.”
“This whole brownstone is Haven’s, then.” I felt my stomach twist. “Of course it is.”
Your expression went cold. “The Husband feels that way, too. You ought to get to know each other, Walter. You might turn out to have a lot in common.”
My plan had been to avoid the subject altogether, to keep Haven small and indeterminate and vague, but I should have known there’d be no way around him. He was a feature of the landscape through which you and I moved—as vast and undeniable as a mesa. But he was also as lifeless as one, and as flat, at least on that first magic afternoon. He was static on a TV set in a corner of the room in which I loved you. I couldn’t even bring his face to mind.
“As far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Haven, your husband—”
“Why were you following me, Walter?”
I wobbled in place for a moment, then stepped stiffly toward you, clutching an imaginary hat. “My intentions are honorable, Mrs. Haven.”
“Your what?”
I took your hand in both of mine, not caring how Victorian I seemed. “I saw you, just by chance, in Union Square—” What on earth was I trying to say? A humming sprang up somewhere behind my left ear, in what may or may not have been my temporal lobe. The chronologic wind was picking up again.
“I was following you,” I said. “I can’t deny it.”
“That wasn’t my question. I wanted to know—”
I grabbed you by the shoulders—roughly, clumsily—and kissed you. My eyes were clenched shut and there was a disturbance in my head like the buzzing of an ultrasonic toothbrush, but I could tell that I had caught you by surprise. I understood, as we kissed, that I was being offered the chance to step out of myself, to reset the clock: to start over from nothing, defenseless and naked, like a lizard wriggling out of its skin. Your body was tense, I remember, but your mouth was warm and open and alive. You smelled like rain and cigarettes and dill.
“Don’t get rid of him completely,” you breathed into my ear.
“Get rid of who?”
“The old you. Walter Tompkins. It turns out that I like him very much.”
I’d been thinking out loud—what else could it have been?—but I felt no embarrassment. “What is it you like? Of his many noble qualities, I mean.”
“I like his politeness. I like the look in his eyes when he’s trying to think. I like his terrible haircut. I like the jokes that he makes—the bad ones especially—and the way his head tilts when he’s listening. I like that he listens at all.” A shyness crept into your features. “I guess I like that he has time for me.”
“He has nothing but,” I said, and bent to kiss you again. It was true, Mrs. Haven: I might have nothing else to offer, but I had plenty of time. It amazed me to think that you might be neglected. How could your husband make such a beginner’s mistake?
You looked dazed and defiant when we stopped for breath. We stood an arm’s length apart, just as we’d been before, but now we were looking at each other without a trace of pretense, grinning complementary stupefied grins. You led me to the back of the apartment, mumbled something about the garden that I didn’t quite catch, then pulled a stack of framed museum posters out of a closet—the kind college freshmen tack on the walls of their dorms—and arranged them on the floor for me to see. At least six were reproductions of The Kiss.
“Gustav Klimt,” I said.
You watched me intently.
“Gustav Klimt,” I repeated. “From Vienna. Of the Viennese school.”
There were twelve posters in all, every last one a Klimt: gold and copper curlicues and gauzy-haired women with alabaster skin and privileged faces. The words THE KISS were printed across a few of them, leaving nothing to chance, in a font that looked lifted from one of my father’s dust jackets.
I noted all this carefully, Mrs. Haven, because I was stalling for time.
“He was definitely a painter,” I heard myself croak. “His use of gold leaf—”
“I can’t stand Klimt.” You shuddered. “His paintings are like butter-covered doughnuts.”
“Then why—”
“The Husband put them up yesterday. There’s one for every wall of this apartment. He screwed them in with an electric power drill and four-inch drywall screws.”
A truck passed outside, then another, rattling the windows in their frames. From somewhere nearby came the buzz of television. I made an effort not to wonder who else might be in the house.
“Four-inch screws, did you say?” I nodded to myself. “He certainly gave it the old college try.”
“He’s R. P. Haven, Walter. He gives everything the old college try.”
“What made him want to do all this, exactly?”
You gave a dull laugh. “I guess you could say he’s the possessive type.”
“So he knows about us?”
“I’ve only just met you, Walter. What’s there for him to know?” You sighed and let your head rest on my shoulder. “There’s no need for you to worry, anyhow. He’ll murder me before he murders you.”
I felt a twinge of dread at that, as anybody would; but you fit against me so well, notching your forehead between my neck and clavicle, that my fear felt like a kind of imposition. Your body was warmer than mine—much warmer—and your cropped hair spiraled clockwise at the crown. I looked down at your pale, goose-boned neck, the width of my palm exactly, and guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that it would be covered in freckles come summer.
“I’m reading a book,” you said suddenly. “A self-help book. I’d like to show you something.”
It was my turn to laugh. “What would you need a self-help book for?”
You pulled a slim, silver-bound book out of your jacket—a sleight-of-hand trick—and passed it to me. I read its title with a sinking feeling.
STRANGE CUSTOMS OF COURTSHIP & MARRIAGE
Authentic revelations of curious mating customs of all ages and all races, and the history and significance of modern marriage conventions
by
William J. Fielding, author of The Caveman Within Us, etc.
“Go ahead, Walter. Page sixty-eight.”
The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to educate myself about marriages, either modern or ancient; but I did as you asked. Page 68 was marked with a wrapper from a pack of Newport Lights:
TREE MARRIAGE.—Among the Brahmans of the south of India it is the established custom that a younger brother should not marry before an older one. To fulfil this requirement, when there is no satisfactory bride in sight for a seni
or brother, he is married to a tree, which leaves the younger one at liberty to take a wife.
Mock marriages are also carried out among the Punjab of India, in the case of a widower taking his third wife. It is celebrated with a certain tree or rosebush, and sometimes with a sheep, which is dressed up as a bride and is led by the groom around the sacrificial fire while the real bride reposes nearby.
“I see,” I said slowly, though of course I saw nothing. “How is this a self-help book, exactly?”
“My marriage is like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I married a tree, Walter. That’s what I mean.”
“Has your husband—was he married before? Or are you trying to tell me—”
“Shh, Walter,” you said, pulling me down onto the beanbag in a way that made all talk seem academic.
Less than a year later, when I was as good as dead to you, I read the rest of Fielding’s tawdry little survey—it’s next to me on the floor right now, in fact—and one passage, more than any other, took me back to that first bliss-drenched afternoon:
THE KISS.—In its sensory impulses, the kiss is the most direct prelude and incitement to sexual fulfilment. Surfaced by a tissue of full-blooded, sensitive membranes, moistened by the honey of salivary sweetness, shaped at their loveliest into a curvature that has been likened to Cupid’s bow, the lips seem especially contrived by nature for their role of allurement into the labyrinths of bodily desire. It is for this reason that restraint and discrimination should be the watchword of those who understand the real meaning and importance of the kiss, and who hold in high regard the sacredness of the forces which its casual bestowal may unwittingly release. Proceed with circumspection!
VIII
THE NEXT TWENTY-ODD YEARS, during which the world went loudly and pompously down the pissoir, were the happiest of Kaspar Toula’s life.
His long-departed father, in the course of his inevitable dinnertime rants—on the evils of the automobile, for example, or the cleansing properties of cellulose—had been fond of quoting a Saxon manic-depressive named Friedrich Nietzsche: “All history is the experimental refutation of the so-called moral order of things.” And the brash and pockmarked twentieth century, in all the brutal enthusiasm of its adolescence, seemed to be doing its frenzied best to prove him right.
My grandfather barely had time to finish his studies, make his bid for Sonja’s hand in marriage, and receive his Schwiegervater’s halfhearted blessing before the empire that both his father and his father-in-law so myopically adored began to come apart like sodden paper. The Czechs, the Magyars, the Slovaks, the Serbs and the Croats—all of whom, admittedly, had exhibited signs of petulance before—now seemed more interested in pitching fits in parliament than in basking in their emperor’s esteem. The bacillus of nationalism had infested all but the remotest crannies of the empire by the time the Kaiser’s cousin had his celebrated rendezvous with a Serbian anarchist’s bullet; it had simply been a question of which member of the imperial family was going to have their candle guttered first. (In certain back rooms and furnished cellars of the capital, money had in fact been wagered on this very question.) But no one—not the bookies, not the anarchists, and least of all the imperial family itself—foresaw the conflagration that would follow.
Sonja Toula, née Silbermann, was a fervent backer of the Serbian cause from the start of the war, and stayed true to her colors even when her husband was sent to the front in a uniform that still smelled faintly of the corpse who’d worn it last. By that late date, a fair portion of the civilized world had muddied its spats, and it was clear to every half-wit that the “six weeks’ war” the Kaiser had promised was a fairy story, albeit one that he himself believed. Kaspar served that sad old fool without complaint, and witnessed his due share of horrors, some of which he committed himself. He lost two fingers in the war, and the top of an ear, but he rarely regretted his injuries: they were his only proof that the war, and the empire he’d fought for, had been more than some preadolescent dream. And there were moments, Mrs. Haven, on his very worst days, when not even his missing fingers could convince him.
The citation for bravery he’d won—a weightless nub of nickel-plated tin, for some obscure reason in the shape of a winged horse—was mothballed away and forgotten as soon as the fighting was over. Years later, when the family was hurriedly throwing everything it could into a clutch of pasteboard steamer trunks, the medal would find its way into the hands of his younger daughter, who brought it to him for an explanation. Gentian never forgot her father’s answer. “It’s a pegasus, Schätzchen—an imaginary animal. Papa got it as a present, from a very old man, for defending an imaginary kingdom.”
* * *
There were quite a few reasons for Kaspar’s happiness during his twenties and thirties, from his hard-won advancement at the university to the deepening of his understanding of the physical world; but the most obvious, even to Kaspar himself, was the indecorous and overwrought passion he continued to feel for his wife. Practically from birth—or so it seemed to him—he had been aware that the elegant, filigreed, eminently reasonable world around him was doomed to collapse under its own weight, like some elaborate architectural folly; the obvious response, to any sensible observer, was to have as little to do with such a world as possible. Kaspar had Sonja, after all, and the well-appointed home they’d made together. It seemed lunacy to ask for more than that.
Sonja had grown more deliberate as she came into the fullness of her years, more austere of temperament, more assured of her intelligence and grace. Her political convictions had only deepened as she aged; her smock, however, lay neatly put away in the same cabinet that housed her husband’s medal. Socialists and anarchists and communists—“your ism-ists,” as Kaspar (more or less affectionately) called them—came and went as if the apartment were a well-appointed flophouse, as they’d done since the end of the war; but now they looked and behaved less like revolutionaries than like librarians, or attorneys-at-law, or even patent clerks. And they tipped their hats politely to him as they came and went.
Kaspar had no doubt that half his wife’s protégés loved her desperately, but the fact didn’t bother him—at least not unduly—because he so completely shared their point of view. Sonja’s hold over him had only intensified since their marriage, and it often submerged him so profoundly in its inky, honeyed depths that he found it slightly difficult to breathe. He was as proud of his submission as his countrymen were—or affected to be—of the wounds they’d received in the war.
Waldemar’s existence during these years of free fall, by contrast, is as shrouded and ambiguous as my grandfather’s is faceted and bright. Rumors would reach Sonja from time to time through her network of fellow travelers: inconclusive scraps of information, little better than hearsay, that she took care to keep from her husband. Waldemar had gone to Russia; Waldemar had taken holy orders; Waldemar had been seen late at night, dressed in a woman’s nightgown, shouting curses at the streetcars on the Ring. This was the time of the great housing crisis in the republic, when a host of city dwellers were reduced to living under bridges, or on barges, or in caves dug into railway embankments. In Budapest, thirty-five people were discovered nesting in the trees of Népliget Park, and word reached Sonja that Waldemar was among them. She had no idea which of these reports to believe, so she chose to believe all of them. She hated to be taken by surprise.
This much, at least, is certain: within three weeks of his midnight visit to the Silbermann household, two weeks of learning of the relativity theory, and four days of delivering his doomsday prophecy to his brother, Waldemar had been expelled from the university, been served a notice of eviction from the dragon-headed building, and had slipped away without confiding in a soul. Kaspar had asked no one what Waldemar had done to bring about these twin expulsions, though he himself was suddenly homeless, as well: he’d resigned himself to severing what few ancient ties still bound them. Each time he asked after his brother and was met wit
h blank, suspicious stares, he permitted himself a small sigh of relief.
It was only as he was sorting through his brother’s meager handful of belongings, the night before their eviction was enforced, that Kaspar truly grasped that Waldemar was gone. His brother had left his modest library behind, and his spectacles, and his only decent suit of evening clothes. His handwritten copy of Ottokar’s notes, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found; and neither, when it occurred to Kaspar to check his own bedroom, was the copy he’d made for himself. He had forfeited the right to search for the answer to their departed father’s riddle, it appeared, at least in Waldemar’s opinion. And to his own profound astonishment, Mrs. Haven, Kaspar found himself agreeing with this verdict.
The Accidents had destroyed both his father and his brother, after all—men with far greater gifts than his own. How could he help but take that as a warning? As he attempted to bring order to Waldemar’s papers, Kaspar realized that he’d long since begun to wonder, in some sequestered annex of his mind, whether the problem of time in physics might not be akin to the problem the sun posed for the early astronomers: it was ever-present along the margins of sight, radiant and vast, but to stare at it too long meant certain blindness.
He remained his father’s son, however, and he’d barely had this idea before he carried it further. Those early astronomers had found a means of studying the sun indirectly, by fashioning reflecting telescopes. Might the same technique work for the study of time? Perhaps Waldemar’s undoing had lain less in his ideas, mad as they seemed, than in the straightforward way he’d approached them. Perhaps the solution was to advance more obliquely: to resist looking time in the eye, to avoid pondering the imponderable, and instead to watch its shadow on the wall. Perhaps the answer was as simple as a mirror.
But no sooner had Kaspar had this thought than he suppressed it. A tremor ran through his body, drawing him away from his brother’s desk, and he made no attempt to resist. By eight o’clock the next morning, the sum of Waldemar’s earthly possessions was sitting on the street in a battered gray trunk, and by evening it was gathering dust in a corner of Professor Silbermann’s cellar, where it would remain until Waldemar—in a black Daimler coupe, with two men whose attire matched the Daimler beautifully—came back from the dead to collect it.