by John Wray
Saint Stephen’s Cathedral was tolling the hour when Kaspar arrived, slightly short of breath but otherwise composed. In accordance with C*F*P’s stage directions, Waldemar was sitting at the same marble-topped table as sixteen years previous, sipping from the same fluted cup, attended by the same enticing Serb. Kaspar was amazed to see her and was on the verge of stammering that she hadn’t changed a bit since 1922 when he saw that she was a different Serb entirely. Waldemar smiled as he shook Kaspar’s hand. “We ought to kiss each other on both cheeks, I suppose,” he said with a laugh, though the laugh he gave made very little noise.
“Well!” Kaspar said as his coffee arrived. It arrived without warning, impossibly quickly, which heightened the sense of predestination he’d been gripped by from the instant he’d sat down.
“Well!” echoed Waldemar, apparently as tongue-tied as he was. But that wasn’t right, either—there was nothing tongue-tied about Waldemar. He was simply waiting, serene and all-powerful, for Kaspar to try his first gambit.
“You look different,” said Kaspar, regretting it instantly.
“Fatter, you mean.”
“Not at all!” But of course he was fatter. “I suppose so, yes. But I meant—I meant the rest of it.”
“The rest of it?”
“Your monocle, for example.”
Waldemar nodded. “I’m not wearing my monocle.”
“My wife must have mentioned it,” Kaspar said, then began coughing fiercely. He hadn’t meant to bring her up so soon.
“Ah,” said Waldemar, in a different tone of voice. “Your wife.”
“That’s right,” Kaspar answered. “Sonja Toula. Your sister-in-law.” Then—suddenly, too soon—he was pleading his case, setting prudence and decorum aside, appealing to Waldemar’s sense of conscience and of charity and to various other senses he very much doubted his brother possessed, letting his voice crack like an adolescent’s and the tears run freely down his cheeks in the hope that they might gratify his enemy. It was the longest speech he’d ever made outside a lecture hall, and the most eloquent he’d made in any setting. When he was done his brother nodded amiably, as if in acknowledgment of a well-turned somersault, and made a cryptic gesture to the Serb.
“I can’t extend my protection to Fräulein Silbermann at this time.”
“She’s my wife, Waldemar,” Kaspar hissed. “And I’m not asking you to extend her your protection. I’m asking you to refrain from hauling her off to your chamber of horrors, like you did to poor Felix Ungarsky.”
“That’s true, I suppose,” said Waldemar. “But when all is said and done, Bruderchen—and it will be very soon—it amounts to much the same thing, does it not?”
A silence fell, leisurely and fatal, during which my grandfather gaped at his brother in an excess of astonishment and loathing and his brother sipped the dregs of his mélange.
“What are you saying to me?” Kaspar got out finally. “Are you telling me that we should disappear?”
“That’s for you to decide. I’ve done all that I can.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Waldemar heaved a good-natured sigh. “I got you those exit visas, didn’t I?”
FROM THE MOMENT I left your brownstone, Mrs. Haven, I was a puzzle to my family, a frustration to my coworkers, and an irritant to every passing stranger. I stepped on commuters’ shoe heels and got in the way of tourists’ snapshots and jaywalked as though cars were made of butter. I seated myself in elegant restaurants, studied the menu intently and left without ordering a thing. My boss at the Xanthia—a red-nosed depressive named Susan B. Anthony—encouraged me to confide in her about my substance dependency; Palladian beat me at Risk thirteen times in a row; Van called repeatedly, apparently in the hope of talking business, and each time was forced to hang up in despair. In a word, Mrs. Haven, I’d become insufferable.
The ancient Pythagoreans, poets that they were, claimed that each instant of each day has a life of its own—an independent existence from the mind that perceives it—and by the end of that week I believed them. You and I saw each other when your schedule permitted, which was practically never; in the dead time between—often days at a stretch—I found myself at each successive second’s mercy.
It was the middle of November, cold and grayscale and dismal, but New York had never looked so beautiful. I wandered the city with my hands in my pockets, muttering to myself like a drunk or an adman rehearsing a pitch, both of which—in one sense or another—I was. I made plans for the future on those rambles of mine that can only, in retrospect, be characterized as insane. I was going to finish my history, win some well-endowed prize, then sell the film rights for a modest fortune; I was going to elope with you to some sultry Central American republic—Nicaragua, maybe—and open a backpacker’s hostel; I was going to run for public office (a comptroller of some kind—nothing fancy) with you in a navy pantsuit by my side. I thought of the Husband, on the rare occasions when he came to mind, with a kind of charitable contempt. I’d progressed from coward to megalomaniac in a single afternoon.
My aunt Enzian had once given my father—for reasons long since lost to time—a piece of advice that he’d passed on to me: “Fall for a single girl, Waldy, and you’re competing with every other man on earth. Fall for a married woman, on the other hand, and you’re only competing with one.” Though Enzian had always frightened me—she was the kind of person, to put it generously, whose patience with children was moderate—I admired her insight into the economics of sex, especially since (as she’d once told me proudly) she’d never once had her “chastity impugned” in the whole of her duration. She was less capable of lying than a pocket calculator, so she must have believed the advice she gave Orson. And as we both know, Mrs. Haven, she was right.
I’d tried to impugn your chastity, God knows, on that first death-defying afternoon. You’d let me drape you across my lap on that sad little beanbag of yours, even fondle you a little, but your sweater stayed on and your buttons stayed buttoned. Your shoes came off after a while, but only grudgingly: it was against your better judgment, you informed me. (I couldn’t help wondering, as I held your bare feet in my trembling hands, which aspect of our situation could possibly not be against your better judgment—but I kept my mouth shut.) Incredible as it seems to me now, I was in no particular hurry. I was prepared to stand by for as long as it took the last spark of your common sense to die.
Not to say I wasn’t horny, Mrs. Haven. Since dropping out of college I’d been practically septic with lust. By my twenty-first birthday, a few weeks before Van’s party, I was running through a Decameron’s worth of obscenity for every respectable thought. You’d made your entrance, in other words, when my defenses were at their weakest, and your own powers—whether or not you cared or understood, or even noticed—were at their indefatigable peak.
You rarely wore makeup, because it struck you as gratuitous, and no one who saw you would have disagreed. Your body looked immaculate by daylight, as though you’d just been created, and at night you glowed like interstellar dust. It overwhelmed me at times, I confess—it fried me like an overloaded circuit. I envied Haven in those moments, it’s true, but also every other sentient being who’d ever known you, down to your most trivial acquaintances; just as I’m jealous, as I write this, of the self-regarding fool that I was then.
To distract myself when these paroxysms hit, I’d steer my thoughts back to plans from the pre-Haven era, half-forgotten now and very long delayed. I hadn’t come to New York on a whim: I’d come for information—even guidance, of a kind—and I’d gotten what I needed only days before we met. I was on a covert mission, one I needed time and money to complete: money for travel, first to Vienna, then to the Czech Republic, then to places still unknown. In my most presumptuous fantasies, I asked you for your help, and you said yes.
In those hours—usually late at night—when even this vision lost its mesmeric power, I fell back on the only source of distraction I had left: my history.
I’d been blocked for a time, Mrs. Haven, as any historian would be when writing about something he still barely understood. For most of my duration the truth had been kept from me, and I was terrified of the countless blanks that needed filling in. You’ll laugh at me, and rightly so, but I feared the judgment of posterity. Since meeting you, however, I’d hit on a solution. If you’re reading this, Mrs. Haven, then the borderline-impossible has already occurred, and there’s nothing to be gained by being coy. My solution was to approach this history as a kind of novel—with dialogue and narration, the occasional sex scene, and even an attempt at atmospherics—and to write it for an audience of one.
* * *
I kept clear of your neighborhood for seven full days: you’d told me it was risky, which was very likely true. By the eighth night, however, my mental distractions were losing their juju, and by morning my self-control lay in tatters. I woke up with a hangover I’d done nothing to deserve, queasy and drained of emotion, and knew that something had to happen soon.
I didn’t have long to wait. Less than an hour later, as I lay bunched on the floor like an old pair of boxers, a padded legal envelope arrived by UPS. I tore the package open and found Fielding’s silver-bound opus inside, carefully dog-eared at page 41:
THE MAGICAL VIRTUE OF CHASTITY.—Belief in the magical potency of chastity and asceticism is widespread, from ancient times down to the modern.
Influential chiefs of the Congo keep in their service a virgin to care for their arrows, shields, rugs and other instruments of war. They are hung up in her room, generally speaking, or in a convenient tree. It is believed that the girl’s purity imbues these objects with some extraordinary virtue, which their user, in turn, “catches.” If the custodian loses her virginity, the articles are destroyed as tainted and dangerous to those who would use them.
As late as the first century A.D., it was believed that the Vestals of Rome had the power by a certain prayer to immobilize runaway slaves where they stood, if they were still within the city walls. A similar power was attributed to one of the “gangas” of Doango, in Mozambique.
For the second time in our acquaintance, Mrs. Haven, you’d sent me a code I was helpless to crack. “Influential chiefs” of the Congo? The “gangas” of Mozambique? Had you sent me the book as a joke, or was it precisely the opposite: a veiled cry for help? And in what sense, exactly, could a rug be considered an instrument of war?
I never needed to break this particular code, as it turned out, because you rang my buzzer that same afternoon. You were out of breath when you entered, like a Hollywood adultress, and you couldn’t seem to look me in the eye. I took the Eskimo coat from your shoulders and kicked a stack of photocopies off the couch. You had on a hideous pair of Adidas cross-trainers, the kind a Boca Raton retiree would wear, and rumpled blue cotton pajamas. The pajamas were emblazoned with a design that I couldn’t decipher: it might have been a pattern of storm clouds, or whirlpools, or even tiny, slate-gray galaxies. You glanced down at yourself, frowning a little, as though someone had dressed you without your consent. You had just taken a step: perhaps the biggest of our secret life together. You must have been as terrified as I was.
“What’s this?” you said, picking up one of my notebooks.
“Nothing,” I mumbled. “Just notes and such.”
“Notes and such for what?”
“For that project I mentioned at my cousin’s party.”
“What sort of project? I can’t quite remember.” You hefted the notebook like a piece of evidence. “Are you working on a novel, Mr. Tompkins?”
“Jesus no,” I said, giving a tight little laugh. “One of those per family’s enough.”
“You’ve got a novelist in your family?” You narrowed your eyes. “No more cloak-and-dagger, Walter. Spill the beans.”
I’d trapped myself, Mrs. Haven, and I knew it. I felt the familiar pool of shame condensing at the base of my spine, the shame I’d felt for years whenever the subject of Orson came up; and there were definite reasons, given who your husband was, to keep his name from you. But there was no way out for me but straight ahead.
“It’s my father, believe it or not. But his books aren’t the kind—”
“I wonder if I’ve heard of him. Is his name Tompkins, too?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Mrs. Haven.”
“Fine with me,” you said blithely, making an elaborate dusting-off gesture with your hands. You were used to men not wanting to talk about their fathers, apparently. I racked my brain for some new topic, anything at all, but I needn’t have bothered. You had an announcement to make.
“I talked to the Husband this morning. I told him about our arrangement.”
I counted down from ten before I spoke.
“Our arrangement?”
You nodded. “I decided it was time.”
Images of the Husband overran my frontal lobe: photographs culled from magazines, mostly, of him shaking the hands of movie stars and hedge-fund managers and minor heads of state. Any temptation I might have felt to come clean—to tell you why I’d concealed my identity, or what I knew about the man whose name you bore—withered when I considered his position in the world. The walls of the apartment seemed to be vibrating faintly, as though a subway train were passing underneath us. You waited patiently for me to answer.
“What was his reaction, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“He laughed.”
The tremors grew stronger. “Why would he do that?”
“He laughs when he’s angry. He’s conflict-averse.”
“I think you need to tell me what he said, Mrs. Haven.”
“He said he’d deal with you in time. Those were his words exactly. ‘I’ll deal with Mr. Tompkins, dear—he calls me “dear”—in time.’”
I said nothing to that. The vibrations had stopped.
“It’s not worth worrying about, Walter. Really. He’s said this kind of thing before.”
“And what’s happened before? When he’s said that, I mean. Did he actually—”
“He doesn’t know you, Walter. He couldn’t hurt you if he wanted to.”
“What else did he say? I’d like the exact phrasing, if possible.”
This seemed to amuse you: you sat up and worked your face into a frown. “‘I appreciate your candor, oh woman, destroyer of worlds,’” you declaimed in a mock baritone. “‘Thanks for telling me about this pal of yours.’”
By now my throat and tongue were dry as chalk. “There’s not much to tell, when you get right down to it. Is there?”
Your eyes went flat instantly. “Not much to tell?”
“I only mean—”
“I thought you were in love with me, Walter. That was my understanding.”
“Mrs. Haven, if you’ll just—”
“You did say that at some point, didn’t you?”
I tried and failed to find the voice to speak. You returned my glassy stare without a flinch.
“I’ll bet I can guess the reason for your hesitation, Walter. Would you like me to guess?”
“Hold on. Hold on just a second—”
“You think it was premature to tell the Husband, because I haven’t let you fuck me yet. And that’s by no means unreasonable. That makes excellent sense.” You nodded to yourself. “We’re basically strangers, after all.”
You sat upright now, your back unnaturally straight, like a typist or a judge behind the bench. Your lips were compressed into a tight and bloodless crimp: Fielding’s “cupid’s bow” was gone without a trace. I saw you suddenly as you might have looked at age six or seven, struggling to control your temper, sitting by yourself in some neglected corner. But when I tried to imagine the rest of that faraway room, or the house you’d grown up in, or the people who’d lived in it with you, the picture went dark. You were right, I realized. The two of us were strangers to each other.
“Mrs. Haven,” I said quietly, “you haven’t even told me your first name.”
&
nbsp; You gave a slight start, as though I’d just spoken Latin, or barked like a terrier, or whispered to you that your breasts were showing. One of them was, in fact, which didn’t help matters. You took a long time to answer, staring off into space—or into spacetime, possibly—and when you spoke again your voice was soft and slow.
“Hildegard.”
“Excuse me?”
“My mother, God rest her, was obsessed with her Bavarian heritage.” You smiled crookedly. “That’s just one of the things the Husband saved me from.”
“What else?”
“Hmm?”
“Tell me what else he saved you from. I’d like to know.”
“Do you really want an answer, Mr. Tompkins? Are you sure you want to hear my sordid tale?”
I was anything but sure, in fact, especially when I noticed your expression. “Just play down the romantic bits, if you don’t mind.”
You shook your head. “That won’t be hard at all.”
* * *
It took you the better part of an hour to perform the vivisection of your marriage, and I paid close attention, painful though it was, because it taught me just how wrong I’d been about you. Your glib, easy air fell away as you spoke, and without it you were awkward and unsure. You weren’t the coddled debutante that I’d imagined: you’d been a lonely, angry child, your girlhood shadowed by your parents’ failures. Haven had discovered you in a secondhand-record store—Rox in Your Head Vinyl in Middletown, Connecticut—on the day you’d finally given up on college. He was a boyish thirty-four at the time, already famous, already rich, getting ready to distance himself (in public, at least) from the cut-rate religion he’d founded. You were ready to distance yourself from everything.
Your father had been kicked out of Wesleyan’s German Department two years earlier for preaching (and/or practicing) die freie Liebe with his students; he now spent his time drinking lager and writing fascist screeds against the state of Israel, which your mother—devoted spouse, Germanophile, and quiet anti-Semite that she was—mailed to The Boston Globe in semiweekly packets. Your job kept the family in bagels and six-packs; occasionally your mother took in boarders. Haven came into your life, as you put it, “like a Martian abduction,” bearing offerings from faraway, exotic worlds. Your previous boyfriend had been a video store clerk and part-time pot dealer; your new boyfriend was the leader of a cult, with disciples in the NFL and Hollywood and the House of Representatives. Your parents hated him, which expedited things. You were married in a courthouse in Poughkeepsie.