by John Wray
From that relative high point, things went rapidly downhill, in such an effortless, frictionless, self-understood way that it barely seemed a topic for discussion. A full year into your marriage, you still had only the haziest sense of what the man you’d married liked and what he didn’t, let alone what he cared for or believed. He met your every word and gesture with a warm, attentive smile, and gave answers to your questions that evaporated when exposed to sunlight. You had no interest in the “church” he represented, and he seemed to have no interest in it either. He left for work each morning like any other husband, and in the evenings he talked sports and investments and music and cars—even fashion, when you introduced the subject—but never religion. He seemed to regard theology and science with the same blank-eyed indifference. In time you realized that he despised them.
You found your new life unusual—freakish, really—but you were still too dazed and grateful to ask questions. Haven cheerfully supported you in breaking with your parents. Your every worldly whim was gratified. Each night he came to you and told you what he wanted: in this regard, at least, his preferences were clear. He referred to the act as “synchrony” or “junction”: the only cult-speak he used in your company. He seemed less in search of pleasure than of information, or possibly—you sometimes thought—some form of proof. And he always left your bedroom disappointed.
A year went by, then two years, then—astonishingly, unaccountably—a decade. Your husband was never less than cordial. You’d had the idea to open a record shop of your own, maybe even a boutique reissue label, specializing in the sixties teen garage rock that you loved; but though he repeatedly promised to put up the “seed capital”—and though it was painfully clear he had money to burn—something always seemed to interfere. You participated in junction each night at 23:15 EST, his schedule permitting. He traveled much of the year, and was never reachable during the final hour of the day, though he returned your calls at midnight without fail. You had occasional affairs of your own, and once tried, semiseriously, to leave him; but you’d lost all sense of how to be alone. Your life was freakish—more than freakish: perverse—but you’d grown to accept it.
Then you met me at my cousin’s party.
You fell silent once you’d finished, staring bashfully down into your lap. A car alarm sounded nearby, invasive and shrill, but you barely reacted. You seemed to have forgotten where you were.
“Hildegard,” I said tentatively. “I have to admit, never in a million years—”
“I agree with you, Walter. A million at least.” You gave a tired smile and took my hand. “But you’re allowed to call me Mrs. Haven.”
For once I understood you perfectly. “I’d consider it an honor,” I said. “Hildegard doesn’t suit you.”
You sighed and shook your head. “It never did.”
“You’re more of an Irmgard, I’d say. Or a Brünnhilde.”
“That’s right, Walter. And you’re more of a Gandalf.”
“Mrs. Haven?”
“Yes, Walter?”
“I’d like you to stay here tonight.”
“I thought you might.” You brought my hand to your mouth and bit down lightly on the knuckle of my thumb. “That’s why I came with my pajamas on.”
* * *
If I stay hunched over this card table forever, Mrs. Haven—if the timestream doesn’t ever readmit me—I might one day find words to do justice to that stupefying night. For hours on end we were as deliberate as forensic scientists, committing the most obscure recesses of each other’s body to memory; the rest of the time we rolled around like chimpanzees. I tried to catalog the moles and scars and freckles on your body—to catalog them, not just count them, beginning with the heel of your right foot—but I never made it past the halfway point. And what a halfway point it was, Mrs. Haven. I could have lived out my duration there and died a happy man.
Did I wonder why you cared for me? I’ll admit it—I did wonder. You were the stuff of daydreams, after all, and I was a dropout with dubious posture. I was the opposite of the Husband in every respect; this ought to have reassured me, I suppose, but it tended to have the opposite effect. When all else failed, I fell back on the one thing I was certain of: I adored you, Mrs. Haven, and you liked to be adored. On that first night it seemed explanation enough.
In between sessions of monkey business we asked each other aimless, drowsy questions. I was ecstatically unaware of what the future held—our escape to Vienna, our doomed trip to Znojmo, and everything that would happen afterward—and I’d have told you everything, consequences be damned, if only you’d asked. But your mind was firmly on the present moment. You made love exactly as I’d imagined you would: clumsily at first, then earnestly, then angrily, then lost to the world altogether. I felt half-dead by morning, to tell you the truth. But my other half felt indestructible.
“That was very nice, Walter,” you whispered sometime around dawn. “I knew you were a man of many gifts.”
“I appreciate your confidence, Mrs. Haven.”
In the light from the street your hair glowed like an angel’s in some pre-Raphaelite painting of questionable taste, or even in something by Klimt. I felt painfully, unconscionably happy.
“Do you really come from a family of physicists?”
“Failed physicists,” I mumbled, nuzzling your armpit. The brass-colored hair there smelled faintly of nutmeg. “Crackpots is the technical term.”
“That’s too bad,” you said, yawning. “I was hoping you could build a time machine.”
On any other day I’d have snapped to attention at that, wide-awake and suspicious; as it was, I only sat up slightly. “A time machine?”
“I wouldn’t want to go too far back. I’m not ambitious.” You ran your close-cut fingernails across my scalp. “About thirty minutes, let’s say.”
It wasn’t easy, in my fuddled condition, to reconstruct what had happened thirty minutes before. Then it came back to me.
“You’re in luck, Mrs. Haven. That can be arranged.”
“It can? How fantastic!”
“There’s nothing fantastic about it.”
“Prove it.”
“In the interest of science, I will.” I took you by the shoulders. “I’ll ask you to lie back down, if you don’t mind.”
Thirty-three minutes later I was nuzzling your armpit again. The brass-colored stubble smelled faintly of nutmeg.
“That was very nice, Walter,” you whispered.
“You see, Mrs. Haven? I hope I’ve convinced you.”
You arched your back and nodded. “I knew you were a man of many gifts.”
* * *
But by morning you were restless again, preoccupied and tense and short of breath. I opened my eyes to find you standing at the window, buttoning up your pajamas, staring anxiously down at the street. My nakedness felt wrong to me suddenly. I crawled back under the comforter, wrapping it around me like somebody saved from drowning.
“What sort of family do you come from, Walter?” you said as you pulled on your sneakers. Apparently it was time for you to go.
“A tribe of honest laborers,” I answered.
“Honest laborers?” you said, turning up the collar of your coat. “Is that true?”
“Not so much,” I admitted.
You seated yourself at the foot of the bed, demonstratively out of my reach. You wanted to talk, not to cuddle: that was only too clear. You wanted to get down to terms.
“Ask me a question, Walter. A question about myself. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
I thought hard for a moment. “What are the chances that the Husband—”
“It’s important that you tell me where you come from, Walter. I’ve spent a decade sleeping next to a cipher. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
“I’m certainly willing—”
“I need to know that I can trust you, and that you feel that you can trust me. I don’t think I can do this otherwise.”
A feelin
g took hold of me then that I’ve often had since: the suspicion that crucial precedents were being set, that matters of weight and consequence hung in the balance, and that I barely had a clue what was at stake. In one sense, of course, I knew what was at stake very well: you were at stake, Mrs. Haven. But this knowledge only paralyzed me further.
“You’re always laying down the law,” I heard myself stammer.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that, Walter. Are you trying to say—”
“I’m trying to say that from the moment we met, from our first conversation, you’ve been the one setting the terms. You’ve never asked me what my terms might be—not even once. What makes you so sure that I don’t have any?”
You sat forward, tucking a lock of sleep-creased hair behind your ear. I’d managed to make you self-conscious, if nothing else.
“What are your terms, Walter?”
I didn’t have any, of course. None. I’d have taken you under every possible set of conditions. I sank back into the pillows with a groan.
“Something shifted while we were asleep,” you said. “I don’t know what, exactly, but something’s different. Our equilibrium seems to be shot.”
If I’d known you at all, I’d have taken this pronouncement in stride, maybe even agreed; since I didn’t, I panicked.
“I don’t believe in this.”
You looked startled. “In what?”
“In anything.” I waved my arms peevishly. “I don’t believe in anything that’s happened.”
Why in God’s name, Mrs. Haven, did I say such a thing? To throw you off balance? To keep my need for you from swallowing me whole? Whatever the reason, the result was terrifying. You rose from the bed with exaggerated calm and did up the leather toggles of your coat. Your face was as white and empty as a plate.
“I’d be a fool to believe in all this, Walter, if you don’t. Wouldn’t I?”
“Please sit down, Mrs. Haven. Don’t go just yet.”
“I’ll be gone in a minute,” you said, searching the floor for your hat. “There’s something that I want to tell you first.”
“Mrs. Haven, if you’d just—”
“The day you followed me home, I showed you what the Husband had done to my little clubhouse—with the Klimts and so on. Do you remember?”
“Of course I—”
“I told you we’d been fighting, but you never asked me why.” You smiled. “You must not have believed in what was happening then, either.”
That brought me out of bed at last. “You have to understand, Mrs. Haven, nothing’s ever prepared me—what I mean is, where I come from—”
“Where exactly do you come from, Mr. Tompkins?”
“I don’t have any clothes on. If you’ll give me the chance—”
“We’d been fighting about you, Walter. I told the Husband that I was leaving him, that I’d met someone else, and he reacted in the way you might expect. He asked me—as anyone would, who’s been given that sort of news—whether I was absolutely sure.” You picked your hat up from the floor. “I wonder if you can guess how I replied.”
I opened my mouth, met your withering look, and felt my answer curdle in my throat.
“No?” you said, stepping out onto the landing. “I’m sorry to hear that, Walter. Maybe it will come to you in time.”
XIII
THERE’S A PAINTING at the Met by Giancarlo Beppino, some forgotten also-ran of the Venetian Rennaissance, that comes to mind whenever I try to picture Kaspar and Sonja’s exodus. An unassuming little oil in a badly lit niche—Joseph and Mary’s Flight into Egypt—it twitches to eager life for anyone willing to stop. An underfed Joseph leads two gaunt, walleyed mules down a gulch; a fat, insipid virgin sits sidesaddle on the second mule’s back, holding a toddler under her arm like the Sunday edition of The Wall Street Journal. In the middle distance, for no apparent reason, an angel is whacking at a rosebush with a stick.
The figures themselves bear no likeness to my star-crossed kin: Sonja was desperately ill by then, and my grandfather, in the sole surviving snapshot from that time, has the oxlike expression of a more classical Joseph, a man prepared for certain disappointment. More important than any of the figures, however—chubby Mary included—are the slick, greasy clouds Beppino packs his sky with: shadowless masses, hideously compacted, glistening in the nauseous light of that landscape like marrow smeared across a crust of bread. To me, Mrs. Haven, those diseased-looking clouds have always seemed the color of insanity, and the sky above Vienna, whenever I imagine that most ominous of summers, is practically bursting with them.
* * *
Kaspar went home from Trattner’s on foot, grateful for the reprieve, storing away the sights and sounds and smells of the city for future reference; no sooner had he arrived home, however, than he announced to his family that they’d be leaving for America that same afternoon. His daughters were too young to fully grasp the import of the news, and his in-laws were too old, perhaps, or too astonished; Sonja was overjoyed, as he’d known she would be. She emerged from her room fully dressed and expectant, as if she’d foreseen his sudden change of heart; she looked clearheaded and rested, better than she’d seemed in months. Kaspar had expected her to ask the reason for his decision—for its abruptness, if nothing else—but she confined herself to questions of logistics. Her equanimity, which had always been a comfort, now unnerved him. He wondered, not for the first time, whether his wife had the slightest idea what lay in store for them; then he reminded himself that it no longer mattered. The choice—such as it was—had been made for them.
The journey by train to Genoa was incongruously festive, as though the family were setting out on a grand tour. The six of them had a first-class compartment to themselves—an indulgence the professor insisted on—and the Alps goose-stepped past, inundating the room with their temperate, vertiginous green, as if the car were a camera obscura for the benefit of the silent, awestruck twins. The Silbermanns sat for hours at the window with Enzian and Gentian between them, pointing out castles and cloisters with proprietary pride. Sonja spoke only rarely, and then in a whisper—and yet she was the center of it all. Kaspar had never seen her look more regal.
They pulled into Genoa at five in the morning, early enough to watch fishmongers with pious faces set out iced trays of whiting and calamari and buckets of spasming eels. The family’s trunks, which had seemed so enormous in their Ringstrasse parlor, looked small and unassuming on the pier. The Comtesse Celeste had been H.M.S. Gloucester until the year before; she’d seen three decades’ service as a coal and livestock transport, and it showed. She was too big for her mooring and too close to the shrimping boats that flanked her, and the pilings bowed and shuddered as she heaved. Kaspar took all this in obliquely, peripherally, as someone drunk or half-asleep might do. Genoa was a caesura to him, a blank interval, unexpected and unknowable and empty. He found himself impatient to keep on.
The professor—who still seemed to think they were on holiday—disappeared with the twins for the better part of an hour, and returned with chocolate stains on his lapel; in keeping with the fever dream in which they’d all become complicit, no one asked where they’d gone off to, let alone what he’d been thinking. The rest of the day was spent unpacking and repacking, making last-minute purchases of everyday items—shaving soap, twine, baking soda—that might not exist in the western hemisphere, and avoiding all but the most necessary talk. The Silbermanns, especially, grew stiller and grayer as the hours went by; but it wasn’t until early that evening, when the Comtesse’s whistle sounded, that Kaspar guessed the reason for the change.
“You’re not coming,” he said. “You’re not coming with us.”
It was his mother-in-law who answered. “You’ll be back soon enough,” she said brightly, gripping her husband’s blotched and birdlike hand. “You’ll run out of soap and well-made shoes and decent butter. Also, I’ve heard there’s no hygienic paper. They eat and wave hello with their right hands only, and use their left ha
nds to—”
“You’re thinking of the southern states, Mama,” Sonja put in, winking at Kaspar over Frau Silbermann’s bonnet. “Alabama and so on. We’ll make sure to keep to the north.”
Kaspar stared at his wife for a moment, struck dumb by her glib reply. But it was possible that Sonja had missed her mother’s meaning—she’d been so weary and abstracted recently. At times she barely answered to her name.
Everyone fell silent when they arrived at the quay: Kaspar due to his steadily increasing perplexity, the Silbermanns so as not to upset the children, Sonja for reasons known to her alone. The significance of the hour seemed to have dawned on her at last. After the twins had been coddled and kissed she sent them away with their father, to the end of the quay, while she spoke with her parents alone. She was a long time with each of them—her mother, particularly—and when she beckoned Kaspar back to her he found their faces flushed and wet with tears.
“Goodbye to you, Kaspar.” His mother-in-law kissed him fiercely on both cheeks—how often had they touched in twenty years?—then propelled her husband forward.
“Best of luck to you, Toula,” Silbermann croaked, extending a kid-gloved hand with an absurdly dated flourish. Kaspar had always laughed at the old man’s stiffness and remove—had laughed at it openly, in fact, in recent years—so it was with no small embarrassment that he found himself drawn into an embrace. An idea struck him then, fully formed and entire, like a line of sentimental poetry: This man has given me everything that I hold dear.