Unhinged

by Anna Berry

  Dave looks at me funny, then shakes his head. “You on something, Anna?”

  I don’t answer him. I bend over and open another box of books. Dave shakes his head again and walks off.

  An hour or so later, the Acquisitions Department phone rings. Dave answers it, frowns, and motions me to come over.

  “Hey, Berry, get over here. There’s some German-sounding guy on the phone for you. Won’t say from where.”

  I set down my box-cutter and dust off my hands. “I’ll take it in the copy-cataloging room.”

  “It’s not the new sales guy from Stern-Verlag, is it? The department head said not to take any more calls from him.”

  “No, Dave, it’s a personal call. Excuse me.” I duck into the glass-enclosed room where we download Library of Congress data onto the mainframe and shut the door. Dave hangs by and watches. He’s always had a bit of a crush on me, though I find his weak chin and the tufts of thick, dark back hair that stick out of his T-shirt collar repulsive.

  “Hello, this is Anna.” My voice is throaty with desire. It’s all I can do to keep from fainting.

  “Anna, my darlingk, I needt to zee you.” Dieter doesn’t identify himself, but he doesn’t have to. “Vhen are you home from verk?”

  “Not ’til after eleven.”

  “Mudst you go to verk tomorrow?”

  I bite my lip. It’s a Thursday. The next day is Friday, when I work first shift because there are no student workers to supervise in the evening. I have no vacation days coming for a while, but I am a model employee at the library who rarely calls in sick. I suppose I can play hooky for one day, with Dieter. It will be worth it.

  “I guess I can call in sick.”

  “Gut,” Dieter says. “For I have judst boughdt us two tickedtz to New York.”

  Dieter meets me at the train station that night at eleven-thirty. When I step outside the station, Dieter sweeps me into his arms and kisses me so passionately my knees buckle underneath me. “I missdt you zo much,” he breathes into my left ear. His accent comes through even in whispers. It drives me over the edge.

  We walk back to my apartment together. A light mist of early spring rain falls; an ambulance speeds past, its lights casting red shadows like blood on the rain-slick pavement.

  “I was supposdt to meet width my ditzzertation adtvizor today,” he says as we walk along, hand in sweaty hand. “Budt I cudt not. You vere too muchdt on my mindt. All I cudt do vas to think up vayz for usdt to be alone together. I searchdt and I foundt us a way to be alone together andt yet in the midst of so much. I vandt to take you somewhere and show you the thingkz that express my love for you. Andt zo, vee are going to New York.”

  We stop at a corner. Dieter picks me up in his arms and spins me around and around. “Vee are goingk to New York tomorrow! Can you believe dat?”

  “No!” I shout, giggling and dizzy. “I can’t believe it at all. This is crazy.”

  “Ja, it is crazy,” Dieter says. “Because I am crazy in love width you.”

  We go back to my apartment, make love well into the night, until we are both sweaty and spent. After so many rounds of pounding, biting, and orgasms, after our bodies collapse into each another, I cross over to another plane and sleep the sleep of the dead.

  It’s a strange foreshadowing. I don’t know it yet, but when my affair with Dieter ends months later, I very nearly take it one step further—almost choosing full, real, waking death instead of just sleeping it.

  Dieter wakes me the next morning at seven.

  “Anna, we mudst go. Our plane leaves at eleven-thirty. I mudst get thingks from my apartmendt and zen vee will go to airport.”

  “Okay,” I agree. I walk to the bathroom in a daze, see my glassy-eyed reflection in the smudged, dirty mirror. In my innocence I think that vague, glassy-eyed stare is the look of a passionate young woman in love, not the look of an addict in the throes of her latest fix. But that’s exactly what it is. I am an emotion junkie with a gaping black hole in my brain, and Dieter Franzl is my heroin.

  I call in sick at eight-fifteen. Dave is the only one in the office that early, and he can tell that I’m playing hooky. “You’re faking it, aren’t you?” he says when I feign a sore throat and cough into the phone.

  “No,” I lie, and cough into the phone again.

  “Whatever. I’ll tell the boss you aren’t coming in. Have fun.” Dave hangs up.

  We fly to New York. We stay at a posh midtown hotel just off Times Square. Dieter buys me an expensive cocktail dress and I wear it to a Broadway show then to a late-night dinner at one of the most expensive and exclusive restaurants in town, where we have a private booth behind a set of swinging Dutch doors in a private dining room, with a charming wine steward who wears a silver tasting spoon on a chain around his neck and offers us the best vintages. We drink wine from 1965 served by three different white-gloved waiters. I order risotto primavera and seventeen-layer chocolate tiramisu from a menu that has no prices.

  We go back to the hotel and have the most mind-blowing sex of our lives. And the next day, Dieter rows me around Central Park Lake in a wooden dinghy with rusty oars. When we make it to the middle of the lake, he says he wants to marry me.

  And I am naive (and sick) enough to believe him.

  “You make me vandt to abandon everythingk I have in Vienna and live here width you,” he says, and kisses me so hard he almost drops the oars into the murky green water and strands us.

  We fly back to Chicago that afternoon, cooing to each other for the entire flight. Dieter asks if I will accompany him to San Francisco two weeks later when he goes there with other members of his graduate program to give a presentation to business-school alumni in the area. Not knowing how I’ll manage to get the time off, I agree. He promises we’ll finalize our plans for the future once the San Francisco trip is complete. In the meantime, he’ll need to spend the next two weeks working on the San Francisco “presentation” and his doctoral dissertation project without distraction.

  He bids me a long, fond goodbye at my apartment building. “I vill call you,” he promises.

  He doesn’t.

  Five days pass, and no word from Dieter. I shrug it off and request two unpaid days off from my boss for the San Francisco trip. Dave overhears me ask for them, and his eyebrows raise.

  “Going on another trip with that German guy, huh?” he mocks later when our boss has gone to lunch. It’s obvious he’s figured out the real reason for my hooky day the week before. “Where to this time?”

  “San Francisco,” I chirp, not looking up from a pile of invoices.

  “What for?”

  “Just a trip with my boyfriend. He’s Austrian, not German.”

  Dave grunts. “What the hell are you, some kind of kept woman?”

  I don’t answer. I keep staring at my pile of invoices and pretend to ignore the feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me Dave might be right.

  The day of our San Francisco trip approaches, and I’ve still heard nothing from Dieter. I leave messages, send emails. All are ignored until the following Sunday, three days before we are supposed to leave.

  “Vhy do you call me zo much?” he demands in an angry late-night call to my apartment, the first time we’ve spoken in nearly a week. “Do nodt call me zo much. I am very busy.”

  “I just need to know what is going on,” I plead.

  Dieter doesn’t try to hide his irritation. “Width vhat?”

  “You know, with the trip, and everything. With us.”

  “You needt to schtopp beingk so fuckingk needy,” he hisses, and hangs up.

  I feel my stomach drop out, my mouth turn to cotton. What’s happened to the man who proposed to me in Central Park and bought me a designer evening dress and a fancy dinner that probably cost more than my monthly rent? What’s happened to the feeling of warmth and euphoria that fills my belly and head whenever Dieter speaks, the dazzling, spinning sensation that his touch evokes in my body like a drug? In an instant, they are
gone, all gone.

  An hour or so later, the phone rings again. It’s Dieter, apologizing profusely.

  “I am zo zorry about judst now,” he says, his Deutsch Don Juan persona back in full swing. “I am judst zo stressdt oudt. I have this San Francisco pretzendtatzion andt my ditzzertation andt my consulting job is givingk me projectz from Vienna even though I am on leave. Whadt I needt now more than anythingk ist to be width you. Can I see you now?”

  I swallow, sigh, and say yes.

  Dieter appears on my doorstep fifteen minutes later. I think he’s come to make up, then frolic in bed with me. But he hasn’t. He’s come to talk business.

  Dieter opens his briefcase and takes out several floppy disks. “You are a profetzzional edidtor, no?”

  “I was,” I say. “I’m not anymore. I work at a library now.”

  “Budt you know how to edidt words in English, no?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I am vonderingk if maybe you cudt edidt my ditzzertation for me.”

  I glance from the stack of floppies to Dieter’s expression—emotionless—and back again. I search in vain for clues about how he feels—if he still feels anything at all—about me. He is a brick wall, blank and drab and mortared tight.

  “Why are you asking me to do this?” I finally ask.

  “As a favor,” he says. “Andt I vould pay you.”

  My scalp skin crawls the slightest bit. “If you pay me, it’s not a favor.”

  “As you wish,” he says, and smiles. “I am only askingk because I don’t know anyone who wouldt be better at it zan you.”

  I can’t help but be flattered, but at no time in our whirlwind courtship have Dieter and I ever discussed anything about my business writing experience or editorial skills, other than the fact I once worked for a high-priced brokerage as a stock reports editor and want to be a successful playwright someday. It all seems a little out of left field.

  Dieter grows impatient. “Vill you do it or nodt?”

  “Sure, yeah, I guess.”

  “Gut.” He hands me the floppies and a stack of handwritten notes. “I mudst go now,” he says abruptly. “I have an important pretzendtatzion tomorrow morningk for my ditzzertation adtvizor. I vill send a taxi for you on Thursday morningk to take you to ze airpordt.” He’s up and out the door before I can say another word.

  Watching him go, I don’t move, I don’t speak. I don’t do anything—I can’t. I feel as if I’ve been rammed through the stomach with a telephone pole.

  Instantly, I start to rationalize. Surely Dieter’s sudden cold shoulder is just due to some kind of Austro–Central European cultural difference. Europeans are reserved and careful, aren’t they? Perhaps Dieter is just pulling back a bit, finding steady ground to stand upon after rushing into such a wildly passionate, instantly committed relationship. Or perhaps he’s just saving all his warmth and love and opiate-like romantic maneuvering for San Francisco. He’s saving it up for that special occasion, like a nest egg or a rare vintage of wine.

  That has to be it. It can’t possibly have anything to do with me. Of course not.

  He wouldn’t be asking me to do such an important job as editing his monumental PhD dissertation if there really were something wrong with me. Would he?

  Of course not. Of course not.

  Everything is fine. Everything is fine. I tell myself this lie over and over, even though I know it isn’t true. Denial is a powerful tool, and it’s a tool I’ve trained myself to use well. You can’t go through life making the choices that I do unless denial is the sharpest, deadliest weapon in your arsenal.

  Everything. Will. Be. Fine.

  I tell myself this over and over again as I pour myself glass after glass of Skyy vodka from my freezer, as I shred three of my favorite silk dresses with a pair of scissors, as I soak in a long, hot bath scrubbing a strange, unnamable sensation of cheapness and filth off my body.

  The San Francisco trip is a disaster.

  Dieter does send me a taxi on Thursday morning (why he can’t share one with me I’ll never know), but it’s an hour late. I barely make it to the airport on time, and security is slow to boot. By the time I make it to the gate, the air hostess is preparing to shut the gangway door when I rush up and beg to be allowed to board.

  “Vhat took you zo longk?” Dieter demands when I make it to my seat.

  “The taxi you sent me was an hour late.”

  Dieter ignores this and reads the in-flight safety card aloud to himself in German.

  We barely speak for the whole flight out to the California coast. Thanks to his business connections, Dieter and I have bulkhead seats in business class in one of the airline’s fanciest new planes, and he spends almost half the trip on the Airfone bragging to some of his work buddies in offices scattered around the world about our fully reclining seat-beds, personal televisions preloaded with dozens of films and TV shows, and Internet connection. The time Dieter isn’t on the Airfone, he sleeps.

  Things only get worse when we land. When we get to the baggage carousel, Dieter retrieves an electric guitar case and amplifier with his baggage.

  “What’s that for?” I ask.

  “Ze pretzendtatzion,” he snaps in the thickest Austrian accent I’ve ever heard, and heads straight for the taxi line.

  “Why do you need an electric guitar for a business presentation?”

  Dieter rolls his eyes, flags a taxi, and doesn’t answer my question until we’re less than a mile from Fisherman’s Wharf. After twenty minutes seething on his side of the cab, he speaks. “I thoughdt dat you knew vhat a pretzendtatzion vas, you beingk a theater person and all.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

  Dieter goes on to tell me that we’re here so he can perform in “The Money Show,”[2] an annual talent show the business school he attends runs. Current graduate students perform onstage for alumni living in the Bay Area, many of whom work in Silicon Valley and help pay for the show’s venue and scenery as part of a career-development and professional networking program.

  “The Money Show,” Dieter says, as if I should have already known. “You know, like ‘Show me the money!’ Ist funny, no?” He’s clearly amused with himself as we pull up to a shabby hotel near the Presidio. I bite my tongue to keep from telling Dieter that he really doesn’t understand American humor at all, and to keep from telling myself I was an idiot to ever agree to go on this trip to begin with. Instead, I fake a laugh. It’s the best I can do.

  We arrive in the peeling faux-marble lobby to find a gaggle of Dieter’s fellow graduate students milling around the hotel bar. “Dieter!” they all call.

  A cocky, twenty-twoish blonde with impressive breasts shakes Dieter’s hand and hugs him. “We thought you’d never make it in!”

  Dieter cuts his eyes at me. “I hadt some difficuldty gettingk hier, ist all.”

  “Oh! Well, most of us have been here since yesterday, rehearsing. The venue’s great, but it’s way out in the middle of nowhere.” Cocky Blonde and Dieter walk off arm-in-arm to the far side of the bar, talking and whispering to one another, and the gaggle of grad students follows them. Dieter doesn’t even introduce me to anybody. I stand tongue-tied in the middle of the peeling lobby with our luggage and Dieter’s three-foot-tall Fender Stratocaster amplifier next to me until an annoyed bellman nudges me toward the front desk.

  I figure I might as well check myself and Dieter’s giant amplifier into our room. When I give our names to the desk clerk, though, he informs me that Dieter and I are booked under separate rooms.

  Separate rooms. Great. Lovely.

  Wűnderbar.

  I guess that means I won’t be needing my diaphragm.

  I spend the next hour pacing my cramped hotel room, wondering whether it makes sense for me to ditch the trip altogether and get a standby seat on the next available flight back to Chicago.

  Just when I’m about to call the airline’s reservations hotline, there’s a knock at the door.

  It’s
Dieter, alone, with a peace offering. “Wouldt you like to go to Chinatown for dinner? Judst you and me.” He pecks me on the cheek, a drug dealer offering one last free hit before jacking up his prices.

  “Sure,” I stammer. “Sounds fun.”

  We walk all the way from the Presidio to Chinatown and stop at a restaurant seemingly at random. The host says he already has a table waiting for us. And there’s already someone sitting at it. Victor, one of Dieter’s college friends from Austria, who now works in international finance here in San Francisco.

  So much for a private, romantic dinner. I spend the entire evening shoving cold eggrolls around on a plate with disposable chopsticks while Victor and Dieter discuss Austrian politics, switching back and forth from English to German and mostly pretending I’m not there.

  Dieter apologizes on the walk back to the hotel. “Zo sorry. Victor calledt at the lasdt minute. I hadt to see him. Ve vill have time alone together tomorrow, after the pretzendtatzion, I promise.”

  When I wake up the next morning, Dieter’s already gone. He’s left me a message at the front desk that he’ll be at rehearsal all day, but in the evening I can take a prepaid cab he’s arranged out to San Jose, where the concert is. He promises to reserve me a seat.

  I spend the entire day wandering the streets of San Francisco alone, walking to all the tourist sights—Haight/Ashbury, Union Square, the cable cars, and Chinatown, again—until my feet bleed and my head aches from dehydration. I have little money budgeted for food and entertainment, so I buy myself a vegetarian hotdog and bottled water at a stand as my only real nourishment for the day. I get lost for an hour or two near the Tenderloin and weep in the middle of the street when I think for sure I’ll be mugged and raped at any minute.

  When I finally find my way to Golden Gate Park, I stare out into the bay, contemplating whether it might just be easiest and best for all concerned for me to walk out to the center of the Golden Gate Bridge and jump off. At the insistence of architecture purists, there are no suicide barricades on the bridge. Nobody even knows I’m in San Francisco except for Dieter and my boss, and I doubt either one of them will miss me very much if I jump. It’s tempting—I can almost feel the cold orange steel of the bridge underneath the pads of my fingertips as I clutch the railing, can almost savor the cold waters of the bay envelope me like a velvet blanket. It would be so easy, so dramatic.