by Anna Berry
But I can’t do it. I just don’t have the balls.
It’s not the first time or way I’ve contemplated suicide, but it’s certainly the most romantic. There’s something strangely beautiful about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, which is why I suppose so many people do it. About one suicide every three days, or so they say.[3] It certainly beats some other methods I’ve toyed with, like slashing my wrists or taking pills or jumping on the third rail of the subway. I know that all of these thoughts are bad, and that I shouldn’t be having them at all, but I can’t stop. Or rather, I won’t stop. I just keep torturing myself because it’s all that I think I deserve.
By midafternoon I’m exhausted. I walk back to the hotel and ask the concierge if he knows anything about a prearranged taxi to take me to San Jose. He does. I ask if the concierge can arrange for it to take me to San Jose three hours early. He can.
I’ve had enough of Dieter’s rigid routines, his backhanded manipulations. I’m sick of being pulled and danced about by invisible marionette strings. I want to do one thing, just one thing on this fiasco trip my way.
If only I had the willpower to stick with that strategy for longer than that forty-minute cab ride. If only.
If only. But I don’t, because I can’t. I simply don’t have the fortitude to take care of myself, especially when I think what I need most is what’s really the worst possible thing for me. Never try to reason with a nutjob—we’ll choose to sit on a rusty sawblade over a chintz sofa every time, because in our world, the rusty sawblade is better. We dwell in a distorted universe that’s full of contradictions and makes sense only to us.
I arrive at the San Jose performance venue—a large, snow-white, Spanish Colonial–style auditorium with an art-nouveau, gold-leaf proscenium stage—at 4:45. I can hear the sounds of an out-of-tune concert band and marginally talented singers doing vocal warm-up exercises. Even outside, I understand why all of these people have chosen MBAs over careers in the arts. They’re hopeless. I’m embarrassed for them. And for myself, for being there in the first place. But I still don’t leave.
I walk into the auditorium and take a seat right in front of the band. Dieter looks up from his amplifier’s knobs and turns pale. He won’t meet my eyes.
A man carrying a cymbal in each hand comes up to me. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Anna. I’m here with Dieter Franzl.”
The cymbal man looks me up and down. “Oh. Right.” He chuckles, looks me up and down again. “I’m sorry about that. Boy. Boy, I’m sorry for you.”
“Why? What do you mean?” But I know why.
Sort of.
Cymbal Man chuckles again, shakes his head, and goes to mess with his drum set.
I stay in my seat for the rest of the rehearsal, then the performance. I don’t go to the box office for a ticket and no one makes me. In fact, everyone at The Money Show—a combination talent show and sketch-comedy spoof of business school and corporate life—seems to know who I am already, and to pity me. Everyone in the audience—and the cast and crew at the after-party at some wealthy alumni graduate’s house in Pacific Heights—seems preprogrammed to give me a wide berth, to avoid touching me or talking to me lest they catch bubonic plague or leprosy. They treat me the way wealthy people treat a homeless, stinking junkie on the street—because in many ways, that’s exactly what I am. Why else would I be willingly choosing to do things that make me miserable? Why did I ever decide to date Dieter in the first place, a man who is using me for sex and free editorial services, when I could have seen the warning signs a mile away? It’s a compulsion. A dirty, destructive compulsion. The first hit of this love-drug is bliss, but it quickly turns into pain—and you just take more and more of it in a vain effort to get that fleeting, blissful feeling back, even if just for a second or two.
I stand alone in the corner of that anonymous Internet millionaire’s Pacific Heights living room, clutching a highball filled with a blue drink I don’t know the name of, staring helplessly across the room at the tall, blonde Austrian who brought me there and hoping that he’ll give me another hit of his wonder love-drug for free and snap me out of my raging DTs. But he doesn’t, and won’t, because I don’t have anything left that he wants in trade. I can’t even suck him off for it because we have separate rooms at the hotel and he won’t tell me which floor I can go to so I can blow him in exchange for a nickel bag of self-worth. And in the meantime, the gaping black hole in my brain keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, until I think it will swallow me up and make me disappear. I know that the black hole is bad, and wrong, and dangerous, but I don’t yet know why, or even how it got there—let alone what to do about it. When you’re sick in the head, that kind of deep, ordered thinking isn’t exactly within your reach.
Another prepaid cab appears and takes me back to the Presidio. I sleep alone, again. Dieter meets me in the peeling marble lobby the next morning. He’s already checked out of his room.
“Sorry aboudt lasdt night. Parties. You know. I needt to netverk. You know. Schtuff.”
“Sure.” I play with lint in my pockets. “I had a nice time here. It’s very pretty here.”
I lie. I lie and smile. I lie and smile because it makes the gaping black hole in my brain shrink.
Just a little.
Dieter calls me two days after we get back to Chicago and says we need to take a break. As if we aren’t already on one.
“I am sorry. I judst need some time,” he says over tallboy Warsteiners at a downtown hotel bar. “My feelingks for you—they are, they were genuine. Budt now I judst dond’t know. I need time. I am goingk back to Vienna for now. I leave in two weekzt.”
“What? But I thought you were going to stay here! I thought you were going to transfer to your company’s Chicago office and stay here. I thought we were going to get married.” I stare at the lemon slice floating in my Warsteiner. There’s a tiny black speck on it, stuck to the cool lemon flesh. I don’t know if it’s dirt or just part of the lemon, and I don’t want to find out.
“I dond’t know. I needt time. I am going back to Vienna. Dat ist all I know righdt now. In meantime, you can help me edit my ditzzertation by e-mail. I vill pay for you to come to Vienna in the fall. It vill be zo nice for you. You can meedt my mother then. We will make plantz then. Vienna, it is beautiful in the fall. I vill pay for everythingk. This is vhat you will do, no?”
“Yeah. Sure. I get two weeks’ paid vacation a year. Okay.”
“Gut.” Dieter stands up too fast, bumps the table with his knee, and knocks both tallboy Warsteiners into my lap. The lemon slices land on my chest. Beer soaks through my cheap polyester skirt and runs into my underwear. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t even offer to get me a towel.
I just smile. Nod, and smile. It makes the hole in my brain smaller. It feels good, just to nod and smile sometimes. But that feeling doesn’t last. The gaping black hole in my brain is too big and too strong, and it’s growing fast. I can’t keep fighting it alone, even if I think that I have everything under control. I simply don’t have the tools. Not the right ones, anyway. Denial is about as useful in this battle as a cotton swab would be on D-Day.
Even if I don’t yet understand how or why, I’m hell-bent on a path to self-destruction. And that path leads straight to the land of waltzes and Mozart.
The spring and summer of 1999 fly by. I work at the library. I ride the el. I go home each night. I rarely go out. I sleep a lot. I charge a new travel wardrobe on my credit cards in anticipation of the Vienna trip, buy frivolous facials and beauty treatments too, until all my cards are maxed out and I have no idea how I’ll pay them back. I wait for Dieter’s correspondence and phone calls, which rarely come and always have something to do with his dissertation. He has promised me a draft by May. May stretches into June, then into August, and there is no dissertation. The floppy disks and notes he’s given to me so far are merely “background information.” I’ve read through them a dozen times and they still make no sen
se. I don’t know if they make no sense because they really are nonsensical, or because my nutjob brain has trouble making sense of anything anymore. It’s probably a little of both.
Dieter dangles the editing project just out of my reach, like beef jerky ten feet over the head of a hungry puppy. He hasn’t paid me anything yet, but it’s not the promise of money that keeps me interested. It’s the promise of a continued connection to him—any connection, even a crappy, dysfunctional one. We speak on the phone every two weeks or so, and only at Dieter’s leisure and pleasure. And every brief conversation we have is the same.
“What’s going on? Why don’t you ever call me anymore?” I wail. I can’t call Dieter myself. He won’t give me his number in Austria, and even if he would I can’t afford that kind of long distance anyway. He holds me out at arm’s length, at absolute mercy to his whim and will.
“I have been too busy.”
“I’m all ready to edit your stuff. I’m looking forward to it. I hope you still want me to do it, because I want to do it.” I say it just like the scrappy, hyperactive little Chihuahua jumping around the giant bulldog did in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Every pedantic phrase I offer up to him on a jittery plate is methadone, a mere substitute for the love-drug the black hole in my brain needs filled so desperately.
“Yeah, yeah, sure sure, I’ll do it for you,” I jigger. I’m pathetic. But I’ll do anything, anything for another hit. Anything at all.
“The ditzzertation ist not done yet. I needt more time.”
“Am I still coming to Vienna? Am I? Am I?”
Dieter sighs. “Yes, yes. I’ll ship you some plane tickedtz.”
“When? When?”
Another sigh. “Soon. Gut-bye.”
And that’s the end of it, until Dieter sees fit to dangle the beef jerky and call me again. He’s master of my domain, and his. He rules two hemispheres.
Plane tickets arrive unannounced at my doorstep in early September, for a departure three weeks hence. I’ll fly to Vienna on Dieter’s dime by way of Heathrow Airport. By then it’s too late for me to ask my boss for a sixteen-day vacation, but I beg and plead and cajole and threaten to quit, and finally get it, though five days of it will have to be without pay. So I skip a student loan payment and sell half my CD collection to a used record store to help meet my bills for the month and still have spending money for the trip.
When I arrive at the small Vienna airport, I see a man in a dark suit standing between Customs and the baggage carousel. The man in the dark suit holds a cardboard sign with my name written on it in stilted black marker. I walk up to him, tell him I’m the name on the sign, but when it’s clear he doesn’t speak English, I have to show him my passport and fumble through a sentence I find in my German phrasebook. He grunts something back in German, waves for me to follow him outside, and leads me to a shiny black BMW with deep-tinted windows and walnut interior paneling. I expected—hoped—that Dieter would meet me at the airport himself. But he’s sent a high-priced car service to fetch me instead, as if I’m a powerful international diplomat. Or a call girl.
The hired BMW wanders twisting Alpine roads and highways until it arrives in central Vienna. It drives past the Hotel Imperial, the opera house, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and dozens of gold-leaf art-nouveau streetlamps, and it stops in front of a drab, postwar, five-story apartment building a block or two inside the Ringstrasse. The uniformed driver ushers me out of the car, drops my baggage at my feet, and drives away.
I stare at the apartment building, an ugly hulking structure coated with dirty white ceramic tile. I have no idea if this is the right place, if Dieter lives here, or if this is merely some kind of cheap hostel where he intends to warehouse me for two weeks at his expense. I walk up to the gray metal door to scan the panel of buzzers and am relieved to find Dieter’s name at the very bottom. I press the buzzer. No answer. I press it again. No answer, again.
I’ve flown halfway around the world to stay with a man who isn’t home.
Dieter waltzes up to the building an hour or so later and finds me in his building’s doorway, lying half-asleep from jet lag on top of my battered suitcase. At the sound of his trademark sigh of irritation, I open my eyes.
Imposing in an immaculate steel-blue suit, Dieter looks me up and down, rolls his eyes, shakes his head. He doesn’t hug me or greet me. “Vhy are you hier now?”
“You sent me a car. It dropped me off an hour ago.”
Dieter frowns. “The car was supposed to take you to Schoenbrunn Palace first.”
“Why?”
“For sighdtseeingk. A mistake to bringk you hier so early. Never mind. Komme upstairtz.”
He ushers me inside and up three flights of a corrugated metal staircase. He unlocks a wide maple door, and leads me into an ultramodern, luxurious apartment.
“Wilkommen,” he said. “This ist your home for nedxt two weeks. Your room is hier. I vill sleep in the livingkroom on sofa. You are guest, you get ze bedt.” He indicates a large, low Scandinavian-style bed with a thick eiderdown coverlet.
So we won’t be sleeping together. Fine. I can live with that. He’s just being a gentleman, surely. A gentleman. Of course.
“Hier, I had a key made.” He hands it to me; it dangles from a sleek chrome ring that matches his apartment’s luxe décor. “I am verking almost all ze time now, come andt go as you please. Hier are maptz of ze city. Walk aroundt. See ze sights. All ist close by.”
“But—”
“But vhat?”
I sigh, bite my lip, swallow hard. This is it. The moment of truth. The moment when I can figure out why I have flown all the way to Vienna at Dieter’s expense when he won’t even let me sleep with him. The rules of sexual engagement have been thrown out the window. I need to know why, and I know if I wait another second to ask I won’t have the courage to do it. “Dieter, why am I here?”
“Because you vandted to come.”
“Why did you ask me? Why did you pay all this money out? Why am I here?”
“You are hier because I vandt to give you ze gifdt of beautiful Vienna. It is a gifdt. A gifdt, width no expectations. Zat ist all.”
“But—”
Dieter holds up his hand. “Zat ist all. I do not vandt to talk aboudt anythingk more righdt now.”
On the third night of my Vienna trip, Dieter takes me to a gritty Eurogoth bar around the corner from St. Stephen’s Cathedral called Steinzeit (German for “stone age”). Situated in a former cheese cellar in a crumbling eighteenth-century building, Steinzeit’s walls are plastered with peeling German metal-band posters and ancient newsprint. The floor is sticky with dried beer, and the bathrooms reek of vomit. Thrashing German death-metal vibrates from two giant speakers, and most of the patrons have shaved heads and at least one metal spike running through their faces. Hardly the right setting for a romantic conversation. I’m sure Dieter chooses the place on purpose.
He orders two bottles of beer from the dirty bar and sits down. “Vee needt to have a conversation,” he shouts over the throbbing bass. The very idea of having a conversation in such a place is a joke.
I stare into my beer. I know what’s coming. Dieter has been ignoring me as much as possible for three days. He’s spent almost the entire time at his office in an ornate Second Empire–style building directly across from the Hapsburg Palace while I wander the beautiful city alone. The only real interaction we’ve had so far was a brief argument over which one of us broke a tiny, razor-thin, totally impractical glass soapdish that juts from the corner of his shower stall. (Neither of us, it turned out; his twice-weekly maid did it while cleaning.)
“Zis ist not goingk to verk out,” he shouts over the din, indicating himself and me. “Vee are too differendt. Plus I no longer wish to verk in the United States. And you vould nodt fit in hier. And you could nodt have you theater writing career hier anyway. I vould nodt take zat avay from you. Vee are nodt goingk to verk out. I hope you understandt zat.”
I go numb. I can’t
move. I just stare at the grey-green beer label and try to concentrate on how pretty the gold lettering in the center is.
“Do you have anythingk to say?” he asks.
I shake my head once. Slightly.
“All righdt. Finish your beer andt let’s go.”
I guzzle it and hiccup in time to the death-metal’s thrashing bass. Dieter is already out the door and doesn’t notice.
I think we’ll be going directly back to Dieter’s apartment, but he hails us a taxi instead. “Komme,” he says. “I know you mudst be upset. Let me take you out for a gut time.”
I’m not exactly sure what happens next. I know there’s at least one flashing discotheque, location and name unknown. There’s beer, then wine, then some kind of semifermented local drink called strumm. A lot of it. The evening comes back to me only in flashes that now seem absurd and hardly possible—especially an indelible image of more than two hundred Austrian teenagers, all dressed in black, jumping up and down in unison and singing “A RAMMA-LAMMA-LAMMA, RAMMA-LAMMA DING DONG” in heavy Germanic accents at the top of their lungs on a sparkling dance floor. (The sound just doesn’t go with the picture, like one of those old Sesame Street cartoon-puzzles that ask toddlers to pick out what doesn’t belong.) It triggers something in me, something that comes to a head once we’re back at Dieter’s central Vienna apartment around three a.m.
I am on my way over the borderline into a full-fledged, rage-filled psychotic episode. Dieter Franzl has sent me over that borderline on an all-expenses-paid first-class ticket to hell.
Everything from that point on is hazy and distorted, like the wavy, stretched images in a funhouse mirror. I’m drunk enough for the room to spin. Dieter carries me from his bedroom to the sofa-bed in a forcible demotion. I scream and thrash and throw pillows from his leather couch around. I roll around on the floor and bang into the furniture. I hurl obscenities and wake the neighbors. He slaps me across the face repeatedly in a vain attempt to stop my hysterical, shrieking, keening, wailing sobs. At some point he packs a suitcase, tells me I’m a stupid, ridiculous bitch, and stomps out of the apartment while I thrash and writhe on the sofa bed. I don’t remember exactly when or how I start crying and wailing and keening to the point that I think my insides are coming out through my mouth. I don’t remember how or when I feel myself leave my body for a time and watch the whole thing transpire from somewhere on the ceiling. It happens almost in another dimension and in slow motion.