by Dennis Bock
If Holly had an opinion about Marina, she didn’t share it with me. I was still seeing her but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I stayed with her once a week and on a rare occasion, when Holly was off at her classes, she’d come home with me for an hour or two. One afternoon the phone rang. Marina was standing in the living room pulling her underwear back on, and she picked up the phone and said, “Bonjour, L’Académie de Montréal.” If it was pure reflex or an attempt at humor I don’t know. We burst out laughing, then I took the phone from her and said hello.
When the other end remained silent I knew it was Holly. Later that night I tried to read but wasn’t able to focus. My mind was going a million miles an hour.
Holly emerged from her bedroom and sat down on the sofa beside me, tucking her knees up into her chest. “You don’t even care about her,” she said. “I don’t understand you.”
I closed my book and slipped it between the cushions. “Probably not in the way you mean, anyway,” I said.
“What other way is there?”
“I feel good with her,” I said. “That counts for something.”
“You two can do that at her place. Please, not here. You’ve got your life, I know that. But please don’t do that here.”
“We usually don’t,” I said.
She looked around the apartment. It had changed little since I’d first sat here almost three years before.
“I have this strange feeling all the time,” she said. “You know when you do something and there’s only part of you that’s doing it? And the other part of you is watching it happen? You know that feeling?”
“I think so.”
“It’s like you’re trapped in a room of mirrors. Does that make any sense? Or am I just losing my mind?” She smiled a heartbroken, confused smile.
“I don’t think you’re losing your mind.”
“I hope getting old doesn’t mean being this fucked up the rest of your life.”
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t,” I said.
“Who I used to be, I think about that person now. I was such a kid. I can’t stand thinking about her.”
“I thought she was nice,” I said. “She was smart. I liked listening to her talk. You made me think about things I’d never really thought about before I met you.”
“I guess I should’ve learned something from reading all those stupid German novels.”
“Last winter was pretty horrible,” I said.
“I’m tired of feeling like shit. That’s one thing I’m sure of.” She looked around the apartment again, then stared at her hands for what seemed like a long time. “I’m probably the most aware person there ever was. I’m not complimenting myself, believe me. It’s something I hate—being aware of everything you do at all times isn’t exactly a party.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“My mind’s always going. Maybe I’m just a big fat solipsist or something. I don’t know if you understand what I’m talking about.”
“I think we all are in some way.”
“I haven’t known anything else since Miles died. And then today happens. I guess I felt shock. For the first time in so long it was just me, and I wasn’t just thinking about how sad I was. I wasn’t watching myself being miserable. You know what it was that did it?”
“I’d like to know,” I said.
“It was that laughing on the other end of the line. How it made me feel. I heard your voice laughing at me.”
“I feel terrible about that.”
“I know you do. But that’s not why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you this because that laughing made me jealous. It made me think about us.” She looked up at me. “I guess that’s surprising to you.”
“It is, a bit,” I said.
She leaned forward and kissed me, and in a flash of heat the greyness inside me disappeared.
Every fiber in my body pounded with hope for the future. Feeling my spirits lift, I touched her cheek. She didn’t stop my hands when I tried to open her shirt and jeans. We made love on the floor beside that couch I’d been sleeping on, where I’d dreamed of her, and then I lifted her into my arms and carried her into her bedroom and made love to her again. My heart filled with joy. I had thought about making love to Holly hundreds of times, what she would look like naked, what we would do together, if she would do certain things that I asked her, but my fantasies were nothing compared with the perfect intimacy we felt together.
In the middle of the night she left the bed. Sleeping lightly, I reached over and found her side was empty. I heard the bathroom door close. A minute later the toilet flushed, but she didn’t come back.
“Are you okay?” I said, standing outside the bathroom door feeling confused and tired but still exhilarated. What we’d just done had solved everything, I thought. Clarified everything. Put everything else behind us. What we’d shared was natural and perfect and beautiful. When I’d held her in my arms, I knew nothing better had ever happened in my life, yet now I felt worried and full of regret. I pushed the door open. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, still naked, holding her hands to her face.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s happening to me.”
Holly took me back into her bed the following night. Trembling with excitement, we made love with even more intensity than we had the evening before. But afterward the same melancholy took hold. She became distant, worried, then apologetic. It wasn’t as bad and didn’t last as long this time. Still, it was terrible to watch. She was in pain, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I couldn’t understand how something as great as what we did and felt together could cause her to roll back into herself like this.
The fear and depression that overtook her after we made love seemed to diminish as time went on. I thought she was beating whatever it was that plagued her. Then one night I woke up in the dark, and again I was alone in bed. The covers were torn up, her pillow on the floor. She was in the living room sitting in front of the turntable wearing a pair of headphones. The room was completely dark but for the pale blue glow of the stereo lights playing on the side of her face, her head bobbing slightly to something I couldn’t hear. I wondered then what it must have felt like to be loved as deeply as she had loved Miles.
It happened again the next night, and then the night after that. It became a regular occurrence, a ghostly ritual. I’d wake up and feel the empty space beside me. I’d stand in the bedroom doorway and watch her listening to music in the dark. Finally I lost count of how many times I saw this. I never interrupted her. I knew she was with him, thinking of him, trying to bring him back. In the morning it was always the Waterboys record sitting on the turntable, the one we’d been listening to the night Miles died. He was still here in that apartment with us. It took finding Holly out there every night for me to really understand that.
• • •
That we were still together, in some fashion, more than a year after his death, and possibly had a shot at being happy and sharing a life—wasn’t that hopeful, and even what he might have wanted? Nothing we did could be ugly or disrespectful. We were the two people he loved most. I didn’t think he’d want to take the chance of happiness away from us. It took a few months, but eventually we were able to lie in bed together after making love and talk about ourselves as a couple without feeling the world was about to crash down on our heads.
Miles’s name didn’t come up when Holly first started talking about going abroad for her master’s thesis. She saw opportunities in West Germany. We both knew we would always associate Montreal with our friend’s death. The thought of leaving grew stronger as we both began to see that this city would always hold that memory. He was everywhere we looked, in the streets, the cafés, in that small apartment the three of us had shared. He was a shadow we needed to outrun.
At night when I got home from teaching, I’d find Holly reading and curled up on the couch in her pajamas, with a pencil and an open notepad on the co
ffee table. As I threw together something to eat she’d read aloud in German. I understood nothing at all of that language, but I listened, in love with her voice and the expressions that moved over her face, and often wondered when the time would come when our friend would finally move off and leave us alone together.
• • •
We flew to West Berlin in the fall of 1987 and lived in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up. The window in our living room looked down on the narrow street. There was a student bar down there, and every morning I saw a little round lady in a blue frock and Adidas running shoes sweeping the sidewalk out front. We went in there at night and watched the crowds of students and drank beer from enormous bottles. At each table there seemed to be a subject of great importance under discussion. The young men wore Palestinian scarves wrapped around their necks and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and handed around flyers that called attention to their favorite causes.
Finally, after a few weeks, we were waved over to join one of these roundtables and provide the North American perspective. Eager faces leaned forward, but I had no positions or arguments on the matters at hand. I couldn’t talk about the arms race. I held no firm notions on the Sandinistas or the PLO or the Solidarity Movement in Poland’s dockyards. I was unable to stake a claim on one side or the other. It wasn’t indifference that bogged me down but an appreciation of the baffling complexity. Always present in my mind, if never clearly discernible, were the strands of truth and the limitless contingencies that spun out from the centre of whatever issue lay before us. At the heart of certainty there was danger, ideology, blindness. One evening I attempted to share this interpretation with three students who quickly pointed out the moral cowardice of such an approach and drew parallels to Swiss neutrality and the complacency of the German citizenry in the lead-up to the war. I tried to articulate my position but was not invited to participate again.
Holly spent her days up at the university working on her thesis. Her adviser was a serious old gentleman from Dresden named Schreiber, who taught a course on modern German philosophy. She introduced us on a foggy afternoon in November.
“You are an English teacher at a record company here?” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
A few weeks after we arrived, I’d been taken on by a small language academy that had contracts with a number of large corporations. One of them was a multinational recording company. After two weeks one of my students, the ranking executive, pulled me aside and proposed that we dump the middleman. He paid less money, and I made more.
“And do you like Berlin?” Holly’s professor asked. His bottom lip was quivering slightly, and he held a battered old briefcase in his right hand. He was probably close to seventy years old.
“It’s an exciting city,” I said. “Sure, I do.”
“Berlin is the new Galápagos,” he said. “It is an island populated by a fascinating new species of German.”
I fell in love with the way Germans spoke to me in my own tongue. There was an almost total absence of idioms and clichés in the English I heard there, and they couldn’t rely on partially formed thoughts or vaguely expressed ideas like native speakers could. I’d noticed this at the bars and parties Holly and I went to when our nights ended in conversation about the Wall or the Green Party or Ronald Reagan, and I found myself as dazzled by the clarity of their expressions as I was hesitant to accept the absolutism of their declarations.
I went to the record company four days a week and spent most of the three hours I billed them for daily talking with my students’ secretaries. The executives were hardly ever around. I read magazines and newspapers and sipped from my bottle of Spezi until one of them waved me into his office to walk him through some phrasal verbs until something more interesting came up. The one who needed the most help was a Parisian named Marcel, and as outsiders we enjoyed pointing out to each other the peculiarities of the Germanic character.
Rolf, the man who had hired me, was forty-seven years old and liked to gaze out his office window and watch the parking lot below as he talked to me, in English, about his life. He was married and had two children, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with prostitutes as often as he could. He told me this without compunction, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t share my prostitute story, which was nothing I was proud of. When I thought back on that night, I felt uncomfortable and awkward that I’d stupidly let myself get pulled into a situation where I felt obligated, even pressured, to play along. Rolf, though, was proud of the number of hookers he’d had sex with. He traveled once or twice a month and came home with stories of call girls crawling all over him at the Regency or the Groucho Club or some anonymous Marriott. He was a short man with silver hair and spoke explicitly about the sexual acts he’d performed on his most recent trip, whether to Hamburg, New York or Amsterdam. He didn’t recount these stories with any sense of titillation or sexual energy as far as I could tell, more like a frat boy bragging about the number of goldfish he’d managed to swallow live.
When I wasn’t sitting with one of my three execs or chatting up the secretaries, I claimed a cafeteria table by the windows on the second floor and took a stumbling swing at learning a bit of German. Most of the people I worked with spoke English well enough that I didn’t have to extend myself, but the staff here was different. They had very little English, so to this day my best German is located in the practical nouns and verbs used in a cafeteria. When not engaged in halting conversations, I’d sit there and watch the attendant in a small glass-and-aluminum station at the far end of the parking lot or read or sketch something, all the while thinking that trying to learn a new language was like climbing up a mountain into a rock slide.
The parking attendant was a Turkish fellow named Gorkhan, whose German seemed to be very good. He’d been in the country for sixteen years, raising and lowering the red-and-white barrier that blocked traffic access to all but paid employees and registered visitors. A man trapped in a glass box all day long these days will spend his shift talking on a cell phone, but not then. Gorkhan was an island. He referred to his outpost as Checkpoint Charlie.
One night I woke up and saw Holly standing at our bedroom window holding a piece of paper in her hand, a letter, I thought. In the morning I found it under her pillow. It was the Ezra Pound poem Miles had taped up on the living room wall back in Montreal. That’s when I began to understand she could never leave that place—not with my presence constantly reminding her of what we’d both lost. I was the problem. With me at her side she could never break the pattern of her grieving. Whenever she looked at me, she remembered our friend and the life they’d had together. I think I knew what I needed to do well before admitting it to myself. What it meant horrified me. I did all I could to push it aside, to wait, to come up with excuses. But I was always drawn back to the same conclusion. I had to leave. I was in love with Holly and knew I would be forever. But that love would never be as strong as the sadness that ruled her.
We were standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate when I told her I had to leave. But I didn’t give her the real reason. I was restless, I said. I was just going through something.
“You’re a strange boy,” she said.
A light snow was falling around us, the flakes melting in her hair and against her face.
“Sicily, maybe. Or Morocco.”
“My head’s all over the place, but you know I love you,” she said. “You know I want to be with you.”
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe Tunisia. I’d go to Tunisia if I were you.”
“Okay. I’ll go there.”
“And when you come back, I’d marry me if I were you.”
“I’d marry you, too,” I said.
“Tunisia.”
“I don’t even know what language they speak there.”
“Tunisian?” she said.
“It’s probably as good a place as any to dig up those essential moral
dictates in life.”
She pinched my arm and smiled. “I’m never going to live that one down, am I?”
The Kantian philosophy she’d rolled out for me at the Montreal diner was still something I teased her about every once in a while. But it was also something that had started to make a lot of sense to me.
I put my hands on her face and kissed her. “I’ll probably be back in no time,” I said.
Six
It was a cowardly way of ending it. I didn’t tell her I could never come back, since I could hardly believe it myself. So there she waited while I stepped into the current of life and was swept away from her until we met again that day years later in Toronto. I thought about her each and every day but didn’t call her. That was the hell of it. I was the problem, and the farther away I kept myself, the better off she’d be. My love for Holly itself became the shadow we needed to outrun.
It was mid-March 1988, the days short and cold and miserable. I spent time in Amsterdam and Paris writing postcards I didn’t send, drank a lot of cheap wine and finally moved along through a series of small Dutch towns. In one of them I met a med student in a bar who said he was leaving for the Costa Brava, where he’d cram for finals with friends for ten days. He said he had room for a passenger if I helped him out with gas money. The next morning we met in the town square, with his car loaded for the trip. We talked nonstop as we drove. I was in love with a girl who could never be happy with me, I told him, because I reminded her of a sad time in her life. Near the end of our trip he asked where I was staying. The plan was to sleep rough in a bus station or park, I said, since that’s what I’d been doing for weeks. He told me I’d get robbed if I didn’t get killed first.