by Greg Baxter
The lodge, in Scotland, where my mother and father honeymooned, is way up in the Highlands, pretty remote, and luxurious. It stands on a tiny little island near the shore of a lake, and long ago they built a land bridge out to it, wide enough for a narrow road. It’s at the bottom of a valley. When you arrive, by car—though some arrive by helicopter—and come down into the valley, you can usually see smoke coming out of the chimneys, or at night you can see the distant lights that make it seem as though a ship is in the water. Inside, there are numerous little rooms where fires burn, where you find soft chairs and isolation, and where you can sit and read a paper or a book for a long time and get a pot of tea served to you. The restaurant is very good. The view is nice. Most of the people who go there are older, and they have been coming for years and years and years. I don’t know how my mother and father found it. They went three times together—the honeymoon, again when Miriam and I were young, and again when I was a teenager—though we never came with them. I know they had plans to return, and after my mother got sick they contemplated going again. But she was too tired to travel. So they waited and put their faith in her recovery. A few years after she died, my father decided we ought to have regular reunions there. I knew that he would have preferred to have regular reunions at home—home was where he wanted us—but he also knew it was easier on me if he came to Scotland, and a little more likely that Miriam might come. He paid for me and my wife to come meet him one year. He invited my wife’s parents, but they couldn’t make it. He invited Miriam, but Miriam was too busy. He accepted it. The three of us had a nice time together. My father asked for the wine he and my mother drank the last time they were there—a Bordeaux that cost about seventy pounds a bottle—and we got quite drunk on that wine. We sat in one of the booths, under the red lampshades, listening to somebody play a piano, and we talked about our flat in Fulham Broadway, how we were slowly modernizing it, first the bathrooms, then the kitchen, about when we might next visit him in the States—my wife never did come with me—and if we were thinking about having children. My wife said she wanted children. I said I wanted children. I even think we decided to start trying to have children after that trip to the lodge. The dinner lasted forever. It was summer, so the evening had some light in it all the way to midnight. We were the last people in the restaurant, and afterward my father and I went for a little stroll down the land bridge and around the lakeshore. My wife went to bed. The stars came out. My father said to me, Why do you think Miriam hasn’t come? I said, You said she told you she was too busy, I guess that’s the reason. He said, Yes, still, it’s a pity. Maybe next time, I said. Yes, he said, maybe next time. Eventually we went to bed.
Leaving the airport bathroom, I am a little less tired. I must have slept, for a moment, standing up. Or else it is the effect of the spaciousness of the terminal, after fifteen minutes in a cubicle. The hunger and the nausea have passed completely. I feel almost as though I have exercised, that I have not walked out of a busy airport bathroom but from the men’s dressing room of a gym. I half expect to see Richard standing here to say hello, standing with that lean of his, which masks his sloped shoulder. Perhaps he waited for a few minutes. Perhaps he got tired of standing in a busy spot.
The terminal seems twice, or ten times, as crowded now as it did when we were sitting in front of our breakfasts. All you have to do is look around to see that there is not enough capacity and there are not enough hours in the rest of the day to get everybody out of here. We are no longer all in it together, this paralysis. The haze that was the fog is bronze now. It is the moment, now, just before it burns up, a spectacular moment. The horizon, in virtually every direction, now, is visible. Airplanes are landing, taxiing. I walk around a bit, up toward the gates near the bathrooms. There are gates on both sides. The gate areas are enormous. The names of destinations are listed on the displays by the gate numbers—Cairo, Bucharest, Madrid, Manchester, Warsaw, Moscow, Athens, London Heathrow, London Gatwick. When we land in Atlanta, the displays will show place names like Memphis, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, San Antonio, Des Moines, Chicago. I stop at the London Heathrow gate. I stand around. I watch a television with some other people, then I move, and stand around some people checking their phones, and I check my phone. I see Richard sitting with a magazine, no more than twenty feet away. He is sitting beside a woman, and the woman looks very like the woman he was married to when I knew him, but is not that woman. She has red hair and pretty brown eyes, and next to her is a child, a boy of about six or seven, who looks like Richard. I move closer and closer. The woman is reading her own magazine, and from time to time Richard stops reading his to look at hers. The woman is beautiful. Richard is handsome, more handsome than when I knew him, having acquired an extra ten pounds or so. The magazine he is pretending to read is about cycling and the magazine she is reading, and which Richard appears to prefer, is a celebrity magazine. I decide to stop watching them and say hello. And just as I move forward with intent, Richard looks up, as though he has known the whole time that I have been there. The look on his face is one of the strangest looks I have ever received. It says, This is not for you, what you see here, go away. We have not seen each other in many, many years, and I am making a face that stupidly says, Good to see you after all this time, Richard. The woman looks up. It is no longer possible to turn around and walk away, so I stick my hand out for Richard to shake. I say, Funny to meet you here. He stays sitting. The woman smiles at me. I introduce myself. She says her name is Catherine. It’s very nice to meet you, Catherine, I say. Richard says, You are looking good. I say, As are you. Catherine says, Are you flying to London? I am, I say, though it doesn’t seem like we’re going anywhere for a while. Catherine says, It’s clearing, not long now.
What has you in Germany? I ask them.
Richard says, Catherine is from Germany.
You’re German? I ask.
Yes, she says.
You have no accent, I say.
Catherine smiles. Richard yawns. I almost say, Well, sorry for bothering you, but instead I say, Well, it was nice seeing you again. You too, says Richard, then he adds, Are you here for work? No, I say, my sister lived here, and she died a few weeks ago. Your sister? he asks. That’s right, I say, her name was Miriam, she lived in Berlin for twenty years.
I’m sorry to hear that, says Richard.
Catherine says, Yes, me too.
The child looks up from the screen he is watching, but not for long.
Richard looks at Catherine and says, Mind if we go have a quick drink?
Listen for the announcements, she says, and he says, I have my phone, text me if something happens. He gives her a dry, swift kiss on the temple, then he waves at the boy by sticking his hand between the boy’s face and the screen, though the boy just moves the screen. As we walk away, Richard says, Do you have any kids? No, I say, nope, no kids.
The first bar, seven or eight gates away, does not have the atmosphere Richard desires, or else he wants to put a bit more distance between himself and Catherine and his son. We go another hundred yards and find another just like it. It is grossly overpacked, and it feels humid, tropical, like it has been raining warm beer. There is an English stag party heading home, more than a dozen men, some of them in oversized Union Jack hats, others in oversized Irish tricolor hats, and some in no hats. Frankenstein! they yell at Richard. They are flying to Manchester, not London. I can see exactly how their day has passed. At seven or eight, just hours or minutes after most of them passed out, they crawled out of their hotel beds, showered, had a greasy breakfast. They gathered quietly in the lobby, all of them pale, stinking, and ill. Some of them had to throw up. They slept in chairs and on couches in the lobby, they wore sunglasses even though it was dark, even though it was foggy. Arriving at the airport, they must have felt like dying. Security took a year off all their lives. After that, they wandered around like a lost flock, encountered a mostly empty bar and entered because somebody realized that a drink was the only
way to avoid the pain of this hangover. There are two staff behind the bar, a pale blonde girl who is serving drinks and a pale blond boy who is furiously cleaning everything. They are both wearing black button-down long-sleeve shirts. The girl’s is too tight and the boy’s is too loose. The boy looks exhausted. The girl looks traumatized. Richard starts to speak to her in English. She refuses to speak English, or she can no longer speak English, so I order. Richard gets a scotch and I take a sparkling water. The only table that is free has a puddle of beer on it, so we find a ledge along a wall and place our glasses there. Richard leans against the wall. I try not to touch anything. The smell is potent. A man from the stag grabs me around the neck and says, Oi! And his breath slithers into my breath. I think he will kiss me, on the lips, until his friend pulls him away from me.
Richard says, What are you up to these days?
I’m on my own now, started a consultancy. Twelve years now. You?
He says he left the bank and got rehired back at four times the salary as a consultant. Now he runs a consultancy with six employees. I tell him what I’ve been doing, the supermarket and various other clients, but that I’m starting up full-time work with a French aerospace firm as soon as I return to London.
Just over Richard’s sloped shoulder, I see a man from the stag—no, the stag himself—trying to kiss a woman at the bar. She will not kiss him back. This is an airport, she is telling him, and I have a husband. We cannot, of course, hear them, but this is what I imagine she has told him. This is how she gazes at him. Richard looks behind him to see what I am looking at. He turns back and says, referring to the stag party, Fucking trolls, fucking scumbags.
You’ve got a new wife, I say.
Yes, he says. But we’re not married.
She’s very pretty, I say, and the kid is good-looking.
Thanks, he says.
What happened with your ex?
Nothing, he says, we’re still together. We’ve got two kids.
For a moment I think he is joking, and I laugh, but then I see he is not joking so I grab my glass of water and pretend to drink.
Richard seems to grow very large suddenly with thoughtfulness. He says, I asked for a divorce, and she said I was insane. We see each other once or twice a month, the rest of the time I’m in Germany or the States, we have a house, let’s keep the house, let’s keep the kids in school, I do what I want, she does what she wants, I come home once or twice a month to see the kids. After Richard says this, he smiles and cheers up, and comes down to his normal size.
This works out okay?
Yes and no, he says. I mean, I don’t know how the alternatives are going. He takes a drink and says, Have you remarried?
No, no, I haven’t.
He looks into my thoughts, sees that he doesn’t want to press that question any further. Behind him, I see that the stag has stopped trying to kiss the woman, now he is just handling her, placing his hands on her stomach and back, and she seems okay with this, this seems proper. They seem to be having an ordinary, lighthearted chat now. She is pretty, with big eyes. She has a couple of kids, they are young, one is well behaved and the other is not. The husband does something creative, but it doesn’t pay the bills—he supplements this work with a regular job, but it demeans him. She stands by him, however, and believes in him, and though he has attempted to give up the creative thing many times, she demands that he stick with it. Even now, she is thinking that the man talking to her, handling her, touching her beneath the bar, where nobody can see, is a worm compared to her husband.
I never knew you had a sister, he says. What was her name again?
Miriam, I say.
I had a sister, she died when I was very young. What happened to Miriam?
She starved to death.
Richard asks me to repeat myself, so I say, It’s true.
How is that possible? Was she ill? Was she trapped in a snowstorm?
She died in her apartment in Berlin. She just stopped eating.
Anorexia.
I shrug. I don’t have another word for it.
That’s awful, he says, truly awful, I’m sorry to hear it. When was it, when did she die?
A little over three weeks ago.
It’s madness, he says, it’s unbelievable. Was it…he searched for a way to phrase it…something that surprised you?
I nod my head, because I cannot really bring myself to say it did not totally surprise me. I saw her five years ago. She was sickly thin, obviously not well, physically or otherwise, and I never bothered to check up on her after that. I said, The last time I saw her was in London, about nine years ago, and she was fine.
Nine years?
Nine years goes quick.
Richard downs his drink and says, It sure does. Then he says, One more, and he goes to the bar again. He doesn’t have to speak German or English, he just points to his glass. The woman in the corner with the stag has entered a sort of trance. It seems she is on the verge of succumbing, not out of a desire for the stag but out of indifference to the act of betrayal. When Richard comes back, I say, That’s very strange, those two. He looks. We both stare for a while. She sees us staring but she doesn’t care. The man looks over and we look away.
Richard tells me I really should think about meeting him for a chat.
About what?
Just a chat.
I say, I’m happy where I am, I really am.
Of course you are, it’s just a chat. He hands me his card.
I’m actually serious, I say.
Me too, just a chat.
We shake hands, and he walks away. I remain. I look at his card. I see that he is based in Munich as well as London. This gives me pause. But no, I don’t want to live in Munich. I put his card in my wallet. I hold my glass of water but don’t drink, and I watch the woman at the bar. She and the man are kissing softly and discreetly, looking around after each kiss, as though they have convinced themselves that they are going unnoticed. I put my glass on a ledge. I check my phone. There’s a message from Trish on it. She and my father are wondering if I’m all right. They’re at some sort of historical exhibit down the other end of the terminal.
On the last night of our journey outside Berlin—which took us up the Rhine valley, then down from Koblenz into the Ardennes and into Luxembourg—we decided to treat ourselves to a five-star hotel in Brussels. From the road, from my phone, we booked two rooms in the Radisson Blu Royal. We had a nice dinner, and after dessert my father had a cognac and went to bed. I went out. A funny thing happened to the weather during our trip. After that first cold week, the temperature shot up, the clouds disappeared, and it seemed that an early summer had arrived. When I went out, I did not even need a jacket. I met a woman. She was nice and funny. She was about fifty. She showed me a few places. She took me to her studio. We ended up back at my hotel room. When she left, she wished me a pleasant journey back to Berlin. When I was alone again, I stood naked in front of the huge closet mirrors. I do not have a full-length mirror in London, so it isn’t often I get to examine what has happened to my body. At first I tried to stand erect, tighten up, suck my stomach in. But then I relaxed. I breathed out. The days of gluttony hadn’t helped, but there was no denying that I had grown soft. I sucked in my gut. I squeezed the flesh in my chest and arms, then I flexed my muscles to see if flexing made that flesh taut. I bent over, and my gut balled up. It was made of three folds, folds that I poked and squeezed together. A wound I’d given myself the previous night opened up—it was excruciating—and started bleeding. It had been bleeding all day, actually, but only when I squeezed my gut together did the wound completely reopen. I told myself, Well, that was dumb. I had bought, at a pharmacy in Brussels, some dressings for it. I showed it to the pharmacist and he said I might need to see a doctor, and gave me some instructions for cleaning and re-dressing it. So I re-dressed it and sat on the edge of the bed, and waited. I looked at myself in the mirror while I waited, and I felt that I would never be able to exercise enough or
eat well enough to reverse the deterioration that had taken place, a deterioration that was more than physical, that was fueled not by time and biology but by memory—my body was made of everything I could remember.
It started to rain, and when the bleeding stopped at last I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself. I got my notebook out, sat on the bed, propped myself up on all the pillows, filled a few pages. I didn’t quite understand why the woman had to leave, but it would have been nice to have her stay the night, stay until breakfast, have her meet my father, surprise him. The bar where we met was full of young people. I don’t remember how we started talking, but once we did, we admitted that the place made us feel old, so we went somewhere else, had a drink, then somewhere else, and so on, until we arrived at a place that made us feel young, which was not busy, neither too dark nor too loud, and played nice music that disappeared when you spoke. Finally I got her to talk about what she did, and why she was in Brussels. She said she was a musician. She had a residency, it was EU-funded. There was so much money, she said, for artists in Brussels, but nobody wanted to come and stay here, because it was so dull and full of diplomats. I asked her if I could buy a recording of her music somewhere. She said, It’s not the kind of music you buy in a store. I used the word experimental. Oh, she said, please don’t call it that. I asked her to describe it, and she said it was not the kind of music you describe. Well, I said, I like music that is hard to describe, now I have to hear it. She said, with a tone that suggested she was trying to call my bluff, My studio is not far. But I wasn’t bluffing, so we finished our drinks, paid up, and left.