Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  Eve is dead. You killed her with your cold neglect. Lilith rose to take her place. Lilith with her scorching anger, her savage wings. Gustav wept and kissed her hands until she held him, rocking him in her arms and weeping with him. Lilith with her raw, open heart.

  Nothing between them could ever be the same. Gustav seemed to be frozen in a state of shock, so terrified Alma would abandon him that he couldn’t bear to let her out of his sight. She had to wait until he was in the bath before she could pen a frantic note to Walter and beg Käthe to mail it for her.

  How dare you expose me in this way? Do you want my husband to lose all trust, all faith in me? Do not under any circumstances come to Trenkerhof!

  Late that night, a sickening crash awakened Alma from her fitful sleep. Scrambling out of bed, she found her husband collapsed on the floor.

  “Oh, Gustav. It’s your heart.”

  Kneeling beside his body, she pressed her hand to his neck to feel his pulse. She helped him to his bed, wrapped him in blankets, gave him his medicine, sponged his brow and chest. She cradled him to her breast.

  “Almschi,” he said, in a choking voice. “I want to make you happy. Please tell me it’s not too late.”

  When he gazed into her eyes, she felt borne up on a love so infinite that it staggered her. How is it that Gustav and I seem to float between heaven and hell and back again?

  A week passed before Gustav could return to his composing hut and attempt to work. Taking advantage of this reprieve, Alma cycled off to the village in an attempt to clear her head—and see if there were any letters from Walter at the post office. She had reached the bridge over the River Rienz when a figure stepped in her path. The shock nearly sent her tumbling off her bicycle.

  “Alma!”

  Walter, his beautiful face eclipsing the sun. He kissed her with all the stored-up longing of their two-week separation. She kissed him back, her body burning for his, before she came to her senses and pushed him away.

  “Walter, I told you not to come. I forbade it.”

  “But I was so worried about you now that your husband knows about us.”

  “Thanks to you!” she hissed.

  Walter reached for her again, but she wriggled out of his grasp, tearing her sleeve. She cycled back to Trenkerhof as fast as she could. Please let Gustav be in his composing hut, she hoped and prayed. She wanted to flee inside the house and pretend this meeting with Walter simply hadn’t happened. But Gustav was sitting in the garden, as though anxiously awaiting her return.

  “Almschi, what happened?” He looked deeply disturbed. “Your blouse is torn.”

  There was no point in lying. “Walter was hiding under the bridge. I swear I told him not to come!”

  Gustav went white. Then his mouth firmed in resolve. “I’ll fetch him for you.”

  “Gustav, no!”

  But he had already set off in his impossibly fast march that she had never been able to keep up with.

  At sunset Alma looked out her bedroom window to see the two men walking up the lane. Gustav led the way while Walter trailed in his wake. What had they been discussing for so long?

  She reared away from the window and slumped on the edge of her bed, her shaking hands clamped between her knees. This was purgatory. Why had Walter insisted on coming, destroying her fragile peace with Gustav?

  Her door opened and her husband walked in. She hadn’t seen him looking so devastated since they lost Putzi.

  “Gropius has asked me for your hand,” he said gravely. “I told him the decision is yours. He’s downstairs waiting for your answer.”

  Deaf to her protests, Gustav took her arm and led her down to the salon, where Walter stood at attention, as tall and straight as a fir tree. Gustav left them alone.

  “Walter, this is madness,” she whispered. “I begged you to wait.”

  “Alma, hear me out,” he said boldly. “The time for deception is over. You have to make up your mind. I’ve already made my choice.” He seized her and kissed her until she kissed him back, her body softening in his embrace. “I can give you a long happy future. You think you’re doing your husband a kindness by staying with him? Can’t you see how tortured he is now that he knows you’re in love with me? Don’t ask me to wait until the poor man is dead before I can love you in the open.”

  “Hush! He’ll hear you!”

  The ceiling creaked with Gustav’s footfalls as he paced upstairs. There followed a silence that filled Alma with dread. Leaving Walter, she flew up to Gustav’s study. Seated at his desk, her husband was reading the Old Testament by the light of two guttering candles that threw ghostly shadows against the wooden walls.

  Gustav looked up at her and spoke in his most controlled voice. “Alma, the time has come to make your choice. Whatever you decide will be right. And final.”

  He closed the Bible, took her right hand, and pressed her palm on the leather cover. Alma quailed. So it was down to this. If she chose Walter, it would be no bid for freedom, no thrilling existence as a New Woman. She would merely pass from one man’s possession into another’s. Make your choice? She wanted to scream that this was no choice. I love both men. I will be owned by neither of them.

  “I’ll give him my decision,” she told Gustav. “Now let me go.”

  He slowly released her hand. A hollow ringing filled her ears as she walked down the stairs to the salon. When she stepped toward Walter, he seemed to radiate hope and assurance, opening his arms wide. She entered his embrace and kissed him until he pulled away.

  “Well?” he asked breathlessly. “Are you mine?”

  She smiled tenderly and traced the perfect curve of his lips. Oh, to have a child with him. My beautiful young lover who raised me from the dead.

  “I can’t leave him, Walter,” she said quietly. “It would kill him. You know he has a heart condition.” The love Gustav and I share is so unfathomable, I couldn’t leave him even if he were hale and hearty.

  “But you love me!”

  “I love you,” she whispered, wanting him more than she ever had. “But we must wait. If you want to be with me, we will find a way. But no more surprise visits, or else I’ll have nothing more to do with you.”

  Whatever you decide will be right. And final. I have decided that from this moment onward I shall be my own woman.

  Not giving Walter a chance to argue, Alma called Gustav down. Her husband lit a lantern and escorted her lover back to the main road. Walter could still catch the late train to Graz. The silent house creaked and settled, and Alma’s breath misted the window as she watched the departing lantern until the night swallowed its light. Men make the rules and we break them so we don’t go mad.

  When Gustav returned, they fell into each other’s arms. His face was transfigured, an ecstasy of love that Alma had been yearning for all their married life.

  42

  “How could I be so blind that I nearly lost you, Almschi?” Gustav held her as though he were terrified she might vanish. As though she would bolt out the door after her departed lover. His confrontation with Walter had shaken him to his depths.

  It tore Alma’s heart to see him like this. “Come, love,” she whispered, leading him to her bed.

  But when she sought to offer him the ultimate proof of her devotion, Gustav couldn’t rise to the occasion no matter how she tried to inflame him. He wept in shame and misgiving, as if he understood only too well what had drawn her to a younger man.

  Alma awakened in the morning to find him gone. There was only his note on her pillow.

  I am possessed of dark spirits. Come and exorcise them. Here I lie prostrate and await you. May I still hope for salvation or am I damned?

  Her heart seizing, Alma dashed to his composing hut. She found him sobbing facedown on the floor, the draft pages of his Tenth Symphony scattered around him.

  “Gustl.” She held his head to her breast. “Darling, we can begin again. We can be happy.”

  But could they? Once Alma had borne on her shoulders al
l the unspoken pain of their marriage, that load that had finally toppled her. Now that she had thrown off that yoke it appeared her former nerve sickness had descended on Gustav.

  “Play from your new symphony. Please, darling.”

  She guided him to the piano. Through every crisis, his music had been his refuge. Gathering the pages of his Tenth off the floor, she sought to arrange them in their proper order. But she shook to read the words he had scrawled across the score.

  To live for you, to die for you, Almschi.

  The devil is dancing with me.

  After much prevarication, Gustav arranged to consult Dr. Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland.

  What had distressed her husband most, Alma wondered, after seeing him off at the station. Encountering Walter, his rival? Or confronting the raw, wild, untamable side of her, the wife he thought he knew? The thought that she had unhinged him left her paralyzed. Yet there was no going back to the woman she used to be. What had happened to her this summer was nothing short of an awakening. Now Gustav would have to overcome his shock of living with a woman who was no longer asleep.

  In Gustav’s absence, Alma missed Walter more than ever despite having sent him on his way. His letters still reached her via general delivery. In her confusion and despair, she couldn’t keep herself from pouring out her yearning to him. In my heart, I am with you so intensely, you must surely feel it, she wrote. I long for the day when we can live in the open, with nothing to separate us but sleep.

  Though Alma wrote to Walter, at night she dreamed only of Gustav. Her husband was lost and she had to find him. After a long search, she came to a cottage in an overgrown garden. When she entered the dwelling, she discovered a narrow elevator that took her many stories high. I will ascend to your heights at last, my love. She emerged in an apartment where she had never been before, flooded with dazzling light. There was her husband’s grand piano but no sign of Gustav. She called out his name until he appeared from another room. “Almschi!” he cried. “My madly beloved Almschi!” His play of expressions—from earnest to angry to indifferent to adoring—was clearer than it had ever been.

  When Gustav arrived back from Holland, he seemed electrified, as if he, too, had suddenly been jolted out of an eight-year slumber. The two of them set off on a long walk to discuss the many revelations he had gleaned from his four-hour session with Dr. Freud.

  “Normally, psychoanalysis takes years,” Gustav told her. “But Freud found the seed of my troubles in one afternoon. The problem isn’t that I’m too old for you, as I feared. Freud said my age is part of what attracted you. You lost your father when you were only thirteen, just on the cusp of adolescence. You idolized him and unconsciously sought an older man to replace him.”

  These words gave Alma pause. She stooped to pick an alpine aster and twirl it in her fingers. Yes, Papa was the colossus around which her childhood had revolved, and she had never recovered from the loss of him.

  “It’s true,” she said, tucking the delicate purple flower into the buttonhole of Gustav’s waistcoat. “I wanted a man who was wiser than I was. Someone brilliant and accomplished. A man I could look up to. But what made you choose me, Gustav?”

  Why, she wondered, hadn’t he married the kind of woman his friends would have considered worthy of him. Someone closer to his own age and not the least bit flirtatious. Someone who loved solitude as much as he, who could happily share his ascetic existence.

  Gustav seemed evasive, almost embarrassed. Looking away from her, he squinted into the blinding sun, reminding Alma of her dream of finding him in that light-filled room.

  “Freud told me I have a mother fixation—a Holy Mary complex. I hated and feared my father, but I loved my mother above all else. Freud says that I look for her in every woman. She was careworn and ill. She limped and suffered under my father’s temper. He beat her, Almschi.” Gustav took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Freud said that unconsciously I wanted you to suffer as she had. To turn you into her.”

  Alma stiffened, twisting away from him.

  “Then when you did suffer—from childbirth and the miscarriages—I was frightened and couldn’t face it. It only reminded me of how Mama died and abandoned me.”

  “The summer you finished the Sixth Symphony,” Alma said. “Do you remember how you told me that if I was suddenly disfigured by some disease like smallpox—if I was too ugly for any other man to look at—then at last you could show me how you loved me?” Her stomach turned at the bitter memory. Old wounds ache.

  “But I finally understand how and why I wronged you.” Gustav took her hands. His face was flushed in love, as though the clock had turned back nine years and she was still Alma Schindler, the girl he had lost his heart to. “All I want is to make you happy. To win back your love. Freud was right. You’re not just my wife. I’ve been utterly dependent on you all these years. You’re the center of my universe. My light.”

  They embraced, his heart beating its irregular rhythm against hers.

  “She loves me,” he whispered in her ear. “These words are my life’s essence. If I can no longer speak them, I’m dead.”

  Finding a secluded spot in the high meadow, they lay together in the grass. Alma soon discovered that Freud had helped Gustav recover more than repressed memories. Never before had he made love with her like this, with such tender urgency, loving the hurt away until every part of her glowed. Yes, there’s such a thing as absolute rapture. As in her dream of the elevator, they ascended to the very heights.

  The following weeks were like the honeymoon they never had. Every night they slept in each other’s arms. Gustav wrote love poetry for Alma.

  Breath of my life,

  My lyre-play,

  My storm song,

  You wondrous being!

  Yet nothing prepared Alma for the thunderbolt of returning from a walk with Gucki to hear the music ringing from Gustav’s composing hut. Not his new symphony. Not his music at all. But hers. Nearly nine years after he had forbidden her to compose without even having taken a serious look at her work, he was playing her songs.

  At first, she froze, petrified. Then she quaked, torn between anger and shame. How had he even laid his hands on her music folder that she’d taken such pains to conceal from him? It felt like a violation. An act of treason against their newfound love. Her music was the most profound, most vulnerable part of herself. The mirror of her soul. Its loss was her deepest wound.

  Alma stormed off to the hut. But when Gustav saw her in the open doorway, he smiled at her with such joy that she couldn’t say a word.

  “Almschi, what have I done?” he asked, drawing her down beside him on the piano bench. “These songs are good. They’re excellent!”

  She could not overcome the sheer unreality of seeing her song “Laue Sommernacht” on her husband’s piano. Of hearing him play and sing it for her with such feeling.

  Upon a mild summer night, beneath a starless sky

  in the wide woods, we were searching in the dark

  and we found each other.

  We found each other

  in the wide woods, in the starless night.

  Our entire life we only groped along,

  only seeking, until you, my love,

  shone in your darkness!

  Alma kept shaking her head, still not trusting that the forced silence of her music had ended. I was a girl when I wrote this. My poor forgotten music.

  “It’s so atmospheric,” Gustav said. “You approach the text with such sensitivity. Love shimmers in every note. It reveals your essence, Almschi.”

  “Don’t patronize me!” After all they had been through, Gustav’s condescension would be more than she could bear. How poor and half-formed her work was compared to his.

  “I’m not.” He wrapped his arms around her. “It’s true your songs could benefit from polishing to bring them to fruition, but you have a gift. You make such bold tonal experiments.” He began to leaf through her other scores. “Some of this rem
inds me of Schoenberg’s early work. Let me play this one.”

  He selected her song “Ich wandle unter Blumen.”

  “Let me play it,” Alma said, with an upsurge of possessiveness.

  Miracle of miracles, she was playing her music for Gustav in his composing hut during his precious summer vacation when he should have been working on his Tenth Symphony.

  “I wandered among flowers,” she sang, “and blossomed with them.”

  To think that this was the same song she had played eleven years ago, at the age of nineteen, in the Venice hotel the day Klimt had given her her first kiss. All the promise and possibility of her lost youth came flooding back.

  “Exquisite,” Gustav said. “So full of longing. Let’s hear another one, Almschi.”

  “But why now?” she asked him, struggling not to cry. “After nine years?” Why had he put both of them through all this suffering?

  “Because I was wrong. God, how blind and selfish I was.”

  Had he truly gained such insight from a single visit with Freud, Alma wondered. It seemed almost too good to be true. Can I trust this?

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” he said, “until you start composing again. This one is sublime.” He reached for her song “Die stille Stadt.” “Let’s choose five lieder to work on. We’ll have them published, along with my Eighth.”

  “You’re serious?” Alma thought the walls of the composing hut would start to spin.

  “Once you let Alex be your mentor. Now won’t you give me a chance, Almschi?” She heard a plaintive catch in his voice, as though he were haunted by both his past mistakes and the fear that he had lost her love and might never win it back. “I want to devote the rest of our life together to encouraging your work.”