Breathless

by Anne Sward

  “Come home and sneak the wedding ring on again, just often enough to keep up appearances. They don’t believe that we know they’re separated, isn’t that touching?”

  He is the last shoot on some noble old tree, as high-class as he is poor. There’s money in the family even if he doesn’t think he has an adequate share of it. He has grown up in his brothers’ cast-off clothes, and when he was a teenager his father was so stingy that Yoel was obliged to seduce his mother’s friends for pocket money. He didn’t tell me that, but he told his ex-girlfriend, who passed it on to me on one of her nighttime get-togethers in his kitchen. A middle-class objection to spoiling their children—you have to have a certain hunger to get anywhere in this world. Yoel’s mama wants her sons to get as far as possible. So that she doesn’t have to look at them, is his guess.

  My mama didn’t want me to get anywhere at all. All the others had gone. I try not to think about it—the reason—it is like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, where most of the pieces are missing; you will go mad if you try to do it. The only thing I know for certain is that it all began when Papa left. That piece of the puzzle was in the middle, and even though the family was large, it only needed one person to disappear for it no longer to be whole.

  I don’t call her. Don’t even open her letters. Reply to them unread. I miss you too, I write. But I can’t go home, I can’t cope with the feeling I would have standing in front of Lukas, even in my head. We met and parted against a backdrop of fire. Perhaps it meant nothing, but behind my eyes when I am asleep it is still burning, and in my dreams Mama calls and tells me that Lukas walked straight into the fire when I went. He left me a farewell letter, she says, but when she tried to read it the ink was smeared, completely illegible.

  “But you’ll definitely know what it said, Lo.” I slam down the receiver as if it has burned me. Then I wake up.

  I have begun to think like Yoel, mañana, I will do it tomorrow, anything less important than sex can wait until tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. With every day that passes it becomes more and more impossible to contact Lukas. Likewise to call home, and the letters Mama sends I leave unopened in a pile.

  “Isn’t it better just to throw them straight out?” Yoel asks. He thinks it’s reproach I’m afraid of, but it’s not that.

  In Mexico there’s a volcanic mountain that hasn’t erupted for three hundred years, and yet clouds of smoke can still be seen over the snow-clad peak. When I heard about that I thought of him, how sometimes time is of no consequence. I’d like to live in Mexico. I hear it’s so lovely. If you don’t love too much you don’t love enough. Words, so easy to say.

  What happened when I left with Yoel must have felt to Lukas like being overtaken in the last yards of a marathon. He had always expected me to race him at growing. He was an adult, but he couldn’t live as an adult, must have felt castrated, seen the change in my face, sensed the teenage smell. To be starving and recognize the smell of something you want to have.

  I know it’s only words, but perhaps you have to stop trying to forget, so that one day you notice that it has worn off by itself, the cloud of smoke no longer hovering above the volcano.

  —

  It’s hard to say what ruthlessness is, what insensitivity is and what just pure thoughtlessness is. Yoel’s former girlfriend will never get away with it, I think, as she tells me how she does what she will with people to get what she wants. But the world around her seems infinitely forgiving. She does all right every time and Yoel does too.

  When she looks at me her eye moves straight on, as if my face bores her.

  “Don’t take it so seriously. Look on it as entertainment,” Yoel tells me, when she has finally gone. Entertainment? Is that really all she is for him? “You’re just jealous,” he teases me. Jealous? Never. Me? What is there to be jealous of? Well, yes, for that matter I am jealous of the way she gets him to look at her—it’s the only time he shows a hint of vulnerability. At some time she has hurt him deeply and he knows that she can do it again.

  While she leans against him and laughs at something only they understand, from the corner of one eye she looks at me: I could seduce him . . . if only you were worth the effort, if only it didn’t mean I would have to touch him . . .

  Why does she never touch anyone, I ask Yoel when at length she’s gone. “Yes, why?”

  He hesitates. “I don’t know, because she thinks it’s a waste of herself, probably.”

  When Yoel thinks I have gone to sleep he satisfies himself.

  “Masturbation . . .” he says at breakfast.

  “Yes?” I ask and hand him the deli liver pâté flecked with truffles like black demon eyes.

  “. . . comes from the word manus, meaning hand, and stuprare, meaning violate or defile.”

  “Mm, I know.” Have started answering like this when he tries to enlighten me about the big world. It’s starting to be tiresome. I have natural talent, all tuition is superfluous. And sex isn’t as revolutionary as I thought it would be—certainly not more than staying awake all night with Lukas or swimming underwater with him the length of the lake. It’s pleasant, it keeps your mind off other matters, you want to do it again, but that is the case with so many things. Perhaps because it’s not quite as satisfying as you would like it to be.

  It takes most of the daytime for Yoel to overcome his reluctance to grapple with his dissertation. Hungarian migration from the turn of the century to the Velvet Revolution. It’s difficult not to be fascinated by his family’s checkered past, twisting its way like a red thread though European and American history. My own family’s history has looked the same generation after generation. If you know where you come from, perhaps it’s easier to know where you’re going. Was that why Lukas always seemed so lost? If you have no memory of a past you cannot imagine a future either.

  Leaving everything behind you, emigrating like Yoel’s relatives, the feeling of freedom imbued with guilt. A black vein running right through the relief—that you can actually leave . . . just go. Yet at the same time you have to live, perhaps forever, with the sense that you’re a deserter.

  —

  He stays long enough to teach me how to handle the remote control for all the unnecessary electrical appliances, to make love to me until even that becomes a part of the everyday, and then he goes. The first trip is to Berlin and Budapest, where he has a parent in each city and an acute financial interest in a reconciliation with them. I don’t know what I’m going to do in the flat. At home there were always jobs to be done, but here in the apartment there’s nothing to occupy me.

  The whole of the first night I spend in front of the television. The picture changes with the level of my intoxication. I have opened one of Yoel’s expensive bottles and empty it slowly. Marsupials. Tasmanian devils. Completely normal kangaroos. Remarkable creatures with a highly unusual reproductive pattern . . . While other mammals carry their young until they are fully developed, the marsupial’s babies are born soon after fertilization. I sit on the floor in front of the sofa with my glass of wine. Yoel has taught me to sit on the floor. It was unthinkable at home, where the floor was something you touched only with your foot.

  I edge nearer to the television screen and watch the embryonic little baby crawl out of its mother’s womb, creep blindly through her fur to reach the pouch. This particular female kangaroo is strangely like my own mama, more and more like her the more I stare at her. When the baby is born it’s so small it consists of only a mouth and a pair of front legs. Under its own power it moves from the vagina to the nipple, latches on, and starts to suck. The nipple expands to become firmly clamped inside the mouth, and hanging there the baby accompanies the mother wherever she goes, the deep voice-over explains. Only after a few months have its jaws developed sufficiently for it to open its mouth and let go.

  Sooner or later you have to crawl away from the great mother animal with her enfolding oxygen-defi
cient love-pouch. That’s when you meet the other type, the ones like Yoel.

  —

  My life is entering a new phase. For the first time I am alone, all by myself, solo. One brief jaunt is followed by another: Yoel has been to see a friend in New York, Yoel has been to see a brother in Paris, a girlfriend in Copenhagen, a cousin in Zakopane. The apartment is full of suitcases that haven’t been unpacked, because he doesn’t like to dig around in the past. Instead of being reminded of old journeys, he wants to plan new ones.

  I stop missing him, and he doesn’t seem to miss me very much either, as the date of his homecoming is always being postponed, without further explanation, until I begin to feel quite used to the solitude. The most beautiful place on earth is your collarbone, he said not so long ago. As if he had been in every place, in every woman. The skin under your arm . . . if I had to choose something to take with me to a desert island. Silky smooth words about chiseled collarbones and soft skin. He slid inside me as if I were an icy street, as if it were never his intention, a pleasing mistake, that’s all. And slid out just as easily.

  However much I may dislike his former girlfriend and her way of marching right through his life as if she owned it, I find that I have taken one piece of advice from her for getting along in all situations: high heels. The higher the better. I buy a pair of sky-high calfskin boots secondhand and walk around in them all day in the apartment until Yoel comes out with:

  “You look different. Have you had your hair cut? No . . . wait—have you lost weight? You have, haven’t you?” He studies me as he sits fiddling with his newly purchased stereo. “It suits you. Not that you needed it, but you look fucking great.”

  “What about you, then?” I ask coolly, gripped with a sudden desire to deflate his self-regard. “Shouldn’t you do something too . . .”

  It doesn’t work. His belief in himself is not shaken so easily. He stands up, slowly moves in, and then goes for the attack.

  Make love. With a hungry Yoel on top of me. With the sky-high boots on. Afterward I try to watch Breathless with him, but he falls asleep in the middle of the long bedroom scene that is my favorite. You know that they have sex, but you never see it. They make love in French, with their mouths, speaking, almost without touching each other at all. Jean Seberg, cool and playful, intense and unapproachable, a mystery, like cats who allow themselves to be petted and tormented at the same time. I sit there with Yoel beside me, knocked out, and I know all the lines by heart without having anyone to play opposite:

  “You don’t even know how to apply your lipstick. It looks terrible,” he would say.

  “Say what you like, I don’t care. I’ll put all this in my book.”

  “What book?”

  “I’m writing a novel.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, why not me? Stop it—what are you doing . . . ?”

  “Taking off your top.”

  “Not now.”

  “You’re a bloody pain.”

  “Do you know William Faulkner?”

  “No, who’s he? Someone you slept with?”

  “No way, José . . .”

  “To hell with him then. Take off your top.”

  “He’s one of my favorite writers. Have you read The Wild Palms?”

  “Take off your top, I said.”

  “Listen. The last sentence is beautiful . . . ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’ Which would you choose?”

  “Let me see your toes. Toes are important in a woman. Don’t laugh.”

  “Which would you choose?”

  “Grief’s stupid. I’d choose nothing. It’s not better, but grief’s a compromise. I want all or nothing.”

  I keep my boots on until I tire of them and of Yoel’s compliments. Take them back to the same secondhand shop and go to the hairdresser’s, ask for a super-short Jean Seberg style. The hairdresser doesn’t know what that is, but I have a picture from the scene where Jean Seberg is sitting on the bed and has just taken off the gangster hat.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, looking at my hair that reaches almost all the way down my back. I think so. At any rate, I have never been more sure.

  “It’s a great sixties look, but it needs a film star charisma for this style to really work,” the hairdresser guy says. I have that. “It needs the eyes,” he says. I have them as well. All that’s missing is a single dimple. I would really like to go blond . . . but I don’t have enough money, so that will have to wait.

  “What the hell have you done?” Yoel bursts out when I come home. “Your hair!”

  “Exactly—my hair,” I reply and stride past him on my way to the bathroom.

  He looks at me as if I’m a stranger, as if he can’t trust me with this hairstyle. Something in him cools down markedly when he’s deprived of my hair. Was that all it was? The long dark childlike hair, was it so paltry that that was all it was?

  INCOGNITO

  Lukas’s unattainable dream is just one of the many places Yoel has been to. Out of the blue one evening he asks me if I’d like to go there with him for the weekend. Budapest. Just like that? For years it had been like a mirage for Lukas, a distorted reflection of something he only vaguely remembered. How many times had we talked about going together? It would feel like a betrayal of Lukas to go there with Yoel.

  I say I don’t have a passport. Yoel the fixer can usually pick up the telephone and arrange anything at all with just one call, but this time he says absently, what a pity, perhaps he will ask her instead. At first I don’t understand. Who? Her? His ex? He doesn’t even like her. How can she behave as she does, be like she is, and still have his . . . whatever it is—love? Most people don’t last long in her presence, only the very strong and the very weak, he had once suggested, without revealing which category he counted himself in.

  Yoel draws back the curtain and looks out at the rain, one of many showers that have become one continuous downpour the last few weeks.

  “We’ve got something going again. I don’t know what. I, kind of, can’t be free of her,” he says, preoccupied.

  As if he had tried.

  He fancied girls like her. Leggy felines. With a squint, dangerous. So what was he doing with me . . . no idea. I wasn’t going to cause multiple collisions when I went over a crosswalk, not even if I walked very slowly with everything hanging out—that was clear enough to see.

  —

  I left him. Or he left me. When he returned from his trip I was to be gone. It was unspoken.

  He hadn’t specifically said that I could take the car, but I knew where the keys were, I knew where it was parked and which tricks were needed to start it, I had seen Lukas coax it into life so many times. Yoel hadn’t used it once since we arrived. Lukas’s old Ford wasn’t a car you wanted to be seen in when you were in town. It didn’t look as cool here as he had thought, more of a sunken wreck with circles of rust around the wheels and the watered-down lacquer that seemed to have lost its color on the way here. He thought it smelled of fermentation from the bottom of the old lake, would probably miss it as little as he would miss me, no deep void when we both disappeared along with a few bottles of wine, bedclothes, and a mattress from the attic. And a bit of cash. I knew where his hiding places were and took what I could find, a mixture of crowns, dollars, marks, and forints. He’d never lifted a finger himself to earn that money.

  Either he would be furious or he would understand. In any case I wouldn’t be here, so it really didn’t matter to me. It’s not a question of getting, it’s a question of fixing, he’d said himself. People with principles rarely like to be treated according to those principles themselves, but his money would go toward something important. I would use it to forget about him.

  A permanent loan. Exactly like the lifelong credit he had from his parents. It wasn’t a small amount that he had put away in his secret places that he thought I knew
nothing about. His parents must have been more generous than he acknowledged.

  While I was searching I discovered an envelope in my own handwriting, the letter I had addressed for him so that he could send the payment for the car to Lukas. It had never happened, even though I’d reminded him several times and even though he said he’d sent it. It was only a few thousand, Lukas’s life did not depend upon it, but it was the principle. The envelope was empty. I put in some of the notes I had found but then changed my mind. Couldn’t send them after such a long time; it would be an insult. As if it was all about the money, when in fact it was about everything but the money.

  Later that evening I wandered up and down all the streets in all parts of town over all the bridges through all the parks. It was like stepping down into a purifying bath. It was still raining and I picked up all the apartment-for-rent notices I could find. Phoned around until I got lucky with a thirdhand rental in a district I had never heard of but sounded pretty, like the countryside, Hjorthagen.

  At midnight I stopped at a little bar, just to see what would happen. Almost immediately a man came up and sat down on the stool next to me, ordered me a drink without even asking what I would like.

  “I’m thirty-three, the same age as Jesus when he was crucified. How old are you, honey?” he asked.

  Lukas’s old car was my only fixed point, and in it I moved what little I had from one temporary address to another—most often in the small hours when the streets were deserted.

  The smell of the lake that Yoel had complained about still lingered in there and made me feel at home. The smell of the fields, the factories, the familiar wildness. Sometimes I would sit in the driver’s seat in a parking lot and let my thoughts wander from my house to Lukas’s house to the pearl fisher’s, out over the sloping fields, along the highway, farther, the Atlantic next. If I was between rentals I could sit there the whole night. As long as I had the car I was never really homeless. In the glove compartment and pockets I found things I had left there long ago, Escape perfume, my Lee shorts, a pack of my favorite chewing gum, an ugly yellow scarf that Rikard had gone to a great deal of trouble to send me, an earring I had lost and searched for everywhere except in his car. I found nothing of Lukas’s. Not so much as a rolling paper. He never left any visible traces behind him.