A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  I got back to the house very late that evening, and even though I’d had a lot to drink I was not drunk. I sat in the kitchen and played Bach again – partita for guitar – on Walter’s little stereo: for some reason this was the music that Walter was listening to most. Then I played some Vivaldi. I closed the kitchen door so I could listen with the volume up: I was drunk and tired, and this helped me appreciate the music without much thought. When I go back to Dublin, I know that I will play this music quietly over dinners and while working; it will drift into the background. Here, in Walter’s apartment, I remove distractions. I do nothing I can set to music; the music is all that there is. I poured a glass of wine and drank under a dim red lamp. And when I came very close to something I cannot describe at all, a proximity to the music that felt almost like a possession, I shook my head clear. All this would be gone in ten days. I staggered into my bedroom, pulled off my jeans and shoes and wrestled the shirt off me, and slept. When I woke, at ten, the snow was roaring past my window.

  An afternoon at Christl and Erich’s – the friends I spent New Year’s Eve with. They are in their sixties, but you wouldn’t notice. I woke up around eleven, after taking my first night off drink since early December, and I had never felt so tired. My body was sore and stiff. I had black circles under my eyes and felt nauseated. But my mind was a little more awake. The hot water was gone because it was so late, so I filled the bath with lukewarm water, then boiled four large pots on the stove and tossed the boiling water in. I put on Scriabin and Glazunov, and, through the open bathroom door, through the corridor, through my room, I watched the snow float down like fat feathers. It had snowed all night, and it was supposed to snow all day, and the next.

  I met Walter after a trip to the doctor – he receives an infusion and massage therapy every day. He was not doing well. He was doing, in fact, much worse. I asked him how the appointment went. He said the therapist – not the regular therapist, but someone new – had grown frustrated because he could not relax, and he had cried for half an hour. The therapist left him alone, and he had cried on his own – and he had no idea why. It was something he could not identify. Something Existenz, he said. The uncertainty was making him worse by the minute. We took the bus as far as we could take it – Walter was in no condition to walk the half-hour up the hills to Baumgarten. We stepped out at a large cemetery. It was pure white – the hillsides rolling upward on one side of us, and the white graves rolling downward on the other. By the time we got to Christl and Erich’s, Walter couldn’t get his coat off.

  Christl and Erich live in a large house that is curiously decorated and very cold. It is grey, black, and white, and the abstract art on the walls is very dark, morose, and sexual: greys, maroons, browns. There are also shelves full of strange collectibles: hundreds of little ink pots, or sugar dispensers, and, in the stairwell, on the window sill and on two large tables, thousands of weights, from the size of an ant up. I thought I’d heard from Walter that they sleep in separate bedrooms, but Christl showed me a room on the second floor with a futon and a shelf with a stereo and a bunch of untidy CDs. This is where she and Erich go, she said, when they want to be like poor students who live on music and passion.

  They made a large lunch for us. I was forced to eat two full plates of food and drink a beer, even though my stomach was upside down. They gave Walter three glasses of diluted magnesium for his neck, and forced him to lie down on a magnetic-field bed for eight minutes – no more, no less. Walter and I asked what a magnetic-field bed was, and Christl explained, but I didn’t understand the explanation. Erich is the kind of man who makes me feel inferior: he builds. He takes things apart and puts them back together. He bought the house next door, which was full of trash, emptied it, and renovated it – but Christl loves the garden behind so much that she won’t let him rent it out. He landscaped that garden, built a giant garage by himself, and put a swimming pool in the basement of his own house. He let me see a few rooms in the house next door in which he stores hundreds of model ships and airplanes. And later, when Christl and Walter were inside having a second cup of coffee, Erich took me to a spot in his garden, which was under large evergreens covered in snow, to show me some sculptures he created – large stones somehow fastened to small steel foundations. He simply found the stones beautiful, and wanted to make art out of them. I agreed they were beautiful, and that presenting them in the way he did made art out of them. Yes, he said, that is what I did.

  Christl is also an eccentric. If she had had a daughter, she would have been one of those mothers who is much more fun than the daughter, and disappointed by the daughter’s seriousness. Every story you tell her, she retells to all her friends for eternity, as though it is the most interesting thing that ever happened. She finds it endearing that Erich is a hound dog when it comes to other women, and, in a tour of the house, laughed at all the evidence of his obsession with large breasts. She gave me, as a present, the shirt they put her son in the day he was born, and which has been passed down many generations.

  Erich gave us a lift home, since the snow was getting worse, and Walter had deteriorated. We had a concert in the Musikverein that night, a French string quartet playing in the Brahms Saal: Mozart, Bartók, and Dvořák. Erich dropped us off at the Testarellogasse bridge. We got out, and a woman in a long black coat walked by. It was dark by then, but she was lit by the bright windows of an office building beside us. She had long black hair and dark eyes. She glanced at me and then away. I watched her walk away from me. She was beautiful, I told Walter. Walter said, Yes, I’ve never seen a woman so beautiful.

  I am writing now in the mid-afternoon. My hands are trembling and I am in the thick of a cold sweat. I have had half a dozen cups of coffee and a bowl of fruit. I am thinking of naked bodies. I am thinking of Maxine’s legs, of her on stage in Linz today. I am thinking of my hand on Astrid’s ass, of lying in bed with her and her sister. I imagine Clare at home with a finger inside herself, coming, thinking of what we will get up to when I return. It’s always like this when I am hungover.

  I am not in the best condition to write, but last night may slip away from me if I do not record it, and John arrives in three hours. I shall try to do it some justice. After the concert, Walter and I went to Motto to see Lucy DJ. Motto is a mixed bar not far from the U4 station Pilgramgasse. I had never seen so many beautiful women, nor so many gay men in white shirts and slicked-back black hair and sunglasses. The bar was dark and violet. Lucy was wearing a tight black dress and red wig. We sat down at the bar beside two women. One was blonde, tall, and wore shorts over black tights and purple boots; the other was short and round and black-haired and looked a bit like Joan Jett. I smiled at the blonde girl when I first arrived, and she turned her head and pulled her hair down. But later, Lucy introduced us: the blonde was Maxine, the black-haired girl was Barbara. Lucy told them I was from Texas but lived in Ireland. Barbara said, in English, Where in Ireland?

  Dublin, I said.

  Never been there, she said. Never been to Ireland. I’m from London.

  You’re from London, and you’ve never been to Dublin?

  Darling, I’ve never been to parts of north London.

  Barbara was a singer and actress, and knew Lucy from a show they’d done together. Maxine, who is Viennese, leaned over and said: She’s very good – a wonderful singer. Lucy agreed – she said Barbara’s voice gives you an erection, though she said so indirectly and very politely. They were on the way out, but Maxine said I could buy her a drink. We chatted for a while. Carolin arrived, and Walter spoke with her while I spoke to Maxine and Barbara.

  Maxine was staring at me. She had very clear blue eyes. Even when Barbara was speaking to her, she stared at me. I went to the bathroom to check that there was nothing wrong with my face. The urinal at Motto is a wall-high mirror so that men can see each other’s dicks. An old man stood beside me and stared. It’s very large, he said. Thank you, I said.

  It’s also circumcised, and very pretty.


  I suppose, I said, shaking it for him.

  Would you like me to suck it?

  No thanks, I said.

  I returned to Maxine. I lied about how big my going-away party would be the next weekend. In truth I imagined that only Walter, Lucy and one or two others would come if I asked. Barbara left for a moment, and it was just me and Maxine, and she turned to me and crossed her legs. I asked her to stay for a few more drinks, but she was tired and had rehearsals in the morning. She gave me her number. She would gladly make the Abschiedsparty. Let’s do it in Motto, she said. That’s the smartest, I said – now I was speaking in German again.

  Over the hour or two since we’d arrived, I’d had about five shots of vodka – most of them placed in front of my face by Lucy, who seemed to have one every five minutes. She also drank gin, soda and cucumber. She liked the suitability of gin and cucumber, she said, though cucumber would probably be just as suitable with vodka. Then she clapped her hands – but clapped is not the word, more like slowly glued them together – and smiled: Apropos vodka! And another shot was put in front of me. She played a folksy Austrian tune that everyone knew the words to, and everyone stopped trying to look sophisticated for a moment and sang along.

  When Maxine stood to leave, and I kissed her, she had two inches on me – without heels. She stooped a little, and I stood a bit on my tiptoes, and we kissed each other’s cheeks. Then Walter left. He said he wasn’t having any fun, because he felt so awkward, and he could not drink because of his medication. Carolin followed half an hour later. And I was on my own, at least until Lucy played her last number – which would be two a.m. I moved a seat closer to two blonde girls – not natural blondes, and clearly sisters – and eavesdropped. I could not make out a single word, nothing I could use to drop myself into the conversation, until I realized they were speaking English; once I adjusted my ears to English I heard everything. They were Irish. I introduced myself: You’re Irish, I said.

  The older sister said, That’s right.

  I live in Dublin, I said.

  The older sister was Alex, the younger was Astrid. Alex lived in Vienna, Astrid lived in Australia, but they were from Galway. And – who knows how these things happen – two hours later I was standing close to Astrid in a gay nightclub called Mango. Astrid was sitting beside Lucy, who was pickled – her word – half sleeping, sometimes managing the energy to flirt with random men, or sign an autograph, and every now and again to quote some famous line from some famous female singer or movie star from the fifties, or from Dean Martin. Astrid told me she was married, and a few minutes later she admitted she was eight weeks pregnant. We drank beer and shots until six in the morning. Alex was trying to kiss a 23-year-old bartender from Motto. There was an asshole there with a black leather jacket who grabbed Astrid’s tits in the ladies’ toilet, and an hour later grabbed Alex’s tits at the bar, right in front of me, and suddenly I felt like a fight. I wanted to beat his brains in. I grabbed him by the collar and tossed him outside. I threw him on the pavement. Astrid and a few others grabbed me and pulled me back. The asshole tried to get back inside. I met him at the door and threw him back out on the street. The bartender – a tiny little gay boy who looked like he might break if you squeezed him – asked me to go back to the bar. No problem, I said. Then he told the asshole that he was banned, forever. I’ll be waiting here for you, the asshole shouted at me. Give me half an hour, I shouted back. Astrid and I drank some more shots and Lucy said, My hero. And when I looked around again everyone seemed to be kissing, men and women, men and men, men and boys, boys and boys. Except for Lucy. Lucy does not kiss. She gets up to the filthiest things imaginable, but she does not kiss.

  When we left the bar at six, the Irish girls had no money, and no bank cards. They needed twenty euro for a taxi. I suggested we all get a taxi home together and have a threesome. Then suddenly they were arguing about whose fault it was that they had stayed out so late. Astrid was leaving for Sydney the next day, and Alex had to work at nine. I couldn’t tell if the argument was serious or a joke, but I wanted no part of it. I kissed them goodbye, gave them some money, and caught the U4 at Pilgramgasse. I got on the rearmost carriage, and because it was a new train, with an open gangway from back to front, I made my way stumbling and swaying and rebalancing and excusing myself to the front. I believe I prepared myself something to eat when I got home, but this may not have happened. Walter got out of bed to go to the bathroom. Hallihallo, he said, sleepily, in his little white underwear. I put my headphones on and played Mompou’s Variations on a Theme by Chopin.

  I picked John up at Landstrasse, where you catch the express train to the airport. It was about eight p.m. He had packed light for the weekend: a phone and two shirts, a change of underwear, and some socks. He asked about our plans for the evening, and I said it was dinner and drinks with Walter, but that things were not going well with Walter, and he might not come out at all. When John and I arrived, Walter was drunk, so he was doing a little better. He had turned all the lights off and lit all the candles in the apartment, and was listening to a collection of famous arias.

  After a brief dinner in Naschmarkt, Walter led us around the southern edge of the First District, by Karlskirche, then Schwarzenbergplatz, because he wanted to take us to Peter’s Operncafé, the place where he had spent his twenties. It was a wet and cold night. The Ring was busy with taxis, but once we crossed into the First District there was just a strange cool emptiness. Madama Butterfly was playing – someone other than Callas. I realized at once that this was the place Christian, the boss at Santo Spirito, meant when he told me, one evening a few weeks back, to go down the road if I wanted to listen to Puccini. Walter explained that the two bars have something of a hatred for each other – but a respectful hatred. Peter’s Operncafé was where all the important players in operas went for drinks after opening nights. Peter himself, an older gay man who wore, that night, a sleeveless muscle shirt and moved around the café as though he were on ice skates, has such high standards when it comes to opera and considers himself such a pivotal figure in the opera scene – the singers ask him for his autograph, for instance – that he is obligated to hate everything. I asked him what he thought of Netrebko, and he nearly fainted with dismay. He put the back of his hand to his forehead and wobbled. Walter used to go there by himself in the afternoons and sit at the bar and listen to music, and ask Peter who was who and what was what. The walls are covered in portraits of opera greats. Peter has told Walter the story behind every picture. Half the stories are true, says Walter.

  John said: Fuck me, horse, this is a cool place.

  I wished I had known about it sooner. To think that I had let so many afternoons and evenings go by in search of a place exactly like this – and I had only a week left.

  John and I had three beers each, and Walter had two. Peter hadn’t seen Walter in years, so he played a few arias especially for us – ‘Nessun dorma’ (Walter wanted us to enjoy it like he enjoyed it: it was a pity that John recognized it as the theme music from Italia ’90), ‘La vita è inferno’, ‘Vissi d’arte’ (I had said I’d seen Tosca, and he said he’d introduce me to a version worth listening to), and some others Walter wasn’t quite sure about. From time to time, the conversation would stop. Walter would close his eyes and lean his head back, or conduct with one finger, and I would look up at the ceiling.