by Mandy Berman
“Take the bra off.”
She did as she was told; then he appraised her again.
“It’s still a little feminine. You don’t have black jeans?”
She shook her head.
“The boots are good,” he said. “Wait.” He took his T-shirt off, threw it to her. “Wear that under the dress.”
“Under it?”
“Yeah. And no makeup.”
“None?”
“Maybe black eyeliner. That’s it. Your whole pigmentless white-girl vibe is good, but we need you to look less American.”
* * *
—
The restaurant was fancier than she had been expecting, and she felt underdressed.
“It’s a casual city,” he assured her.
They arrived before Avi did and sat, sharing a cigarette, on the ledge outside the restaurant, which overlooked the canal. Stu was from Frankfurt, she learned, and had lived in Berlin since he was eighteen (he was “in his thirties” now). He had started as a server and worked his way up, and now he was managing one of the nicest restaurants in the city. Often during the course of their conversation, he paused midsentence to hop up and greet someone middle aged and expensive-looking, moving seamlessly between English and German, always sure to introduce Fiona to them. He greeted one couple in English, and they responded to Stu in American accents.
“Hi, darling!” said the woman. She was gray haired and wearing an elegant silk shawl. She kissed him on both cheeks. “We have to get a cocktail soon, okay? Just the two of us.” She winked at him.
“Of course, darling,” Stu said back to her. “Your table is ready.”
The man opened the door for the woman.
“That’s the U.S. ambassador to Germany and his wife,” he whispered to Fiona.
“Are you serious?”
“I had to go to their place for Thanksgiving last year and wear a tuxedo. It was so boring.” He raised his hands and waved at Avi, who came skipping down the steps.
Avi kissed Stu on the lips, then Fiona on both cheeks. He put his palm out to Stu. Stu made a tsk and pulled a cigarette from his back pocket.
“I’m not buying them anymore,” Avi explained to Fiona. “I’m trying to quit.”
Stu rolled his eyes. “He’s been trying to quit since the day I met him.”
They went inside and had cocktails at the bar before sitting for dinner. Avi asked Stu how work was (a headache); Stu asked Ari how his photography class was (long but useful). Then Avi turned to Fiona.
“How was lunch?” he asked pointedly.
Stu looked at her. “What was lunch?”
Ari looked to Fiona, not wanting to explain for her.
“My professor,” she said. “Former professor.”
“I’m listening,” Stu said.
It was strange: Fiona had the impulse to share every detail of her day with these strangers, even though she knew it might be uncouth.
“Well,” she said. She wasn’t sure how to begin. She had told Avi the basics earlier—that he had been her professor in college and that he lived here now. When he’d asked if she wanted to sleep with him, she’d obliquely replied that she wasn’t sure what would happen.
“Did you?” Avi asked.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t.”
“How come?”
“It just…it didn’t feel right,” she said.
They both nodded, letting her continue.
“I guess I felt like I was doing it for the story.”
“That makes sense,” Avi said.
“You never slept with him in college?” Stu asked. “Wait, did you come here for him?”
“No,” she said, leaving it unclear which question she was answering, and they didn’t pry. Of course, they understood that she had come here for him. What other reason was there to book a spontaneous trip to a foreign city and ask strangers to let her stay with them on a moment’s notice? But she understood implicitly that they would not judge her for it even if she were to admit it out loud. It wouldn’t make her appear weak to them. Just human.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a more interesting story for you,” she said.
Stu waved a hand.
“It sounds like you did what was right for you,” said Avi, putting his hand on top of hers. The conversation topic was thus changed. She could have cried at their kindness.
The plates at dinner didn’t seem to stop coming—buttery artichokes and garlicky mussels and a giant chateaubriand with a side of béarnaise sauce. The wine was a cold, full-bodied white.
“What is this wine called?” she asked, declaring it her new favorite.
Avi reached across the table to fork another piece of steak. “I’m so full, and yet.”
“Slow down,” Stu said. “That won’t feel great in an hour.”
“Oh God,” Avi said. “Remember Tim?”
“We have a lady in our presence,” Stu said.
“It’s fine, she’s American,” Avi said, proceeding to regale Fiona with a story about a friend of a friend who had eaten a large dinner followed by one too many lines of coke at the club.
“He…on the dance floor?”
Avi and Stu broke into hysterics.
“He disappeared to the bathroom for like half an hour to clean himself up,” Avi was saying as he tried to catch his breath. “We thought he was getting head.”
Fiona felt her chest fill, and she let out a giant laugh, joining them. They all sighed at the bottom of their laughter in unison, which sent them into another fit.
* * *
—
Stu paid for their cab to the club, which was not what she had been expecting. She had thought it would be a giant, bright discotheque in the middle of a city street; this was very much the opposite. The taxi had to let them off in what looked to Fiona like an abandoned parking lot, and as soon as they got out of the car, Avi and Stu removed their dress shirts and revealed matching black muscle Ts, transforming themselves instantly from buttoned-up dinner dates to Berlin clubbers. Avi collected both shirts and stuffed them into his backpack.
There was a wide dirt path in front of them, and people were waiting in a long line, silently smoking cigarettes and passing green bottles of beer back and forth. Ahead was a giant bunkerlike structure. It looked abandoned, with graffiti all over the exterior and barbed wire on the high fences around its sides. There were several giant German men manning the door and as they got closer, Fiona could hear pounding bass from inside. The people waiting on line were dressed in a hodgepodge of outfits, all of them representing a sort of minimalist, goth aesthetic: a woman in a black leotard with no pants and four-inch platform boots; a man with green hair and a black mesh top, the rings on his pierced nipples gleaming; an androgynous trio in nondescript black T-shirts and black jeans and black sneakers. As they approached the entrance, Fiona watched a straight couple—tattooed, clad in leather—being appraised by the doormen. Two of the men murmured to each other, then looked back at the couple and shook their heads, the bouncer closest to the door gesturing a hand away from the entrance to send them on their way. Fiona was confused—they looked the part to her. Maybe this was the club where Liv had waited in the cold for two hours and then didn’t get in.
They stood off to the side, until one of the bouncers—the one with the tattoos on his face—noticed Stu and greeted him amiably. They had a quick conversation in German; then the man checked a list on his clipboard.
He looked up at Fiona and asked her something. She looked to Stu for translation.
“He wants to know how old you are.”
“I’m twenty-one,” she said.
The bouncer exhaled in disappointment, waving them in anyway, patting Stu on the back as they walked through the door.
“What?” she said quietly to Avi.
/> “It’s young,” he said. “This is more of a late-twenties-and-up crowd.”
Inside, a strong-nosed woman patted her down, barking orders at her in German.
“What?” Fiona said, wishing desperately that she could understand the language. She hated being marked as an American everywhere she went.
The woman told her again, impatient, in German.
“Turn around,” Avi said to her, being patted down himself by a male bouncer.
Fiona did so, and the woman patted her bottom perfunctorily, though what she was checking for Fiona wasn’t sure. She imagined that a place like this looked the other way when it came to drugs.
“Telefon?” the woman said. Fiona took her phone out—was the woman going to confiscate it? Instead she put a hot pink sticker over the lens on the flip phone’s camera. “Keine Fotos,” she said, shaking her head and making a “No” signal with her hands, like “Do not cross.” Fiona nodded in assent. She would do whatever this woman told her to.
They paid for their tickets and went inside. Fiona felt the bass reverberating throughout the dark ground floor, though the music was coming from the upper levels of the giant building. Avi went to drop the backpack off at the coat check, and when he came back he took both Fiona’s and Stu’s hands and said, “Shall we?”
They walked through the bottom floor toward the steps, passing silhouettes of pairs in dark corners, behind columns or on benches along the walls. Fiona saw the shadow of one man standing against a column, holding the head of another who kneeled below him. Avi and Stu seemed not to notice the outlines of the people they passed.
They climbed a wide staircase to the second floor, and the music grew louder with every step. She knew nothing about techno music, or about clubbing, and she could not have characterized what she was hearing if she’d tried. It sounded like darkness and glee and sex and intensity rolled into an overwhelmingly deep and bodily bass line, and layers that kept piling on top of that: drums and cymbals and synthetic, man-made loops that weren’t quite melodies, really. It sounded as if computers had found God. At the top of the steps there was a mass of people moving in time to the music, steady as a heartbeat. The strobe lights pulsed and lit the smoke rising above their heads and into the rafters. It was so loud that no one was talking; there was no point in trying to be heard.
Avi grabbed her hand and brought her to the bar, where they could hear each other better, and where he bought them sodas called Club-Mate and shots of vodka.
“It’s German Red Bull,” he said, drinking a bit of the maté-flavored soda to make room for the vodka. She followed suit, sipping hers and then pouring the shot in. It tasted like cream soda.
“Let’s look around,” he said into her ear. “Do you want to take anything?”
“Like drugs?” she said.
“Yes, like drugs.” He laughed. “Like a pill?”
“Ecstasy?” she mouthed. She had only ever done psychedelics; she was scared for her heart. As if it were only a matter of time until she, too, would succumb to the same disease that killed Helen.
He nodded. “Have you ever?”
She shook her head.
“Well, if there’s a place for it, this is it. It’s sort of a perfect pairing with the music. We could split a pill to start, if you’re nervous.”
“Is it bad for your heart?” she asked.
He said he didn’t know, and then made a face that denoted sudden realization. Lula had told him about Helen; of course she had.
“Let’s not do anything you’re not comfortable with,” Avi said.
“No,” she said, because she didn’t want, yet again, to be marked for this tragedy. “Let’s do it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said, even though she wasn’t.
“Actually, I know that guy has it,” Avi said, gesturing toward a dark-haired man wandering the bar area. He was wearing black eyeliner and a lacy vintage wedding dress. “Want me to get us some?”
Fiona nodded, and she waited alone at the bar while Avi conversed with the dealer, then walked out of the bar area with him. Someone next to her was smoking and she asked to bum a cigarette. Wordlessly, he handed her one, and then lit hers with the butt of his. “Danke,” she said, and he nodded and turned toward the crowd to watch them dance.
* * *
—
When they took the pills Avi said, “I won’t leave your side,” and she believed him. When they got on the dance floor the music felt like lights inside her body. It was hard to know where the music ended and the drugs began. She saw her arms moving up into the air like she’d always seen ravers do in nineties movies, holding those silly glow lights, which no longer seemed so silly. Avi’s eyes were closed and he was moving his hips like a salsa dancer. They looked like they were drawing figure-eights; she could see the psychic marks his hips left in the empty space all around him. They’d lost Stu a long time ago. Fiona wanted to reach out and touch Avi’s hip bones, so she did. They felt hard and human under her fingers, the bones rotating under flesh. Bodies were amazing, the way they knew exactly what to do. Why couldn’t she always feel this sense of wonder? He had taken his shirt off and his skin was warm and slick and taut and she moved her palms in experimental circles around his abdomen. He leaned into her touch. They kissed, their tongues playing off each other like instruments. Why couldn’t she always do things for the sake of doing them, for the sake of the way they felt, and nothing else? Why did everything always have to be attached to so much meaning? And then they were done kissing, and were smiling at each other, dancing like they were exactly as young and high and beautiful as they felt. Soon Avi was kissing a boy in the mass of the dance floor, and she watched them, curious and removed, and it reminded her of being six, in the playground with her mother, seeing a couple making out on a park bench and feeling a spark of excitement that she immediately understood she wasn’t supposed to feel. When else, until now, had she ever been given permission to watch someone? She had always implicitly understood that she, a young woman, was meant to be the appraised, and never the other way around. In here, femininity was neither a virtue nor a burden. In here she was anonymous and free. She knew she could leave Avi, could wander the upper floors of this place or be with someone in the dark rooms downstairs. They would find her eventually. But all she wanted, really, was to stay in this giant mass: one in a thousand, an easily replaceable blood vessel in the heart muscle of the dance floor, no one and everyone.
* * *
They got home around eight in the morning on Sunday, and Fiona awoke on her last day in Berlin at two in the afternoon.
“I feel like shit,” she said, walking into Stu’s room, where he and Avi were lying in bed, watching a show on Stu’s laptop. Avi moved into the middle of the bed and patted the space next to him.
The three of them lay in Stu’s bed for hours, eating stale gummy candies and watching reruns of Friends. Stu and Avi laughed at nearly every joke. Fiona knew when the jokes were coming, she had seen the episodes so many times, but sometimes she laughed as well, because of the delivery or a bit of physical comedy or simply out of a sense of comfort and a desire to laugh for the sake of laughing. She knew she should go outside, go see the city, go to the Pergamon or Checkpoint Charlie or see parts of the Wall along the canal. It was another beautiful day outside.
“Should we order food?” Stu asked them.
“I’m not actually hungry,” Fiona said.
“Me neither,” said Avi.
Fiona checked the time; it was five in the evening. Her flight home to New York was at seven the next morning.
“I should probably pack soon,” Fiona said.
“Don’t leave,” Avi said to Fiona, snuggling into her.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“Stay forever,” said Stu. But she had her mother to see, a house to help pack up. It
was Amy’s birthday next week. She wanted to talk to Marley, and to Lula. Tell them everything that happened. Maybe she would reckon with Liv. Maybe not. She had a semester to finish. She wanted to stop spending her father’s money, or else tell him that she was spending it. She felt guilt now—about her dad, Helen, all of it. She had taken his penance and run away, even spending his money on drugs to make her forget.
But she had felt so good last night. The source of the feelings was synthetic, but didn’t it mean that those feelings were inside her, somewhere? Even without drugs, or anything else? They hadn’t come from nowhere. The experience almost made her believe she could learn how to do the healing herself. She suddenly felt anxious to see her mother, to tell her about this trip. Maybe she could even share the Oliver parts, obscure some of the details. She wanted to figure out a way to show Amy: Look at the adult decisions I’m making. Look at this good person I’m becoming.
“How’s your heart?” Avi asked her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s good.”
He put his hand on her chest, and held it there.
27.
THEY DIDN’T NEED to induce Danièle after all; her contractions began naturally at one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. While Joséphine and Alex were in the delivery room with Danièle, Simone had to stay in the waiting room with Henri. It took all of Simone’s might to focus on the boy in front of her as he zoomed his toy trucks around the room with intense concentration. She thought she could hear Danièle’s screams, even though the delivery room was past a set of swinging doors and all the way at the other end of the hall. She could practically conjure the pain of her own delivery almost six years earlier, pain unlike anything she’d previously thought possible: the internal twisting, as if her organs were being ripped apart from one another; the searing sensation in her lower back, like someone was stabbing it over and over. She’d been determined to deliver without an epidural, which she came to regret as she endured thirty sleepless hours of labor, a constant stream of contractions with no end in sight. But she was too stubborn, and as much as she’d been tempted, she didn’t give in to the drugs.