A Curable Romantic (2 page)

At that moment, I realized, with a riveting sense of shame, that I was staring at her lap!

My cheeks burned. I lifted my lorgnette and, in order to distract my gaze, took a better look at my rival. Bearded, well barbered, impeccably haberdashed, he was puffing on a slender green cigar. Steadying its nib with his thumb, he roared with laughter at some witticism or other of the mother’s; tilting back his head, he exhaled, filling the air above them with a plumy smudge.

How I hated that man! I hated him the way one hates anyone who possesses what one lacks, whose sturdy happiness exposes how ludicrously constructed is one’s own. I felt barred from the marvelous joke they were sharing, exiled from their witty conversation, not only by the distance
that separated us — I was, after all, four tiers above them — but by my poverty, broadcast plainly to the world, if by nothing else, then by Otto’s suit.

Lower your lorgnette, I counseled myself, look away, spare your heart! But instead I watched as the mother placed an ungloved hand upon the arm of the gentleman and caressed it. Meaningful looks were traded between these two. They’d agreed upon something — that much was clear — and as they turned towards the daughter to see if she concurred, and as she signaled her assent with an embarrassed charade of shrugs, I knew I possessed no hope of winning her.

My rival had bested me before I’d even announced my intentions!

THE HOUSE LIGHTS
dimmed, the curtain went up, and I watched the play — half a crown is half a crown, after all — though I could barely concentrate on its plot. (Dr. Herzl’s
The New Ghetto
, it had something to do with a count, a duel, a questionable marriage, and a coal mine.) When the gaslights came up, I stood in my box and peered over the heads of the couple in front of me to search the stalls for the girl in the lavender dress with all the extravagant flounces.

(Ah, that women no longer dress in this way, as though they were packages waiting to be unwrapped, is an understandable, if no less lamentable thing!)

I found her easily enough this time with my lorgnette. As soon as the curtain had fallen, she’d taken leave of her mother and was walking towards the lobbies. “Bitte!” I cried to my boxmates; standing, I bumped into their knees. My heart pounding, I charged out of the gallery through the corridor towards the staircases, where, hurrying, I leaned over its railing, searching the crowd below me for a glimpse of a lavender hem.

Pince-nez flashing, monocles glittering, well-dressed men stood in clusters, roaring their opinions about the play into one another’s faces. Snaking through these dense knots of smokers and drinkers, I circumnavigated the ground-floor lobby, its red velvet wallpaper, its red velvet sofas, its red velvet chairs whirling about me in a hurricane of scarlet. However, the Fräulein was nowhere to be found.

Mildly out of breath, I could only chide myself: Did I really expect to
find her in so large a crowd, a solitary queen inside such a busy swarm? And if I had, what did I next propose to do? Introduce myself? Declare my love for her perhaps? No, the quest had been a foolish one, impulsive and doomed. I was on the point of conceding as much when, as though alerted by a signal only they could hear, a rout of drunken loiterers moved off, scattering from the bar in several directions at once. Behind where they had only moments before stood, indeed stationed there as though by the Unseen Hand of Fate, was the well-barbered gentleman I’d seen speaking to the Fräulein before the curtain, his immaculately tailored person encircled by the whitish fumes of his cigar.

With no idea how much longer the interval might last, I seized my chance and placed myself beside him. As he was facing the bar, I leaned my back against it. As he was drinking a brandy, I ordered one as well, a fact he noted out of the corner of his eye, nodding almost imperceptibly in approval. With mirrors on all four of its walls, the little alcove seemed to repeat itself in an eternal stutter. Though a single chandelier dangled from the ceiling, a thousand appeared to have been strung, in long lines, back to a thousand distant vanishing points, and no matter which direction one faced, one could see the room from a dozen different angles. And so, although I was facing away from Dr. Freud, I was able to watch him while simultaneously watching myself. (Yes, the stranger was Dr. Freud. Why not reveal it now and get it over with? I’m not a novelist or a playwright, after all, that I must bait my reader’s interest by withholding pertinent information.) Like everything else in the room, like the barman and the wall sconces and the chandeliers, Dr. Freud’s figure receded into the mirrors’ staggered horizons, replicated in ever smaller versions. I followed this unending trail of Freuds, moving my gaze from the back of one of his more distant heads to the front of a head less distant, jumping from mountain peak to mountain peak, as it were, moving nearer to the original, until I realized that he was doing the same with me and my many reflections, and although we were facing in opposite directions, we were very soon staring into each other’s eyes. Dr. Freud seemed to note this queer fact at precisely the same moment as I, and a shockingly awkward intimacy ensued: one’s habitual mask falls away and one feels naked, having presented his unguarded face to another man (better to
rouge one’s cheeks with the appurtenances then available to masculine physiognomy — beards, monocles, muttonchops, mustaches, dueling scars — so that if the mask slips, one mightn’t lose face altogether).

Of course, it’s easy enough to lionize Dr. Freud now, but even then, in the years before fame enveloped him in its luminous cloak, he possessed a brooding quality, a fierce, unblinking omniscience. His eyes were dark and lustrous, whereas mine were pale and myopically blue, and though I’ve no idea what Dr. Freud saw in them, as his glance swept over their surfaces, I’ve no doubt he saw everything there was in them to see. As his many reflections turned away from mine, I felt like a mouse that had been spared inexplicably by a cat and was alarmed, therefore, to find him now only a small distance from my shoulder, looking me straight in the eye. The looming geographies of his face, so near mine, were dizzying. Beneath the whiskery arms of his mustache, he drew on a yellow-green cigar, grinding its smoke between his teeth. Two fumes coiled out of his nostrils like a pair of charmed snakes.

“Dreary, wouldn’t you say?”

I took a step away from him. “I … I beg your pardon?” I hoped to sound as though I’d only just noticed him, as though I hadn’t been watching him the entire time, as though
I’d
been the one lost in thought and it were
he
who had pulled
me
out of the mists of my own foggy preoccupations.

“Why, the play and its themes,” he said, tilting his brandy to his mouth.

I struggled in vain to recall the play. Though I’d been looking forward to it — it was the event of the season, as far as our little circle was concerned — I’d paid such scant attention to the opening act I could barely quilt together the fragmentary fabric of its themes. Dr. Freud had tossed me an opening, and I had dropped it, like a blind man juggling eggs.

His thumb against the nib of his cigar, he leaned in closer to me and murmured, “I’m speaking, of course, of the low social status of the race to which we both belong.”

At these words, all thoughts of silly Fräuleins and lavender dresses vanished from my head. “Yes,” I said, “and for my generation, it’s even worse.”

“Worse?” Dr. Freud said. “How so?”

“Our greater expectations, based upon your own generation’s accomplishments, combine with our more limited economic possibilities, to make everything far worse.”

I next expressed a regret that my generation was, in fact, doomed to atrophy.

“These are strong words,” Dr. Freud said.

“Perhaps,” I said, warming to my theme. “However, it’s difficult to feel oneself destined for a higher purpose and still be uncertain of earning one’s daily bride.”

Dr. Freud’s brow contracted. “Bride?”

“Bread.” I corrected him as politely as I could.

“No, no, you said
bride:
‘And still be uncertain of earning one’s daily bride.’ “

“Surely you misheard me.” Whatever I’d said, I’d meant
bread
, of course (
Brot
in German), and not
bride (Braut)
. Dr. Freud grinned and bit into his cigar, rolling it in quick circles between his teeth. “And if I did, what of it? It’s a simple and meaningless mistake,” I said.

“Is it?”

“A mere triviality — yes! — an error in speech, and nothing more!”

With his elbow on the bar, Dr. Freud leaned his head against his fist. A thatch of his hair fell into his eyes. “I agree with you that these occasional lapses are quite trivial in nature, and yet I would suggest to you, on the evidence of my own medical researches, that there are no occurrences, however slight, that drop out of the universal concatenation of events or escape the tyrannical rule of cause and effect.”

The universal concatenation of events? The tyrannical rule of cause and effect?

“You’re claiming — what? — if I’m understanding you correctly that you can trace my silly verbal misstep back to the mental processes that caused it?”

“Certainly I can, and it shouldn’t take long. However, to do so, I ask of you only one thing.”

“And that is?”

“That you tell me, candidly and uncritically and without any aim
whatsoever, whatever comes into your mind as you direct your attention to the misspoken word.”

As Dr. Freud leaned in closer to me, I could smell the medicinal tang of brandy and tobacco on his breath, and I couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was laughing at me, playing with me, as though it were all a merry game, or not a game, but a sport, since, like a fox beaten out of the hedges, I had no understanding of the rules that were to govern my painful exposure.

“Bit of a parlor game?” I said, attempting to make light of it all.

Dr. Freud tapped his cigar against the spittoon on the bar, letting a red plug of ash fall into it. “I’ve no idea what parlors you frequent, but I can assure you it’s hardly a game.” Once more, he confined me inside the prison house of his gaze. Indeed, I felt as though I’d been hauled by the imperial police into an interrogation chamber. However, what could I do? Refusing him was out of the question. Doing so would put an end to our conversation and irrevocably forfeit for me any chance of learning the Fräulein’s name. (Though I knew not yet one syllable of it, I could practically feel my tongue and lips conspiring to pronounce it.) Slyly changing the subject would be impossible, I sensed, with a man like Dr. Freud. Ruled by his passions, he’d never permit himself to be distracted or put off. I had no idea how much longer the interval might last, and I made a quick calculus: though sounding my mental depths for the buried source of this verbal slip might take the entire intermission, thus depriving me of the moment in which I might steer the conversation towards my own uses (viz., the learning of Emma Eckstein’s name), I was convinced the procedure would reveal nothing of consequence about me and that afterwards, having indulged my new friend in his harmless pursuit, I could more forcefully ask his patience in indulging mine.

“Good! Marvelous!” Dr. Freud said, clapping his hands. “Let us begin immediately!”

Exhibiting considerably less enthusiasm for the examination than he, I coughed into my fist and cleared my throat. “Well,” I said, “if I recall correctly, I said something along the lines of ‘It’s difficult to feel born for higher things and still be uncertain of earning one’s daily bread,’ or rather ‘bride,’ as you maintain.”

“And what springs to mind?” Dr. Freud said. “Quick! Quick! Don’t give it too much thought.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. The Lord’s Prayer, I suppose.”

“Ah, very good, the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Give us our bride, our daily bride,’ eh?” Dr. Freud said this in English, and as he did, I began to feel the first stirrings of an inexplicable shame. “Yes, you see,” he continued, “one might make a similar mistake in English, as well as in several other languages. In Hebrew, for instance,
kallah
is ‘bride’ and
challah
a sort of bread. Why, even an aristocratic Pole might confuse
pain
, ‘bread’ in French, with
panna
, the Polish word for ‘miss.’ ”

I ducked my head. “Well, I suppose I’m not as cunning a linguist as you,” I said, or rather tried to say. I’d attempted this riposte in English as well, but I’d tripped over the difficult locution and now blushed, hearing my own words.

Dr. Freud raised a well-barbered eyebrow. “A Latinist?” he chortled.

“Forgive me, Herr Doktor,” I stammered, “if I’ve consulted you in any way!”

“Ah!” he crowed. “If only my patients were as honest as you!”

“Insulted
, I meant!”

“There! You see? That’s another aspect of these faulty speech acts. They’re highly contagious, and quite so!”

“Yes, but what have you learned so far?” I said, hoping to master the situation. I could feel my cheeks burning.

“Not much.” Catching the barman’s eye, he waved two fingers over our empty glasses. I cringed: I could barely afford the first. “But let us continue. Now, if I asked you what thoughts the Lord’s Prayer produces in your mind, you would say what?”

“Right off the top of my head?”

“Certainly right off the top of your head.”

Feeling unfree to consider the matter for more than an instant, I answered him with the first thing that sprang to mind: “Why, Reni’s
Gathering of the Manna
, I suppose.”

“Ah.”

“I saw it not too long ago in a cathedral in Ravenna.” The painting still hung in my mental gallery, and I could see it clearly: Moses in his
red cloak and sandals, two goat horns emerging from his head; winged babies tossing an invisible something from their nursery blanket of clouds; the crowds’ arms raised to receive; a muscular man bending, lifting something from the ground, the thumb of his hand inside the handle of a clay jar, and not a crust of bread in sight.

“Why the Reni?” Dr. Freud asked.