Hausfrau (12 page)

With Polly in Daniela’s arms, Anna didn’t know what to do with her hands. She felt ill at ease, like a dateless girl at a school dance. She moved to join Bruno but he was already locked into conversation with another party guest, a man whom Anna had met before, but whose name she couldn’t recall. He was blond and muscular and only an inch or two taller than Anna. When he noticed Anna he widened the circle and invited her with an open hand to join. He interrupted Bruno mid-sentence, pointed to his beer, and raised his brow.
“Willst du?”
That’s what it sounded like he said. He was speaking Swiss. Did Anna want?

Nice, so very nice to be asked.

Anna stepped a little closer while shaking her head no. She wasn’t a beer drinker. The blond man nodded and smiled, then motioned Bruno to continue.

A
NNA LED
S
TEPHEN TO
a nearby bistro, the Kantorei. They sat in creaky wooden chairs, the legs of which were uneven and annoying. Anna ordered a brandy and Stephen asked for a beer. And then they began to talk. Stephen was a scientist on a short-term sabbatical from MIT with an appointment at the
ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It is one of the world’s top schools. Einstein was a graduate. Apart from the banks and businesses of Zürich’s financial industry, the ETH is the city’s most prestigious institution. Stephen had sublet an apartment in Wipkingen, a quarter on the city’s north side, and the namesake of the district’s train station. Stephen was, Anna learned, a thermochemist. A pyrologist. He studied combustion. Stephen was an expert on fire.

In the difficult months following the affair, Anna had ample time to consider the symbolic implications of Stephen’s work and the effect the man had had on her. Anna’s conclusions were these: That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn. That an ordinary flame’s hottest point cannot always be seen.

D
OKTOR
M
ESSERLI OPENED A
book and pointed to a series of related drawings depicting a couple making love in a fountain. In the first they’re rained upon. In the next their bodies have fused together and the pair—now singular—rise. “The result of a union of opposites. King and queen lie down in a mercurial bath. They face each other’s naked truths. The psychosexual union is a symbol of coming to consciousness.”

Anna offered her a quizzical look. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“
Schau.
The being dies and takes the body with it. But it returns. Transcendence has been achieved, but at a cost. The cost is death.”

“Symbolic death?”

“Of course.”

A
NNA STOOD TO THE
side and watched her husband interact with his friends. It was strange seeing him like this, chummy and familiar, relaxed among old pals. Twenty years sloughed off him almost instantly. She imagined him a young rake, a scamp with a quirky smile knocking back a beer, his hands darting through the air as he told a story, recounted a soccer match, talked about a girl. That was Bruno at twenty-four. Anna would have been eighteen. Had they met twenty years ago, each would have scared the other off. Anna with her needy solitudes, Bruno with the confidence radiating from the very posture his body seemed to be recalling just then in Daniela’s backyard.

Bruno downed the last swallow of his beer and turned to the blond man and asked if he wanted another. He called him Karl. Karl nodded,
Jo gärn.
As Bruno brushed by Anna he bent his head to hers and asked her. His eyes were kinder than they were twenty minutes earlier.
It’s the beer,
Anna thought. Bruno’s eyes always softened when he started to drink.
Water, please.
Bruno nodded, winked, then marched off to grab drinks for all of them.

He’d called the blond man Karl. Anna remembered now. He was Karl Trötzmüller, a childhood friend of Bruno and Daniela. Anna was embarrassed she hadn’t recalled his name right away. He’d been to the house a dozen times. She blamed her absentmindedness on the weather.

“How are you, Anna? It is kind to talk to you. You see very pretty.” Karl spoke a very strange and extremely slipshod English. By “kind” he meant “nice,” and by “see” he intended
“look.” Both were odd mistakes to make, but Karl was odd to begin with. Seemingly benign but without a doubt peculiar. Even his name was a little off the mark.
It’s got too many umlauts,
Bruno once snarked.
It sounds made up. It’s not Swiss.
Umlauts aside, Bruno was right: it wasn’t particularly Swiss. But it was Karl’s. And it suited him.

Anna considered her clothes. She wore a rust-colored autumn dress styled in an A-line pattern, ribbed yellow tights, and black Mary Janes. Anna preferred the feel of dresses on her body. Slacks and jeans were too confining. Swiss women, Anna noticed, were not dress wearers, choosing more often the practicality of pants. Tomorrow, this dress would return to the closet until spring. As it was, the weather was cold enough that Anna had to complete the look with the only sweater she could lay her hands to as they rushed out of the house, a rough red cardigan. It ruined an otherwise stylish outfit. “I look like a Thanksgiving centerpiece,” Anna said to Karl, who laughed and made a hedging motion with his hands. “Well, I do not understand about that,” he offered, confusing “understand” with “know.” “We have not Thanksgiving in d’Schweez,” Karl said, using the native pronunciation of Switzerland’s name. He, too, wore an outlaw grin and stood in a near-reprobate stance, his hands in his pockets, his feet squarely planted, and his hips thrust forward like a come-on.
Is this a come-on?
Anna wondered.
Is he looking me up and down?
Yes, Karl eyed her as they spoke.
But that’s what people do, they look at each other when they talk,
Anna reminded herself.
Not everyone’s as haphazardly moral as you.

Bruno returned with their beers and Anna’s water, and the men—
those rapscallion boys
—took up the conversation where they’d left it. Anna paid only vague attention until she heard
Tim’s name and figured that Bruno was telling Karl about their dinner with the Gilberts. Bruno spoke in a rapid, scuttling Schwiizerdütsch. Anna didn’t even attempt a proper listen. Karl intuited her frustration and asked Bruno if it would not be better to talk in English. Bruno swigged his beer, shook his head no, and answered, in Swiss German,
She is taking classes, needs the practice, it’s time she learned the goddamn language.
This Anna did understand. He was smiling when he said it, and the smile was real. Bruno meant all his gestures. Bruno meant every word he said.

A
NNA AND
S
TEPHEN TALKED
over one, two, three rounds of drinks. Anna phoned Ursula, fibbed to her, explained that the shops were crowded, that every task was taking twice as long to accomplish as she’d planed, and would Ursula mind watching Victor after school? Would she collect Charles from
Kinderkrippe
?
Would you? Would you …?
Of course Ursula would. But she wasn’t happy about it.

By then Anna had been drained of the vexation she’d been carrying around. Her heart shifted gravity again, only this time, it rose above her head like a helium balloon. Anna acknowledged the absurdity of this feeling. It didn’t matter. She was high on the moment. A wind could come and blow her away. She begged the clock to spin more slowly. She begged the clock to stop.

“W
E MAKE THE PASSIVE
voice in German with the verb
werden.
‘To become.’ So the bicycle
becomes
stolen, if you will. Or the woman
became
sad.”

Or the body would become ravaged. And the heart will become broken.
Somehow it made more sense this way to Anna. “To be” is static. “To become” implies motion. A paradoxical move toward limp surrender. Whatever it is, you do not do it. It is done to you. “Passivity” and “passion” begin alike. It’s only how they end that’s different.

C
LOCKS DON
’
T STOP
. E
VENTUALLY
, with great disappointment, Anna tore herself away from the drinks, her giddiness, and Stephen’s company. It was time for Anna to go home. She wrote her phone number on a napkin and implored him with a wink not to lose it. She blushed as she made a happy journey to the train station.
Yes, yes, of course. A flirtation. Nothing more. I won’t rely on desire to tell me the truth. It rarely does. He will not—he really shouldn’t
—
call.
But as her homeward bound train rolled past the shunting yards to the west of the Hauptbahnhof, Anna felt a tremor in her hand. She attributed it to shivering from the cold. It was winter, after all. But the tremor repeated itself and she realized it was her cell phone. A message that had been sent was received:
What are you doing tomorrow?
Anna didn’t respond. But on that message’s tail came another:
Come see me.
And as the train slowed to a stop at Bahnhof Dietlikon, the last message arrived:
Tomorrow. 10
A
.
M
. Nürenbergstrasse 12.
Anna was pressed to answer; she could do nothing else. She told herself—convinced herself—she could do nothing else. She sent a singular reply.

Yes.

She did not even attempt to pretend she had no intention of sleeping with him.

D
ANIELA
’
S PARTY WAS ORDINARY
,
PROSAIC EVEN
. A
T TWO THEY
feasted upon cervelat, the thick, stubbed wurst known commonly as Switzerland’s national sausage. At three they ate a buttercream cake baked by Eva, a distant cousin of the Benz siblings who lived nearby. At four o’clock Daniela unwrapped her birthday gifts. It was five. Anna had a headache. When she checked her Handy, she found a message from Archie.
Tomorrow after class?
She texted back:
Maybe.

O
N THE DAY AFTER
meeting Stephen Nicodemus, Anna left Charles at
Kinderkrippe
and told Ursula, whom she passed on the street returning from the post office, that she had just a little more shopping left in the city but would be home in time to get Charles and meet Victor after school. Ursula nodded and kept walking. Anna scolded herself for being so chatty. It would be weeks before she learned that the secret to telling lies was simply not to tell them:
Omit, Anna, omit. The fewer the details, the more credible you’ll sound.
When Anna reached
the station, she boarded her usual train. But instead of riding it all the way to the Hauptbahnhof, she got off at Wipkingen, the station just before it. From Oerlikon, the station that immediately precedes it, the ride to Wipkingen was a short two kilometers, three-quarters of which took place in a dark, straight tunnel. Tunnels made Anna apprehensive. Indeed, she found a comfort riding trains, but this occurred in open air alone. In tunnels she could think of nothing but the earth above.
What if the ground collapsed? What if I was buried underneath? What is it like to be buried underground? Will I know it when I’m dead?
In tunnels she worked her best to distract herself. She would imagine, then, the topographies above her, perhaps with a city map in her hand, and trace the train’s path. On the S3 she’d picture the hills of Zürichberg, the Dolderbahn, the FIFA headquarters, the empty fields between Gockhausen and Tobelhof. On this train, the S8, she imagined the houses she was passing underneath, the people inside of them. Who was cooking, who was sleeping, who was fighting, who was making love. Who was sitting on a balcony feeling sorry for herself. Who was breaking someone else’s heart. Who was having her own heart broken. As maudlin as it was, it perturbed her less than the alternative.
It’s through a tunnel a body comes into the world,
Anna thought.
And as a body leaves it?
Anna didn’t know, though some people described a tunnel of light. Anna was willing to accept that as fact.

A short walk found her at Nürenbergstrasse. Stephen sat on a bench in front of his building. He was waiting for her. He took her to his room on the first floor.

Anna had never been mad about foreplay. She was not one of those women who needed to endure complicated half hours of rubbing and prodding and explosive plyometrics before her
body tensed and the dam holding back her pleasure burst. Her desires were basic.
Put it in, take it out. Repeat for as long as possible.

This was Anna’s first infidelity.

They fucked so hard that afterward neither could walk.

D
OKTOR
M
ESSERLI POINTED TO
a picture of a three-footed fountain framed by stars, the sun and moon, and a two-headed dragon. Pillars of smoke plumed up either side. “Fire,” she said, “is the first act of transformation. And,” she added, “in alchemy, fire is always associated with libido.”

A
NNA ATE TOO MUCH
. Her stomach ached and she herself was restless. She was ready to go home but they wouldn’t leave for another two hours at least.

She rose from the table, stretched her arms above her head, and looked around. “Anyone want to go for a walk?” Bruno grunted. The beer was catching up to him and he was getting tired and cranky. Anna took the grunt for a no. Ursula had no interest. The boys were elsewhere. Daniela had guests to entertain. Even Polly Jean; she was asleep on David and Daniela’s bed. Anna shrugged and started off alone.

She’d only made it down the drive before Daniela called after her and asked if she wanted an umbrella. Anna shook her head no. All day long rain had seemed unavoidable. And yet, they had avoided it. She’d take the chance. A few steps farther on she heard the call of her name once more. She turned. Karl Trötzmüller was jogging across the yard to meet her. “I want to come with you,” he said. Bruno glanced briefly in their direction,
then turned back to his conversation. Anna didn’t need his permission. But apparently she had it.