Hausfrau (16 page)

“What am I looking for?”

“Really, Anna. Look again!”

Anna looked again. She saw Bruno and Otto on the couch. Standing next to the couch was Andreas, a bank employee under both of them. And next to Andreas stood a man she did not know. He was blonder and shorter and younger than the other men. He wore a trim sports coat and dark jeans and trendy designer eyeglasses. He threw his head back to laugh and Anna noticed a gap in his teeth and a chin cleft. He was handsome, yes. And twenty-five years old, if that.

“Who is he? Does he work at the branch? What does he do?”

“Oh, I don’t know what he does.” Edith waved the question away as if it were a housefly. “Some bank thing.” Anna scowled. “His name is Niklas Flimm.”

“Flynn?”

Edith shook her head. “No, dammit. Pay attention.
Flimmmm.
” Edith drew out the
m.
“He’s
Austrian,
” she said with italic emphasis as if somehow whatever she said next would carry more weight, more meaning. “We’ve been sleeping together for a month!”

A
NNA COULDN
’
T DESIGNATE A
single romantic relationship she’d ever entered into that did not begin in sexual earnestness on the very day she’d met the man, whichever man he was. Bruno. Archie. Stephen. Her college boyfriend, Vince. They’d hooked up at orientation. Later that night he’d kicked his dorm mate out and Anna’s hand was in his pants. It’s true, she’d met Karl before that day in Mumpf. But they’d never actually had
a proper conversation until Daniela’s party. A mistake made once is an oversight. But three times, four, a dozen?
Dog, you are begging for the bone.

“A
WHOLE MONTH
!” E
DITH
repeated.

“Huh.” Anna said it with a matter-of-fact thud. Affairs no longer surprised her. Edith smiled harshly.
She’s expecting more of a response,
Anna thought, then fished for something relevant to say. “How did this, um, happen?” Anna stumbled on the word “happen.” She didn’t know what else to offer. “Are you and Otto having problems?”

Edith laughed and smiled glibly. “Oh, no. We’re fine. What Otto doesn’t know can’t hurt him. And look at my skin! It’s the best it’s been in years!” Anna didn’t deny this, though she hardly knew what that had to do with anything.

“Er, how is he?”

Edith gave her a you-must-be-kidding look. “Anna, look at him! He’s gorgeous. And young! Isn’t he amazing?” Niklas turned momentarily from his conversation and saw Edith and Anna looking at him. He raised both an eyebrow and his wineglass to the women. “It’s thrilling, isn’t it?”

Yes,
Anna thought.
Adultery’s a blast.

“Let’s get you one, Anna.”

“A lover?”

Edith rolled her eyes. “No. A fucking houseplant. Yes, a lover.” Edith smirked. “It’ll cheer you up!”

That’s exactly what it won’t do,
Anna thought. Even weak, Anna was occasionally wise. “Are you in love?” Anna asked, in all provincial sincerity.

Edith laughed a tipsy laugh. “Heavens, no!” It sounded quaint and arcane, like something Mary would say. “It is most certainly not about love!”

A
NNA
’
S
G
ERMAN HOMEWORK REGULARLY
consisted of vocabulary drills, verb conjugation exercises, declension practice, and the writing of many, many, many sentences.

Love’s a sentence,
Anna thought.
A death sentence.

E
DITH FUSSED WITH THE COLLAR OF HER BLOUSE THEN LOOKED
around and dismissed herself from Anna with a pat on Anna’s shoulder. “Other guests!” she said as she flitted away and left Anna alone to hug an empty corner of the room. The Hammers had arranged two heaters on their patio but no one was outside. Anna crossed the room as inconspicuously as she could and slipped out the back door.

Christ, I’m good at being alone.
This was the truth. As a child, Anna preferred to spend most of her time by herself. Eventually her parents took her to a psychologist. It didn’t seem healthy, such remoteness in what seemed like an otherwise normal girl.
Is she depressed, Doctor? Will she be all right?
Their concern was legitimate. At home Anna set herself apart. Daily she retreated to her bedroom and locked herself behind the door, where she’d read or listen to the radio or write in her journal or sit in the windowsill and do nothing but stare into the street.
What are you doing in there, all shut away and alone?
they’d ask. “I’m studying,” Anna always replied.
And dreaming,
she’d think but not say.
And wondering who I’ll be
in twenty years.
The psychologist asked three dozen questions and in the end told Anna’s parents she was fine. “It’s puberty,” he said. “It’ll pass.” Then he handed them a bill for two hundred dollars. But Anna’s aloneness didn’t blow over. After her parents died and until she met Bruno four years later, Anna lived alone.

Anna wandered into the Hammers’ yard, nursing the same glass of wine she’d been drinking inside. A mid-October chill defined the night air. Clouds hid the stars. The darkness was tense and fragmented. Anna was staring into the indeterminate sky when she heard a man’s cough. It startled her. “Oh!” She whipped around.

“Hallo, Anna.” It was Niklas Flimm.

“Hello.” It bothered Anna to hear someone she hadn’t been introduced to use her given name. It was an unfair advantage. In some indigenous tribes, a person’s name contains more than their identity, it’s the vessel of her spirit. Niklas hadn’t been given the right. Anna’s ire was already up.

“My name is Niklas.”

“I know.” His English was high-pitched and nasal and he was better looking up close than he was from a distance, and even then it was possible to mistake him for a male model.
Well done, Edith,
Anna thought.

“Edith say you are Bruno’s wife?”

Anna smirked. “Sure.” Niklas’s English was clunky. His “Edith” sounded like “eat it,” and he dropped articles in his speech as frequently as Karl confused vocabulary. Anna stared, not knowing what else to offer. The Austrian accent was difficult for her to get past. Anna listened but avoided his direct gaze by focusing her eyes on his forehead.

The talk they made was tedious. Niklas spoke of Vienna,
skiing, and how sometimes he did not understand the Swiss. Anna kept her face blank as she remembered the punch line of a joke that she’d heard Bruno tell about the Austrians. She’d forgotten the joke’s lead-in. Anna traced the rim of her wineglass with her thumb and wondered what time it was and how much longer Bruno planned on staying.

T
HE WEEKEND BEFORE
E
DITH
’
S
party, Anna and Mary took their children to the Greifensee, Kanton Zürich’s second largest lake, the bank of which lay no more than half a kilometer away from the Gilberts’ front door. The three boys brought along their bikes. Mary and Anna walked the path behind them. Anna pushed Polly in a stroller. Alexis stayed home.

“How did you meet Tim?”

Mary blushed. “We met in high school.”

This didn’t surprise Anna. “You’ve never been with anyone else?”

Mary shook her head. “Nope. No one else. Just Tim.” This admission seemed to shame her.
Just Tim.
Anna focused her gaze on the path ahead of her. Of course she’d had lovers before Bruno. College boyfriends, men she saw for a few months then dumped or, alternately, was dumped by. Male friends who, under differing circumstances, she might have seen less circumstantially. But then there was Bruno. Mary redirected the conversation. “How did you meet Bruno? How did you fall in
looove
?” Mary drew out the word “love” like a sixth-grade girl.

Anna answered the first question. “At a party.” This was the bland truth. They met at a party of a mutual acquaintance. Drunken groping followed on that very same night. And even
now, despite differences both petty and consequential, the lusts upon which they founded their love still thrummed near the surface of their skins. The second question required some circumnavigation. Mary waited on Anna to continue. “Well, he’s handsome, and responsible …” Anna dodged the question by trailing off. Mary nodded deeply. “And,” Anna sighed the sigh of resignation, “here we are.”

“As simple as that?” Mary asked. Anna blinked. “How did he propose?”

“In an orchard. In Washington.” They walked a few steps forward. “We were on a trip.”

“How romantic!”

It should have been,
Anna thought. For any other pair of lovers it would have been. A few months after they met, Anna and Bruno moved in together. A few months after that and while on vacation and walking through an apple orchard near Wenatchee, Bruno turned to Anna and said, “I think you would make a good wife for me. I think I want to marry you.” It was spur-of-the-moment and matter-of-fact. The idea crossed his mind and he spoke it aloud in the same way he might announce that he’d be up for seeing a movie. There was no ring. A thousand round, ripe apples looked on from above.
I agree,
Anna thought.
I would make a good wife. I would mostly make a good wife.
And Anna loved Bruno. Was in love with Bruno. Was in a version of love with Bruno. Inasmuch as she understood it, Anna felt confident enough to name what she felt for Bruno to be love. The sex was good and in those days that mattered as much as anything else. Anna said yes. They married two months later.

Anna felt the crush of dry grass beneath her shoes. Polly Jean fussed intermittently. “Charles!” Anna cried out. “You’re
too far away—come back!” Charles couldn’t hear and didn’t turn around. Anna yelled for Victor to catch up to his brother. When he did, Charles looked back and he waved. “He’s always doing that.”

“Riding off?”

“Not paying attention.”

“Ah, a butterfly chaser! His mother’s son!” Mary giggled.

Bruno’s proposal may have been matter-of-fact, but Anna said yes without hesitation. The orchard air was peaceful. The sky was promising. The apples introduced the possibility of joy. She remembered them all:
Honeycrisp, Honey Sweet, Golden Supreme, Ambrosia, Sunrise, Gala, Fortune, Keepsake.
Their names so improbable, the queer potential of happiness foretold by each.
Yes, Bruno, I’ll be your wife.
They held hands on their walk back to the car. At the end of the path, Anna stopped to pick a black pearly pebble from a pile of lackluster others. She buffed it on her shirt and cached it in her pocket. Anna had carried that pebble with her since. It rattled around in her coin purse against the change.

One day while Stephen was in the bathroom Anna pilfered a blue linen handkerchief from his sock drawer. It was embroidered with initials that weren’t his. It might have been his grandfather’s. She felt bad, but only for a bit. Like the pebble, she’d carried it in her purse since the day she took it.

I think you would make a good wife for me,
Bruno had said.

But that’s not why Anna said yes.

She said yes because she couldn’t imagine a man more suited for her than he.

“M
EN DON
’
T USUALLY HAVE
affairs because they are lonely or want emotional connections. For a man, the reason often reduces to simply this: the challenge of the seduction.” Anna had told the Doktor about Edith and Niklas.

“What about women?”

The Doktor looked sympathetically and directly into Anna’s eyes. “I’m worried about you, Anna.”

T
HE CONVERSATION WITH
N
IKLAS
continued, pained though it was. Niklas had lived in Switzerland for less than six months. He peppered Anna with questions. He asked about day excursions from Zürich, specialty shops for foodstuffs, where he might buy a mountain bike. He was chatty and curious. Anna tensed. He was much too young for Edith. Much, much. Niklas worked for Otto. How flagrant of her. It was an unexpected instance of correctness. It swelled in Anna’s throat.
Christ, what a hypocrite I am,
Anna thought.

But even hypocrites have moments of clarity.
Anna could live with the hypocrisy. It was the clarity she couldn’t dodge.

N
EAR THE END OF
their walk that day, Anna and Mary herded the children into a café near the
Schiffstation
and across from Greifensee Castle, a twelfth-century tower house. They ordered orange sodas for the boys, coffees for themselves, and Anna pulled out a small container of animal crackers and placed two on the snack tray that snapped onto Polly’s stroller. Polly picked them up and began banging them against the plastic. They crumbled into immediate bits. “No, Polly.” Anna grabbed two more cookies and put one near Polly Jean’s mouth. Polly took
the animal cracker in her chubby fist and tapped it against her lips as if to eat it, then smashed it, like the others, on the tray. “I give up.” Anna handed over the remaining cookie. Sometimes that’s what Anna did: she just gave up.

Mary offered sympathy. “Oh, they’re like that sometimes, you know. Willful. Girls, I think, especially.” Anna would have to think on that before she agreed.

When the drinks came Anna reached for her wallet. “No, no—I’ve got this,” Mary said and Anna backed down. Mary carried a large, unwieldy purse. When she reached inside the bag for her wallet, she tipped it and some of the contents fell out, including a travel-sized container of hand sanitizer that landed in Mary’s lap and a paperback novel that fell to the ground. “Oh shoot!” Mary reached for the sanitizer as Anna nabbed the book.