My Other Life (47 page)

"Don't call me darling."

"OK. If you promise not to call me Andreas."

I looked around the restaurant to see whether anyone was listening and in a way to gauge what would happen—who would witness it—if, as I feared, Jutta might stand up and howl at me. Lowering my gaze and sinking in my chair, making myself seem small and harmless, even insignificant, perhaps pitiable, I held my breath. And then I drank some more champagne, keeping silent.

She said, "Don't worry, I'm not going to freak out."

She knew exactly what I had been thinking. The waiter approached with our first course. I let him set out the plates, holding my breath, and then I said in the lightest way I could muster, "So how was work today?"

"There are moments when I feel that nothing is real but evil, nothing true but pain." Then she smiled in a haunted and horrible way.

"Oh, God," I said. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. Jutta, are you that unhappy?"

"No. I was quoting," she said. "That's Monkton Milnes, Lord Houghton. He was Sir Richard Burton's patron and, poor old fellow, he got pretty depressed at times. I was editing a program about him today."

The moment passed, though the quotation stayed in my mind as indescribably bleak. Jutta was still talking in an animated way. "Burton was a bit like you, actually. Banging around the world. Always writing, interested in everything, a dab hand at languages and arcane lore.
A History of Farting,
if you please.
The Arabian Nights.
A selfish beast, too."

"Still, he discovered the source of the Nile."

"No, he didn't. John Harming Speke did. You didn't know that?"

"I forgot. That's right. There was a kerfuffle and Speke committed suicide."

"It might have been an accident," Jutta said. "You'd better listen to the program."

"I definitely will. Burton hated inconveniences but he enjoyed hardships. I can relate to that, as the jargon has it."

'"He was my god,' Isabel said. Maybe I should have been more like her," Jutta said. She smiled at me. "Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"Isabel."

"Isabel who?"

"Isabel necessary on a bicycle?"

When I laughed she seemed to grow sad, and then began working her knife through her pâté with more force than was necessary. "No," she went on, "I am not a doormat," and slashed again at the pâté. "Did you do anything about putting the car in my name?"

"I sent the papers by registered mail."

"What about the house insurance?"

"Navin said he'd send the forms. He said it's no-fault insurance."

"That's what we should have had from the beginning," she said, and then, "But it's no one's fault."

I said, "It doesn't seem possible that Navin was at our wedding."

"And still alive. The Africans must be dead—that funny little clerk, and your housegirl, Veronica. She stole flowers and put them all over the house."

"Not for the wedding. She did that when you first visited my house. She was trying to placate you."

"It's the old servant fear in Africa. As soon as the bwana gets married, the mem sacks all his servants."

"But you did fire her."

"She was very dirty. There were cockroaches in the kitchen. And that reminds me. In the typescript you had me saying 'bloody.' I want you to change it."

"It's fiction."

"I never say "bloody'!" Her sharp voice rang in the restaurant. No one looked up, but her raised voice caused a silence and a sense of people listening hard.

"Of course I'll change it," I said quickly. "Do you remember that Englishman who came and said, 'Why, this Kraut's married an English rose'?"

Jutta smiled, remembering, and then said, "Let's not talk about the past. It just makes me sad."

"How do you think Wolfie will do on his finals?"

"You'll miss them. You're really letting him down that way."

"I can't take his finals for him."

"You know what I mean."

I realized that I had been protesting dishonestly. I was being evasive. We both knew that.

"I'm sorry."

She frowned. "
Sarig,
" she said. "Old English. It means sad."

"Sorry is the name of this country. Sorry is what you say to the person who just stepped on your foot. I've never heard the word spoken so often. I'll bet there's a village in England called Sorry. I'll bet there's a local product—jam or a local wine. Sorry Jam, Sorry Champagne."

"Are you drunk?" Jutta asked. "When I was at Cambridge, Wittgenstein gave us a whole lecture on
sarig
and its variants."

And through a haze of wine I saw her in the lecture hall in Cambridge, in the famous snowy winter of 1947, watching Wittgenstein through her National Health specs and writing in her notebook, so serious in her black gown, hard up for money, scrimping to get by, anxious and lonely, because her whole life lay ahead of her—all this. It was a pathos I found unbearable.

"Why are you crying?" she said, shocked at my tears.

"I was thinking of you at Cambridge. Those stories of how you had to be so frugal. Your cold room. The disgusting food."

"It wasn't so bad," she said, and the idea that she was being brave made it all worse for me.

"The past is so sad," I said. "All that innocence."

"Please, Andy, you're blubbing. People will see you."

The worried way she said that reassured me of her sympathy and kept me sobbing softly, snuffling, the tears flowing fast. She took her napkin and dabbed at my face.

"I get so unhappy when I look back and think of how hopeful we were. Nothing is sadder than that. Just two little people. We had so little—we were starting with almost nothing. Once I found a pair of your shoes. You must have had them a long time ago. They were cheap ones and all worn out. I held them in my hands and cried the way I am doing now. The sight of them tore at my heart. Why does the past seem so bleak?"

She held my hand, more like a mother than a lover, taking charge of the hand, but softly, and I was comforted.

"You're being a little melodramatic, Andy."

"Marrying you was the best thing that ever happened to me," I said, and licked at my tears.

"That's sweet of you to say. But please let's not talk about the past."

"I don't remember bad things in our marriage, only good things."

"It doesn't matter," she said.

Her eggplant arrived, and my quail, and when the waiter had made his little bow and withdrawn, Jutta poked at her plate.

"I can't eat a thing. What a wicked waste."

"Have some bread. Otherwise you'll get drunk."

"I think I'm drunk already."

She twisted the bread with her fingers, ripping the crust, pulling it apart. Seeing that I was watching her, she became self-conscious and offered me some, and I took it like communion. She did not eat any. She sipped her wine and she relaxed, easing herself back, one shoulder higher than the other, and she smiled.

Instead of eating, we drank more of the champagne, drank faster than the waiter could keep our glasses filled, and so I kept snatching the bottle from the bucket.

"We should have come here more often."

"There are so many things we should have done more often," I said. "And some not at all."

"I don't want to think about that."

"More wine?"

"Shan't. Won't. I know when I've had enough." As she spoke she was rooting in her handbag, shuffling the contents.

"I'm paying," I said. "That was the agreement."

"No," she said, still searching in the bag. She began to cry, a sudden gust, her face crumpling, her look of panic replaced by one of utter misery. Her tears flowed as she dug among a hairbrush and a compact and a clutter of tickets and pens. They were the tears I had feared all evening, and they were piteous, and she said in a voice aching with grief, "Oh, God, I've lost my credit card!"

"Let me look," I said, and took the bag, and clawed through it, so sad to see all these worn objects, the scratched compact, the broken purse, the hairs snagged on the bristles of the brush, the smears of ink on the ballpoint pens, the tickets that were used, punched, clipped, and out-of-date, all those trains to work, all that effort. And she sat helpless, weeping, while I searched, and she still looked sad, even after I found the card.

We quarreled a little over the bill again, and I reminded
her of what we had agreed, and I gave the waiter my card. When he returned, he said, "I wanted to ask you the last time you were here whether you're the writer."

"I'm the writer."

"I envy you. That's the life I'd like. I love traveling myself. I've been all over Europe, but I suppose that's not really traveling by your standards. Any more trips planned?"

"I don't know."

Jutta said to the waiter, "He means yes."

Outside the restaurant, I said, "I wonder if that waiter saw me crying."

"I'm sure he did." She walked a few steps, then turned to me and said in a breathless, gossipy voice, "Andreas Vorlaufer, the famous writer, was at table eight last night, blubbing."

That made me laugh, and that laughter saved everything. Her mockery was like proof that there was nothing she could say that would offend me. We understood each other perfectly, without having to be gentle. There was something unshakable, indestructible that bound us together.

"And so was his wife," I said. "He must have made her cry."

Jutta's laugh delighted me, and we crossed the common under the lamps, saying nothing more, just holding each other to keep from slipping, because we were both drunk, and the temperature had dropped. There was ice on the footpath, the shallow puddles had frozen. Side by side, steadying each other, propping each other up, we made our slow way home through the night, which was hard and dark and clear, ice crystals on the footpath and frost in the grass, and even the stars and the cold cloud-smudged moon seemed like aspects of this black, frozen city.

Entering the house, stamping to warm our feet, I had a proud, almost exalted sense of fulfillment, for the house
was large and solid, ten rooms piled on four floors, crammed with furniture and paintings, and the sharp odors of floor wax and brass polish and the lingering aromas of burned candles and leather bindings and exotic carpets seemed to give it greater substance, the suggestion of trophies, the accumulation of almost twenty years of love and work, this whole heap from the revenue of my writing, all of it risen from a thin trickle of ink. Yet there was a shadow over it, which was partly the hour of the night, and my mood: I felt an anticipation of emptiness, as though I had just entered my own tomb.

We stood wordlessly, still gasping from our walk through the thin wintry air, looking at each other in a silent pleading way, as though fearful of speaking.

Finally she said, "There's half a bottle of champagne left."

There was the bottle, with the knife jammed into it.

"It will go flat if you don't drink it."

"Leave it," I said. "I have to get up early. Six probably."

"Jesus, that's the absolute crack."

How I loved the way she spoke to me in her own untranslatable language.

She used the downstairs bathroom, I used the upstairs, and for the next ten minutes or so water rushed up and down the house, fountains and cataracts sounding in the walls.

The bedroom was in darkness when I entered, but I knew from the vaguest flutter of breath that she was in bed. I slipped beneath the duvet and moved into her orbit of warmth.

And there we lay, all night, holding each other in the close and steadying way that we had crossed the common, balancing on the ice. But we were under the covers, generating heat.

Often, sleeping, the image came to me that I was buoyant in an enormous ocean, submerging myself in sleep. Sleep was not the act of swimming, not action at all, but rather a sense of submersion in the deep currents of that ocean's darkness, among flitting slivers of lighted fish, the odd phosphorescence I always saw glimmering when I was in a dark bedroom. And holding my wife was the best version of that, sinking with her, clasping her from behind, and then shifting and feeling her roll against my back and ride me down to the profbundest, the darkest depths, where there were no dreams, where there was nothing but sleep.

The alarm's ringing was harsh and sudden and too loud, like the signal of the direst emergency.

She woke a moment after me, as I was kissing her.

"Andy!" she said.

But I had slid out of bed and was snatching at my clothes.

"I'll miss my plane."

"No, please, no! Come back! Please, don't go. What will I do without you—no!"

And worse than the words was the sound that followed, not a scream but a sob, the most grievous I had ever heard, as though she were strangling on blood, the nearest thing I had ever heard to someone dying. It was her own sound.

Sometimes in a big parking lot you hear a car door slam, and you note it, the strength of it, the grunt, like the chop of a cleaver; then there is a pause, someone sucking air, and an unearthly howl of pain. I had shut the door, and I knew I would go on hearing that cry of pain wherever I went, for the rest of my life.

It was the saddest story I had ever read.

A
FTER A MARITAL SEPARATION
, because of the awful things you say or hear, you start using public phone booths more—anyway, I did, for their privacy and anonymity, to avoid embarrassment. And they all seemed to look alike, indistinguishable, allowing me to forget the bitter conversations and the hopeless silences. But in a short time an odd and unexpected thing happened, and it frightened me, and a sadness entered my soul and sank it. That capsizing made me see that I had never been to a place like this. The traveler was now a castaway. I did not know how I had gotten here; I did not know how to leave this lonely country where phones had faces.

The phones were memorable, each in a different way. Every one of them, even the most humdrum and seemingly featureless one, took on a particular appearance, its own look. In nightmares inanimate objects often have personalities—the wicked chair, the menacing tree. This was the phone with a memory. My misery made them unique, gave them a history. One represented tears, another stood for a particular crisis, and others still for pain or certain ugly words or a vow. Their low hoods and half-walls gave them the look of high-tech confessional booths, all pretty much alike, yet I think of these plain objects and it amazes me to reflect on how powerful the associations are. A bank of phones now looks to me like a wailing wall.