November Sky (16 page)

“Honey, you worry too much. I feel super. You’re right, I have no desire to let some head-shrinker talk me into anything. Just relax a little bit more and don’t take things so seriously.”

“How can I relax when we’re talking about your life and our future together? Instead, I’m spending all my time wondering how it would feel to organize a funeral if I come to your rescue too late.”

Our argument got louder and louder, and at some point he flew into a rage.

“Just stop giving me the perpetual feeling I’m off my rocker and desperately need therapy!” yelled Nick. “I feel fantastic, except that my wife’s making a mountain out of a molehill and is two steps away from having me committed. Just because I swallowed a few harmless pills once and then took the belt off my pants when I was wasted. Maybe my ‘problems’ have to do with you. Before I met you, I never had these attacks. If I had, I’d have been dead ages ago!”

I screamed back, “You’re lying again! You’ve had that recurring dream! The night we met, you were roaring down the road like a madman and didn’t give a shit if you hit a tree or not. Parachuting is not a safe, normal hobby, either. And Hanna said you constantly did risky things as a kid. Will you finally admit that when you put all that together, it doesn’t say a lot for your mental health?”

Riled up but exhausted, I sank onto the nearest armchair and used my palms to angrily wipe away my tears. What a nightmare! Other couples had rows about things like whether the toilet seat should be up or down, or about splattered toothpaste in the sink. But we were arguing about his dangerous hobbies, his suicide attempts, and his aborted therapy sessions. And apparently now
I
was the one who triggered Nick’s urges to tempt death. I decided to pack my things on the spot. But a second later, Nick was in front of me, sweeping me up in his arms and kissing me madly. I wanted to fight it, but his inexorable grip was too much for me as he pressed his lips to mine and his tongue relentlessly sought entrance.

Between kisses, he ran his hands over my body and whispered, “I love you, Laura. Please stop fighting with me. I know you worry. But I really do feel good. You should see a few of my colleagues—then you’d know what real psychological damage is.”

His lips tenderly brushed my forehead, and he kissed me greedily again. I was too drained by our fight to challenge him, and I was swept along by his impetuous lovemaking. We threw ourselves onto each other—we couldn’t get enough—and I repressed my fears once more. I persuaded myself that as long as we could make love like this, we’d overcome every difficulty.

Chapter 14

The sharp blade of the meat knife glided effortlessly through the huge cut of beef sirloin. Nick made thin, regular slices, while I stood at the sink washing button mushrooms and rinsing lettuce leaves. As it turned out, Nick was very handy in the kitchen and loved to try new gourmet recipes even more than I did. Today’s dinner would be filet strips in a cream-and-mushroom sauce. Like many men, he loved the supermarket, mostly the biggest ones, and when he went shopping he’d bring back enough for us to withstand a five-month siege.

“There’s something primeval about wandering through the aisles and piling up the food. Like Stone Age men hunting mammoths and dragging huge masses of meat into a cave,” he argued against my protests that he was buying for a whole battalion instead of a two-person household.

We’d discovered a common passion for cooking after we’d returned from France five months earlier, and had started to cook for ourselves occasionally to relieve Hanna. She’d joined a group of single men and women her age and would go hiking or bowling with them when she wasn’t needed to take care of us.

“I don’t want to be a pest. You don’t need to keep me company. You need time to yourselves,” she’d explained to rationalize her new activities. But I could tell she enjoyed living her own life again after existing so long for Nick and his parents. She was always exhilarated when returning from her outings, and Nick would tease her.

“Are you sure it’s not just
one
man you go around with and you do who knows what with him?”

She stood at the kitchen sink and washed her hands energetically before reaching for a dishtowel. “I am
not
a hussy.”

“Oh, well, dearest Hanna. Who knows? Still waters run deep.”

Indignant, she threw the towel at him.

Nick laughed himself half to death, and I had to admit, I had the devil’s own time to keep from chuckling.

Other than the fight over the counselor, the first half-year of our fledgling marriage was without incident. In the positive sense. We worked a lot, enjoyed our life together, and planned house renovations. Nick’s parents had given us an extremely generous Christmas present.

“Angela and I spend most of the year in Spain, anyway. And the warm climate’s ideal for her arthritis, so we definitely won’t be coming back for an extended stay. It only makes sense to give the house to you two. You need room and a garden, especially when the children come. Make a guest apartment for us upstairs, and do what you want with the ground floor. We’ll pay for the remodeling,” announced Jürgen that Christmas Eve.

Unfortunately, Nick didn’t have the same enthusiasm for planning as I did.

“For God’s sake, with all those ideas of yours, workmen will be in the house for months,” he complained, half seriously and half in jest, and rubbed a tired hand over his forehead.

In April, I made my first concrete suggestions for revamping the first floor, with two bedrooms for the children, of course. He was dubbing an American feature film at the time, speaking the lead’s voice. What would eventually appear in the cinema and on TV as perfectly natural, actually took a lot of concentration and effort to create.

Hanna was having dinner with us and gave him a censorious look over her reading glasses. “That’s what renovations are, my boy. But you’re welcome to lend a hand to save on workmen. At least for the time being.” She chuckled. She very well knew how much Nick hated house repairs of any kind.

I knew Nick was a wonderful lover and a talented actor—and he was becoming a good cook—but he was a lousy do-it-yourselfer. He hated hammering or sticking recalcitrant strips of wallpaper on the wall; he said it was a pure waste of time. And his previous attempts at hanging pictures, unplugging drains, and putting together small pieces of furniture demonstrated his lack of motivation.

I grinned at him and Hanna. “If Nick’s to install the kids’ rooms, I’ll reach menopause before they can move in.”

He got up, threw us a mock withering look, and shoved his chair under the table. “You two possess enormous sensibility in your dealings with highly sensitive people. But continue with the near-demolition of my parents’ house. I’m going upstairs to do more useful things, like learning my lines for tomorrow.”

I helped Hanna clean up, and then we chatted for a bit before I headed upstairs to bed. When I entered our room, it was dark. Was Nick already in bed? Then I saw a narrow slit of light under the closed bathroom door.

“Nick? Can I come in?”

I opened the door and slipped inside. Nick was at the sink with his back to me, looking as though he’d just come out of a deep sleep. He looked frightened when saw me in the mirror. Fine pearls of sweat dotted his forehead.

My eyes dropped lower. He had rolled up his sleeve and in his right hand was a long knife with a black handle. I recognized the knife as from a set we’d been given for a wedding present. It was a bit of a joke at the time, but when we started cooking together, we quickly found out that the tools in that block of wood were much sharper than our other set. However, knives were for dicing vegetables and not for self-mutilation. I would never consider using one of the knives on my own body. But my husband, in one of his exceptional states, did.

As if hypnotized, I stared at the shining silver blade reflecting the light from the mirrored cabinet. The knifepoint pressed into Nick’s wrist, and a trail of blood dripped from the wound into the sink and ran toward the drain. I began to shake all over.

I didn’t move toward him, but I whispered, “Nick, what are you doing? Please, drop the knife.”

I didn’t think for a second he’d hurt me. But I was afraid he’d hurt himself worse with any uncontrolled movements with that sharpened blade.

He looked at me for a few seconds in desperation and shock. Then his eyes widened and his face turned chalk-white. The knife rattled into the sink and he gave an agonizing groan, lowered his head, and braced himself against the edge of the sink.

He didn’t look at me as he choked out the words, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I was going through my lines for tomorrow and I got hungry. I went to look for a bowl and suddenly saw the knives. Then that horrible sadness and hopelessness came over me again. There was nothing I could do.”

He abruptly turned around and pulled me into his arms. I was too shocked to react and was immobilized as he pressed me to himself. What would have happened if I’d chatted with Hanna a little while longer?

“Laura, please, don’t go away. I don’t want to lose you. I’m so happy I’ve found you, and I’m so sorry to keep disappointing you. Something inside me compels me at times to . . . I can’t think about anything else . . .”

The cut was shallow, thank God, and as I bandaged it, we both cried. I cried over my despair at reliving this nightmare over and over, and he, because of his shame and regret at breaking his promise again. And this time it had happened for no apparent reason. We hadn’t argued, he hadn’t had any liquor, and just a few minutes earlier we were all comfortably teasing each other at the dining room table.

My mind was in a whirl. I would have to lock up, hide, or throw away all the knives and scissors in the house. Anything capable of dispatching a person into the next world would have to go. But there were so many things—even electrical appliances were in the same category . . . I thought of my hair dryer . . . And away from the house, Nick could do something stupid at any time, but I couldn’t lock him up, could I? While he was sobbing on my shoulder, I thought of something else. I realized I was taking the wrong approach. I couldn’t constantly protect him from himself. He had to accept a third party’s help.

Three weeks later, exactly a year after our first meeting, with a heavy heart I took Nick to the psychiatric ward of a hospital on the Munich city limits. The hospital was in a converted castle in a large, seemingly well-maintained park. After the knife incident, I’d bluntly told Nick that I couldn’t live with him like this any longer.

“Nick, I can’t stand my anxiety for you, this continual up and down. If you don’t see a doctor, I’m moving out. And then there’s nobody around to rescue you.”

I immediately regretted how hard I was on him. Nick was completely shocked by my threat and fell into a deep melancholy. At first he withdrew totally from the world, answering me only in monosyllables. He slept a lot, and when he was awake, he lounged around in the apartment, listless and staring vacantly ahead. I didn’t dare leave him alone even for a second, and left all the office work to Chris. We phoned each other daily. I only did what I could deal with from home.

Hanna, who was also distressed by Nick’s condition, did our shopping and stayed close by. I was relieved at not having to be responsible for him all by myself. At Nick’s express request, I hadn’t told her about his earlier suicide attempts or the knife incident. I didn’t want her to be even more upset. He hid the bandage on his wrist under long-sleeved shirts and sweaters. Hanna thought he was overworked and had suffered a kind of nervous breakdown on the night in question. I let her think that.

A day after the knife incident, my desperation drove me to persuade a general practitioner in the neighborhood to make a house call. In private, I told him about Nick’s condition and his mental breaks. The man made a sensible impression but explained that as a GP he couldn’t be of much help. Nick urgently needed inpatient psychotherapy and proper medication. I assured him I’d watch him day and night until we found a place for his therapy, and the doctor, after some hesitation, decided against compulsory hospitalization. Otherwise, Nick would have been sent immediately to a psychiatric ward.

At this point, I realized that Nick wouldn’t be able to work in the coming weeks. Further dubbing assignments for him would have to be postponed. I called Mira, who then showed up at the house—unannounced, of course—to check on Nick’s condition for herself. Apparently, she didn’t believe what I’d told her over the phone. Hanna tried to fend her off at the door, but Mira rushed past her and promptly barged into the living room, where Nick lay apathetically on the couch.

Without looking directly at her, he said to me, “She ought to leave. I don’t want to see her.”

Mira looked appalled at how gray and sunken he appeared, and I rapidly escorted her out to the next room. I secretly expected she’d blame me for his condition, but she surprised me. She gave me the same searching look she had when we first met, but this time there was sympathy in her eyes.

“Laura, how long have you been playing along like this? You look pretty much as if
you’ve
had it, too.”

When I waived her off, she raised her hand. “Stop kidding me. My mother had recurring depressions. When it got really bad, she sat around looking exactly as listless as Nick does now, and I was absolutely pushed beyond my limits and helpless. How long has he been like this? We’ve got to do something about it.”

I wasn’t ready to see her as my ally quite that quickly, even if she was revealing her human side at that moment.

“
We
don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Your job is to not let a word of this get out. Think up a plausible statement. I’ll do the worrying about him.”