Secret Dreams (34 page)

But the girl had not touched her deeply yet. Merely a thing of the hospital, suitable for fantasy — and far away.

So as the bright October days shortened to cooler nights, she waited with him in her mind as he languished at the door of 401. And the wait became interminable and dreary.

Their talks in bed stopped when he began spending nights on the fourth-floor hall, watching for the girl to take a plate of food into her room or send a chamber pot out. Once, Emma came in from shopping and was appalled to find him trying to force feces down the bathroom sink. He looked up from his task, grinning idiotically, and launched into an explanation about how “this was the way the patient did it, you see, in order to keep her room free of excrement.”

Later in the week he sat at the dinner table while his food went cold, drawing a picture of the gift Fräulein Schanderein made for him: a repulsive, faceless little doll. “You see, she made them out of strips of her bedsheet and her stools, which she somehow made in small regular amounts —” He broke off, admitting sheepishly, “I was all wrong about her trying to force it down the sink. She wasn't doing that at all. She saved them up. One a day for thirteen days. Making them for me!”

What could Emma say? All that day she had shopped for the meal herself, and cooked it herself, and sent the servants away early. Now the food lay on his plate, hunks of spongy meat and tired vegetables, growing cold. Her own plate barely touched. “Yes, I see,” she said.

November came, blowing cold each day and colder at night. The bed was cold and she lay alone. He came in at odd hours, muttering to himself in snatches she couldn't catch. If he spoke to her at all, he did so in asides, his face brightening for a moment when he told her, “I opened the door today and stared inside.”

Then, on another day, “I got inside the room.” And on the next, “She allowed me to sit.” Then finally, with a grim smile, “Three months to the day, exactly. I introduced myself.”

Nothing else existed in his life. Emma stopped asking questions,- waiting silently for him to speak, yet all the time wanting it to change, to go back to the way things were before. Far easier to hold her tongue than to put the hard questions now. Questions like “Do you still love me?” And “When will you come home?” November was the silent month.

Then one day he did come home. On a day when the ice glinted blackly on the windowpanes in the December dusk, barging in livid, shouting, “The idiot lost her goddamn sheets! The very
raw material
of her gifts. What did the moron think? She didn't want them back?”

He shut himself up in the kitchen, letting the teakettle whistle. She heard china shattering in the sink, heard cursing. He broke two cups making tea. She told the maid she could leave early

He left the kitchen a wreck and went to the parlor sideboard, where he took a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard, the only liquor in the house. Emma watched him pour three slugs one after another, then push the shot glass away after the last. Finally gripping the bottle, head bowed as though praying to the whiskey god before putting him back in his dark hole. From then on he shut her out completely

When he began composing the letter to Herr Vienna Professor in earnest, Emma crept into the study to read his notes. Consumed with curiosity and loathing — swearing never to look again but knowing all the while she would. For now she saw through the viewing slit into the patient's room, seeing what he saw. How Fräulein kept full chamber pots around her bed for comfort. How she sent him out in frantic searches for more vessels in which to store her excrement. Offering up her chamber pots and used meal plates. How her husband finally saw the girl's unwashed foot as it pushed a slop pot toward him.

He said one thing to her during this time, right at the end of December, murderously happy. “Hah! She threw a plate at a nurse named Simson. Almost killed her. Pity!”

In early January he began to get more cooperation from the staff; and for a little while at least, he came home regularly and in a better state of mind. She caught a light cold, which she passed on to him. He fought it for ten days, yet going each day to the hospital, and the cold grew worse. He looked more and more drawn, as if some hidden physical bond with the patient robbed the very life from his blood. She brought him sugared tea with oranges squeezed in it as he lay hacking in bed…. He said thank you. And she said you're welcome.

The next day he overslept, woke up in a panic, and fumbled about the bedroom, trying to disentangle clean clothes from soiled ones. “I don't think you should go,” she told him. She could have stopped him if she wanted, just by holding his hand and drawing him back to bed. But she let him go, tying his necktie to speed him on his way. Part of her hoped he would get really, really sick, and leave the Schanderein girl to someone else.

Emma's vile Whisperer suggested that. Her secret Whisperer who said things like:
Try to understand and not he too critical
But he whispered it in such a mealy-mouthed way, she knew he really meant:
Let the fool hang himself. Then he'll come back with his tail between his legs
.

Who was this secret Whisperer anyway, always poking his long, blue-carbuncled nose into everything she thought? A figment of her mind, of course. A vile incubus who took pleasure in feeding off all the sensible and mature words she used to hold her life together, only to spew them out again as cheap, smelly virtues, the nice words she used to fool herself into seeing everything as normal. She knew his face. Bulbous eyes, swollen from crying in the dark and feeling sorry for himself. Running nose, from the cat hair that collected in the bottom of the closet where he lived. Spidery fingers, perfect for picking at all her open sores.

And forever cajoling her, whining from his dark corner, interjecting some nasty piece of counsel. Every time she thought she knew her mind, he just made matters worse. One day insisting,
Try to understand — after all, he's your husband
.

Yet the very next day whimpering fearfully,
Say something, do something. Save yourself before it's too late
.

Yet when her Whisperer went back to his smelly hole and she saw her husband trembling with fever, putting on his clothes, determined to make it to the hospital … her heart did leap out to him, knowing how alone he was. Knowing how much courage it took to drag himself forward as the whole sea tide of things battered like a gale to flatten him down. While her Whisperer sneered,
Help him Emma — after all, he's your husband
, Licking his chapped lips, making it sound so dirty.

Only he could put those quotation marks around the word “husband.” … And it had been a long time since Emma found it possible to remove them.

Ja, her “husband” …

Running off half dead to save his little Fräulein.

Then came Orderly Zeik straight from the Burghölzli. Herr Doktor had fallen sick, and they were keeping him in a room across from the patient. An open war had. been going on over the body of the girl in 401. That very morning Herr Doktor had arrived in the nick of time to prevent a major catastrophe. And all the while her vile Whisperer chided,
After all, he's your “husband,”

Yet the days she nursed him in the hospital brought them closer than they had been for months. Emma found a reason for being. He needed her and she could serve. There was a wholesome center in that, a warm place where the Whisperer never shoved his nose. She sensed that even as her husband lay sick, part of him wanted to “make love” to her. Sensed it like a smell rising from the sickbed. But as for “making love” … quote marks had been placed around those words too. That night her eyes fluttered open to see him creeping close to her, almost close enough to take the quote marks away from making love. She felt him wanting it then. And she wanted him to want it. And take her in the chair …

Nursing him was a little like making love. She wiped the perspiration from his forehead while his eyes glistened up at her. And every day she waited while he went to Fräuleins room to try to cure the girl for a few minutes, returning shaking and weak. How sensually ironic that during the time Fräulein S defiantly clamped onto her bowels, Herr Doktor noisily expended himself in his own chamber pot. While Emma babied him and wiped his bottom, Making them more intimate than they had been in months. And yet horrible too, touching him that way in the hospital and not at home, in private.

On the night the fever broke, she knew she would not be needed the next day. Indeed, he had already gone to the girl's room when she awoke in the morning, stiff and cramped in the chair. How galling! She had worn herself to a fray keeping a death watch over him three nights running.
Don't even leave him a note
, her Whisperer suggested. She wrote one anyway: Dinner at six, Darling — or some such nonsense.
What a good little doormat
…

And only when Emma walked in at the front door did she realize she had taken her husband's dirty clothes from the hospital room to press them, twisting his jacket and pants into knots as she mumbled furiously to herself all the way home.

Suddenly she laughed. Served him right. And she tried to stifle her smiles and smirks that evening when he stepped out of the carriage in front of their house with his bathrobe tucked around him, bare calves and feet in slippers. He came right into where she sat in the parlor, hooking his thumbs into his bathrobe belt, and announced with quiet pride, “Fräulein Schanderein spoke today.”

Thence straight to bed.

The next day his head cold seemed to be waning fast. “I'm going to see her face,” he told her.

Emma stared out their bedroom window into the broad dome of a brittle blue February sky. The sun warmed a triangular patch of their bed … the winter passing. God, I hope she dies today, Emma thought. Before he can finish the letter, before the man in Vienna writes back.

Now, as Emma watched the triangular patch of sun creep higher and higher on the bedspread each morning, Fräulein Schanderein seemed less and less like a flesh-and-blood person. More like a living vegetable living in a hosoital bed, which clung to its miserable existence by sending out fungus-like tentacles, sucking the putrefied essence out of everything it touched. The girl had long since ceased being ill, ceased being fascinatingly crazy. Now every time Emma thought of her husband with that girl, she called the girl a name —the Cunt, He was with the Cunt. He's seeing the Cunt, He's just come from the Cunt, And nothing she could ever do erased this ugly word from her mind. An unspeakable word — the mealy-mouthed Whisperer was too afraid to say it. And then one day Emma discovered she could not even keep the cunning word locked up in her head. But that it cunningly managed to escape.

This is how it happened. Emma's final university paper was due for her baccalaureate in archaeology — to be finished in five weeks' time — and she had barely begun to collect the materials! In desperation she had turned the kitchen into a study of sorts, working long hours there when no other chair or room in the house seemed to suit. After a few days of cloistering herself among the smoky bricks and pots and pans, she began to think she might actually deliver the paper on time….

How snug and comfy the kitchen was: rows of china plates smiled down from their shelves, and teacups gossiped with their saucers. A net of onions hanging from a dark roof beam amiably consoled a smoked ham nearby on the tasty fate of being eaten. A place of her own, where she ruminated to her hearts content while a cheery fire hissed, a bubbling pot of water whistled for tea, and Geschrei purred sweetly in the chimney corner.

She made the kitchen table her desk. And beside a pile of half-peeled turnips for a stew she stacked old volumes. Various tomes on the European Grave Builders, with long-winded titles such as
Prehistoric Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages-
, and dubious pronouncements bordering on the pompous, like
The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man
, And still further leaps of the imagination, such as an obscure medical paper titled “The Marking of Lunar Time Through Synchronized Menses in Tribal Females of the Tahitian Islands.” Also strewn in sheaves across the table were some pen-and-ink drawings by the Frenchman Abbé Henri Breuil, who sketched bones and artifacts he uncovered while digging holes in the Aurignac caves at Les Eyzies in the Vézère vallev.

What made a person carve the soul-image of a bison onto a round flat stone? Why cherish a reindeer antler etched with the figures of spearmen on the hunt? She had traveled through Les Eyzies once — a gentle rolling valley with a sparkling river, tame and secure. The huntsmen chipping flints and stalking game were long, long gone, Only a quiet, cultivated valley, where peach trees laden with fruit swayed in the wind and where a plump gendarme in his smart blue uniform pedaled along the road, ringing his bicycle bell.

In the midst of her pondering, Helga, their housegirl, brought a note into the kitchen. Helga, a sweet, sheltered creature, didn't mean to disturb her, but an irritation welled up in Emma, as if some nasty substance embedded in the envelope itself had passed from her husband's hands to hers. Of course the note came from him, who else? Once thoughtful gestures, now they were fast becoming annoying interruptions. Each one the same. Dear Love, 111 be home late tonight, will you please see to something or other of no particular importance. So Emma just took the note silently from Helga, glanced at it, and tossed it aside — thinking to herself,
He can't come home because he's with the Cunt
. And blithely went on paging through the pages of Àbbé Breuil.

The housegirl gaped at her from the kitchen door.

“What is it, Helga, dear?”

The pale maid pressed a dimpled fist into her moist red mouth and fled with a mousy squeak. Had the word really been said out loud? Into the air?