The Receptionist (16 page)

F
RITZ:
T
HE
D
ENOUEMENT

T
H
E END OF THE
affair began after Fritz and I had enjoyed three happy years together. Well, two of them were happy. So happy that from my point of view, the natural consequence was marriage. Fritz finished the
Peer Gynt
translation, finished his own play, and began work on some cabinetry in the new apartment. One night, after he and I had been living there for a month or so, I became a full partner in our lovemaking. I just let go and achieved complete surrender. It was as though, all my sexually active life, while experiencing pleasure aplenty, I had had a cramp, and the more I tried to release it the tighter it got, until, not from tiredness, not as a result of default, but from readiness, aware and carefree, I stopped trying and the cramp disappeared.

Fritz was immensely moved. He held my face in his hands and said, “I did not dream that I would one day receive an American girl’s first unselfish love.”

I beamed.

It was wonderful. It was like discovering the world. More and more I longed to bear him a child, if only I could win his consent. For the first time, I felt confident that I could have a child without turning into the bane of its existence, its mother. As for marrying, with Fritz I saw the possibility of avoiding the lifelong farce of the Happy Home—that conventional kind of marriage entered into for security, merely in order to be safe in a world of manufactured images, where no harm could come to me as I sat in the family bomb shelter, raising my kids on a pack of lies about how swell everything was.

It must have been our third winter when, having been through two holiday cycles of Christmas together and even sent out joint Christmas cards to a select few, I began to make nervous notes in a composition notebook of the kind I still use. Rather pathetic little notes . . .

Why can’t he be sure he loves me? Why can’t he make up his mind to marry me? He’s like that in everything, of course. He turns and turns things over in his mind till he sees so many possibilities he doesn’t know which end is up. I would fall in love with Hamlet. But I am no Ophelia, even though I did damn near send myself down the river over Evan. I would not do it again. He can hang fire all he wants. He can’t outlast me. He suspects it, too. He even said to me, “Anyone who cries as easily as you do is pretty tough. You don’t give an inch; you give only tears.”

One morning I woke from a dream to face Fritz. “Remember that woman we saw last night, sitting at an outside table at the Peacock?
Th
e one with the terrific purple cloche that dipped down across one entire half of her face? Well, I dreamed I had one just like it in red. I looked marvelous in it. I was holding our son in my lap—he looked marvelous, too—and you were driving the three of us to New Jersey.”

Fritz did not respond. I rose on one elbow and looked at him. “You didn’t like that dream, did you?”

“No.”

I looked again into the abyss. It was becoming all too familiar. I saw it each time we disagreed or saw things differently and whenever marriage or children were mentioned. Each time I had more to lose. But I also had more to hold on to. I was ready, now, to acknowledge my own strength. I knew that if I had to, I could be alone and remain perpendicular. I was even prepared to reject the idea that if I were to be left alone, I would be unalterably miserable. Kierkegaard had it right. Being is always in a state of tension with nothingness, and the only way over the abyss is a leap of faith. He says you keep making the leap over and over. I hoped I could. But there it was again, the yawning abyss.

And always now the tantalizing idea of marriage to this Continental playwright-translator. It could be as unconventional as he wished. In fact the prospect of an unconventional union appealed to me enormously. But his resistance and my insistence led to an inevitable ultimatum. Fritz called my bluff and left me. He moved out and into a small place on Horatio Street. I still heard from him periodically. Nineteen sixty-three staggered along, fraught with attempts on my part at reconciliation. In the early summer of 1963 I countered by leaving us both. I went away, home to Minnesota, still thinking that after a period of absence, Fritz would change his mind. I returned to find that he had changed his mind, all right. He had found a new girlfriend. Several years his senior, Gina was part Italian, part German Jew, a former mistress of Hugo’s, his chief opponent in chess, a fact in which I found a dark significance. She was, in every physical attribute, my exact opposite. Where I was tall, she was short; where I was thin, she was thick; where I was blond, she was brunette. It didn’t occur to me that other dichotomies were possible: perhaps where I was shallow, the new woman was deep; perhaps where I was neurotic and needy, the other was secure and independent. And it was not fair either that the new woman was a better cook.

By August I decided on an escape to Europe. Making it plain he would be traveling without Gina, Fritz said that he, too, would be in Europe then—making the trip we had talked so many times of taking together. He was enthusiastic about my plan. I would of course visit him at his father’s house. (Fritz had made a kind of peace with his family by then.) I had their addresses. I had only to inform them of the date. I was expected.

My August visit to Germany was perverse, quixotic, willful, and above all irrational. Perhaps it is true that a woman in love is seldom a rational creature. I knew that Fritz, who would be in Hamburg, expected me to arrive via Madrid on the twenty-ninth. Instead I went to Copenhagen on the twenty-ninth. I told myself I did that because I had found it so hot in Spain, but was I giving myself an out in case Fritz—or was it I?—didn’t want to reconcile? Better to miss the boat literally than through some deeper, more personal failure of my own. Still not cold enough in Denmark, I went on to Norway. I might yet have arrived within a reasonable approximation of the date I’d announced. Instead I opted for the train that went to Germany via the length of the coast of Sweden.

Years later, when people asked me why I wasn’t married, I’d laugh and say, “It was too hot in Spain.”
Th
ey took it as a joke.

When I arrived in Germany at last, I called Hamburg, only to discover that Fritz, having concluded I was not coming, had struck out for Copenhagen in the family sailboat. He would return on roughly the date of my arrival back in New York. Beautiful. I could scarcely have missed it better.

I left the phone booth and inquired of the customs officer how to get to Niendorf, a nearby village where, I knew, Fritz’s father had a house. One of the customs officers was just going off duty. He lived in Niendorf. Could he offer me a ride?

Th
ere was no mistaking the man who answered my knock. Herr Steffan-Freude was seventy-four and seven feet tall. His tanned face beamed down at me. He put one arm around my shoulder and with the other took my hand. “Janet, come in.” I was surrounded by a gray suit of scratchy material, then encouraged down a short, narrow hallway and onto a blue couch in the living room.

“Now,” said Fritz’s father, calmly producing a decanter and glasses, “we will have a little sherry.”

His English, while slow, was correct; he told me he had not spoken it since 1922, when he made an exhibition tour of the United States with a plane of his design, very advanced for those times. In the course of that tour, he told me, he had flown with his partner to Siberia and then the North Pole.

As I told him of
my
little trip, my mind checked off the things about the room that were already familiar to me. How proud Fritz had been that this house was designed by his father. Fritz had drawn it for me on a paper napkin in New York, even down to the French doors.

I recognized, too, the portrait of Frau Steffan-Freude over the dining room table. I had seen one photograph of Fritz’s mother, taken in the conservatory of the big house in Wismar where they had lived from 1934 to 1944, though the lady herself had died in 1941. I would have known her from her eyes alone.
Th
ey were Fritz’s eyes.

We sat sipping sherry in the living room, which was strewn about with a widower’s clutter of newspapers and books. I spotted an open volume of Goethe.

Herr Steffan-Freude smiled a charming smile at me. “Will you join me at my simple supper?” I protested that my heavy dining on the boat had left me not at all hungry. He said, “Keep me company, in any case.” Moving to the table under the portrait, he held my chair for me. I saw that bread and cheese had been laid out.

Herr Steffan-Freude went to the kitchen and, moving with his slow, deliberate air, brought to the table a white china teapot. I offered to assist him. He refused with a wave of his hand. Soon he was seated beside me, and a mellow camaraderie fell over the table as we shared the bread and cheese, but not before Herr Steffan-Freude lifted a bottle of rum from the bookcase behind him. Holding it up, he said, “We will add a little rum to the tea this evening, in honor of your visit.” And so we did, conversing on the topic that had been binding us together all along.

I asked him if he remembered a story Fritz told of himself as a four-year-old. He had slipped into the kitchen while the staff was engaged in preparing a large, festive dinner, stolen half a dozen tarts, and eaten them, every one. Later, when his mother came into the nursery to supervise her sons at their meal, she asked, “Fritzie, why are you not eating? Won’t you have at least one bite?” Shoving away his plate of vegetables with a virtuous air, Fritz had cried, “No, no—it will make me fat.”

Herr Steffan-Freude greeted my recital of this episode with laughter, yet with a certain restraint, as if he still found his son’s behavior lacking in discipline.

I brought out some Swiss chocolate I’d purchased on the steamer, and we smiled at each other as it melted on our tongues.

Not long afterward, for we were both tired, I was shown to a bedroom to the left at the top of the stairs. I had no sooner settled into the bed than, engulfed by its red feather duvet, I fell into a deep sleep.

Next morning we breakfasted together, Herr Steffan-Freude allowing me to do dishes, though he rearranged everything after I had put them away.
Th
en I watched, entranced, as he contrived to get his seven-foot frame into an old gray Volkswagen and we putted off to Travemünde, a very pretty resort town. Hundreds of sailboats of all sizes were moored alongside the large marina. A regatta was in progress. As we drove up a curved drive to stop before a huge white luxury hotel, Herr Steffan-Freude announced his intention of taking me to lunch.

In the hotel’s grand, airy dining room, which was entirely deserted, tuxedoed waiters lurked behind every pillar. As Herr Steffan-Freude held the waiting armies at bay, we lunched on clear beef broth, tender golden fish, rice pilaf, and
Gurkensalat,
savoring a bottle of mellow Rhine wine and forming between us a friendly island of humanity in the ghostly atmosphere.

Just then, a wedding party emerged from the hotel and passed across the terrace to the lawn, where they posed for photographs, a handsome couple.
Th
e blond bride’s white, full-skirted dress billowed out like a sail around her legs. It was a small party, only the two attendants, a set of parents, and a naughty young cousin in the group.
Th
e bride’s shoe came off and the groom teased her, withholding it, now behind his back, now over his head, until she gave him a kiss and he tapped her lightly with it on the tip of her nose, then fell on his knees with exaggerated gallantry to slip it on her foot.

From the deserted dining room, the two of us watched all this in silence, absorbed in our own thoughts—perhaps a bit oppressed by our thoughts.
Th
en, all at once, we pushed back our chairs and left the table and the hotel.

As we rolled back into the driveway of the sensible little house in Niendorf, we saw a big gray Mercedes pulled over on the lawn.

“Ach, wie schön,” said Herr Steffan-Freude, “Karl and Lotte are here.”
Th
is was Fritz’s brother and his wife. I guessed that they must have driven up from Heidelberg, where Karl worked at the Max Planck Institute.
Th
e hall and living room became a jolly confusion of greetings and hugs, of questions and answers that changed places in midair and ended with everyone getting only the information they already knew.

Lotte and I were soon talking like long-lost friends.
Th
e two of us went upstairs to sort out baggage and closets and featherbeds. I crossed the hall to take a smaller upstairs room with more coat hangers. I let out a cry as I saw something gleam from between the covers of a book on the dresser: “Oh, but that’s mine. How can it be mine? But it is my bookmark!” I held out the gold clip for Lotte to see my initial there. She laughed. “
Th
at’s not so strange. Fritz was here for a day to pick up the boat. He must have left his things in this room.”

Feeling a little faint at this discovery, I considered how I came to be in this little bedroom under the eaves in Niendorf, Germany, and how I came to be holding in my hand the copy of Henry James’s
Portrait of a Lady
that I had last seen in my apartment in New York. Looking around the room more closely, I saw the gray-blue sweater, frayed at the elbows now, that I had given Fritz two Christmases ago, the first Christmas we were together. I saw the bronze and black striped tie I had given him on his birthday, and there were some familiar yellow fragments from his asthma pills, which followed him everywhere.
Th
e sound of voices downstairs stayed on the edge of my consciousness, but the sense of what was being said went past unheard as I stared at the pile of Fritz’s manuscripts, which seemed, even more than his clothes, even more than my bookmark, to bring his presence home.

Th
en I was overtaken by the thoughts I had been shutting out ever since the moment of my arrival the day before.
Th
is was just the way it would have been.
Th
is was exactly the way it would have been if Fritz and I had come over for the wedding. Our wedding.
Th
e house full of people, the special fetes in my honor.
Th
e reception at the great hotel.
Th
e photographs on the lawn.
Th
e fatherly gallantry of Herr Steffan-Freude, the girlish confidences of Lotte in the upstairs bedroom. I would have recounted the family jokes I already knew, and they would have let me in on more. Fritz’s things would have spilled over into the bedroom across from mine; there would have been sounds of laughter floating up the narrow stair. It was all just the way I had imagined it a hundred times. But I was not here for a wedding.
Th
ere wasn’t going to be any wedding. And Fritz was heading, it was thought, for Copenhagen.