This Must Be the Place (2 page)

“Where’s your wife?”

“My wife?”

“You’re usually here with a lady. The actress from the soap opera.”

Ever since Heike had taken the role on the soap, which was set in a women’s prison, her fans had been coming out of the woodwork. Married women of a certain age who, Heike insisted, felt like prisoners themselves. She had never been and would never be his wife, since she didn’t believe in marriage. She couldn’t even enjoy a Hollywood romantic comedy if it involved a wedding; whenever he’d dragged her out to one, she’d groaned disdainfully over her popcorn for ninety minutes and picked apart the happy ending before they’d even left the theater.

“She’s not my wife,” he said, accepting the paper package across the counters.

“That’s too bad.” The woman in the bakery shrugged, looking past him at the next person in line. “I love that show.”

Outside, Walter watched the sidewalk disappear beneath his feet, holding the bread close to his heart.

“We think Heike’s fantastic,”
he imitated the producer’s tone exactly under his breath.
“And who the hell are you?”

As he came around the corner, he saw the American couple still arguing on the stoop. Since he was hardly in a hurry to go back upstairs, he retreated gratefully to the other side of the street. Did they live in his building? Walter rarely crossed paths with his neighbors, mostly housebound geriatrics and traveling businessmen, not attractive young people from the United States. He sat down on the low wall around the schoolyard and looked around as if he were waiting for someone. He looked over at the couple as if simply checking the time on an invisible clock above the front door. The man was fully dressed in a suit, as if for work in an office, and shaking the paper map, now open to reveal an expansive tangle of pink and yellow streets. Although he was accompanied by a small blue suitcase, the woman wasn’t even carrying a handbag. Closer inspection revealed that she wasn’t wearing any shoes and her hair was wet, as if she had just emerged from the shower and wrapped the trench coat around her body like a bathrobe. The angry tone of their American accents was audible, but the words were just beyond Walter’s grasp. How long had they been at it? Where did it start? Probably this began as a normal discussion: which way to go, which way was faster, when to leave. Maybe she was taking too long to get ready. Maybe the man was rushing her. But now it had come to this: he was yelling, she was crying. The woman grabbed the map away and threw it to the sidewalk.

Upstairs, thought Walter, Heike would be in the shower by now, washing her long brown hair. She would be wondering how the hell he was going to get ready in time if he didn’t come home immediately. He pulled his jacket tightly around his body. The answer was that he would not be ready. The answer was that he would not be going at all. Why did she care so much if he ever acted again? She was too young to remember watching
Schönes Wochenende
in its original broadcast, of course, but she certainly appreciated the looks on people’s faces when they went out in public together, that slow glimmer of recognition. She loved it when shy adult women came up to them in cafés to admit a teenage crush that had never died. Although the truth was that recently it had been shy men coming up to the table for autographs— hers, not his.
We think Heike’s fantastic.
She pitied him, he thought.

The concrete wall was cold against his jeans, but Walter stayed where he was, still unwilling to break up the scene on his doorstep. The American man had picked up the map off the ground and was tearing it into pieces; the woman was doubled over, weeping. Walter watched them with the tense exhilaration of a sports fan in the bleachers at the very end of a game. The last few moments of a fight were always the most dangerous. On the one hand, he wanted to yell something across the street, stop them before they went too far. On the other hand—he couldn’t help it—he wanted to see them throw themselves off the precipice into a miserable abyss. His mobile rang and although he recognized Heike’s number, he didn’t pick it up.
Fantastic,
he thought, relishing the thought of frustration brewing in the shower four flights up. On the stoop, the woman cried and the man ripped up the map until his hands were empty. Then they looked at each other in silence for at least a minute. Then the man walked away. Walter inhaled sharply. Would she run after him? Should she? The pretty American did not move. She did not look down at the shredded pink and yellow paper at her feet. She smoothed her wet hair back and wiped her eyes, and although she continued looking down the street in his direction long after he was gone, she didn’t call out to him once.

After a few moments had passed, Walter figured that he could walk right by and greet her normally, but it was cold out and suddenly he worried about her wet hair. If he came close enough, he felt, he would not be able to resist the urge to lift her feet from the cold ground and carry her across the threshold into the lobby. So he waited until she went inside. When enough time had passed that he was certain she had taken the elevator, he crossed the street, looked quickly over both shoulders, and collected the pieces of the paper map as carefully as he could, folding them into his jacket.

Heike was still in the shower when he returned to his apartment and entered the bathroom. Her mobile phone sat, wet, in the soap dish at the sink.

“I’m back.”

“You’re late.”

He wiped away the steam from the mirror to examine the progress of his bald spot, a permanent yarmulke nestled into the close-cropped remains of what had once been thick, curly hair.

“Can you name a single famous actor in Hollywood who’s bald?” he asked through the shower curtain.

“Are you getting ready?”

“One,” he insisted. “Name one.”

“Kevin Costner.”

“He isn’t famous anymore. I mean a great one.”

“Jack Nicholson.”

“He has power rails. Those are different. They imply virility and wisdom. I mean really bald.”

“Well—”

“You can’t. Because none of them are. Think about it: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Tom Cruise, of course—”

“Aren’t some of those guys dead?”

“But they were never bald.”

When he had been famous in Germany in the early 1980s, his Dionysian mop had been Walter’s trademark. But despite the daily application of expensive potion, by the end of 2001, a shiny pink monster was emerging from the hole in his head. He dropped his chin to his chest and strained for a glimpse of the back side. By the time his father died, in his forties, he no longer had hair on his legs or his toes. Walter was thirty-nine.

In middle age I will emerge anew, he said silently to himself. Smooth and hairless, like a baby.

Heike turned off the water and pushed open the curtain. She had the kind of figure that appeared shapely in clothes, but stripped of padding it was sharp, as if he might be injured on contact were his own body not so soft and forgiving.

“All the important actors were already famous in their early twenties,” he told her. “Just like I was. At that point there was no way to predict if any of us would lose our hair. But look at me and look at them. All of them have kept it. All the big ones.”

“You stopped acting before you started losing your hair.”

“You’re missing my point. In retrospect, it’s as if these guys knew innately that they would keep their hair, and the knowledge of that gave them a comparative advantage. It’s as if there were some hormonal connection between hair follicle activity and the development of enduring charisma.”

Heike twisted a towel around her head.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

“Everything will be fine.”

“I mean, this show is beneath me. The opening weekend of my last movie alone grossed more than fifteen million marks.”

She stepped out of the tub. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave.

“Think of your fans, baby. Everyone in Germany will watch the show when it airs.”

“Just to see what I look like after all these years.”

She shook her head.

“You have to let yourself evolve as an actor.”

Allow himself to occupy a different space in people’s minds is what she meant, thought Walter, a space off in the hinterlands, off the sexual radar. The middle-aged guy, innocuous neighbor, buddy, postman, high school teacher, killer; the character actor, not the heartthrob. He preferred to leave his celluloid persona uncompromised by the ravages of laziness and time. Was that so terrible? He thought of the American woman standing still in the cold on his doorstep a few minutes earlier and suddenly wished that he had swept her off her bare feet, right there, like the groom in one of the romantic movies that Heike couldn’t stand. By “evolve,” she meant she expected him to sacrifice the last golden vestige of his self-image in the interest of personal growth.
Fantastic.

“I know you lied to me,” he said.

“What?”

“You said you needed me on the show to boost the ratings. You begged me, as I remember it.”

“I knew you wouldn’t agree to do it otherwise.”

It was true, but he would punish her anyway. For lying, for encouraging him, for giving a shit in the first place; for moving on with her young life while he wallowed in chronic indecision at the gateway to middle age.

“You lied to me,” he said. “The fact remains.”

Heike’s wide-set eyes filled up halfway with tears and although they didn’t touch, Walter felt as if one of his hands were wrapped delicately around her esophagus, one shoulder pressing hers to the wall.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

Walter had been anticipating this moment since the day they met, but he did not respond. She squeezed past him in the doorway. The light blue of her eyes was the first thing he’d noticed about her, he thought; it was the thing he would always remember. When he turned around, she was dressed and throwing her things into a bag, smoking a cigarette held between her front teeth and wearing a tight white I LOVE NY T-shirt with a big red heart. Neither of them spoke until the downstairs buzzer rang.

“That’s it then?” she asked. “You have nothing more to say to me?”

Don’t go, he thought. But her figure was already receding down the hallway, through the front door, out into the world.

“The T-shirt is ridiculous. You’ve never even been to New York.”

“It’s a symbol, Walter.”

“Of what?”

“Solidarity. Compassion. Something you know nothing about. What should I tell them when I get downstairs? They’re expecting both of us.”

“Just say I couldn’t make it.”

For the next thirty seconds he listened to the sound of her bag dragging along the wooden floorboards of the apartment, followed by the opening of locks.

“Bruce Willis,” she called out, before slamming the front door decisively behind her. “Bruce Willis is bald.”

2

Hope leaned back against the inside of her front door, quickly calculating what to pack. Facing down the long white hallway inside her apartment, she blinked as if driving into the light, trying to remember where she had last seen her passport. She had brought so little with her from New York that she could just throw it all back into the same suitcase and be out of there in five minutes flat. But she needed the passport. In the kitchen she found her handbag and dumped out its contents into the sink: the ticket stubs from her flight to Berlin, her wallet, a notebook, a pen, the wrapper she had saved from a German granola bar with the brand name Corny, the cover of a local magazine called
Zitty,
a dead U.S. mobile phone and some loose American change. No passport. She hit the counter with one hand and threw the bag on the floor. In the bedroom her suitcase was still standing in the same place it had been since she arrived a month earlier, like a child at a boring dinner party begging to be taken home. She stuffed it with her clothes, and by the time she sat down to close it, she was out of breath. Then she noticed her passport wedged beneath a standing lamp and the floor, and started crying again. It was one thing to leave, but she had nowhere to go. She sobbed into the arm of her raincoat not with regret for the place she might abandon, but from the realization that she had no clear alternative. When she imagined herself out in the world with her passport, she was unable to come up with a single viable destination. New York was no longer the home that she knew, and she could hardly return to her parents. In the past five months she had distanced herself even from her closest friends. Dave had turned out to be a pretty flimsy rug, she thought, but leaving him now felt like pulling out all she had left from beneath her feet.

The phone rang and she wiped her nose with the back of one hand. Only two people had the number: Dave and her mother, who called once a week to deliver cheerful midwestern edicts laced with palpable anxiety about Hope’s life. But since it was two A.M. in Kansas City, it was not her mother. She let Dave wait long enough to worry that she was still outside, freezing her ass off on the doorstep where he’d left her, then rose from her seat on the packed suitcase and reached for the phone.

“You’re home,” he said.

She could hear the highway around his voice in the car.

“On Thursday night,” he said, “when I get back, I’m going to take you to this great schnitzel place I heard about from a colleague.”

Hope had to swallow the fury she felt rising in her throat. This is what he’d been doing since June, behaving as if nothing had happened. What was one more fight to him?

“Schnitzel.”

“Breaded veal, Hope. It’s a local delicacy.”

“Great,” she said.

“Good. My cell phone’s fading out now.”

When he was gone, she leaned against the wall and tried to calm herself down. Thursday night Dave would take her on a date. They would eat schnitzel. They would be polite to each other, as if they had just met, and make small talk about the Polish economy, the reconstruction of Berlin, the progress of the war in Afghanistan. Dave was perhaps the only person on earth who was able to spin even the war on terror in positive terms, she told herself. Everything would be fine. He would talk and she would not and after dinner they would have sex (habitual, results-oriented, precise). He would not mention the fight they had just had on the doorstep. He would not comment on the fact that although she spent most of her time in the bathtub, she had once again forgotten to wash her hair. He would not press for details about what she had been doing all week, alone, in this vast and empty apartment and she would try to make this work. They had been married for six years already. She thought: This is my life.