MY WIFE SAT enshrined chief among the mistakes and disappointments I’d come to Germany to escape. I met her in my third year at Michigan, when she was a first-year fresh from a small liberal arts college in Maine. Clara came from an old-money family of Chicago lawyers, bred for summers at Saugatuck and seats on museum boards, and attended our graduate seminars in peasant dresses no peasant could afford and high leather boots that pressed smoothly against her calves. At parties she would stand in the corner telling practiced stories to a small, rapt circle of fellow students clutching bottles of Oberon or Winter White. About the night the president (before he was president) came for cocktails: “He had really hairy ears. You think someone would tell him.” About the year after her parents’ divorce: “I met my dad each week at this Chinese place. I always ordered the Happy Family.” A pause, then a half smile. “He never got the joke.”
That I made her love me, that I somehow entered her existence and found a place in it — the comfiest chair in the living room of her soul — I still count as the greatest accomplishment of my reinvention. I had been a sweaty, acned nobody from a small town in East Texas that most people had never heard of, then a scholarship student at the state university with no claim on anything higher than the dreary futures (pharmaceutical sales, a chain store’s management track) touted at the job fairs held each year in our basketball arena. But a marathon semester spent polishing an application essay ended with me in a grad program where my peers were people with the kinds of East Coast, private-school educations I had long envied. By the time I met Clara I had transformed myself, through the alchemy of a research assistantship with a famous theorist and a paper on Spinoza and Coleridge given at a major conference, into a promising scholar, a rising star of the department. I was climbing, never so sure of what I was climbing toward until I saw Clara standing in her circle — her hair loose over her temples, her upper lip pooched by the slightest of overbites — exuding class privilege like a musk.
We married a year later. The ceremony was small, in the chapel of a large downtown Chicago church, St. James Episcopal. The other graduate students dubbed us the power couple, and we took an apartment in a house in the Old West Side with a porch we’d sit on when it was warm, drinking gin and tonics, and two spare rooms we used as offices. Clara dressed me in thrift store blazers, idly ran her fingers through my thinning hair while she read. In the summer we spent long weeks at her family’s place on Lake Michigan, swimming and working through stacks of books. Our happiness seemed unquestionable. But the following spring, after a semester spent trying to break ground on my dissertation—“Representations of Eastern Europeans in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” chosen after a misleadingly exuberant seminar — I had a crisis. I saw all my future years spent waking to wrestle with murky thoughts, to put cold words on cold pages no one would ever read. It was a rather mundane crisis, my adviser told me, but I didn’t get over it. Meanwhile, Clara had turned into a plodding worker, in her office every morning, and only now that we were married did I discover that what I’d thought was a quiet, aristocratic disdain was instead pure shyness, that her affected coolness shrouded a sentimental heart. I had expected the air in this new world to which I’d laid claim to be different, to ease me past imperfection and strife in a narcotic mist. But sealed together in that house, Clara and I began to fight. Usually I was the provoker, coming to Clara with some correction I thought she could make to her habits or person (the dissertation abandoned, I had little else to brood about). At first, whenever I caught the sound of her crying behind her office door, I’d go to her, apologize, but eventually I chose to leave her be and waited instead for her to come to dinner, amnesic smile pinned to her face. When, at the end of summer, I told her about the job in Germany, a one-year exchange appointment I’d begged from our grad director, she said she didn’t want me to go, but within a day she’d packed my things in a box.
AMY AND I BEGAN MEETING on Mondays and Fridays. I taught the other days of the week at the university in Mainz, and the weekends, I told her, I needed for grading, though in fact I simply wanted to keep them to myself. Sometimes we took trips: In Bad Homburg we strolled through the Kurpark with its Thai temples and miniature Russian church, then toured the kaiser’s summer palace where the guide showed us first the kaiser’s telephone cabinet, with its private line to Berlin, then the kaiser’s flush toilet, with its view over the palace roof. In Höchst we wandered into the toll castle’s moat, a green, ivy-strewn park abandoned that day under a gray sky, and in Rüdesheim we sat on a rock in a muddy, bare vineyard, getting drunk on grape brandy while we watched the Rhine flow by, its long, thin cargo barges easing their way to Rotterdam. On our trips I found it difficult to contain myself. In the vineyard I brought her head to my lap and unzipped my jeans as hikers passed a hundred feet above us, and in the Höchst moat I’d leaned her into a corner and slipped my fingers inside her waistband before a man overhead whistled, his head poking out from the castle’s high tower, which cost a euro to climb.
The days we didn’t take trips we spent in my apartment, and the days we did take trips we always ended there. As soon as we closed the door we’d shed our clothes and scurry to bed, me getting up and dressing only to fetch our dinner from the dimly lit takeaway — Indian food, pizza, schnitzels — four doors down. We never talked of our lives beyond the age of nineteen, only of prom, football games, and the bored, unending nights spent driving the Longview loop. One afternoon she went through the catalog of girls we’d known, asking which ones I’d had crushes on, and giggled anytime I said yes and for at least two declared, “Skank!” Another time I brought up our date.
She blushed. “I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”
“So you do remember?”
She looked at me. “What about you? What do you remember?”
“You barely spoke to me. I took you to the Jalapeño Tree and we ate fajitas, then I asked you what you wanted to do and somehow we ended up at a soccer game. We sat in my car and all I wanted to do the whole time was feel you up, but I could tell you just wanted to go home.”
“I was horrible!” she said. “I was really into you when you asked me out, but by the end of the week I wasn’t. I was like that all sophomore year.” Then she kicked back the sheets and sat atop me, leaning down so that her breasts pressed against my chest. “Have I made up for it now?”
I admitted she had.
SINCE ARRIVING IN WIESBADEN, I’d been trying, off and on, to find out where Dostoevsky had lived during his time in the city. I’d had no luck (even Google had turned up nothing) until early in November I spent an afternoon hiking on the Neroberg. At the Russian cemetery I happened upon a faded display, in Russian and German, recording the history of Russian notables in the area, and next to Dostoevsky’s name I saw Hotel Viktoria.
I was going to wait until Saturday to look for the hotel, but Amy said she wanted to come with me. As we were walking together down Wilhelmstrasse, the street where most of the old spa hotels had stood, she asked me why I wanted to find where Dostoevsky stayed. The truth was I hadn’t read him since college. But he’d lived in Wiesbaden, and now I did: there was hope in the parallel, depth I could glom on to. If nothing else, the search for his hotel would be a good detail to drop over drinks in Ann Arbor. Before I could make up some different, better answer, though, Amy took my hand in hers and swung it a little and said, “If you wrote something, what would you write about me?”