I thought for a moment. We passed the Meissen shop, its porcelain goat staring mutely through the window, and then I said, “That you had nice thighs and you helped me through a bad time.”
The question had been asked in a jokey tone, and I had answered in a jokey tone, but at my reply she grew quiet.
After we walked another block she slipped her hand from mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure what you wanted me to say.”
“Nothing,” she said. “I was just being stupid.” When I glanced at her she smiled. I was practiced at detecting false smiles, but I was practiced at ignoring them, too.
I’d asked about the old Hotel Viktoria in the tourist office, and the woman behind the counter had first consulted a book and then made a phone call before telling me that it stood on the northeast corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Rheinstrasse. We arrived there and I stopped and looked up. The Viktoria was dressed in red stone and had curving, wrought-iron balconies. It wasn’t a hotel anymore but offices, its bottom floors given over to an interior design firm and a shop selling ballet clothes. In the summer of 1865 Dostoevsky had holed up here and feverishly churned out his first draft of Crime and Punishment. Judging by the names on the plate next to the main door, his room belonged now to either a notary or a foot doctor. I’d expected to feel something, for inspiration to zap out from the stones and grip me, but it was just a building.
Later, as we lay in bed, bellies full of chicken korma from down the street, Amy’s head resting on my chest, she said, “I like you.”
Since our conversation on Wilhelmstrasse, things had been unsettled between us. “I like being with you, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “I like being with you, too.”
A FEW DAYS LATER, Clara called. It was a Thursday and I’d spent the day teaching and had had to keep reminding myself that it was actually Thanksgiving. Clara and I hadn’t talked in two months, and after she wished me Happy Thanksgiving we didn’t say much else until she asked, “Are you flying home for Christmas?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Do you want to fly back?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I need to know what to tell my parents.”
“I know,” I said.
“Well, what should I tell them?”
There was the slightest quaver in her voice. I couldn’t hear the murmur of family behind her. She must have been up in her room, sitting on her bed, the door shut. In my mind I saw her there, the lights turned off and light coming in from the street, her face pointed toward the stable of horse figurines from her girlhood. Through the deadness of my heart I felt a throb.
“Well?” she said again.
I told her, “I’m not sure,” and she hung up.
THE PHONE CALL was still troubling me when, a day later, Amy and I were sitting in bed. It was rainy and cold and we’d stayed in. Pulling closer to me, Amy told me that she and Macy were going to Rothenburg with Beth and her husband next week and she wanted me to come with them.
“Seriously?” I said.
“It’ll be fun.”
I tried to picture the five of us on a jaunt together. I couldn’t.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said, and added something about grading.
She put a leg on top of mine, rested her chin on my chest, and looked at me. She was smiling, but I didn’t know how long I had.
“Fine,” I said. “Okay. Yes.”
THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, the day set for the trip, a beat-up red Opel honked for me at nine. Amy introduced me to Beth and then Wesley, whom I gave a shy glance. His face was red and pitted and his upper lip bore a sparse brown mustache. We’d been at war for eight years and I hadn’t yet talked to a soldier. I was assigned the passenger seat, and Amy and Beth sat together in the back, Macy buckled into her car seat directly behind me.
As Wesley guided us out of town he didn’t speak, but once we were on the highway he started talking. He drifted from the trips he and Beth had taken to Cologne and Neuschwanstein to karaoke at the Irish Pub to run-ins between his fellow soldiers and the polizei — one soldier caught flying up the autobahn, drunk, throwing beer bottles at the cars coming the other direction, another found passed out in his car, four in the morning, beneath a traffic light deep in the Wiesbaden suburbs. “Don’t fuck with the polizei,” he warned me. “They’ll fine your ass.” I waited for an opportune moment to mention my father’s combat in Vietnam. Those rare times I felt guilt over not going to war in this our decade of troubles, he was my excuse. He did that, so I didn’t have to — he’d actually said that to me once. But Wesley didn’t bring up Iraq or Afghanistan, though Amy told me he’d been to both, and at the end of each of his stories I simply smiled and laughed politely.
We arrived at Rothenburg and found the place already filled with tourists, half of them American: I spotted their SUVs in the parking lot, imported Explorers and Escalades with Frankfurt or Munich plates, the owners army officers or expat bankers. We squeezed the Opel between twin Denalis and walked in through a gate in the town wall; I pushed Macy’s empty stroller while Amy held her. At the platz a brass band played in the Christmas market and crowds swelled like tides beneath the high old buildings. We bought sausages and glühwein from a booth, then started the cycle through the tidy medieval streets. A couple of times Amy took pictures of me and Macy in front of a fountain or one of the leaning, half-timbered houses. I wasn’t sure what to do with her — I’d only seen Macy a couple of times since that day in Langgasse — and I held her awkwardly against my chest or rested my palm on her head as she squirmed next to my leg. By the third picture I began to get nervous. I said something to Amy about it and she gave me a blank look and said, “I just want some pictures.” I let it go.
“Jason would have loved this,” Wesley said, stopped in front of a shop selling souvenir knives. Jason was Amy’s ex-husband, from whom, she’d told me, she’d divorced a year ago. It was through him Amy and Beth had met, army wives at Fort Bragg. But Wesley’s eyes were red. I looked to Amy and she was teary, too, and at that I felt the bottom of my stomach sink open. Amy caught me looking and said, “Please.” I stayed quiet and we left soon after.
WHEN THE RED OPEL PULLED UP TO MY APARTMENT, Amy got out. She kissed the still-sleeping Macy on the forehead, then asked Beth, “You’re sure you don’t mind?” and Beth waved her toward me.
Once inside she told me what I’d already figured out, that Jason was dead, not divorced. He’d been killed a year ago in Afghanistan, she said. I started to say something, though I had no idea what, and she stopped me before I could.
“I needed to talk to you about all this tonight anyway. You get to stay ninety days without a visa.”
“Okay,” I said.
“My ninety days are about to run out.”
I was a little stunned. “Really?” I said.
“I’ve got ten days — I have to leave a week from Monday. But if we got married—” She broke off, glanced away.
“I’m already married,” I said.
“You could divorce.”
“That would take time.”
“Only thirty days in Michigan. I looked it up. I could go home, then come back once you were divorced.”
I felt the blood drain from my body. The newly risen ghost of Amy’s husband sat in the corner of the room. “My visa’s only good until August,” I said, to say something, even though she knew I’d been offered an extra year. Despite myself, I’d kept the university here happy. Unlike my predecessors, I had resisted throwing stacks of student essays in the toilet or claiming that people in the department were passing secret messages to me in their lectures.