Back at the apartment Klaus offers me a Jägermeister, then pours himself a tumbler, half of which he knocks back when he thinks I’m not looking. Encouraged by my attentiveness at dinner, he is working up to some kind of declaration. He has an eager clumsy quality that I find touching.
I settle on the sofa, my legs folded under me. “Why don’t you come out and say it?”
Klaus replaces the top on the bottle. “Say what?”
“You want to go to bed with me.”
He looks over his shoulder, startled. I feel I might have drunk too much but I can’t stop.
“You want to sleep with me,” I say. “You want to fuck me —”
“Don’t.”
“Well, don’t you?”
“It’s too brutal, putting it like that.”
“How would you put it, then?”
Klaus walks over and looks down at me. He seems older than me, but not wiser.
“It’s true,” he says.
He takes my hand and pulls me to my feet, then embraces me awkwardly, his face buried in my hair. I see him reflected in the plate-glass window, enormous and dark and stooping over me. One person devouring another.
Straightening up again, he leads me past the gray painting, across the hall, and down the corridor. I have already seen his bedroom. I explored the entire apartment on my first day, while he was out at work. I have even used his bath, which is round and deep, like a Jacuzzi or a well, and covered with tiny turquoise tiles. I know that his sheets and duvet are maroon, and that he keeps his boxer shorts on shelves, in neat ironed piles. He drains his drink in a single hurried gulp as he follows me into the room.
I put my glass down next to a book on Fabergé and lie back on the bed. Sitting at my feet, he removes one boot, then the other. He handles them as if they’re objects of great value, like the jeweled eggs he has been reading about. Why am I thinking of sleeping with him? No, wait. That’s the wrong way round. If I don’t sleep with him, there will be a sense of incompleteness. This tenuous, artificial relationship, which I have fabricated out of nothing, seems to require it of me. It’s partly my desire to see it through to its conclusion — going to bed with Klaus is an end, not a beginning — and partly the need to clear the way for whatever might come next.
He places his glasses in their case, then closes the case with a crisp snap. At that moment I have the feeling I won’t be able to go through with it. He isn’t the kind of man I’m used to or have ever thought of sleeping with. When he turns away to hang his jacket on the back of the door I take off my tights and skirt and slide beneath the covers. He strips down to his boxer shorts, his body larger and whiter than I imagined it would be. The maroon sheets don’t help.
After it’s over, I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, my pubic bone bruised from where he ground himself against me, trying to force an erection. The fact that he couldn’t get it up doesn’t bother me. In a way it’s a blessing. Since I wasn’t excited to start with I’m not left feeling frustrated. I sense possible orgasms, but they glide far below the surface like fish in deep water, incurious, unruffled.
“Sometimes, the first time,” he says in a low voice, “if a person’s very beautiful —”
“It doesn’t work?”
“Yes.” He grimaces. “It doesn’t work.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe tomorrow …”
If what he says is true I suppose his failure is a compliment. I wonder if it also happened with Valentina. The first time.
He asks whether he can read to me. I can hardly refuse him. Putting on his glasses, he reaches for a book. “Do you know Heinrich Heine’s work?”
“I don’t think so.”
He reads a poem about love being more precious than the pearls in the sea, and another poem about a man cutting his soul into pieces. He reads a poem about a girl with a frozen heart beneath white branches. After fifteen or twenty minutes he looks at me and asks if I’m all right.
“That was lovely,” I say, “but I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to my room now.”
“Of course.” All of a sudden he sounds serene, as if I have returned him to ground that is familiar and safe. It occurs to me that he might be relieved. “Here.” He passes me a black silk kimono.
“Thanks.” It feels cold and slippery, and I shiver as I put it on.
Back in my room I remember reaching between his legs and trying to make him hard, but his penis was small and slack and rubbery like the bit left over when you’ve tied a knot in a balloon. Even when I took it in my mouth it wouldn’t stiffen.
“What would you like me to do?” I asked. “Is there something special?”
His eyes were closed, and his face twisted in a kind of agony. “Nothing. It’s all right.”
He turned over in the bed and began to run his hands over my body. Though I knew he was attempting to arouse himself I felt, oddly, as if I were being searched. The silence in the room was pointed, critical. We couldn’t seem to move beyond the confines of our bodies.
Maybe tomorrow.
Outside, the wind has risen, and I’m conscious of being high up, on the top floor of a building. Only the terrace is above me, Japanese in its simplicity. The empty glass globes gleam on the table; the stems of bamboo stir. To the northwest, on the horizon, are the tall chimneys. Smoke leaks across the sky like ink in water. Like calligraphy. I think of all the people below me — reading, drinking, talking, making love — then I curl up on my side and face the wall. After a few minutes I drift backwards and downwards, sinking into a place that has no color, no light.
/
Not long before chemotherapy began my mother cut her hair off with the kitchen scissors. She did it in the living room, in front of the mirror with the varnished frame. I tried to stop her. You’re making mistakes, I cried. It doesn’t matter, she told me, laughing. It’s going to fall out anyway. I didn’t understand — I had no idea of what was coming — but she made it easier by turning it into a game. The golden hair on the floor resembled an illustration from a fairy tale.
A few months later I walked into her bedroom and found her lying on her back with her eyes closed. Only her head showed above the covers. It was the middle of the day. The sky in the window was patchy and gray, rain threatening. Rome in the winter, the river breathing its damp vapors into the city. All the old, sad stones. Her hair was gone by then. Her eyebrows too. She looked fragile, ethereal. Half erased. A baby bird, an alien. A ghost. My throat ached at the sight of her. I love you so much, I whispered. She wasn’t aware of me. She didn’t even wake.
There were good times after that, moments of almost hysterical elation, the brightness of forgetting. Then something would catch in me and I would remember what the future held. Like the statue of the winged woman in the Tiergarten, and those clouds gathering behind her, loaded, black …
I was with her when she died. It was the evening of May 12. My father was in the kitchen with my mother’s sister Lottie, who had flown over from England. He had opened a bottle of wine and laid out olives, artichokes, prosciutto, and fresh bread. To keep our strength up, as he said. I couldn’t eat. Instead, I sat by the bed, my mother’s hand in mine, the sky above the Vatican warm yellow streaked with red, like the flesh of a peach. The usual sounds rose up from the street — plates being stacked, a church bell tolling, a motorbike. I wasn’t conscious of my body, only my hand holding hers. I was walking along a beach. On one side tall grasses fenced me in. Bleached to a pale, sugarcane yellow, they tapped and clicked in the offshore breeze. Off to the right was a brooding ocean, the waves explosive, the dark blue farther out flecked savagely with white. The sand beneath my feet was cool and slightly gritty. I don’t know where I thought I was. Puerto Rico, perhaps. Or Nicaragua. No place I had ever been. My mother was drawing breath, with long gaps in between, each intake arduous and harsh. As I walked on that imaginary beach I remained aware of her breathing, regular, relentless — hypnotic. But then the sounds ended and I realized that the last breath I had heard had been her last, though I hadn’t known it at the time, having expected to hear another, and then another, having become accustomed to the rhythm, not having been able to accept, or even contemplate, the possibility of silence. It had been like being on a train and watching the telegraph poles flick by, the wires rising and falling, linking one pole to the next. You watch the poles, you’re always waiting for the next one, and then suddenly they’re gone. There’s nothing in the foreground, nothing to focus on. The view that was always there is all there is. Gaping. Empty. I stared at the veins on the back of her hand and thought about the blood slowing down. Once it stopped, it would never move again. She would never talk to me, or stroke my hair, or drive me to unexpected places. I buried my head in the duvet, and my body was returned to me, shaking uncontrollably, and cold.