There was no stool. I fetched a plastic chair from the conference room and sat down at the piano.
‘What would you like to hear?’
‘“Bridge over Troubled Water”,’ Suess said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘The loveliest song I know.’
Fortunately I knew it by heart, and my voice was suited for it.
‘Yes,’ Suess murmured a few times as I was playing.
The song seemed attached to some memory of his, and he was visibly moved by it. When I was finished I launched right into the andante of Mozart’s eleventh sonata, just to show off my eclecticism.
‘Buddy,’ Suess said, ‘where can I get hold of you?’
I grinned.
‘Room 304.’
‘That situation,’ he said. ‘Two people in a single room. Ms. LeSage’s guest. I didn’t want to say anything about it yet. A splendid woman, so friendly I mean, not stuck up or anything. Truly magnificent.’
‘My mother,’ I said. ‘It was only for a couple of nights, these days I usually sleep somewhere else.’
‘Listen, have you got the right outfit for this? Tie, shirt? Blazer?’
Lovers’ insomnia. Whispering, we take little bites of each other’s life stories. I listen to the youth of a stranger, a girl who saw snowcapped mountains to the west and violent thunderstorms over the prairies, with bolts of lightning reaching from the clouds all the way to the ground. The word nowhere for Augusta, a dot on the map. Ranch-style houses, pickups out in front. The desperate longing for something else. Once a year there was a big rodeo, men in leather chaps, the gruesome shouting of ‘yee-haw’ in the streets. She remembers the pang of excitement when one day a body was found along the road, riddled with bullets. Later her father read aloud to her from the newspaper, about a married woman who had become involved with a Hell’s Angel; she had complained to him about her husband, how he made her suffer. The plan to murder him had arisen from her lamentations. The Hell’s Angel had asked two friends to help him, they had lured the husband to a strip joint, later that night they had waylaid him along the road and shot him in the chest and face. Her father read such stories to her as a warning, beware of the world, but it had served to awaken in her a desire for that world, for the romance that lay outside the straight and narrow.
Sarah tries to go home twice a year, to Augusta, for Thanksgiving and for the annual family reunion.
‘My mother would like to meet you,’ I say.
‘Already?’
Sarah doesn’t know what a high tea is, but she’ll try to be there on time, after work. The moment I’ve been avoiding all this time. She’ll have to find out before they meet.
‘A while ago you asked me why my mother and I are here.’
I unroll before her a threadbare life story, catchwords, incomplete sentences, compressed until no life is left in them. Mother’s side, father’s side, all those things I left out. Telling it straight. Ignoring her dismay.
‘Oh my God, poor Ludwig.’
She remembered hearing something about it, or reading it.
‘Insane,’ she said, ‘completely insane.’
That sounds a lot more like it already. Then she falls asleep. She has a little over three hours before her day begins. She breathes deeply and calmly. I watch over a wonder.
A little past five, later that same day. I ask my mother whether Mr. Suess has called. She shakes her head. What I really want to know is whether the shooting has already started, whether the irony and the propaganda have already segued into the earnestness of sex for money — have the hordes already descended upon her person?
She says she’ll go ahead and order. Her voice at my back, ‘It takes them a while to put it together. I hope your girl gets here on time.’
Everything she says repulses me. Worse than that. A hatred that nestles high in my chest. If I were to seize her by the throat, I’m afraid I might never let go. I want to know who it is who fucks her, I want to see their faces as they go into her. Sometimes I awaken from daydreams: orgies of crime and rape — by broad daylight, I walk down the street, the events in my head are razor-sharp, the world around me is cast in weak light.
Sarah is late. I know that somewhere, back in the kitchen, the meter is running. Now that I’m paying attention, I notice that you actually hear sirens here all the time. All the time. As though people here immediately act on every bad impulse. The tea and scones must be pretty much ready by now. Maybe I should keep a parking spot open for her along the street, valet parking at the hotel costs a bundle. Don’t forget later on to get a pair of clean underpants out of my suitcase.
*
She arrived just after six. I was annoyed and relieved. My mother was seated behind a silver tower of aromatic substances and flavor enhancers.
‘Hello, Sarah,’ she said. ‘I’m Marthe.’
And then to me, a little more quietly.
‘We would have been better off ordering dinner.’
She poured the tea.
‘No sugar for me, thank you, Marthe,’ Sarah said.
She took an egg-salad sandwich. My mother rattled her spoon in her teacup. Sarah told us that someone had spilled a plate full of pasta all over her that afternoon. The woman hadn’t even apologized.
‘Some people,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not right to judge, but still. .’
‘You’re very pretty,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s hard to believe that you two are mother and son. In terms of age, I mean.’
‘Lucky genes,’ my mother said. ‘Only our necks, ugly necks run in our family.’
‘I don’t see anything ugly about it.’
‘You do when I do this.’
My mother bowed her head, causing deep wrinkles in her ugly neck.
‘Oh, but I have that too,’ Sarah said.
She bowed her head as well, a double chin appeared.
‘The two of you have other interests in common as well,’ I mumbled.
‘Do we?’ said my mother.
‘Incense,’ I said. ‘Candles. That kind of thing.’
‘Do you mean spirituality, Ludwig?’ Sarah asked with a treacherous kind of amiability.
I smiled at her to confirm our bond, but was suddenly not quite sure we belonged to the same conspiracy.
‘He always jokes about that,’ my mother said. ‘You seem so afraid to believe in anything, sweetheart. Even though. . life would be so much richer if you weren’t so cynical. Just look at your father. .’
‘Let’s change the subject,’ I said.
I had told her beforehand that all things Schultz were taboo when Sarah was around. But I was now no longer certain that I had nailed shut that particular fire door firmly enough.
‘Is cynicism something that’s passed from father to son in your family?’ Sarah asked. ‘It seems so typically male to me. As though you men can’t tell the difference between disbelief and strength.’
A little tremor of approval played at the corners of my mother’s lips. Then she started talking about when I was born, how in the hospital in Alexandria she had rocked my cradle every few minutes to hear whether I was still alive. She laid her hand on Sarah’s forearm.
‘Even then I was already so jealous of the girlfriend he would have someday!’
The conversation fanned out into practical idealism; I raised my head with a start when I heard Sarah say, ‘And that’s how I met Ludwig.’
‘Oh really?’ my mother said.
Sarah looked at me.
‘Didn’t you tell her how we met?’
‘Things like that don’t really interest her.’
‘Oh, Ludwig! That’s mean! Those are exactly the kinds of things I love to hear!’
‘I want to get going,’ I said.