It was as if your words were a bell, a gong struck in the backyard, signaling the descent of the evening, calling me back into the house. Why didn’t I hear it back then? Then, I felt you had it all wrong. After years of pointed ignorance and speeches about embracing the present, what did you know about my parents, my boarding school, my little sister? What right did you have to talk about them? Then, I felt nothing but resentment, but now something had shifted. Now I responded to your words, felt them zinging around in my bones.
I began to feel frightened. What was I discovering, that all along you had it right? No. You didn’t “embark on a journey.” Until the war, my family never struggled for money, and it was with pride in my heart that I left Berlin. You didn’t have it all right. Why, then, this feeling of being called back in for the night? Perhaps, repeating your words, I wasn’t going back to Berlin. I was going back to you. Back to the sound of your voice, to the person I was when I met you, the wife I became in order to please you. The funny thing is, I found that I missed her. All these years, I’ve thought I despised her — a woman who fled without looking back, who married a man who could not understand her — but as I moved closer, I realized she wasn’t so different from the girl I was at that boarding school, not so unlike the child I was in my father’s pharmacy. They were all intertwined; it was impossible to tease them apart. Telling your imperfect story, you were trying to knit me together. For my sake, you learned to reach backward. In our house, with the warped floors and the big windows, you were calling me back, and just as I did when I was a girl, moving up to that school, stepping on board that boat, flying across the ocean to Pennsylvania, I was fleeing from the sound of your voice.
I kept typing, a lump rising high in my throat. Finding your words, remembering what you said about me: You turned twenty. A young woman, no longer a girl, but you didn’t think of falling in love. By the time I typed those words I found I was crying. For you, for the young woman I was, for the marriage I fled. You took my hand and led me back to our bedroom, but to fall in love would have been a distraction. In the attic apartment where you were living, you trained her mind to be a museum. I accused myself of ignoring the one gift I was given. I accused myself of heartlessness, of pathological readiness to depart. You had to remember things right, so that when your family arrived, you could pick up where you’d left off. Instead of falling in love, you wrote letters.
My fingers on the keyboard were brutal. I could have gone on forever, but the receptionist in her goggles blinked the lights twice to let us know it was time to shut down. She snapped me back to my senses. Taking a deep breath, wiping the tears from my papery cheeks, I stopped where I was. Such sentimentality, ever since that documentary! I signed off for the evening. I picked up my straw hat, I collected myself, I gave the receptionist a neat smile, and I felt that I’d made a mistake.
Outside, I squelched home in my sneakers. It was dark out, well past nine o’clock. The runners were now home with their families, so I was alone on the trail. When I arrived at my building, I passed the doorman in the lobby that smells like a dentist’s office. In the elevator, there was a sign for HAPPY HOUR at a place called O’Donnell’s, with special prices for residents. My ears popped with the altitude change, and I thought to myself that this was no place for a woman my age.
I entered my empty apartment and took stock of the place: bare walls, books on the floor, two stools at the counter. I tried to go about my evening routines, to prevent myself from slipping into self-pity. I stood at my window. The horizon was checkered with spires of light, blinking telephone towers lining the ridges that block out the west. I looked over them all. What right, I asked myself, does a person with such a view have to such feelings? There’s an electric can-opener built into the wall. I have food in the pantry, I am alive.
From my unsociable stockpile, I chose a can of lentil soup, poured it like sewage into the pot, and stirred it with an old wooden spoon. Stirring, I felt myself settle. My thoughts became more distinct. It was one thing, I realized, to miss you after twenty years apart. But the woman I was when I was with you decided she’d rather be free than be a part of your story. One can only act in the moment. The bloodred rhomboidal shadows at your feet in that lecture hall, the didactic tone in your voice when you said things like “real world”: those caused revulsion to simmer in me. That revulsion was real, no less so now that I’m back in my modern apartment, longing for the home you could have provided.
Once the soup boiled, I turned it down and returned to my desk. So here I am: looking over my letter to you. Trying to maintain my rational mind-set. The truth is, if I were to fly to Germany on a whim, hop in a taxi and show up at your door, I’d probably want to leave as soon as I got there. First of all, your little wife would annoy me. I imagine her asking me questions about what it’s like to be a woman my age, me giving her exaggeratedly frightening answers about bone-density loss and living alone. With two women to impress, rather than one, you’d start holding forth, waving your confidence that takes up the whole room. I’d watch you, leaning forward in your excitement, wearing a sharp sweater over your shirt, and I’d remember the feeling of inhabiting your version of life. Of living on board a ship with you at the helm and nothing to do but stand at your shoulder. I’d remember the feeling of symbolizing suffering, and I’d do something insane like call a cab from the bathroom and leave without thanking your wife for the supper. I’d get on the first flight back to Boston. On my way home, I’d think to myself that bare walls aren’t so bad. They allow a person to think. I’d tell myself I’ll get a dog, name him Ralph, take him for walks. Work on my bone density. Have dinners with Toby, spend my mornings browsing the stacks, my afternoons talking with MARY. Telling her your story. Feeling less lonely for the company of your words, the attempt you made to knit me together.
I’m relieved enough to laugh at myself as I go check on the soup. It’s gotten cold, so I turn up the heat. I notice that the ring of flame from the burner casts a little reflection on my windows, and though I often take my view for granted, I’m struck with the enormity of the city below me, the multitude of lights, the knit and glitter of a metropolis fending off sleep.
I turn out the kitchen lights, extinguish the lamp on my desk, and go up to the glass to look out on the night. The bridges sparkle with electricity; cars pulse red down the highways. In the sky, the lights of airplanes weave between stars, and I almost feel I’m on board one, coming back from Germany, returning from your apartment. Without thinking, I lift my hand to wave through the window. I peer down below, hoping to find the single warm light that shines out of your perfect apartment. Goodbye, Karl, I think. Goodbye, my only husband. Have a good life and thank you. You led me back to our bedroom. You made me strong enough to depart.