“Maybe Meyer will go first,” Gudrun said. “He’s so unpopular. It can’t be nice for him.”
Utta laughed. And laughed again. “Sweet Gudrun,” she said, and reached out and patted her foot. “Never change.”
“But why should it affect you?” Gudrun asked. “Marianne runs the metal workshop.”
“Exactly,” Utta said, with a small smile. “Don’t you see? That means there’ll be a vacancy, won’t there?”
Mr. Koenig steps out of his car and wrinkles his eyes at the sun. Mrs. Koenig waits patiently until he comes around and opens the door for her. Everyone shakes hands.
“Bet you’re glad you’re not in Okinawa, eh, Spence?” Mr. Koenig says.
“Fire from heaven, I hear,” Spencer says with some emotion.
“Oh yeah? Well, whatever.” Mr. Koenig turns to me. “How’re we doing, Miss Velk?”
“Running a bit late,” I say. “Maybe in one hour, if you come back?”
He looks at his watch, then at his wife. “What do you say to some breakfast, Mrs. Koenig?”
Tobias liked to be naked. He liked to move around his house doing ordinary things, naked. Once when his wife was away he had cooked Gudrun a meal and asked her to eat it with him, naked. They ate thick slices of smoked ham, she remembered, with a pungent radish sauce. They sat in his dining room and ate and chatted as if all were perfectly normal. Gudrun realized that it aroused him sexually, that it was a prelude to lovemaking, but she began to feel cold and before he served the salad she asked if she could go and put on her sweater.
Tobias Henzi was one of the three Masters of Form who ran the architecture workshop. He was a big burly man who would become seriously fat in a few years, Gudrun realized. His body was covered with a pelt of fine dark hair, almost like an animal’s, it grew thickly on his chest and belly and, curiously, in the small of his back, but his whole body — his buttocks, his shoulders — was covered with this fine glossy fur. At first she thought she would find it repugnant, but it was soft, not wiry, and now when they were in bed she often discovered herself absentmindedly stroking him, as if he were a great cat or a bear, as if he were a rug she could pull around her.
They met at the New Year’s party in 1928, where the theme was “white.” Tobias had gone as a grotesque, padded Pierrot, a white cone on his head, his face a mask of white greasepaint. Gudrun had been a colonialist, in a man’s white suit with a white shirt and tie and her hair up under a solar topee. By the party’s end, well into January 1, she had gone into an upstairs lavatory to untie her tight bun, vaguely hoping that loosening her hair would ease her headache.
Her hair was longer then, falling to her shoulders, and as she came down the stairs to the main hall she saw, sitting on a landing, Tobias, a large, rumpled, clearly drunken Pierrot, smoking a dark knobbled cigar. He watched her descend, a little amazed, it seemed, blinking as if to clear some obstruction to his vision.
She stepped over his leg, she knew who he was.
“Hey, you,” he shouted after her. “I didn’t know you were a woman.” His tone was affronted, aggressive, almost as if she had deliberately misled him. She did not look around.
The day the new term began he came to the weaving workshop to find her.
I take my last cigarette from the pack and light it. I sit on the step below the cab of Spencer’s crane, where there’s some shade. I see Spencer coming briskly along the sidewalk from the pay phone. He’s a stocky man, not small, but with the stocky man’s vigorous rolling stride, as if the air were crowding him and he’s shouldering it away, forcing his passage through.
“They say it left an hour ago.” He shrugged. “Must be some problem on the highway.”
“Wonderful.” I blow smoke into the sky, loudly, to show my exasperation.
“Can I bum one of those off of you?”
I show him the empty pack.
“Lucky Strike.” He shrugs. “I don’t like them, anyway.”
“I like the name. That’s why I smoke them.”
He looks at me. “Yeah, where do they get the names for those packs? Who makes them up? I ask you.”
“Camel.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Why a camel? Do camels smoke? Why not a … a hippo? I ask you.”
I laugh. “A pack of Hippos, please.”
He grins and cuffs the headlamp nacelle. He makes a tsssss sound, and shakes his head, incredulously. He looks back at me.
“Goddamn factory. Must be something on the highway.”
“Can I buy you some breakfast, Spencer?”
Paul met Tobias only once in Gudrun’s company. It was one afternoon at four o’clock when the workshops closed. The weavers worked four hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. The workshop was empty. The big rug was half done, pinned up on an easel in the middle of the room. Paul stood in front of it, the fingers of his right hand slowly stroking his chin, looking, thinking. From time to time he would cover his left eye with his left palm.
“I like it, Gudrun,” he said, finally. “I like its warmth and clarity. The color penetration, the orangy pinks, the lemons … What’s going to happen at the bottom?”
“I think I am going to shade into green and blue.”
“What’s that black?”
“I’m going to have some bars, some vertical, one horizontal, with the cold colors.”
He nodded and stepped back. Gudrun, who had been standing behind him, moved to one side to allow him a longer view. As she turned, she saw Tobias had come into the room and was watching them. Tobias sauntered over and greeted Paul coolly and with formality.
“I came to admire the rug,” Paul said. “It’s splendid, no?”
Tobias glanced at it. “Very decorative,” he said. “You should be designing wallpaper, Miss Velk, not wasting your time with this.” He turned to Paul. “Don’t you agree?”
“Ah. Popular necessities before elitist luxuries,” Paul said, wagging a warning finger at her, briefly. The sarcasm sounded most strange coming from him, Gudrun thought.
“It’s a way of putting it,” Tobias said. “Indeed.”
We sit in a window of a coffee shop in Westwood Village. I’ve ordered a coffee and Danish but Spencer has decided to go for something more substantiaclass="underline" a rib-eye steak with fried egg.
“I hope the Koenigs don’t come back,” Spencer says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have ordered the steak.”
I press my cheek against the warm glass of the window. I can just see the back end of Spencer’s crane.
“I’ll spot them,” I say. “And I’ll see the truck from the factory. You eat up.”
Spencer runs his finger along the curved aluminum beading that finishes the table edge.
“I want you to know, Miss Velk, how grateful I am for the work you’ve put my way.” He looks me in the eye. “More than grateful.”
“No, it is I who am grateful to you.”
“No, no, I appreciate what you—”
His steak comes and puts an end to what I’m sure would have been long protestations of mutual gratitude. It’s too hot to eat pastry so I push my Danish aside and wonder where I can buy some more cigarettes. Spencer, holding his fork like a dagger in his injured left hand, stabs it into his steak to keep it steady on the plate and, with the knife in his right, sets about trying to saw the meat into pieces. He is having difficulty: his thumb and two fingers can’t keep a good grip on the fork handle, and he saws with the knife awkwardly.
“Damn thing is I’m left-handed,” he says, sensing me watching. He works off a small corner, pops it in his mouth and then starts the whole pinioning, slicing operation again. The plate slides across the shiny tabletop and collides with my coffee mug. A small splash flips out.