A year went by, then two years, then — astonishingly, unaccountably — a decade. Your husband was never less than cordial. You’d had the idea to open a record shop of your own, maybe even a boutique reissue label, specializing in the sixties teen garage rock that you loved; but though he repeatedly promised to put up the “seed capital”—and though it was painfully clear he had money to burn — something always seemed to interfere. You participated in junction each night at 23:15 EST, his schedule permitting. He traveled much of the year, and was never reachable during the final hour of the day, though he returned your calls at midnight without fail. You had occasional affairs of your own, and once tried, semiseriously, to leave him; but you’d lost all sense of how to be alone. Your life was freakish — more than freakish: perverse — but you’d grown to accept it.
Then you met me at my cousin’s party.
You fell silent once you’d finished, staring bashfully down into your lap. A car alarm sounded nearby, invasive and shrill, but you barely reacted. You seemed to have forgotten where you were.
“Hildegard,” I said tentatively. “I have to admit, never in a million years—”
“I agree with you, Walter. A million at least.” You gave a tired smile and took my hand. “But you’re allowed to call me Mrs. Haven.”
For once I understood you perfectly. “I’d consider it an honor,” I said. “Hildegard doesn’t suit you.”
You sighed and shook your head. “It never did.”
“You’re more of an Irmgard, I’d say. Or a Brünnhilde.”
“That’s right, Walter. And you’re more of a Gandalf.”
“Mrs. Haven?”
“Yes, Walter?”
“I’d like you to stay here tonight.”
“I thought you might.” You brought my hand to your mouth and bit down lightly on the knuckle of my thumb. “That’s why I came with my pajamas on.”
* * *
If I stay hunched over this card table forever, Mrs. Haven — if the timestream doesn’t ever readmit me — I might one day find words to do justice to that stupefying night. For hours on end we were as deliberate as forensic scientists, committing the most obscure recesses of each other’s body to memory; the rest of the time we rolled around like chimpanzees. I tried to catalog the moles and scars and freckles on your body — to catalog them, not just count them, beginning with the heel of your right foot — but I never made it past the halfway point. And what a halfway point it was, Mrs. Haven. I could have lived out my duration there and died a happy man.
Did I wonder why you cared for me? I’ll admit it — I did wonder. You were the stuff of daydreams, after all, and I was a dropout with dubious posture. I was the opposite of the Husband in every respect; this ought to have reassured me, I suppose, but it tended to have the opposite effect. When all else failed, I fell back on the one thing I was certain of: I adored you, Mrs. Haven, and you liked to be adored. On that first night it seemed explanation enough.
In between sessions of monkey business we asked each other aimless, drowsy questions. I was ecstatically unaware of what the future held — our escape to Vienna, our doomed trip to Znojmo, and everything that would happen afterward — and I’d have told you everything, consequences be damned, if only you’d asked. But your mind was firmly on the present moment. You made love exactly as I’d imagined you would: clumsily at first, then earnestly, then angrily, then lost to the world altogether. I felt half-dead by morning, to tell you the truth. But my other half felt indestructible.
“That was very nice, Walter,” you whispered sometime around dawn. “I knew you were a man of many gifts.”
“I appreciate your confidence, Mrs. Haven.”
In the light from the street your hair glowed like an angel’s in some pre-Raphaelite painting of questionable taste, or even in something by Klimt. I felt painfully, unconscionably happy.
“Do you really come from a family of physicists?”
“Failed physicists,” I mumbled, nuzzling your armpit. The brass-colored hair there smelled faintly of nutmeg. “Crackpots is the technical term.”
“That’s too bad,” you said, yawning. “I was hoping you could build a time machine.”
On any other day I’d have snapped to attention at that, wide-awake and suspicious; as it was, I only sat up slightly. “A time machine?”
“I wouldn’t want to go too far back. I’m not ambitious.” You ran your close-cut fingernails across my scalp. “About thirty minutes, let’s say.”
It wasn’t easy, in my fuddled condition, to reconstruct what had happened thirty minutes before. Then it came back to me.
“You’re in luck, Mrs. Haven. That can be arranged.”
“It can? How fantastic!”
“There’s nothing fantastic about it.”
“Prove it.”
“In the interest of science, I will.” I took you by the shoulders. “I’ll ask you to lie back down, if you don’t mind.”
Thirty-three minutes later I was nuzzling your armpit again. The brass-colored stubble smelled faintly of nutmeg.
“That was very nice, Walter,” you whispered.
“You see, Mrs. Haven? I hope I’ve convinced you.”
You arched your back and nodded. “I knew you were a man of many gifts.”
* * *
But by morning you were restless again, preoccupied and tense and short of breath. I opened my eyes to find you standing at the window, buttoning up your pajamas, staring anxiously down at the street. My nakedness felt wrong to me suddenly. I crawled back under the comforter, wrapping it around me like somebody saved from drowning.
“What sort of family do you come from, Walter?” you said as you pulled on your sneakers. Apparently it was time for you to go.
“A tribe of honest laborers,” I answered.
“Honest laborers?” you said, turning up the collar of your coat. “Is that true?”
“Not so much,” I admitted.
You seated yourself at the foot of the bed, demonstratively out of my reach. You wanted to talk, not to cuddle: that was only too clear. You wanted to get down to terms.
“Ask me a question, Walter. A question about myself. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
I thought hard for a moment. “What are the chances that the Husband—”
“It’s important that you tell me where you come from, Walter. I’ve spent a decade sleeping next to a cipher. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
“I’m certainly willing—”
“I need to know that I can trust you, and that you feel that you can trust me. I don’t think I can do this otherwise.”
A feeling took hold of me then that I’ve often had since: the suspicion that crucial precedents were being set, that matters of weight and consequence hung in the balance, and that I barely had a clue what was at stake. In one sense, of course, I knew what was at stake very welclass="underline" you were at stake, Mrs. Haven. But this knowledge only paralyzed me further.
“You’re always laying down the law,” I heard myself stammer.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that, Walter. Are you trying to say—”
“I’m trying to say that from the moment we met, from our first conversation, you’ve been the one setting the terms. You’ve never asked me what my terms might be — not even once. What makes you so sure that I don’t have any?”
You sat forward, tucking a lock of sleep-creased hair behind your ear. I’d managed to make you self-conscious, if nothing else.
“What are your terms, Walter?”
I didn’t have any, of course. None. I’d have taken you under every possible set of conditions. I sank back into the pillows with a groan.