Please Remove Your Shoes at the Door

I was utterly happy with my height…with my life…until the summer of my 18th year, in 1987. In that year, you may remember, music still sounded somewhat like music, and shoulder pads were the prosthetic of choice, and the destruction of the environment was only the concern of a rarely-fucked minority of jobless sour-grapes crackpots. Now, everyone’s worried. But that’s another story. The summer of 1987 was the summer that my mother, trying to be helpful, made the devastating remark that changed everything.

“Now you listen to me,” she said, standing in the middle of our kitchen with her hands on her wide hips…her hips were the wide base of a very tall A-frame of Scandinavian design…“you’re going to meet plenty of bloody nice girls who would be proud to have you for a boyfriend, do you hear?” Bloody…that was her word.

She was shaking with anger as she said this, and it caused me to reflect that she was taking the news of Gilda Fontaine’s decision to dump me by leaving a message on the family answering machine more seriously than I was. Those were the days when answering machines were still a relatively new feature in the well-equipped household and the outgoing messages that answering machine owners recorded on their machines in order to greet new callers could be ornate and well-rehearsed presentations. Our machine boasted a salutation in four-part harmony. It was composed and arranged by my father; a crafty ditty that stretched our last name (Smoot) into five distinct syllables, and had all four of us enunciating the terminal “t” with a clarity that bordered on being hostile. My father was the music teacher/ phys ed instructor for King of Prussia Junior High, and he probably felt pressured into coming up with something technical like that, considering his position in the community.

I remember the tune as clearly as any song by The Beatles, and sang it under my breath at Dad’s funeral the year I hit thirty, not long ago. He was a little man too, but seemed to burn up the fuel of his allotted years with the physical greed of a giant. We bought him a full sized coffin, out of respect, but I’ve always been a little disturbed by the idea of Dad rattling around in that lonely box like a little gray lozenge in an otherwise empty tin of cough drops. A little man should have a little coffin: there should be no shame in that. But I digress.

So Gilda Fontaine called that Saturday morning in 1987 and waited impatiently through our barber shop quartet of an answering machine greeting, and with cold-blooded precision delivered herself of the announcement that the plans we’d made for that evening, or any day or evening thereafter, for that matter, were off and no hard feelings ciao. I should have heard that message alone: I really wouldn’t have cared that much. I wouldn’t have made much of it. Maybe I might have kicked something but so what.

She wrapped the kiss-off up with a very reasonable sounding “I just thought you should know,” and I remember being grudgingly impressed that she’d made her little speech without faltering. She was that kind of girl, the kind of girl who could leave a message like that on an answering machine without stuttering, in 1987, when everyone else was still afraid of them, and knowing that my whole family would probably hear it, but I guess she wasn’t born with the name Gilda Fontaine for nothing.

Some people are better than their names (like my college buddy Bubba Rukeyser), and others never seem to grow into theirs, but Gilda Fontaine lived up to her labeling like something from an exclusive shop (with its own brass nameplate) that the average person isn’t allowed into; that the average person doesn’t even know exists. Mother and I alone heard Gilda’s valedictory message. Father was busy with concrete and fence posts in the back yard, and Shel was somewhere near Haverford learning to drive. Mother’s finger was still on the “play” button as I left the living room to go into the kitchen to get some apple juice and hide my shame. She followed me straight in there and erupted with the pep talk that ruined my life.

“Now you listen to me, you’re going to meet plenty of bloody nice girls who would be proud to have you for a boyfriend, do you hear?”

It never would have occurred to my ego that Gilda Fontaine’s rejection of me was anything more personal than an act of God until my mother’s rage about it showed me the truth: Gilda Fontaine was dumping me because of me, and not because of some faulty wiring in her brain…she was dumping me because I wasn’t good enough. And the only thing about me that I could isolate as noticeably different from everyone else to a degree that it could be considered some kind of defect was my height. Before that, it’s funny to say this, but I thought of myself as a perfect jewel of a young man…pretty as a girl, but well built, and sensitive as a pampered prince from ancient Persia. A musician, a poet, a wasp-waisted boy: that’s what I saw in the mirror when I checked, which was often. A gymnast, a joke-teller, a mystic, a gentleman.

I knew I was tiny, but my size back then made me feel special, and well-crafted…transistorized. And back then I had the whisperable litany of The List: Alexander the Great, Al Pacino, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Paul Williams, Friedrich Nietzsche, Tom Cruise, Ringo Starr, David Cassidy, Michael J. Fox, Roman Polanski, Francois Truffaut, Michael Dukakis, Rudolf Valentino, Napoleon Bonaparte, Dustin Hoffman, Toulouse Lautrec, Christopher Isherwood, Gary Coleman and Jesus H. Christ.

Well, seeing the compassionate outrage on my mother’s face in the kitchen that afternoon put a stop to those perfection fantasies; I might as well have been her hare-lipped birth control accident, chained to a pole in the cellar. I suddenly saw through my mother’s own eyes that I was fucked up and runty and I’d never be a leading man in the movie of my own existence. I was doomed to be a side-kick to some tall lummox at best, just like in all of those old cartoons where the smart little mouse tells the big dumb one what to do, but it’s always the big dumb one who has to save the little smart one from the cat when they sneak out in the kitchen for cheese accompanied by xylophone music.

The main point: my new knowledge changed me over-night. I became strategic rather than generous, and competitive as opposed to Aquarian. I divided the world into the complacent tall and the aggrieved short, and gave myself the rank of general in the secret war against tallness that I vowed to prosecute. But first there was the matter of acquiring a proper uniform. The footwear, at least.

One hour and ten minutes by car from our Elm-lined grove of a street was a shoemaker’s shop that I found after searching diligently all summer, poring over the Yellow Pages like a monk caressing an illuminated text. I found this beautiful old cobbler’s place…the smell as one crossed the shop’s threshold was the olfactory equivalent of rubies.

I got there minutes before closing time, but the proprietor of the shop knew my story in one half of a glance, and so he mercifully fitted me for a special pair of shoes which then came by special delivery the day before I had to pack my things and handshake my family goodbye for a private college set on the vertiginous flatness of the heartland. The proprietor of the shoe shop was a chocolate brown old African-American guy with the euphonious moniker of Elvinius Belkins, and his shop was called “The Shoe Fits,” and Elvinius, for three hundred dollars (a lot of money back then), gave me about twenty percent of my self-esteem back, plus a two year guarantee on the heels. They fit like new feet.

Now what would make more sense for a profoundly not-tall man-boy like myself, a man-boy who could just about achieve the low end of an average height with the benefit of teetering custom-made platform shoes? To pursue romances with the tiniest and most vertically suitable beauties available, or to measure himself against the quixotic challenge of scaling the lankiest amazons on the horizon? It’s a question, as always, of what might have made more sense, versus what really happened.

The administration of Fate is a concise business, I find. It tends to get right to the point (whether you know it or not). My first night at college I saw her: Mary Ford was that blonde redwood walking into my dormitory building as I looked down from the window in the second floor lounge, and because I was looking straight down upon the pale crown of her head, and the smooth topology of her breasts and shoulders, I couldn’t quite grasp her enormity, except by the shadow she cast in the glare of the floodlight mounted above the dorm entrance, which appeared to be five miles long.

It was evening, I had finished unpacking my things and I was thinking about meeting people, hanging out in the lounge down the hall from my single. I had opted for a single rather than a double because I wanted privacy (to strap into and out of my special shoes unmonitored, for one thing), but it hit me that the concept of privacy is separated from the condition of loneliness by the hairline fracture of self-satisfaction. And I wasn’t satisfied with myself. I wanted to meet people.

Mary Ford was walking into the building with another girl, a black-haired girl, and though they were neck-and-neck in the race into the building with their armloads of books and potato chip bags and whatever, Mary’s shadow was nearly twice as long as the black-haired girl’s…their shadows laid out were an umbral mother and child. “That’s my girl,” I said, out loud, as I watched her loom below.

It didn’t slow me down a bit when I discovered, looking up at her a little later that evening, that she had the heavy jawline and protuberant brow of a man, and hands that way too. Her new friend, that black haired girl, who was exactly my height when we were both in heels, was an exquisite Persian beauty. Her face and body were a study in delicates, and subtles, and rares. Her hands were sand-colored flowers. Her eyes were amber. But still, I wanted the big one. I wanted to be inside that particular Statue of Liberty.

“Farrah,” said titanic Mary Ford, with her surprisingly squeaky voice, “this is Albert…what was your, er-”

“Smoot.”

“Smoot. Albert Smoot! Smoot?” She nodded interrogatively, got my permission, and went on, “Albert Smoot. Farrah…what-”

“Dizadji.” Farrah looked directly at me while saying it. Then she clasped her hands behind her back and looked up at the giant who seemed to be finding us both so adorable and got up on tip-toe and said “Dee-zah-JEE.” Her voice was smoke and rosewater. “Dee-zah-JEE.”

She smiled, on the verge of repeating it, when Mary said “Right!” and clapped her big hands with pleasure, a young Ford discovering some of the acrid spices of the ethnic names to be found in the World beyond her high-wasp enclave in Connecticut.

Mary, daughter of Missy and Robert, sister to Hester, Paul and Ronald, granddaughter of Robert and Susan and Winston and Hester, niece of Robert jr., Ronald, Paul, William, Bob and Susan…

There was a gathering of people in the second floor dorm lounge. The lights were low. Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians were on the stereo. There was a keg of beer at the other side of the room, hoisted up on the aluminum counter beside the sink, and bags and bags of ice had been emptied into the sink, and stacks of plastic cups towered over two big yellow bowls of stale chips. There was no real food that I could gallantly offer to cross the room and fetch for either of them, and we all already had cups of beer to fondle as props, and the music was too loud for me to say much of anything to anyone but Farrah, whose ears were damnably close to being perfectly aligned with the axis of my mouth. Mary soon enough got tired of bending over to keep tabs on our conversation, and drifted towards the only other equally tall person in the room, a hyper-thyroid case named Wolper.

“Tell me something about your friend Mary,” I said to Farrah, with the innocent rudeness natural to my age and class, “do you think she likes me?”

“Why not,” she should have said, “You’re the perfect size for a pet,” but her manners forbid it. She said, instead, “Why shouldn’t she?”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I nodded. “Because I really like her,” I gulped my beer, “a lot.”

“She wants to be an actress,” offered Farrah, “So if I were you I’d try out for something in the Drama Department.”

What I ended up getting was the lead role in a Theatre-of-the-Absurd type play called ‘Oedipus Christ,’ a never-produced text unearthed by H. Frawley Caine, the school’s controversial (and soon thereafter ‘let go’) Drama Teacher. I played the Baby Jesus to Mary Ford’s portrayal of my character’s famous mother and there were plenty…too many…opportunities for closeness between us. By the end of the six weeks of rehearsal, I had mistaken Mary’s amateur professionalism for love. I confused the one for the other like a pitifully foolish mosquito, mistaking an onion for an elbow. So when she invited me to her door room “for a quiet little get-together,” on the night before the play’s premier, I misinterpreted her intentions with self-immolating raptures of stupidity.

“Knock knock!” I called through Mary’s dorm room door, coyly, at the appointed hour. Imagine the look on my face when Wolper opened it and bade me enter, the ominous prongs of undergrad cocktail chatter meshing behind him. I made to push by Wolper but he instructed me to remove my shoes and place them in a long row of conspicuously normal-looking footwear, on the mat in the vestibule, first.

But what’s the point of trying to mislead you? This is merely my attempt at a little creative empathy. I’m not short at all; the truth is, I’m rather lanky… it’s just that I haven’t reached the point “within myself” from which I can address my actual defects directly.

Dolores

 

I remember everything about Dolly the first time I saw her and almost nothing about my self. Was I happy? Sad? Confused? Lonely? Driven? In great shape still or a wreck like I am today? Hairy or hairless? The prince or the toad? I can’t seem to remember being anything other than the bitter old me I’ve become. Useless old animal hands. Blessed is the forgetting. But I remember Dolly, what Dolly looked like, the tensile strength of her warm grip and that everyone in those days was walking around with a telephone. Talking not to the phones but to each other! The phones were merely a medium. You won’t know what I mean by that. You’ll shake your heads; you’ll wink at each other.

Too much has happened. Maybe it will come back. I will come back. As I talk about it. Get it off my chest. They told me to record my thoughts, all of my thoughts, don’t be selective. They said that they’ll be the ones to worry about what to throw away and what to keep and despite the fact that I’m more than sure (delusions of grandeur, right?) that I can out-talk anything’s capacity to record me, talking about it might bring, in the archaic parlance of a long-gone culture, ‘closure.’ It might even be what people who once read better books than the people who once said ‘closure’ called ‘cathartic’. Submit ‘cathartic’ and the know-it-all thingy will inform you that it comes from the Greek, meaning ‘to cleanse.’ I could use some of that now. I look around me at all these gleaming white surfaces and let me tell you I feel like the rag that was used to clean them.

Twenty five years ago. There was a lot more sex then. It took two, three, maybe four people sometimes to do it, actually. You’re snickering at that. On the day in question, the day I’ll call Dolly Day (or D-Day) from now until the end of time, I had just turned thirty and had been feigning horror for weeks, for thirty is the last milestone one can truly afford to mock. So true. Thirty is like the girl you’ll never forget or the song you’d forgotten you’d loved more than any other song you ever knew. Thirty is as fragile as an egg; a skull.

The sun was coming out after a terrific little tantrum of weather, on D-Day. It was the middle of May and the cloudburst was winter’s parting shot. Like an antique soldier charging, bayonet extended, after all the bullets are gone. The Daguerreotype buffoon in his mustache and his long underwear. The sun that emerged was so vital and fierce that it murdered the clouds and got busy drying the sidewalks and I was so warm, suddenly. It was so suddenly summer. The sidewalks steaming. I carried my jacket over an arm and walked up the hill past the park, looking for a café for breakfast and the café that I chose was the café that Dolly was sitting in front of, soaking up the rays with her eyes shut, smiling at the sky. I’m thinking, in retrospect: I’ll bet the sky knew. You know? I’ll bet it winked at her.

People of the past strike us as being so stupid. We know everything they knew plus everything we know and they knew only what they could have known at the time. The people of the past are like country bumpkins. Excuse me but it’s like watching a retarded or blind person walking right for an open manhole. All you can do is gaze with open-mouthed incredulity. You almost have to laugh.

I remember trying to remember the word for omelette. I ordered an omelette which came with two diagonally halved slices of toast, a pat of butter, a decorative wedge of orange and a suspicious sprig of parsely. Suspicious because I had a friend who claimed that the parsely was often recycled; he never ate it but also never left it on his plate. He’d slip it in his pocket with compressed lips and a curt nod like he was doing his civic duty. His jacket pockets were full of brittle sprigs of parsely. He later turned out to have a screw loose.

Inside the café was dark with cigarette smoke and greasy light bulbs and a half a dozen tables of couples and trios in dark clothing at work on their cappuccinos and puffing on Marlboros and complaining about either or both of the two governments. I told the waitress I’d be sitting outside and she handed me a rag to wipe my seat with.

Dolores and I were the only ones outside in the sun…the sunshine-news hadn’t yet reached the dark interior of the café, apparently… and I stared at her while wiping the seat of a chair at a table that was neither too close nor too far from her. I stared because I thought her eyes were safely shut but on closer inspection I would have seen her eyelids fluttering. Sneaky little thing. The rag I was using to wipe the rain-beaded seat was too wet already and didn’t much help to dry the seat. It was wet and greasy and Dolores, who was peeking, laughed as though she was watching a Chaplin film. Then she handed me her orange scarf. Orange. As they say: there are no accidents in this clever world.

“Use this.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t.”

“I used it to dry my seat. Why shouldn’t you?”

“But…”

“Use it, take it home, wash it and dry it and return it to me tomorrow. As long as there are tomorrows, yes?” The trinket of her laughter. “I trust you to return it.”

I remember being nervous talking to her; not just because she was so beautiful but because of the age difference, which was obviously significant, without me having to ask. People seeing us talking…flirting…would be sure to think: what does this pervert want with her? What a face she had. Her face the first time I saw it was half dream, half cat…voluminously wrinkled like satin. Those pearly, translucent teeth.

She was carrying it already, of course. What I thought of as a stringent, crushing, unearthly beauty at the time (30! The poignant linger of poetry’s innocence!) was, in fact, the fingerprint. The fingerprint from the angel of that particular attitude towards extinction. The angel pressed his faint red fingerprint hard on the paper of her old white face and I mistook the blood-pattern for beauty. I gallantly offered to buy her a chamomille tea, if I recall correctly. Not that you’d know what that is.

I keep telling them it was already in her the day we met but they don’t believe me. If I could speak with someone face to face I’m pretty sure I could convince them. Communication isn’t only about words but none of you seem to trust me; you feel safer on the other side of that glass, don’t you?

 

 

.

dead girl

 

Henry waited until Mr. Buckler ducked into the storage room hunting for cigarettes before he took a peek at the girl on the table again. A closer peek. My first naked girl, he thought, and she’s dead. Even worse, she was pretty. Very pretty, with a big round reddish Afro and a perfect black body, but she was dead. Henry was a virgin and she was dead.

He noticed that her earlobes were attached (a trait they’d concentrated on in genetics his junior year), and her arms were lightly silky with straight black hairs that barely showed against her very dark skin. Her arms were crossed at the wrists, hands joined like a bird with tapering wings tensed over her stomach. To forestall the inevitable glance at her vagina he concentrated on her navel, the ebonite iris that folded into itself with wasted precision.

She was long and slender and looked weightless-but-durable. Her bush was a copper coil like material out of an old radio and her lips were all-but shut in an eerie smile of endurance; a thin white crescent of clenched teeth exposed where the lip curled back, a sneer at the living.

She had small breasts but big nipples. This shocked the boy, who tried his best not to look, though her nipples were so big it was embarrassing. They were so big and warm-looking, so seemingly capable yet of what they were by design so intended to do…it seemed to him that by their fact alone the dead girl couldn’t really be dead; not with perfectly good parts on her still. The clear-lensed eyes and jointed limbs and elegant fulcrums of jaw and hip. He just didn’t associate nipples with death in general and certainly not big ones like that, though he’d never seen in life a living pair with which to compare them.

He thought he might recognize her, but then again don’t all pretty girls look familiar, at first glance?

When Buckler came back in the morgue with a toothpick stuck in his rubbery mouth, he found Henry with his back to the room, mysteriously facing the radiator by the ramp door, bent forward at the waist with his knees straight and his hands in his pockets, staring down into the spider-webby gap between the radiator and the wall in a non sequitur of concentration.

“Yo,” said Buckler.

Henry responded without turning. “Georgia,” he said, and cleared his throat, “Georgia wants me to paint the wall in here pretty soon and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to paint the wall here behind the radiator.”

“Oh man,” said Buckler, sauntering over with his hands in his pockets and his hat tilted way back on his head, “It’s a bitch alright. Fifty dollars says there ain’t an inch of lee-way ‘tween that wall and them pipes.”

Buckler was a man who could stand and stare at the wall behind a radiator all day if he had to. Henry was greatly relieved when Aunt Georgia summoned Buckler over the intercom instead, speaking so softly that this unusual discretion implied the wounded presence of clients. Probably the N.O.K.s of the dead girl herself, to whom they both had their backs at that moment.

“Ed,” reiterated Georgia, just audible over the intercom’s hiss.

Two handsome black ladies under so much foundation that they themselves resembled the resplendent dead were seated in front of Gil’s desk, sniffling at wads of the perfumed tissues Georgia bought in bulk from Newark. In fact the tissues discarded and at their feet were so smudged with dark it was almost as though the ladies were in blackface. Georgia produced documents to sign, knowing exactly when to slide what across the desk towards whom. She must have summoned Buckler in case one of the handsome ladies fainted, though his posture insinuated less a comfort than a deterrent. He stood beside Georgia behind the desk, scratching an elbow and dreaming of lunch.

Later, Henry wondered if it was a trick of the light, or if the girl had contracted somewhat in the five hours since the two of them had first met? Were her knees a little higher, her arms crossed tighter and her elbows tucked in a bit more? Yes, he thought. Bracing herself against a shock that could come any moment.

Her color too. She seemed ashen…grayer…even correcting for the dramatically different lighting he was now seeing her in; the candles that had replaced the sun. There were sunken circles around her eyes and a rough and ugly dullness in the hollows of her cheeks that looked like ghoulish makeup…sparingly applied but noticeable nevertheless. She was beginning to look very much dead, in fact, whereas a large part of the shock he’d experienced when first seeing her was how she didn’t really look dead at all.

In violation of the courtly respect one accords certain chemicals gathered in the embalming room, Henry had placed and lit a few candles along the sink to give the dead girl the benefit of their softer light. Upstairs, safe in a duvet on the hottest night of the year, blasted by the snowless blizzard of air conditioning, his Aunt was watching The Tonight Show with her eyes closed. The chit chat and laughter.

The first candle struggled and guttered in a pool that spread and spilled into a solid down the front of the sink, subtracting light by a fine degree, and Henry aware, suddenly, of the passing of time. Not the years but the hours.

Sarah is Five-ish

 

You expect a clockwork metropolis resembling dirty stacks of old wedding cakes. It’s a surprise riding into Vienna from the airport on the shuttle and seeing miles of heavy industry instead…silver pipes and vast white tanks and smokestacks protruding from asphalt plants and refineries. There was a premonition of this already at the airport because the horizon is ringed with the rust-tinged edge of an inverted bowl of old industrial weather. The last thing you’d expect of the former heart of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire is to be reminded of pre-EPA Pittsburgh in its sky-killing heyday, but life is just one long surprise for the living, isn’t it?

Further in, at the center, in the area around the Stephansdom (the cathedral), things look more as they are supposed to. Vienna is a closer match for “Vienna” here: the plaster-pallid coachmen are top-hatted and their Fiackers are brightly enameled in greens or reds and heavily trimmed in black. Some of the Fiackers, drawn by two-horse teams, are so black they look like funeral carriages, never more so than when the horses drawing one of the grandiose things through crowds across Graben, the old square, are pure white.

Sarah and I are having a rest on the long lawn in front of the Votivkirche. Sarah is five-ish. We watch as a bespectacled file clerk in short-sleeves and stiff-legged pants goes from girl to girl, snapping photos with the barest minimum of subterfuge. Every three snaps or so, he pretends to take a picture of the church, or a tree, as long as the church or tree happens to fall within the sight line of an interposed girl showing skin. He makes his way around the park, barely able to control his excitement at capturing all these soft white girls and their long limbs laid out browning in the sun.

In the sun it feels like late spring but in the shade it feels much colder, as though patches of snow should still be visible in the trees and on the grass. The man snaps his fill of girlflesh and eventually disappears into the Votivkirche, following two tiny things in tulip dresses with their unsuspecting parents who are entering the whispery dark no doubt with the unironic intention of prayer. Sarah and I stand up, brush off our bums and leave the park as the bells begin their robust work at noon. I am feeling a bit hungry.

Sitting in The Café Braeunerhof, I’m struck by the paradox that the service is both far ruder and infinitely more polite than what I have come to expect in Berlin. The waiters in Berlin espouse the rights of man and bodily refute the very notion of service; what are your pennies compared to their self respect? They slouch and mumble while serving and your manners devolve to the level of the service. Viennese staff hold the clientele to a much higher standard, for service is a form of mastery in Vienna. Sarah’s plate of scrambled eggs comes with an implicit command not to play with her food and I’ve never seen her use a fork so adultly. For myself I’ve ordered a sausage filled with cheese and served with a tin of beer, known in jolly Viennese slang as An aatrige mit a blech… some pus with a tin.

Sarah says, “Aunt Iris has two big horses, a black one and a white one, like the ones we saw with the carriage, Henry,” but I tell her that isn’t true. Then she says, “But I saw them,” and I assert that this, too, is untrue. Sarah has never seen her Aunt Iris before, unless it was in photos so old that Iris herself was a child in them. And Iris definitely doesn’t have horses. She lives with a cat in a shitty little apartment on Hahngasse.

Leaning through the cook’s portal in his immaculate toque and framed by steam is a dead ringer for Paul Gaugin, bent nose, grease-paint mustache and everything. Earlier in the day we saw Richard Wagner in a light gray suit, shirt open at the collar, inspecting the tourists and shop fronts of Graben with an air of lordly tolerance, hands clasped behind his back, gray hair skirting the suit collar.

Half of the clientele of The Braeunerhof are phantoms themselves. There’s the grinning geezer with a lap-long beard he is not much wider than to the front, right…and there’s the off-season Brunhilde, like a ship in her bosom-prowed dress, in the booth opposite, slurping her soup…and there’s a dapper fellow with his Herald Tribune in the window under a fading magazine clipping about Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer who liked brooding over his coffee and a newspaper in that very spot. Bernhard is dead as a Mesopotamian now, ribs like a sprung umbrella…can no longer talk, feel, write or taste coffee. I wonder what he thinks about in that little room. I wonder if death was worth it?

When I ask Sarah if she wants a dessert she says no thankyou, Henry. Declining the pleasure is her way of proving to me that she’s a good person I guess and this touches me terribly and I take her hand and lead her out of The Braeunerhof and onto the iron shadow of the cathedral. I almost make the mistake of offering a look inside the eternity-obsessed hangar with its gray recumbent saints and its vertebral columns but catch myself before the blunder. I’m relieved that she’s simply happy to walk in the new shoes I bought her. Relieved they don’t hurt.

The goodwill that being an English-speaking tourist elicits never ceases to astonish me. Sheepishly begging directions from one Viennese after another, we become not only progressively more lost, but treated with greater and greater patience and sympathy, until I’m ready for the last direction-giver, a Muslim lady pushing her somber tram, to give us a kiss, cab fare to Hahngasse and a little mother’s milk for the trip. I come to the interesting conclusion that the landmark each person has given us to navigate by is calibrated to his or her respective social class or personality. Bank, kulturhaus, discount shoe store. The dark-robed Muslim lady tells us to turn right at the cemetery.

We are standing on a steep hill on a wide street in windy shadows when we notice a gray pasha in brown polyester, shiny-domed and grandiosely mustached, beckoning madly from a café table in front of the bistro on the other side. He is either the bistro’s owner, or some sort of local landmark, a colorful character busily writing himself into the oral history of the neighborhood.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks, dismissing my map with a gesture of gregarious scorn. He thumps his chest. “I know everywhere.”

I tell him the name of the street and he frowns. Soon, both of us are huddled over the map, gripping its corners like the wings of a bird we’ve snatched, for the purposes of divination, from the breast of the wind. A handsome matron in a cheerful scarf and a Burberry coat is just then stepping from the bistro and pasha intercepts her with one discreetly lateral move, blocking her exit and inquires, sotto voce, how to get to Hahngasse. The matron peers at Sarah, then me, registering, no doubt, the fact that the little girl and I cannot possibly be related.

“Do you speak English?” she asks, with a heavy German accent.

With five or six sets of conflicting directions to choose from, Sarah and I finally find Hahngasse. I think I remember the street number, but how to get into the building to search for the flat? Her name isn’t on any of the buzzers. I buzz a random name and politely explain that I wish to leave a note for Frau Lott. Once in the building, we climb the staircase, ascending into a bowely-warm odor of cooking that harmonizes with the dark trim and carpet. On each landing I look for Iris Lott’s name, three different doors per landing, many of the doors astonishingly beautiful, ornate in the Belle Epoque style. On the fourth landing, two to go, Sarah says she’s tired so we take a break, sitting on the stairs, and I wish I’d been prescient enough to buy fruit for her. Something. She says,

“Henry, when we find Aunt Iris, will you stay with Aunt Iris too?”

I say no.

“Just me and Aunt Iris?”

And her cat. Yes.

“Will I see you again Henry?”

No.

She lowers her head to a resolute angle and says, logically, “Then I hope we don’t find Aunt Iris.”

We descend again to the front hall and find the mailboxes and there stands, on one of the boxes, on a strip of paper taped beside the name on the official nameplate on the box, in faintest pencil, M. Lott. It must be Iris, but I don’t know what the “M” stands for. Does she have a name I’ve never heard her sister Sandy mention? Discoveries like this tend to take all the air out of me; doors opening onto doors opening onto doors towards a room of useless secrets; so I concentrate on the task at hand. But there’s no slot on the box that I might slip a note through (if I had a pencil and paper to write one with) . The mailman carries a masterkey, I assume, with which to open the whole bank of boxes in one go.

I’m trying to shimmy my business card through a narrow crack in the mailbox, an activity that looks suspiciously like a foreigner tampering with the Austrian postal system, a crime probably punishable with flogging, when we hear a key in the front door and I jump an inch in my skin. An elderly gentleman in a derby hat and a three-piece suit lets himself in, pauses to take in the scene and greets us with a loose nod and a “Grüss Gott” that sounds like a dying man’s terminal speech.

Sarah says, “That man scared me, Henry!” and I have to admit that he scared me too. But everything does.

Notes for a Story about What Happened

I’m going to tell you a lie and you’re going to believe it. You will have no choice. I will tell you the truth, too, but that you’ll doubt. Also inevitable. The lie will be seductive because it is something you already know.

I didn’t love her.

I got the call on the train, at lunchtime, and believe it or not I was actually watching the news (the Nth iteration of it) on a ceiling-mounted monitor as I answered the phone, swaying with the train. A Hollywood coincidence. The Malaysian with his infuriating grin. I was thinking give me ten minutes with that cunt in his padded cell. I was thinking ten minutes and a hammer. I could do it in five. Hello?

-Is this Steven?

She was five foot seven, about one hundred and twenty pounds. I don’t know if they weighed her after; what the procedure is; what she even looked like. Put her on a scale in a plastic bag. I do know that she’d just signed up for a fitness course and that is what always angers me when I think about it, the time and effort she wasted. Getting back in the game. But then some stupid cunt with his grand ideas. His belief system. Some vast sea of stupid cunts with their million raised fists called a belief system.

Note: the fistfight we got into in Limbo.

Note: also, the argument in class with Herr Wieland about the word “Jew” in the story and how I then lost my job over it. He hadn’t written the story: I had. It was a published story. Wieland claimed the term was pejorative.

Note: tie it together. Something about violence. But what?

-Is this okay? Does it hurt?

-No, it’s good. It’s okay, it’s good.

-Can she hear us?

-She’s asleep.

-We shouldn’t wake her.

-Are you saying I’m noisy?

-I’m just saying.

-You’re sweet.

But I’m not. I am what I am, and I was doing what I wanted to her, without asking first, on the gold batik bedspread on the fold-out sofa in her borrowed living room, capitalizing on her position of relative weakness as a single mother of 28 without any real career prospects. New age music down low. Or a recording of the ocean with gulls dubbed in. The inevitable candles. The inevitably post-coital, anticipated-with-genuine-dread looks of searching depth. The kinds of looks that make one’s face feel as though it’s crawling with tiny people. I buried my nose in her hair. Went to the bathroom. Anything to escape those searching looks. Jogging with Ginger the next day, I was too out of breath to go into detail. I said,

“What can I say? The earth didn’t move.”

“For you or for her?”

He gestured at a rain-glazed croissant of merd on the sidewalk and we veered. We usually veer together; this time we veered apart. Significant? Ginger, whose man-of-the-world self-image has a tendency to grate at precisely the moment I most need his worldly advice, said, “Any woman who lets you fuck her in the ass is the kind of woman you should never under any circumstance fuck in the ass.”

“So the only acceptable option is forcible sodomy, in your opinion.” I was so out of breath that it ruined my timing and killed the joke.

“Were you wearing a condom?”

“Were you?”

“When?”

“Whenever.”

Last night she came back to me again: most of her hair burned off and half of her face crunchy black. I was thinking I hope I don’t see any bone. Don’t let me see the bones. Any skull or ribs or lidless eyeball. She was trying to kiss me and I was forced to be honest.

It was August of that year that I bumped into Indra while walking along Golt Strasse. I hadn’t seen her since the early part of the last decade, but walking along Golt Strasse on a Friday afternoon is a reliable method for bumping into long-lost Berliners of a certain generation. The veterans of this fossilizing in-crowd still haunt the area on weekends, shocking (and reassuring) each other with toddlers and wrinkles and receding hairlines, waltzing towards the same precipice with touching synchrony, clearing the way for the next great wave.

I knew her from the golden age on the cusp between my boredom and my stupid youth, an appetizing girl whose last name I never caught, one of the faces I’ll always associate with my first few ecstatic months in Berlin, before my increasing familiarity with the language, and its native speakers, ruined everything. Beware the expat who masters his German. We had always flirted and nothing more. We never risked touching (each assumed the other had fucked or been fucked too much), but had sometimes exchanged a certain kind of laden look on the packed dance floors of an era during which it now seems to me we all had been rather hysterically afraid to go home.

And here she was sitting in sunlight. That same black-haired girl, now a woman, or old enough to claim the title, sitting on a bench in front of a restaurant a few doors down from the café I had always seen her showing off in, looking almost exactly as she had a decade before. Half-Indian, father German, she was a mischling, as the Germans put it. Coin-colored, round-faced, voluptuous under spectacular black blades of hair. I jogged to her, grinning, and was rewarded with a crushing hug that felt more genuine than what I’d expect. Bent by the hug, I smiled meaninglessly at a toddler seated near her on the bench, hoping the child wasn’t hers, but she was.

“This is Jinny,” said Indra, introducing me to Jinny, but not Jinny to me (most probably because she couldn’t recall or had never known my name) as I took a place between them. I toasted Jinny with a Coke I ordered.

“To once being young,” I said, but Jinny just stared and Indra corrected me. She tapped her temple. “To staying young,” she smiled. “Both of us.”

Which made me feel extremely old. Several times during the conversation, Indra touched my arm and stared unwaveringly in my eyes and invited me to visit her in Bali. She painted a dreamy picture of a murmuring sea and laid-back days and Caligulan disco nights and I was touched to realize that she was looking for a man.

“Anyway” she said, as I eventually stood to leave, “Let’s hook up soon. We should really do something. It’s so good to see you again! Ciao!”

Jinny waved back (note: as though prompted) as I saluted a jaunty goodbye from the corner. It was the end of my lunch break.

I’d lucked into this incredible corporate gig, teaching creative writing to the executives of a company called Eurologika. The CEO wanted his underlings not only to speak and write English fluently but to be able to do so creatively. He wanted them to do that supposedly American thing called thinking outside the box. A dreadful cliché, yes, but I had a year’s contract.

Herr Weiss, Herr Brückner, Herr Richter, Herr Gumpenhölzl, Herr Wieland, Herr Woyczechowski, Herr Sonnabend, Herr Schlegel.

The first day (the class was on a Friday afternoon, in a conference room with a view of the canal, when most people with good jobs were already wherever they’d be spending the long weekend) saw me facing down the bemused tolerance/ mild contempt, for non-famous artists, of the typical German of a certain class. If you’re so good, why haven’t we heard of you? What is it that you do, exactly, that a hundred other people off the streets, with a little time on their hands, can’t do as well or better?

I turned the tables on them: what is it that you do?

“We design and manage systems protocols for capital storage and retrieval patterns on the Hannover model,” sighed Herr Wieland, the youngest in the room, whose headset never, in the three months I knew him, left the bluish egg of his balding head.

“Can you repeat that in plain English?”

He couldn’t. Pressing my momentary advantage, I said: “Your race, your class, your sexual preferences, national identity, earliest childhood memories, religion, education and professional standing are all stories that you have been told, and that you re-tell to others, without having a clue what the techniques and mechanics of storytelling are all about. I’m surprised you’d rather be so sloppy and haphazard about something you will do for every waking moment of your life. And in your dreams, too, and long after you die, possibly. You will be storytelling, but you don’t even really know how to. Is that a satisfactory state of affairs?”

-Is this Steven?

-Yes.

-Steven, you don’t know me. This is Indra’s sister Padme.

I was on the train during the lunch break on the ninth Friday of the class. Classes were held from 14:00 until 15:00, then a forty five minute lunch break, after which another hour or so until I dismissed them to fly off to Ibiza or Gstaad. On this ninth Friday we were critiquing the first bona fide assignment I’d given them: write a 600-word story about another member of the class.

Note: every single story they handed in was about me.

Note: exactly 600 words each.

I was staring at that little fucker’s monkey-grin face on the monitor. I’d assumed it was Ginger, calling with a new number. I looked at the phone and said,

-Excuse me?

-It’s about Indra.

A light dawned as I frowned at the monitor. Note: It’s astonishing how much thinking we’re capable of in a millisecond. Goosebumps. The coroners had shipped the recovered cellphones to the next of kin.

-Wow.

-I second that emotion.

-Your English is pretty good, you know that?

-I had good teachers.

-Is that was this is about? Free lessons?

-(laughs) I’m so glad I called you. Are you glad I called you?

-Of course I am.

-You’re not just saying?

-Would I tell you if I were?

-What do you want to do now?

Note: again the dream. She’s burning and moaning and I’m wondering if it’s pleasure. Does it hurt to burn? In the dream I’m not sure. I turned all the lights on afterwards and watched a little television before falling asleep again. Coda?

(Work this in as dialogue-possibly ironic: I firmly believe that you fake your own reality. What is a lie but the truth with a little talent? What is life but death pretending? When a katydid pretends to be a leaf, do we call that lying? The hawk moth caterpiller resembles a snake, and I resemble a hawk moth caterpiller. I lie, I get laid, I move on.)

Herr Schlegel, who looks like a JFK who’s made it to his 70^th birthday with thick white hair intact and now only dresses in black, is confused. He is Herr Wieland’s picador, just as Herr Brueckner, with his off-puns and aphorisms, is the rodeo clown who breaks things up when I challenge Wieland’s arrogance; Wieland’s default pretense that any information he doesn’t already own is trivial. Everyone else is the audience. The coliseum. Schlegel says, “This story of yours, Herr Instructor, is it true?”

Note: classes were cancelled after the 12^th week, but I was paid for the year.

“Define true.” At which, of course, Herr Wieland snorts.

“Did it happen as you have written it?”

“Does that matter?”

“If it is fiction, it is mere pornography. If it is true, I think, in all honesty, one must say the writer has no shame.”

“By revealing his truth, the writer reveals the reader to himself, Herr Schlegel. It’s a sacrifice we’ve been obligated to make since before Mr. Joyce.”

“Nonsense. There is nothing of me in this story!”

Wieland picks up his copy of the stapled pages and flips them until he comes to an excerpt, which he reads with such excitement, such theatrical disgust and sarcasm, that he can barely pronounce the words, let alone contain himself.

It’s the posture of submission that turns you on: the oiled flesh, brown as furniture, rich in the flamelight. The ass up and the head down with all that hair gushing forth, gushing out, a fountain of crude oil spilling over the edge and pooling on the Persian carpet at the foot of the futon, the face inclined politely away, gasping at the wall in a prayerful rhythm, the grunts of assent or helpless recognitions. So many groans are just prayer, and so much of prayer is just begging, and almost all begging is the music of pain. Her guttural prayers and my flickering shadow on her wall and those glistening streaks of her mud on me: what’s more exciting than that?

“Goatfuckers.”

Ginger, with his Jesuit upbringing, says “Don’t start.”

“Don’t start what?”

“Don’t start that intolerance shit.”

We are back in Limbo, our old club, after two months of swearing off the smoke and the sweat and the alarming influx of rich kids in from Zehlendorf, simply because there is nowhere else to go. Twice we’d tried places where the sensation that hit us like a wall of digital locusts as we entered couldn’t even be identified as music. We’d tried places that looked and smelled like the decadent version of daycare. Sheepishly, we returned to the passé nightspot we’d sworn off, and three Turkish types in payment-plan suits and pastel loafers, sunglasses mired in their highly flammable jet-black hair, have pushed across our view of the dancefloor, tugging their blondes by the rings in their noses. Two are blondes, actually, and one is not.

I finish my drink. “What intolerance shit?”

Ginger says, “Oh, come on. Remember the day Indra flew back to Bali? You were so fucking relieved you bought me dinner. And now you’re playing the grieving fiancé. Boo fucking hoo.”

I pretend not to hear and move onto the dance floor, parting a metaphorical curtain, doing my American dance. Loose in the shoulders. Impossible for Germans and alien to Asians and instantly identifiable. That and my very good shoes. I dance from the periphery in, eyes on myself, easing towards the center. The three Turks and their escorts are trying out their modern dance lessons in the middle of the crowd and I am locked on the best-looking girl in their menagerie, the taller, thinner, slightly embarrassed and attractively reticent one in dark slacks, gold pumps and ruffled white collar and sleeves. She can’t be older than nineteen. Tossing her hair. They must have kidnapped her. First you look, and then you look away, and then they look, and then they look away. There’s a rhythm to it until your eyes meet and you can all but predict the future.

 

 

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