Decompression (22 page)

They were both standing in front of the house. I hadn’t reckoned on more than one of them. On this morning, as on every morning, they waited at the foot of the Casa Raya’s front steps while I backed the van across the sandlot. Jola wore a red dress with a swaying skirt that I hadn’t seen before. Theo looked like he wasn’t awake yet. I got out of the van, walked up to Jola, put my hands on her waist, and kissed her on the mouth. I didn’t know why I did that. I hadn’t planned it. Nor did it feel good.

“Whoops!” said Jola.

Theo looked past us, gave a slight nod, and smiled.

Some fuse in my head must have blown overnight. In the van, I gazed at Jola from the side and stroked her cheek with my forefinger. I put a hand on her knee. She seemed happy, but also a little mixed up. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. At the dive site, when she turned her back on Theo and me to take off her dress and get into her suit, I had to keep my hands still. I felt like a boy forbidden to test out his new toy, even though it had so many functions he’d yet to discover. Theo was suddenly full of questions about technical diving. Only then did I remember that tomorrow was the day I’d been waiting months for. My fortieth birthday, one hundred meters underwater. No matter what the wrecked ship’s original name had been, I was going to rename it after myself. A few more preparations remained to be made; there were tanks to
fill, various pieces of equipment to check, calculations in the dive plan to be gone over one last time. The impending expedition seemed far away to me, like something I’d already lived through and concluded. That perception had to change. I needed my full concentration. I answered Theo’s questions without properly listening to myself. While I was explaining that helium, even under high pressure, had very little narcotic effect, and that this was the reason why divers at hundred-meter depths breathed a helium-oxygen mixture, I looked at Jola, who was standing a little away from us. She returned my gaze with her head slightly tilted to one side, like someone contemplating a piece of furniture, uncertain about which room to put it in.

I thought about how urgently I needed to make a few decisions, and this immediately put me in a bad mood. Then I reflected that such decisions were best left to fate, and my mood improved. I said that the thermodynamic law of ideal gases didn’t take the interaction between gas atoms into account, and that therefore it was advisable to fall back on the van der Waals model when using helium. I thought that I had as valid a right as anyone to follow the laws of logic. Which meant that if Theo, Antje, Antje’s girlfriends, Bernie—if the whole island—assumed that I was having an affair with Jola, then it was only logical that I should actually have the said affair. The thought appealed to me. A man who didn’t want to lose his reason had to make sure that idea and reality were coextensive. As a general rule, one adapted ideas to reality. Sometimes the opposite method was the simpler one. An affair with Jola would ease the sting of Antje’s unjust accusations, give my conviction a retroactive basis, and put me back at the negotiating table. I’d had enough of feeling
that I couldn’t explain anything because no one would believe me no matter what I said. I composed a text message to Antje in my head: “Just slept with Jola, so you can stop thinking I’m a liar.” Let her try to get over that.

Jola watched me as I thought. She appeared to know what was in my mind. I smiled. She smiled. I laughed. She shook her head. As though she couldn’t rightly believe what she read in my thoughts.
Come to your senses
, her look seemed to say. All the same, she’d been coming on to me for days. It bordered on the miraculous that a woman of her caliber was prepared to go to such obstinate lengths to get a man.

I’d apparently broken off my helium lecture at some point in the middle; nevertheless, the Boltzmann constant and Charles’s law of volumes were still hanging in the air somehow. Theo looked unsatisfied.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go for a dive.”

Three hours later, when the dive was over and we were back in the van, Jola asked me, “Do you own a dinner jacket?” I said I didn’t. “Then a clean pair of jeans and a white shirt will have to do,” she said. “But with long sleeves!”

She hadn’t asked me whether I wanted to go out with them.

“Dinner on the
Dorset,
” Theo explained. “Aperitifs at seven.”

I gave some brief consideration to what Antje might be planning for dinner, but then I recalled that Antje wasn’t home. My aversion to parties was irrelevant in this case. Theo and Jola were scheduled to depart on Saturday. The time remaining until
then must be utilized, deliberately and thoroughly. Relishing the thought, I swung the van through the open gate and onto my property.

“Would you like to come in?” I asked in Jola’s direction, addressing her as casually as possible. Theo burst out laughing and left the van. Jola extended an index finger, poked me on the nose, and got out too. Her sports bag dangled jauntily from her shoulder as she walked over to the Casa Raya and disappeared inside.

With his back to me, Theo was standing on some indefinite spot between the gate entrance and the sandlot, approximately where the sidewalk would be in a German village. As he turned around, I could see a cigarette between his lips. He was crying. It was a weird sight: the forty-two-year-old man with the old face, the burning cigarette, the tears. Like a still shot from a movie that Antje would have liked.

“When we were children,” Theo said, “we wouldn’t have imagined we’d come to this one day.”

His flamboyant talk of the past few days was still in my ears.
I’ll put up with you banging her
, he’d said.
Just stop denying it
. As my mother would have observed, there’s no pleasing some people. Right there and then, I found Theo repulsive. He wasn’t only smoking and weeping, he was also smiling, all at the same time.

“Just imagine,” said Theo. “Seeing that drowned swimmer didn’t bother her a bit. It was almost as if she was enjoying it.”

He wiped his face with his cigarette hand. With the other, he made a regretful gesture, as though sympathizing with me about something. You had to hand it to him—he certainly had a knack
for producing shock effects. Without turning around again, he crossed the sandlot and entered the Casa Raya.

Jola wore a silver-white dress that gave off a pale, liquid shimmer and reacted to her slightest movement. Her dark hair was braided and wound around her head like a wreath. She was breathtakingly beautiful.

She had made sure we’d arrive fifteen minutes late. As we went up the gangway, she took my arm. The conversation on board fell silent. Theo walked behind us. I felt ashamed to be wearing jeans.

It was a moment I’ll never forget. Bittmann, tuxedoed and filthy rich, stared at us wide-eyed, as if he were standing on a raft while I steered a luxury yacht in his direction. Because of Jola, my jeans suddenly presented no problem; on the contrary, they seemed like a clever gambit.

A young girl wearing a man’s suit and a 1920s hairdo served the aperitifs: Aperol spritzes. My question as to what those might be made everybody laugh. A guy who was a singer in an East German band ordered a beer. On my left a young black man wearing gym shoes and a hoodie was grinning nonstop. I asked him how he liked the island. He understood neither German nor English nor Spanish. I couldn’t speak French.

We stood in a circle on the quarterdeck. The
Dorset
radiated light to all points of the compass. People in Morocco could probably see that something was going on here. A couple of children
whom Bittmann had permitted to take a tour of the ship ran up and down the deck. Their parents were on the quay, so curious they didn’t know what to do. We gazed at the starry sky, or rather at what there was to see of it behind the haze of the
Dorset
’s lights, and said, “Fantastic” and “Spectacular” alternately. Jola greeted a tall man in his sixties named Jankowski, whom Bittmann introduced as Germany’s most important literary critic. Next to Theo stood a lady wearing a multicolored shawl; according to Bittmann, she was the star director of the Schauspiel Köln theater. The other guests included a famous photographer with unwashed hair and the noted East German singer with his beer. The young black man was an artist from Burkina Faso who glued together collages of plastic bags; an exhibition of his work had opened in a gallery in Hamburg a few weeks before.

“Jola Pahlen and Theodor Hast need no introduction,” Bittmann said. “And this is …”

“My personal trainer,” said Jola, raising her glass to me.

I found that mortifying and therefore laughed with everyone else.

“Lovely to have you here,” Bittmann thundered, and all the glasses met in the center of the circle. “To art and culture!”

“To art and culture!” the guests shouted to the stars, and I began to have an uneasy feeling that my dinner companions, no matter how well or little they were acquainted and whether or not they liked one another, all belonged to a kind of club, a club whose membership didn’t include me. It had been an eternity since I’d last stepped into a museum. I didn’t read books, didn’t listen to music, rarely watched a movie, never went to the theater, and couldn’t even stand the works bequeathed to the island by its
local artist. Such things, I felt, required me to make myself small and to tilt my head as far back as possible.

“Art is always where you aren’t,” Antje had said to me one day. She meant this observation as a reproach, but I considered it a compliment. Maybe it was an either-or proposition: you could love nature, or you could love art. Nature needs no admirers. It works, in every respect, by itself. I took another glass of Aperol from the flapper’s tray.

“I wouldn’t have recognized you,” Jankowski said to Theo. “The photograph on your book must be a little old now.”

“As old as the book,” said Jola with a bewitching smile.

“When will we see something new from you?” Jankowski asked.

“I’m working on a big project,” said Theo. “It’s a social novel that—”

“Great,” said Jankowski.

“He writes short stories,” I remarked.

“Touché!” Jola cried out and pressed my hand. Jankowski laughed.

“Short stories,” he said, winking at me. “What do you know.”

I saw Theo’s jaw muscles working, felt unclear about what exactly I’d just done, and emptied my glass. Bittmann shooed the children off the yacht and invited us to move to the dining salon on the lower deck.

With an elegant naturalness that surprised even me, I stepped back and let Jola go first down the stairs. Antje was one of those women who got irritated when someone held a door open for them. Jola inclined her head like a queen, gathered up her dress, and descended the steep steps. The action of her thigh muscles
showed through the clinging material she wore. An athlete’s legs. I looked from above at her artfully braided hairdo. The impulse simply to turn around and run home grew almost overwhelming. The other guests crowded down the narrow steps behind me.
Everything is will
, I thought. Without knowing what I meant by that. One after the other, we plunged into the
Dorset
’s belly.

Down there, the past was waiting for us. The restorers had returned the interior of the
Dorset
to its original 1926 splendor. Cherrywood paneling on the walls. Cream-colored leather upholstery on chairs and armchairs. Every door handle, every little wall lamp, every drawer pull was polished brass. The large skylight in the ceiling overhead reflected the candles on the dining table. Over the sideboard, an oil painting of the “Big Five”: the five biggest racing cutters of the 1920s sailing in a regatta, the
Dorset
in the midst of them.
Shamrock, Westward, Britannia—
I couldn’t think of the fifth schooner’s name. Jola would certainly have known it at once.

The flapper had duplicated herself. The two of them were now passing out glasses of Moët & Chandon, an activity that required them to snake among the guests. The presence of nine people standing in the salon showed how small it actually was. We formed a miniature group of banqueters in a miniature banquet room. The noise level rose. Glasses clinked. The champagne was excellent. The girls distributed refills. When she laughed, Jola clutched my forearm, which I was holding bent at an angle, like a waiter. The warmth in the room seemed to emanate from her body. At last, Bittmann suggested we take our places at the table. The seating arrangement was up to us. We sat down. Jola was on my right, the black Frenchman still on my left. Theo sat at the
other end of the table, far from Jola, who now belonged to me. That was exactly what I thought:
She belongs to me
. I let myself lean back, laid my arm across the top of Jola’s chair, and laughed at a joke I hadn’t understood at all.