Good Things I Wish You (15 page)

“You will want to visit Zwickau, I imagine,” Hart continued. “Perhaps Düsseldorf and Bonn. Friederike is interested in this as well, so I’m thinking it is best to rent a car. At the end of the week, she goes to music camp in Zurich. If her mother agrees, we’ll drop her off there, and then you and I can go on to Lucerne, take a ferry to Gersau. There’s a glider club nearby as well. We could fly a little way into the Alps.”

The warmth of his shoulder had found my own. I leaned back against it, expecting he’d pull away. But he put his arm around me like a man claiming a decision, held me awkwardly, determinedly, as the sun dropped below the edge of the field. Together we stared at the poisoned sky, listening to the sounds of night insects and, in the distance, I-95. I felt as if I were being embraced by—not a stranger, exactly—but someone I knew very slightly: a bank teller, a crossing guard, a checkout clerk at the grocery store.

“What is it you’re not telling me?” I asked.

Suddenly the air was clammy, cool, the way skin feels after fever. I hadn’t even realized I was shivering until Hart
pulled a rumpled shirt from his flight bag, draped it loosely, kindly, around me. With that gesture, he became himself again. His arm around me lightened.

“Certain things,” he said. “As, I suppose, there are things you do not tell me.”

31.

“H
E’S MARRIED
,” E
LLEN SAID.
“Or gay.”

We were sitting beside her backyard pool, where her twelve-year-old niece, Mabel, had been entertaining Heidi for the past two hours: giving her underwater rides, teaching her to cannonball, spinning her in circles on an inner tube.

“Nope,” I said, reaching for my lemonade. “And nope.”

“How often do you see this guy?”

“Depends on…” I nodded at Heidi.

“How often do you talk on the phone?”

“Every day. Your point?”

“But you’re not dating. It’s not serious.”

“He’s helping me with the book.”

“
Your
book. Why is he being
so
helpful? And when does he have time to do all this reading? Maybe he’s not really a doctor. For all you know, he doesn’t even work.”

“He had a stack of mail in his car one time, all of it addressed to Dr. Hempel. And once, when I called him about something, he said he was at the lab.”

“What lab? Where?”

“He said he couldn’t talk because he was balancing a stack of slides.”

“Slides of what?”

“Monkey brains.”

“Really?”

“How should I know? Look, Ellen, it just doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters.
You
matter. What are his feelings for you?”

“Murky,” I said. “Is that a crime?” But my eyes filled with tears, and I hated myself for this, hated myself for being drawn into a conversation I didn’t want to have. “I know you think he’s using me, but I’m writing about all this, so you could say I’m using him, too. Or maybe there’s a kinder way to look at it. Maybe we’re helping each other somehow.”

“Sweetie,” Ellen said. She put one cool, ringed hand to my cheek. We waited, and after a moment I said, “I’ve seen where he lives, does that reassure you? Beachfront condo. Direct ocean view.”

“From the master bedroom, too?”

I gave her a look that made both of us laugh, so it was okay again, even though it wasn’t. “I wouldn’t know. We just stopped by to grab a book. But from the looks of the living room, Viso-Tech does just fine.”

“So then why won’t he talk about it? And what’s this big secret with his daughter?” The girls had clambered up out of the pool, breathless and wrinkled and dripping. “Can we have something to eat?” Mabel asked, leading Heidi across the patio toward the cabana. Ellen nodded, lowering
her voice. “C’mon, he doesn’t see her for
six
years? Maybe he A-B-U-S-E-D her or something.”

“Please.”

“You’re always with this guy. I hardly ever see you anymore.” She poured herself more lemonade, her pretty face flushed, brooding. It was true that I hadn’t been home much lately, but it was also true that when I did call, she didn’t call back either. She was spending lots of time doing volunteer work at a women’s shelter. She’d started jogging, evenings, with her sister. As far as I knew, she hadn’t gone out with anybody since Dancing Man. “Before you go, I want you to write down his full name and the name of his company. I’m going to plug him into our system at the bank, see what I can find.”

“Ellen.”

“Meanwhile, when you
do
sleep with this guy, use an industrial-strength condom.”

I glanced at the cabana. The girls were scooping ice cream from the well-stocked fridge into colorful plastic bowls. “I’m not going to sleep with him,” I mumbled.

“You said he was cute.”

“I said he was handsome.”

“Why not, then? If the situation arises.” She laughed bitterly. “And trust me, it will. It always does.”

What I said: Absolutely nothing. Because what was there to say?

The master bedroom also overlooked the ocean. The bed, king-size, was checkerboarded with books: fat medical texts, novels, trade journals, biographies. Before he slept, he
read for hours, devouring information, remembering every word. I could have told him, then, what I’d been writing. But I didn’t. The one thing he didn’t want to know was my heart.

“I envy you your passion,” he’d said, the first time, the sliding doors open to the sounds of the sea. “Once, I loved my research, I think, the way you are loving your writing. Now I am a dead man, I must warn you.”

“You don’t seem dead to me.”

“You mustn’t get attached to me, Jeanette. I am a dead man. I am like a stone.”

32.

J
UST BEFORE HE LEFT
for Germany, Hart came to my house for dinner. It was the first time he’d entered my other life, my real life, the life in which I worked and wrote, visited my parents, raised my daughter. He set the table and tried to chat with Heidi, who regarded him suspiciously, and with uncharacteristic reserve. He ate, without comment, the overcooked chicken and green beans. He looked strangely ordinary. Small. Afterward, he cleared the table and washed the pans while I gave Heidi her bath. “When is that man going home?” she whispered as I tucked her into bed. When I tried to step away, she gripped my arm with a strength that startled me. “Don’t go,” she said, tears spilling sideways into her ears.

Half an hour later, I came out of her room to find Hart at the piano, paging through her music. “She’s already playing Bach?” he said.

“Just starting. Yes.”

“She is cute.”

“Thanks.”

“She looks nothing like you.”

“Thanks again.”

He asked where I wrote, and when I took him down the hall to my study, he looked up at my treasured Gaela Erwin self-portrait and let out a little mock shriek. “A man must have a drink after such a shock,” he said, settling himself on the love seat, and before I could tell him that I usually—okay, never—let people into my work space, we were sitting together, drinking wine, select chunks of the manuscript spread between us as I hunted for places where I needed a line in German or French:

Kann ich denn nicht mit dir kommen?

Il faut que je te laisse.

And then we were talking about the Schumann children: Emil, who died in infancy; Julie and Felix, who succumbed to tuberculosis; Ludwig, who was committed to a mental institution where he died, like his father, of undiagnosed causes. Ferdinand became addicted to morphine, leaving Clara to support his wife and seven children. Clara’s two oldest daughters, Marie and Elise, along with their youngest sister, Eugenie, fared better, at least in physical ways, but it was to Marie and Marie alone that Clara would turn, throughout her lifetime, as both daughter and friend. The other children were provided for in every practical sense, but they were raised by servants, boarding school teachers, and eventually—the youngest, at least—by Marie. Clara saw them on holidays plus a few weeks each summer, if then.

“Not an uncommon upbringing for children of that class, in that place and time,” Hart said. “Once again, you
are finding
significance
”—he squeezed my foot—“where there is none. I am thinking this longing for significance is a serious flaw of character.”

“Which would, in itself, become significant over time. Think of all the decisions such a longing would influence. Think of all the ways it might alter, significantly, the direction of my life.”

“Ah, Jeanette.”

“Ah, yourself. You don’t think it’s significant that Clara concealed Julie’s death so that she could go ahead with a scheduled concert? That she only visited Ludwig once during the many years he lived in the mental institution? That Marie, not Clara, attended Felix as he lay dying?”

“Distinctive, perhaps. But significant?” His hand was on my ankle now. The back of my knee. “In a thousand years, what can such a word mean?”

“I don’t plan to live a thousand years. Do you know how Clara informed her two oldest children of Robert’s death? In a letter. Do you know how often she saw Ferdinand during the year before his death? Not once. Marie went to visit him in the hospital. Marie, for that matter, arranged his funeral. Meanwhile, Clara’s writing in her diary,
Work is always the best diversion from pain.
”
^*

“Sex is also effective,” Hart said, shifting his weight. Manuscript pages fell to the floor; somehow he’d pinned my arms. “Is your daughter a good sleeper?”

“No. And then I read something…can’t think where…”

“Might we lock that?” He was eyeing the open door.

“…about Clara traveling to perform in some major German city and encountering on the street,
completely
by accident, one of her daughters who went to boarding school there. A daughter she hadn’t seen in months. The two of them spent
a most delightful afternoon
before it was time for Clara to return to her hotel.”

Hart sighed, rested his head on my chest. “You are thinking it is cold, even heartless, that Clara wouldn’t have made plans to see this girl.”

“Yes and no.”

“I am tired of the yes and no.”

“I just mean that I understand how she felt. You think I don’t miss the uninterrupted intellectual life I had before Heidi was born? But I wouldn’t put her in a boarding school, even a good one, for the sake of that work.”

“No, you’d just put her to bed at your parents’ house. You’d hire a babysitter. And don’t tell me you are not happy to have her father take her for two weeks so that you are free to travel—”

He was right, and it cut me to the quick.

“At least I wouldn’t miss her birthdays! I wouldn’t skip her graduations! I certainly wouldn’t leave her to die alone in a hospital or mental institution because it interfered with my writing. There’s a balance to all this, and I’m not saying I’ve got it right—I
know
I don’t have it right—and I also know, by the way, men do this sort of thing all the time—”

“Men like me, is what you are thinking.”

“Which is why you’ve been successful at the things you’ve pursued. Maybe I’m just jealous she was able to do it, too. I suppose I believe, in the back of my mind, that if I were a true artist, a real artist, I could.”

His weight deepened against me, the way a child’s weight deepens with sleep. “You are a strong person, Jeanette. You would have visited your husband in the madhouse, I have no doubt of this. You would have sat at the bedside of each and every one of your dying children. But not all people are strong in this way, particularly when there’s a child concerned.”

“Does it take so much strength to let your lonely little daughter know you’ll be in town for a day?” I was speaking against the side of his neck; he could not see my face. But he knew—he must have known—what I was thinking.

Or visit your daughter more than once in six years?

His breathing matched my own.

“The first weeks, the first months, after you are leaving a child?” he said. “It is a difficult thing. Not knowing how much she is changing. Having no connection to her daily life. Nothing to talk about.”

He was too heavy now, but I didn’t want to shift his weight, didn’t want to risk distracting him, interrupting whatever it was that, at last, he was going to say.

“Eventually you start feeling better. You hope it goes the same way for the child. You don’t want to stir it all up again, for either of you, so you stay away. You send the checks. You make sure she wants for nothing. Do you understand what I’m saying? I fought for my daughter in
court, and you know what they gave me in the end? One weekend each month. One
supervised
weekend. And me living overseas.”

I wriggled a bit, I couldn’t help it, and he said, “I am crushing you, I think.”

“No,” I said, but he pushed himself away from me, the excuse he was looking for, and then we were sitting in our separate corners, as far from each other as, just moments earlier, we’d been close. He touched his wineglass, tapped the base of the lamp. He picked up the plastic hair band that had fallen out of my hair and fiddled with it, twisted it, until it broke.

“Sorry,” he said. Then he broke it again. I got up and locked the door. When I turned, he was behind me, he was kissing me too hard, as if he were testing me to see what I could bear. At that moment I was terrified. All I wanted was to return to the relationship we’d had before. Because one can write anything about a dead man.

One has no obligation to a stone.