Lucca (12 page)

She turned round when she had taken in the scene's inventory
of details. He asked who it was. He had been badgering her for a month at all hours of the day, at the Drama School, in cafés, on the telephone. He had burst in to pester her in the middle of the night in the crazed hope that she could be persuaded to love him. As if sheer dogged persistence could serve his cause. She conjured up Otto's secretive face, which she had been studying that very morning in bed while he was still asleep, to note each particular of it. The uneven arch of his brow beneath the long fair hair, strong eyebrows, broad nose and full lips.

Daniel had been jealous from the start, even when he had her to himself. On the other hand he could be happy in his ignorance, when she came straight from another man to visit him in his ascetic apartment. She felt like a dazzling guest from a differently callous and profligate world, and she marvelled at how abruptly reality could change in the space of a few hours. He gave her tea in the English faience cups he had inherited from his grandmother as he described the piece he was composing. She let him talk and studied the pictures on the tea cups of romantic lovers reclining in little rowing boats, rocked by tiny waves on a lake in the moonlight, surrounded by mountain peaks, tall trees and reeds swaying gently in the wind.

When they lay together on his mattress he could go into ecstasies over her high-heeled shoes and lace underclothes and the black stockings mingled with his biographies of composers and symphony scores like sexy meteorites come flying from space to land in the midst of his solitude. She had enjoyed closing her eyes and listening when he spoke of his music or read aloud to her from the
Bhagavad Gita
or Omar Khayyam. She had taken pleasure in playing with the idea of the oddness in the combination of him and her, but it had been only a game, an idea.

It had never occurred to her that it would be other than what it was. That he should be the man to exclude all other men. She had certainly not anticipated much. She had deferred all anticipations to some indefinite time, completely open to what might happen. The future had been white and untouched, and she had felt about it as you do when you open the door of a house in the country one morning when snow has fallen.
You hesitate on the threshold, hardly having the heart to go outside and leave tracks in the unbroken whiteness where only the blackbirds' claws have left simple dots and dashes that end as abruptly as they begin.

She had liked Daniel best when he sat at his piano and seemed to forget she was there. Something hard and decisive came over his mouth and eyes when he bent over the instrument, head slightly on one side. As if the music hid itself somewhere inside the black, varnished box, and he had to search for it with the keys, blindly, infinitely careful not to chase it away. There was a restrained strength in the touch of his hands on the chords, his fingers moving so swiftly and precisely. On the keys his hands displayed a disciplined confidence at odds with his clumsy, vague way of caressing her in bed.

As soon as he looked up his expression took on a short-sighted, otherworldly look. When she embraced him she could feel a sudden urge to protect him from colliding with hard reality. But she did not listen when he moved close to her and whispered tenderly in her ear. His adoring words and humble fondling were like a sticky web spun around her, and she wanted to provoke him into forcing a more dangerous, unfathomable music out of her than her conventional sighs rewarding his efforts. She did not believe him when, breathless and blissful, he told her how wonderful she was. He hadn't the least idea what he was talking about, she didn't deserve the words he took into his mouth.

But she did not properly understand that until she met Otto. Strangely enough, for Otto made her feel stupid and bungling, not because of anything he said but simply by letting his expressionless blue eyes rest on her unguarded face. In her thoughts she kept on returning to the morning she rang his doorbell with his jacket over her shoulder and a churning feeling in her stomach. He had just smiled and pulled her inside in a long, astonishing kiss. He could do what he liked, she had come of her own will.

She had been around a good deal, and men had passed through her life, young or slightly older, more or less briefly. She had been in love with some of them, until they submitted completely and
reached out for her like shipwrecked sailors about to drown. Others had been more cautious, whether they were married and remorseful or just saw her as a gorgeous lay, available when the urge came over them. She had day-dreamed about them for months on end until her dreams were threadbare from being dreamed over and over again.

Otto was different, he didn't beg for love, and he didn't run away either, as she gradually stopped bothering to hide her feelings behind a mask of uncommitted ease. She was tired of throwing off emotional, snivelling guys who dreamed of nothing but tying her down. But she was equally exhausted from being a fuckable doll dreaming her sweet dreams of exciting, unattainable men who lay pumping between her legs like creatures possessed. When Otto embraced her she had no wish to flee or dream.

They had stayed in his bed that first day. She questioned him about the boy in America who had been sent a red car by post from his far away, unknown father. He didn't mind her asking, but when he replied, in a curt and matter-of-fact way, he made it sound like a kind of technical hiccup. A child clearly belonged to life's contingencies. All the same she couldn't help musing over the unknown areas in him no one had infiltrated before. Maybe he himself was unaware of them. While she lay in the twilight looking into his shadowy face, she fantasised about being the one who, like a traveller on a voyage of discovery, found and charted the blank spots in his interior and one day had them named after her.

One rainy day a few weeks later when she went to see Daniel she knew it was the last time. He played her a new piece he had just finished. She sipped the hot tea and gazed at the romantic pair on the cup in their rowing boat in moonlight. The black and white keys were reflected in his spectacles. His face was closed in concentration in a way that made her recall he was actually several years older than she was. It was only when he played that she thought of it. She hoped he would go on, that the music wouldn't come to an end, maybe because she knew what was coming, but also because
that was how she liked to see him, buried in himself and his music.

She turned to the window again to avoid his suffering gaze and looked through the drops down at the yard of the car workshop. One of the branches swayed and spread a little silver cloud of drops around it when a bird flew up and vanished in an irregular lurching curve. A skinny tabby cat slunk along the fence with lithe steps and bent head. It stopped, lifted its head and sniffed, ears laid back. Cautiously it stretched out a paw, tested the cracked asphalt and drew the paw back again before sitting down with its tail curled round its forepaws, nonchalant and completely motionless as if it had sat there always.

She felt Daniel's hands on her hips and his breath against her neck. He loved her. Remorse struck her in the stomach with a hard, cold blow, but only one, immediately followed by a totally different feeling. It rushed through her with its warmth, as if guilt had released it. She visualised Otto. He could have her if he liked, whether he wanted her or not. That was how it had to be, and no one could help it. But if it hadn't been for Daniel, she might not have felt it so simply, so clearly.

Couldn't they be together one last time? She turned towards him. He looked at her with a strange expression, as if nothing mattered to him. He couldn't mean that. He blushed. Would she do that for him? He tried to kiss her, she turned her head away, he went on pestering. Then she gave in, as amazed as he was, and while it happened for the last time she looked into his ignominious, despairing face, but it was not so much contempt she felt, and in fact not pity either. Most of all it resembled gratitude.

She could still feel the heat from asphalt and walls even though the sun had disappeared behind the houses when they rode down their street. The sky over the roofs was yellow. Otto went on round the corner to get a pizza. She couldn't make out how the staircase could smell of wet dog when it had not rained for a fortnight. A pile of trash mail was on the floor inside the door and among it a couple of letters, one for Otto from the inspector
of taxes, the other for her. The corner of the envelope bore the Royal Theatre logo. She registered that without thinking, maybe because she was tired after the cycle trip and the hours in the sun. Then she tore open the envelope, went over to the window and unfolded the letter.

It held just a few lines, signed by a secretary. In the coming season the theatre was putting on August Strindberg's
The Father
, directed by Harry Wiener. One of the women actors had fallen pregnant and would therefore not be able to play the part of Bertha, the daughter of the cavalry captain, as planned. Would Lucca consider taking her place? To further their planning, she was asked to respond within a week. She could feel she had caught the sun, her cheeks felt stretched and burning. A light was switched on behind a window on the other side of the building site and she saw a small figure walking up and down in the yellow square. She stuffed the letter back in its envelope and put it in the pocket of her jacket. She could hear Otto on the stairs.

They ate in front of the television and drank beer. Neither of them said anything special. Otto sat with his feet on the sofa table among the beer bottles and the empty pizza box, lazily watching a hit man in a dirty vest empty the magazine of his submachine gun with a resentful twitch of the jaw. She picked up a magazine and leafed through the pages of pretty girls showing off the summer fashions, strolling along with head on one side in the evening sunshine, now among slim palms in a Moroccan oasis, now beneath the wet laundry and drawn blinds above the balconies of an alleyway in Lisbon.

Later that evening they met up with some friends at a bar. Lucca fingered the folded letter in her pocket. She could have told him about it while they were at home, but Otto had been lost in his film. She felt irritated at having hidden it instead of leaving it out so he could find it for himself. As if she felt guilty. The place was packed and the crowd swayed back and forth every time someone pushed over to the bar counter. Standing beside Otto in the din of music and voices it dawned on her that she had been given the chance she had dreamed of ever since she
hit on the idea of becoming an actor. Obviously Harry Wiener had meant what he said. She looked round at the clusters of faces. One day they would all know who she was. She felt a bit ashamed at the thought but couldn't help thinking it.

She caught sight of a tall man standing at the end of the bar bending over a beautiful girl. She was sure she had seen him before but could not remember where. He wore an elegant black jacket and his curly hair was cut short. The girl's face was thickly powdered and her breasts looked as if at any moment they might burst out of the bulging C cups. She smiled with her red lips and nodded assent to what the man was saying. Lucca recognised his self-effacing smile and awkward gesticulations. He seemed to have overcome the worst of his shyness, but where were his spectacles? Daniel had obviously taken to contact lenses.

She pushed her way over to them. When he caught sight of her she could see how he swallowed before smiling, but otherwise there was not much left of his old uncertainty. He introduced Lucca and the inflated beauty to each other. Her name was Barbara, and she widened her nostrils as she smilingly took Lucca's measure with her large dramatic eyes. They had just come back from a festival of new music in Munich, where he had conducted one of his works. He had even been interviewed by the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
. He managed to make quite a story of it. She said it was nice to see him and kissed his cheek before going on to the toilets.

She held her hands under the cold tap for a long time. The water splashed up on the mirror and she met her own eyes behind the trickling drops as she pressed her hands to her sore red cheeks. She shouldn't have stayed so long in the sun. Did Daniel also read Omar Khayyam's love poems to Barbara with the big breasts? Did she drink Chinese tea from a cup with romantic dreamers in the moonlight, while he entertained her with his twelve-tone serenades? And if he did? When she forced her way back through the crowd and the fog of cigarette smoke again, Daniel and Barbara had left. Otto followed her with his eyes from the end of the bar. Lucca smiled at him, but he didn't smile back, merely looked at her as if he had caught sight of
something she was not aware of. She said she was tired. He could stay on if he liked.

It was warm, the window was open and she lay naked under a sheet, listening to the sounds of the city, the voices from other apartments, and the hollow rattling from the container in the yard when the chef of the Egyptian restaurant took the rubbish out. An Arabian song came from the restaurant kitchen, a woman's wailing voice accompanied by abrupt drums and strings. She pondered on Otto's calculating expression when she returned from the toilet. She lay absolutely still, listening. At last she heard the street door slam downstairs and recognised his quick step as he climbed. She closed her eyes. The sound of steps came closer and stopped suddenly. Then she heard the rattle of his keys, the lock clicked and the door opened. The floorboards in the hall creaked and a moment later she heard him peeing into the lavatory pan and the explosion of water when he flushed it away.

He came into the bedroom. She felt the soft air on her breasts, stomach and thighs when he lifted the edge of the sheet. She imagined his hands, their dry warmth and firm grip. She didn't move, holding her breath as she waited, tense and excited. Her nipples gathered into two small hard spikes and she felt her pores open wide like so many baby birds' gaping beaks, stretched in the air, hungrily piping.

Nothing happened. Afterwards she couldn't tell how long she had been lying there waiting before she felt the mattress give under him as he sat up on the edge of the bed. She heard the metallic click of his lighter and breathed in the smell of cigarette smoke. She opened her eyes. He was still in his jacket. He sat with his back to her looking out into the courtyard. She asked for a drag. He turned and passed her the cigarette. She could not see his face, he was just a dark outline against the open window. He took back the cigarette and knocked off the ash into the ashtray on the floor between his feet. There was something they needed to talk about.