November Sky (15 page)

“We can forget the first platform, it’s about two hundred feet up. We’ll go to the second one. We can decide later if we want to go up to the top.”

I did not want to go up anywhere. Not to the first platform, not to the second. I felt sick. But the yellow elevator had arrived, and we were in the next group waiting. Nick simply pulled me along with the crowd. I stood defiantly right in the middle of the car and let everybody else rush to the windows.

“I can’t look out or I’ll toss my breakfast.”

Nick stayed close and said with an encouraging smile, “Just look at me, that’s the best view anyway.”

I was able to survive the shaky trip more or less by looking desperately at Nick’s chest. He read me a stream of technical details from his beat-up guidebook, but they went right by me and only a few fragments stuck. My mind was busy coping with the panic that was giving me sweaty palms and a racing pulse. I clutched Nick’s waist as the crowd pushed me against him. How could they all stand around so matter-of-factly, like in a café, and keep staring down through the windows?

A young woman next to me said to her son, “We could have taken the stairs. Only a ridiculous seven hundred steps.”

Or a ridiculous seven hundred opportunities to stumble and fall because of the distraction of looking down. The elevator stopped with a jerk. Though the solid platform floor was under my feet, the wind felt quite cool. I shunned the panorama and concentrated on the people who got out with us. Then I focused my attention on the kiosk near the elevator. I’d rather have kept looking at the items there and stayed away from the railing altogether, but Nick spoke to me with an angel’s tongue and talked me into chancing a look at Paris lying below.

In the end, it wasn’t half as bad as I’d thought it would be. There was a chest-high fence crowded with telescopes and a second safety fence some distance beyond that. I didn’t make it all the way to the front of the crowd but still enjoyed the breathtaking view of the city spread out like a carpet before us. We even managed to walk once around the platform. I kept to the inside wall, well away from the railing. As a reward, Nick bought me a wildly expensive cappuccino. The long line for tickets for the top-floor elevator killed any talk about a new challenge for my fear at the thousand-foot level. We decided not to wait, to instead go directly back down. As we waited for the elevator to return, I watched Nick. He went back to the railing, and suddenly I turned cold. I was about to shout for him to come back when he turned around with a smile and came running. He saw right through me.

“Darling, cut it out with that frightened, furrowed forehead. Do you really think I’d end this magnificent day by jumping off the Eiffel Tower?”

His smile grew broader. “And leave you here all by your lonesome at this dangerous height? With your French you might not even find the exit!”

Since he was so relaxed as he spoke, I nodded warily. “I’d rather not think about it, but the fear that you’ll take your life is always present.”

Now it was his turn to frown. I hoped I hadn’t made him angry. But he stayed calm. “Please get it into your head that those two exceptional situations were completely different. In the first one I was terrified that you never wanted to see me again, and the second one—how many times must I say it?—I was drunk.”

He took me in his arms. “Laura, I’ve married you. I’ll never leave you.”

He seemed to be absolutely convinced by what he said. And I felt reassured again, although I still had an uneasy, gnawing feeling. But he’d promised to seek professional help back in Munich, and so I changed the subject so I wouldn’t jeopardize the rest of our stay. Now that I’d seen the spectacular views of Montmartre and Sacré-Coeur from above, I absolutely had to see them in person.

That night, before going to bed, Nick gave me a present—a hideously kitschy key-chain with a glittering pink Eiffel Tower in rhinestones.

“So you will always remember the day with me in Paris when you went up very high. There was another one in plush, but it was too ugly even for me.”

“Really? Like this one here?”

Nick roared with laughter when I reached into my shoulder bag and solemnly handed him a key ring with a pink-and-red plush Eiffel Tower on it. We’d both had the same idea independently.

Between sightseeing tours and shopping expeditions, we recharged ourselves at the numerous street cafés, basked in the unseasonal, mild, sunny weather, and admired the famous Parisian elegance of the chic French women hurrying past. And when in the evening we came back to our room after a wonderful meal in an excellent gourmet restaurant, his tender touch, his passion, and his embraces drove away all my fatigue and worries. It was a picture-book honeymoon, and I held back my sad feelings when we got off the train in Munich.

But during the first night at home, I had to wake him around three in the morning because he was tossing restlessly and muttering incomprehensible words. When he was mostly awake, he admitted that he’d had his nightmare again. Then he threw his arms around me and quickly dozed off again. But I spent the rest of the night wide-awake, brooding. By the next morning, he’d forgotten that I’d woken him up, and claimed he could not remember his dream.

The day after we got home, we both had to leave for work and we said good-bye with a tender kiss.

Chris was glad to see me back. “There’s work to do. We’ve got two new clients. And the seminar organizer wants exact dates for next year’s lectures.”

She wanted to hear all about Paris, and her eyes gleamed when I told her about it. “Sounds like the perfect wedding trip. And it wasn’t even your proper honeymoon.”

Then she gave a dreamy laugh. “Richard suggested we get married in June and then fly to the Seychelles. Laura, I’m so happy I’ve finally found the right man. Like you and Nick. It was perfect timing. Neither of us had to envy the other her dreamboat.”

Nick was my dreamboat, but one with unexpected depths. I wondered if Chris and Richard had their deep, dark secrets, too. Was there anything that they carefully concealed from the outside world because it was too bizarre? Maybe Richard, who’d studied medicine and worked in a research facility, had odd sexual preferences or hobbies that Chris didn’t want the world to know about.

To me, any hobby that didn’t put your life in peril was more acceptable than my husband’s unpredictable attempts to put an end to his earthly existence. I loved the words
my husband
and used them frequently. I wanted to be able to say them happily and often at a ripe old age. And so I didn’t leave Nick in peace. I made him renew his promise to see a specialist about his dark moods and his disconcerting dream. He made no bones about the fact that he thought it was unnecessary—he felt terrific—and was considering it only for my sake.

“My colleague Marisa thinks it’s chic to go to a psychologist and dump her emotional garbage on him. She calls him her ‘coach.’ If you really think I should, I’ll ask her for a referral,” he said.

A week later, we stood in front of a modern office building in the Inner City. Nick looked unhappy.

“Laura, must we really do this? I feel great. I have no idea what to do with this character.”

“This character” was Dr. Harald Lighter, and his futuristic aluminum nameplate identified him as a psychological consultant and life coach. Nick had gotten his name from Marisa who swore by the man.

“Naturally, I didn’t tell her I needed a shrink but said it was for a friend who had some problems. Marisa recommended the guy very enthusiastically—she said he was so empathetic and competent.”

Nick insisted that I attend the first consultation with him. “Or else I won’t go,” he said. “Anyway, you’re the one who wanted me to get somebody to poke around in my psyche.”

I had high hopes that the proverb
nomen est omen
would prove true in this case and that Dr. Lighter would help lighten Nick’s burden. But my optimism was dashed as soon as we walked into his office. Maybe some women would find him attractive, but I found him to be a greaseball. He was of medium height and thin, and his dark hair was combed back and loaded with gel. As he fixed his black eyes on us and offered a limp handshake, I noticed that his left hand repeatedly, almost compulsively, slicked down his greasy hair. I caught myself wiping my hand on my jeans after his handshake.

He barricaded himself behind his desk and merrily asked us to sit down in the chairs in front of it. Fascinated yet revolted, I couldn’t stop looking at a black wooden sculpture on his desk. It looked innocuous at first sight, with two semicircular bumps and a red, lacquered link shaped like an old-fashioned telephone receiver between them. Upon closer examination, however, I realized this “artwork” represented the best part of a man’s manhood in its natural physical surroundings.

As soon as the doctor stopped touching his hair, he began absentmindedly stroking the red part of the sculpture. It didn’t give me a lot of confidence in the stability of his personality. My instinct was to get Nick out of there on the double. But I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to persuade him to see another therapist anytime soon.

When the doctor asked why Nick had come, I couldn’t believe my ears. Nick just shrugged and sighed and said it was to please his wife. Oh, he and the compulsive doctor got along famously. They joked, talked shop about cars, good Munich bars, and—I thought I’d wound up in the wrong film—parachute jumping. Finally, I could no longer contain myself and begged Nick to get to the point.

He gave me a surly look before turning to the eager therapist. “My wife is overly concerned. She has acrophobia herself and for that reason can’t empathize with my passion for jumping. Ah, yes, and then I’ve done something rather stupid twice: I was drunk the first time, and now she fears for my life and thinks I need therapy.”

He laughed heartily, and Dr. Lighter laughed along with him. I wondered what field his doctorate was in and how he got it—maybe in African fertility rites? I cursed myself silently. I should have never trusted Nick to find a competent therapist. Clearly, my husband had pulled a fast one on me. I saw through him like a pane of glass. He never had intended to tell anybody other than me about his problems. Least of all a real, experienced psychologist or psychotherapist. He’d only gone along with seeing this windbag to get me off his back.

When our time was up, the self-styled “psychological consultant” turned to me and said that he’d rarely seen such a physically fit and mentally healthy man in his office as my husband. Then he recommended to me that, instead of using my husband as an excuse, I should think about getting some coaching with regard to my “generalized anxiety disorder.” He assured me in all seriousness that he could “get a handle on it” in about thirty sessions.

At that moment all I could think was how dearly I’d love to get a handle on the quack’s throat. But I struggled to keep my cool, and said between clenched teeth that I’d think about it. Then Nick and I left the charlatan’s office. We were barely in the stairwell when Nick burst out laughing. He could hardly control himself.

“There, sweetheart, now you’ve heard it from an expert. I’m healthy as a horse.
You
need therapy. What’s Marisa been doing with this guy for two years? Oh, well, she’s such a narcissist I doubt even this con man could do any further harm. I hope you’re satisfied now.”

His laughter died when my icy stare hit him. He reached for my hand, but I pulled it back in a rage.

He put on his hangdog look. “Darling, don’t get mad. I kept my promise and really tried.”

“You tried nothing. Except trying to take me for a ride.”

I was furious. That was the evening Nick and I had our first big fight as a married couple. The minute we walked through the front door, I threw my key onto the vestibule table and took off for the bathroom without a word. When I came back to the living room, a relaxed Nick was stretched out on the couch.

He made a pitch for us to make up. “That character was really a funny duck, don’t you think?”

I stared at him, enraged. “Stop acting as if we’ve been to a hilarious play. Goddammit, Nick, I’m dying of fear for you and am trying everything so we can lead a normal life. A life where I don’t have to worry constantly about when this thing will recur and whether I’ll get there in time to keep from becoming a widow. And you’ve nothing better to do than to lead me around by the nose and waste our valuable time with an incompetent, wannabe psychologist just to calm me down?”