Wonderland (14 page)

I am wild for you,
he said, tossing the shirts to the floor.
I can’t explain it.
I crawled on top of him, cradled his face in my hands. Jesus Christ, I said. It’s you. The sense of him: harbor, boat, wind. As if my long legs were trailing in the water under the boat as I braced myself on his hands. I woke up on the second night and wasn’t sure where I was until I heard a shout in Italian from the street below. In the dark, I felt his hand with the wedding ring on it; I loved it that he didn’t bother with the lie of taking it off. And the vulnerability of that, I thought: to be married, who would dare it? It was more foreign to me than Lebanon. His belly against my back, His arm heavy on my waist. He snored. He was an exile, a seeker, but he was also a good Lebanese husband, with a wry, strong-faced Lebanese wife, the two of them marooned in Switzerland. The sheer faith of it, like the impeccable shirts and French cuffs. It made me want to cry for them.

On the third night, late, naked, eating the last of the tiramisù in its silver dish, he said, “Let’s tell one another a secret.”

“All right. Okay.” I tried to think of one. “I’m not sure I have any big secrets. You go first.”

“I killed a man,” he said. “He was going to kill me, I had to kill him. He was a soldier. But you’re never the same after that. That’s why they sent me to that horrible boarding school in Wales for the next generation of imperialists, the place where Nils and I met.” He set the empty silver dish on the nightstand and lay down with me.

I traced his irregular face in the dark. “Are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes. Anna. It was a war. People die. But tell me—you must have a secret.”

“No,” I lied. I told myself that it would be wrong, it would be manipulative, to tell him then, there. It would seem like I wanted something. I shook my head.

He kissed my palm. “Then I am your first secret.”

“My second, actually,” I said, but he didn’t ask me to explain.

“They hate us in Switzerland, of course,” Simon told me the next evening, our last few hours, as we walked through the Piazza del Popolo. “They’re terrible racists. I’ve always wanted to live in New York, you know?” Shy glance at me, abashed again. “Well.” He shrugged. “I have a business, I have children in school. So.”

“But you could visit.”

“Maybe. Yes. I could visit.” Around us, people were launching those funny, whirling, neon-lit toy spaceships into the sky, catching them again. He stopped and kissed me hard, the kiss—though I didn’t know it then—of a man who knows he will never visit. We must have looked an odd couple, the older, swarthy, tense-looking man in the impeccable shirt and cream-colored suit jacket, the younger (though not so young, at thirty-four, not really) woman in American jeans and a T-shirt, all elbows and boot heels; we could only have been illicit lovers. Nothing about us matched; we were the wrong height for each other; I looked more like a roadie than the mistress of a man who worked day and night building sprawling, angular, tastefully modernist office buildings in Switzerland and was subject to inexplicable pains in his stomach, his head, his back, a man who dreamed nightly that he was at war. I didn’t care. And I didn’t think of myself as Simon’s mistress; I thought of myself as his opportunity to be free, to be away from the flying bullets, even if only in bursts like this. I was, after all, rich in freedom, it was my dowry and my legacy, I had it to spare. I ran my hand under the collar of that expensive linen suit jacket, the one that did, in fact, make him look ten years older than he was. I cupped his head behind his ears, my fingers in his soft, graying hair. I kissed him back, kissed him again. He was mine. I heard the opening notes of
Bang Bang
in my head, it began right then. It was my record for Simon, to give him back the world in peacetime, its most tender and private spaces. Little neon spaceships whirled upward everywhere. He left on the late train that night.

I
T’S BOILING HOT
in Berlin. Our large, fashionable hotel, which looks a little like a bank, is air-conditioned, with cool marble columns and floors, but everywhere else it is oppressively, apocalyptically hot. The pretty café where we eat lunch is hot inside and out; the boutique next door that sells cute dresses is hot; our hands and feet are hot. At lunch, Zach’s head shines, reddens. Boone is flushed. Alicia, pushing salad around on her plate, is even paler than usual. She whispers in my ear, “Do you have a tampon? God, I feel like hell.” I dig in my bag, fish one out, pass it to her. Even the plastic wrapping on the tiny object feels hot. A misery: cramps in this heat. Alicia pulls her platinum hair off her neck, puffs out her cheeks. The waiter leans against the bar nearby; the back of his neck is red.

“How’s the house?” I ask. The show is tomorrow night.

Boone shakes his head. “About two-thirds sold. I think it’s just too fucking hot. Been like this for weeks. Everyone’s worn out. People in Russia have died from it, for God’s sake.” His iPhone tweets, purrs, dings every minute or so, as if trying different, alluring ways to get his attention, but he doesn’t answer it. “You’re a bad influence,” he says to me. “Next thing you know I’ll be turning it off. Suicide by iPhone power button.”

Tom raises a finger to the waiter, who nods and brings over another beer. Purelling his hands, his wrists, Tom says, “Boone, did the runner bring the laundry back yet?” He yawns in the heat, drinks his beer. “Shit.”

“I tweeted the show,” says Zach. “I commanded the fans to represent.”

I smile as if I believe that this will do any good. The last time I was in Berlin, it was early spring; the deep cold still lingered in the air. It was, what? Six years ago. No, five. Jim and I came for a long weekend, a super-cultish band from Serbia he wanted to hear, an extravagance. He was six months clean and sober, skinned, fresh as a baby. We ate a lot of vegetables together, and I didn’t think about cocaine anymore, either, which was a good thing.
Bang Bang
had taught me that it wasn’t magic after all. Jim was seeing everything again, filled with a gratitude and wonder that bored me a little. We went to a lot of museums and stayed in an expensive hotel. I also felt protective of him, proud of him; he was having trouble with his teeth—we had to call the dentist back home, and this made me feel terribly married. I was proud of that, too, proud of our self-conscious sex in the luscious hotel bed. My old man, down to the bad teeth. Our very bones the obligation of the other. Now, though, I am relieved to be free of him, his frequent, pointed observations about the general bad faith of the entire world.

“Right on,” I say to Zach, the scrupulous tweeter.

I order a cookie and the red-necked waiter brings it, enormous and wilting, on a plate, with a napkin and a fork. This makes me stupidly happy, and I eat the whole thing and immediately feel ill, but still happy.

“Tom, you have to do some tweeting, too. Alicia.”

Tom laughs. “I’m spending the afternoon sleeping and drinking, man.”

Alicia flaps a pale hand at Zach. “My German friends don’t go to shows.”

Zach looks wounded. “What the fuck?”

Boone nudges me.
Sotto voce,
he says, “Want to go hang out with Billy Q? He’s in Mitte with some people. This is bumming me out.”

We leave the others and get a taxi; it is hot in the taxi. Boone, flushed, looks even younger, like a college soccer player fresh off the field. “Where did you grow up?” I ask.

“Me? Los Angeles. Hollywood—the cruddy part.” He smiles, seems to blush in his flush. “My mom worked on
The Price Is Right.
Still does.”

“And your dad?”

“C.P.A. Comb-over.” He winks. “But both so sweet. They’re the sweetest people ever.”

“Do you have siblings?”

“You’re funny today. Yeah—twin sisters. Both married, with kids. Turn right,” he says to the cab driver. “
Danke.
”

“Were you lonely?”

Boone lowers his gaze. “Yes.” He flicks his gaze back up at me. “Were you?”

“No. No, I wasn’t. Not like that. Strange.”

“What?”

“I never thought of it that way before.”

“Here!”

The cab jolts to a stop on a smallish street. Boone thrusts some euros at the driver, then waves, but I can’t see anyone he’s waving to. He leaps out of the cab and I follow; we hurry across the street toward a silver van with its side door open. A face—male, long, lined—leans out of the van. “Yo.”

We get into the van; it is hot inside. Boone clambers into the far back seat. There are two women in the front, next to the driver, and two young men and an older woman with a headset on in the back. In one penumbral corner sits Billy Q, in a bonnet and a long black coat, not unlike the long black coats Hassidic men wear; it might even be one of those coats. White cuffs emerge from the sleeves of the coat. Billy’s pants are yellow, with large, iridescent-yellow squares affixed to them. His alligator shoes are pink. “Love,” says Billy, kissing me on both cheeks. “Do you want to be in our movie?”

The man with the long, lined face, whose hair is thick and white and reaches to his shoulders, slides the heavy door shut. “Let’s go,” he says to the driver, a heavyset man with beefy arms. “Jesus, turn on the a/c.”

“What’s the movie about?”

“It’s complicated,” says Billy.

“I love your movies,” Boone says from the back. “Have you ever seen his movies, Anna?”

“Well, no—”

“They stream on the Internet. Incredible.” Boone taps on his iPhone. “Wait, I’ll show you one.” He hands the phone over the seat. On the small rectangle, a creature flows by that looks something like a gryphon, something like a mermaid, something like a sea serpent; letters, seemingly handwritten in crayon, spell out “Beatrice” over this chimera. There might be music, but I can’t hear it over the ambient noise of the van. Something blue, something gold, a shadow on a lawn in black and white. It is beautiful, and though it flashes by quickly, I sense that it’s intensely personal, chosen, curated even, from some private storehouse of Billy’s memory. What is in Billy’s memory?

“Gorgeous,” I say.

“They’re all I want to do anymore,” says Billy. He pulls on his bonnet strings. “I love this thing. An artist in Warsaw made it for me.” As my eyes adjust to the gloom, I notice that the bonnet has a pattern pricked out in holes on it, like a constellation, though it isn’t any constellation that I know. The bonnet appears to be made out of rubber. “Hey, I’m bringing some friends to your show tomorrow night, is that okay?”

Boone snorts. “No.”

The others in the van laugh. The older woman with the headset smiles at the laughing faces, listening to whatever she’s listening to inside her head. We are driving through a part of Berlin I have never seen, a scrubby, scrappy, nowhere strip of empty parking lots and Soviet-bloc-style apartment buildings that appear uninhabited. The neighborhood looks like Late Urban Anywhere, not dangerous, just deflated, forgotten. Billy’s profile, framed by the rim of the bonnet, passes across the landscape. Perhaps he is blessing it.

The van stops in a parking lot indistinguishable from any of the others we’ve passed. We all pile out, back into the heat. Billy exits last, squinting. The iridescent-yellow squares glow in the sun; his pink shoes are pinker still, and come to pointy pink tips, like otherworldly nipples. He is simultaneously foolish and grand, and a ripple passes through the little crowd of us in the parking lot, a palpable delight.

“Look at you,” I say. He smiles shyly.

Boone walks off a ways, to the next parking lot, talking softly on his phone. The others take up their positions—the man with the long, lined face holds a camera, the headset woman bears a small, portable mic not much bigger than the kind you can get in a toy store for kids to play rock star, the two young men hold still cameras and coils of electrical cord that feed back into the van. The other woman sits in the open van eating a sandwich. I don’t know how she can stand it in there; it’s shady, but it must be very hot indeed. Billy walks to the center of the parking lot, sighs, shifts his shoulders back and forth, does a few deep knee bends. Sweat is already beading his forehead just beneath the edge of the rubber bonnet. The man with the long, lined face nods, flaps his hand.

Billy, black-coated, yellow-legged, pink-footed, rubber-bonneted, walks in a large circle. He walks casually but deliberately, tracing a line of which he seems to be sure with an open, unmarked expression. His expression isn’t blank; on the contrary, it is an expression of willed and somehow urgent receptivity, as if he wants this moment in Berlin to be inscribed on his face but has only the amount of time it will take him to walk around the circle to accomplish this. I wonder if his outlandish outfit is some kind of technology to catch the moment off-guard, a spiritual tuning fork. He holds his hands ever so slightly away from his body. The bright white cuffs fall nearly to his knuckles—one might almost imagine that he is shrinking as he walks, that by the end he will emerge, tiny, naked, from a puddle of strong, clashing color and material. A hot wind blows over us all, brightening our faces. He comes to a halt at the spot where he started.

The man with the long, lined face shakes his head.

“Fuck,” says Billy. One of the young men brings him a bottle of water, and he drinks it down at once.

“It’s just . . . ,” says the lined-face man.

“I know,” replies Billy. “It’s not like we can go back to Bangkok.”

“Not this week,” says the lined-face man.

Billy looks up at the sky, gazes thoughtfully at Boone on the phone in the next lot, and points a pink alligator toe straight down, as if he might go up en pointe, tapping the empty water bottle against his thigh. “All right.” He turns to me, holds out his hand. The young man takes the water bottle away. “Can you try? We’ll go together.”

I take his hand, which is as soft and warm as it was in Sweden, though damp now between the fingers, damp on the palm. The sun is heavy on my head; it’s hard to breathe; I’m also starving. Boone waves from across the way, gives me a thumbs-up. I am a little taller than Billy. Although he is older than me, I feel like a mother taking her adolescent son’s hand for a rare walk. I want to kiss him on the crown of his bonnet, tell him that everything is all right, because he feels nervous, sweaty, impatient for something that I don’t know if I can provide. What does he want from me? What is the meaning of the circle?