Wonderland (22 page)

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve basically seen the hotel and the club. We’re bombing, by the way.”

“No, no.” He shakes his head. “I don’t believe that.”

“You’ll come tonight, you’ll see. They hate us here.”

“It’s Germany. They hate everyone. They hate themselves.”

The pressure of his hand on my back. We smile shyly at each other, as complicit as ever. He smells the same. In the plush little taxi he says, “He was a great man, your father. I know how much you admired him.”

“Well. Admired, loved, hated, was frustrated by, sought out, lost so long ago, if I’m being honest. The recent paintings.” I shake my head. “I don’t understand what happened. Never will, maybe.”

We glide past a shopping arcade lined with sleek stores. “Time,” says Simon, opening his hand, as if to show me its map on his palm. “Perhaps he got tired.”

“Simon. Where’s your wedding ring?”

“Ah. I am divorced now.” He shrugs, coughs.

I am breathless. I just manage to say, “What are you talking about?”

“We got divorced. About two years ago.” He glances at me without entirely turning his head, then back toward the busy, prosperous street outside. “It was very . . . it was very difficult. Our daughters were very upset by it. The youngest will never forgive us, it seems. We have only just finished disengaging from the property.”

The taxi stops in front of the hotel. Simon pays the driver, says something in German, the taxi driver laughs, nodding. I wonder if Simon said, “I really have no emotional or interpersonal skills whatsoever, I’m completely selfish, I’m basically a total asshole, and I should be on my knees thanking God that anyone anywhere has ever loved me.”

And then maybe the taxi driver, laughing, said, “Me, too!”

But he didn’t use enough words for that, so I doubt it. I get out of the taxi feeling lightheaded. My heart is racing. I am sweating through the wrap dress. I lose my balance on my heel again and Simon catches me by the elbow. “Careful,” he says tenderly. The doorman opens the ornate door for us and we go up in the elevator in silence. I feel as if I am going to be sick. The corridor has a fusty scent mixed with strong soap and kitchen smells from downstairs. It reminds me of William’s rooms over the restaurant in Berlin, that earthy mix of food being cooked and rough cleaning agents. My heels sink into the pile carpet as I lead us to my room. We have both assumed, silently, that he will be staying with me; why did I assume that? More to the point, why did he? His shoulder brushes mine, our hands touch. When we went down hotel corridors in the past, our shoulders and hands touched in just this way, a Morse code of desire, tiny yeses, a sequence of touches that accelerated as we neared the door to whatever room in whatever hotel in whatever city. A lethargy, an anxiety, overtake me—I have wanted to see him again for so long, but now I find myself wondering what I’m going to do with him for the next five hours. It feels claustrophobic. Madly, I suddenly want to spend the afternoon alone with my guitar, writing music. The dress feels absurd, like a costume; I want to put on my baggy-assed jeans and a T-shirt. I insert the flat, blank plastic key in the slot. Click-click, green light. The door opens.

His hand on my hip as I open the door. His breath near my ear. I sway back toward him, pulled, but then move forward again. A line from a dance song goes through my head, something raunchy and fast about who’s giving what to whom where all night long; it’s a path I see that I could take this afternoon, that attitude. One more, one more. A few verses of erotic nostalgia. But I can’t catch my breath. What if I can’t catch it by tonight? I unbelt the white coat, kick off the pointy shoes, loosen the dress.

He sets his briefcase down on the floor. “How beautiful you are,” he says. “Always so beautiful.”

The sun is streaming through the open curtains onto the neatly made bed. Housekeeping has been and gone. Everything is tucked, vacuumed, centered. Chocolates on the square white pillows. The impossible quiet of a hotel room. The lines at his eyes have deepened. Untethered, he holds his arms close to his body, stands very straight, as if trying to look taller. We turn to embrace, he kisses me, his hands on my face; he strokes my hair. My body betrays me without a second’s hesitation, folding time; I am his. In the past, this would be when we would begin making love, it was the first thing we always did, beginning at the innermost point and then working our way out to whatever city surrounded us, in spirals.

I turn away, walk slowly in my stockinged feet to the little, uncomfortable armchair, sit down in it, still in my coat. I brace my hands on the chair’s arms, put my feet flat on the floor. He remains standing awkwardly at the end of the room’s tiny hall, near the television. I pull the pins out of my hair, shake it loose, set the pins on the side table. They make gentle, syncopated clicks. Nothing that is going through my mind seems like the right thing to say, because surely he can imagine all of it himself.
How could you, why didn’t you tell me, why did you come here, are you a complete jackass, what if I hadn’t written you, why are you standing there as if waiting for permission to approach? You never loved me. Admit it. You always loved me. Admit it. Leave. Stay. Don’t make me have to decide, on top of everything else.

I say, “Simon.”

He inclines his head, shakes it. “I thought of calling, of course. But I thought that might be unfair.”

“To whom?”

He doesn’t answer.

“What happened?”

He sits down on the corner of the enormous, perfectly made bed, looks at his gleaming shoes. Classic loafers. Did he wear them for me this time? “I discovered that she’d been having an affair for some time. With a man we both knew. I confronted her about it and she admitted it at once. I completely fell apart. I thought maybe we could patch it up, but we couldn’t—I found that I couldn’t forgive her. She is already living with him. I am sure they will marry as soon as they can.” He raises his head; tears fill his eyes. “So.”

A question is forming in my mind, edged with a vertiginous suspicion. Disingenuously, I ask, “And what did she say when you told her about me?”

“I didn’t do that, Anna.” In a tone of excessive politeness.

“What do you mean?” Though I know, I know exactly what he means. Haven’t I always?

“Why should I give her that?” Less politely. “She betrayed me. She betrayed our marriage, our children. The other man was my
friend,
he had once borrowed money from me—”

“But Simon,” and though I try to control it, I can feel my own tone sharpening, “you were hardly faithful to her, we both know what happened, and my God, you and me, what that was—”

“It’s not the same thing,” he says, much too quickly.

“Not the same thing as
what?
Your marriage?”

He flinches at my intonation of the word “marriage,” and though I didn’t quite think I intended to say it that way, maybe I did. My stomach heaves. Who could I have possibly convinced myself that I was? I see myself, a slender figure in tattered jeans, on the edge of someone else’s five-story, steel-and-glass marriage in Switzerland. A footnote, at best. An adventure. His wonderland. A woman without a key to his house.

“I should not have come here,” he says. “I’m sorry. I will go to another hotel.” He fumbles in his pocket for his cell phone. His hand shakes.

“Why
did
you come here?” I grip the arms of the chair.

He looks at me, looks at all of me, his hawk’s eye as dark and keen as ever in his smaller, more open face. My body, blind to the present moment, alights. “I wanted to see you, Anna.”

“Why?”

He presses a button on the cell phone, puts it back in his pocket. “You wrote me, and, I don’t know, it had been such a long time, you have lost your father.” He pauses. “Perhaps I was curious.”

“Curious? You took a ten-hour train ride from Zurich to Hamburg after seven years because you were
curious?
Simon, even for you that’s a ridiculous thing to say. You couldn’t possibly believe that.”

“Eight and a half hours, actually. I took the faster train. I got up very early this morning.” He lies back on the bed and gazes at the ceiling. This isn’t like him; he was never casual, didn’t sprawl and slouch like Americans. I know without seeing it that under his button-down shirt is a bright white undershirt, that his socks are silk, that his feet are smooth and soft, toenails neatly clipped. “I no longer know what I believe. She was my wife and the mother of my children. We were married for twenty-five years. I loved her. After this happened I became very depressed. I take something for it now. I gained weight, I lost weight. I couldn’t focus. I felt that I had lost my life, and I still feel that way. I came because I miss you. I have missed you for years. That’s the truth. Please come over here.”

“I can’t be late for sound check.” Sound check is three hours from now.

“Please.” He reaches a hand out over the bedspread.

I go. I go because I want to, my body is tugging me forward, but I also go because I want to know him, want to know what has happened and where he’s been, and only his body can tell me that. I think this might be unfair, a little; I might be taking advantage of something he can’t control. I don’t mean the stiffness of his cock. I mean him—his weight, his scent, the way he moves, the sounds that he makes. He looks straight at me like a drowning man, as urgent as that first time in London. I climb on top of him, I can feel the ridge of him, I run my hand inside his pants to his cock, his balls, I unzip him, open his belt buckle, free him. He runs his hands under the dress, up along my ass, he pulls at the black stockings, the lacy black panties underneath. I kick out of them; his thumb, his fingers, part me. His suit jacket smells of starch; the cufflinks on his light blue shirt are small bars of brushed steel. I bury my face in his warm neck as I straddle him, half naked; his cock is hard against my ass and his hand is inside me, opening me. Our clothes seem to be everywhere, tangling us, but also nesting us. Silk, linen, cotton, nylon, bunching, dampening, half-exposing skin, pussy, dick, nipple.

He grips me inside so hard, he pulls against the small, spongy internal ridge nearly to the point of causing me pain. “Anna,” he says. “Anna. Anna.” With his other hand, he pulls my hair back; I am kissing him, pressed open-legged over his chest, we are already starting to move together. It is as if he is making of me a bow, a circuit, or that we complete a circuit together; my length on his weight, my scent on his, my mouth on his mouth, the force of him pulling at me from within: we are a chord. Even as I am hearing that chord, I want to hear it again, to hear it louder. I sit up on him, put my thumbs in his mouth; he sucks, sucks, his eyes closed, his tongue rolling over and over my fingers. I make him stand up so that, kneeling on the bed, I can unbutton his shirt, push it and the suit jacket off his shoulders, pull and tug him out of his clothes. Naked, he unwraps me from the wrap dress, un-bras me in one gesture, buries his face in my breasts. We press together, both naked. I hold his shoulder blades in my hands. I am shaking.

We lie down. I think of his wife, try not to, but I can’t help it. Even as I pull him in, as I whisper in his ear, as he groans and I feel him just as I did seven years ago in Arezzo, the swifts darting in their mad arcs in the sky outside,
say it say it say it say it say it say it,
even as he moves more deeply into me, I wonder why she left him. I have only the haziest image of her—dark-haired, short, strong-faced, laughing in a bathing suit, a photo on his laptop he showed me just once, quickly. He gathers me closer to him, closer still, but my mind is wandering to this woman I don’t know but who, strangely, is more real to me at this moment, when I am in bed with the man she left. She knew his body, this very body, his warm flat feet, she fucked him in just this way, in all the ways no doubt, for twenty-five years. And then she left. He knows why, but he doesn’t want to tell me; he isn’t going to tell me. Instead, we are going to fuck. We are fucking. I feel the great weight of it, of their broken marriage, their broken country, his despair, his need, his breaking again as he comes; the heat and force of it, and that it has disappeared into time like a train around a curve, into a past of his that I don’t understand and that he can’t explain to me except, perhaps, like this. I don’t come, because I am too busy listening to his body, spying on his heart. He is breathing hard, still inside me. Even with everything, all that I know, I want him to stay there. He shudders. I remember now—how did I forget?—that it was his way to stay inside me for a long time after coming, as long as possible, like a man who wants to stay at home, to be at home, who feels at home right here, right now, and who does not, ever, want to be sent out to wander alone; a man who never wanted to be in exile. He would have continued to lie about everything, forever, if only she wouldn’t leave him. But she did, and he has come back to me, he is here. I begin to shake.

“Shhh, Anna,” he whispers, stroking my hair. “My darling, shhhh. I have missed you. I have missed you so much. I am so glad that we have found one another again.”

He turns and curls around me on the bed, holding me. His legs fit behind mine and his arm is strong, pulling me against him as he buries his hawk face, softer now, in the back of my neck. I stop shaking very slowly. He holds me to his chest. I pull the bedspread over us. We fall asleep, wake in dim light. I am, in fact, late for sound check. Zach, in the center of the round stage, plucks angrily at the untuned bass strings. My guitars are lined up neatly in their stands. I thank him for setting me up.

The show goes a little better, but just a little. We’re not going to woo Hamburg, that’s clear. Simon sits with Boone at a small table near the stage sipping a martini, wearing a suit jacket and a crisp white button-down shirt, no tie. Boone, tapping away on his phone, looks like Simon’s black-sheep son. As we soldier on through the set, me turning on the circular stage, returning several times to see Simon and Boone, the twelve on my personal clock, I wonder what they could possibly be talking about.

After the show, Simon and I go straight back to the room. In the past, we would have made love again, exhausted but still hungry, just one more, never enough time. Simon hangs up his suit jacket, his shirt. I undo my braid, take off the shoes with the thick black straps and the high white heels. We sit down on the bed. Simon takes my hand. He twines my hair in his fingers, kisses it. “This red—I love this red.”