“Why didn’t you tell me that you were in Brenners Park-Hotel? I asked them if they were full and they said yes. So you must have booked ahead. Other times you tell me where you’re spending the night when you know in advance.”
“I forgot. I booked weeks ago, and just got into the car on Friday and didn’t look at the paper stuff with the address and the time of the performance and the reservation till I got to Baden-Baden. Because I was late getting there, all I had time to do was check in and change my clothes: I couldn’t call you. After the play and the party I didn’t want to call and get you out of bed.”
“A four-hundred-euro room—you don’t normally do that.”
“Brenners is special, and a night there is something I’ve dreamed of for years. I …”
“And the fact that you made a booking for this old dream of yours is something you forgot? Why are you lying to me?”
“I’m not lying to you.” He told her about the stress of the last weeks, about the various other things that had slipped his mind, even things that mattered to him and he would have liked to have done.
She was still mistrustful. “Brenners was your dream, and you get there so late and leave so early that you have no time to enjoy the hotel? It makes no sense!”
“No, it makes no sense. But then I haven’t been making much sense to myself these last few weeks.” He went on talking about stress and pressure, contracts and appointments, meetings and phone conferences. He talked himself into a picture of his life in the past weeks that was exaggerated but not entirely unfounded, and that Anne had no right and no cause to disbelieve. The longer he talked, the more certain he became. Wasn’t it outrageous that Anne mistrusted him baselessly and unjustifiably and had doubts about him? And wasn’t it laughable that she was knocking herself out about a night with a woman he hadn’t had sex with and didn’t even feel really close to? Knocking herself out in a park that was filled with the warmth of summer and the still of the evening and lay spellbound under the light of the first stars?
5
Eventually the energy ran out of the argument the way a car runs out of gas. Like a car it faltered, juddered, faltered again, and came to a stop. The two of them went out to dinner and made plans. Did they have to spend the weeks when Anne could come to him in Frankfurt? Couldn’t they go to Sicily or Provence or Brittany, rent a house or an apartment and write with their desks next to each other?
In the apartment they took the mattress off the worn sagging bed frame, laid it on the floor, and made love. In the middle of the night he was woken by the sound of Anne crying. He took her in his arms. “Anne,” he said. “Anne.”
“I have to know the truth, always. I can’t live with lies. My father lied to my mother, he cheated on her and he made promise after promise to my brother and me that he never kept. When I asked him why, he got mad and yelled at me. During my entire childhood I never once had solid ground beneath my feet. You need to tell me the truth so that I’ve got solid ground beneath my feet. Do you understand? Do you promise?”
For a moment he thought of telling Anne the truth about the night in Brenners Park-Hotel. But what a drama that would produce! And would the truth outweigh the fact that he’d lied to Anne for a whole hour, no, two? And wouldn’t a belated acknowledgment about the night with Therese give it more weight than it actually had? In the future, yes, in the future he’d tell Anne the truth. For the future he could and would promise her that. “It’s all fine, Anne. I understand you. You don’t have to cry. I promise I’ll tell you the truth.”
6
Three weeks later they drove to Provence. In Cucuron they found an old, cheap hotel on the market square where they were able to rent the big room with its big loggia on the top floor for four weeks. They wouldn’t be served breakfast or dinner, and there was no Internet, and the beds were made only haphazardly. But they got a second table and a second chair and could work side by side in the room or on the loggia, just as they had pictured it.
They began assiduously. But as the days passed, work seemed less and less urgent and less and less important. Not because it was too hot; the thick walls and ceilings of the old building kept the room and the loggia cool. Work—she was writing a book on gender differences and equal rights, and he was working on a play about the financial crisis—just didn’t fit. What did fit was sitting outside the Bar de l’Étang by the rectangular walled village pond, drinking an espresso and gazing into the plane trees and the water. Or driving into the mountains. Or discovering new varieties of grape at a vineyard. Or laying flowers at Camus’s grave in the cemetery at Lourmarin. Or strolling through the town of Aix and catching up with e-mails in the library. The stroll would have been nicer without the e-mails, but Anne was waiting for confirmation about a job and he for a contract for a play.
“It’s the light,” he said. “In this light you can work in the fields or the vineyards or the olive groves, and maybe you can even write—about love and childbirth and death, but not about banks and stock exchanges.”
“The light and the smells. They’re so intense! The lavender and the pines and the fish and the cheese and the fruit in the market. The thoughts I put into my readers’ heads—what are they compared to these smells?”
“Yes,” he laughed, “but with these smells in your nose, who would want to change the world anymore? Your readers are supposed to change the world.”
“Are they really?”
They were sitting on the loggia with their laptops in front of them. He looked at her, astonished. Didn’t she want to change the world, and didn’t she write and teach so that her students and readers would want to change it too? Wasn’t that why she had refused to make compromises and tailor her career to the requirements of various universities? She was looking out over the roofs, and there were tears in her eyes. “I want a child.”
He stood up, went to her, squatted down by her chair, and smiled at her. “That can be arranged.”
“How would it be supposed to go? Given my life, how can I have a child?”
“You come live with me. For the first few years you stop teaching and concentrate on your writing. After that, we’ll see.”
“After that no university will invite me to come. They invite me because they know I’ll be available. And I’m not as good a writer as I am a teacher. I’ve been working on my book for years.”
“Universities will invite you because you’re a great teacher. And so that they don’t forget you in those first years, maybe it’s no bad thing if you write a couple of essays instead of the book. You know, in a couple of years the world is going to look quite different again, and there will be new professional possibilities and new courses of study, and that means new jobs for you. So many things are changing so quickly.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Everything is also being forgotten so quickly.”
He put his arms around her. “Yes and no. Didn’t you tell me the dean at Williams invited you because the two of you were in the same seminar twenty years ago and she was so impressed by you? People don’t forget you that quickly.”
That evening in Bonnieux they found a restaurant with a terrace and a wide view over the countryside. The large group of Australian tourists taking up most of the tables with their joyful chatter left early, and they were alone in the darkness. Under her astonished questioning gaze, he ordered champagne.
“What are we toasting?” She twisted the glass between her thumb and forefinger.
“Our wedding!”
She kept twisting it. Then she looked at him with a sad smile. “I always knew what I wanted. I also know that I love you. Just as I know you love me. And I want children and I want to have them with you. And children and marriage go together. But today’s the first time we’ve talked about it—give me a little time.” Her smile brightened. “Shall we drink to your proposal?”
7
A few days later they went to bed in the afternoon, made love, and then went to sleep. When he woke, Anne was gone. A note to
ld him she’d driven to Aix to check her e-mails at the library.
That was at four o’clock. By seven he was surprised she still wasn’t back, and by eight he was worried. They had brought their cell phones with them on the trip, but switched them off and left them in the chest of drawers. He checked, and there they were. By nine he couldn’t stand it in the room anymore and went to the village pond where they parked their car.
It was standing where it always stood. He looked around and saw Anne; she was sitting at a table outside of the dark, closed Bar de l’Étang, smoking. She’d given up smoking years ago.
He went over and stood in front of the table. “What’s the matter? I was getting worried.”
She didn’t look up. “You were with Therese in Baden-Baden.”
“What gives you …”
Now she looked at him. “I read your e-mails. Booking a double room. Arranging to meet Therese. Your greeting afterward: It was lovely to be with you, and I hope you survived the trip okay and everything was fine when you got home.” She was crying. “It was lovely to be with you.”
“You went spying in my e-mails? And do you go spying in my desk and my closet? Do you think you have the right …”
“You’re a liar, you’re a cheat, you do whatever suits you—yes, I have every right to protect myself from you. I don’t get the truth from you so I have to find it myself.” She was crying again. “Why did you do it? Why did you do that to me? Why did you sleep with her?”
“I didn’t sleep with her.”
She screamed at him. “Stop lying to me, will you just finally stop lying. You take this woman to a romantic hotel and share a room and a bed with her, and you take me for a fool? First you think I’m too dumb to see through your lies, and now you think I’m so dumb I’ll let myself be talked out of the truth? You motormouth, you fucker, you piece of shit, you …” She was shaking with outrage.
He sat down facing her. He knew he shouldn’t care if windows opened and people looked out and ridiculed them. But he did care. Being screamed at was humiliating enough; being screamed at in front of other people was a double humiliation. “May I say something?”
“ ‘May I say something?’ ” she imitated him. “The little boy is asking his mummy if he can say something? Because his mummy is always suppressing him and never allows him to say a word? Don’t play the victim! Just finally take responsibility for the things you say and do! You’re a liar and a cheat—at least you can admit it!”
“I’m not a …”
She struck him on the mouth, and seeing a revulsion in his eyes that shocked her, she kept on screaming. She leaned forward, her spit hit his face, and when he recoiled it only made her louder and more enraged. “You piece of shit, you asshole, you piece of nothing! No, you can’t say something. When you talk, you lie, and I’ve had it with your lies, which means I’ve had it with your talk. Do you understand?”
“I …”
“Do you understand?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry about what? That you’re a liar and a cheat? That you and other women …”
“I don’t have other women. What I’m sorry about …”
“Go fuck yourself with your lies.” She stood up and left.
At first he wanted to follow her, but then he stayed sitting. He suddenly remembered the trip in the car when a girlfriend revealed to him that she had other men besides him. They were driving on a winding road in Alsace, and after her admission he simply drove straight ahead off the road and onto a forest path and off the path through the bushes at a tree. Nothing happened, the car just stopped. He put his hands on the steering wheel and his head on his hands and was sad. He had no desire to attack his girlfriend. He hoped she’d be able to explain what she’d done in a way that he’d understand. That he could make his peace with. Why wouldn’t Anne have it explained to her?
8
He stood up and went to the pond. It began to rain; he heard the first drops splashing gently into the water and saw the surface ripple before he felt them. Then suddenly he was wet. The rain rustled in the plane trees and on the gravel, pouring as if to wash away everything that didn’t deserve to exist.
He would have liked to stand in the rain with Anne, put his arms around her from behind and feel her body under her wet clothes. Where was she? Was she outdoors too? Was she enjoying the rain the way he was, and did she understand that their stupid quarrel should just be washed away by it? Or had she ordered a taxi and was packing her clothes in the hotel?
No, when he came in, her clothes were still there. She wasn’t. He took off his wet clothes and lay down. He wanted to stay awake, wait for her, talk to her. But the rain was pattering outside and the day had made him tired and the fight had left him exhausted, and he fell asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night he woke up. Anne was lying beside him. She was on her back, arms crossed behind her head, eyes wide open. He propped himself up and looked at her face. She didn’t look at him. He lay down on his back too.
“The feeling that I can’t contradict a woman, that I’m not allowed to refuse her anything, that I have to be alert and anticipate what she wants and flirt with her—I think it’s all to do with my mother. I feel it all the time, and I behave that way automatically, whether I’m attracted to the woman or not, or whether I want anything from her or not. As a result I create expectations that I can’t fulfill; for a time I try to fulfill them anyway, then it becomes too much for me and I sneak away, or the woman has enough and retreats. It’s a fool’s game, and I ought to learn to leave it alone. Should I talk to a therapist about me and my mother? Whatever—the game reaches its limit before it leads to sex, it doesn’t even lead to preliminaries. Maybe I put an arm around the woman or squeeze her hand, but that’s all. Maybe the limits have something to do with my mother too. I don’t want to owe the woman anything, and if I slept with her, I’d owe her something. In my whole life I’ve only slept with women I loved or had at least fallen in love with. I don’t love Therese, nor am I in love with her. It could be lovely with her, light somehow, undemanding, relaxed, in a way that things almost never are with us. But I’ve never asked myself if it was a possibility or if I wanted to leave you and live with her.
“That’s one thing I wanted to say to you. The other is that …”
She interrupted him. “What did the two of you do the next day?”
“We went to the art museum in Baden-Baden, and a winery and the castle in Heidelberg.”
“Why did you call her from here?”
“What gives you …” He realized that he’d started to say the same thing when she’d asked him about the trip with Therese, and that he was being interrupted the same way.
“I saw it on your phone. You called her three days ago.”
“She had a biopsy because there was a suspicion of breast cancer, and I asked her how it went.”
“Her breasts …” She said it as if she were shaking her head. “Does she know you’re here with me? Does she have any idea we’re together? For seven years now? What does she know about me?”
He hadn’t concealed Anne from Therese, but he’d left things vague. When he went to see her, he was going to Amsterdam or London or Toronto or Wellington to write. He mentioned seeing Anne there, and didn’t rule out the possibility that he was living with her there, but he also didn’t make it clear. He didn’t tell Therese about the difficulties he had with Anne, and told himself that that would be a betrayal. But he didn’t ever talk about his happiness with Anne either. He told Therese that although he liked her a lot, he didn’t love her, but he didn’t tell her he loved Anne. On the other hand he hadn’t kept Therese’s existence from Anne either. Though he also hadn’t told her how often they saw each other.
It wasn’t right and he knew it, and sometimes felt like a bigamist with one family in Hamburg and the other in Munich. Like a bigamist? That was too severe. He wasn’t presenting anyone with a false picture. He was presenting sketches rather than pictures, and sketches
aren’t false, because that’s all they are—sketches. Luckily he’d told Therese that Anne was going to be in Provence too. “She knows we’ve been together for years and we’re together here. What else she knows—I don’t talk about you much to friends and acquaintances.”
Anne didn’t respond. He didn’t know if this was a good sign or a bad one, but after a time his tension eased. He realized how tired he was. He struggled to stay awake and to hear whatever Anne might say. His eyes closed, and at first he thought he could manage to be awake even with his eyes closed, but then he realized he was falling asleep, or rather, no, that he’d already nodded off and then woken up again. What had woken him? Had Anne said something? He propped himself up again; she was lying beside him with her eyes open, but still didn’t look at him. The moon was no longer shining into the room.
Then she spoke. There was the gray light of dawn outside, so he must have gone to sleep. “I don’t know if I can get over what happened. But I know I won’t be able to get over it if you keep trying to fool me that it was all nothing. It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and you want me to believe it’s a swan? I’m sick of your lies, I’m sick of them, sick of them. If I’m going to stay with you, then it’s got to be the truth.” She pushed back the covers and got up. “I think it’s best if we don’t see each other again till tonight. I’d like to have the room and Cucuron to myself. Take the car and go someplace.”
9
While she was in the bathroom, he got dressed and left. The air was still cool, the streets still empty, not even the baker or the café were open yet. He got into the car and drove.
He went to the mountains of Luberon and when the road forked or came to a crossroads, he simply took whichever one promised to lead higher into the mountains. When it had nowhere further to climb, he parked the car and followed the well-worn, overgrown wheel ruts along the ridge and down the far slope.