The Woman on the Stairs Page 13

  I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered. I had described the dog that the children had brought home one day. They had found it at the park where they met their friends in the afternoon; it was ownerless – didn’t have a dog tag anyway – and they had taken it into their hearts. It was really social; my wife liked when she sat on the sofa and it lay down next to her with its head on her leg, and she called it her warm little bundle. I made sure that we did not keep it. I was bothered by the dirt it brought into the house, the mess when the children played with it, and the damage to our Biedermeier sofa, which, when my wife wasn’t there, it would sometimes bite and lick; and the thought of having to take it for walks when the children grew tired of it. No one complained when it was gone.

  I have always seen myself as a generous husband and father. My wife got all the help she wanted in the house, and her own car as well, and whatever the children needed, they got – even when they only thought they needed something, but it turned out they did not. Had I, in small things, been a little petty sometimes? How did I know that my children would grow tired of the dog? How did I know that losing him didn’t upset my wife and children? Did I hear no complaint from them only because we talked so little? What else was left unsaid?

  My wife’s accident came to mind. I lay on my back, arms crossed behind my head, and looked at the sky. I knew the Southern Cross from the Australian and New Zealand flags; I looked for it, but could not find it. The Milky Way got me thinking of my mother, of whom I have almost no memory; I do know that my birth was by caesarean and that she didn’t breastfeed me, because at the time doctors advised against it after a caesarean. A tiny, bright dot arced through the sky; I followed it with my eyes and fell asleep.

  11

  Irene enjoyed the drive from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. The clear light, the dry grass – brown, but lit gold in morning and evening; the orchards, row after row of trees planted with such precision that their shadows whisked over our car like the beat of a metronome; the vineyards growing not on hillsides but in valleys; the place names that bore witness to the Spaniards or Russians who once had settled there. Irene imagined the people from the Crimea who had found their way to California and founded Sebastopol, the stoves glowing between the vines on cold nights, the rush of pink when the orchards bloomed in spring. Before we reached the Pacific, we crossed one last mountain range. From its heights we could see the fog that hung in the valleys and over the ocean, a fog so thick that it seemed no sun could dissolve it. It was late morning, and we sat on the brown grass, the dog at our feet, and drank the red wine we had bought at a winery. We felt sleepy, dozed off, and woke up. The fog was gone and the Pacific shimmered in the midday sun.

  “I lay still. While we were asleep, you had turned towards me and laid your arm over my chest.”

  Irene smiled. “You’re becoming daring.”

  “You laid your arm across my chest, not the other way round.”

  She laughed. “Understood. And then what?”

  “You woke up, left your arm on my chest for a moment longer, then sat up and looked out at the Pacific. I sat up too, and you leant your shoulder against mine.”

  “How did you feel with my arm on your chest and my shoulder on yours?”

  Why do women always need to hear how you feel? They have to hear it – knowing it isn’t enough. It’s like in the army, where it’s not enough that you serve loyally, you have to face the flag every morning and pledge allegiance. It’s a ritual of submission, one which I refused to surrender to with my wife, and one which she eventually abandoned. At some point, she gave up asking me how I felt.

  “Good,” I said, and we drove down to the ocean, and along the coast towards San Francisco. Irene had seen The Birds, and in Bodega, I showed her the schoolhouse from the film. Then we went down to the water, and walked the beach, and I told her about the waves that suddenly, out of calm water, can rear up and snatch anyone walking too close and not give them back.

  Suddenly, I was afraid for her. She had no choice. She was walking on the edge, and at some point the cancer would take hold of her and not let go.

  As we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, the sun set. It dipped into the fog, and from one moment to the next the Pacific was gray, hostile, merciless. But the city was still awash in light. I would have liked to hear the song on the radio that I had once heard and liked. Something about San Francisco, or California, or both, but the title escaped me, and all I could remember was a bit of melody. I sang it to Irene, and she recognized the song, but she couldn’t remember the title either. Whatever – we had arrived.

  “Here we are.” I smiled at Irene.

  “Yes,” she smiled back. “Here we are.”

  12

  I hardly ever got sick. When I was, I did as my grandparents taught me: be as little of a bother as possible, need as little as possible, ask as little as possible. It’s bad enough that when you’re ill, you don’t function; you shouldn’t get in the way of others functioning more than you have to. And that is how my wife and I handled illness in our family. In the war, the sick had to fight in soaking trenches, or flee for their lives through snow and ice, or wait for bombs to drop on their freezing cellars. Do we not have reason to feel satisfied and grateful that, unlike them, we can lie in bed when we’re sick?

  In the beginning, Irene was similar. She only asked for something when she was truly helpless, and then she was visibly embarrassed, and apologized and thanked me. With each day, my help became more of a given, and Irene had more needs and requests. Instead of three large meals, many small ones; instead of the alternatives of a bed in the bedroom and a bed on the balcony, a bed on this and on that side of the balcony as well, and on the veranda of the house, on the beach, and underneath the acacia by the steps. Instead of a request for a glass of water, “I’m thirsty”, and instead of “Thank you”, a smile, or nothing. When she felt nauseous, and vomiting brought no relief, and she had to continue gagging and spitting, and the bucket was too far away, or there was no tissue ready, or if I didn’t hold her right, she snapped at me.

  I found that hard to put up with. I could not imagine that she would have wanted to be treated like that. So how was it okay to treat me that way? Does cancer or the proximity of death grant special privilege? I couldn’t see it, and I remain determined not to claim special privilege in the same situation. But maybe I couldn’t, as I had been doing, brush off her embarrassed apologies and thanks, and say it was nothing, without accepting that I’d be taken at my word. Maybe it was good that she took my help for granted now. Maybe fairness isn’t everything.

  The evening after our arrival in San Francisco, she was again different. She said please when she needed something and thanked me when she got it, and apologized for all the trouble she was causing. It was as if she wanted to put some distance between us, and turn me into someone she wasn’t already tied to, from whom she could withdraw. She reminded me of my little daughter, who in summer camp learned that she could get along without us, and let us know, when she got back, that she was independent, and that we could no longer take her for granted. Irene was turning away.

  “I can manage,” she said as she got up after dinner and went to the stairs.

  “Where do you want to sleep?”

  “On the balcony.”

  She walked up the stairs, slowly, laboring, bowed, walking her hands on the steps. I stood nearby, ready to help her, but she didn’t need me.

  I washed the dishes, cleaned up the kitchen and set the table for morning. Then I poured myself what was left of the wine and took the glass out onto the balcony. I heard Irene walk from the bedroom to the bathroom, shower, and return to the bedroom. It was hot, like the entire day had been and the night before and the day before that, and I noticed that I had come to like the night heat; it wasn’t less, but it had lost its bite.

  Then I heard Irene call and went into the kitchen.

  13

  She came down the stairs. Her right hand grazed
the wall, to support her if needed, but she held herself upright and placed one foot surely in front of the other. She held her head at a slight angle, and looked at me. She was naked.

  What went through my head as she came down the stairs! That she must have taken the last of her cocaine. How pale, how deathly pale her body looked aside her sun-tanned face, neck and arms. How weary it was, with its tired breasts, the tired skin around her belly, and yet how beautiful. That weary beauty was still beauty. What the kids in the Art Gallery had thought about her hips, thighs and feet, and how wrong it was. What I had projected onto her: softness and seduction, resistance and refusal, and that in the end she was just a woman with a life of her own. How courageously she had lived it; how timidly I had lived mine. That she had shown the children she’d taken in more love than I had shown mine. That her body’s weariness moved me. How close that feeling was to desire.

  She spoke with her eyes. She was playing a role for me, but not performing. She wasn’t the young Irene, we both knew, but was old – as I was old. That at this point, she had little left to offer but love. That she was inviting me to also offer just that, and to acknowledge that that was what I wanted. But that she also enjoyed the game, the self-reference, and my admiring gaze.

  Then she came down and gave her entire body to our embrace, chest to chest, belly to belly, thighs to thighs. My hands felt her skin; she was like silk paper, soft, dry, fragile. I knew that I would soon carry her to her room. But there was no hurry.

  14

  The next day, I made a double bed in her room from two singles, and pushed our mattresses together on the balcony. I was hesitant to share a bed with Irene on the balcony, where Kari might appear at any moment. But she shook her head. “He only comes when he thinks I might be in danger. If a helicopter appears, or a boat, any strangers.”

  Never again was Irene so lively as the evening when she took her last cocaine. We never made love again either; she was too weak, and she was happy when we held each other. Something else changed. She kept wanting me to tell her stories, but after our night together, she wanted to hear something different. “Would you tell me how it might have gone if we had met as students?”

  “How could we have met as students? You were political, you had admirers, you were invited to parties and openings, you got married early – all I did was go to lectures and seminars and sit in the library.”

  “But now you know you could have met me…Didn’t you ever go to the Cave?”

  “No.”

  “But you knew about it? And where it was?”

  So when the library closed at ten, I didn’t go home, but to the Cave. It was an underground club on two levels, with a bar and tables above, and a stage and dance floor below; the air was full of smoke, and a couple of kids were playing jazz. The music had no melody – was that free jazz? Was The Black – black skirts, black jeans, black sweaters, black jackets – existentialism? Was that what lent cool ease to the way people moved, sat down, stood up, lit each other’s cigarettes and smoked, and raised their glasses and drank? What let the men, who in fact wanted to get near the beautiful women, look so blasé, and the women look at the men as if they were tedious? I looked around and—

  Irene laughed loudly. “Where did you get that nouvelle vague cliché? By the end of the sixties, nobody was wearing black; the girls at university wanted all the excitement they’d missed in their little towns, and the boys tried to impress us with grand speeches about critical theory and revolutionary praxis. Did all that really pass you by?”

  “Like I told you, I did nothing but study.”

  “And later you did nothing but work? The firm took you on, and you took over, and made it bigger and bigger?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t want anything from you.” She took me in her arms. “I’m trying to picture your life. Your walled-in life. Maybe if you live behind walls, the world outside is bound to become a cliché.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My work often takes me abroad and I keep an open mind wherever I go. At home, I read two newspapers, the business and finance sections first, but also politics and culture. I’m better informed about the world than most. Just because I wasn’t familiar with the student fashions of the late sixties – does that make me someone who lives behind walls?

  She felt me holding back in her embrace, and pulled me closer. “Did you never go visit your kids at university? And go to their hangouts, their parties?”

  “My children went to boarding school when they were fourteen, and they stayed in England. I went to Cambridge for their graduations, terrific occasions, all pomp and circumstance. And I was there when my youngest won the Boat Race against Oxford.”

  “Do you see each other often?”

  “They all stayed in England, the eldest and the middle one as lawyers, the youngest with his own software company. I go over whenever a grandchild is born or the three of them celebrate something. I don’t want to be a burden.”

  Slowly and gently, Irene ran her hand down my back. “My pure fool. You always want to do the right thing.” She said it again, tenderly, and sadly. “My pure fool.”

  Again, I had no idea what she meant. I started crying, not knowing why, and not why now. I was ashamed, I felt ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop myself. I missed my children, not the children who now lived in England, but the teenagers they once were, and all I had missed: their adolescence, their school conflicts, the hobbies and friendships and first loves, the questions about what to study. When, back then, I picked up my children at the airport, they weren’t returning home, but were only visiting on holiday, and often they immediately left for a language course or tennis camp. Back then, my children never complained, but still, now, I felt sorry for them. I felt sorry for myself as well, and I was crying for myself as much as I was crying for them, and for my wife, who had always been opposed to England. Had I really thought that was what was best for them? Or had I just given myself an easy and comfortable child-free life?

  “Go on, cry,” Irene kept stroking my back. “Everything will be all right.”

  But how? Anyway, I took in her comforting attention, and it wove together with my self-reproach and self-pity into a blanket, under which I cried myself to sleep.

  15

  “I think this is the last time,” Irene said the next morning. “I want to go down the stairs to the beach once more.”

  As we went down, she with one hand on the rail and the other on my shoulder, I too knew this was the last time. She stopped on each step and gathered her strength for the next, then put down the right, always first the right foot, and then the left. Then she rested until she had again gathered her strength. She breathed heavily, and couldn’t speak, and every now and then she gave me an exhausted or apologetic or ironic smile.

  I could have cried again. What was wrong with me, last night and today? When Irene and I found each other, it was clear that we would have each other only briefly. But that was a truth somewhere out there, not between us, where so much happened, where there was so much life, so much promise. Now, on the long way down the stairs, the shortness of our time became a truth between us, and I could not bear it. I don’t need anyone, I had always thought – perhaps to be happy, but not to survive, and I had survived on my own. Now, I didn’t know how I could survive without Irene, how I would approach my children differently without her, or do my work differently, or make my life different. How I would fall asleep, or wake up without her.

  But I did not cry. I tried to go down the stairs slowly, one foot in front of the other, step by step, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Then she stopped on one step for a long time, until she caught her breath. “You said that English legal firms are taking over German ones. Why don’t you open a branch of your firm in England with the two older ones?” I thought of the distance my children maintained with me. “They did follow in your footsteps after all.”

  A couple of steps further down, she stopped again.
“My daughter – you’ll have to see whether you think you can tell her about me. I don’t want you to upset her. I want you to do her good. If you do her good by doing nothing, then do nothing.”

  Then we had reached the end of the stairs. “How lovely,” she said, standing in the water. Everything was lovely, the warm water, the smooth sea, the pebbles and fish and plants at the bottom, the sky, still morning-blue, without the haze of the day’s heat. Irene leant into my embrace, took everything in, and rested. “Can we make it to the boulder at the end of the cove?”

  But after only a few steps she felt sick, and she threw up what she had just eaten. We took a break and sat down on the veranda of the house on the beach. “And if we had met as children?”

  “I remember the schoolhouse, yellow brick with red sandstone ornaments, and its two equal halves, one for girls and one for boys. Like the building, the schoolyard was divided into two equal halves, and during the main break the girls and boys from grades one to four would walk, two by two, in two big circles overseen by some of the older children, who were themselves overseen by a teacher. The older children who didn’t have to oversee us were free to move around, and they bothered us, and hit us, and took our apples and pretzels – it was a game for them, it wasn’t about the apples or pretzels, but about getting away with it.

  “I was an anxious child. I was afraid of school, of the teachers, of the big kids, of the walk to school, where the big kids bothered me, and sometimes hit me or took something from me. Of arriving late, and again and again I was late; though I left on time; I would dawdle out the way, dreading school. For a long time, I saw my life at school through a fog, without understanding what it was about, or what mattered.