Longing (28 page)

“Have you ever been up here?” asked Ernestine when they had reached the top of the stairs.

“Yes.”

She stopped and looked fiercely into his eyes. “When?”

“Never.”

“I might answer the same if you were to ask me if I have ever made love.”

“You have and you haven't?” he inquired.

“I have only imagined it,” she answered.

Now he did love her. She was rich and a virgin and at least intelligent enough to tease him with his own words.

She opened the door to a small bedroom.

“This will do,” she said.

Robert looked around. There were no paintings on the walls—this in itself was cause for celebration—nothing but a single melancholy drawing by Moritz von Schwind of Schubert at the piano. Within the room, there were merely a bed and a chair and a relatively simple Jacobean oak chest of drawers on stile feet and a small, well-worn prayer rug with a particularly gentle mihrab, or arch, inspired by a mosque that was particularly welcoming to those pilgrims on life's last journey.

She closed the door behind them and held out her hand. “Now I am ready for my drink.”

Robert looked down at the glasses in his hand. There was almost nothing left in either of them. “I seem to have spilled it all,” he said.

“I doubt it,” she said and took the cigar from his mouth and a glass from his hand and thrust her tongue all the way to its bottom until there was nothing left but an amber drop or two that rolled off her lips onto his.

The longer Henriette Voigt sat with Ludwig Schunke, the more time she wished she might have with him. She tried to distract herself with thoughts of Robert and his Ernestine, wherever they might be lost or hiding in her cavernous house, however they might be exploring each other's considerable charms (his profound, hers generously superficial), but she seemed to have lost her former gift for, and pleasure in, the visualization of others in the act of love. This man before her was robbing her very soul. He was sitting at no small remove from her—she with her feet up on a French walnut duchesse brisée, he having sought the refuge of a far-less-comfortable George I walnut armchair with its narrow shepherd's-crook arms, and between them a hideous giltwood banquette covered in red toile de Jouy over which Karl had wept in presenting it to her—but had entered her as surely as if…It was an amazing thing for a relationship to have been consummated thus. The flesh had not been bypassed. It had been foreclosed upon. She felt they belonged to one another as the sky did to the sea and the sea to the sky at that point beyond which vision failed and only faith was left to imagine the infinite.

He was dying, this man. He was wandering through the house of death and showing her the rooms, not to trap her there but simply to provide the pleasure of an afternoon in which eternity is measured in a gesture, a word, the serenity of silence.

She had not known anyone who was dying. That is to say, she had not known anyone who had known he was dying. She wondered what it was like to live with such knowledge. Did it make you want to hide yourself away or to dance with practically everybody? Did it make life precious or demean it? Did it inspire fear or courage?

It was not that she asked these questions of Herr Schunke—that would be impertinent and intrusive. But she did ask them of herself, even as she sat there watching and listening to a man who seemed, with his very dying, to bring life into her life.

He himself appeared nothing if not comfortable with the entire subject. He treated it as if he were planning someday soon, he wasn't sure just when, to go off by train or carriage to yet another city, as he had, he told her, left Paris for Vienna, Vienna for Prague, Prague for Dresden, Dresden for Leipzig.

“But this will be your final journey,” she said, not insensitively, she trusted.

“Let us hope so,” he replied, laughing.

Take me with you
, she wanted to say, but could not. She hardly knew him, or at least had known him for so short a time, mere hours that love had tricked into seeming an eternity. She had never been able to imagine accompanying a man even to a hotel room, let alone this, through the door of death itself.

“How can you talk of this so breezily?” she asked.

“It's a bigger wind than you might imagine, Frau Voigt.” He put his hand upon his frail chest, as if to indicate both the nucleus of its force and the site of the dying going on within him. “My doctor speaks only of illness, and Robert…Robert cannot speak of death at all. We avoid the subject entirely. We live together with it but do not touch it. He has had so much death in his life, as you know.”

“And I have had so little.”

“Now you have me,” he said.

Her whole body became chilled. She feared he would see her trembling and mistake what was love for antipathy.

“Now I have you,” she said.

Robert and Ernestine lay upon the bed, his head upon her naked breast, her fingers in his hair, not moving, trapped there in its thickness, strangely unaffectionate.

“Do you suppose this is her bed?” she asked.

“I believe she sleeps with her husband.”

“You have not been in this bed before?”

“Never.”

“Nor with her?”

“Never.”

And yet, this whole short time he had spent with Ernestine—playing with one another, touching, looking, laughing a bit, wishing for more sherry, each undressed to the waist but no more, aside from their shoes kicked off, each aroused but each unspent—Robert had found his thoughts wandering to Henriette, and to Ludwig with her, wishing he were there instead of here; nearer the sherry, of course, but nearer also to his friends, those he loved more than he loved this girl he was to marry, who was beautiful and kind and whose breasts were so incredibly ripe it seemed a crime against nature itself that they not occupy him fully rather than provide a mere resting place for his confusion and distress.

Finally, he said, “We best join the others.”

“Are you done with me?” she asked.

“Done? How?” If only, he thought, she might release me now, let me go, banish me forever.

“
Done
with me. Here.” She took his hand and placed it upon the middle of her body.

“I could not force myself upon you.”

“No force would be involved.”

He shook his head. “It is too soon.”

“Are those not meant to be my words?”

“And are they not?”

“They are not.”

“It is too soon,” he said again. “I want to save you.”

“For what?”

“Not for.
From
.”

“From what?”

“From me.”

“It is too late.”

He sat up and took his watch from the pocket of his trousers as he turned to place his feet upon the floor. “Alas, you're right—it is too late.”

Ernestine was not at all sure how to present herself when she and Robert joined the others. She knew, from the evidence of her tangled hair and her wrinkled dress and her cheeks red from their contact with Robert's and a certain tightness in her bosom, that it would be assumed he and she had done something they had not done. Wishing, indeed, they had done it, she felt it quite unfair that she provided merely the appearance of having done it. It did not matter whether the others would envy or disdain her for it. She merely wanted to do it. Or, in this sad case, to have done it. Not only to have looked as if she'd done it. One might as well have been arrested for stealing something one had been tempted to steal and was indeed about to steal when suddenly an announcement was made that the shop was closed for the day.

She decided, therefore, that she would act as if they had done it.

And so, after Robert had knocked gently on the door, they walked into the sitting room with her arm in his, her head on his shoulder, the front of her dress pulled even farther down, her hair shaken into even greater turmoil, and a look in her eyes, as near as she could get it, of having devoured or having been devoured. She also, in deciding whether to let her breath come in short spasms or huge gusts, chose the former, which had the advantage of causing her breasts almost to quiver beneath the flush of her neck and the pride of her chin.

Assuming this attitude of the fallen woman, she felt risen. And if it were this easy, through such minor deception, to feel you were ascending to Heaven, she could only imagine what flight her heart would take when finally he made of her a true woman. And a true woman she needed to be: As it was, she was seducing him under false pretenses. She had been born out of a profane passion, and it was the very profanity of the act she wished not to escape but to duplicate.

Yet, from the looks of it, it was Frau Voigt and Herr Schunke who had achieved some union that Ernestine felt would have escaped her and Robert even had they torn every scrap of clothes from one another and ground their sherry glasses to sand beneath their bleeding flesh.

It was a union not of the body. Frau Voigt and Herr Schunke sat quite far apart, she on a strange kind of double-headed bench, he in a chair of monstrous proportions, at least in comparison with his frail bones, its arms as skinny as his own.

Their clothes were in place. So was their hair. But there was between them some kind of concentration it was impossible to breach. How foolish Ernestine felt, having made herself look ravished. They scarcely saw her, and even had they gawked, they would not have cared. Somehow, these two had left the world. And they had left it together.

Robert seemed not to notice. “Might you have more sherry?” he asked Frau Voigt.

She unlocked her gaze from that of Herr Schunke and turned to Robert and looked at him as if she had forgotten he was in her home. She smiled at him in a way that convinced Ernestine she was not, and had never been, his lover. It was the kind of smile a grownup gives a child who has interrupted the most private of reveries: indulgent and dismissive at the same time.

“I have more of everything,” Frau Voigt answered and pointed toward the elaborate decanter in which the sherry lay as still and dark as Ernestine's heart.

Leipzig

SEPTEMBER 6, 1834

I desperately wanted a woman to hold on to
.

Robert Schumann

Clara was given a reprieve from her exile in Dresden through her commitment to play two charity concerts in Leipzig on September 11 and 12, the same program for each, she had decided, Chopin and Schumann, in particular Robert's brand-new Toccata, which she was still learning. It was strangely sonata-like for so rebellious a composer, and she hoped the audience would appreciate the astounding hush in its final bars, huge chords attenuated into a kind of eerie repose, provided she could achieve cleanly and sedately the final octave-and-a-half in the left hand. But even shut away in her room on the third floor, she was unable to avoid the turmoil in the house, and was finding it very difficult to practice.

The house was filled constantly with people, and not only the usual servants and students and
New Journal of Music
contributors and near-strangers who wanted to ennoble their own lives under the guise of providing some little favor for her own.

Robert was here for Ernestine, and Ludwig Schunke was here for Robert, and perhaps also for Henriette Voigt, who, most peculiarly, was here for him as well as for Ernestine and Robert, for whose union she claimed responsibility and to whom she had apparently opened her own house.

Worse, Baron von Fricken was here. And when he was not playing upon his flute for anyone who would listen some Variations he had written,
*
he seemed to be carrying on an endless dialogue with Clara's father about possible compromises to Ernestine's virtue. The baron kept asking Herr Wieck if his daughter was still “whole,” as he put it, and Herr Wieck kept assuring him she was, calling as his witnesses Ernestine and Robert themselves, who, belying their offended answer to this ridiculous question, gave every evidence that their intimacy knew no bounds.

Ernestine, who upon her arrival in April had befriended Clara, now shunned her or, when she could not avoid talking to her, spoke of things so inane that Clara was tempted to inquire after Robert's talents as a lover. She imagined herself telling Ernestine she had taken lovers of her own in Dresden and had found them to be not as all as skillful as she had found Robert, from what she could remember of their many happy unions. But what she really wanted to tell Ernestine (having no one else to tell) was how lonely she was in Dresden, fourteen years old and all alone in cold, old Dresden, to which she was condemned to return immediately after her final concert, and how she loved Robert more than Ernestine ever could, because she had loved him for what seemed her whole life and knew him better than Ernestine would if Ernestine were to spend her whole life trying to love him as much as Clara did.

Clara tried to picture saying as much to Robert, but it was too difficult even to envision such a scene, out of fear not of her own words but of his. When he had finally written to her in Dresden, he had called Ernestine “the shining jewel whom it is impossible to overestimate,” which at the moment she read it brought to mind a precious stone of such proportions that it tore off the finger upon which it had been slipped. This image of mutilation caused her to think of Robert's injured finger and his music lost to the world. Tears fell from her eyes upon his letter as she saw him taken from her by another woman and destroyed by his own hand.

In person he seemed, except with her, perfectly content. He shadowed Ernestine and inquired constantly after her welfare, saying such things as, “How is my little Estrella?” which, whether it was his nickname for all of Ernestine or for a particular part of her body, Clara detested. And Ernestine, if Robert happened to be out, would stand by the window watching for him to appear in view, or as soon as he had left would rush to her room to change into yet another outfit, in which she would appear and only then address Clara, soliciting opinions about the bunch of her dress or the tilt of her shoe or the beribboning of her hair or the pronouncement of her bosom, all of which made Clara want to scream at this betrayal by someone she had been foolish enough to imagine might become her friend.