The Dark Path (8 page)

I talk about all this with no one. Instead I try to love God and Mara in fierce parallel, to keep them distinct from each other by doing extremely religious things for God and extremely romantic ones for Mara. I get obsessive on both fronts.

Some Catholic friends tell me of the Croatian town of Medjugorje, a mountain village where, beginning in the early 1980s, the Virgin Mary allegedly started appearing to six young people and telling them how humanity could return to God. I don't know if I buy the story, but the visionaries say that Mary is urging mankind toward fasting and this intrigues me. Like darkness and silence, fasting sounds like a honing, an existential stripping away, an emptying out of myself . . . so maybe it is part of the path.

I try it. For twenty-four hours each Wednesday and Friday I ingest only water and bread crusts.

But the fasting only makes me starved for pleasure. Each Wednesday and Friday night I sit on Mara's couch, watching the clock till midnight. Then I wolf down Lipton butter noodles, haul Mara into her bedroom, and have at her.

Soon any small thing Mara likes becomes a mission for me to acquire. She likes a Steiff stuffed-animal bird in a shop window: I sneak back alone later that day to buy it. She mentions an obscure Genesis song called “Your Own Special Way”: I scour grimy record stores, buy the album, and make Mara a mix tape.

On her birthday morning in April, I cook her homemade blueberry muffins, using my mother's recipe, and I appear in Mara's bedroom with a tray bearing the Steiff bird and the muffins.

“Surprise!”

Mara opens her eyes sleepily. “What? Hi, honey . . .”

“Happy birthday! Listen to
this
!” I pop the tape into the stereo and press play. A song begins. “It's ‘Your Own Special Way'! And we're going on a picnic!”

She yawns. “Can't we just stay in bed?”

“No!”

I've borrowed Adam Goldman's car, and I drive us to Rock Creek Park in D.C. In the trunk is a picnic basket that I filled with sandwiches and a bottle of wine shaped like a fish that I bought because Mara once pointed to a bottle of wine shaped like a fish in a store window and said: “Kinda cool.”

On the picnic we enjoy ourselves. But even the perfect setting and the hip wine bottle can't make things between me and Mara as perfect as I have been willing, or cosmically demanding, them to be.

A few weeks later, one night when we're in bed, I can't hold inside anymore what's been bothering me.

“Mara.”

She hears the fear in my voice. “Honey, what is it?”

“I'm too ashamed to say it.”

She locks her arms around me. “There's nothing you can't tell me.”

“I have to stop. I can't go all the way with you in bed anymore.”

She strokes my cheeks. Her expression is puzzled but accepting. “Okay.”

“I—I hate that this is the case, but somehow—somehow me giving all of myself to you in full-on sex is something I can't handle, not till we're married. I'm sorry.”

I say that I know that she might blame the Church and I tell her that I want to be like our friends, who seem to have no struggles with sex, but I say that I do have struggles with it, that it touches on God and my relationship with Him in overwhelming ways, and I say that if she's angry, I'll understand.

She hugs me. “I'm not angry, you dolt.”

I promise her that we can still get wild and crazy and climaxingly naked together. I promise her that I love her.

“I love you too,” she says.

Then we put on The Alarm, since that's something we can both believe in.

MARA AND I
sit on the ground in London's Trafalgar Square, holding hands. It's a bright day in late September 1989. The sun warms the gray bricks beneath us. Tomorrow I'll head to Tübingen in West Germany for my junior year abroad, a year which Mara will spend in Florence, Italy. We're having a last weekend together in England before launching our separate expatriate adventures.

“Check out that girl.” Mara points to a couple our age standing beneath Lord Nelson's Column. The guy wears jeans and a black muscle shirt, while the girl has kinky red lace-up Doc Martens, a tight white bustier top, and black hair razored short. She's leaning up to her guy, whispering in his ear.

“She's doing what I do to you,” Mara says. “She's using her feminine wiles to get what she wants.”

“Why are wiles always feminine?” I ask. “That makes it sound like women are scheming behind the scenes, like courtesans. Can't I have masculine wiles?”

She squeezes my hand. “Yes. I'll always respect your masculine wiles. In fact I'll shorten the phrase and that's your new nickname. Max Wiles.”

I kiss her knuckles.

“I'm going to bear your children,” she says. “I'm scheming behind the scenes.”

“I am, too.”

“I'm afraid of this year,” she says. “I'll miss you with everything in me.”

I tell her that sometimes I miss her that way even when we're together.

Thirty-six hours later I'm alone on a train heading south from Frankfurt. It's late at night and there are no other passengers. My destination, Tübingen, is a university town in Germany's Baden-Württemberg region, in the country's southwest. I've never been there, but I've decided that the town will be quaint, and that my year here will be a perfect fairy tale, a break from real life.

I stare out the window. The train chugs past a moonlit field in which a cow stands by the tracks. The cow looks at me. Without opening its mouth it says,
Be a priest
.

I close my eyes.
Shut up, cow. You're part of Germany, so your job while I'm here is to be quaint, not prophetic, okay?

When I open my eyes the train is passing a towering section of the Black Forest. I look out at the forest.
Be a priest
, say the trees.

Shut up, Black Forest
.
What part of this-year-is-my-break-from-real-life didn't you understand?

But the Black Forest is bigger than a cow and the train isn't hurtling past very quickly, so the Forest answers,
You know you'll be a priest. When you're alone, you know it. Stop fooling around with Mara. You can't run from God, David.

Watch me
.

The conductor enters the car and takes the ticket I bought in Frankfurt. About seventy, he has a sturdy build and a snazzy conductor's cap. I smile, ready to let him inaugurate me into my fairy-tale year. Unfortunately he speaks Schwäbisch, a dialect I don't know, and I can babble back to him only in Hochdeutsch. Only later in the year, after listening to others speak his dialect, will I be able to cast back and parse out his increasingly frustrated words. Here they are in English:

TRAIN CONDUCTOR: 
(
studying my ticket
) This is out of order. This is totally wrong.

ME:
Heartfelt greetings . . . I will study at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

TRAIN CONDUCTOR: 
(
waving my ticket
) You bought the wrong kind of ticket.

ME:
I am very pleased and excited . . . I am the first from my family to study here.

TRAIN CONDUCTOR:
 This is totally wrong. You bought the wrong kind of ticket. (
He points out the window.
) You must get off this train at the next stop.

ME: 
(
looking where he's pointing
) I too like to look out the window and witness the beautiful countryside.

TRAIN CONDUCTOR: 
You must get off this train at the next stop.

ME: 
What was that about the next stop?

TRAIN CONDUCTOR: 
(
taking me by the shoulders and steering me unequivocally toward the door
) At the next stop, you will leave.

ME:
Whoa! Wait . . . is something out of order? Is something totally wrong?

At the next stop my bags and I disembark. At the station house I buy a ticket that to me looks identical to the out-of-order, totally wrong one, then I wait on the cold platform for a few hours, get on the next train and it takes me to Tübingen.

•   •   •

IT IS THE YEAR
of Graham. He's a fellow Georgetown junior in the German study-abroad program, and we both get assigned to live north of the town of Tübingen in a student dorm called Waldhäuser Ost.

Graham is a ruddy, hot-tempered guy with blond hair and a fast, hard laugh. He's strong and built like a bear. He loves to cook and eat enormous meals. He sleeps late in an always darkened room with a mask over his eyes and he growls each morning when I wake him for us to catch the bus down to the university.

We take classes together and we're stunned at how badly we suck at understanding our professors' German. During our entrance exam Graham and I and other Americans are made to listen while a proctor reads a story called “Der Delphin” (dare DELL-fain), which we must then summarize in written German. I write a three-page essay about the oracle at Delphi, but it turns out that
der Delphin
is a plucky little dolphin trying to avoid commercial fishing nets. I barely get matriculated.

Graham hoots when we get our tests back and he sees the red-ink question marks all over my essay. “Nice work, Schick.”

“Fuck off,” I tell him.

We both love the blues music of Lightnin' Hopkins and we listen to his CDs while we play cards. We get plastered on pilsner most nights and go out to see dubbed-German movies like
Harry und Sally
or
Sex, Lügen und Video
. When we get back to the dorm I squirrel myself away and write Mara haikus like this one:

Pale cool Irish girl

with green-fired eyes and tart tongue.

Italy loves you.

Or this one:

The world's shouting but

our bodies pulse like Quiet.

Stay inside with me.

I send these poems to Mara in love letters. I miss her terribly, but after mailing the letters, I usually come back to my dorm and linger in the hall outside the communal kitchen, hoping to see Audrey and Nicole, the two girls who live on my floor. I'm still always in thrall to women living close to me.

Audrey is French and Nicole is Tunisian, and they're exchange students, too. Both are smart blondes who speak fluent German. Audrey has sad brown eyes and a just-out-of-bed languor to her movements. In the kitchen she and Nicole smoke together for hours. They laugh at my jokes and correct my German language mistakes. I admire the muted kitchen light in Audrey's hair, and she winks at me through the smoke rising from her Gauloises cigarette, and my heart asks,
Are you my wife, Audrey Vaillant?

Each day after classes I wander in Tübingen's Altstadt, the Old City. There are fairy-tale details—cobblestone streets, buskers playing accordions—but I move past them alone, nervous about talking to natives and somehow just plain nervous anyway. I have a new unsettled dread in my blood. It's not loneliness for Mara or God because when I yearn for them, there's usually goodness—some sweet ache—to the yearning. This is Something Else, this other feeling. There's nothing good about it. It isn't vertigo exactly, but it makes me feel like solid ground isn't there beneath me.

To shake the feeling off, I hang out with Graham. Every morning we go to the
Bäckerei
near our dorm and eat warm
Kirschtaschen
with ice-cold milk. Graham has been growing out his thick blond hair, with a beard to boot. He grins at me one morning as we chomp our cherry pastry.

“You know who'd enjoy this?” he says. “
Der Delphin
. Yes, if the dolphin prophet oracle were here, he'd devour these
Kirschtaschen
and tell us of our fates.”

I punch him.

Days later I'm out running on a forest path near the dorm when I turn my left ankle hard and fall. Unable to run now, I hobble to the dorm and collapse in a chair in the common room, where Graham is riveted to the television. It is November 10, 1989, and the TV is tuned to the falling of the Berlin Wall, which began yesterday.

“We've gotta get up there,” says Graham reverently, watching the images of people dancing atop the wall. “We'll hitchhike. We'll leave first thing in the morning.”

“I can't. I just fucked up my foot. Twisted my ankle.”

Graham shoots me a look. He and I have become so inseparable that Audrey and Nicole now just call us Dam-and-Grave.

“Just rest it tonight. But we're going, period. This is historic shit, man.”

So I agree and go to call Mara (we speak rarely, since calls are expensive). The floor phone is a communal one in the hall. When I talk on it, I hunch over for privacy.

“I miss your river rapids,” I tell Mara.

“I miss having you navigate those rapids,” she says. “Listen, I've decided our first daughter will be named Mavis, after my sister, and maybe our first son will be Connor. Connor is negotiable, but Mavis is too cool a name to pass up.”

It is cool, but I don't say so.

“Something's wrong, Max Wiles. Out with it.”

“It's nothing . . . I've just been . . .”
I'm going to be a Jesuit
, I think.
There will be no Connor and no Mavis
. “I hurt my foot running, that's all. It's swollen.”

“Then go ice it. And take some ibuprofen. Girlfriend's orders.”

We hang up. In the dorm kitchen, I fill a bucket with ice and cold water and put my ankle in. Audrey wanders in and sees me.

“Oh, Dave . . .
was hast du getan?
”
Dave, what'd you do?

I tell her about Berlin. She counsels me against the road trip. She's wearing silky, revealing blue pajamas and smoking, and I can tell from her breath that she just brushed her teeth. I try to keep my thoughts loyal to Mara, but Audrey keeps chatting with me and being lovely and French, so soon I'm fucking her senseless on a Saint-Tropez beach in my mind. After her twelfth orgasm, we swim in the waves. Then we plan our Notre Dame cathedral wedding, during which the music will be
Flying Cowboys
by Rickie Lee Jones.

“Dave?
Hast du mir gehört? Ich glaube dass du deine Reise nach Berlin absagen sollst. Dein Füss ist sehr verletzt.
”
Dave, did you hear me? You should cancel your Berlin trip. Your foot is too hurt
.

I blink, come back to the moment. I've never even kissed another girl behind Mara's back. Audrey smells like smoke and mint toothpaste and she tilts her head, letting her hair fall to one side in blond disarray. I'll never sleep with her, but she'll still go home to France next summer with a sliver of my soul tucked in her silk pajama shirt pocket.

On Saturday of that same weekend, Graham and I arrive at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate at midnight. The crowd is a singing, drinking mob. Graham brought a pickax and this makes us minor celebrities. Each person we meet borrows our weapon and hacks off a piece of history.

We haven't been in the crowd even an hour when my ankle starts killing me. It flares up so hugely that my swollen foot strains out of my sneaker. I try to drink enough Warsteiner beer to drown the pain, but standing up is almost unbearable. I sit on a curb to rest and watch the happy tumult. CNN, a fairly new TV network, is filming nearby. An East German man emerges from the crowd, beaming at me, carrying a dozen oranges in his shirt hem.

“You are American?!” he demands happily, in English.

“Yes.”

“Look at me! Fruit! Huge moments!”

I laugh. There have been reports that those crossing over are being given token gifts from West Berliners: some citrus or a few West German marks.

“Gratulieren,”
I tell the man.
Congratulations
.

He hauls me up to my feet.
“Tanzen wir!”
Let's dance!

“I can't . . .”

He spins me around a couple times, gripping my arm with one hand and holding his oranges with the other. I try to keep smiling, but the pain in my foot is excruciating, and he eventually sees my swollen sneaker.

“Oh,” he says. “You are broken.”

He pats my head and wanders off.

I'm a buzzkill, but it's no use. I hobble a long mile through the masses back toward my hostel bed.

Graham lets me lean on him as I limp along. “Don't give up, Schick. Would
der Delphin
give up?”

I grin at him, but the stabbing sensations in my foot get sharper and sharper. And beneath the pain but in league with it is that unsettled dread, that groundlessness I've been feeling. As I hobble along, this dread seems to whisper,
You
are
broken, David. And I am coming for you more fully
.
I am still a long way off, but make no mistake. I'm coming.

•   •   •

MY ANKLE HEALS
and my father visits Tübingen. He has just come from conducting some General Motors business in Frankfurt. We meet by the Tübingen town hall, hug hello, then go to a nearby tavern and get a table. I tell him about my classes until the waitress comes.

My father nudges me. “David, I think we're about ready for our first beer together.”

His voice has a Rite of Passage tone to it. Sometimes when I was young he'd give me a sip of the one Grand-Dad Old Fashioned cocktail he would have each night when he got home from work. He never had two or more, and he told me once that he'd never been drunk in his life, that he'd never needed to be. I absolutely believed him. Meanwhile, he does not know that I have hung from windows drunk on rocket fuel or that I got plastered and horny and climbed a closet to search for my Mara.