The Little Book (31 page)

She looked into his face for an instant to find any trace of disapproval. “It has such a powerful effect on me. Perhaps I’ve gone too far.”

“Not at all. It’s fine. In fact it is admirable. It’s just that people are more reserved, I guess.” What he meant, of course, was
people of your century
.

“It wards off the chaos,” she said, holding up a fork full of the thick whipped cream and torte.

“What an interesting observation,” Wheeler said.

“It is from a teacher of mine in college. He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be said for great books.”

“What a fascinating idea,” Wheeler said. “You will have to include it in your work of significance.”

She frowned. “Oh no,” she said with a sigh. “I fear my alter ego has written his last. This morning I wrote to the editor at
The New York Times
and resigned. I explained that the muse has abandoned the project. There will be no more penetrating observations from Vienna.”

Wheeler did his best to hide his surprise. “I am sorry to hear it. It sounds as if the pseudonymous fellow was making a contribution.”

“Well, all that is gone now,” she said. “Poof. The inspiration has left the author. She is too distracted by all this—” She waved her fork, now empty, at the room. “His time has passed. But I will tell you one thing.” She looked into his eyes. “If ever he did return, it would be my conversations with you, which I go home and write down in detail and almost verbatim, that provide the inspiration.”

“They have been very special to me too,” Wheeler said.

She looked off for a moment, silent. “You know, my stay in Vienna has given me a lot of time to think. I came here really quite by chance, at the suggestion of my former headmistress, looking for new trends in music. But I am finding much in myself. Back home, even away at college to a degree, I was always afraid to move about too vigorously, afraid always what the elegant ladies of the parish would think, or what the founders of the cotillion would say if I wore my hat at a rakish angle or talked to one of their sons too passionately about suffrage rights. And here no one knows me, and there seem to be fewer rules, perhaps
no
rules for foreigners.”

A seriousness fell onto her brow. “Sometimes I think there is a lot more to us than we know. I mean deep beneath the surface. For years I have felt a desire to uncover something buried inside. There is no one at home interested in talking about it, but parts of me—some deep inside—would never come out in the place I was raised. I am pulled in two directions by life. I know something of what the two directions look like: my mother’s side, a side filled with joy and light, and my stern and severe aunt’s, filled with darkness, repression, and judgment. Sometimes, it is as if I am both those people. The forces are stronger than I can understand, and the directions, both a part of me, sometimes make me feel a house divided.”

“I understand,” Wheeler said, not losing her eyes as she spoke. She continued without hesitation.

“Somehow, here in all this gaiety and rich life and whirling music, my division seems closer to the surface. I feel as if I might be coming close to knowing what it is that pulls me in two directions.” Having said that, her brow lifted and she eyed the dessert in front of her. Wheeler sat enthralled, barely able to stir.

“It is funny. Fraulein Tatlock is my chaperone, and she does not seem to mind where I go or what I do. She writes home to my former headmistress that she is watching over me with care, and my former headmistress, I am sure, passes the word along to the fine ladies. The situation is really quite—” She took a spoonful of whipped cream and torte. “—licentious. ”

Wheeler was captivated. Her openness, somehow accentuated by her unabashed attack on the torte, gave her a guilelessness that Wheeler had loved in her from the start, but that now drew him to her like a siren’s call.

“That is a long-winded explanation,” she said.

“But very much to the point, I would say.”

“It is difficult for me to explain, Mr. Truman. I have told you how being in this foreign land has affected me. ‘Poised between the rich cultures of central Europe and the riches of the Orient,’ as my guidebook says. But you are not part of this. You are from America, from the Wild West. Yet, you have only accentuated the effect of Vienna. At first I found that disquieting, and then I grew to like it very much. In your presence and with this city as a backdrop, I feel like a flower opening.” Suddenly, it was Wheeler who was beginning to feel disquieted.

“I have grown fond of your company,” she continued, “and your influence on my thinking. You seem to guide me without being paternal or directive.” She looked down, as if building courage for the conclusion.

“And I have enjoyed being with you.”

“My fear of the Giant Wheel was an embarrassment.” Her eyes widened for an instant. “But real nonetheless. You pulled me beyond it.”

Wheeler smiled. “It would have been a shame to miss that view,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment. “Even at home, I have a habit of embarrassing myself with directness.” Up until this point Wheeler must have felt in control, on the brink perhaps, but still within the bounds of his own interpretation of Dilly’s no-contact admonition. He was definitely skating close to the thin ice with this captivating Emily James from Amherst, Massachusetts, but still safe, influencing things in a minuscule way, causing nothing major in the way of a shift. Then her eyes came up to his.

“Mr. Truman,” she said with the perfect, gentle elocution she found even with her own language, “I would like very much for our strong mutual attraction to become physical.”

32

Caught Off Balance

Wheeler knew he had to stop thinking about her, and to stop his heart from racing. The
Tristan and Isolde
evening had been one of the most delightful and most sensually captivating of his life. There was something about the opera that defied even his old teacher’s words of description. Mahler’s magnificent Wagner had filled the air in a way he had before only imagined. And to have shared it with her, to look over at her face and see the rapture, to see the way the low cut of her dress accentuated her most lovely neck and smooth alabaster skin and the swelling of her breasts, the way she looked over at him in the poignant moments of the fated love story, all had defied anyone’s words of description. He was most sure that she had no idea what she was radiating in the way of a persona, how stunningly beautiful she was in the obscured light of the opera house, how mature and worldly she looked in the midst of all that Viennese splendor, how she held her own, as Kleist had pointed out so vigorously, amongst the most beautiful women in the city. What was her allure for him? Why was he drawn to her so part of him was now calling out through her for completion?

And then her words at the evening’s end at Demel’s, and how they had caught him so completely off guard. Such candor was unusual for a woman in her century, he reflected, even more unusual for a girl raised in nineteenth-century New England. The feelings of the past few days, the richness of the evening’s sounds, the
grandesse
of the scene, the indulgence of the chocolate and raspberry torte
mitt schlagg
, all that coupled with her startling revelation that she was intending to write articles under a masculine pseudonym, and now that she had abandoned the project.

And he had pulled away, as he said in his journal. It all turned what he thought would be an innocuous evening into potential disaster. He took her home without discussing her request, without allowing himself any form of closeness at the end of the evening in spite of the allure of the dress and the way she leaned into him in the carriage. He did not allow himself to consider
her
feelings, that she had asked for this at extreme risk to herself. He held himself at a distance, something very new for the impulsive Wheeler Burden.

“I will avoid seeing her again,” he had written in his journal. “It’s that simple!” He had to stop playing with fire. He had let things get out of hand, rushed forward without heeding Dilly’s warnings, and should never have allowed the feelings that were now raging inside him to begin. He thought, of course, that he could go along just enjoying her company, just looking at her beautiful face, just skating on the edge of the thin ice. He skated there in spite of Dilly’s warnings because he knew he could handle the consequences. And now he had lost control. There was still time to get out before there was real damage. “Get the toothpaste back in the tube,” he wrote. He imagined telling Freud about the proposal and his reaction to it.

“Why do you think
she
initiated such things?” the great doctor would have asked dispassionately. He could hear his voice.

“She is very attracted to me,” Wheeler would say. “I am older and quite different from men she has known.”

“Old enough to be her father,” Freud would reply too quickly.

“You know what I’ve been feeling,” he would continue. “And she has eyes. I’m sure she could see it too. We had a very romantic evening at the opera and at Demel’s and she got that feeling. She’s young and inexperienced. I’m probably the one who started it all. I mean, I am the one who kept agreeing to meet with her, even when I knew the situation—”

“And now her request for something physical makes you uncomfortable? ”

He knew well Freud’s view that everyone in civilized society is repressed. “Is it not highly unusual for a twenty-two-year-old American woman to say something like that to a man?” the doctor would ask.

“Very unusual,” Wheeler would say, becoming annoyed by Freud’s clinical attitude. “I don’t think that a man in my position can afford to get involved in something like this,” he would say emphatically. “I have made a big mistake.”

“I see,” the doctor would say with that annoying abstracted distance of his. “What are you thinking?”

“What was I thinking? I am thinking that what I have here is a real flesh and blood dilemma.”

Fraulein Tatlock answered the door and did not seem to notice Wheeler’s sheepishness as she ushered him into the sitting room. “I was wondering if my friend is in,” Wheeler had said.

“Your friend is right here,” Weezie said from inside the sitting room. “Thank you for an absolutely delicious evening.” She gestured to a place on the couch from which she had just risen.

“We both enjoyed ourselves,” he said. She had an air of caution about her, he thought. “I have come to apologize for not being very polite last night.”

“You were the perfect escort,” she said, but her voice was flat and without enthusiasm. “The opera was beautiful, the dessert was delicious, your company was scintillating, and the conversation was, as always, worth coming home and writing about.”

“I mean at the end. I was not very considerate of your feelings,” he said.

She looked down. “I don’t know what you are talking about. It was a delightful evening.”

Wheeler kept his eyes on her until she looked up. Her eyes met his, then she looked down again. “I came to apologize. I wish I had been more considerate,” he repeated.

There was a long silence in which she was obviously deciding how to proceed. Finally she broke it, but without looking up. “I feel terribly ashamed,” she said finally. “I do not know why I said what I said. You have been a gentleman and even a friend to me, and I intruded on that by following some shameful dark impulse.”

Wheeler moved to speak, but she stopped him. “No,” she said, “let me continue. I thought you would not come back, which would have meant my not having to tell you this, but now I will. There is something about you, Mr. Truman, that has disarmed me from the start. You are the most curious and probing and yet caring person I have ever met. You seem to bring emotions to the surface in a way that I find magnetic and at the same time disturbing. It is not good for me, and my reaction is not good for you. I am sorry for what I did.” She looked more compelling than ever as she spoke. It was all Wheeler could do to resist reaching out to her and pulling her toward him.

“And I came to tell you how very flattered I was by what you said. It was perhaps the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“Please.” She shook her head softly, looking down. “I am ashamed.”

“No, listen,” he said again and waited until she looked at him. “I wanted so to respond to you.” He could see that this whole conversation, in the light of Fraulein Tatlock’s parlor, without the wine and the Demel’s was making her very uncomfortable.

“I wish I had not said certain things.”

“Certain things,” Wheeler said, “are what I am here to talk to you about.”

“Oh, I know. I was terribly inappropriate.”

“Quite the contrary.”

She interrupted him by raising her hand. “You don’t need to soften your reaction, Mr. Truman. I understand.”

“What you perhaps do not understand. What I am here to tell you is—”

She put her hands to her ears, not wanting to hear the stern rejection. For a moment Wheeler teetered dangerously between his two strong desires, first to adhere to Dilly’s admonition with all its wisdom, and then, second, to leap at the inexplicable siren call of this woman’s total being. For a moment, he sat paralyzed, gazing into her beautiful, apprehensive face.

“Miss James,” he said suddenly, “what I am here to tell you is that I too want very much to allow our strong mutual attraction to become physical.”

Nothing more was said of it. The next morning, they met as usual, walking along the Danube Canal, she with her hand resting gently on his arm, telling him stories of her attractions to music and her ideas about modern trends. They made arrangements to dine together and afterward Wheeler arranged for a carriage to take them around the Ring and then home. The air inside the cab was warm and lightly scented by her perfume. In spite of the pact they had made, then not mentioned again, their mood was relaxed and happy. As she sat beside him in the carriage, he felt her arm gently against his. “I feel very comfortable beside you,” Wheeler said as the cab approached Fraulein Tatlock’s. “I feel we could stay this way forever, talking.”