The Lost Time Accidents (14 page)

The bedroom at the back was the barest of all. I crossed its freshly waxed floor to a window that faced a high wall of bamboo. Its sill was as sterile as everything else, but I found a cocktail napkin (
Bemmelmans Bar at The Carlyle
) wedged between the window and the frame, with a scribbled note along its inner fold. It took me a moment to decipher the scrawl:

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

1 NO lying

2 NO biting

3 NO travel thru time

“What have you found back there, Walter?”

“Nothing,” I said, pocketing the napkin. “Any more stops on the tour?”

“Only the grand finale.”

The bathroom, with its overflowing medicine cabinets and terry-cloth toilet-seat cover and heap of scaly-looking couture in the bathtub, was the only room that seemed lived-in. The clothes in the bathtub looked oddly compressed, and I felt a dark thrill, a tingle in regions unmentionable, when I realized you’d used them for a bed.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Three years this Thanksgiving. What do you think of the decor?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Haven. I don’t know how to answer that.”

“I had a fight with the Husband,” you said matter-of-factly. “The Husband took my furniture away.”

“Is that what that truck’s for, outside? Van Gogh Movers?”

You shrugged. “He hardly needed them, really. They just took everything upstairs.”

“This whole brownstone is Haven’s, then.” I felt my stomach twist. “Of course it is.”

Your expression went cold. “The Husband feels that way, too. You ought to get to know each other, Walter. You might turn out to have a lot in common.”

My plan had been to avoid the subject altogether, to keep Haven small and indeterminate and vague, but I should have known there’d be no way around him. He was a feature of the landscape through which you and I moved—as vast and undeniable as a mesa. But he was also as lifeless as one, and as flat, at least on that first magic afternoon. He was static on a TV set in a corner of the room in which I loved you. I couldn’t even bring his face to mind.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Haven, your husband—”

“Why were you following me, Walter?”

I wobbled in place for a moment, then stepped stiffly toward you, clutching an imaginary hat. “My intentions are honorable, Mrs. Haven.”

“Your what?”

I took your hand in both of mine, not caring how Victorian I seemed. “I saw you, just by chance, in Union Square—” What on earth was I trying to say? A humming sprang up somewhere behind my left ear, in what may or may not have been my temporal lobe. The chronologic wind was picking up again.

“I was following you,” I said. “I can’t deny it.”

“That wasn’t my question. I wanted to know—”

I grabbed you by the shoulders—roughly, clumsily—and kissed you. My eyes were clenched shut and there was a disturbance in my head like the buzzing of an ultrasonic toothbrush, but I could tell that I had caught you by surprise. I understood, as we kissed, that I was being offered the chance to step out of myself, to reset the clock: to start over from nothing, defenseless and naked, like a lizard wriggling out of its skin. Your body was tense, I remember, but your mouth was warm and open and alive. You smelled like rain and cigarettes and dill.

“Don’t get rid of him completely,” you breathed into my ear.

“Get rid of who?”

“The old you. Walter Tompkins. It turns out that I like him very much.”

I’d been thinking out loud—what else could it have been?—but I felt no embarrassment. “What is it you like? Of his many noble qualities, I mean.”

“I like his politeness. I like the look in his eyes when he’s trying to think. I like his terrible haircut. I like the jokes that he makes—the bad ones especially—and the way his head tilts when he’s listening. I like that he listens at all.” A shyness crept into your features. “I guess I like that he has time for me.”

“He has nothing but,” I said, and bent to kiss you again. It was true, Mrs. Haven: I might have nothing else to offer, but I had plenty of time. It amazed me to think that you might be neglected. How could your husband make such a beginner’s mistake?

You looked dazed and defiant when we stopped for breath. We stood an arm’s length apart, just as we’d been before, but now we were looking at each other without a trace of pretense, grinning complementary stupefied grins. You led me to the back of the apartment, mumbled something about the garden that I didn’t quite catch, then pulled a stack of framed museum posters out of a closet—the kind college freshmen tack on the walls of their dorms—and arranged them on the floor for me to see. At least six were reproductions of
The Kiss
.

“Gustav Klimt,” I said.

You watched me intently.

“Gustav Klimt,” I repeated. “From Vienna. Of the Viennese school.”

There were twelve posters in all, every last one a Klimt: gold and copper curlicues and gauzy-haired women with alabaster skin and privileged faces. The words
THE KISS
were printed across a few of them, leaving nothing to chance, in a font that looked lifted from one of my father’s dust jackets.

I noted all this carefully, Mrs. Haven, because I was stalling for time.

“He was definitely a painter,” I heard myself croak. “His use of gold leaf—”

“I can’t
stand
Klimt.” You shuddered. “His paintings are like butter-covered doughnuts.”

“Then why—”

“The Husband put them up yesterday. There’s one for every wall of this apartment. He screwed them in with an electric power drill and four-inch drywall screws.”

A truck passed outside, then another, rattling the windows in their frames. From somewhere nearby came the buzz of television. I made an effort not to wonder who else might be in the house.

“Four-inch screws, did you say?” I nodded to myself. “He certainly gave it the old college try.”

“He’s R. P. Haven, Walter. He gives
everything
the old college try.”

“What made him want to do all this, exactly?”

You gave a dull laugh. “I guess you could say he’s the possessive type.”

“So he knows about us?”

“I’ve only just met you, Walter. What’s there for him to know?” You sighed and let your head rest on my shoulder. “There’s no need for you to worry, anyhow. He’ll murder me before he murders you.”

I felt a twinge of dread at that, as anybody would; but you fit against me so well, notching your forehead between my neck and clavicle, that my fear felt like a kind of imposition. Your body was warmer than mine—much warmer—and your cropped hair spiraled clockwise at the crown. I looked down at your pale, goose-boned neck, the width of my palm exactly, and guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that it would be covered in freckles come summer.

“I’m reading a book,” you said suddenly. “A self-help book. I’d like to show you something.”

It was my turn to laugh. “What would
you
need a self-help book for?”

You pulled a slim, silver-bound book out of your jacket—a sleight-of-hand trick—and passed it to me. I read its title with a sinking feeling.

STRANGE CUSTOMS OF COURTSHIP & MARRIAGE

Authentic revelations of curious mating customs of all ages and all races, and the history and significance of modern marriage conventions

by

William J. Fielding, author of
The Caveman Within Us
, etc.

“Go ahead, Walter. Page sixty-eight.”

The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to educate myself about marriages, either modern or ancient; but I did as you asked. Page 68 was marked with a wrapper from a pack of Newport Lights:

TREE MARRIAGE.—Among the Brahmans of the south of India it is the established custom that a younger brother should not marry before an older one. To fulfil this requirement, when there is no satisfactory bride in sight for a senior brother, he is married to a tree, which leaves the younger one at liberty to take a wife.

Mock marriages are also carried out among the Punjab of India, in the case of a widower taking his third wife. It is celebrated with a certain tree or rosebush, and sometimes with a sheep, which is dressed up as a bride and is led by the groom around the sacrificial fire while the real bride reposes nearby.

“I see,” I said slowly, though of course I saw nothing. “How is this a self-help book, exactly?”

“My marriage is like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I married a tree, Walter.
That’s
what I mean.”

“Has your husband—was he married before? Or are you trying to tell me—”

“
Shh
, Walter,” you said, pulling me down onto the beanbag in a way that made all talk seem academic.

Less than a year later, when I was as good as dead to you, I read the rest of Fielding’s tawdry little survey—it’s next to me on the floor right now, in fact—and one passage, more than any other, took me back to that first bliss-drenched afternoon:

THE KISS.—In its sensory impulses, the kiss is the most direct prelude and incitement to sexual fulfilment. Surfaced by a tissue of full-blooded, sensitive membranes, moistened by the honey of salivary sweetness, shaped at their loveliest into a curvature that has been likened to Cupid’s bow, the lips seem especially contrived by nature for their role of allurement into the labyrinths of bodily desire. It is for this reason that restraint and discrimination should be the watchword of those who understand the real meaning and importance of the kiss, and who hold in high regard the sacredness of the forces which its casual bestowal may unwittingly release. Proceed with circumspection!

VIII

THE NEXT TWENTY-ODD YEARS
, during which the world went loudly and pompously down the pissoir, were the happiest of Kaspar Toula’s life.

His long-departed father, in the course of his inevitable dinnertime rants—on the evils of the automobile, for example, or the cleansing properties of cellulose—had been fond of quoting a Saxon manic-depressive named Friedrich Nietzsche: “All history is the experimental refutation of the so-called
moral order
of things.” And the brash and pockmarked twentieth century, in all the brutal enthusiasm of its adolescence, seemed to be doing its frenzied best to prove him right.

My grandfather barely had time to finish his studies, make his bid for Sonja’s hand in marriage, and receive his
Schwiegervater
’s halfhearted blessing before the empire that both his father and his father-in-law so myopically adored began to come apart like sodden paper. The Czechs, the Magyars, the Slovaks, the Serbs and the Croats—all of whom, admittedly, had exhibited signs of petulance before—now seemed more interested in pitching fits in parliament than in basking in their emperor’s esteem. The bacillus of nationalism had infested all but the remotest crannies of the empire by the time the Kaiser’s cousin had his celebrated rendezvous with a Serbian anarchist’s bullet; it had simply been a question of which member of the imperial family was going to have their candle guttered first. (In certain back rooms and furnished cellars of the capital, money had in fact been wagered on this very question.) But no one—not the bookies, not the anarchists, and least of all the imperial family itself—foresaw the conflagration that would follow.

Sonja Toula, née Silbermann, was a fervent backer of the Serbian cause from the start of the war, and stayed true to her colors even when her husband was sent to the front in a uniform that still smelled faintly of the corpse who’d worn it last. By that late date, a fair portion of the civilized world had muddied its spats, and it was clear to every half-wit that the “six weeks’ war” the Kaiser had promised was a fairy story, albeit one that he himself believed. Kaspar served that sad old fool without complaint, and witnessed his due share of horrors, some of which he committed himself. He lost two fingers in the war, and the top of an ear, but he rarely regretted his injuries: they were his only proof that the war, and the empire he’d fought for, had been more than some preadolescent dream. And there were moments, Mrs. Haven, on his very worst days, when not even his missing fingers could convince him.

The citation for bravery he’d won—a weightless nub of nickel-plated tin, for some obscure reason in the shape of a winged horse—was mothballed away and forgotten as soon as the fighting was over. Years later, when the family was hurriedly throwing everything it could into a clutch of pasteboard steamer trunks, the medal would find its way into the hands of his younger daughter, who brought it to him for an explanation. Gentian never forgot her father’s answer. “It’s a pegasus,
Schätzchen
—an imaginary animal. Papa got it as a present, from a very old man, for defending an imaginary kingdom.”

*   *   *

There were quite a few reasons for Kaspar’s happiness during his twenties and thirties, from his hard-won advancement at the university to the deepening of his understanding of the physical world; but the most obvious, even to Kaspar himself, was the indecorous and overwrought passion he continued to feel for his wife. Practically from birth—or so it seemed to him—he had been aware that the elegant, filigreed, eminently reasonable world around him was doomed to collapse under its own weight, like some elaborate architectural folly; the obvious response, to any sensible observer, was to have as little to do with such a world as possible. Kaspar had Sonja, after all, and the well-appointed home they’d made together. It seemed lunacy to ask for more than that.

Sonja had grown more deliberate as she came into the fullness of her years, more austere of temperament, more assured of her intelligence and grace. Her political convictions had only deepened as she aged; her smock, however, lay neatly put away in the same cabinet that housed her husband’s medal. Socialists and anarchists and communists—“your
ism
-ists,” as Kaspar (more or less affectionately) called them—came and went as if the apartment were a well-appointed flophouse, as they’d done since the end of the war; but now they looked and behaved less like revolutionaries than like librarians, or attorneys-at-law, or even patent clerks. And they tipped their hats politely to him as they came and went.