The Lost Time Accidents (7 page)

“I love you, Mrs. Haven.”

You pursed your lips at that, looking more prim than I’d have thought possible, and patted me very gently on the cheek. “That’s nice of you, Walter. How soon are you going to be sick?”

“That isn’t important. I want to—”

At that moment my cousin reeled into the room, leading a sniggering young man by the collar of what appeared—from what I could make out—to be a uniform of the merchant marine. The two of them grappled for a while at the foot of the bed, taking no notice of us whatsoever, butting foreheads like amorous elk. I’d never seen my cousin behave in this way, though I can’t honestly say I was surprised. Something about Van has always brought late-night nature programming to mind.

“Hello, cousin,” I groaned.

Van gave a slight jerk, as though he’d been stuck with a pin; the boy closed his eyes and flopped onto the bed. You sat up and arranged your hair and dress.

“Jesus, Waldy. What are you doing down there?” Van squinted at us for a moment. “That can’t be Richard Haven’s fucking wife.”

“This man is ill,” you said politely.

“What have you got to say for yourself, Waldy? You’re sick? Is that true?”

“It will be soon,” I managed to reply.

As I write this, Mrs. Haven, it occurs to me that our romance was bookended—set in parentheses, as it were—by visits to the toilet to be sick. You waited just outside the bathroom door, chatting cordially with my cousin; I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror (scruffy brown hair in need of a cut, startled-looking gray eyes, general air of defeat) and resigned myself to the inevitable. Our illicit encounter, such as it was, was over. Our desert island had been colonized.

Van was gone when I finally emerged, but you were just where I’d left you, leafing through an Equus Special Blend brochure. I stood beside you sheepishly, steadying myself against the wall, waiting for you to acknowledge me. When you did I knew at once that it was over.

“I have to go,” you said flatly. “The Husband is waiting. I told him that I’d left something upstairs.”

“That something being me.”

“You don’t understand the chance we’re taking, Walter.” You looked suddenly tired. “He has a possessive streak—a nasty one. If he starts to suspect—”

“I’m not afraid of him. Let him come up.”

Your reply was a yawn, which was what I deserved. It’s typical of my cursed nature that I discounted the fact that you were risking your marriage—and most likely far more—by waiting while I threw up in the bathroom. All I cared about was that you’d soon be gone.

“Mrs. Haven, I feel it incumbent on me—”

“You talk funny,” you said. “Like an actor playing the part of a college professor. I’m not sure I like it.”

“I come from an odd family. Let’s blame it on them.”

“What sort of a family?”

“Millionaire recluses.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, the way you talk.” You considered me a moment. “I like it.”

“You’ve already made up your mind?”

“That’s right, Walter. Sometimes it goes fast.”

I put my hands on your shoulders. “Mrs. Haven—”

“It seems a bit weird, your calling me that now.”

“Why?”

“No one’s ever called me that before they kissed me.”

For some reason this stopped me cold. “You haven’t told me your name,” I said. “Your given name, that is.”

“I guess this means we’re in a stalemate, Walter.”

We stared at each other, both of our expressions guarded, as though it had just occurred to us that we were strangers. “My name isn’t Walter,” I said finally. “It’s Waldemar.”

You narrowed your eyes. “What sort of a name is Waldemar, if you don’t mind my asking? Are you a wizard?”

“It’s a family name. It came from my grandfather’s brother.”

“That
family
of yours again. They keep popping up.”

“Mrs. Haven, I’d like very much to—”

“Your breath smells like toffee,” you said, wrinkling your nose. “Don’t operate any heavy machinery tonight, Walter. Okay? Take a cab.”

I took a step toward you—more of a lunge, really—but my cause was clearly hopeless. You were at the head of the staircase already, frowning at me slightly, as though I were becoming hard to see. All the seconds and minutes that had hung suspended since I’d met you hit the floor with a crash, scattering like ball bearings across the parquet. I watched your cropped head spiral out of view as smoothly and irrevocably as the water in the toilet had just done.

A thought came to me then, or the ghost of a thought, but I flushed it irritably from my mind. It had to do—of all possible thoughts, in that place, at that instant—with time, and with our progress inside it. I found myself spinning clockwise—the opposite spin to your descent of the staircase, to the swirling of the toilet, to the direction in which I wanted time to move—but it had no effect at all on your departure. At the end of the hall, like a frigate coming over the horizon, my cousin drifted grimly into view.

“What are you trying to do, Tolliver? Can you answer me that?”

“I’m putting up resistance,” I mumbled. “I’m testing a theory. By turning in the contrary direction to the prevailing—”

“Shut up, asshole. What the hell were you doing with R. P. Haven’s wife?”

I came to rest and stared into Van’s eyes. He looked chillingly sober.

“I wasn’t doing anything, really. I found her under the counter. She was—”

“Do you have any idea how
important
Haven is for me? For my company?”

I’ve always had trouble distinguishing rhetorical questions from literal ones, Mrs. Haven, and this was no exception. “I have a hunch,” I said carefully, “from the look on your face, that he’s one of your principal backers.”

Van said nothing for a long, reflective moment.

“Get out of my house, Tolliver.”

IV

KASPAR AND SONJA’S LOVE
flowered lushly, Mrs. Haven, as secret liaisons will—but Waldemar had secrets of his own.

The cause of his mysterious sleeping habits and absences from school was, in fact, a middle-aged widow with a rose-colored villa, just as the departmental wags had whispered; but their mutual passion took a form that would have surprised even the most imaginative of gossips. The widow Bemmelmans—Lucrezia, to her intimates—was a fearsome opponent of vice in all its irruptions, from child prostitution to cardsharping to the intemperate consumption of coffee. In his role as her favorite, Kaspar’s brother had taken to spending his evenings at the widow’s side, assisting her in composing a staggering number of articles, letters, and feuilletons, of which the following text (concerning the “waltz king” of Vienna, Johann Strauss) is as good an example as any:

A dangerous power has been put into the hands of this dark man. African and hot-blooded, rabid with life, he exorcises the devil from our bodies; his own limbs no longer belong to him when the thunderstorm of the waltz is let loose. His fiddle-bow dances in his arms, and the tempo animates his feet; bacchantically the young couples waltz—lust in its purest form let loose. No God inhibits them.

Whether lust of any kind—other than a kind of righteous bloodlust—was let loose in their late-night drafting sessions, it was clear enough to Kaspar that the widow Bemmelmans (or the “Brown Widow,” as she would come to be known) had a hold over Waldemar that ran deeper than any shared schoolmarmishness. The precise nature of this hold continued to elude my grandfather, try as he might to divine it; but he was certain that the two of them had some skeleton in the cupboard, and that it was the reason for his brother’s furtiveness. He made a point of telling Waldemar about his affair with Sonja Silbermann in rapturous detail, in the hope of bridging the widening gulf between them, but his brother barely seemed to hear. Kaspar forced himself to take an interest in the widow’s pet crusades, and even went so far as to attend one of her gatherings; this, however, proved an even worse miscalculation. He made the fatal blunder, Mrs. Haven, of bringing his new
bonne amie
along.

Their romance was barely a month old when Kaspar and Sonja paid their call on the widow Bemmelmans, but already my grandfather’s fitted shirts and fawn-colored suits had been exchanged for a brown linen jacket that looked perpetually slept in, and blue canvas trousers—as shapeless as the dresses back in Znojmo—that he’d bought from a bricklayer’s apprentice. His nervousness at meeting his brother’s benefactress was somewhat offset by Sonja’s surprising decision to wear a delightful saffron sundress, but his misgivings returned at the sight of the widow’s footman, a badger-faced giant with a waxed blond mustache, who wore the uniform of a Hungarian hussar.

The widow received them in a ballroom on the villa’s second floor. Waldemar was there, as were half a dozen other young men, arranged about the room in self-consciously romantic poses, like actors in some grim tableau vivant. The widow was the only person seated, on a leopard-skin couch that appeared to take up a third of the room. A pair of sabers lay crossed on the waxed floor before her; it was unclear, at least to Kaspar, whether their function was decorative or sporting. He found himself picturing the widow Bemmelmans, surrounded by her eager coterie, officiating at round-robin tournaments, perhaps even at duels.

“
Willkommen
, children,” the widow said langorously, extending her arms. “It always heartens us to see new faces.” Sonja curtsied prettily, doing an excellent job of disguising her bemusement; Kaspar hesitated, attempting to catch Waldemar’s eye, then took the nearest of the widow’s hands and kissed it. She was frailer than he’d pictured her, long since gone androgynous with age; her sharp velvet collar and white, shrublike eyebrows gave her the look of a clean-shaven Bismarck. She stiffened momentarily when he brought her fingers to his lips, then surprised him by clamping her hand on his forearm and pulling herself up from the couch. “It’s time for dinner, Herr Toula,” she said, extending her left hand absently to Sonja. “Kindly escort this ancient piece of crockery down the hall.” The honor guard broke rank—grudgingly, it seemed to Kaspar—to let the three of them pass. His brother was the very last to follow.

*   *   *

Dinner was surprisingly opulent, given the austerity of the house: trout-filled potato dumplings, sweetbreads in aspic, beef tongue, bitter gherkins, and a succulent
Kalbsbraten
, followed by a tray of flavored ices. Kaspar was confident—almost certain, in fact—that the gherkins were his family’s own, but he took care not to embarrass his brother. After the requisite pleasantries, the talk turned to the widow’s most recent campaign: abolishing the Washerwomen’s Ball.

“The Washerwomen’s Ball?” Kaspar said. “I’m not sure what that is. Perhaps Fräulein Silbermann—”

“My brother spends all of his time at the university,” Waldemar cut in, to all appearances embarrassed already.

“As well he should!” said the widow. “It’s to your credit, Herr Toula, that you’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a filthy extravagance,” one of her courtiers chirped. “The women wear rags on their heads—women of the best families—and their underthings only, which means—in most cases—that their most intimate garments, by which I mean to say, if you’ll excuse the term, their
knickers
—”

“It’s a kind of masquerade,” said the widow, silencing the boy with a glance. “The gentry of this city, out of a mixture of lasciviousness and boredom, dress up as their inferiors, and behave accordingly. It’s a way of getting past their inhibitions.”

“You sound postively Freudian, Frau Bemmelmans,” said Sonja.

Slowly and ratchetingly, with an almost audible creak, the widow’s head revolved in her direction. “I beg your pardon, fräulein,” she said dryly. “I’m an adherent of no party or religion. My views are my own.”

“I applaud that, Frau Bemmelmans. But I was referring to the teachings of Dr. Freud, a physician in the Ninth District, who specializes in bourgeois hysteria. He and his disciples believe that our actions are guided by a second self: an animus, so to speak, hidden from the conscious mind—”

“That sounds like a religion to me,” the widow said, snapping her head back into place. “I’ve never heard such idiotic prattle.”

Sonja gave a high-pitched, brittle laugh. Kaspar had heard this particular laugh before—on a number of occasions, in fact—and he knew enough to take it as a warning. “I see your point, Frau Bemmelmans,” he said quickly. “I think what Fräulein Silbermann means, however, is that—”

“I went to the Washerwomen’s Ball last year,” said Sonja. “I rather enjoyed myself. It helped me to get past my inhibitions.”

“Is that so,” said the widow. “How interesting.”

“I think what Fräulein Silbermann means,” Kaspar put in, laughing weakly, “is simply that—”

“Oh
yes
,” Sonja singsonged. “I felt just like the purest child of nature.” She sighed prettily and took Kaspar’s hand. “Didn’t I, honeypot?”

“Sonja,” Kaspar stuttered, doing his best not to redden. “I really don’t—”

“And afterward Kaspar took me home and gave me a thorough, uninhibited buggering. It really was
extravagantly
filthy.”

No one spoke for a medium-sized eternity. All eyes—Sonja’s included—were fixed on the widow. Now would be the moment for those sabers to come out, Kaspar thought. But the widow, when she finally replied, was more decorous and genial than ever.

“By all reports the balls are colorful affairs—one can see how they might magnetize the young. Citizens of all breeds and pedigrees intermingle freely there, or so I understand.” She turned her mannish face toward the assembled gallants, allowing the entire room to bask in her goodwill. “I’m told the Israelites, especially, lend a feral sort of spice to the proceedings.”

The specifics of Sonja’s reply are not recorded in my grandfather’s entry for the fourth of October, but it sufficed to bar her—and Kaspar as well—from the villa indefinitely. What my grandfather does describe, however—and in great detail, as if he knew that it would prove significant—was Waldemar’s response to Sonja’s antics. While the ardent young men around him rolled their eyes and gnashed their teeth, Waldemar sat straight-backed in his chair, as still as the bust of Schubert on the mantelpiece behind him. There was something in his eyes, however—or
behind
his eyes, Kaspar wrote, crossing out the preceding phrase—that gave the lie to his debonair manner. He was looking at Sonja more closely than Kaspar had seen him look at anything.