Flights of Love, page 23
She never noticed that what lay behind all his objections was a general rejection. But once when he proved especially stubborn about holding fast to some foolish objection, she asked him with an annoyed laugh what it was he actually wanted. To go on living the life of the last few years?
6
THEY RENTED a large car, a convertible with air conditioning, a CD player, and all sorts of electronic gadgetry. They bought a big stack of CD’s, ones they loved and others just hit-or-miss. When they reached the cape from where they could see the Pacific for the first time, his wife put on a Schubert symphony. He would have preferred to listen to the American station that played music from his student years. He would also have rather stayed in the car instead of climbing out with her into the rain and just standing there. But the symphony matched the rain, the gray sky, and the gray rolling waves, and he had the feeling he had no right to disturb his wife’s production. She had been driving and found the little road that led to the beach. She had remembered that there was a sheet of blue plastic in the trunk and wrapped him and herself in it. They stood on the beach, smelled the sea, listened to Schubert, gulls, and rain on the plastic, and gazed at a piece of bright evening sky behind the rain clouds in the west. The air was cool, but damp and heavy.
After a while he couldn’t take it under the plastic any longer, stood there hesitating in the rain for a moment, then walked across the sand and into the water. The water was cold, his wet shoes were heavy, his wet pants clung to his legs and belly. There was not a trace of the lightness that the body usually has in water, but he felt light, and slapped at the water and let the waves knock him over. His wife was still thrilled by his spontaneity as they lay in bed that evening. He was more startled and embarrassed.
They found a rhythm for their journey, which brought them about a hundred miles farther south each day. They frittered away the mornings, made frequent stops, visited national parks and vineyards, and walked for hours along the beach. In the evenings they would take whatever they found, sometimes a shabby motel by the highway—with large rooms, the smell of disinfectant, and a TV bolted to the wall at eye level—and sometimes a bed-and-breakfast in a residential area. They would both be tired by early evening. At least that’s what they told one another as they lay there in bed with a book and a bottle of wine, and his eyes would grow heavy and he would turn out the light on his nightstand. When he woke up again around midnight one evening, though, she was still reading.
Sometimes he arranged it so that he would wait and watch her come toward him. He would have her let him out at a restaurant and wait by the door until she had parked the car and then walked from the parking lot across the road. Or he would run ahead on the beach, turn around and watch her moving toward him. It was always beautiful, watching her figure and the way she walked, but it left him sad at the same time.
7
THE COAST and the roads in Oregon were fogbound. In the morning they hoped the weather would be better by noon, and in the evening they put their hope in the next day. But fog lay over the road again, hung low in the forests, and enveloped the farms. If the map had not put a name to the towns they drove through, often just a few houses, they would have missed them. Sometimes they drove for an hour or two through forests without seeing a single house or meeting an oncoming car or passing one, either. They got out at one point and the sound of the idling engine bounced off the mass of trees on both sides of the road, stayed close without fading, but was simultaneously muted by the fog. They turned off the engine and there was not a sound to be heard, no creaking branches, no birds, no cars, no ocean.
With the last town well behind them and the next one still thirty miles up the road, a sign announced a gas station ahead. Then they were there—a large graveled area, two pumps, a lamp, and beyond the gravel a house blurry in the fog. He braked, turned onto the gravel, and stopped at one of the pumps. They waited. When he got out to go knock at the door, it opened and a woman stepped out. She walked across the gravel, said hi, grabbed the nozzle, turned the crank, and started filling the tank. She stood beside the car, holding the nozzle in her right hand, her left propped on her hip. She noticed that he hadn’t taken his eyes off her.
“The nozzle’s broken, so I have to stay here. But I’ll clean your windshield in a sec.”
“Isn’t it lonely here?”
She gave him a puzzled, cautious look. She was no longer young and her caution was the caution of a woman who had got involved too often and been too often disappointed.
“The last town was twenty miles back and the next one’s not for another thirty—isn’t it a little . . . I mean, don’t you feel lonely out here? Do you live alone?”
She saw the seriousness, the concentration, and the tenderness in his eyes, and smiled. But because she was not about to be enchanted by his eyes, there was mockery in her smile. He smiled back, happy and embarrassed by what he would have to say next.
“You’re beautiful.”
She blushed a little, though it was barely noticeable under all her freckles, and stopped smiling. Now she was looking at him seriously too. Beautiful? Her beauty had faded, and she knew it, even if she could still attract men, still arouse their desire and pride—and still scare them, too. She scrutinized his face.
“Yes, it’s lonely, but I’ve gotten used to it. Besides . . .” She hesitated, looked down at the nozzle, looked back up—directly at him—her face really red now, and stood tall, defiantly confessing her longing. “Besides, I won’t be alone forever.”
She stayed like that for a moment—standing tall, blushing, eye to eye with him. The tank was full, she screwed the cap back on, stepped away from the car, and hung the nozzle on the pump. She bent down, took a sponge from a bucket, flipped the washers back, and cleaned the windshield. He watched her curiously eyeing his wife, who was reading the map spread over her knees and glanced up briefly to nod at the woman and smile at him, but then went back to her map.
He found it disconcerting to stand there beside her doing nothing while she worked. At the same time he liked looking at her, liked watching her. She wasn’t wearing jeans with a checkered shirt or a faded blue dress, but dark blue overalls, the same color as the logo of the gas station, with a white T-shirt underneath. She was robust, but had a lightness about her. There was a grace to her movements, as if she enjoyed both the robustness and lightness of her body. One strap of her overalls slipped off her shoulder, and she pushed it back up with one finger; taken together, both touched him like some shared intimacy.
When she had finished cleaning the windows, he gave her money, and as she started back to the house to get change he walked with her. After a few steps together across the crunching gravel, she laid her hand on his arm.
“You don’t have to come along. I’ll bring the change out.”
8
SO HE STOOD there out in the drive, halfway between his car and her house. She went inside, the door closed behind her.
How long, he asked himself, do I have to decide? One minute? Two? How long will it take her to get the change? How organized is she? Does she have a cash register with all the bills and coins separated, so that she only has to take out a couple of coins here and a couple of bills there? Is she hurrying, or does she know I’d be happy to have a few minutes more?
He looked down at the ground in front of him and saw that the gravel was wet from the fog. He turned a piece over with the tip of his shoe; he wanted to know if the gravel was wet underneath, and it was. He had taught his staff that thinking and deciding are two different things, that thinking doesn’t necessarily result in the right decision, or any decision at all, but instead can make a decision so complicated and difficult that it can paralyze decision making. Thinking requires time, deciding requires courage, that’s what he used to say, and he knew that what he lacked now was not time to think but the courage to decide. He also knew that life keeps an account of both the decisions we don’t make and those we do. If he were to decide not to remain here, then he would drive on, even if he had not made a decision to drive on. Stay here—what should I say to her? Should I ask if I can stay? What would she answer? Wouldn’t she have to say no, even if she wanted to say yes, because she had to refuse the responsibility my question imposed on her? When she steps out the door again, I’ll have to be standing here with my suitcase and my bag, and the car will have to be gone. But what if she won’t have me? Or if she wants me now, but tires of me later? Or if later I don’t want to stay any more? No, that’s not how it’ll be. If we want each other now, then we’ll want each other forever.
He walked toward the car. He wanted to tell his wife that they had made a mistake, that they couldn’t make their marriage whole again, even if they wanted. That there had always been a sadness in his joy these last weeks, and that he didn’t want to live with that sadness any longer. That he knew he was crazy to risk everything for this woman he didn’t know and who didn’t know him. That he would rather be crazy than stay reasonable and sad.
When he was only a few steps away from the car, his wife looked up. She looked at him, leaned across the driver’s seat, rolled down the window, and called out something to him. He didn’t understand. She repeated that she had found the big dunes on the map. At breakfast they had remembered seeing pictures somewhere of big dunes, and had been looking for them on the map with no success. She had found them now. It wasn’t that far, and they’d make it by evening. She was beaming.
The joy she took in little things—how often she had surprised him with that and made him happy. And the trust with which she had shared her joy – it was a child’s trust, full of the expectation that other people are good, will be delighted by good things, and will respond with kindness. He hadn’t seen his wife like this for years, only in the last few weeks had her trust come back.
He saw her joy. It welcomed and embraced him. Was he done? Could they drive off?
He nodded, half-walked, half-ran, climbed into the car, and turned on the engine. He drove off without looking back.
9
HIS WIFE told him about how she had found the dunes on the map, and why they hadn’t found them that morning. Told him when they would arrive that evening and where they would be able to stay. How far they needed to travel the next day. How high the dunes were.
After a while she noticed that something was wrong. He was driving slowly, staring attentively into the fog, responding to what she said with an occasional grunt of agreement or encouragement—if he didn’t want to speak, that was all right, but not those lips pressed tightly together and the tension in his cheeks. She asked him what was wrong. Was it something about the engine or the tires or the way the car was handling? Something about the fog or the road? Or something else? Her questions were casual at first, but when he didn’t answer, they began to betray her worry. Wasn’t he feeling well? Was he in pain? When he pulled over to the grassy shoulder and stopped, she was certain that it was his heart or some circulatory problem. He sat there frozen, his hands on the wheel, gazing straight ahead.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, and was about to go on to say that he just needed a moment, but the words had released the strain that had kept his lips tight, his cheek muscles tense, and the tears back. He hadn’t wept for decades. He tried to choke back the sobs, but his choking turned into a whimper and the whimper into a howl. He made a motion with his arms that was meant as an apology, an attempt to explain that it had just come over him, that he didn’t want to cry but couldn’t help it. But then the urge to apologize and explain was washed away in a flood of tears, and he simply sat there, his hands in his lap, his head drooping, his body shaking, and howled. She took him in her arms, but he didn’t yield to her embrace, just continued to sit there as before. When the weeping wouldn’t stop, she decided to find a hotel in the nearest town and maybe call a doctor. She was about to try to lift him and push him across to the other seat, but he slid over on his own.
She drove off. He went on weeping. He wept for his dream, for what life had offered him and how he had resisted or failed it, for what was irretrievable and irreplaceable. Nothing returned, nothing could be repeated. He wept for not wanting what he wanted more passionately and for often not knowing what it was he wanted. He wept for what had been difficult and bad about his marriage, but also for what had been beautiful in it. He wept for the disappointments they had inflicted on themselves and for the hopes and expectations they had shared these last weeks. Not a thought crossed his mind that didn’t have its sad, painful side, even if it was only the transience of all things beautiful and happy. Love, their marriage when it had been good, the good years with their children, the rewards of his job, his enthusiasm for books and music—it was all gone. His memory presented image after image to his inner eye, but before he could examine an image it was stamped in fat letters enclosed in a fat circle: Gone.
Gone? It was not simply gone, hadn’t just slipped away behind his back without his doing anything. He himself was destroying the world that their love had created. And from now on that world would cease to exist— not even a black-and-white world instead of color, but simply no world at all.
He had no tears left. He was exhausted and empty. It dawned on him that he had been weeping for his marriage as if it were gone for good, for his wife as if he had lost her.
She looked across to him and smiled at him. “Well?”
They had passed a sign with the name of a town, its population, and height above sea level. A few hundred people, he thought, and already a little town. It lies only a few feet above the sea; the sea must be very near, even if you can’t see it for the fog.
“Would you stop, please?”
She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. Now, he thought, now. “I’m going to get out. I’m not going any farther. I know that I’m behaving impossibly. I should have known better. But I don’t really know how I could have known any better. We’re struggling to put things back together again. But we can’t and I don’t want to live with the shattered pieces. I just want to try one more time.”
“What? What do you want to try?”
“Life, love, a new beginning, everything in fact.” Under her startled, wounded gaze, it all sounded childish to him, too. What would he do, what would he do here, how would he live, what would become of his life back home—if she were to ask he would be unable to give her any answers.
“Let’s drive to the dunes. You can still run away. I can’t hold you. Let’s talk, once you’re out of your hole. Maybe you’re right, maybe we haven’t really got a good hold on what we did or didn’t have together. Then we’ll get it.” She had her hand on his knee. “Okay?”
She was right. Couldn’t they at least drive to the town by the dunes and talk it all through? Or couldn’t he at least tell her just to leave him here and drive on, that he needed a couple of days to himself and would join her, for the flight back at the latest? And didn’t he have to tell his wife about his dream and about the woman at the gas station? Wouldn’t that be the honest thing to do?
“I can only run away.” He got out. “Would you open the trunk?”
She shook her head.
He got out, walked around the car, opened the door on her side, and pulled the little lever between the door and the seat. The trunk lid sprang open. He took out his suitcase and his bag and set them on the ground. Then he slammed the trunk and walked back to her door. It was still open. His wife looked up at him. He gently, calmly closed the door, but it felt as if he were slamming it in her face. She went on looking up at him. He picked up his suitcase and his bag and started walking. He took a step and didn’t know if he could take another, and once he had done it, if he could take another, and another. If he stopped, he would have to turn around, turn back, and get into the car. And if she didn’t drive away soon, he could not go on. Drive, he begged, drive.
Then she turned on the ignition and drove away. He didn’t turn around until he could no longer hear the car. By then, the fog had swallowed it up.
10
HE FOUND a motel and made a deal for a cheap rate for the next whole month. He found a restaurant with a counter, Formica tables, plastic benches, and a jukebox. He drank a lot, was absurdly cheerful at some moments, but could have started weeping again at others, if he hadn’t told himself that he had wept enough for one day. It was the only restaurant in town, and he kept one ear cocked the whole evening, waiting for a car to pull up, for someone to get out—and for the footsteps on the gravel to be his wife’s. His waiting was full of longing and full of fear.
The next morning he walked to the sea. Once again fog hung over the beach, the sky and sea were gray, and the air was warm, damp, and muffled. He had the feeling he had an infinite amount of time.
1 Heinrich Heine, Deutschland: A Winter’ s Tale (Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1997).
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
JOHN E. WOODS is the distinguished translator of many books—-most notably Arno Schmidt’s Evening Edge in Gold, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize, in 1987; Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, The Last World (for which he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1991), and The Dog King; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain (for which he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 1996), and Doctor Faustus; Ingo Schulze’s 33 Moments of Happiness and Simple Stories; Jan Philip Reemtsma’s More Than a Champion; and The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe. He lives in San Diego, California.
