The Edit Page 20

  I assured her I would be better by evening. I just needed a little time in bed.

  I heard Father’s gruff voice after Mother left the alcove: protesting tones. Her soothing ones. Footsteps drew near, then receded. I felt a trickle of sweat under my left arm. Finally, the front door opened, then closed with a heavy finality. Alone at last, for they had taken my little sister with them, too. Alone. The delicious freedom of it. It is always that which we don’t have that we value the most. For one forever in the midst of family, to be apart and separate is salvation. Being alone held no fear of loneliness for me.

  I waited several minutes until I was sure that Mother and Father had forgotten nothing, were not returning, then I let my hand trail down to my middle slowly. I luxuriated in this—in the expectation of touch. My love organ was responding to the thought of touch, twitching toward my snaking hand.

  You see, Father was right. No telling what one would get up to with enough privacy. Masturbation was not something I felt guilty about. It was something that felt good, something that I might have enjoyed doing with a girl instead but was far too embarrassed and shy to attempt. Even if I had known a promising girl. Which I didn’t. So I enjoyed my own touch instead. No use denying myself pleasure just because of the lack of a partner, I reasoned. I know how my father felt on this score, and that is why I waited for Sundays when I might be alone: unafraid of interruption, discovery, calumny.

  So I lingered over the snail-creep of fingers over my belly, my penis jerking spasmodically in anticipation. There was a knock at the door. I lay perfectly still. My parents would have used their key. This was a visitor. A visitor who need not know I was home. Another knock followed by a voice: “Hello, hello. Your father asked me to check in on you. Wake up.”

  It was Frau Wotruba, our recently widowed neighbor. So the old man had foiled my plans after all.

  “Schatz? Are you there or do I call the municipal fire department?”

  I called out that I was here, to wait a moment. I threw a bathrobe on, hoping it would hide any lingering signs of my excitement, and went to the door. She smiled mischievously when I opened it.

  “Up to your old tricks again, I see.” She rumpled my hair.

  I turned a violent red. How could she know? I stammered a protest: I was sick, I had been asleep.

  “We know better, though, don’t we?” She winked at me and a blast like pressurized steam went straight down my stomach to my groin. “What is it this time? Shatterhand or Winnetou? Lord knows you wouldn’t play sick just to brush up on your Latin text.”

  The crimson at my cheeks began to fade.

  “Well, which is it?”

  “You know me too well, Purgi.” She forbade me, when alone, to call her Frau Wotruba. She’d much rather I use her Christian name, Walpurga: Purgi to her friends.

  “‘Frau Wotruba’ makes me feel so old. Like I should have stockings rolled around my knees and wear housecoats and my hair in a kerchief. And I’m not that far gone, am I?”

  Indeed she was not, dressed today in a simple muslin dress that clung to her every curve and showed off the beginning of the plunge between her breasts. She looked hardly old enough to be called a frau, if you didn’t know she had been married and widowed already. And if you did, one look into her eyes would let you know she was not a staid old widow. Humor also showed there, and warmth, and a great deal of playfulness. I loved Purgi’s eyes. I loved looking into them.

  “Sorry to bother you, Schatz. Your papa requested it. Demanded it would be closer to the truth. But you look fine. A little reading isn’t going to kill you. I need my beauty rest, too.”

  “Were you out late last night, Purgi?”

  Suddenly, I did not want her to go. I wanted to hear about her social life. I sometimes saw a beau of hers drive up in the sleekest of roadsters with its top down, pull to the curb, and gracefully leap over the door of the car instead of opening it. He was a tall blond man who wore tennis whites most of the year and walked as if he had India rubber balls in his arches. Though I pretended to shun such role models, I secretly wanted to look just like him. I wanted to leap over car doors, but we had no car. My only door was the paisley curtain separating my alcove from the rest of the apartment.

  “Dancing.”

  She said the word with enough verve and pep to conjure up the entire evening for me: Moonlight in the Volksgarten outdoor dance arena. Her escort swirling her around the podium to the new jazz tunes from America. Some ornate newfangled cocktails on the candlelit tables when they sit a dance out, sweating and laughing, squeezing hands under the table. A kiss on the neck, perhaps more in the dimly lit garden as they sway to the music.

  “Is he a good dancer, your friend?”

  “Marvelous!” She laughed her high exquisite laugh. “But what do you know about my friend?”

  “Is he the one in the roadster?”

  “Arnulf? No, Arnulf and I … have gone our separate ways.”

  Her face turned so tragic at the mention of him that I was deeply sorry to have brought him up.

  “Do you dance?” she asked.

  I mumbled something about taking waltz lessons at Dobmaier’s.

  “No, silly. I mean jitterbug, Charleston. Fun dances.”

  I had never heard of them.

  “Of course,” I told her.

  She grabbed my hand. “Come on, then. I’ve got some new records. Let’s dance.”

  I made no protest as she dragged me, still in my pajamas and robe, to her apartment down the hall. This was night and day as compared to ours. Mother loved heavy somber furniture, Turkish carpets, and tasteful prints on the wall. But Purgi’s place was something out of a new world—all chrome and glass and lightness. Some mad swirls of color on canvas on the walls. Clothes strewn here and there. Everything in disarray. I thought I saw a pair of knickers by a rattan couch and blushed once again.

  “What’ll it be? Glenn Miller? Oh, let’s do Glenn Miller!”

  “Sure.” It was as if I were giving her a present.

  There came a lovely and pure line of trumpet—high and tight, followed by drums such as I had never heard before, and Purgi began swaying to the music like a willow in the breeze. Watching her ecstasy at the music, I was suddenly filled with the same feeling she was exhibiting. But in me it was translated to sexual excitement, and I tried hard to hide it with my hands in front of me. She reached out to take hold of me and dance, but I had to hide the bulge and acted as if suddenly I did not want to dance, as if the music did not please me.

  She stopped swaying. “Shall we listen to some Benny Goodman then?”

  “I’d better go back,” I said. “Mother and Father—”

  “Oh, they won’t be back home for hours. Not to worry.”

  And she grabbed my hands, brushing my erection as she did so. It stood out like a conductor’s baton.

  She giggled. “So that’s what’s wrong. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s healthy. With the right person.”

  And she led me to the center of her living room floor and taught me the magical steps of swing. Then after what seemed hours and hours of this glorious free motion, she took me to her huge round bed and taught me how to dance without feet. …

  “But that’s not the way it happened!”

  “It’s the way it should have happened.”

  “I won’t have you mucking about with my life, Miss O’Brien. When we started this, it was only a matter of a little editing here and there. I don’t want a collaborator. It’s my life!”

  “Saying it’s so makes it so.”

  “No haiku today, please, Miss O’Brien.”

  “I mean if you say a thing often enough, it will be so. It becomes a reality.”

  “But you can’t play fast and loose with the historical record like that. I was never an onanist. Portraying me as such highly perturbs me. Even your decadent D. H. Law
rence knew enough to condemn the practice: the cancer of the twentieth century, he called it. Moreover, I did not even see Frau Wotruba at age fourteen. All my experiences with her were confined to an earlier age. And having Goodman and Miller on the gramophone. They don’t fit that period at all.”

  “I’m not interested in the small historical truths any more than you Nazis were. You rearranged history to fit your needs. Don’t carp at me about historical accuracy. I repeat—we are talking about what should have been, not what was. And you can rewrite your own history. You can free yourself of the burden of it by writing it the way you want to make it.”

  “But it already is the way I want it.”

  “A child pawed over by a bitch in heat? I doubt it. I doubt that’s really the way you want it.”

  “It’s always the same with you. Sex, sex. You dwell on it.”

  “If I do, it’s only because I know that a society sick in its sex is a sick society. And I don’t mean simply one without so-called free or gymnastic sex. I mean one deeply injured in its heart and soul as well as its cock and cunt. Yes, Herr ____. I use those hard-edged words. Those good old Anglo-Saxon words for a good old Anglo-Saxon concept. Don’t you feel it? Something’s gone wrong with the world, very wrong. It was something desperate just at the turn of the last century. As if the planet Earth passed through the dusty tail of a comet of perversity. It’s no accident that Freud should have grown out of that time, for the distillation of centuries of woman hatred came to a head then. The Madonna-whore nexus had been fought for millennia in the hearts and minds of men who did not understand love, and the whore finally won out. It’s as if anyone who lived through that time was infected by a great sexual blockage, and central Europe was the center of the malignancy. The bottled-up rage of those millennia finally came spilling over in a froth of sadism and cruelty that was made official by a political conceit: your Nazism.”

  “Facile.”

  “But nonetheless true. Perhaps it is so obvious because it is true. And it is hardly me who dwells on sex. Every scene you write implies it. Your life seems to be one extended botched job of sexuality. From Frau Wotruba to … what was her name? The little prostitute? Oh yes, Miranda. You write of the lack of synchronicity between men and women. About how, when a woman finally is ready to give her love, then the man no longer wants it. And that is so telling. You’re not talking of love there. You’re talking about opening up. The unfurling of the petals in the sex act. And it is hardly a woman’s fault if men require no sensitivity in that act.”

  “Sentiment is not what I was writing about. You distort my words.”

  “No worse than how you distort the concept of love. Was what you felt for Miranda love?”

  “Compassion perhaps. It was quite often almost passionless.”

  “You say that as if to defend your actions. As if compassion is not one of love’s perimeters.”

  “She was a child.”

  “But you did love her?”

  “What do you mean by love? It’s a colossal ambiguity, love is.”

  “You know what the feeling is. Or what the lack of it is. Why are you so afraid of saying it? Didn’t you love her?”

  “This is exactly what I mean. This sort of hectoring. I won’t have it anymore. Not about my manuscript. Not about my private life.”

  “You must have loved her, then. Go ahead. It’s an easy word to say. Like falling off a log. There is absolutely no need to bottle it up. Not in front of me.”

  “—”

  “I’m not your enemy, you know. You say we started this editing of your manuscript out of solely professional need. I would clean up your misspellings, your word choice. Not so. If you remember, it was at the time of the first postcard. I wanted an assurance. Belief in you, that I might trust your word. Of course that was before I knew you developed the postcard trick to help in the smooth operation of the Final Solution. But I hoped for a window to your soul. Not an editing job. That’s why we started this. And I got my window, my view. In ways, I feel I know you intimately. In others, I don’t know you at all. But there is understanding. There’s no need to fear me. I am not the snake in your garden that you make me out to be. The young girl, Miranda. You did love her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I loved her. I thought she loved me, too.”

  “She hurt you somehow. She betrayed you?”

  “That is the hurt one expects from a woman. Yes. She betrayed me. I installed her in a quite lovely apartment. High up on Asuncion Hill, all the red-tiled roofs of the city sprawled out below. At night, it was like looking at a field of stars with all the lights of the city below us. Very nice. Even a couple of my little works of art on the walls. We were happy there, until he came. …”

  “—”

  “She said it was her brother and I believed her. I wanted very much to believe her. An old man’s folly. But I was still virile in those days. I believed I could satisfy her needs. Old man’s vanity, as well.”

  “And he wasn’t her brother?”

  “I will be frank with you, Miss O’Brien. She liked to make love in the dark. It was her breasts, you see. They were so small. She was ashamed. And there was also a downy patch of hair around her nipples. I loved her little breasts. I told her so many times. Just as I loved her hips so narrow, so prominent. Her tiny rumps. My little boy, I sometimes called her in jest. She hated that, but it was only joking. Yet in bed—lights out. That was her rule. I finally discovered why.

  “It was not long after he came. She had urged me to find work for him. I did, at a factory producing tires, owned by an acquaintance. After a couple of weeks, this man told me the boy was no good. He would do no work. But Miranda pleaded. The owner owed me a favor for certain reasons, so the boy kept his job. She was appropriately grateful. That night, the night I am speaking of, she was warmer to me than she had been in weeks. When I close my eyes tightly now just before sleep, I can sometimes still feel her tiny body wrapped next to mine. She was like a cat: Miranda could always find a comfortable place next to me or on my lap. She folded up like a warm breath of air. Those tiny breasts. She would rub them against me as she grew more and more excited. I am not trying to shock you, Miss O’Brien. Merely to explain. And this night when I reached out to fondle her breasts, she whimpered. It was not delight registering in her voice, but pain. I asked her what the matter was, but she only kissed me harder and pulled me on top of her. I was suspicious, however, and reached to turn on the light. She screamed at me not to, but too late. The bedside light had a red shade, but still I could make out the welts across her chest and belly. I turned her over. Across those perfect tight rumps were more signs of abuse. I demanded of her who had done such a thing, but she only began crying and would say nothing. I thundered at her, threatening and cajoling all at once. I knew it was the lad she called her brother. I screamed my suspicions at her, that I would have him killed for this. She spoke then, her face full of fear. It was not his fault, she pleaded. She had driven him to it.

  “Absurd, I countered. But then she told me she liked it. Wouldn’t I give it a try, too?

  “I was sickened, Miss O’Brien. Shocked and sickened. My Miranda! I had at one time even considered marrying the girl. Whether she said this as a truth or merely to save the skin of her ‘brother,’ I did not know. Either way, it was revolting. I got up immediately, dressed, and left that apartment for good. She held on to my leg halfway down the hall, naked, striped with welts, pulled along the floor like a slattern.

  “I never saw her again. Later, I learned from my friends that she had never stopped working, if you know what I mean. She saw customers in the very flat I had rented for us. Did unspeakable things in the bed we shared. It was one of those customers who had left the marks. And the irony was that the boy really was her brother. Totally ignorant of his sister’s doings. Totally innocent. What a joke on me.”

  “How did you find this out if you never
saw her again?”

  “I have persuasive friends.”

  “You had the pair of them disappeared, didn’t you?”

  “—”

  “Didn’t you!”

  “I was advised that this would be the safest course. She might have compromised me.”

  “And yet you loved her.”

  “She betrayed me.”

  “But if you love a person. To have her killed? No sadness? No remorse?”

  “A man must be hard.”

  “Nothing reaches you, does it? Not love, not death. Do you have any feelings at all, Herr ____? Any nerve endings left?”

  “Don’t touch me like that, Miss O’Brien. It’s not right.”

  “No nerve endings at all?”

  “Please stop it. It’s—”

  “How long has it been? You know you want me. I read how you had to stop yourself from having me after you’d doped me. Is that feeling gone, too? Along with the rest?”

  “No, Miss O’Brien. Leave the blouse.”

  “They aren’t small like a boy’s. They’re a woman’s breasts. See? Won’t you touch them? Taste them? You’ve wanted to often enough. You can make love to me here and now. No need to watch me, spy on me. We can lie together and make love in the here and now. Touch and embrace like humans. You want that, don’t you?”

  “—”

  “Help me with these, won’t you? Here. Hold me like this. Harder. Yes. That’s good. I told you before, I won’t break. Yes.”

  “No! Get away from me. You’re just like all the rest! A whore at heart. Don’t touch me with your filth. Away!”

  I took a shower, as long and hot as I could stand. Now I sit at my trestle table gazing out at the brittle blue sky. The first clear days of January are upon us and it is a surprise to me. As though I have awoken from a long sleep. The events of this afternoon have done that for me.

  I feel as if something were spoiled, as if a world has been destroyed, in fact. Cordoba is right. We are locked in mortal combat, Miss O’Brien and myself. First she attempts to rewrite my life, then to ensnare me in her sex.