The Edit Page 4

  Even the poodle was well groomed, as if it had just come from a cutting at the most expensive of dog salons in the inner city. Suddenly and acutely, I felt the abyss separating me from them: This poodle, it seemed, had better opportunities in life than I, a son of a foreman with the Municipal Transport Company.

  This realization was shocking enough for me, who had always viewed the world from the safety of our apartment window, who had always judged it from the benchmark of our tiny lives. More shocking still was what transpired next. A duck, low flying and out of season, buzzed over the back of the poodle and skidded in for a landing in the fountain. In a trice, the poodle had bounded away from its mistress and had plunged into the fountain after the duck. Of course the bird flew away, while the dog was left to flounder in the water. Swim the animal could, but it was unable to scramble up the scummy and steep-sided lip of the fountain to dry land. The man in his sharp-creased linens was loath to aid the dog; his wife quickly grew frantic. It was apparent, though neither wanted to create a scene, that the woman was going to do something desperate quite soon to save the struggling, whining animal.

  Father threw down the rest of his third glass of wine and sauntered over to the pair. I remained at the table watching the tableau. Father tipped his hat to the woman and spoke some words at which the man nodded gratefully. Thereupon Father got down on his knees, leaned over the edge of the fountain, and grabbed the dog by its collar.

  “Watch out! You’re choking Henri!”

  But Father was not to be daunted by the lady’s yelps. Tugging at the dog, he began extricating it from the water, but before Father was able to save the dog, he lost his balance and tumbled into the fountain himself.

  I was not so certain of this: I had no idea if Father could swim and was sure that Mother would chastise me greatly if I came home without him. What sort of punishment would there be in Struwwelpeter for losing one’s father? But Father quickly surfaced, spitting water and coughing, a lily pad on his head. He managed to get a hold on the side of the fountain. From that position, in the water and behind the dog, it was easier for him to boost Henri out.

  The poodle, once out, churned itself from tail to snout, throwing a rainbow arc of water off its fur. Father put his hand up to the man for assistance, but the couple, Henri now in tow, hurried off in the direction of the Hofburg without a backward glance.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” was all that Father said, his voice echoing against the sides of the fountain. It was left for the waitress to give him a helping hand out of the fountain while I retrieved his derby from the water.

  I still remember the squeaking sound his shoes made as we walked home that afternoon, his clothes steaming in the dying sunlight.

  Monday.

  I wrote quite well yesterday; my confessional has worked. Or is it the Irish? With something to look forward to, I begin to order my days once again. I do look forward to tomorrow when Miss O’Brien and I shall sail the main together. I am a foolish old man. I have been down to the harbor, getting things ready aboard Clan for an early departure tomorrow. The boat gleams in the sunlight: I have lovingly cared for its mahogany and brass throughout the tenure of my ownership of her.

  I also took the Land Rover in to Cordoba to work on, as we had arranged last week. The Land Rover is leaking water from the radiator. In addition to owning the only taxi service in the village, Cordoba also maintains the only garage and is the only mechanic.

  While there, I broached the subject of the Irish, and Cordoba said he would make some calls. There was a leering smile on his lips. Cordoba thinks that I am up to the same tricks his father got up to at my age. I did not disabuse him of this idea. He got on the phone to his friends at the Interior Ministry in the capital straightaway.

  After calling, Cordoba said that he might be able to supply me with some information that very afternoon. I thus decided to wait in town. I sauntered over to the harbor, thinking that I might see Miss O’Brien on the way, but she was nowhere to be seen. Was that significant? I wondered. Then I remembered that she had arranged to take the early morning bus to San ____ to see the ruins today. Hence our boat trip was scheduled for tomorrow.

  I sat at Hernando’s Café on the esplanade and had a coffee, feeling vaguely downcast that Miss O’Brien was taken away for the day until Cordoba came along with his snippets of information from the Interior Ministry. Miss O’Brien is apparently what she purports to be: a journalist of Irish extraction living in New York. She arrived at the capital, ____, three days ago on a Pan American flight from New York.

  I bought Cordoba a coffee with brandy in it and we watched the boats for a time, and then I took myself off home, enjoying the walk.

  I must make an early night of it tonight, but meanwhile I shall continue with the excellent progress I made yesterday. Forward into the past.

  I dip my hand into the froth of life’s sea and come out with this scene.

  No snow this time, but the evening wind is up in the trees: the föhn, a warm breeze off the Alps that puts most people’s nerves on edge. The steady caress of it has always calmed mine.

  I hang my head out the window of our flat as Frau Wotruba reads to little Maria.

  Yes, several years have passed now from my first remembrance of Frau Wotruba. I am now twelve, large for my age, and still she sits for both me and Maria. And still I long for her touch. But time is running out. Mother has already indicated that I am getting old enough to take care of Maria on my own when she and Father go out. Her “big man” she calls me. I do not feel big so much as desperate. Tonight may be my last opportunity.

  I watch the occasional passerby and feel the warmth of the breeze on my cheek. The air is pine-laden, as if the forests are invading the concrete of Vienna, reclaiming it for nature. It is Strauss that my parents are seeing this time. The Gypsy Baron in a revival at the Volksoper. I calculate the time Frau Wotruba and I have left: It is about intermission now and then comes the short final acts, followed by some hot chocolate, and they will be home. We have, at most, ninety minutes left. We: Frau Wotruba and I. Maria does not figure into this “we,” as far as I am concerned.

  Over the several years of our friendship, we have progressed painfully slowly with things physical. For months at a time, Frau Wotruba will act as if nothing has ever happened between us, as if the sighs she utters when I rub against her are merely stifled yawns. We never speak about this, you see. It is all forbidden territory as far as we are both concerned.

  And then, out of the blue, she will cuddle me, and we will rock together until the exquisite frisson has been created for her and I am left breathless with a painful yearning. Then, for more months, she will again simply tousle my hair playfully if I attempt to put my head in her lap. She will read in Father’s chair on these occasions, or worse, fall asleep there, her mouth agape, a sound between a purr and a snore emitting from her nose, while I toss in my bed, every muscle taut, the warmth in my belly turning into a searing heat.

  From the window, I catch bits and pieces of the story the frau is reading to little Maria: “Such big eyes!” A streetcar jangles its bell angrily out in the main thoroughfare. I feel as impatient as that bell sounds. Time is wasting! Father and Mother will be home soon.

  Turning from the window, I see Frau Wotruba kissing Maria’s cheek. My sister has been drifting off to sleep, but the kiss awakens her. So Frau Wotruba is consciously stalling tonight, I think.

  She sees me looking at her and lets Maria drift off to sleep now. I smile sheepishly and make preparations to get in my own bed. She seats herself in Father’s armchair. I crawl under the comforter, and the cotton sheets are warm.

  I watch Frau Wotruba settle into the chair. She knows my eager eyes are on her. She takes up a magazine and, licking her forefinger, begins plucking through the pages. Soon Maria’s sleep-heavy breathing can be plainly heard, but this seems to make Frau Wotruba even more frantically attack the pages
of the magazine.

  I whisper her name. She pretends not to hear me. I speak again, louder, and she looks up from the magazine to me, then glances at Maria.

  “She’s sleeping,” I say in my normal speaking voice. “Nothing wakes her.”

  It is true. Baby Maria has the facility of such deep sleep that the first day home from the hospital, she would not wake to cooing sounds or to kisses from Mother, who thought the baby was dead. Whereupon Mother screamed loudly enough to wake the tenants of the Central Cemetery, which did the job that kisses and coos would not. In our household, where we all have to share the one large room, such a proclivity for deep sleep amid the toing and froing of the rest of the family is a definite plus.

  “Will you say good night to me, too?” This from me, coyly. “Father and Mother may be home at any time.”

  The mention of my parents gets her going, for at our last meeting, I was already desperate enough to play a final card: I threatened to tell my parents about our little games if Frau Wotruba would not let me touch her flesh. She laughed at first, but then saw that I was serious and promised: “Next time, next time.”

  This is next time. This may be the last time. I am willing to risk all for one touch.

  She gets reluctantly to her feet and pats absently at her hair as she moves across the room, attempting to assume an air of control and disdain. I know better: She is conquered. She is forced now to allow me to do things to her that I have always dreamed of but never dared ask of her. This delicious sense of power I have over her warms me throughout. My body shivers as I watch her approach the bed. A throbbing at my middle announces a painful erection: These have been happening more often of late. Feeling under the bedding and my pajamas, my hand grips it. How startling it is! That tiny, drooping worm, used up to now solely for micturition, has suddenly taken on a new size and shape. This transformation frightens me every time it happens, but I sense that it is part of the totality of the sexual experience. My hand tightens on the pulsing organ and the subsequent sensation is delightful, tinged not in the least with pain now.

  “This is no longer right or proper.” She stands over me, hugging her arms around herself.

  I am silent as I watch a moistness forming in her eyes. One tear glistens down her cheek. My penis jerks.

  “It was innocent to begin with. There was no thought. But now …” She spreads her hands, looking at the bulge under the eiderdown where my hand still grips. Her head shakes violently.

  “Sit down, Frau Wotruba.”

  Her head continues to shake violently. I am afraid I have pushed her too far.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It was nicer before, wasn’t it? I liked it then, too. Couldn’t you just hold me one last time? Just to let us both remember the feeling?”

  This is no approximation of my speech, for I had it memorized and can remember it verbatim even today.

  Still she stands.

  “Please.” I pat the bed next to me.

  She begins to sob as she crumples onto the bed. I do what I can to hold her, but she is still far larger than I; I cannot get my arms around her. My attempted comforting is clumsy, like trying to shake hands with someone who grips yours too quickly to allow you a firm hold. You are left wagging a part of the other person’s hand almost effeminately. I feel ineffectual trying to console her thus. Besides, I am afraid if I scoot up any farther in bed she will see my erection.

  Instead, after an attempted hug, I curl into her lap and burrow my head against her tummy. This is my inspired frontal approximation to a consoling pat on the back.

  After what seems an age, her sobbing stops. I can barely hear her as she blubbers over me: “I just didn’t want it to come to anything sordid. I feel so awful. You’re just a boy. It’s as though I’ve used you, hurt you somehow.”

  I assure her that what she has shared with me has been the grandest thing in my short life. Then I resume my furrowing against her belly, making an occasional sortie upward with my forehead to her left breast. At first, she stiffens at these touches, but soon I feel only that one part of her body stiffen, and that is what I have been waiting for. I leave the region of her stomach and begin actively caressing her breast and its taut nipple with my cheek. She wiggles against me, emitting the by now familiar, lazy sigh, and pushes her bosom harder toward my cheek.

  I increase the tempo of caressing—first this cheek against that breast, now the other. Back and forth I go, around and around until I have her breathing fast and I feel my own erection will soon burst.

  At this point, I do something I have never before attempted. I stop moving my face and place my hands instead over her ample breasts. I find the buttons at the front of her white blouse and begin opening them deliberately. She does not move; her breathing comes more rapidly now: a hiss in my ears. When my hand finally finds its way to bare flesh, she makes a sharp intake of breath that startles me, stopping my hand against the heat of her skin.

  After an instant, she begins to squirm insistently against my inert hand, her eyes closed tight. I renew the unbuttoning: It has been her decision.

  Soon her blouse is open from top to bottom and a warm rush of scented air bathes my face. Having secretly watched my mother undress before, I am not surprised at the next layer of clothing that confronts me. Nevertheless, this I mistakenly attack from the front, though the stays are in the back. Soon, however, I have pulled one of the cups down far enough to expose a crescent of purple-brown areola and I fall to rubbing my cheek against it furiously. Frau Wotruba is electrified. My ministrations seem to drive her straight out of her mind. She begins muttering unintelligible phrases—little clucking sounds coming from deep in her throat.

  Her arms, until now gripping me to her, suddenly loosen. She arches her back, fidgeting behind with her hands—her eyes still maddeningly closed—and suddenly the white, coarse brassiere drops from her, revealing the twin objects of my desire. Blue veins crisscross the top halves of each globe like rivers on a map. All tributaries seem to lead directly to the nipples: fat, deep red, and tasty looking like cherries. I cannot contain myself, and my mouth goes directly to these two little fellows, miniature replicas of my straining penis. I swirl them about with my tongue, sucking all the while, and Frau Wotruba begins a long, high moaning sound, pressing my head to her harder and harder. With her free hand, she is busy playing down my back to find the bottom of my nightshirt, which, once found, she proceeds to draw up above my waist. Her fingers now trace a course around to my front. As they pass over my abdomen, I twitch involuntarily as if an electric current has been applied to my body. Her hand then begins a slow, playful walking—finger by finger—down my belly, so arousing me that I no longer feel in control. I begin to squirm just as Frau Wotruba has been doing.

  The breast in my mouth; her fingers inching ever closer to my erection—I am these two sensations only. And quite suddenly these two sensations fuse as her hand grips my twitching penis firmly—I feel her garnet ring bite into the base of my staff, the only piece of reality to ground me in the swirling water that I am entering.

  Another moan, though this time it comes, surprisingly, from my own throat. She gently nudges me from her breast, then lays me out flat on my back as she reaches in back of her head, pulling hair pins out as slowly and deliberately as before I unbuttoned her blouse. As she reaches up, her breasts rise high and point out from her chest like marble obelisks, incredibly beautiful and at the same time terrifying. Her tresses tumble about her face, obscuring her features momentarily. She brushes hair out of her face and now her eyes are open, looking at my body, from my penis to my face.

  “I guess you’re old enough,” she says with a laugh and then bends down over my body, her hair veiling me in a deep and exotic jungle. The hair bunches over my face and flows across my shoulders, soon to be replaced by the pink tips of her nipples dangling over my mouth.

  At that moment, my extreme eroticism is replac
ed by another emotion, equally as strong: fear. I am suddenly terrified that she is going to smother me in her hair and breasts. I begin to hyperventilate; her hair continues its course down my chest to my belly. She makes little pecking kisses on my skin. When the horror and fear of suffocation is at its peak, I feel a great welling up in me and, as if in a scream, the lower part of me seems to explode. The fear and eroticism blend in the most vivid feeling I have ever experienced, a commingling of joy and despair, tension and utter relaxation. I continue to explode for what seems minutes. I feel my penis bobbing back and forth, my whole lower body gyrating madly. From a great distance I hear Frau Wotruba’s voice: “Not in my hair!”

  Her weekly bath day was only yesterday. She holds on to pragmatism in the midst of everything else. Like all women.

  And then the apartment door opens and Father and Mother are standing in their shabby evening clothes gawking at me and Frau Wotruba as they might at a soprano and tenor who had sung off-key.

  Disaster in the present. I shall record it all as it happened to me.

  Tuesday was a peaceful morning. Bats were in the air just before sunrise: They hunt in the stand of bamboo just beyond my driveway. I walked to the harbor, for, as I mentioned, I had left the Land Rover in town on Monday for Cordoba to work on.

  These minutes before sunrise are my favorite time of the morning, and it is no punishment for me to walk then. I had no need to carry anything, as I had already stored all we would need aboard the Clan yesterday. My hands were empty and the road stretched out before me magnificently as a purple ribbon in the crepuscular dawn light. A soft, warm breeze came off the land. As the sun rose over the hills in back of me, it illuminated cloud cover overhead. There might be rain later in the day, I thought, but for now the sea would most likely be calm.

  Bats continued darting about in the air, hunting before the rising of the sun. Unlike most people, I do not shrink from these tiny animals, not even from the vampire bat, which is indigenous to my locale. Such animal fear is reserved, in me, solely for snakes. Instead, I marvel at the agility of bats, at their extreme sensitivities. They construed diving feints at me as I made my way along the dirt road. Neither did this unduly bother me, as I am accustomed to their tricks. I feel close to them in many elemental ways. Over the course of my years of exile, I have developed many of the same sensibilities that bats possess. It is as if I can see in the dark; my internal radar is unfailing. I can bring the Clan into our tiny bay, reef laden as it is, on a moonless night with no running lights. I am also unusually perceptive with people, managing to steer clear of emotional reefs, as well. This is a sixth sense that I have developed, and bats seem to recognize it in me. They play with me; I with them.