Страница 14 из 39
Later we stood on a street corner across from the cafй and waited in the fall cold for a tram to take us back downtown. I was freezing in no time at all. Bad circulation. Seeing me shake, India rubbed my arms through my coat. It was a familiar, intimate gesture, and I wondered if she would have done it if Paul had been there. What a ridiculous, small thing to think. It was insulting both to India and to Paul. I was ashamed.
Luckily she started singing, and after a while I got over my guilt and cautiously joined her. We sang "Love Is a Simple Thing" and "Summertime" and "Pe
Why was I so scared to have her over alone? Nothing happened the next night. We ate spaghetti carbonara and drank Chianti and listened to the Joseph Le
I didn't see her the next day, although we talked for a long time over the phone. She was going to the opera with some friends and kept telling me how much she liked Mahler's The Three Pintos. I wanted to tell her before we hung up how disappointed I was that I wouldn't be seeing her that day, but I didn't.
Something very strange and almost more intimate than sex happened the next day. How it happened is so utterly ludicrous I'm embarrassed to explain. India later said it was a great scene out of a bad movie, but I still felt it was the worst kind of corn.
It was Saturday night; she was cooking di
We got three quarters of the way through the song, but then the end loomed up. If you don't know the tune, I should tell you that the end is very sad; I always stop singing before I get there. This time I'd arrived, but because she was there with me, I decided to mumble my way through to the finish. It did no good, because she dropped off too, and we were stuck out there in space with nowhere to go. All of a sudden I felt sad and full of tired echoes, and my eyes filled with tears. I knew I would start crying if I didn't think of something fast. Here I was in my friends' warm kitchen, the man of her house for a few hours. Something I had wanted for years but had never been able to find. There had been women before – deer and mice and lions. There had been moments when I was sure – but they weren't. Or they'd been convinced, but I wasn't . . . and it was never simple or good. What it boiled down to was being alone – particularly alone – in Vie
My eyes were stuck on the ceiling while the black silence honked its horn, but I knew I would have to look at her soon. Steeling myself, I blinked three or four times against the tears and slowly brought my scared eyes down. She was leaning against a counter and had both hands in her pants pockets. She'd held nothing back, and although she was crying, she looked at me with a grave, loving stare.
She walked over and sat down on my knee. Putting her long arms around my neck, she hugged me tightly. When I returned the embrace – tentatively and light with fear – she spoke into my neck.
"Sometimes in the middle of everything I get so sad."
I nodded and began rocking us back and forth in the chair. A father and his scared child.
"Oh, Joe, I just get so spooked."
"Of what? You want to talk?"
"Of nothing. Everything. Getting old, knowing nothing. Never being on the cover of Time magazine."
I laughed and squeezed her harder. I knew exactly what she meant.
"The beans are burning."
"I know. I don't care. Keep hugging me. It's better than beans."
"You wa
She pulled back and smiled at me. Her face was all tears. She sniffled and rubbed her nose. "Can we?"
"Yes, honey, and you can have a milkshake too, if you want."
"Joey, you're breaking my heart. You're a good fellow."
"You did that to me once, so we're even now."
"Did what?" She let go and started to get up.
"Broke my heart." I kissed her on the top of the head and smelled that fine clean India smell again.
The next morning we had breakfast at a brass and marble Konditorei on Porzellangasse, near their apartment. Then, because the day was bright and clear, we decided to drive up along the Danube and stop when we saw a nice place. Both of us felt full of life and were definitely in the mood for a long walk. We found a spot near Tulln, a dirt path that ran parallel to the river and wound in and out of the forest. She held my hand the whole way, and we walked and ran and waved at the crew of a Rumanian barge that was slowly working its way upstream. When someone on board saw us and tooted the horn, we looked at each other wonderingly, as if we had accomplished something magical. It was the kind of day that, in retrospect, is almost cheapened by its cliches, but that, when you're experiencing it, has an i
We drove back to town under a plum and orange sunset and had an early di
The two weeks Paul was gone went by like that. I didn't do a lick of work because we were constantly together. We cooked, went for walks in remote districts of town where no one ever went, much less sightseers. The fact that we were probably the only people who had ever gone there to sight-see pleased us no end. We went to a couple of movies in German, and on the spur of the moment to hear Alfred Brendel playing Brahms at the Konzerthaus.
One night we decided to see what Vie