Hausfrau (13 page)

Karl caught up with Anna and the two of them started on the path that led into the Mumpf woods.

“T
HINK OF A BUCKET
, Anna. Your heart is a bucket with a hole in the bottom of it. It leaks. You cannot keep it full.”

Anna nodded opaquely. A sparrow landed on the outside sill and just as quickly flew away. “I’ve got a hole.”

“Over time it widens. From the size of a one-franc piece to the size of a small plum, then an apple, then a man’s fist. Eventually the hole becomes so large that the bucket has no bottom at all. Then it is useless.”

“I have a useless heart.” It was a vacant statement.

Doktor Messerli shook her head. “No, Anna. All I am saying is you cannot treat a mortal wound with iodine and plasters. Repair the hole. That’s the only thing to do.”

I
N
J
ANUARY AND
F
EBRUARY
and the first half of March 2006, Anna spent every available moment in Stephen Nicodemus’s arms. They were wiry and able—not strong, but
his.
Anna had fallen in love. Or a version of love.

They spoke most often of things both scientific and theoretical. It was how they flirted. It was almost the whole of their windup. It became Anna’s challenge to ask him questions no one had asked him before.
Why is fire hot?
she asked.
Is fire ever cold? Why won’t wool burn? Does a flame have weight? Have mass? Is there anything that is entirely resistant to fire? Can fire itself catch fire? Can fire freeze?

Anna made a fetish of all things fire. She passed her palms through the flames of candles she lit in the den. She lifted the covers of the stove and stared at the pilot light. She dreamed of explosions, of houses burning down. She’d wake in the night with ecstatic sweats.
What would it be like to strike a final match and set it to the center of this bed?
Even Anna knew that she might be approaching the rim of her reason.

Stephen tried to explain his work to her.
Pyrology is an applied science, with practical uses in many fields,
he said. Anna replied,
Apply it to me, this science of yours, Professor,
then threw herself open on his bed.

“D
IFFERENT SYSTEMS GIVE DIFFERENT
names to alchemy’s stages,” the Doktor said. “But the step that follows the burning is the washing.
Solutio.
The bathing of the calcified elements in water. For example, the water of tears.”

D
AVID AND
D
ANIELA
’
S HOUSE
abutted the woods. Anna and Karl entered the forest under a vault of foliage, a canopy of trees. They passed a mannish woman walking a Rottweiler.
“Grüezi mitenand,”
she greeted them in the local dialect. Anna and Karl greeted her back. She was the only person they passed. Anna wondered if they should have brought the umbrella. It began to drizzle just a few steps in.

Karl and Anna walked in relative tandem silence for three or four minutes. Karl was a bruising, muscular man, slightly heavyset and almost imperceptibly bowlegged. His blond hair had been bleached by the sun, his hands were calloused, and his was a ruddy, affable face. Karl worked for Kanton Aargau
as a
Holzfäller,
a lumberjack. Karl and Anna shared the most minuscule of small talk. He mentioned Willi, his thirteen-year-old son who lived in Bern with his mother, the woman from whom Karl was divorced. He spoke of a vacation they’d taken the year before to California. He told Anna a joke he’d heard on a television program and asked her if she missed the USA. For Anna he named aloud the plants and trees:
Bergulme. Elsbeere. Hagebuche. Efeu. Scots elm. Service tree. Hornbeam. Ivy.
Anna wasn’t feeling any better. Her stomach pulsed with queasiness as if her body sensed an encroaching inevitability.

I
N MID
-M
ARCH 2006
, A
NNA
lay on the floor before Stephen in his apartment on Nürenbergstrasse. She wailed:
Take me, take me, take me with you.
It was the worst day of her life. She’d never felt so awful.

No, Anna. That’s not going to happen.
He spoke patiently, but there was irritation in his voice. He didn’t want to be cruel. Anna clawed at ways to keep him.
I’m coming anyway. You cannot stop me.

That was true. He could not have stopped her. If Anna had found the nerve she would have needed in order to chase Stephen back to America, she would have brandished it, proved herself, made good on her promise to follow. But she couldn’t find it. She didn’t even have a bank account.

Hi, um, Bruno? Yeah, I need a one-way ticket to Boston.
The only thing that made her laugh that day was imagining that phone call. No. Stephen had to be the one to carry her off.
He
had to do it for it to count, for it to be real.
He
had to grab her and drag her out. She needed to be able to say
I had no choice.

But Stephen didn’t do that. And Anna didn’t follow him to Boston.

For three entire months they’d spent at least an hour of most days together. They met at his apartment. They met in the woods and went for walks. They met near the ETH for lunch, coffee, drinks, a fast bout of lovemaking behind the closed door of his office. But the inevitable soon inevited: Stephen left. He went home. He did not come back.

I feel so fucking used.

She had no recourse but the comfort of her tears. She hid them in the best way she knew how to hide them: she cried them only at night, only when she walked, only when no one could question them. But there were so many tears.

And so many daily chastenings.
Goddammit, Anna. You’re wasting this much grief on a three-month affair?
She tried to be rational. She tried to focus on her family. She tried to feel guilt. All she felt was inescapable woe.

But no real grief is ever a waste. And every grief is real. And this was bigger than Anna was ready to admit. It extended beyond the immediacy of her shattered heart. But she wouldn’t know that for a very long time.

By mid-April Anna had a plan. It was selfish and irrevocable.
But it seems so strangely sane and sensible,
she thought. Bruno had a pistol. A World War II–era Luger. Semiautomatic. Light enough for a lady’s hands. Toggle-lock action. An iron-sighted Nazi sidearm.
I will walk into the woods one night and not walk out again.
Twice Anna worked up courage. Twice she went into the woods. Twice that courage failed her and she returned from the forest unharmed. Both times her hands shook so hard she couldn’t even grip the gun. The irony was evident:
I’m too terrified of the trigger pull to die.

But she missed a period before she had the backbone to try again (and after the second attempt she knew she wouldn’t). Bruno had wanted another child. Anna hadn’t. But the guilt of the affair and the stress of the breakup were gaining on her. The baby could absolve her. The baby could be her consolation prize. Her only consolation.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES INTO THEIR
walk, Karl and Anna reached a
Waldhütte,
one of the hundreds of free-use cabins dotted throughout the Swiss woods. This
Waldhütte
was more rudimentary than most. It was a small three-walled hut in which there were two benches and a fire pit that looked as if it had been used as recently as that morning. The
Waldhütte
’s interior walls were littered top to bottom with graffiti. As fussy as they were about cleanliness and order, the Swiss seemed to Anna to be rather lax about graffiti. It was everywhere. Anna pointed to an enigmatic scribbling on the stacked-log wall of varnished wood. “What does this say?” she asked. She wasn’t invested in the answer, but there was safety in small talk, and Anna sought it. Karl moved closer, put his hand in the small of her back and whispered,
It says I want to kiss you, Anna.

Before Anna could say one way or the other, Karl had turned her to face him so that she was pressed between his body and the wall. He kissed her. His tongue tasted of
Weizenbier,
the heady wheat brew he’d been drinking all day long.

Anna protested. “No, Karl. No.” Karl breathed
Yes
in Anna’s ear. The
yes
was enough. Anna’s passive self gave in.
I’m going to let him fuck me.
It was like handing an open wallet to a thief.

Anna thought a half dozen thoughts at once:
I should stop
this. I should feel ashamed. I should feel infringed upon. I should feel bad about Bruno. I should feel bad that I don’t feel bad. What time is it? Where are my sons? It’s raining and I’m in the woods. It’s Daniela’s birthday and I am letting this man fuck me.
Karl kissed Anna again. When Anna kissed Karl back, these thoughts flew away like little birds.

It was a quick, hard fuck. Karl peeled off her tights and panties. Anna kicked away her right shoe and wiggled her leg and foot free from the nylon. She hooked her calf around Karl’s ass and hitched him toward her. He’d already loosened his belt and was shoving down his jeans and briefs. His cock was stiff and wet. That was enough to make Anna wet, too.
Yes, that’s it, put it in.
She spoke so quietly her voice was audible only to the air around her lips.

They rummaged through each other’s clothes until they hit skin. Anna panicked only once; she thought she heard the crackle of footfalls on the trail. “Just the trees,” Karl said, and he was right. So Anna closed her eyes and opened the valve of her thighs even wider. Karl took the invitation and pushed himself deeper in.

Then something happened. Anna felt a shift. A limbic slip. A displacement. Tremendous feeling began to move beneath her skin. It wanted out.
Harder, Karl. More. Now.
He did as he was told. Every thrust knocked something else loose. A worry, a fear, a conundrum, a despair, a sadness—whatever it was, each fell away, one after the other.
Mary who begs for the friend I don’t want to be. Archie who can smell my sadness. Victor who I sometimes just don’t love that much. Stephen who I will love until I die. Ursula who should just shut the fuck up. Doktor Messerli to whom I’ve already told too much. Polly who but for that Wednesday would not even exist. Hans.
Margrith. Edith. Otto. Roland. Alexis. My dead parents. My age. My face. My breasts. Bruno. I’ve done everything but eat a plate of glass for you. Just look at me! Love me anyway!
Anna started to cry. Karl stopped and looked at her but Anna hit him with her fist,
Keep going!
He did. Anna tumbled through the litany once more. The harder he fucked her, the truer her thoughts became. Each statement cracked open a new catharsis. It was as honest as she’d been in years. She let them cover her. She lay down in them.
I’m a queen in a goddamn mercurial bath.
She remembered what the Doktor said:
The being dies and takes the body with it. The cost of transcendence is death.

Anna gave over to a soundless, unexpected orgasm. Karl shuddered and grunted when he came. Anna squeezed him, then pulsed around him then let him slip from her like a soaped finger sliding through a tight ring.

Anna caught her breath getting dressed. Karl zipped himself back into his blue jeans and handed Anna her shoe. “I’ve wanted to do that for a craving time.” He meant “long.” Anna didn’t believe him but it didn’t matter. “Let’s do it again,” he said. The assent Anna gave was automatic.
Okay.

A
NNA NEVER TOLD
S
TEPHEN
about Polly Jean. In fact, she’d never contacted him at all.

B
Y A QUARTER AFTER
seven the Benzes were homeward bound. The boys, Polly, and Ursula fell asleep after the transfer in Frick. It would be past nine by the time the Benzes got home. On the train Anna watched a Swiss Army cadet talk on his cell phone. She passed her time imagining the party on the other
end.
Is it his mother? His father? His girlfriend? Is today his sister’s birthday, too?
Anna held her sleeping daughter. Victor rested his head on Anna’s shoulder. An affection surged in Anna for her eldest child when, lowering her nose to his head, she noted that he smelled like David’s dog. Charles was asleep as well. He’d had a difficult afternoon. While Anna was on her walk he’d fallen off the branch of the tree he’d been climbing. He’d cut his palm. He was howling in the bathroom fighting Bruno as he tried to wash the wound when Anna returned. Anna took over. “You have to let me clean this,
Schatz
,” she cooed. He shook his head. “I know it hurts. So close your eyes. We’ll do this quickly, okay?” Charles sniffed and held out his hand and closed his eyes. Anna rinsed and dried the cut, then put a little ointment on it and dressed it with gauze and tape, all in less than a minute. When Anna asked Charles how it happened that he fell he said he couldn’t remember. Anna mustered her sternest face and reprimanded him for not paying better attention. Then, she gave him a giant hug.

Anna looked across the row to Bruno, who wore a blank, drunken expression. Despite the day’s cloud cover, he was sunburned.

“How,” Bruno asked sleepily when they were almost halfway home and for the first time since Anna had begun them, “are your appointments with the psychiatrist? What do you talk about?”

He wants to know whether we talk about him,
Anna thought. “We talk about ways I can steer myself into a trajectory that forces me to participate more fully with the world,” Anna said, quoting Doktor Messerli.

This seemed to satisfy him. He yawned and pointed to her leg. “Your tights are ripped.” Anna looked down. There was
a hole the size of a ten-rappen coin on her right shin and a run laddering after it. She must have snagged it on her toenail, dressing.

“I didn’t notice,” Anna said. This was not a lie.

A
NNA SPENT THE PREGNANCY
reconciling herself to herself.
This would be his parting song,
she thought. The adieu he didn’t bid. It would be, she argued, the only part of him worth keeping. Despondency nauseated her. Morning sickness made her cry. She’d been weepy with the other pregnancies and her daily tears were no surprise to anyone.