Hausfrau (17 page)

“
His Illicit Kiss
?” Anna was amused.

Mary blushed. “Just something to read on the train.” Anna thumbed to a dog-eared page and read a paragraph aloud. “Her stubborn fingers sought the flesh under his shirt. His pleasure was evident. ‘I want you,’ she purred as she stepped even farther into his space. She gyrated her hips against his groin and the protuberance between his legs caused her to sigh, knowing that soon he would be atop her thrusting and moaning in the agony of desire …”

Mary yanked the book away. “Anna, the children.”

The children were absorbed in their own childishness. They weren’t listening. “
Protuberance?
Why are you reading this?” Mary put the novel back into her bag and sighed. “Oh. Because. You know.” Anna shook her head in a way that meant both yes and no. Mary tried to explain away her embarrassment. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t settled down. So soon I
mean.” The admission shamed her. “I missed all my chances to be … more sensual.” Anna’s heart dropped for her friend. Mary hooked her bag on the back of her chair. “But. It doesn’t matter because I
did
settle down and I
am
incredibly happy and I
would not
trade this life for any other. So, I read these. It’s a small indulgence against … I don’t know what.”

Anna knew what. “I’m sorry, Mary.”

Mary pretended not to hear her. “And anyway. These books? They’re full of nonsense.”

“How so?”

“They all end happily. The heroine gets everything she wants. An amazing job. Loads of success. Fame, money. She’s always beautiful and her fella is the man she’s dreamed of all along. An absolutely perfect life.” Mary’s wistfulness was palpable.

“Wow. If only.” Polly Jean gurgled and kicked against the stroller, scattering cookie crumbs everywhere.

“I know, right?” Mary blew on her coffee, then took a tentative taste. Anna drank hers hot. It hurt her mouth, though she pretended it didn’t.

B
ECAUSE SHE HAD NOTHING
else to do with either her hands or her mouth, when Niklas Flimm asked Anna if she wanted another drink, she said,
Yes, please.
A half minute later, Anna held a fresh glass of wine. That second glass of wine turned into a third. And three glasses of wine turned into a whiskey and by then Anna was drunk.

Anna and Niklas were still on the patio. Bruno was inside, drinking and telling stories to his friends. Edith looked through the glass back door occasionally, Anna assumed, to make sure
that Niklas wasn’t trying to pick her up as well. She tried to assure Edith with her body language that was in no way possible. Niklas and Anna were running out of things to say. “So Edith is good friend?” he asked.

When drunk, Anna’s tact and civil elegance were the first of her social skills to flee. They were usually replaced with the same kind of gadabout forthrightness Edith was known for. Anna wore a sloppy, rickety grin. “What I heard is that Edith is
your
good friend!” Her drunkenness made her irrepressible.

Niklas smiled with slightly narrowing eyes. “She tells you.” His voice was even. He wasn’t demoralized. She hadn’t disconcerted him.

“Don’t worry,” Anna was quick to add. “I’ll keep your secret. I’ll keep it.”

“I’m not worry.”

Past that, Anna had nothing to add. They stood there a minute longer in silence. Anna spoke. “I’m going inside. It was nice talking to you.” Anna slurred her words. The tipsy was catching up to her. She left Niklas alone on the patio.

Anna wasn’t so drunk that she couldn’t walk straight. She walked just fine. Finer than usual, in fact. The alcohol had given her swagger; with every forward step she ticked her hips side to side like a clock’s pendulum and wondered who, if anyone, watched her as she passed. In the Hammers’ bathroom, she glossed her lips and finger curled the strands of hair that had worked their way loose from the clip. She gazed into her own eyes like a lover would.
I look glassy and mischievous.
Somewhere between the whiskey and the wine, a switch had flipped.

When she left the bathroom, she sidled up to Bruno and put a hand on his shoulder. Bruno looked up, saw that it was
Anna, then returned his attention to the conversation. Anna sat on the arm of the chair in which he was sitting and leaned into him and whispered in his ear. “Let’s go home and fuck.”

Bruno looked to her once more. He chortled. “I think you’re drunk.”

Anna’s smile was cagey. “I am. Let’s go home and fuck anyway.”

A handful of seconds ticked past during which Bruno considered her proposition. He locked his eyes on hers. How long had it been? A month? Two? Anna made so much love of late that she couldn’t keep track. Bruno’s assent was silent.

“Let’s go,” Anna said.

“D
O YOU KNOW THE
German word
Sehnsucht
?” Anna shook her head no. “It means disconsolate longing. It’s that hole in your heart out of which all hope leaks.” Anna became queasy with dread. Doktor Messerli sensed this. “Anna,” she consoled, “it only feels hopeless. It doesn’t have to be.”

Doesn’t it?
Anna answered silently.

B
RUNO AND
A
NNA BADE
slapdash goodbyes to Edith and Otto and all the other guests and drove home quickly. Anna let her hand glide up her husband’s thigh. Bruno made a hard, hot groan. Anna bit his ear, sucked the lobe.
I want you to fuck my mouth,
she said.
Fuck my mouth then shove your cock in my ass.
Bruno kept his eyes to the road but sped up all the same.
I want you to scrub my pussy with your face, Bruno. I want you to suck on my clit until it’s as fat as a cherry.
When they got to the house he pulled in fast and parked the car at a crooked
angle. This was something he never did, too regimented and square cornered he was. They began undressing before they even fully stepped inside. Jackets were abandoned in the boot room. Anna cast her shoes and dress aside in the entryway. Bruno’s shirt fell away in the hall. There, Bruno grabbed Anna’s arm above the elbow and pulled her roughly into the bedroom behind him.

There were freshly washed and folded clothes on the bed. Bruno swept them to the floor and shoved Anna to the mattress without ceremony. Anna let down her hair and tossed the clip toward the nightstand, where it bounced and then slid right off. She reached for the waistband of her pantyhose, the back fastening of her bra—she was too aroused to decide which she’d take off first.
Stop,
Bruno commanded.
I will undress you.
Anna complied limply as Bruno unzipped his pants and pushed them along with his briefs down his legs.

God, he’s so fucking handsome.
Anna allowed herself this swoon.
I forgot how handsome he was.
Even for a Swiss man Bruno was tall; at a slouch he stood six foot four. His eyes were hazel—yellow and brown like a tiger’s-eye jewel. His chest was broad and beautiful, silken and downy. The hair on his head, the hair on his body the rustic brown of fresh-turned soil. His forearms were veiny, strong like a carpenter’s. His nose, more Aryan than Alemannic, ran straight as a taut line of string from its bridge to its tip. His were the features of an aristocrat; he was the physical heir of another era. And his cock. Anna loved Bruno’s cock. Of all the cocks belonging to all her lovers past or present, Bruno’s was the largest. Erect, it was nearly as long as a dinner knife and as big around as the face of a man’s pocket watch. Uncut. Precision straight. It was obscene, aggressive, and in just a minute it would split her apart. Anna had never
been able to slide more than half of it into her mouth. Her orgasms were painful, exquisite affairs.

Bruno spread her legs. Anna, still drunk, wanted nothing more than to lie there and let his will overpower her. Her knees fell open as Bruno climbed between them, entered her, then slammed his cock in and out of her as hard as he could. After two, three, four minutes of this he pulled out entirely and flipped Anna onto her stomach. He hitched her pelvis to the edge of the bed, knelt on the floor and pushed her legs each to their own side before burying his tongue inside her. Anna moaned, sighed, bucked her hips against his face. But she didn’t come. Bruno shoved her forward on the bed and forced her knees underneath her. Anna started to lift herself up onto her hands but Bruno barked
No
and with his left hand he pushed her shoulders down, even as with his right, he positioned his cock to enter her again. Anna allowed herself the ecstasy of powerlessness. Of all her men, it was only with Bruno that this could be fully accomplished. Of all her men, Bruno was the most threatening. Bruno pushed so deeply into her that Anna felt like she might split into halves. Anna growled. Bruno moved his left hand to the small of her back and reached his right around her and found her clit with his fingers. He twiddled it, flicked it, pinched it. “I’m gonna come,” Anna rasped and reached back with her own hand and pushed his away. Bruno took hold of her hips, fucked her harder than he had in years. Anna’s orgasm called forth Bruno’s. They stiffened, flushed, first called out each other’s names and then the name of God, before collapsing in a singular, satisfied cry.

When it was done, Bruno let the weight of his body press Anna between him and the bed. They remained that way until Bruno’s cock stopped pulsing and it softened enough to fall
out on its own. When it did, Bruno rolled off her and onto his back. Anna turned her head to look at him. Bruno, empty of energy beside her, stretched his body out its full length and capped the motion with a shiver. By the light of the dim but undeniable moon, Anna saw what passed for a smile on Bruno’s face.

“Bruno,” she whispered. “What’s the purpose of pain?”

“This is pillow talk?” Bruno yawned. “Go to sleep, Anna.” Anna asked him again. She wanted to know. Bruno took several breaths before answering. Anna thought he’d fallen asleep. “Pain is the proof of life.” His voice was unguarded. “That’s its purpose.” It was a more satisfying answer than Doktor Messerli had given her.

“Bruno,” Anna pressed. “Do you love me?” He answered Anna’s question with a snore.

T
HE POSTANALYSIS LETDOWN IS OFTEN PALPABLE
. A
S IN THE
aftermath of sex, you are tired, spent, and for the moment relieved it’s over. You leave the analyst’s office aware of your singularity and your solitude alike. It’s you who lives in the prison of your skin. No one gets the afterglow they want. Everyone dies alone. Analysis is a process. The process is a slow procession. It is a cortege.

Vhat are yooo sinking?
Doktor Messerli had asked.

Anna shook her head. There was nothing she wanted to admit thinking of. The session was almost over. Anna stood, rubbed her neck, and stretched herself in several directions. “My back hurts. I’m tense. That’s all.” Anna bent to gather her things and leave.

Doktor Messerli rose and followed her to the office door. “Even the loveliest shoulders can bear but so much.”

A
NNA WAS STILL DRUNK
. She couldn’t sleep. Bruno never had this problem. He was an easy sleeper. In sleep, he died to the
world. That’s what lovemaking did to him. But sex often made Anna restless and insecure.
The consequence of sex is always doubt,
she thought. With greater intimacy came greater doubt. When Bruno fell asleep Anna was alone. The white noise of worry kept her awake.

Anna rose and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and her boots. She didn’t bother with underwear or socks. She found her coat in the hallway where she’d stripped it off an hour earlier and pulled it on as she left the house.
Where can I go?
Anna felt trapped no matter where she was. Even at the end of such an evening as this.

In the darkness she traipsed the familiar path behind the house. She passed a rotting barn and the back units of an apartment complex. A motion-detecting light flashed on. The sudden spark of brightness startled her, as it always did. She looked across the sunflower field to the newer houses south of Loorenstrasse. Most were fully dark, but a window here and there was softly lit.
Where am I going?
Anna had nowhere to go and no reason for the going.
Everywhere I go is nowhere.
This was true. But her own ennui annoyed her and so she dismissed it.

The sky was so clear it shone. Anna crested the hill and sat on the bench at a curve in the path. Her bench. One of the most familiar things to her in all of Switzerland. She gazed at the autumn constellations and wished she knew their names. Above her hung the moon.
I have nothing to say about the moon,
she said to herself and in saying that she had nothing to say, somehow said something. She watched the red blinking lights of three airplanes at varying altitudes blip across the dark star-spotted field. Anna was accustomed to airplanes. They lived only a few kilometers from the Zürich airport. She
always watched for movement in the skies. In the seventies and ten kilometers away in Bülach, a man named Billy Meier told everyone that spacemen in honest-to-god flying saucers came to visit him. He had hundreds of pictures of so-called proof. Anna had seen the photographs on the Internet. The image was familiar—an empty, pastoral scene, a metal dish poised in a way that toyed with perception and pending from wires that while invisible surely must exist. Anna, having spent nine years considering the words “alien” and “alienated,” took to Billy Meier’s story. And almost six years earlier in Bassersdorf, the town immediately north of Dietlikon, a Crossair flight crashed four kilometers short of its runway. Pilot error. Anna remembered that night. She’d heard a terrible noise and ran outside. She could see nothing in the dark. Bruno read about it in the next day’s paper. There were pop stars aboard the plane, though neither Bruno nor Anna recognized their names. And so Anna scanned the vault of sky above her, searching for signs. She found none.

The air made everything seem lonelier than it already was. Anna reached for her Handy, which she’d put in her pocket before leaving the house. She opened the phone on its hinge and pressed a single button twice.

O
NCE
,
FOLLOWING AN ALMOST
painfully tender morning of lovemaking and as the sun passed through the shutter slats and fell upon their bodies, Anna turned to Stephen. “Tell me about spontaneous human combustion.”