A Curable Romantic (19 page)

I offered her my arm, and we ascended the stairs, the good Viennese milling in groups or in pairs beneath every arch and in every arcade on the landings above us. I handed a white-gloved usher our tickets and followed him to a box on the first tier. The Fräulein sat in a red plush chair nearest the front. However, as though she were suddenly ill, she laid her head on the red velvet banister before her. Standing over her, I observed
with concern the little beads of perspiration that had appeared along the piping of her neck.

“The Champagne you ordered, Fräulein,” the usher said. A steward brought in a stand and a brass bucket, all frothy with ice. After proffering me its label, he plunged the bottle back into the bucket with an abrupt violence. I nodded, distractedly, in approval. Both men, impeccably trained, glanced not even once at Fräulein Eckstein, and the noise they made seeing to their work covered, perhaps intentionally, the moaning coming unmistakably from her throat.

“Fräulein, are you … is everything all right?” I asked when they had finally left us.

“Can it be locked?” she said, raising her head and nodding at the red plush door, closed now and so almost invisible inside the red plush wall.

“I think not,” I said. “Are you well?”

“Of course, I’m well.”

“In any case, there’s no lock,” I said, checking the door.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve reserved the box for us alone, and no one would dare enter without knocking.”

Her face was ashen, her look oddly vacant. I had the eerie impression that she wasn’t really seeing me but that something inside her was staring through her, using her eyes as though they were windows.

“You’re certain you’re up for an opera this afternoon?”

“Of course I am, silly,” she said. “I’m fine.”

She fluffed out her skirts and then, as though mesmerized by the rustling of her petticoats beneath them, continued to fluff them. “Oh, Yankl, have you ever seen such a marvelous dress as this!” I didn’t know what to say. The overture had begun, and I sank into the cushions of my chair, easily the most comfortable I’d had for an opera. I wouldn’t have minded sitting in the hardest seat in the back of the highest gallery, however, if it meant listening to the music in peace. In truth, the Fräulein’s company was draining. Her emotional squalls exhausted me. Her needs were frustratingly impossible to satisfy, her problems evaded solution or were at least beyond my abilities to solve. All I wanted was to let the endless waves of Mozart’s sublime genius wash over me and to forget about everything else.

However, the Fräulein would not stop talking.

“See to the curtains, won’t you?” she said.

“The curtains?”

“Draw them.”

“You’d prefer the curtains drawn, Fräulein?”

In those days, before Mahler took over as director and insisted otherwise, the house lights weren’t dimmed during a performance; and those who didn’t wish, for whatever reason, to be seen were invited to close off their boxes with a drape.

“Yes, pull the curtains,” she said again.

“But what will people think?”

“It’s better that no one see us together. What if Dr. Freud is here? Or, worse, my mother?”

Sighing, I did as she bid me and released the scarlet curtains from their braided ropes, plunging the box into an artificial red twilight.

“Good. Now pour out two drinks.” She’d closed her eyes and had begun rubbing her temples with three fingers of each hand. I poured the Champagne and, holding both glasses, offered her one. She stood. Ignoring the drinks, she pressed both her hands against my chest before laying her head upon it as well, near my tie. I trembled against this unexpected gesture and dribbled a bit of the Champagne onto her dress.

“No, no, sha, sha, it’s all right,” she said, “it’s all right, my darling.” With her hand beneath my chin, she lifted my head, forcing my attention from the stains on her dress to her face. She brought her mouth to mine. “Oh, Yankl,” she said, “you’ve no idea how long I’ve been missing you.”

And then, of course, she kissed me.

It was a hard, frank, unpleasant kiss, nearly a bite really, her teeth rasping against mine. My upper lip, pinched between her teeth and my own, received a painful nip. The experience was disconcerting. (Quite literally: I forgot all about the overture.) Forbidding me to speak, she covered my mouth with her own.

“Kiss me, Yankl,” she whispered. “Kiss me back.” I’d stopped breathing and stepped back to look at her, hoping to regain my bearings. “Put the Champagne down,” she ordered.

I was suddenly aware of the fluted glasses in my hands. “Of course,” I said.

Woodenly, I turned towards the small stand, and thinking better of it, with the awkward air-bound grace of a marionette, I downed the first drink and then the second, before depositing the empty glasses there. My hands were trembling so, at least one of the glasses fell off the table and onto the carpet, which was, thankfully, too thick to break it. Like a schoolboy having performed a task for his master during the course of his being punished by him, I placed myself before Fräulein Eckstein again. She returned her hands to my chest, exactly as she had them before, as though she had memorized the proper attitude one must strike when receiving a kiss. I moved towards her, our heads tilting together first to the left, then, correcting, to the right, then to the left, et cetera, until they were properly angled. She laughed at me, and I could feel her breath in my mouth. My lips touched hers politely, inquisitively, deferentially, although obviously too tentatively for the Fräulein, who received them with the rapacity of a wolf, her mouth open and slavering. As though devouring it, she kept her mouth upon mine and pulled me in closer. I folded her into my arms, but soon she was sitting, pulling me on top of her, lifting her legs against my outer thigh, drawing me onto her skirt and her petticoats, so that I lay atop her frilly undershifts with my knees upon the floor.

“Here,” she said, placing my hand beneath her bosom, and I could feel her heart heaving against the fabric of her garments. I lifted my neck and drew back to take a better look at her. Her eyes were closed, her nostrils flaring; a vein throbbed visibly in her throat. “Yankl, be my husband,” she whispered. “Lie with me as your wife.”

Conscious of applause sounding out on the other side of the curtain, I stood and moved far from her.

“Ha!” she laughed. “You haven’t changed at all.”

“I’m not certain what you mean by that, Fräulein?”

“Still with your head in the clouds.”

“Fräulein, are you certain you’re all right?”

“Pay attention, Yankl. Look at me.” Staring me in the eye, she reached down with both hands and lifted up her skirts. It’s difficult now, when in our modern era a woman wearing no more than a fig leaf is considered dressed, to remember how many undergarments a woman then wore, but I couldn’t begin to number her silken petticoats, as she untied their
colored ribbons and lay open their flounces. Lying back in the narrow chair, her skirts to her lap, she unclasped her blouse, exposing the ornate piping of her corset. With an agonizingly slow hand, she unbound the ribbons threaded through its seams and unfastened three enormous whalebone hooks. Gently, she picked up its now-freed halves, one in each hand, and parted it as though she were opening an oyster shell. The twin pearls of her bosom lay inside, exposed. “Husband,” she said, a brazen look transforming her face, “do I please you now?”

“Fräulein,” I said, knowing neither what to say nor where to look, unable to gaze upon her nakedness openly though less able to turn from it completely.

“Does this body please you better than the other?”

Mastering myself, I stared at my shoes. “Fräulein,” I said, pleading with her, “dress yourself or I won’t be held accountable for our actions.”

“Tell me, Yankl,” she asked, “how satisfied are you with your tailor?”

“With my tailor, Fräulein? Quite satisfied.”

“I was thinking you should perhaps speak to him.”

“Speak to him, Fräulein? But why?”

Her eyes dropped vulgarly and she laughed a small, pleased, whorish laugh. “Because there seems to be a slight distress in the fabric of your pants.”

She was clearly in the grip of some severe form of hysteria. Indeed, there seemed to be two Emma Ecksteins — the one who had expounded at length upon her doomed infatuation with Sigmund Freud earlier in the afternoon, and this one, a second Emma, inside of which the first had all but disappeared, and who lay back in her opera chair now, her bodice unlaced and her bosom exposed. I knew of no way of calling the first Emma back. Her offer of herself had so rent the fabric of our normal conversation that I hardly knew what to say. She had also addressed me, as no one had in years, by my childhood name, and though I didn’t realize it until later, we had slipped together into Yiddish. In fact, her German had become unspeakable, filled with all sorts of grammatical and syntactical errors.

“Fräulein Eckstein,” I addressed her as tenderly as I could. “Emma,” I said — for how could I speak to her formally when she sat before me three-quarters undressed?

“Don’t I please you, Yankl?”

“Of course, you do. You’re exceedingly pleasant, but the opera!” I said, clutching at straws. “We’re missing the first act!”

“Be kind to me, Yankl. I’ve waited so very long for this moment.”

“Fräulein Eckstein.” I took a step towards her. Tentatively I lifted her hands from her open bodice and covered her bosom with her corset.

She pouted seductively. “No,” she said.

“Sha, sha,” I said, trying to button and lace up her clothing. Her ensemble was ridiculously complex.

“Yankl.” She lowered her face and kissed my hands.

“But Fräulein,” I said, “I thought you wanted to see the opera.”

It’s difficult to account for what happened next. I continued trying to dress her, my hand fumbling with the fabric. Her face, beset by a siege of neuralgic tics, became a fearful mask of incomprehension. With a too-real shriek, she looked me in the eye, as I was lacing up her blouse. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, Dr. Sammelsohn?” Her voice was entirely unlike the sultry sulk with which she’d moments before addressed me. “I beg your pardon! Unhand me this very instant, sir!”

Ah, here was the first Emma who had so inexplicably disappeared. And this was exactly what I’d feared, indeed what I’ve always feared with women. I had misunderstood her, I had misread her. Intoxicated by fantasies of sexual conquest — a conquest I wouldn’t permit myself! — I’d placed myself in a position where I now seemed a fool. Or worse: a Bluebeard, a debaucher, a libertine. Though she had undressed herself, though she had plied me with Champagne, though she had ordered me to draw the curtains, clearly I had read vastly more into these things than she had meant. I shuddered to think what might have happened had I allowed my misperceptions free rein, giving into impulses from the darker hemisphere of my nature!

Without ceasing to scold me, Fräulein Eckstein turned away. Her chin tucked, her hands working between her bosom, she rebuttoned and relaced herself, relocking herself inside her garments. “Dr. Sammelsohn,” she said, realigning her skirts, “you may fetch me a cab. You shall go out of this building, and you will summon it, and you will pay for it in advance. Here is the money that you will need.” In her agitation, she riffled
through her reticule, producing a small fistful of banknotes, which she dropped onto the floor between us. “You will return, without entering this box again, to inform me when my ride has arrived.”

She spoke now in the clearest of German — what is more German than the imperative case? — and I turned sheepishly from her towards the curtains.

“Do
not
open the curtains!” she cried.

“As you wish, Fräulein.”

“I only hope that no one of my acquaintance saw me enter this box with you, or my name —
and my family’s name!
— will be ruined forever. Surely you understand that!”

“I’m certain no one saw us.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“I can’t be, Fräulein. No, you’re correct there.”

For the second time since the overture began, I became aware of the music outside our box. The singers had taken their places onstage. I’d read marvelous things about this production. I could never have afforded so splendid a ticket on my own. What a shame to let so magnificent a box go empty! But Fräulein Eckstein was right. Opening the curtains, broadcasting my face to the civilized world, the long-nosed leer of her seducer, was out of the question. Still, perhaps after bundling her into a cab, mightn’t I return? What harm could come from my peeking through a breech in the curtain and listening to the rest of the opera?

Fräulein Eckstein finished dressing, and though I hesitated to interrupt her before she’d fully vented her spleen, neither did I wish to make her wait unnecessarily long for her cab. “Very well, Fräulein,” I announced, “if you’re through, I shall go in shame and disgrace and summon you your ride.”

She turned quite suddenly. “No! Don’t! Please don’t leave me, Yankl, my husband, my lover! Don’t leave me!” She crossed the few meters of red carpet that lay between us as though the earth had opened up behind her, and she threw herself against me, her mouth once more upon mine, ravenous for my kisses. Before I could kiss her or even refuse to, before I could utter a word of surprise, however, her nose started to bleed.

“Oh no!” she cried. Crooking her back like a hunchback, she tilted
her head towards the ceiling to keep the blood from spoiling her dress. Her hands fluttered like hummingbirds on either side of her face before she thought to cup them beneath her chin. Holding one bloody palm above the other, her shoulders drawn in, she resembled a pitiable beggar. “Help me, Dr. Sammelsohn!” she shrieked in a whisper, not wishing, I presumed, to disrupt the performance or to draw attention to us here, illicitly hiding behind the velvet curtains.

I quickly pulled a handkerchief from my pocket. She seemed torn between accepting and rejecting it, apparently not wanting aid from the man who had nearly ruined her. With little choice, however, she took it and brought it to her nose. “Fräulein Eckstein,” I commanded her. The situation was now a medical emergency, and I was obliged to take charge of it. “Sit down!”