A Curable Romantic (22 page)

“Why did I run from you at the opera?” she asked playfully.

I rubbed the backs of my hands against her breasts which hung loose beneath her shift, two roses wrapped in silk. “Absolutely no idea,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said. “That tickles.”

I tried to kiss her, but she moved away. “Wait,” she said, and she turned her back on me completely, lying on her belly, her arms beneath her chest. I leaned over her and kissed her neck, which seemed to elongate against the pressure of my kisses. Lying beneath me, Fräulein Eckstein turned her body around so that she faced me. I felt her arms, like snakes, coiling up my back, encircling my neck. She kissed me on the mouth and then, with an alarming strength, hugged me to her, her cheek hard against my cheek, burying my face in the pillow beneath her dampened hair. I was still sitting, and so my torso was pinned awkwardly against hers. I unfolded my body, bringing my legs onto the bed and pressing my body against hers fully. I could hear the brittle hair of her naked pubis crinkling against the crotch of my lamb’s wool. We lay, kissing each other lightly.

“You have no idea,” I said, “but I’ve been thinking of nothing but you since the moment I first saw you.”

“You’re such a charming liar,” she said.

“No, Fräulein, it’s true.”

“How many woman have you lured into your bed with such charming lies?”

“Until now? None, quite honestly.”

A proud gleam illumined her eyes, but immediately the look clouded over. “Never leave me,” she said, tightening her arm around my neck.

“I won’t.”

“I mean it!”

“I promise.”

“Swear to it!”

“I’d rather not swear, Fräulein,” I said, and by then, we were both breathless with laughter.

“Love me then,” she said, “finally and completely!”

Her tongue clanged inside my mouth like the clapper of a bell. Her elbows pummeled my soft belly as she unbuttoned my woolens. My spine rigid, my back raised, I pinioned myself inside the brace of her thighs, struggling to pull my long underwear off past my feet, and then, suitably unclothed, I once again pressed myself against her compliant body, kissing her wildly, with a lover’s manic sorrow, my heart in anguish. I kissed her again and again until I felt something warm and liquid in my mouth.

“Fräulein Eckstein?” I said, removing my mouth from hers.

“No, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter!” she said, holding me fast.

Her nose was bleeding again, so propulsively this time, in fact, that within moments, the blouse of her chemise, and her breasts beneath it, my chest and the bed sheets upon which we lay were soaked.

“It’s nothing, my darling. No, it happens all the time these days and will soon stop. I promise you.” She tried to kiss me again, but her mouth was so filled with blood that it dribbled down her chin until she appeared to be wearing a diabolical red goatee. I drew away in panic, but she held me tight, her hands on my arms, her legs encircling my waist.

“Let go of me,” I cried, “and I’ll summon help!”

“Always running, always running, little Yankele, you poor little thing. Well, run away then. Run away!” She pushed me off her, kicking me with one leg. As I tumbled out of the bed, she cried, “You disgust me!” I gathered my clothes from the floor: my long underwear, my robe, my slippers. But she held her arms out to me. “No, don’t! I didn’t mean it, Yankl. Hold me! Please: I’m cold!”

“I’ll ring for help!” I said, departing the room.

“No, no, don’t!” she shrieked so loudly I feared she’d rouse my neighbors from their moral slumbers, and they’d mass together, outraged, at my door.

I found my pince-nez and put them on. “Sssh! Fräulein Eckstein. Please! I’ll stay in the room,” I conceded, “if that’s what you prefer. I’ll do whatever you wish.”

“This is
my
blood, Yankl!” she said. She stood on her knees in the rumpled bed sheets, her face smeared with it, her hands dripping, more blood cascading from her nose to her chest, her belly, her knees. Even her brow was smeared where she’d pushed her hair from her forehead.

“Of course, it is, Fräulein. It’s your blood. Of course, it is.” I tried to placate her. “Calm down, please. No one’s suggesting that it isn’t your blood.”

“And who spilled it?”

This question confused me. “Who spilled it?” I said. “I’m sorry, Fräulein, but I don’t follow your gist.”

“Who spilled it, Yankl?” Her hands, curled into fists at her sides, opened and closed, as though in solidarity with the pumping of her heart. She looked like a ruffian spoiling for a fight, irritating her own anger as one might a maddened dog, waiting until it was frothing at the mouth and she had only to open a gate and release it for it to sink its teeth into the throat of her opponent: me.

“Well, I might have bumped into you too roughly,” I admitted. “We’d both become a little extreme in our passion, I agree. But as you said, it’s been happening a lot lately, all the time, as it did this very afternoon at the opera.”

“You killed me, Yankl!”

“Oh, don’t exaggerate, Fräulein Eckstein.”

“You killed me!”

“And also please consider my neighbors, many of whom have to get up for work early in the morning.”

With her bloody palms lifted to the ceiling, she stood on her knees. “How could you have killed me when I loved you so? I loved you so much, Yankl. My sweet Yankele.”

I hardly knew the woman, and she knew me not at all. I’d been infatuated, it’s true, off my head with dreams of her, but even as foolish a fellow as I would not confuse an attraction of that sort with the kind of love that kills.

“Fräulein,” I said, “it’s true I’ve allowed myself to become overly fond of you in recent days …”

She shrieked again. Still on her knees, she closed her eyes and dropped her head back. Her bared throat angled towards the ceiling, she cried out in extreme pain. She looked as though she were being whipped across her back, lashed with a strop wielded by the hand of an unseen tormentor. At intervals, she gasped, her chest buckling forward, her head thrown farther back, her face ecstatic with pain. Her hands were balled into fists. With each lunge forward, she dug her nails deeper into the meat of her palms, until they too were bleeding.

“Ah! … ah! … n’ah!” she cried. “God is merciful, Yankl! God is merciful, yes! Even when we spit in His face, even when He must rebuke us!”

She opened an eye and looked at me with a small sad smile: the very portrait of a loving penitent, though nude.

I stood at the door, my nightclothes in a bundle before my sex. I counted thirty-two invisible lashes until her rhythmic bucking came to an end.

“Oh, yes! yes!” she cried. “Oh, but do you see God’s extraordinary mercy, my lover, my husband, my slayer?”

Finally she collapsed, falling sideways onto the bed.

(Today, of course, I would assume that in an hysterical frenzy of sexual excitation Fräulein Eckstein had brought herself to a climax, perversely enjoying my voyeuristic participation in her guilt-ridden self-degradation. Ignorant then of such things, I had no way of interpreting the gruesome masque she’d played out before me. All I knew, all I told myself, was that the hypodermic I’d given her seemed to have finally worked.)

I checked her pulse. It was dangerously faint. I covered her where she lay, not daring to move her, lest I awaken her again. I put on my clothes. Unable to find a fiacre at that hour, I ran all the way to Berggasse, bisecting the Ring, and by the time I got to number 19, dawn had announced its presence in the sky.

“Dr. Freud! Dr. Freud!” I shouted, following his sister-in-law in her nightclothes to their kitchen where I found Dr. Freud at his morning table. He looked up from his porridge and his Kaiser roll and took in what I’m certain was the ghastly sight of me, standing before him, unshaven,
my hair wild and uncombed, my hands and face smeared with blood where, distracted in my haste, I’d neglected to wash them.

“It’s Fräulein Eckstein,” I cried.

“Emma?” he said, standing.

“You must come immediately!”

CHAPTER 12

Along with throat catarrh and his heart troubles, Dr. Freud suffered from boils that made his every move a torment. Especially painful was a boil at the base of his scrotum, which, he told me, had lately grown as large as an apple. It was my misfortune to have bounded into his kitchen, my face and hands smeared with Fräulein Eckstein’s blood, on the day he’d scheduled to have it lanced. Minna, serving him his breakfast, promised to ring the doctor and, if possible, to remake his appointment for later in the day.

“Thank you, my dearest,” he said, rising from his place with a great show of pain. Wincing, he gathered up his things and, in a moment of pique, ground his cigar into his uneaten porridge.

“I’ll hurry back and make sure she’s still all right, then,” I said.

“Still?” He glowered. “What makes you think she was all right to begin with?”

Moving gingerly, his legs slightly bowed, he grimaced again, and before I could answer him, he barked out, “Yes, yes, go on then, go!”

A half hour later, he was making his way painfully up the stairs of my apartment, a damp handkerchief pressed against his nose. “The suppuration is intolerable this morning,” he explained.

I leaned over the railing and called down to him, “This way.”

“I’m ascending as quickly as I can, Dr. Sammelsohn! Do not hector me!” He hesitated at each landing, puffing like a grampus. “Is there a spittoon anywhere on the premises?”

“None on the landing, I’m afraid.”

He hawked up a viscid oyster of phlegm and spat it into an umbrella stand in the corner.

“Pity,” he said.

A disgusted exhalation slipped through my lips before I could censor it. Dr. Freud eyed me coldly. “The body has its needs, Dr. Sammelsohn.
Now, show me to my patient, and while I see to her, perhaps you will be so good as to rinse her blood from your face and hands, so that you cease to resemble a Red Indian on the war path!”

He limped into my rooms. Taking a deep breath and surmounting his disgust, he entered my bed chamber. I called to him from the kitchen, where I stood at the sink, “I assure you, Dr. Freud, I had no intention of ever seeing the Fräulein again, exactly as I pledged to you.”

I tamped my face with a towel. Through the bedroom door, I could see him examining Fräulein Eckstein, checking her pulse, her arm lifted awkwardly behind her back. She had fallen forward onto the bed, and I’d thought it best to leave her undisturbed when I’d fled the apartment in a panic. I explained as much to Dr. Freud.

“Dr. Sammelsohn, if you would, please help me turn her over.” He was bitingly polite, and I felt appropriately bitten.

In concert, we each took one of her shoulders and lifted her up, placing her on her back. Her unbuttoned chemise exposed the length of her body: her breasts, her belly, her knee caps all lacquered and shiny with blood.

At that moment, Dr. Freud ceased being able to look at me. “Call an ambulance” was all he said, staring at his shoes.

“It looks terrible, I know,” I said — and it did: the bed splashed with blood; the room, a shambles — “but she came here on her own. You have to believe that. She was sleepwalking, in fact.”

“The ambulance, Dr. Sammelsohn. I’ll take the particulars of the case from you later. At our leisure. Once the patient has been seen to.”

“Of course.”

Chastened, I went to find the porter. Before I left the apartment, I turned to watch as Dr. Freud buttoned Fräulein Eckstein’s chemise with all the tenderness of a father. He’d neglected to remove his hat and was wearing it cocked onto the back of his head. “What has he done to you, my poor child?” he said, though she’d not yet awakened from the chloral I’d given her.

THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED
, and the attendants bundled Fräulein Eckstein out, still unconscious, on a bier.

Dr. Freud turned on me quite suddenly. “You!” he said.

“Yes?” I asked meekly.

“Have you any coffee by any chance?”

“I’ll set about brewing it at once.”

Wincing, Dr. Freud sat down at my kitchen table.

“An unfortunate morning,” he muttered, rubbing his face in his hands. He inspected the length of his beard, lifting it with one hand and letting it fall, his face a growl of self-disgust. In addition to the surgery for his boil, I’d kept him from his daily appointment with his barber. “Even my teeth feel gritty,” he complained.

“Milk?” I asked, handing him a cup.

“Black.”

“Black it is.”

“Indeed.”

Refusing to acknowledge the little laugh I’d presented to him in appreciation of his joke, he nailed me to the cross of my own guilty feelings with a dour stare. Sitting across from him, I turned my cup around and around on its saucer, waiting for him to speak.

“Can you please stop that incessant clattering!” He closed his eyes and brought his hand to the middle of his brow. “I have such a headache.”

I released the cup.

He took his pulse. “I want a cigar. And I need more cocaine.”

Dr. Freud treated the mild cardiac arrhythmia from which, during the time I knew him, he imagined he was dying, with unstinting, self-administered doses of cocaine. (If not the actual cause of his arrhythmia, the cocaine must surely have exacerbated it.) He painted his nostrils repeatedly until copious amounts of pus were discharged, after which he imagined he felt better. Now he blew his nose into his already saturated handkerchief. Attempting to wipe it clean, he daubed with the kerchief at the embouchure of his beard, spackling it further.

“Dr. Sammelsohn, if you would be so kind, rehearse for me the events leading to your appearance this morning at my breakfast table. And leave nothing out,” he warned, “as it shall be I and not you who decides which details are of importance and which not.”

He pierced me again with that terrible gaze of his. More than Fräulein
Eckstein’s health, I realized, hung in the balance between us. Though I’d come to think of my longing for her as a month’s folly, never to be reciprocated, the friendship with Dr. Freud that resulted from it was of great value to me. At the moment, however, that friendship seemed as precarious as Fräulein Eckstein’s health. One ill-chosen word, I knew, and it would be lost forever and, through it, my citizenship in the brave new world I’d come to think of, prematurely, as my own. How much could I tell Dr. Freud without risking everything? In a moment of myopic, if not blind panic, I decided to leave out all the sexual details in order, I told myself, to spare Fräulein Eckstein and to guard her honor. Plus, what possible interest could Dr. Freud have in that aspect of things? (At that point, I knew nothing of his then-revolutionary interest in the psychodynamics of sexuality.) My hands fidgeted and ceased fidgeting with my coffee cup, and I poured forth the story as I thought he wanted to hear it, eliding over all self-incriminating details in the hopes of proving myself worthy of his continued esteem, meanwhile emphasizing my passivity in the whole bloody show: I’d been up late, reading Fliess, I emphasized for good measure, lost in my own thoughts, when Fräulein Eckstein knocked upon my door. Sleepwalking, she’d come to my apartment barefoot, without a wrap, in a state of dangerous psychosis. When she began screaming, I gave her a hypodermic of chloral to help her sleep the few hours until morning, placing her in my bed. All was well, until her nose began to bleed, and she began screaming, accusing me of having murdered her. Under the circumstances, had I really done anything he himself wouldn’t have done, either as a doctor or a man?