Heart of the City (19 page)

AT A rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, Tina said, “I’m tired. You mind driving for a while?”

She handed Chris the keys to her teal blue Volvo station wagon.

“Really?” he said. The open road had been another touchstone of the American movies he’d seen back in Straubing. “Wow.”

Liz and Ron, vigilant, were right behind them in their own car. But by Baltimore, unbeknownst to them, the plan to drop Schwartzie in Washington had been scrapped.

Tina told Chris that a number of friends, including Liz and Ron, were converging on her house in Newport News for a weekend. “It’s going to be like a gypsy camp,” she told Chris, giggling. “We’re going to go crabbing, drink some beer, listen to music. You want to see the real America? This will be it, baby.” He could sleep on the couch and catch a bus to D.C. from Virginia on Monday, she told him.

That evening, by the York River up in Gloucester Point, Tina’s friends taught Chris how to crab by tying a string around a chicken neck for bait. Later, back at the house, they taught him lines from
Saturday Night Live
’s “Hans and Franz” skit.

“We just want to pump! You! Up!” Chris repeated gamely, even though he’d never heard of
Saturday Night Live
. Everyone had had a few beers by then, and the room erupted in hysterics.

Tina was exhausted and went to bed early. Chris stayed up with the guys, who gathered in front of the VCR to watch
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
.

ON MONDAY morning, Tina dropped Chris at a Greyhound bus station and sent him on his way to Washington. He checked into a seedy hotel in a neighborhood he soon realized was the province of drug dealers and prostitutes. He spent little time in the room. Over a couple of days, he saw the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and Arlington Cemetery, and took a jog around the Mall. In Pittsburgh, he saw his Uncle Gerhard’s old acquaintance, an elderly man named Ralph who showed him Three Rivers Stadium and spun stories about the good old days.

America, with its kaleidoscope of people and its dramatic history, fascinated Chris. Still, at the back of his mind was Tina. He loved how fluid she was with people. She was friendly, not just to him but seemingly to everyone she met—waiters, other tourists, the people who stopped her on the street for directions, mistaking her for a native. She had a way of making everyone around her feel good. “Full of life!” Chris knew it was a popular American expression—he may have heard it on a TV commercial. He thought it fit her perfectly.

It had been nearly a week since they’d parted. He was anxious about how she might react if he got back in touch now. A week was plenty of time for chemistry—if you could even call it that—to dissipate. His return flight to Germany was now just two days away. But he had an open-ended ticket, and he didn’t have to be back to work at the factory for another week and a half.

On his last night in Pittsburgh, he worked up the courage to call her. “Hello, um, Tina,” he said.

“Schwartzie!”

She told him she was going camping in the mountains for a week with Todd and his friend. Did he want to come?

From her voice, it was as if six minutes had passed, not six days.

THEIR WEEK in the Adirondacks was a turning point. They hiked up Blue Mountain, a grueling four-hour trek, and stayed in a cabin that belonged to one of Tina’s college friends. It was an isolated spot in the wilderness, without electricity or plumbing. Chris canoed and picnicked with Todd and his friend during the day, and accepted their invitations to play manhunt in the woods. “I want Schwarzenegger on my team,” one would shout. “No fair, he was on your team yesterday,” the other would say.

While Tina was away for her evening bath in a nearby pond, Chris built a fire so the cabin would be warm when she returned.
At campfires after dark, they talked more about their families and their past relationships. They talked about their aspirations—how she tried to absorb as much as possible while sightseeing so she’d have lessons to share with her elementary school students, how he hoped for a life with more balance. The more time she spent with him, the more he reminded her of her father: good-mannered but playful, strong but gentle. And optimistic, even in the face of struggle.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Chris said at one point, trying to buck her up. “The good thing about being down is you can only go up.” It was an expression her own father might have used.

On the drive home, they saw roadway signs for the Great New York State Fair, in Syracuse, and pulled off. When the boys ran ahead to examine a prizewinning cow, Chris slipped his hand into Tina’s. It was the first time they’d really touched, and she recoiled. It was too tender, she thought. It was something people in a committed relationship did. She wasn’t sure what was happening between them. But she was levelheaded enough now to face facts: Chris was going home to Germany, and Germany was three thousand miles away. Why sink your heart into something when you know—when you can see—it will wind up in pieces? Why bother? She was annoyed at him, and at herself. “What are you doing?” she snapped.

Chris raised their interlocked fingers to eye level, as if close study would convince Tina of the gesture’s innocence. “I’m just holding your hand.”

Tina lowered their hands, but didn’t let go.

“Okay,” Tina said after a few moments, as her breathing settled. “Just holding my hand. Okay.”

Back in Newport News, she asked Chris to write his home address and phone number in her book. Then she drove him to Fredericksburg, where a bus was leaving for New York’s JFK Airport. They gave each other a peck on the lips. Then the bus doors wheezed shut and he was gone.

At the house, Tina found herself short of breath. What had just happened? What had she done? Her emotions were roiling. Frantic, she ran to the counter by the back door. Where was her address book? It was the last thing he touched, and when she found it, under an old newspaper, she rippled through to the pages marked “H.” Beneath “Chris Holter” and a street address, she saw now that he had also inscribed something else: “I love you.” Then, a final notation: “I’ll be back.”

BACK HOME in Straubing, Chris buried himself in work, hoping to forget about the woman he’d met in America. “Back to the job,” he kept telling himself. “Back to routine.” But the routine seemed more and more like drudgery. He looked down at the conveyer belt and the never-ending parade of plastic circuit boards. Each time one came off on his end, another appeared at the other. His fingers had healed in America, but the copper wires scored them now as mercilessly as before.

“Just let it go,” he told himself. “One day maybe you’ll go back to America, and you can look her up. See if she remembers you. But for now, for a few years, just forget her. Forget. Forget.”

Then, a couple of weeks later, a letter arrived. Chris’s hand shook as he opened the envelope. Inside, beneath an amusing recap of their time together, Tina had written, “I love you, too.”

Their phone bills got so expensive—$350 in one month—that they decided to mail each other cassette tapes instead. They filled entire forty-five-minute sides with stories from their lives and with songs they recorded off favorite albums. “I’m getting ready for work,” one might begin. Or, “It’s another snow day.”

Her first trip to Germany, late that December, with Todd, had its share of cultural gaffes. Tina’s informality shocked some of his relatives: she hugged everyone she met—handshakes were about as far as Chris’s relatives typically went, even with family. And when there weren’t enough chairs to go around during coffee
and kuchen one afternoon, Tina just plopped down on the floor and took her food there.

“Get up, get up,” Chris’s mother said, aghast. “She’ll catch cold down there.”

His relatives tried to teach her German phrases. She tried to teach them the Mexican Hat Dance.

“My family likes you,” Chris confided one night. “But I’m not sure they completely understand you.”

American tourists weren’t much seen in Straubing, and everywhere she went, people stopped to stare at the visitor and her son, who had become minor celebrities. “
Amerikaner
,” kids shouted. “
Amerikaner
.”

In February 1989, Chris returned to Virginia for a visit. By late that spring, he told his family he was moving to America to be with Tina. None of his siblings, all older, had left Straubing, and his mother, aggrieved, shook her head at the news. “Every generation has its crazy Holter,” she said. “First Uncle Gerhard with his ideas about America. Now you. How will you survive? You don’t know anything. All you have is this woman.”

But Uncle Gerhard urged him to go. “The family ordered me back to Straubing, and for what? To sell shoes for the rest of my life.

“Go,” Gerhard said. “Go for me.”

Chris arrived in June and moved in with Tina and her son. He had no job prospects at first but soon enrolled in an apprentice program in brick masonry. In December, in the dining room of the nearby Chamberlin Hotel, with its sweeping view of Chesapeake Bay, Chris proposed.

They were married on Valentine’s Day 1990, at the home of an elderly justice of the peace and his wife.

Depths

THE SUBWAY