Munich Airport (13 page)

Two days after I rearranged and cleaned Miriam's apartment, I returned. I went, again, by bicycle. It was a wet day, so the ride was sloshy and slow, I got sprayed by a few cars, crashed through countless deep puddles, and my pants, by the time I arrived, were not only soaking wet but spotted with oily, superblack gunk. I hitched my bike to a lamppost. My hands were numb, inside the gloves. My legs felt numb, because my pants were wet. But I also felt that pleasant energy you get after steady physical exertion. I looked up at Miriam's windows. The apartment wasn't her first apartment in Berlin, but she had lived there almost fifteen years.

I went inside, checked for mail—there was none—walked up the steps, walked along the corridor. The building was quiet. It was clean. It smelled a little like bleach and a little like wet cement. From the outside, it looked like a dump without heat or water or electricity, and where at night you might have to light candles to read or write. But on the inside it was like anywhere else.

When I put the key in the lock of Miriam's door and turned it, I heard some heavy steps, then Otis appeared, first just his head, then he stepped down and out and put his hands in his pockets.

Hi, Otis, I said.

Hey, he said.

I knew, or thought I knew, what he wanted, but I didn't understand his impatience, unless he simply didn't trust me.

I've just arrived, I said.

I saw you on the street. You're still riding your bike.

It's getting warmer, I said. You want to come in?

I opened the door and he squeezed his shoulders together and walked in with his head down and arms pressed into his sides. I followed him. It still smelled strongly of the cleaning agents I had used in the bathroom. And I had forgotten just how drastically I had altered her apartment. The piles of her things were vaguely equidistant from each other. I took my coat off and threw it on the floor in the corner, then I took off my hat and threw it on the dining table, then I threw the keys on the dining table. I had stacked the chairs up against the wall, so I had to unstack one to sit on. Otis was rolling up a cigarette, and when he was finished he asked, Is it okay to smoke? I said, No. But I don't think he was consciously conversing with me, because he lit his cigarette anyway and said, Thanks. He walked to the pile of books and knelt down. He squinted down into it, then he turned his head sideways so he could read the spines. Miriam had a couple hundred books. Otis asked me if I'd gone through them. I said I hadn't, I'd just thrown them into the pile. That was the truth. Otis dug his hand in deep, grasped a book, and tried to pull it out without disturbing the pile, but the pile toppled and the books scattered on the floor, and Otis said, Sorry.

Is that one of yours? I asked.

Yep, he said.

How did your books end up here in the first place?

Like I said, it's not just books, he said. A lot of the stuff here belongs to me.

Well, I said, how did your stuff end up here?

I regretted asking it, because it was obvious. And if I had ever come to visit Miriam, I would not have had to ask. So I said, Never mind. Otis grabbed another book. He seemed delighted to see it. Then another. A little stack began beside him. I started to feel irritated, so I said, My father wants to ship all this stuff back to the States.

Oh yeah? asked Otis.

Yep, I said.

My father, of course, didn't care. He hadn't cared enough to save her things twenty years ago, and he had no connection to the woman Miriam had become, or the things she possessed. My father had needed to see her apartment, but only once, and not for any reason that he or I could define. Nor could I define the cause of my compulsion to be around Miriam's things, or to organize them into stacks, or to fret over their destinies. I said, Did you give any more thought to getting Miriam's friends together for a drink? He got up and moved to another stack, and another, and another, until he saw a lamp, a really nice antique lamp, and he pulled out the lamp, again, quite delighted with himself. Then he said, It'll cost a lot to ship all this stuff, and the appliances won't work in the States. I repeated my question about the drinks and Otis looked at me, realizing I had changed the subject, and that the new subject and the old subject were connected. Not yet, he said.

I was about to stand up and start going through a stack or two when my phone rang. It was the senior marketing manager from the aerospace firm. Her name was Chris. She first expressed her condolences, saying that she had heard the news about a death in my family. I sat down on the chair. I thanked her, and I said what I guessed she would expect me to say, which was that it was a difficult time but we were coping. Very good, she said, you should take as long as you need. Thank you, I said, I really appreciate that.

I looked up at the ceiling. It was badly stained from cigarette smoke. It was brown-gray and the stains were in streaks, as though she always sat, when she smoked, in the same three or four places, and the path her smoke made on its way upward from the ends of her cigarettes and from her nose and mouth was always the same. She would have come home, placed her keys on the table, grabbed a drink—possibly some tea, coffee, or a glass of water—and sat at the dining-room table to smoke. And after a while she would move to the couch to smoke. She read her books there and also in bed. She didn't have much else for entertainment, just the radio. Though she never did anything for very long, or anything with much determination—so that from month to month her life outside the apartment was full of inconstancy—I imagined that her rituals at home were unwavering without ever being deliberate.

I said, I won't be able to start on Monday. I'm not even in the country.

No, of course not, said Chris. Where are you?

In Berlin, I say.

Oh, she said, with some excitement, though she stopped herself from saying anything nice about Berlin.

It could be a couple of weeks, possibly a little longer.

There was a pause, which I had expected.

My sister died, I said. My father and I are in Berlin, waiting for her body to be released, then we'll fly her home and bury her. We don't know when her body will be released.

Oh, she said, this time utterly without excitement.

I'm sorry about the timing, I said.

Please don't be sorry, how horrible for you.

At that moment Otis dug a small copper ashtray from a mound of small household items and stamped his cigarette out in it. Then he grabbed something else from that mound—a red-glass candleholder—and placed it behind him. Then he seemed to go about searching for the other candleholder in the set.

When I started my business, I often contrived to take important telephone calls at inconvenient times. I liked the idea of being interrupted, and I liked to be seen to be interrupted, so I made sure a lot of calls came when I knew I'd be at the gym. My phone would ring, I'd slow my treadmill down and talk into the microphone of my headphones. I'd stop doing sit-ups, wipe my face off with a towel, and speak. I'd put the weights back on the rack and sit hunched on a bench, trying to catch my breath. I'd also schedule calls during chamber of commerce events, or business lunches. I was constantly looking for new clients. The search for clients was always my priority. I hoped I would finally get too much work and have to hire somebody. Sometimes potential clients offered me a full-time, salaried job. Sometimes the pay was very good, and I would spend a couple of days trying to decide whether to go for the job, sometimes agonizingly. I'd lie in bed and visualize my work routine the next day—at my supposed consultancy gig, the firm I'd left as an employee, only to return as a consultant—and all the days I could foresee, and of course I knew that the difference between what I did as a consultant and what I would be doing as a salaried employee was slight. But I was more comfortable as an outsider. I valued the degree of distance I could maintain from a client that I could not insist on from an employer, a distance that enforced cordiality and respect and also a fear of confrontation—so if I wanted to go out and stand on a bridge on a sunny day and watch ducks, I could say, I'm going out for a bit, without somebody saying, Where are you going? I also didn't want people to thank me for working. I didn't care if they were personally happy with me. I didn't want a boss to knock on the door of my office, or the desk at my cubicle, and say, Good work on the such and such, or, Thanks for working late these last couple of months. I didn't want to go for drinks with colleagues and celebrate anything. And as I'd lie in bed, thinking these things, I would tell myself, Your freedom only exists so long as you operate entirely within the parameters of what's expected of you, you take shit from people anyway, you can't go stand on bridges and watch ducks, people have called you in to tell you that they must have miscommunicated their wishes because your work was way off, and you hated them, then they came by later and said, Great work on the such and such, and you cherished the reinforcement, and you found yourself out with people from the office having a drink and it wasn't so bad. So I'd think, Take the job, work for five years, then try your own business again. And I'd meet them. I'd make an effort. We'd sit down together in a room with them on one side of a table and me on the other. There'd be water, coffee, some cookies. They'd introduce themselves, they'd explain what they did, I'd tell them about the work that I'd done. The following exchange always took place—

You left your old firm.

That's right. To start my own business.

But you're back with them now.

As a consultant.

Are you willing to work here as a full-time employee?

Yes, I think this is a unique opportunity.

Why?

And I'd tell them, but during my explanation of what it was that I liked so much about the opportunity, a certain gloom always came upon me. I'd run out of energy to make eye contact. I'd look at my hands. I'd yawn. I'd start with ebullience and expansiveness, with wit and a sense of purpose, and with each sentence I seemed to tire myself out, as though I were trying to climb the circular steps of an inconceivably tall tower. The fatigue began before I noticed it, and when I did notice it, I always tried to wrap up my speech as soon as possible. After that, we'd go through other questions and scenarios. But I'd already talked myself out of it. I loved that moment—the moment I knew I was going to say no. It was like stopping, turning around, and coming down the stairway of the tower. I felt revived, and generally the interviews went exceedingly well after that, and though I'd get some questions that annoyed me or felt insulting, or outdated, I'd stay engaged, stay polite, because I knew that when I called them to tell them that I couldn't take the position because my heart was still in my business, I would add, Please keep me in mind for the future.

I finally stopped interviewing for full-time positions.

We can set you up to work remotely, said Chris. You can start when you feel ready, from anywhere, and join us here when it's appropriate.

Absolutely, I said, that's perfect, let's do that as soon as possible.

Perfect, she said, and I was glad to have made her happy, except that I had no energy to work, I had no ideas and I had no enthusiasm. Otis, at that moment, lit another cigarette as he found something else that was either his or that reminded him of Miriam, warmly, or that he figured was worth some money.

Let us know if we can do anything else for you, said Chris.

I sure will.

I could have ended the conversation there. There was nothing else to say. In a week they'd have me set up remotely and I'd be sitting in a café somewhere in Berlin, or in the living room of my father's house, working on a computer. But I also knew that I could not possibly begin work in a week. I felt then, standing in Miriam's apartment, that I might never work again, or I might at least leave marketing. So I said, She starved to death. And I said that I was standing in her apartment, sifting through the debris of her life with some guy named Otis, who probably, at one time, was her boyfriend, and didn't even have the fucking decency to move out of her building after they split up. Chris was silent. I imagined her going immediately to the director and suggesting they find a way to cancel the contract. So I apologized and hurriedly got off the phone.

I went back to wander among the stacks of Miriam's possessions. Not everything was in an orderly stack, or separated into uncontaminated categories, though my mind keeps trying to remember it that way. There was the couch, which I had turned on its end and surrounded with rolled-up rugs. There were tall standing lamps I had gathered and stood in a crowded circle, and they looked a little bit like brass and chrome flamingos. There was the wardrobe and the sideboard and the squat drinks cabinet, and I had pushed them close together. Close together, it was easy to see how fine these pieces of furniture really were. I thought it was telling that Otis wasn't saying anything about them, or going near them. I assumed it was because he wanted them the most. It was fifties furniture, what was called Contemporary in the fifties. And they were original. And as I saw how conspicuously Otis ignored them, how transparently little attention he was paying them, the three pieces assumed a great weight in my thoughts, and I felt that I had better protect or destroy them, or whatever it took to make sure Otis could not get his hands on them. Miriam's wardrobe and sideboard and cabinet were not in perfect condition, but all the brass knobs and handles were original, the keys were original, the glass was original, and the panels were original. They needed some oil, but they weren't chipped anywhere. They were just the things a young family might spend a month's salary on in an antiques store. I knelt down by the pile of books. She had a huge variety of books, a variety that, all by itself, dispelled any fear that she had lived a life of imaginative surrender. I opened one of them and saw that she had made notes throughout the margins, in pencil. I opened another. It was the same. And another. Mostly these notes were one-word or brief responses to passages she'd underlined, but also, in the bottom and top margins, sometimes, the passages themselves, transcribed in her own handwriting. At first I couldn't believe my luck. The first day I arrived, I had gone superficially through drawers and shoeboxes looking for notebooks, diaries, anything that might have contained her everyday thoughts. All I could find were meaningless scribbles on bits of paper, to-do lists, numbers, addresses. I was not looking for an answer to the cause of her death, because I didn't believe such a thing could exist, but I felt as though it would be the closest thing possible to having a conversation with her. I hadn't looked inside the books because I never wrote anything inside books, in fact I was sure I had told her, when we were young, that she was not to write in books. But there it was—the thing I sought, a record—contained within her disordered library. But then the feeling of luck was supplanted by distress, because the notes were self-evidently too multitudinous to achieve shape—either in isolation each note would imply its own incompleteness or in the wholeness of them would be torrential white noise, and anything between was an illusion. I also felt distress because her library, though it appeared disarranged, might actually have had some structure, and in my haste and in my presumptuousness I had mishandled it, and erased it. And I felt distress because I could already see that the discovery was lost. Otis had removed some of the books and whatever he did not take we would leave here. We had the money to ship them, of course, but we had already let her discard her things once, and to act, now, as though we were the kind of people who would unbox them at home and go through them was only going to feed our desire to put off, or possibly delay forever, an appreciation of her death. I knew instantly that I wasn't even going to tell my father I had found them.