Munich Airport (9 page)

Just over Richard's sloped shoulder, I see a man from the stag—no, the stag himself—trying to kiss a woman at the bar. She will not kiss him back. This is an airport, she is telling him, and I have a husband. We cannot, of course, hear them, but this is what I imagine she has told him. This is how she gazes at him. Richard looks behind him to see what I am looking at. He turns back and says, referring to the stag party, Fucking trolls, fucking scumbags.

You've got a new wife, I say.

Yes, he says. But we're not married.

She's very pretty, I say, and the kid is good-looking.

Thanks, he says.

What happened with your ex?

Nothing, he says, we're still together. We've got two kids.

For a moment I think he is joking, and I laugh, but then I see he is not joking so I grab my glass of water and pretend to drink.

Richard seems to grow very large suddenly with thoughtfulness. He says, I asked for a divorce, and she said I was insane. We see each other once or twice a month, the rest of the time I'm in Germany or the States, we have a house, let's keep the house, let's keep the kids in school, I do what I want, she does what she wants, I come home once or twice a month to see the kids. After Richard says this, he smiles and cheers up, and comes down to his normal size.

This works out okay?

Yes and no, he says. I mean, I don't know how the alternatives are going. He takes a drink and says, Have you remarried?

No, no, I haven't.

He looks into my thoughts, sees that he doesn't want to press that question any further. Behind him, I see that the stag has stopped trying to kiss the woman, now he is just handling her, placing his hands on her stomach and back, and she seems okay with this, this seems proper. They seem to be having an ordinary, lighthearted chat now. She is pretty, with big eyes. She has a couple of kids, they are young, one is well behaved and the other is not. The husband does something creative, but it doesn't pay the bills—he supplements this work with a regular job, but it demeans him. She stands by him, however, and believes in him, and though he has attempted to give up the creative thing many times, she demands that he stick with it. Even now, she is thinking that the man talking to her, handling her, touching her beneath the bar, where nobody can see, is a worm compared to her husband.

I never knew you had a sister, he says. What was her name again?

Miriam, I say.

I had a sister, she died when I was very young. What happened to Miriam?

She starved to death.

Richard asks me to repeat myself, so I say, It's true.

How is that possible? Was she ill? Was she trapped in a snowstorm?

She died in her apartment in Berlin. She just stopped eating.

Anorexia.

I shrug. I don't have another word for it.

That's awful, he says, truly awful, I'm sorry to hear it. When was it, when did she die?

A little over three weeks ago.

It's madness, he says, it's unbelievable. Was it…he searched for a way to phrase it…something that surprised you?

I nod my head, because I cannot really bring myself to say it did not totally surprise me. I saw her five years ago. She was sickly thin, obviously not well, physically or otherwise, and I never bothered to check up on her after that. I said, The last time I saw her was in London, about nine years ago, and she was fine.

Nine years?

Nine years goes quick.

Richard downs his drink and says, It sure does. Then he says, One more, and he goes to the bar again. He doesn't have to speak German or English, he just points to his glass. The woman in the corner with the stag has entered a sort of trance. It seems she is on the verge of succumbing, not out of a desire for the stag but out of indifference to the act of betrayal. When Richard comes back, I say, That's very strange, those two. He looks. We both stare for a while. She sees us staring but she doesn't care. The man looks over and we look away.

Richard tells me I really should think about meeting him for a chat.

About what?

Just a chat.

I say, I'm happy where I am, I really am.

Of course you are, it's just a chat. He hands me his card.

I'm actually serious, I say.

Me too, just a chat.

We shake hands, and he walks away. I remain. I look at his card. I see that he is based in Munich as well as London. This gives me pause. But no, I don't want to live in Munich. I put his card in my wallet. I hold my glass of water but don't drink, and I watch the woman at the bar. She and the man are kissing softly and discreetly, looking around after each kiss, as though they have convinced themselves that they are going unnoticed. I put my glass on a ledge. I check my phone. There's a message from Trish on it. She and my father are wondering if I'm all right. They're at some sort of historical exhibit down the other end of the terminal.

On the last night of our journey outside Berlin—which took us up the Rhine valley, then down from Koblenz into the Ardennes and into Luxembourg—we decided to treat ourselves to a five-star hotel in Brussels. From the road, from my phone, we booked two rooms in the Radisson Blu Royal. We had a nice dinner, and after dessert my father had a cognac and went to bed. I went out. A funny thing happened to the weather during our trip. After that first cold week, the temperature shot up, the clouds disappeared, and it seemed that an early summer had arrived. When I went out, I did not even need a jacket. I met a woman. She was nice and funny. She was about fifty. She showed me a few places. She took me to her studio. We ended up back at my hotel room. When she left, she wished me a pleasant journey back to Berlin. When I was alone again, I stood naked in front of the huge closet mirrors. I do not have a full-length mirror in London, so it isn't often I get to examine what has happened to my body. At first I tried to stand erect, tighten up, suck my stomach in. But then I relaxed. I breathed out. The days of gluttony hadn't helped, but there was no denying that I had grown soft. I sucked in my gut. I squeezed the flesh in my chest and arms, then I flexed my muscles to see if flexing made that flesh taut. I bent over, and my gut balled up. It was made of three folds, folds that I poked and squeezed together. A wound I'd given myself the previous night opened up—it was excruciating—and started bleeding. It had been bleeding all day, actually, but only when I squeezed my gut together did the wound completely reopen. I told myself, Well, that was dumb. I had bought, at a pharmacy in Brussels, some dressings for it. I showed it to the pharmacist and he said I might need to see a doctor, and gave me some instructions for cleaning and re-dressing it. So I re-dressed it and sat on the edge of the bed, and waited. I looked at myself in the mirror while I waited, and I felt that I would never be able to exercise enough or eat well enough to reverse the deterioration that had taken place, a deterioration that was more than physical, that was fueled not by time and biology but by memory—my body was made of everything I could remember.

It started to rain, and when the bleeding stopped at last I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself. I got my notebook out, sat on the bed, propped myself up on all the pillows, filled a few pages. I didn't quite understand why the woman had to leave, but it would have been nice to have her stay the night, stay until breakfast, have her meet my father, surprise him. The bar where we met was full of young people. I don't remember how we started talking, but once we did, we admitted that the place made us feel old, so we went somewhere else, had a drink, then somewhere else, and so on, until we arrived at a place that made us feel young, which was not busy, neither too dark nor too loud, and played nice music that disappeared when you spoke. Finally I got her to talk about what she did, and why she was in Brussels. She said she was a musician. She had a residency, it was EU-funded. There was so much money, she said, for artists in Brussels, but nobody wanted to come and stay here, because it was so dull and full of diplomats. I asked her if I could buy a recording of her music somewhere. She said, It's not the kind of music you buy in a store. I used the word experimental. Oh, she said, please don't call it that. I asked her to describe it, and she said it was not the kind of music you describe. Well, I said, I like music that is hard to describe, now I have to hear it. She said, with a tone that suggested she was trying to call my bluff, My studio is not far. But I wasn't bluffing, so we finished our drinks, paid up, and left.

Her studio was in a vast, multistory steel box that had very few windows. I have been to the studios of visual artists, but this was something different. There were three rooms. The first was an office, the second was a place where she kept clutter, and the third was the size of a ballroom, except with a very low ceiling—it must have been a false ceiling. That room was white with glossy white walls, ceiling, floor. The surfaces were so glossy they looked wet. At the far end, a black trapezoidal box hung from the ceiling by fine, invisible wires. She gave me a soft white hooded gown and white paper boots. She put on a gown and boots as well. Then she gave me some large white headphones. I put them on, over the hood. There was a deep noise in them, something like the sound you get when you submerge yourself in a bath and try to be absolutely still and listen. I lifted them off my ears and asked, Now what? Walk around very slowly, she said. So I walked, very slowly. I would have walked slowly anyway, because the appearance of wetness made me think the floor was slippery, even though it was not. There were, as I walked, tiny fluctuations in the low, underwater sound. These fluctuations at first sounded like pure static, but every once in a while I could hear something distinct, I thought. Music, possibly. A slow disorientation began to come over me, and it seemed the slower I walked, the more thrilling the disorientation became. The glossiness of the room started to blur my sense of depth, and after a while I could not tell where the floor stopped and where the wall began. The black trapezoidal box seemed to absorb the room's sense of definition, and remarkably, as I slowly made my way around the room, following what felt like a path made by these fluctuations, the box—which evidently housed the transmitter that was sending out the signal that produced the fluctuations—changed shape. At first these changes were very slight. It bulged a little, or shrank, and sometimes it seemed to rise or fall slightly. But then it started to change orientation, so that it seemed upside down, and abruptly right-side-up again. Then it became a square, a circle, a triangle. These shape-changes were confounding. But also obviously not real, because it remained—all I had to do was stop believing the hallucination—trapezoidal. It changed color, too—from black to green to blue, by shades. Meanwhile, the aural fluctuations continued, and the more I tried to make sense of them, the more I could hear the static-y echoes of music. Whatever piece I thought of, I could hear. Anything I thought, I could apply to the noise, and momentarily this thought could grip the noise and make sense of it. I walked all the way to the box and stood under it. The low noise was strongest right underneath it. So were the fluctuations. I could hear high-pitched drilling, but the harmony I faintly recognized—and which became anything I wanted it to be—remained out of reach. Then I took the headphones off, and I pulled the hood down. The woman noticed, and she took her headphones off, too. What do you think? she asked. You're right, I said, it's not music you can easily describe. We met in the center of the room and I gave her back her headphones. What is it playing? I asked. What is
it
? she asked. I was about to turn around and point to the black trapezoidal box with the transmitter inside, but the tone of her question suggested I'd completely misunderstood what was happening, and I felt so self-conscious for not realizing what was obvious, and maybe even a little irritated, that I just said, If this is in your studio, what will it look like in public? She said, It will be vast. It will be ten times this size, and the trapezoid will be the size of a commercial airliner.

Ten times? I said.

Well, maybe just the same size, maybe twice the size.

Where will you exhibit it?

She named a large, important-sounding gallery in Barcelona, but not in a way that made her sound pompous. She said it with a shy grin, as though she herself could barely believe it. If I exhibit at Tate Modern, I will make it ten times this size, she said.

It was really late when we left the studio. We hadn't been flirting in an obvious way, or touching, but there was something between us, and I think we both had the sense that if anything was going to happen, it would have to happen soon. I felt completely disarmed by the experience I'd just had, and not quite deserving of her, so I did not try to kiss her, even though it seemed like kissing would have been appropriate. She said, Please tell me you are not a diplomat. I'm not a diplomat, I said. Please tell me you do something completely insipid, you're a lawyer or an accountant, or a graphic designer. I gave her a funny look. Well, she said, then tell me you're something evil, like a journalist or a politician. I said, I'm in marketing. Marketing! she exclaimed. That's marvelous, that's a hundred times worse. I said, You don't hear the word marvelous much anymore.

We walked along a lot of empty, dark streets—I mean the windows were dark, and the place seemed very sleepy. She said Brussels was so dull that, after midnight, you could walk down the middle of any street you liked, and she liked to do that. While we were in her studio, a cold front had arrived, just like that, and now the skies were gray, and there was a chill. That chill felt nice after the week of weird, swampy heat, though the chill would transform, in a day, into the return of winter in central Europe, and my father would feel quite proud of himself for splurging on a warm coat. The clouds, which were low, and which absorbed the lights of the city, were bright and fluorescent, and they moved swiftly.

What did you want to become? she asked.