Secret Father (42 page)

 

"I used to think that hair didn't grow on women's legs," I said, "like their faces." I was rubbing my foot along the smooth skin of her calf, the bent knuckle of my forefinger along the high ridge of her cheekbone. This was later. We had moved to the bed, had drawn back its blankets, and the cool, crisp sheets had received us as ifwe alone were meant for them.

I had suggested with a whisper killing the microphone in the chandelier, but she said no—what is left to hide? And besides, it is better for the children if the Stasi think us naïve.

I could tell from the way she answered that she had already thought about it, and I might have wondered why, but didn't. Anyway, she said, who cares what the Stasi hear, what they think?

We made love again then, with more deliberation, more delight, more tenderness, and more attention. Aware of the microphone above us, I made my moves this time in near silence, and was struck that, despite her disclaimer, so did she.

Now, enacting the cliché of our kind, we were smoking, our bodies half up, leaning against the cushioned headboard. "Really," I said, "I used to think that."

She laughed. "And then you came to
Deutschland
and met the
Fräulein.
"

"My secretary has more hair on her legs than I do."

She brought her foot to my leg while drawing on her cigarette, then let her foot fall away, the utter complacency of sexual satiation. As she exhaled, I watched the smoke stream out of her elegant lips.

Beside her, away from me, was the bedside table and the glowing small lamp, which alone kept the room from darkness. With the drapes still drawn, it could have been the middle of the night. In silence I watched her smoking, aware of the way the table lamp backlit her profile, from her face down to the quite pointed form of her uncovered breasts.

"You know why that is," Charlotte said, and it took me a moment to realize she was still thinking of my offhand remark about unshaven legs.

"Why?"

"Razors have been rationed in this country during forty of the last fifty years, because German steel went to guns. When razors are rationed, how readily do women procure them, do you think?"

She paused, and I was unsure if she expected me actually to answer what was, after all, no question. But before I did, in any case, she added, "There was hair on my legs and under my arms until I met my American."

Her simple statement threw me. I looked away and stared at the glowing tip of my own cigarette. She spoke so matter-of-factly that I could not discern what, if any, feeling she was expressing. To my regret, her words sparked feeling enough in me, a feeling I did not want. Her American. Healy. Her rescuer. Her "V & V," kith and kin. Ulrich's well-meaning stepfather. Her husband.

A good guy, obviously. And here I was in bed with his wife. But what kind of man lets his wife take on the Stasi by herself? Healy, I had concluded, was a military man of supreme duty. I knew the type. However unwillingly, hadn't he put "national security" ahead of his family? And hadn't he pressed Charlotte to do his Berlin dirty work for him, reversing some breach that he had caused? And anyway, hadn't he abandoned a first wife and child of his own? So who was innocent? What had that girl said? They sin in innocence.

And now wasn't Charlotte indicating that if there was infidelity here for her, it was in relation to unfinished passions tied to her dead husband, not Healy?

Such was the cluster of rationalizations with which I could have brushed my qualms away. But in fact I needed no such rationalizations. My qualms did not survive a next glance at her naked form. The unabashed ease with which she lay next to me, uncovered if not precisely exposed, was enough to obliterate forever any idea that language, accent, nationality, even history are the particularities that matter. Instead, the slight mound of her abdomen, the crater at her navel, the twin ledges of her rib cage, her languid breasts, and the erect buds of their nipples—all of this defined her. At that moment my capacity to take it in defined me.

The unselfconscious show of her repose seemed as erotic, in its way, as had her earlier frenzy. I found myself becoming hard again, as if my foot gently running up the hill of her lower leg was the very height of foreplay.

I reached across her to put my cigarette in the ashtray between the lamp and the telephone, a movement that made her adjust, but that also brought a smile to her face. She handed me her cigarette to do likewise. With me leaning across her, it was a simple matter for her hidden hand to steal down my body to my stiffened penis.

"What?" she teased. "My grim talk of fifty years of German steel, is that what brings you up again? The grimness, darling, or the steel?"

"Neither. It's the thought of you—needing an American." I kissed her. "I wish I could have been your American."

"But you are,
Liebchen
" she said, laughing and pulling me onto her again.

And with a laugh of my own, I sang, "To look sharp every time you shave, to feel sharp and be on the ball...,"the Gillette jingle that would have meant nothing to the uncomplicated German girl she seemed to be just then. I began by kissing each of her shaven armpits, which tickled her and made her even wilder. The laughter this time, even more than the sex, was what made us friends.

 

Later still, forgetting to whisper, she said, "If I call the front desk and tell them to ring us in an hour, we can sleep now and still keep our dinner reservation."

It seemed a thought out of the blue, but in fact I had begun to doze. I didn't care about dinner, but I said, "Sure. Good idea." I found my wristwatch on the floor on my side of the bed. The time was a quarter past six. She made the call, then snapped the light out.

She kissed my forehead. "Sleep well," she said, then turned away from me, bunching her pillow under her head, a woman who, in sleeping, needs a little space.

I was not sure how much time passed—not much—before I vaguely registered that she had slipped out of bed and crossed to the bathroom. The hazy thought pleased me because I assumed somehow that she would return wearing the burnished satin nightgown, a sexy domesticity as a complement to her nudity. Through the closed door I heard the faint sound of the toilet flushing and the whine of a faucet that I took at first to be the sink. But, coming more fully awake, I realized it was the bidet.

When the bathroom door opened again, she had turned out the light, and so her form was a shadow as she walked purposefully to the far side of the room where our clothing lay folded on the chairs. What is this?

I sat up, threw the blanket back, and would have spoken, but she came right to the foot of the bed, to stand close enough for me to see her forefinger pressed against her mouth. She was already wearing her bra and underpants.

I got out of bed and went past her to the bathroom, turning on the light, closing the door against her. I was not prepared to see myself in triple images again. I went to the toilet, urinated, went to one of the sinks and splashed my face with water. As I was toweling myself dry, still trying to stretch my brain to the new thing, the door opened and she came in, almost fully dressed. Only the last buttons of her blouse needed fastening. She closed the door behind her, careful not to let it click.

"What?" I asked.

"I have to leave."

"You deceived me."

"No." She closed her blouse as we spoke.

"You wanted me asleep so that you could go. Go where?"

"I wanted you asleep so that you would not ask me."

I wrapped the towel around my waist. "Well, I am asking."

"And I am not answering. You must not think there is anything you can do to stop me."

"What changed you?"

"Nothing changed me."

"This was your plan all afternoon?"

"Yes."

"So it was a lie, all of it."

"No, Paul. Almost none of it. Dinner was a lie. And sleeping. Nothing else."

"And you wanted them to hear so they would believe, as I did, that you weren't going for your husband's film, that you are capable of putting your son first."

"My son
is
first."

"What is on the film, Charlotte?"

"Do not ask me!" she hissed.

"Agents. The battle order of spies. Soviet plans. KGB, Stasi—who cares? Why does this matter so much to you? Let them play their game. 'Let go,'you said. Why can't you let this go, at least until tomorrow afternoon?"

"You fool!" she whispered bitterly.

The word seared me. Yet it also cauterized the wound of my ignorance, my pathetic readiness to be hurt by what I did not know.

"They will not release Rick tomorrow or
ever,
" she said, "until the film is dealt with one way or another. I
must
deal with it." She turned to go, but I stopped her.

"Charlotte."

"No. And do not ask. Ask nothing."

"Let me come with you."

"This is for me to do."

"I respect that. Just let me be with you."

"I will explain nothing."

"I won't ask. I promise."

"And you keep your promises."

"As you know, because you have seen that in my son. He learned it from me." I found it possible to smile at her. Each of us was aware of the new place to which she had brought me—she and also Michael. The change in me had come from both of them.

She studied me with her careful eyes, no stare but a long, unmoving examination. Then, quite simply, she nodded. She turned, opened the door, and let me go through. She moved back to the dressing table and its mirror while I found my clothes and put them on in silence.

 

When we left the room, Charlotte wore her tweed jacket and brown skirt, the leather bag on her shoulder. Her hair was up from her neck, as before, but she had covered it with her cloche hat. I was in my suit and tie, as before. We might have been the demure couple in the hotel brochure except for the hint of stealth with which we moved into the hallway, closing our door without a sound.

Assuming that we would do better slipping down the stairs, I was surprised when Charlotte punched the elevator button. While we waited, I said quietly, "You left a wake-up call. The phone will ring."

"Does not matter. By then"—by 7:15—"all will be complete."

I looked at my watch. It was ten before seven. What could we do so quickly?

Suddenly she stopped. "Wait!"

She returned to the room. Her gloves, I thought. She never goes out without her gloves. But I was wrong. When she reappeared, after closing the door with an audible click, it was her gold lighter she was carrying, not gloves. Joining me as the elevator arrived, she dropped it into her bag.

The elevator operator tended his machine as if we weren't there. The doors then opened onto the main lobby, the bustle of arriving guests, of porters handling luggage, of waiters sailing among the tables and chairs of the open lounge to one side, all spread against the yellow glow of twilight just showing itself through the far wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. I followed her into this complicated scene, aware that she was coolly striding toward the entryway with nary a glance to one side or the other. It fell to me to eye the strangers around us, especially the lone men—three of them, no, four—sitting at separate tables and on sofas in the lounge area.

And sure enough, as I followed Charlotte through the revolving door into the full soft light of evening, I looked back and one of those men was up and walking after us, fast.

I fell into step with Charlotte as she cut into the pedestrian flow, and like strollers around us, I linked arms with her. With a quick glance back I said, "Don't look, but we have company."

"Does not matter," she said.

"We should—"

"Paul!"

Whatever she proposed to do now, it would be known, if not prevented. Her behavior contradicted any plan I could imagine. In her carelessness, she had let the hotel room door close with a noise and waltzed through the lobby and out the front door.

 

She carried us along, offering no comment, no explanation, no acknowledgment that I was even with her, except for the crook of her left arm. Holding on to her had become my purpose.

Up the Kurfürstendamm, one block, another, and another, past the crush of sidewalk cafés that were nervously alive with high-toned theatergoers and club haunters; past the brass piping and awnings of deluxe hotels; past the light show of galleries and shops, now closed, but with their plate glass windows glittering. All around us were self-styled boulevardiers in pegged trousers and cravats, women in stiletto heels and seamed nylons, lace veils, and fur stoles. There were dandies carrying walking sticks.

The ghost of Isherwood was out, one Sally Bowles after another, on the hunt for parfait and crème de menthe. They were a legion, one could say, of impressionists, half taking in the scene, wanting only to
be
impressed, the other half defining it, happy to oblige. Yet to me and Charlotte, the twilight revelers were mere obstacles, even if, to the enemy across the city—or behind us—they were a decadent throng, cosmopolitanism itself, proof of the virtues of Socialist struggle.

We passed the bombed-out Kaiser Wilhelm Church, left standing as a memorial now, an accidentally ironic one, since the horrors it kept in mind had been inflicted by the heroes this half of the city wanted only to emulate. The wreckage rose from the bustling avenue like the charred, half-broken tooth of a monster giant. It might have warned against the surrounding sparkle, but the church was itself newly decked with Chartres-made glass, as if to proclaim that in the West even the ruins are beautiful. Sparkle is all.

At the street beyond the church, Charlotte led us left onto a narrower sidewalk where, because of the press ofpeople, we had to slow down, then separate. Here, instead of boulevardiers, the crowd was made up of the vacant-eyed and lost, refugees from the East, and opportunists looking to exploit them, sharpies and hawkers. When I glanced back, I glimpsed the same man cutting across the street. I knew better by now than to warn Charlotte. I walked one step behind her. We went along the block and across the next street, approaching the mammoth central train station.