Sleeping in Flame (6 page)

Kids _have_ to know who their parents are, and were."

"When would you let her read it?"

"When she is sixteen or seventeen. Old enough to understand what I was saying."

"You're crazy about children, huh? How come you've never had any?"

"Because I never met a man I loved enough to want to share that experience with. I don't care if we were married or not, or even if the relationship ended later. It's only important that at the time we decided to have the child, we were so completely involved with each other that it'd be the absolutely right thing to do."

She looked out the window and ran her hand through her new haircut.

"I've been talking the whole time, haven't I?"

"I'm glad."

"I can't tell if that's good or bad. It usually takes me a long time to talk like this with a man.

Especially one I just met. But maybe we didn't just meet, you know? Someone came up to me once and said 'Weren't you my wife in our last incarnation?' It was the best come-on line I'd ever heard."

"What happened to that man?"

She looked calmly at me. "It was Luc. The one who . . . hit me yesterday."

"It's four hundred steps to the top, Maris, maybe more. Then we have to walk for another fifteen minutes, straight up. Are you sure you want to do it?

It really doesn't matter to me. Honestly."

We stood at the bottom of a staircase in the Thirteenth District. To our right was the Lainzer Tiergarten, a private hunting reserve of Kaiser Franz

Josef in the time of the Habsburg Empire. Now it's a big, lovely park, where strange animals roam free, and you can come face to face with a family of wild boars if you're lucky. It was weeks since the park had closed for the winter.

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But after Maris insisted on visiting my third happy place, we drove to this far-off corner of Vienna to see . . . a field.

She looked at the steps and then at me. She let her tongue hang out as if she'd made the climb three or four times that day already. "So what's up there that's worth four hundred steps?"

"It won't sound interesting if I tell you. You have to see it for yourself."

She pulled her tongue back in. "Is it the Emerald City?"

"Better. I've never shown it to anyone. I only go there once in a while: Only when I'm either completely happy or totally sad."

"Sounds interesting. Let's go."

She started fast up the stairs, but by the halfway point I could hear her breathing hard. She finally stopped and put hands on hips. "Walker, I'm not in love with climbing four hundred stairs. How come you're not even winded?"

"I used to do a lot of mountain climbing when I first came here. One of those grizzled old guides showed me how to walk vertically."

"Teach me." She dropped her hands and gestured toward the stairs, ready to move again.

I walked ahead and spoke to her over my shoulder. "Walk more slowly than you think you should. Don't take giant steps, because that'll just tire you.

Walk slow and steady, and breathe like that too: slow and steady."

"It sounds like a meditation from Bhagwan's _Orange Book_."

I turned and mugged at her over my shoulder. She reached out and gave my jacket a friendly tug.

It felt as if she'd stroked my hand: the same little electric shock that comes whenever someone important touches you the first time.

We climbed and climbed. The steps were covered with layers of gray and brown leaves so dead they didn't even make that skittery, crackly, dead-leaf noise. Everything had gone out of them, and they were soft under our feet.

A few other people passed on the way up and, invariably, said the inevitable "_Grüssgott!_"

when we passed. God's greetings. It's a small, nice piece of Austria I have always noticed and liked.

At the top of the stairs, Maris turned around for the first time and looked behind us. Above the treetops of the Tiergarten you could see wet rooftops and smoke from chimneys, slices of sun reflecting hard off windows everywhere, like flashy clues to God's whereabouts. The air had been washed clean by the rain, and we'd climbed high enough above the city for there to be totally different smells around us -- pine, fresh earth that had never been out of shadow, wet plants. After the stairs came a dirt path that wound up and into a forest. Without hesitating we kept on, walking side by side. A man with a soccer ball under his arm and a Great Dane close by came marching smartly down the path. The dog looked like a silver-brown ghost in the dim light through the trees. "_Grüssgott!_ Are you going up to the hill?"

"Yes, we are."

"It's wonderful there now. We've just been playing ball on the field.

Only a few people around, and the view is clear all the way to Czechoslovakia." He tipped his hat and the two of them moved off down the way.

"It sounds like something special up there. You're still not going to tell me?"

"No, Maris, you have to see it. It's not that much longer now. Only a few hours." I smiled to reassure her I was kidding.

Before leaving the forest, we passed a giant antenna for O.R.F., the Austrian National Broadcasting Company. Its high, intricately worked steel and busy electrical noises were completely out of place here. She looked at it for a moment, shook her head, and moved on. "It looks like some invader from Mars sitting here, trying to decide what to do next."

Two men came out of the little office at the base of the antenna. Each had a sandwich in one
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hand and a beer in the other. Both stopped in midstep and midbite when they saw Maris.

"_Mahlzeit!_"

They seemed so tickled by this lovely woman in the middle of nowhere wishing them a good meal, that they grinned like the cartoon characters Max and Moritz. They tipped their bottles to her, and nodded to me their approval of my companion.

"That wouldn't be such a bad job; working up here on top of the world."

"Wait, you haven't seen anything yet."

It was another few minutes before the hill evened out into the giant open field that gave onto the most beautiful panoramic view of Vienna I knew.

I'd discovered the place years before, but it was true I almost never went there. There are certain experiences in life we should hoard so we never forget to savor them when we have them.

I didn't want to look at her until the full impact of the view sank in.

The late afternoon sun, perfectly round and sad yellow, had begun its slow slip to the horizon.

The light at the end of a clear fall day is wise light: melancholy, able to pick out the most beautiful or important characteristics of anything it touches.

Without thinking, I said that to Maris as we stood there, and I was glad I did, but also a little embarrassed.

She turned and looked at me. "Walker, this place is superb. I can't get over how much has happened in the last twenty-four hours. I can't. Yesterday at this time I was talking to the Munich police about what Luc had done to me.

I was crying, and scared to death. More scared than I've ever been. Now, today, I'm up here on Mount Olympus, feeling comfortable with you." Her voice changed completely. "Can I say something else?"

"Sure."

"I think something is going to happen between us. The feeling is already there for me, and it's only the first day we've spent together. I don't know if you want that, though. I don't even know if I should be telling you."

I took a deep breath and licked my lips. My heart felt like a truck trying to burst out of my chest.

"Maris, the first time I saw you I thought it would be the greatest thing in the world if that woman in the red hat were waiting for me. As far as

I'm concerned, something's been _happening_ between us since then."

That's when we should have embraced and held each other tight. But we didn't. Instead, both of us turned away and went back to looking at Vienna below. But despite our not touching then, it was a moment I will remember the rest of my life. One of those extraordinarily rare moments when everything important is so clear, and simple, and easy to understand. It was a moment like the view of the city: perfect, tinged with a light so pure it made me sad, transient.

In the next months, we would grow so close and empathetic that she once joked she wasn't breathing air anymore, she was breathing me. All that happened, and I will tell you about it, but those minutes on top of the hill were somehow the best. They were our Eden, they were what set everything else in motion. Finally, they were what ruined us.

1.

When we were driving back downtown, Maris asked if she could see my apartment. There was nothing in her voice that said she had anything more in mind than normal curiosity. She'd been so forthright about her feelings that I

didn't freeze up at the request or lick my lips like the Big Bad Wolf. She wanted to see my place, and that was that. After we got out of the car and were walking down the street, she took my hand and slipped it with her own into her pocket.

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"I liked the barbershop and I loved the hill, but why did you take me to that pet shop?"

"Because the owners love being there. I sense it every time I go in.

They love the dog, they love talking to their customers, they probably love it when no one's in there but them. So few people like what they're doing these days. People don't do their job well because they hate it or are bored by it.

I like to see people enjoying what they're doing with their lives. There's a bank near here I go to just to watch the teller handle money."

We were at the door to my building and I stopped us just short of it.

The door was fifteen feet high and made of carved wood, a beautiful thing.

"Look at this door. Sometimes when I'm going in I stop and look at it because the guy who made it obviously did the job with love."

We walked down the long hall to the entrance to my part of the building.

Then up three stairs to the ancient elevator that made so much noise ascending that I often worried whether I'd reach my floor or not. We got in and I slid the door closed, pressing the button for the fourth floor. The thing clanked, groaned, and lurched up. Maris gave me an alarmed look.

"Don't worry, it does this every time."

"That's not reassuring."

When it stopped on my floor she opened the door fast and got out faster.

"That thing should have been in _The Third Man_."

At the door to my place I fumbled with my keys, and realized I was more nervous than I'd thought. But I finally found the right one and turned it in the lock. As soon as I did, Orlando gave his normal "welcome home" meow on the other side. He must have been standing right by the door, because it hit him with a small thump when it swung open.

"Do you always greet your cat like that?"

On hearing a foreign voice in his kingdom, he stopped dead and "looked"

in Maris's direction. He was a friendly fellow, as cats go, but wasn't used to other creatures (besides me) being in the house.

"Let him smell you, then he'll be okay."

He walked over and gave her the once-over sniff test. Satisfied she was neither enemy nor large mouse, he began his normal weave around and through her legs.

"Can I touch him?"

"He'd like that."

She picked him right up and gently patted his head. He didn't purr, but I could tell by the set of his empty eyes that he was content to let this happen. Holding him in her arms, she walked into the living room. I followed, feeling like a real estate agent eager for a sale.

It was important that she like where I lived, liked the space and objects with which I had chosen to surround myself. Sitting down in one of my expensive chairs, she looked slowly around, checking out the room from that low altitude.

"Which of these do you sit in when you're alone?"

"The one you're in."

"I thought so. The leather has the most wrinkles. Le Corbusier was such a goof. These are the greatest-looking chairs around, but there's nowhere to put your arms. He talked about the necessity for absolute simplicity in things, then designed snazzy furniture like this that's simple, all right, and totally impractical! It's the same with his buildings."

"That's true! I'm always looking for something to do with my arms when I'm sitting there."

She put Orlando down and worked her way out of the chair. "Sure. And they cost a small fortune, too. Do you have any pictures of your family?"

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Nodding, I went to my desk and took out a large envelope filled with photographs. I felt a little exposed handing it over, though, because of the pictures of Victoria in there, the pictures of Victoria and me clowning for the camera, the pictures of me in costume for movies and ads I'd done. Besides the wrinkles on my face and personality, those shots were really the only concrete remnant, proof, to Maris York of my last few years. There was a pullover in the closet bought on a trip to Paris with my former wife, spoons in a kitchen drawer we'd chosen together at the Vienna flea market. But Maris didn't know that. Besides these photographs, she would only know Victoria, or my past, through my stories, but those were so shadowed and colored by my biases, secrets, and hurts . . .

"Is this Victoria?"

"Yes."

"She looks a lot like I thought. Your description was good."

She saw my parents, their house in Atlanta, my stepsister, Kitty, in the kitchen making brownies.

"Did you ever read anything about handwriting analysis?" She was holding a snapshot of me at the age of ten in a Little League uniform. I shook my head.

"The most interesting thing about it is that experts say you can never tell people's personality via handwriting until you've read five pages of their script. There are certain big companies that give a test when you apply for a job where you're required to write longhand for five pages. Then they give only the fifth page to a graphologist or psychologist and get their opinion. I think it's the same with a person's picture album. You've got to look at the whole bunch before coming to any conclusions. Right now I'm thinking 'How come he doesn't talk much about his family? Why does he only have a couple of pictures of his stepsister?' Things like that. But I know I have to go through all of them and see what they're of before I can get any clear idea of you."