This Must Be the Place (12 page)

“No way. That must have been really disturbing.”

“It was!”

He was on a roll. He almost went on to tell her that Heike’s soap was shot in a prison, in Spandau, where the British kept Rudolf Hess after the war, and where he died in 1987. The British moved out after the Wall came down, and it became a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis, so the city converted it to a TV studio. It was a good story, but Walter stopped himself because it would have required an explanation of both Heike and the stupid soap opera. Hope’s fingers picked up the tube of suntan lotion, turned it over and put it again on the table. He tried to think of something else to tell her.

“When I first moved here, someone pointed out to me that you can gauge the point of contact of each bomb dropped during World War II by tracing the radius of reconstruction around it,” he said. “Have you noticed the circular patterns of buildings from the 1950s? Take our building, for example. Where we are is still the original part, the prewar houses have long wooden windows and high ceilings, but everything extending to the corner is new, all the ugly buildings with plain façades. If you draw a circle around the corner at Schiller and Schlüter, to encompass the new buildings on either side of the street, you can be pretty sure that the bomb fell right in the middle of it.”

“Why here? Was there some sort of industry nearby?”

“Berlin was the capital. Everything here was a target, even residential neighborhoods. The fanciest ones were the ones worst hit. The Hansaviertel, around Tiergarten, was completely destroyed, Grünewald, Wilmersdorf. But even here, if you walk to the corner you see that Grolmanstrasse, which used to run all the way past the Schillertheater, had to be cut off to accommodate the destruction. That’s why there’s a big hole in the middle.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. But you know, if you just look closely at pretty much any corner of this city you’ll see the same thing.”

“Imagine how awful it was for the people living here at the time, I mean right here in this apartment.”

Walter remembered the first day he saw Hope on the stoop, barefoot in the cold. Why was he telling her disaster stories?

“My hometown was built after the war,” he backtracked. “All the houses were new and cheaply constructed. Before I came to Berlin I had never seen so many elegant prewar buildings in one place. I liked trying to imagine what the city looked like before everything was bombed, at the turn of the last century during the
Gründerzeit.
It was a good time in German history, the last really good time, actually. A big economic boom. At night when I walked down the street, I tried to recapture it.”

He narrowed his eyes and looked at her through the fuzzy fringe of his eyelashes. Her blond hair was a halo, her face an Impressionist painting. She did the same, looking back at him.

“Like this?”

“That’s right. But you have to do the horses too if you really want to get into the mood.”

He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth to reproduce the sound of hooves against the cobblestones. To his relief, she laughed.

“I’m going to try that,” she said.

“You’ll see. This city can be very nice from the right perspective.”

“I’ve been reading up on Christmas here.”

“Christmas?”

“Do you remember celebrating the day of Sankt Nikolaus from when you were a child? Getting candy in your shoes?”

“Where I come from, Nikolaus had an evil assistant, Knecht Ruprecht. Nikolaus was ruddy-cheeked and white-bearded and cheerful, like Father Christmas, but Ruprecht was dark, the bad guy in black clothes, with a long, black beard. If you were good, you got candy from Nikolaus, but if you were bad, you got coal from Ruprecht. In our village, people used to dress up and run through the streets at night on the fifth of December making a huge racket with bells, threatening children. It was like Carnival, only scarier. In the morning, everyone was afraid to put their shoes on.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It was awful. I hid under my bed. I hated it.”

“Seriously?”

“There was nothing nice about it.”

“Not even the candy?”

“There wasn’t any candy,” said Walter, trying to make a joke of it for her benefit. “Not at our house.”

Hope’s hands drifted up to her ponytail again, this time pulling it out of the elastic so that her hair fell down around her face and a few strands of her hair got caught across her cheeks. Walter just barely controlled the impulse to reach up and brush them away, to touch her skin with his fingers.

“Thank you for inviting me in,” she said, standing up.

“You’re not leaving?”

“I have some things to do before the shops close. If I don’t go now I’ll stay all day,” she said. “I’m so starved for company you’ll never get rid of me.”

After she was gone Walter admired his kitchen, which still radiated her presence. She had been there only half an hour but it had been long enough to remind him that he could reinvent himself completely just by speaking another language, which was a relief. Because while blowing out the candles on a cake at his thirty-ninth birthday six months earlier, he’d had a strangely disheartening realization: the traditional midlife crisis was not an option for him. Although he was experiencing all the attendant frustration, dissatisfaction and ennui typical of a middle-class white man facing forty, he had no wife and children to leave behind, he already owned an expensive German car and he was already dating a much younger woman. None of this was making him happy, he realized, and yet there was forty lurking just up ahead like an unfriendly cat on the prowl. In the intervening months he had considered the range of remaining options. Weight loss, hair plugs, a sail round the world; a spiritual quest into the Eastern religions, even a doctor-sanctioned nervous breakdown at a traditional Alpine cure, with sexy nurses in starched white uniforms, a view of the Alps and chamomile tea. For a week or so at a time, he had attached himself to each one until it proved impossible: he lacked the motivation for a serious diet, and hair plugs would just make his head look like a plastic doll’s. He got seasick on sailboats and couldn’t get into the lotus position to save his life. The worst discovery had been that the sanatoriums described in nineteenth-century German romantic novels were a thing of the past. The nurses at Alpine cures no longer wore starched white uniforms with visible cleavage and pointy caps; in the twenty-first century, they just wore aprons over their sweatpants, and rubber clogs.

Until the evening he encountered Hope in the elevator, his most recent midlife crisis fantasy had been in danger of getting stuck in turnaround like all the others: although he had been able to see the outline of his life in Southern California, the convertible and the asphalt driveway, the suntan, the salty waves licking at his ankles, he’d stopped short when he tried to picture a domestic life across the Atlantic. Instead of seeing, for example, the sun pouring in the windows of a Richard Neutra house filled with Playboy bunnies, Walter had only been able to see himself coming home to the warm-weatherequivalent of his Charlottenburg apartment and padding around, alone, in his socks. When Hope walked into Walter’s kitchen, Walter walked through a newly opened door in his imagination. Suddenly he was no longer alone in the California of his mind. He envisioned their life together there in a series of future snapshots. Hope in a sundress, pulling apart a lettuce for salad behind the counter of their open kitchen. Hope asleep on the pillow next to his, holding his hand across the stick shift in the car, dancing against the backdrop of a smog-induced Technicolor sunset, her head resting on his shoulder. He deliberately kept things PG-RATED. No seduction scenes or gratuitous nudity. But he did allow himself a glimpse of the two of them toasting long-stemmed glasses of champagne with Tom Cruise himself on a terrace in Malibu overlooking the beach. Why not? Even Christmas wouldn’t be so bad. He could fill her shoes with candy, if that’s what she wanted. They could string up electric lights around a palm tree in the yard. They would give each other handmade gift certificates, he thought dreamily:
1 Foot Massage, 1 Breakfast-in-Bed.
It would be the first time he’d ever enjoyed the holiday season.

Throughout their conversation in his kitchen, Walter had listened carefully for any mention of the man he had seen with Hope on the doorstep, even a simple reference to
we,
but none had come. He decided that the man, like Heike, was yesterday’s news. A few days later, when he was coming in from the studio, he found Hope in the lobby carrying two large bags of dirty clothes.

“Where are you off to?”

“The laundromat at the corner,” she said. “I don’t have a machine yet.”

Given the steps they had already taken toward domesticity in his mind, he automatically offered her the use of his. It was a bold move, which she accepted quite naturally, and he found himself with her again in the elevator, which had already become
the place where we met
in his mind. For years, its small dimensions had seemed to him suffocating and impractical; now they were intimate. The fluorescent light in the ceiling had been garish; now it was bright. He would have liked to take her everywhere with him. She looked him in the eye as if he made sense to her, and seemed to turn his comments over in her mind not skeptically, as Heike had done (always looking for an argument) but as if to fully absorb them. In his apartment he made a grand gesture with one arm toward the washing machine. Hope emptied the two bags on the kitchen floor.

“I’m terrible at this,” she said. “I always dye everything pink.”

“Let me help you.”

They sorted the whites, darks and colors. When he noticed a few pairs of men’s boxer shorts, colorful ones printed with polka dots and a paisley pattern, he assumed that she wore them to bed. It was when he picked up a long-legged pair of men’s jeans that all the air trapped in the kitchen rushed into his lungs. He dropped them on the pile of darks and reached for a bottle of water.

“My husband will be happy,” said Hope, surveying the three piles. “He doesn’t like to wear pink underwear, although I’m not sure why not. No one sees it except me.”

My husband.
Walter’s cheeks filled with air.

“He couldn’t possibly wash his own underwear, of course. When I got to Berlin there was a mountain of laundry in the bathroom.”

She seemed angry about it. Angry was good.

“But look at you,” she said. “You’re an expert.”

The truth was that Walter rarely did laundry. He let it pile up in a basket until it spilled over onto the floor. But he could rise to this challenge. One of his most lucrative advertising contracts was an ongoing campaign for a line of detergents, and he had absorbed some useful information over the years.
My husband. Will be. Happy.
He put the water bottle down on the counter.

“There is a science to this,” he said.

He picked up the pile of darks and stuffed them into the washing machine. Then he opened the cabinet to its right to reveal two shelves stuffed with free samples. Mango-fragrant fabric softener, bleach for sensitive skin, liquid formulated to remove wrinkles. He withdrew a bottle of soap and held it up, label forward, like a spokesperson in a supermarket.

“This one is specifically for darks,” he said. “No leakage.”

“No more pink underwear?”

“No.”

The machine began its cycle and he put the kettle on for tea.

“German men are enlightened,” said Hope.

“The laundry is nothing. We don’t even leave the toilet seat up.”

“What?”

“German men. We pee sitting down.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Women seem to think so.”

“You do that even at home? Living alone?”

The final remains of Heike had left his apartment only an hour before Hope first came into it.

“All alone.”

The clothes churned slowly through the machine. His work required an explanation since Hope had never seen a dubbed movie.

“I’ll show you some of the best ones sometime, if you like. You’ll like them even better in German.”

“I love Tom Cruise. I especially liked
Jerry Maguire.
”

Walter was ready to take requests.

“I suspect that many women actually like
Cocktail
best, but they usually don’t want to admit it.”

“I’m an easy target. I like it when the characters fall in love at the end.”

He grinned indulgently across the table. Heike had always claimed
Interview with a Vampire
as her favorite Tom Cruise, but only to set herself apart. By contrast, Hope seemed to celebrate her mainstream movie tastes as if they, like everything else about her, were special. She rested her chin in both hands, propped up by the elbows. She had been a third-grade schoolteacher in New York, she said. She played guitar badly. She preferred red wine to beer. She was a good cook, but she could make only Mexican food.

“I’ll make you salsa if I ever track down cilantro in Berlin,” she said. “I make really good salsa verde.”

She talked about things in an easygoing way, as if they’d known each other much longer than they had, but halfway through the evening he noticed that he had managed to gather very few concrete facts about her. She had a tendency to refer obliquely to personal things, as if they had already been discussed long ago and so required no further explanation.

“The school was only three subway stops from our apartment,” she might say, without actually giving the location of either one.

Of course, he was never completely sure he hadn’t missed something. Because they were speaking English, he had to concentrate to follow her, which slowed the conversation down.

The laundry reached the rinse cycle, the kitchen filled with the sound of rushing water. It was almost nine P.M. and he had almost managed to forget that Hope was married.