Where Love Begins (6 page)

Nine

Now Mister Pfister comes by every day. He has figured out that Stella is trying hard not to be at home in the mornings, changing her shifts, starting them as early as possible, or being somewhere else; three times already she's sat in a café in the pedestrian zone, trying vainly to read a book, drinking tea with milk, eating a plain croissant, and feeling like a stranger in her own life.

Mister Pfister has caught on. That's Jason's expression – Mister Pfister has caught on, and so he just comes by a little earlier or a little later; even though he knows that Stella won't come to the door, it's important that she's there when he rings the bell. He knows when she is there; he knows almost always, and Stella can't think where he's actually observing her from. When Ava is there, he doesn't ring, but she feels it's only a matter of time, a matter of days before he'll ring when Ava is at home too. What comes to Stella's mind? A flood. The level rising. A deadline approaching, a time limit expiring.

Mister Pfister rings at the garden gate. He waits a precisely measured moment, drops something into the mailbox, goes on his way. He never turns around; he always passes the house and walks on. Stella no longer stands in the hall by the door. She stays wherever she is when he rings. Sometimes she's sitting in her room at her desk and sees him coming; he comes along the street from the left, and she leans back, closes her eyes, counting his steps. She whispers: Four, three, two, one more – now, and then the bell rings; if the window is pushed up, she can hear the clatter of the mailbox. She keeps her eyes closed, counts his steps to the street corner, keeps counting, and when she opens her eyes, he's already gone the length of Forest Lane and is out of sight.

Every day.

There's a letter in the mailbox. A card, an envelope, a scrap of paper, or a letter, and Stella takes a shoebox with her to the mailbox and drops the letter, the card, the envelope, the piece of paper into the shoebox, unread; she pushes the cover down on the shoebox as if there were something inside it that might offer resistance, and puts the shoebox on the floor in the shed under the workbench.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Friday is a warm day. The early morning sky, a transparent blue. Stella argues with Ava about whether or not shoes are necessary for the trip to kindergarten. At least she gets her to wear a jacket. In the child seat Ava triumphantly sticks her bare feet up in the air.

You have no idea what hot is. In kindergarten today we'll be allowed to go swimming. Are you going to buy strawberries? Can you buy ice cream? Can we turn on the lawn sprinkler soon? I love it when it's hot. I love when it's summer. Stevie loves it too when it's summer.

Stella listens to Ava's voice, Ava's self-absorbed questions, she can hear satisfaction in Ava's voice. Satisfaction in her clear observations, unambiguous feelings. I love summer. I love hot weather. Stevie loves summer too.

Do you love summer? Ava leans far to the left so as to be able to see Stella from the side; the bicycle wobbles. Ava puts her arms around Stella's stomach from behind.

Yes, I love summer too. Sit up straight, or we'll fall over. But I like winter better. I like it better when it's cold and it snows and is stormy.

Why?

Oh well, why.

The lawn at the kindergarten is shady and cool. The round table has been set for a second breakfast under the trees. Stella greets the kindergarten teachers from afar; she's afraid there might be questions about Ava, remarks that might alarm her. The shadows of the tree leaves dance over Ava's face, she looks so wide awake, she gives Stella a firm, untroubled child's kiss.

Tomorrow we're going to Papa.

Yes, tomorrow we're going to Papa.

*

Stella cycles home. She pushes the bicycle to the back of the house, unlocks the sunroom door with the key that's kept under the watering can, thinking that she should take the key inside the house, but then she puts it back under the watering can. She leaves the door open. Washes the dishes in the kitchen, makes tea, turns the washing machine on and the radio off, and sits down with the newspaper at the kitchen table.

Mister Pfister rings the bell at nine twenty-three.

Stella, her head propped in her hands, looks closely at a photo of some Chinese mine workers. Black faces, iridescent eyes. She reads the caption without understanding a single word. She turns one page back, then forward again. After a while she gets up from the table and goes into the living room, casually, just a woman looking out of the window, nothing more. The street is deserted. Nobody standing outside the garden gate. Nothing moving.

Stella closes the sunroom door, takes her jacket from the coat rack in the hall, and leaves the house. She doesn't look inside the mailbox. Pulling the garden gate shut behind her, she turns left and walks down the street.

*

A dog is lying in the sun outside the house next door. The front door is open; the student – Political science? Medicine? English literature? – who sometimes, either shyly or rudely, says hello over the fence, is nowhere to be seen. Her dainty vests and yellow dress hang on the rotary clothes dryer on the lawn; the grass hasn't been cut; the flowerbeds are neglected; sunflowers are already shooting up in several flowerpots. The picture window is dusty; in its right-hand corner, a skeleton, its bony hand held up in warning; candles in bottles on the windowsill. Stella looks at the display; she has the distinct feeling that it all has a meaning, a hidden message.

The house of the Asian family next to it is freshly painted; the garden, well cared for, the hedge trimmed and almost impossible to see through, a silver car in the driveway, the blinds down at all the windows.

An old woman one house farther on is clipping the branches of a rhododendron with huge garden shears; she greets Stella indulgently, and Stella greets her in return as she goes by, then she passes an empty, undeveloped lot. Stella vaguely remembers a house burning, an accident. Fallow land, yarrow and lupines, dried-out soil, no birds, finches, wrens in the grass. Next, a house with a glittering pool on the lawn, another one with an awning extending over the picture window and the terrace in front, an ironwork table, four chairs set around it as if for an important meeting. And then a house with a man sitting out front on a folding chair, setting the spokes in a wheel; on the stairs leading up to the front door a portable radio is playing; a mirrored sphere hanging in the branches of a sumac between the two properties throws spectrally coloured points of light on the house and the lawn. The man raises a hand. Stella has seen him before – where was it, in the city, at the shopping centre, at the kindergarten? She saw him at the kindergarten, a bicycle mechanic; he was fixing the children's bicycles. A boat lying under a tarpaulin, old bicycles leaning against each other in the rear part of the garden. Something makes Stella pause, and the man gives the wheel a push and sits up.
Carlyle was in a spot, he'd been in a spot all summer, since early June, when his wife had left him,
a voice on the portable radio is singing. Stella can hear each and every word clearly; she can see everything in detail, heightened and exaggerated; possibly it's because her heart is beating rather fast that she feels as if she were afraid. But afraid isn't the right word. She sees the wheel slowing down and coming to a stop, sees the man lean back in his chair; the chair is standing on sand, the garden path isn't paved; the sand is dazzling, summery. The next house is Mister Pfister's house. Number 8, and Stella looks away and walks on before she can change her mind. She can still hear the voice on the radio. A man softly and suggestively whistling to himself. Then she's there.

*

Mister Pfister's house is white. A grape vine grows skyward next to the front door. The grass is bleached. No flowerbeds, no garden chairs, no clay pots, no table, no umbrella. Nothing.

His house sits there, silent and still, in the midday sun. Orphaned. Stella has to squint, then sees that the picture window has been draped on the inside with some dark material, the small window next to the door also seems to be blocked with something, and the panes of glass in the door are black.

Grass grows in the cracks between the steps. For some intangible reason it's as if the front door hadn't been opened in a long time, as if Mister Pfister went in and out through the back door or through the chimney. Stella stands by the garden gate. She feels dizzy and hot. She has her hands around the rusty braces of the fence, looking at it all; there's something gratifying about being able to look at it all. It's like getting satisfaction, how do you say, it is like an appropriation. Stella feels that she oughtn't to be doing this – she shouldn't even be here. She is doing the opposite of what Jason advised her to do; she is reacting even though Mister Pfister doesn't even know anything about her reaction. But she can't help it. She cannot resist. She looks at his house the way he looks at hers; her eyes follow his route without holding back, without any affection. She also knows that the way he looks at her house, at her home, lacks all affection. Somehow or other, she knows it.

Mister Pfister's mailbox is old and dirty. Stella turns around; there's no one in sight. She lifts the cover. Feels the perspiration running down her spine. The mailbox is brimful. Advertisements, direct mail, window envelopes. Stella takes out a letter, an official letter from a bank, and stuffs it back into the mailbox. So, even if she were to write to Mister Pfister, her reply would never reach him. Mister Pfister, it seems, doesn't read his mail; nor does he seem to want to receive any more, and Stella has a sudden inkling about the inside of his house: mountains of paper, piles of newspapers, garbage bags, the kitchen half dark, the table full of things, things that from Mister Pfister's point of view might change their form any minute, their shape, their purpose and their identity. A bizarre, glowing, toxic wave of chaos sloshes from the house over the doorsill out into the garden, flowing towards Stella, and Stella lets the cover of the mailbox drop and backs away.

*

She wipes her hands on her trousers.

Then she goes home.

Past the man on the folding chair, past the terrace with the wrought-iron table that has now been set and at which a child and three grown-ups are sitting; only the child looks up. Past the fallow land over which downy poplar pollen is already flying, past the house with the rhododendron, past the silent house of the Asian family, past the house next to hers, in front of which the dog is just getting up, yawning and stretching his rear legs; she walks towards her own garden gate, following the same route Mister Pfister takes daily, walking in his energy field. At what moment did he decide that his life should have something to do with hers. How long has he been walking down this quiet street past all these houses and finally past Stella's and Jason's house, thinking there was something that he could discuss only with Stella and with no one else. Since when has he known when Stella is at home and Jason isn't. How long did he think about ringing at her gate before he actually did ring.

Days?

Weeks or months.

Maybe Mister Pfister has been thinking about Stella for months already. Stella hadn't even known that he existed. There must have been a moment – in the street on her bicycle with Ava, at the shopping centre standing in the queue at the cash register, in the park with Walter in a wheelchair, on the bench by the fountain, in the pedestrian mall walking arm in arm with Jason, or someplace entirely different. Stella alone at the other end of the world – where he saw her, where he noticed her. There must have been a beginning. When was that.

Ten

Dermot and Julia's kitchen is warm. Julia is sleeping. She had something to eat, a soft-boiled egg and half a slice of bread; she drank some water and took her midday medications, primarily painkillers. She's lying on her side on the chaise longue in the living room, the blanket between her knees. Stella can see her through the open door. Lying there like that, she looks like a young woman, like the woman she once was, a tall, slender woman with short hair, eyes spaced far apart, arms that were too long, and terribly attractive; it's what Dermot says; Julia was so terribly attractive as a young girl, it was almost unbearable. The chaise longue is brown. The blanket is green-and-magenta-striped. Julia is wearing a grey dress. She doesn't care at all what Stella dresses her in; Dermot puts the things in which Stella is supposed to dress Julia on a chair, and Stella slips the dress over her head while holding Julia's head which is as heavy as a baby's. Stella believes that Dermot chooses these things carefully. Dresses he thinks are beautiful. Dresses that Julia once thought were beautiful. Dresses that aren't simply reduced to serving a purpose, and in which she wouldn't be humiliated. Today's dress has a delicate button tape on the collar, the buttons are round and made of worn mother-of-pearl. The hem is embroidered. Julia, sleeping on the chaise longue, enveloped in the darkening colours of the stormy afternoon doesn't look like a sick woman, one who is dying, but like a picture. Stella looks at her, blinks. She is tired; lately she's been tired all the time.

Dermot pours Stella a glass of water and sets it down in front of her. Outside, a worker apologetically pulls a plastic tarpaulin over the kitchen window; he looks into the kitchen as if into an aquarium, surprised but at the same time interested. The house, which doesn't belong to Dermot and Julia, is old, and it's going to be renovated and then sold. They have been granted a period of time still, but they will have to move out. By that time, Dermot may perhaps already be by himself. He'll have to pack up the things of their life together by himself – books, music, above all the books and the music, but also a lot of pictures, drawings, framed photos, boxes of papers, and cabinets full of correspondence in file folders, not to mention the dishes in the kitchen, the tables and chairs, shelves and lamps, armchairs and sofas, the harmonium and the brown chaise longue. In the cellar there's still a rocking chair, Julia's ice skates in a leather bag. Dermot doesn't talk about these things. Stella watches him. He doesn't act as if everything were finite. He has been married to Julia for sixty years. No children. No relatives. When Julia dies, and Stella thinks this will happen fairly soon, Dermot will be alone. The situation is so obvious that it seems simple. Dermot might perhaps say he was prepared for it. Maybe he would say that – I'm prepared for it.

He is short and a little hunchbacked. His head is too large. His manner is so gentle and self-effacing that Stella, even though she has spent only a short time with him, has felt for quite a while that she could be a better human being from now on. A more pleasant, kinder human being, grateful. Dermot's kindness is transmitted to her, is also transmitted to other people with whom they come in contact – Paloma, the irritable nurses in the hospital, the exhausted Indian doctor, the ill-humoured ambulance driver, the woman who cuts Julia's still-dark and very soft hair, the construction workers who are erecting the scaffolding around the house, ripping up the roof, spreading tarpaulin, scraping plaster, and who can't wait to do it, regretfully, can't delay no matter what – all of them take a step back, collect and calm themselves, try to smile, for once try to do things differently. That's Dermot. Stella can't say how Julia reacts to Dermot. Julia was already too far gone; she was already too far gone when Stella came to their house. It's possible that Dermot's kindness, his pleasantness is tied to Julia's illness. That can't be ruled out. But Stella also sees this kindness in the photos standing on the shelves, forty-year-old poses. Dermot and Julia at the seashore, Julia is walking out of the picture with a terribly attractive smile, Dermot is sitting on a round boulder, his face turned to the photographer, his shoulders hunched, and his hands between his knees. The horizon is blurred and almost unrecognisable. A pier jutting into the water lost in the indefinite. Where was that taken?

Ah well, where was that, where had that been. Dermot says he has forgotten, and he laughs about it. In any case, it was in March? Maybe it was March.

The kitchen is now in twilight. The construction workers are scraping plaster as if they were tearing the house apart. The windowpanes quiver. Stella looks at the clock. She can stay another half hour. She'll stay another half hour. Dermot sits down with her. He arranges Julia's pill boxes on the table, presses sky-blue, white and red pills out of their foil wrappings and sorts them into the dispenser; he counts softly under his breath, leafs through the prescriptions, says, Multimorbidity. Do you find this word as absurd as I do? He says, Drink your glass of water before you leave. Stella knows that formerly, when Julia wasn't yet sick, he was always the first to get up in the morning, to bring her a glass of water in bed. Julia, at dawn, in the early morning light, leaning back in bed, the window open and, outside, the beginning of an ordinary day. That was taken for granted. Dermot is still the first one to get up. Julia continues to lie in bed; were she to drink a glass of water, she'd have to throw up. That also is taken for granted.

I will, Stella says.

She watches him for a while, then plucks up her courage. She says, Do you know what it's called when you fall in love like a flash? When love hits you like a lightning bolt, like an accident. I know that there's a word for it, but I can't think of it.

She turns her glass on the table, trying to look distracted. She knows Dermot likes her. They each feel devoted to but also wary of the other, a shy trust.

Dermot closes the pill dispenser. He pulls his sweater sleeves down over his wrists – he always wears the same black sweaters, the wool at the wrists is always unravelled and full of holes – and looks at Stella, maybe slightly bemused but also surprised, forthright.

Did that happen to you? He says it as if he would be glad if it had happened to Stella.

No, Stella says, it didn't happen to me. Maybe what happened to me with Jason was love at first sight, that's what I had with Jason. But that's not what I mean. I mean the opposite of that – the same feeling but with something destructive about it, something not good.

Dermot mulls it over.

Then he says, You mean coup de foudre. A Love Thunderstorm, that's what you mean. The destruction comes from the lightning. From the force, the power of the lightning.

He smiles at that as if it were something quite wonderful. Wait. Wait a moment.

He gets up and goes from the kitchen into the living room, past the chaise longue, not touching Julia, he could straighten her blanket or touch her shoulder, but he doesn't, and she doesn't move; remains as this picture in soft colours, a woman sleeping. Stella watches as Dermot opens the drawers of his desk, rummaging around in a box for a while, putting it aside with a sigh, then going from there to the shelf and pulling out books. He blows the dust from their spines, opens them and closes them again, and finally comes back to the kitchen with a postcard. He pushes the pill boxes aside and puts the card down on the table in front of Stella.

A picture, an abstract painting, a figure the way Ava still draws them – a round head with braids, ears that stick out, and saucer-like eyes, from which arms and legs grow like feelers. The expression of the figure is sorrowful; she looks as if she had been bashed to pieces, destroyed and demolished, irreparably; nothing here can be healed. A bolt of yellow lightning flashes through the body. Arrows directed down from above, and in the background another figure, male and shadowy, one body and two heads.

Something like this?

Yes, something like that, Stella says haltingly. But maybe more the other way around. Is the girl with the braids experiencing the coup de foudre, the lightning? Or that shadowy figure in the background. The male figure. She points with her index finger to the two heads, to the head on the right.

You can see it either way, Dermot says. I don't know. In any case, you can't defend yourself against being loved.

Mister Pfister's look at me must have been like this, Stella thinks. And now I'm like the girl in the picture; I'm falling.

Are you all right, Dermot says.

Oh yes, I'm all right, Stella says. I'm all right. I'm up against someone to whom this happened; you understand, this happened to him in connection with me.

She feels she is blushing, it embarrasses her to say this. I have to deal with it. I just have to learn how to deal with it.

Probably not easy, Dermot says. Oh my, this probably isn't easy.

That's all he says. And there is nothing more to say, Stella thinks. They sit together in silence and listen to the pounding of the construction workers, pounding on wood, stone and concrete, repeated, like a vague request to be admitted, a notification of some difficult task, and even if it's just one single word.

Julia turns over on the chaise longue. Stella listens, but Julia doesn't call her.

I think you always have to try to come to some arrangement, Dermot says. He says it as if he had thought about it for a while already. To find a midpoint between sympathy and indifference. Indifference is very important. I don't mean coldness, I mean something more like cool-headedness, composure. Maybe you shouldn't take it to heart? All this will pass, that much I can tell you.

Stella nods. Suddenly she has to think of Jason as clearly as if he had called out to her. As if he were falling from the roof at his construction site and calling to her. She has to think back to her first sight of Jason – serious and angry, on his part as well as on hers. Serious and angry; one of them shrank back from the other, and for the first time she realises that this is how it was.

She would like to ask Dermot whether he remembers his first glimpse of Julia. A glimpse that goes back more than sixty years. But she doesn't have the nerve. She repeats his last sentence like a question, and she can tell from the expression on Dermot's face as he turns around, that this isn't the truth either. Not something that one could know with finality, once and for all. Not something for always.

*

That evening she is sitting at the kitchen table with Ava; they're eating together. White bread and green tomatoes. Ava tears the bread up methodically and completely, drinks her juice in thirsty swallows; in kindergarten she drew a cat with long whiskers and big eyes. The cat now hangs on the wall above the chest. Stella can see the wild meadow through the window, storm clouds over the wild meadow. It's not yet late; in spite of that, almost dark. Ava was allowed to light the candle on the table.

She says, The cat looks stupid.

She says, I would always like to sit next to Stevie in the morning circle. Always. I never want to sit anywhere else in the morning circle. Do you know what Stevie wants to be?

No.

A fireman. Ava leans across the table and whispers. He wants to be a fireman or a spy.

Aha, Stella says. Something about Stevie seems odd to her, and Ava senses it; she frowns angrily and changes the subject. I'd like to take a bath. And I don't know at all what I should wish for my birthday. What should I wish for my birthday? I want to have a garden party. Go to the circus. Do you think the cat looks stupid? I like it when we sit in the dark. Oh, I wish it would rain soon.

Ava turns to the window.

Stella says, I think the cat looks clever. Like a magician. The doorbell rings. Hard, long and decisively.

Ava says, That's Papa. Is that Papa?

She says it without turning around, and for one unreal moment Stella thinks that Ava knew the bell would ring. That she turned to the window so that Stella couldn't see her face.

Stella says, No that isn't Papa. Papa has a key. He never rings the bell.

Ava waits, listening. Then she does turn around to Stella and puts her hands on the table, looking at Stella, subdued; she sits there very quietly.

Why don't you open the door.

Because we don't want any visitors. We don't want any visitors, do we. It's late, we're just having supper, you have to go to bed in a little while, you still want to take a bath, we have to pack your little bag because tomorrow we're going to see Papa; we have no use for visitors now.

But who's ringing, Ava says. Who's ringing? She looks so alert, so wise; her eyes are shiny, round and strange.

Somebody or other, Stella says testily. Somebody or other, somebody we don't know and don't want to get to know. I don't ever want you to open the front door without me, not the house door and not the garden gate either; do you hear what I'm telling you? Do you understand me?

But why don't we want to get to know anybody, Ava says. She simply ignores Stella's question. Why not? Maybe it is better if you let him in and we can get to know him then.

Ava, Stella says.

She tries to imagine it. Simply to imagine it. Mister Pfister in the kitchen. In this kitchen next to Ava, sitting at the table. It's of course impossible.

She says, That's not possible; it's impossible; you have to accept this even if you don't understand. We have to wait and see. See how it will go on from here.

But I
do
understand, Ava says. I understand it exactly. And the cat
does
look stupid, I drew an ugly cat. I know that, and you know it too.

*

Mister Pfister doesn't ring again.

*

He rings the bell that night at two a.m., and Stella is instantly awake. She gets up and goes from the bedroom to the little room. She is awake because she has been waiting.

The street is dark. The storm has moved on; the street lamps are already out. In spite of that Stella can see Mister Pfister. This time he's walking in the other direction, home, and she can hear his measured, imperturbable steps in the night-time silence. For a long while still. She thinks she can almost hear Mister Pfister's garden gate slamming shut behind him. Where's he coming from at this hour.