White Apples (30 page)

Isabelle felt a gush of guilt go up through her like ice water, as if she had been tricking the other woman by not telling her what she knew. "But how do
you
know?"

"Believe me, when you're dead you know it." "I mean—"

Her grandmother nodded. "I know what you mean. Everything you see here is a little bit off. Have you noticed that yet? Look at it carefully. That's because this room was created from both of our memories combined. So if you look closely, you'll see that things everywhere in here are not quite right."

Isabelle knew the room intimately. In her last years, the old woman had rarely left it except to go to the toilet, Isabelle had spent so many hours in there that she had unwittingly memorized most of it.

But now, almost as if these familiar surroundings had suddenly become her enemy, she looked fearfully at what she had known so well for such a long time.

Her grandmother reached over and took her hand to reassure her. "There's nothing to be afraid of. Did you see me a minute ago when I was drinking tea? How I squinched up my nose? That's because the tea suddenly became hot chocolate."

Isabelle forgot her fright and added eagerly, "We always used to drink hot chocolate in here. Almost every afternoon when I came home from school; it was our ritual."

"That's right, but now I can tell you a secret, dear: I loathe hot chocolate. It makes my throat feel mossy." Isabelle laughed hard. For years and years it had been their tradition. She would run into her grandmother's room,

full of stories from the day at school. There at the table next to the bed would be Grandma with a pot of fresh
kakao

and vanilla
kipferl.

She had to laugh again. "The truth comes out after all these years."

"That's right. There are benefits to being dead. One of them is never having to drink
kakao
again. To get back to what I was saying, I imagined tea in my cup. But you imagined cocoa because that's what we always drank. Your memory was stronger than mine so suddenly I had
kakao."

"If this isn't your room, Grandma, where are we?"

"Where? Well, I'm dead and you're visiting. Your boyfriend asked if you could come here while he tried to make things safe for you."

"This is death?" Reluctantly Isabelle looked around the room.

"It's somewhere between life and death. You came here from one direction and I came from the other." Her grandmother smiled in a way which Isabelle remembered from old times meant she was about to say something she thought witty. "We're at an
Autobahn
rest stop between Salzburg and Vienna. Do you need to go to the toilet while we're here?"

"You sound just like my mother when we would go on a trip. Do you know where Vincent is now?" "No, dear."

"Can you do anything to help him?"

"No, dear. I'm very new to this. I've only just begun to
un•derstand
how to look at my own life with any kind of objectivity. I have no special powers."

Isabelle remembered what Coco had said about first going to purgatory and then later to the mosaic after dying. "Can you tell me what it's like?"

"I could but you wouldn't understand. Not because you're stu•pid, but because life must be over before you can see it clearly. You must have no more stake in it, no more ulterior motives or hopes... Telling you what I've learned would be like trying to explain something while you were having an orgasm."

"Grandma!"

"It's true. It's the difference between the calm clearness that comes just after sex, and being in the middle of an orgasm."

Isabelle smiled crookedly. "I thought life was supposed to be a cabaret. Now you're telling me it's an orgasm?"

Ettrich opened his eyes slowly, wary of what he was going to see. And he was right to be worried because what he saw was definitely not what he had hoped to see. Once again he had tried to go back to the hospital in the time before he died.

Instead he was outside somewhere, and it was night again. He saw the flames of a large fire. In between their crackle and snap he heard the lapping of water on a shore.

Lifting his head to get his bearings, he saw that he was on a beach somewhere. A bonfire was burning thirty feet away. In the middle of wondering where the hell he was now, Ettrich heard a Medusa voice and froze. It was Isabelle's phrase and perfectly de•scribed the total paralysis that came whenever you heard certain familiar voices. Voices you might not have heard for half a lifetime, but when you heard them again they turned your whole being to stone because of who was speaking.

This Medusa voice was high and nasal, a voice that had only one tone, one range, one inflection—whine. The only thing it was capable of doing (although it did it brilliantly) was to whine. Whether it was happy, sad, in the throes of ecstasy or despair—no matter what, that voice always came out sounding like a whine, a bleat, a bellyache, or a gripe.

"Can't you at least wait till it's really dark so no one sees?" That was what paralyzed Ettrich. Not only was it the voice, but it had said that sentence. One of the few truly unforgettable sen•tences from his past that had been notched on his soul with a sledge•hammer and a chisel.

She was lying under him on the sand. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her yellow shorts. He did not need to look down to know that it was Gigi Dardess, the first girl he had ever had sex with. She had a pleasant face, a reasonable body, a filthy reputation, and that voice. Sixteen-year-old Ettrich had invited her to this

end-of-the-school-year party because he was desperate to lose his virginity and all indications were that Gigi was the most likely to help him do that.

Like all young men on the planet, he had hoped and dreamed that the golden girls in his school, the Andrea Schnitzlers and the Jennifer Holberts, would one day magically say yes to him. But Vincent Ettrich was invisible to those great beauties and in his secret heart he could understand why. So, like most young men on the planet, in the end he set his sexual sights lower and then still lower until they eventually submerged like a submarine. Looking out the porthole one day, he saw Gigi Dardess swim by at full fathoms five.

She did not seem surprised when he invited her to the party. In fact her acceptance consisted of a sigh, broken eye contact, and a flat "Okay" that made going to the party with him sound more like duty than a pleasure.

Nevertheless, two weeks later here they were and things be•tween them had gotten hot fast. As darkness fell, the couples at the party wandered off to different far parts of the beach.

From the first kiss on, Gigi had unresistingly let him put his hands wherever he wanted on her body. This carte blanche confused Ettrich as much as it excited him because he had not the slightest idea of what he was doing. In the past he had talked endlessly about it with his friends. But none of them knew anything about it either so whatever they came up was only hopeful conjecture. He had also zealously read "The Playboy Advisor" on such matters. But what good did dry words on a page do when you had presumably willing female flesh under your fingertips right this minute? Now that the moment had come, he felt like he was driving a truck full of nitro•glycerine down a narrow mountain road in a blizzard.

Desperately trying to figure this puzzle out, he slipped his hand back into her panties for a third try. Maybe this time he would be able to locate her clitoris. A moment later he was reduced to ego-rubble by her whining, "Can't you at least wait till it's really dark so no one sees?"

The only interesting thing about reliving that memorably dread•ful, life-shriveling moment was the fact that this time, both the teenage and adult Ettrich existed in it simultaneously.

Young Ettrich was an interesting mess of emotions. On the one hand he was dying to get laid. On the other he wanted to at least try and make Gigi happy. He wanted her to show him how to do this thing right because she had obviously had a lot more experience at it than him. Yet he wanted her to come away from the night thinking Vincent Ettrich was a pretty damned good fuck.

He was not kidding himself about that: If things went right tonight he would fuck for the first time in his sixteen years. Later in life when he was a real
bon vivant,
he would find a spectacular woman and they would make Hollywood love until the day they died. But that was years from now and, as with anything else, you had to learn the basics first. But how could you learn the basics if your partner was no help? Yes, she was letting him have it, but what good is a sandwich if you don't know how to eat it?

When he had waited for what he thought was a sufficiently long time, he started to kiss her again. Just that—no

touching or other hanky-panky. Innocent-as-lemonade kissing to try and get things go•ing right between them.

But Gigi kissed like she was licking postage stamps. Even in those days Ettrich was a good kisser but nothing he did tempted her. Whatever sexy tricks and clever lip dances he offered up, she just licked his stamp in return.

When this went on for far too long and the elder Ettrich couldn't stand it anymore, he spoke to his younger self. "Touch her face. Run your hands over it. Touch her ears and neck very gently. Then kiss her wherever you touched her."

He said it out of frustration, not because he thought that he could really get through to the other him. It was like talking to the screen when you go to a horror film. "Don't open that door!" "Don't go in the basement!" But the actors in the film always go in the basement and get devoured. So Ettrich did not for a minute think that his younger self would hear and actually heed him.

He was wrong. A moment later in the middle of yet another dud kiss, the boy opened his eyes and looked at Gigi an inch away as if she had just dawned on him. Slowly his right hand rose to her face and began to touch her cheeks and rounded chin. Something came over both of their expressions as if sparkle really was happen•ing between them.

What followed was the first of many lousy lays Vincent had in his life. But this was the most memorable because it was the first. Gigi's passion moved up a degree or two because of young Ettrich's unexpectedly sweet caresses and the elder Ettrich's coaching. She was never going to be Cleopatra when it came to this stuff but at least some warmth came to both her heart and skin.

Most importantly, the advice from the elder Ettrich, unbe•knownst to the younger, saved the experience from being a sexual Waterloo,
Titanic,
or an Edsel—one of those hideous experiences of youth that cripple some part of us forever when they are over. Ettrich would always remember Gigi's callous line about waiting till dark. He would also remember how difficult it was to put on the unlubricated condom he had optimistically carried for so long that the leather of his wallet had molded around it.

Because it was his first time, he remembered many details of that night. But not the fundamental one, which was that his older self's advice made the experience merely mediocre and not disas•trous. It ended up being a shrug, a rueful grin, and a good story to tell rather than a permanent knife in his heart.

The past was fixed, that was a given. What happened with Gigi Dardess that night was exactly what had happened twenty-five years earlier:

A little passion + a little response = one less virgin in the world

However, the senior Ettrich now knew that he was capable of going in and out of his past life as if it were rooms in a house. Although he could not change the dimensions of the rooms or any of the objects in them, he sure as hell could move the furniture around. Slide the bulky dresser away from the window so that more light could come in. Or push the beautiful couch into the center of the room so that it would be used, not only admired.

Then he remembered Coco's tiles and how you chose to arrange them into a personal mosaic. He began seeing connections between all of these things. It gave him hope that if he connected all of these dots the right way, he might succeed.

When the sex was over, he and his younger self lay on their back looking up at the stars. One Ettrich was happy it had happened but was just as happy that it was finished. The older Ettrich was looking for the constellations in the sky above them, trying to con•nect the trillion stars into coherent forms.

"You always were the optimist."

Time had passed. Ettrich was still looking up at the stars when he heard that familiar voice. His unconscious recognized its owner before he did. That part of him asked the rhetorical question, "Coco?"

"Yes, Vincent." She stood a few feet down the beach, her hands shoved into the pockets of a pair of tight new jeans. She wore a black T-shirt and rubber sandals. Everything on her looked new, just bought. The biggest change was that her hair was long now and fell to her shoulders. She was a small woman but this new hairdo somehow made her look taller and wider. He didn't know if it was very flattering.

"What are you doing here?" He wanted to say more. He wanted to say I saw you dead earlier. I saw what was left of your body after they were through with it. But he held back and waited.

"Come walk with me. Let's leave the lovebirds in peace." "Can I do that?" He didn't know how he was going to separate from himself and go with Coco.

"You're doing all of this to yourself, Vincent. None of it is real. Come on." Without another word she turned and walked away.

He moved out of himself—just like that, just that easy—and followed her. He looked down at his body to see what was there. Everything was there—one whole adult Vincent Ettrich. He turned and looked at young Ettrich who was still lying on his back, one arm under his head. Gigi turned to him and started talking.

A few minutes later Coco came to a lifeguard tower and climbed the ladder to the top. Ettrich had been walking some steps behind. He caught up but did not follow her up the ladder.

"Nice view. Don't you want to come and join me?" "I'm fine down here. Tell me what's going on, Coco." "You're trying to take the easy way out, Vincent."

"What do you mean?" All of his defense mechanisms jumped up and growled at her.