White Apples (6 page)

Bruno rubbed his eyes with the heels of his small hands. He was a handsome man. He had a certain gravitas that gave him a substantial and trustworthy air. You wanted him on your side of an argument.

"I'm gay, Vincent. It took me a whole lifetime to realize that and then admit to it. When I did, it felt like a stone had been lifted off my soul. Don't get me wrong—I have a wonderful wife and we've had a good life together. But it was a lie and part of me always knew it.

"Know what I like about you, Vincent? How much you love women. Not so much the way you behave toward them because from what I've seen, sometimes you're a stinker. But you were always so sure they were the best thing on this planet. Sure. You were always sure of who you were and what you wanted.

"Not me. Looking back on it now, I was your classic closet gay. I won't go into detail because who cares, but all the time it was there and I pushed it away like it was the plague. But eventually you have to deal with it. Especially today, when it's not the worst crime in the world to want to be together with another man.

"Then I met Edward Brandt."

"The guy you said I introduced you to at Acumar?"

"Right. For your benefit we pretended to be meeting for the first time. But we've known each other for months. He owns La Strada, the men's store. Do you know it?"

"No." A thought came to Ettrich like someone stamping a foot hard on the floor. "He owns a store? Where is it?

Where is the place?"

Bruno was annoyed at the interruption. "On North Wells."

Ettrich slowly put both hands flat on the table. "678 North Wells, right?" "How do you know?"

"Because that's the address of Coco's place. Both of our friends run different stores at the same address.

Interesting, huh?" The men stared at each other until Ettrich grew a slight smile. "And both sell what we love in their stores: I'm crazy for women so Coco sells lingerie. You're into fashion and Edward Brandt sells men's clothes. It would be interesting to go there right now and see what kind of store is there. Maybe neither. How did you meet?"

"I went into La Strada."

"The same way I met Coco.
Was vor ein Zufall."

"What?"

"That's German. What a coincidence."

They spoke for another hour without getting anywhere. They discussed exhaustively the question of their shared experience and, more importantly, what they should do now. They came to no comfortable conclusions. In the middle of the conversation, Bruno asked whether Vincent had experienced any odd powers since his "discovery."

Ettrich didn't hesitate. "Besides no heartbeat? Unh-unh. You?"

"No, but I keep hoping there's some kind of upside to this, you know? Like maybe tomorrow we'll discover we can fly. I'm tired, Vincent. I've got to go home and get some sleep or else I'm going to collapse." He chuckled. "Resurrection takes a lot out of you."

After putting Bruno in a cab and watching it move away, Ettrich unexpectedly became very wound up and nervous again. He knew that if he returned to his apartment now he would only pace around or turn the television on and off as if it were a light switch. In fact the
last
place he wanted to be right now was at "home." A small bachelor apartment in the good part of town, it had a river view and nothing in the refrigerator but an unopened bottle of Chopin vodka and too many microwave pizzas. He decided to walk the seven blocks from the bar to Coco's shop to see if anything was different there.

It had rained while he met with Bruno. The streets shone from it now. Cars passed in a sexy hiss. The night air smelled of wet stone and metal. Two women went by laughing and he was given the gift of their good perfumes. Colored lights from various store windows fell across his feet, turning his shoes different colors as he walked by. As he passed a bar, the door suddenly opened and three burly guys in baseball caps came out accompanied by the sound of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." The tune's bass line stayed in Ettrich's mind as he walked on.

Kitty liked rain, Isabelle snow, Coco liked hot sunny days. Walking along, head down and the Queen song going somewhere in his background, Ettrich started making a mental list of the simi•larities and differences between the three women. Kitty tried so hard to be a vegetarian. Coco seemed to eat only junk food. Isabelle loved meat—the heavier the better. She often called herself a farmer and said she fit right into van Gogh's painting
The Potato Eaters.
What a laugh. With her Swedish-blond hair and big bee-stung blue eyes she looked more like a beauty in a cosmetics commercial than a brown van Gogh peasant.

One thing that struck him as he walked along was that with the exception of Margaret Hof, Ettrich never spoke of Isabelle to any•one. He kept his thoughts about her to himself. Even when there had been trouble between them and he'd desperately wanted to talk with someone about it, he'd remained silent. What did that signify?

He turned a last corner and was on North Wells Street. Coco's store was at the end of the block. He walked toward it with curiosity rather than trepidation. The day had been so insane that one more piece of madness would have fit right in. But to his surprise the store was still there. No La Strada, nothing but that familiar shop with its glass door and window full of lingerie. Hands in pockets, Ettrich stood in front of it for a good five minutes, thinking things over. He was lost in his thoughts when the car pulled up behind him.

"Hey sport, what are you doing over there?"

He turned around and was faced with a policeman staring at him from inside a patrol car. He smiled. "Thinking about buying some lingerie."

The cop wasn't amused. "It's one in the morning. You planning on waiting around till that store opens?"

Ettrich saw that a second cop. the driver, was looking straight ahead and smoking a cigarette. "No, Officer, I was just taking a walk and stopped to look."

"Well then, why don't you keep on walking." Ettrich was about to respond when he saw something. Some•thing that was going to happen to the driver in a few days. It was a family thing. It wasn't a terrible thing, but it was ugly. The man had caused it to happen but was unaware of what the consequences would be. Ettrich saw the man's next few weeks and they were full of sorrow. He saw the policeman's future as easily as he saw the man's face wrapped in its gray veil of cigarette smoke. He walked away.

Two nights later Ettrich parked his car in a half-empty lot just as a 747 came in overhead, taking up the whole sky and then the whole world for a few thrilling loud moments. He loved picking people up at the airport. Loved the feel of airports—the comings and go•ings, the tremendous emotions that filled the air like ozone—part•ings forever, welcome

homes after years away, the tactile immediacy of right this moment when so many important things ended or began.

He took a few steps, hesitated, and looked back at his car. He'd washed and vacuumed it like a demon an hour before. Normally this new auto looked like hell. It went weeks, sometimes months, without being washed. Inside lived a dizzying mess of papers, candy wrappers, magazines, books, numerous coins, and other now-fuzzy ephemera that had rolled beneath the seats. On the back floor lay a music cassette with the tape unspooled. Next to it was his daugh•ter's headless Barbie doll (the head had fallen into one of the cracks and was stuck to a breath mint). The variety of junk went on and on in a sometimes surprising, always disgusting array. The only time Ettrich cleaned the car was when he knew someone important was going to ride in it, or he had it tuned and the repair shop threw in a free wash. Kitty's car was immaculate. Isabelle drove an ancient Land Rover that was also messy inside but nothing like this. No automobile was like this. While riding in it one day, Isabelle said his car must have done terrible things in its last life to be damned to living this one with him.

What would Isabelle say when she saw his gleaming car now? Would she be impressed or skeptical that he had transformed it for this occasion? He thought of the postcard that he had sent her after she ran away the last time. On it he had written: "In leaving, you took away a part of my life that didn't belong to you. It was mine, Isabelle, not yours, and not ours in common. Which makes you a thief." What had she thought of that? He never knew because when•ever Isabelle fled, she stopped communicating with him altogether. Even more than her running away, he resented the heartlessness of her silence. It bled all the substance out of the relationship they had created together and the closeness they had attained. Her abrupt silence was nothing but cowardice and a betrayal of a deep, impor•tant trust. They had agreed time and again that the best thing going for them, and what both relished most, was their ability to talk frankly and intimately about everything that mattered. Isabelle's si•lence rudely finished that.

Although she was only half of their dia•logue, she had taken both sides with her into that wordless black hole.

He checked his coat pocket to see if he had the camera with him. Another Isabelle quirk—she had an obsession with picking peo•ple up at airports or train stations when they came to visit her. She said it was an important custom in her family. She felt it was some•thing you must do whether you liked it or not, to show your visitor you cared and make them feel welcome from the first minute. Et•trich thought it was sort of loopy but he also liked how committed she was to the tradition. So he went along with it and was always there to meet her wherever in the world they chose to rendezvous.

Isabelle invariably brought a camera with her to photograph whatever person she had come to meet as they came through the gate. She loved looking at these arrival pictures and had literally hundreds of them.

Ettrich had his camera—the beautiful digital Leica she had given him for his birthday two years before. When he had opened the present, she asked him to take pictures every day of his life and send them to her via e-mail. Nothing special or arty, just whatever interested him enough to want to show her. From the first it sur•prised him how much he liked doing this. Liked e-mailing her his photographs of a puppy jumping over a puddle, or three bums eating popcorn from big yellow tubs, and of the little girl who could not have been more than five years old sticking out her tongue and giving him the finger at the same time. He sent Isabelle so many pictures. Sometimes she would comment on them, usually not. Sometimes he was disappointed when she said nothing because he really wanted to hear what she thought.

The worst was when she left and he stopped sending her his pictures. He kept taking them and many were stored on computer discs. But they were for Isabelle and now she wouldn't see them. So there was a strange deadness to these photographs when he looked at them. Stillborns. It made him resent and miss her even more.

Walking into the terminal he asked himself if he felt nervous. He had to take a wicked piss which always meant
some
part of him was nervous. But which part was it? Some of him was nervous, some delighted, a large chunk still simmered with anger... Ettrich was a tossed salad of emotions. And he was
dead.
He was dead, dead, dead. Or
had
been before he was back in his life. But no one seemed to notice a difference, including himself, until Coco had enlightened him with her slide and snapshot show. Would Isabelle see any difference? Did his return to life have anything to do with her? How would he appear to Isabelle Neukor? Would she see a sullen man, a happy one, hopeful, or only a fool?

Worst of all, would she be the one to see a dead man? What did she
want
to see? The thought "Why is she coming here now?" galloped across his mind. Followed closely by "She's pregnant with jour child, stupid. That's why." But it really didn't make sense. Because as far as he could figure, the last time they had slept together was almost three months before. Isabelle had a very regular period so she must have known for over sixty days that she was pregnant. Why hadn't she contacted him then? Why had she waited so long? And why tell him about it in such a roundabout way via Margaret Hof? Why hadn't she just called him and said this has happened and we must talk about it?

Because she was Isabelle. Her line, often repeated, only she usually phrased it "That's just me." Over time it had become both the most endearing and infuriating sentence he'd ever heard a woman say. She used it to explain her intelligence, perception, and consummate generosity. But she also used it to explain her neuroses, disappearances, and selfish silences. At the beginning of their rela•tionship he had begged her to say more about what this phrase meant. "That's just me."
What
was just her? But Isabelle shut down hard and cold when he persisted in asking. Ettrich quickly realized it was a place in her he was not meant to go.

On the afternoon of the day she was to arrive, after pissing six thousand nervous times and otherwise trying to keep himself busy until it was time to go to the airport, he took down a photograph of her from the mantelpiece.

Turning it over, he read again what she had written on the back:

Like a hand on your face that puts my blood next to yours

I want you so much. You tick in my chest. All the seconds.

My heart is a clock.

He never fully understood what those mysterious lines meant but nevertheless they touched him deeply. He read them often.

The photograph had been taken in their room in Krakow, Po•land. It was the oldest hotel in that singular town of high looming shadows and medieval spires. Above the front entrance of their hotel was written, "May this house stand until an ant drinks the oceans and a tortoise circles the world."

Ettrich had been in London on business and wasn't planning on seeing Isabelle that trip. But she called a day before he was to return to America and said in her deep resonant voice, "I've discovered a town. You must come.
Please.
It will haunt you for the rest of your life. It's Venice without the water. There's an amazing restaurant called Peasant's Food where you sit at hand-carved wooden tables and drink hot peppery borscht. It will be our city. We don't have a city together yet, Vincent. Please, please come."