We met Grace downstairs in the bar. Drinks there cost about four times what they do in a normal bar. And if you buy a drink for one of the women, you can easily pay ten times more than at a normal bar. Just to get the woman to talk to us. It’s like tying a couple of sticks of salami beneath the chin of an unloved child to get the dog to play with him. That’s the way it is in this kind of establishment. You can’t just start up a conversation, convince the woman you’re nice and charming, and take off with her. Nope. You have to pay for every little thing.
We bought a bottle of champagne for her. She passed some out to her colleagues so that it emptied quickly and we had to buy a second bottle. And then she started kissing me. She had warm, soft lips. My thin English lips sank right into hers. I’d never felt anything like that on my mouth. Wow. It felt wonderful. I could have done that for hours. Everything around me just melted away. And I thought,
Oh no, my husband probably wants to kiss her, too, so I should stop soon
. She grabbed my breasts there at the bar. Her lips on mine and her right hand on my left breast. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her other hand wander down to my husband’s crotch. She was good at her job. Like an octopus.
We quickly went to one of the rooms above the bar. The beds are nice—made out of washable rubber. Big cubes, like plastic building blocks—a bit like sacrificial altars, too. One of those was in the middle of the room, much taller than a normal bed. I think it should become the new standard height. You can be thankful, I was told, for how great it looks compared to other establishments. But I missed my electric blankets. Maybe I can take them some other time.
She asked if I wanted to take a bath with her. Sure! You have to start somewhere—just to get over the embarrassment factor. She turned on the water and Georg was clearly excited. He already had a hard-on. It’s always quick with him. Grace got into the tub first; then I did. She had put in only a little bit of bubble bath so Georg would still be able to see everything. He sat down on the toilet seat. Grace complimented me, and I her. We giggled, both still a little bashful. But things started to go quickly as soon as we kissed a few more times, long deep kisses with our tongues. I began to relax. I could do anything. Without asking her. She let me touch her entire body. In order to get at her better, I knelt in front of her. She spread her legs. I stroked her neck, her breasts. She mirrored all my motions with her hands on my body. I fingered her, though it was a bit difficult because of the water. I put my head underwater to lick her for as long as I could hold my breath. I thought about my father, who always said to me that when you think you are going to die underwater while diving, you can actually stay down twice as long again and nothing will happen.
I came up snorting, gasping for air. Georg had in the meantime locked onto her other lips. His hand massaged her left breast. Then he kissed me again. She fingered me. The ice was
broken and all my remaining tension melted away. There was no more danger. The three of us lay down on the plastic cube. I could really go down on her now. Georg quickly undressed. He wanted to get into it, too. He’d let me get enough of a head start.
He never comes inside a prostitute. Must be a Catholic thing. I can’t understand it, but whatever he wants to do is fine. He always wants to come inside me. I suspect he secretly thinks no other man should come inside me. Is it possible? We’ll see.
The two expensive hours with Grace flew by. Afterward she left her little bag of toiletries in the room. I took it as a memento of the beautiful experience we’d had together. Stole it, you could also say.
Now I look at my beloved old husband as he lies with his head in my lap. I ask myself whether I am negating myself by doing everything for him. I can’t find the answer. I wouldn’t put it past myself—it’s certainly possible that I could be denying myself and not noticing it.
He sits back up. Enough romance for one day.
“I’m going to go use the rowing machine for twenty minutes. Will you order the food and pick out a movie?”
He has a nice wooden rowing machine in the basement. Custom-built for his body and his back condition.
“Sure. Do you want a vegetarian dish, too?”
“No. I’ll have lamb, please.”
He disappears downstairs. I go to the website of the DVD delivery service. I’ve wanted to see
The Clearing
for ages, though he has no desire. I order it. I call the Indian restaurant, the best one in the city. All my English relatives have said it’s good, which is something, because they’re all very picky. It’ll be forty-five minutes before the food arrives, but it’s worth it. I miss my
daughter. I have nothing to do. Without children, life can be horrible, too.
Since Frau Drescher thinks it’s so important, I lean back on the couch again and do some more deep breathing. I see pretty spiderwebs in the upper corner of our built-in mirror. Sometimes I’m crazy. It’s my fault that the spiderwebs are there, because I told the cleaning woman in no uncertain terms not to vacuum up any spiderwebs in our apartment. She thought it was a strange request, but she sticks to it.
The reason I think of that is because my daughter is learning about spiders in school. How they are useful animals. How we humans use them. They don’t do anything to us, but they eat mosquitoes, which bother us, and ants and other things that disturb us. And yet we don’t like to have them in our apartments. Now, thanks to my good idea, we have an intact ecosystem—there’s a spiderweb in almost every corner, and the spiders live with us and help us get rid of mosquitoes. And it makes me feel that I am one of the good people, not the bad, because like a Buddhist I try to live in harmony with nature. It’s going great. I recommend it to everyone.
I have to divide the world into Good and Bad because otherwise I’m incapable of being political. If you pay attention to all the yeas and nays and exceptions to the rules, it drives you nuts and you just stop doing anything. You don’t fight against things. But if you divide people into good and bad, companies into good and bad, and so forth, then you can do something. You have to decide what you are opposed to. What you consider good. And then go for it. Fight against everything that’s bad. First learn to abstain from bad things, and then start trying to get other people to go along with you. Like in the Michael
Jackson song “Man in the Mirror.” You want to make the world a better place? Look in the mirror. Start with yourself. It’s tough at first. But when you manage to do without something for the first time and then get used to it, you get a rush of righteousness. Environmental sainthood will be just around the corner.
The accident completely altered my personality. I wasn’t like this earlier in my life. Something like that makes you lonely and weak. And after the accident Stefan was too weak himself to help me. The exact moment I fell for Georg was when he answered a question I asked: “What does a normal day look like for you?” He said, “I go to work and take care of all the unpleasant things I’ve written down on a list earlier in the day.”
Violins, beautiful pink sunset. This was the man for me. He’s a doer. Exactly what I need. For all of my problems and because of all the catastrophes that are yet to come. Murder and death, collapsing high-rises. He’s the right person.
As soon as my husband and I got together, I got pregnant. In love with him the way I was, I attributed it to his strong sperm. But it must really have been his strong sperm because it happened despite the fact that I was on the pill. Though to be honest, I was drinking so much at the time that I constantly threw up—not ideal for keeping down birth control pills. In any event, we were pregnant immediately. He absolutely wanted me to get an abortion. At first I thought,
Why? We’re in love and we have money and time
. The reason he was strictly against having a baby was that our relationship was still in flux. He was very clinical. Too clinical for me. It was a love child! I had hippie parents and was brought up to think shit like that. The situation was fucked up. We fought and fought. We’d just fallen in love and we had to make a decision like that.
He didn’t want to lose his first son. He worried about that a lot during the initial period of our relationship. He thought it would be betraying his baby boy if he had another child right away. Pretty early in our conversations I realized I didn’t want to convince him to have a baby as badly as he wanted to convince me to have an abortion. An abortion is quick and painless; a child sticks around an eternity. All I wanted, crying every day, was to hear him say, just once, that he was sorry about our baby, that it was just bad timing and that he would surely want to have a baby with me soon. But he refused to say that to me. I pleaded with him, I begged him, I humiliated myself to hear that sentence:
I’m sorry about our baby
. But he thought if he said that, he wouldn’t be able to go through with the abortion. He didn’t want to betray his child any further—he’d already left the boy’s mother. We learned that in couples therapy: a good father doesn’t leave the child, only the mother of the child. Very important! The crappy new patchwork family arrangement was apparently a little too disorderly for him.
Anyway, he refused to say that sentence. He never said anything nice at all. He just repeated one thing over and over: the baby had to go, it just wouldn’t work right now. Maybe he thought it was a trap. If he were to say what I wanted to hear, something would happen—I’d hold him to it. Even though it hurt me to the point of feeling physically ill, I also realized that my own feelings weren’t as strong as his—the extent to which he so badly didn’t want the baby was not true of me the other way around. So he won that contest. As soon as I said I was prepared to get an abortion, he was much nicer to me again. He didn’t have to put up a front anymore. The hard decision
had been made and now it just had to be acted upon. We were a team again, and things were much better.
I like to think back on the abortion clinic. I’ve never again met such sensitive and cautious nurses. You were handled so gently that I thought to myself that it was a place I’d like to come back to often. I felt as if I were on happy pills. Maybe deep down inside I didn’t want the baby, either, and I had just been shocked by the strident nature of Georg’s insistence. I took it personally. Still, I am to this day envious and jealous of his ex-wife. Why could he be talked into having a baby with her but not with me?
Once, years later, he told me that he’d also thought that I wasn’t mentally stable enough to have a child, much less a second one. Cheers! After the termination of the product of our love, the abortion doctor, who was very good and very nice, told us we shouldn’t have vaginal sex for a while because of the risk of infection. Aha, we thought, looking at each other, just no
vaginal
sex! Because he was so thankful that I’d had the abortion—my husband, not the doctor—that we felt very close and wanted to sleep with each other immediately. We had the best anal sex—no, actually just the best sex—of all times on the grave of our unborn child. As soon as we got home.
We walked home, as it was only a few hundred meters from our apartment. My husband supported me on my shaky legs. I’ll never forget the image and how nice that extremely rare feeling of being supported was, being supported in the true sense of the word. And when we arrived home, we tore into each other like animals. For sex you don’t necessarily need your shaky legs to hold you. All the conflict between us was forgotten. And I
think it didn’t hurt so much because the anesthetic was still having some effect.
All of that is incorporated in our relationship. Incredible that we can still have sex. That we’re still together. How such an ol’ couple keeps going. Great!
Where is he anyway? Where is Georg? Oh, right, rowing. Without water. I feel so much love for him when I think of all that again. He’s earned my company tomorrow in the brothel. I want him to have a nice life. I want to help him achieve that. With as few moral restrictions as possible!
Georg comes back with his face nicely aglow from the exercise. Finally I can stop brooding. The Indian food and movie have arrived in the meantime. I paid for both of them with money from Georg’s briefcase, which he leaves next to the front door for just such eventualities.
When Liza isn’t home, we act like low-class bastards. We eat on the couch, directly out of the foil containers. Georg pulls our curry mat out from behind the couch. It’s an old piece of carpeting that we lay on the floor between the couch and the coffee table so it catches everything that drips. Afterward we just roll it up again and stuff it behind the couch. We put on the movie and eat. The food is too spicy for me. Somehow it hits me in the diaphragm and I get the hiccups. Georg rolls his eyes. He hates it for some reason when I have the hiccups. Who cares?
With his mouth full he says, “Oh, man, the movie seems to be about old marriages.”
I answer with my mouth full, too. “So? Do you have something against old marriages?”
We keep watching. It’s also about cheating on your spouse. Get the message? I’ll still have to explain it to him anyway; he’ll never pick up on it from a movie. Georg, can’t you see that the man in the movie loves his wife above all else and yet he still cheats on her? It’s possible. Love on the side. A great love can withstand it. Yeah, yeah.
The food is unbelievably filling. We eat too fast and need to take the containers away. Like a porn magazine you’ve already come over—you want nothing to do with it afterward. I press
PAUSE
so Georg can throw out the containers. The frozen image is of the actress Helen Mirren. She’s just gotten undressed and is standing there with her beautiful big breasts in a skin-color bra. I stare at the frozen image.
When Georg comes back, I quickly press
PLAY.
“Finally the breasts are gone. It really gets me down.”
Georg rolls his eyes and pushes the
PAUSE
button again. The breasts are frozen on the screen again.
“Good that you brought that up again. What exactly is it again—what’s the story with breasts?”