project/valet-story

It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.

“It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”

“Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”

They have been all over the world, Lucy thinks, watching the sea. Yet so little of it has stuck with her. She clings to names, to snapshots and matchbooks, but the many seasons have mingled hopelessly. She used to arrange their photographs according to which bathing suit she was wearing—the polka-dotted one in Cannes, the striped red in Spain. But the sand and water around the bathing suits all look the same.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick. They’re expecting to be turned down so you shouldn’t feel any obligation.

I hoped he’d say he’d wait for me, that he’d still be here when I got back. But he said that if I really loved him I’d marry him right now. I reacted to that. He needs to graduate; he only works part-time. I didn’t say more of the truth which is that I don’t want to leave school. I want to study Shakespeare, the Romantic poets. He said we could live with his dad until we had enough money. We were crossing the bridge over the Rio Grande when I said I didn’t want to get married yet.

“You won’t know for a long time what it is you’re throwing away.”

I said I knew what we had, that it would still be there when I got back.

“It will, but you won’t. No, you’ll go on, have ‘relationships,’ marry some asshole.”

He opened the car door, shoved me out onto the Rio Grande bridge, the car still moving. He drove away. I walked all the way across town to the dorm. I kept thinking he’d pull up behind me, but he never did.

What were these six weeks about? What were we waiting for? Were we hoping for something? We seemed to be living in silence. My husband had brought books to read: he had perfect pitch as far as language was concerned and, like a great musician, could tell the false note from the true. He was like Lázár in this respect. We’d sit on the balcony at twilight and I’d read to him: French poems, English novels, heavy German prose. And Goethe and some scenes from Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. He loved that play. He had seen it on stage once, in Berlin, and had never forgotten it. He also loved Büchner’s Danton’s Death. And Hamlet, and Richard III. I was obliged to read him verses by the great Hungarian poet János Arany, from his late Autumn Crocuses cycle. Then we’d dress, have supper in one of the best restaurants, drink sweet Italian wine and eat sea crab.

In some ways we were living like nouveaux riches, like people who want to make up for everything they have ever lacked, to enjoy it all, and all at once. People that listen to Beethoven while chewing on a capon and slurping French Champagne in time to the music. But it was also like saying good-bye to something. Those years, the last years before the war, were drenched in this peculiar atmosphere. It was like saying good-bye without quite knowing it. My husband said precisely that: something about Europe. I said nothing. It was not Europe I was leaving. Can we, just the two of us, as women, own up to the fact that, concepts such as “Europe” have little to do with us? What I knew deep in my heart was that I lacked the strength to cut myself off from something more important. I was almost choking with helplessness.

Unless you say otherwise, people assume the end of a marriage involves an affair. So I am saying otherwise. This one did not. Just the mistake of two people believing they could make a life together, when in fact they couldn’t. Which is its own betrayal.

My parents’ marriage left me more allergic to affairs than to endings. But I knew there were people who felt otherwise—who believed the worst thing was giving up too soon.

I was certainly capable of infidelity—had inherited some version of my father’s capacity, even as I judged him for it. In the past, I’d cheated on two boyfriends—could still remember waking up in the beds of other men, trapped inside my own body like a rumpled, foul-smelling outfit I could not remove.

For me, cheating had been a way to avoid the work of either fixing a relationship or ending it. This time, with C, I did not want to avoid that work. But I was scared of myself. I had no illusions about my own innocence. Whenever I heard myself saying, I’d never do that, I heard a false promise. We can’t imagine ourselves doing many things until we do them.

Hans remembers her smile and her breasts, but the way she looks overall, he perhaps doesn’t know. But there she is, turning onto Schiffbauerdamm, and he recognizes her right away. She’s swinging her handbag as she walks, she’s dressed all in black, and as she comes closer, he sees she’s put up her hair and tied it with a black velvet ribbon. Exposed, he thinks, her face. He wanted to be straight with her today, he knows now he will have to be. It’s his only chance. He gives a nod as they pass the two waiters with long white aprons at the entrance, who are performing France for French soldiers over from West Berlin who like to have a cheap meal in East Berlin’s expensive Ganymede.

It takes me considerably longer to get ready in the morning, or to go to sleep at night. Leaving aside the complicated network of decisions involved in putting clothes on, there are a nearly infinite number of products which must be employed in the ongoing campaign to appear young, thin, well rested, and, if I’m lucky, and all the potions have worked, pretty. Glossing cream (my hair tends to be dry). Some powdery stuff to give it texture (it is too straight, too fine). Micellar water, with a stack of cotton rounds and a cup full of Q-tips. Eye make-up remover, oil-free. Evian in a spray can. Two different kinds of serum. Day cream, night cream (premières rides d’expression). Sun cream, to mix into day cream, SPF 50, I am very fair-skinned, when I was little my mother always protected me from the sun, big hats, big umbrellas, because her mother didn’t, she said, and now she’s paying the price. Eye cream. Thigh cream. Body lotion. Foot cream. One bottle of perfume, used daily. (Three bottles gathering dust.) Two kinds of eyeliner (charcoal and black liquid). Concealer. Pressed power. Several shades of eyeshadow. Lipsticks, several. Lip gloss, several (none new). Liquid blush. Solid blush. Assorted brushes, nail files, bobby pins, barrettes, tweezers, samples of other potions which I might eventually use, thrown into my little shopping bag by a shop assistant when I paid for the potions I do use, in the hope no doubt I would return to buy full-sized versions of the potions.

Experienced dancers knew what to say. They could sweetly shame a college boy into, at the very least, subscribing to their OnlyFans. This is no ordinary bar, they’d say with a wink. They’d indicate their breasts, foaming out of a bustier. Do you like what you see? Yes? Then show me!

I envied their skill. I didn’t know how to be sassy yet endearing, lovably firm. When rejected by guests, I just walked away. I was scared that if I opened my mouth, I might end up shouting. There was a very small yet ferocious girl inside me that was prone to throwing drinks in men’s faces. Dino had seen her, though I tried my best to keep her under wraps.