project/valet-story

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.

Nice for an afternoon—but too strenuous a business to incarnate some guiding star or even an exotic fish for a floundering millionaire. Has she missed her calling? She recalls backing out of a very attractive offer two years ago: a yacht, villa in Nice, apartment in Paris. Wanted her to fly to San Francisco with him. Took her three days to realize the futility of it. Sorry now? But then other things wouldn’t have happened. As for the tyrannical rich man who was usually on the other side of fifty, that too was impossible in the long run—and anything over a day ran into a long run or just a waste. No, it was just too much trouble to comply with an assured, vain man’s whims, or revolt, or get around him—that was the kind of patience Sophie knew she didn’t have. It naturally occurred to her that she might use a floundering rich man for her ends, indeed this was mostly on her mind. It wasn’t so much a question of the means; it wasn’t at all a moral problem, but simply that if you’ve set your heart on going to Rome, the Shanghai Express won’t get you there. You’re better off walking. The Shanghai Express might be great fun, you might fall in love with a station master, it could make you forget about ever wanting to go to Rome, revolutionize your life or be just an adventure. All this was possible but it wouldn’t get her to Rome.

Sanity depends on order. Within a month of leaving the Hotel Caiette and arriving in Jonathan Alkaitis’s absurdly enormous house in the Connecticut suburbs, Vincent had established a routine from which she seldom wavered. She rose at five a.m., a half hour earlier than Jonathan, and went jogging. By the time she returned to his house, he’d left for Manhattan. She was showered and dressed for the day by eight a.m., by which point Jonathan’s driver was available to take her to the train station—he repeatedly offered to drive her to the city, but she preferred the movement of trains to gridlocked traffic—and when she emerged into Grand Central Terminal she liked to linger for a while on her way across the main concourse, taking in the constellations of stars on the green ceiling, the Tiffany clock above the information booth, the crowds. She always had breakfast at a diner near the station, then made her way south toward lower Manhattan and a particular café where she liked to drink espresso and read newspapers, after which she went shopping or got her hair done or walked the streets with her video camera or some combination thereof, and if there was time she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while before she made her way back to Grand Central and a northbound train, in time to be home and dressed in something beautiful by six p.m., which was the earliest Jonathan would conceivably arrive home from the office.

She spent the evening with Jonathan but always found a half hour to go swimming at some point before bed. In the kingdom of money, as she thought of it, there were enormous swaths of time to fill, and she had intimations of danger in letting herself drift, in allowing a day to pass without a schedule or a plan.