I’m calling her, Fil said, phone in hand.
Please do, Albert said. I have nothing to hide.
Before Erica moved in, Albert spent most of his afternoons in the study, radio tuned to classical WQXR, a box of Cohibas at his elbow, his mind slathered with lust. Christ, it was all he could do not to think of women. Surely this was a side effect of going senile, water pulling back at low tide to expose the dark rippled mud just beyond the pristine beach. He would never have believed that after so many years there’d remain such a stockpile of filth within him, and he resented not having done a better job of depleting it. The midnight erections were not unpleasurable. But his powerlessness during those empty afternoons, voids flooded by an endless procession of rooms, beds, creaking slats, the recurring image of a stateroom on an Atlantic passage, three portholes in the bedroom alone, which hadn’t been his (all he’d had to his name then was a shaving kit and a pinstripe suit), and the woman, who had at first been unfathomably old to him, a novelty, a married mother of four, white fissures in the flesh of her belly, and a lush, joyous way of pounding at him with her hips that transmuted the thudding noise from the ship’s engine room, ever-present in his own sardine tin of a cabin, so that for years it was impossible not to think of her when he saw a painting of a ship or caught sight of the docks from a cab on the West Side Highway, impossible not to think of pistons, oil, steam. He’d been on his way to England, 1931. There were others. A field in rain, a park at night, the streaking sun on a brilliant white wall, clouds against the blue through a farmhouse window. Another open window, Yorkville, the breeze blowing in—and how there’d been a fan in the room in Italy, it dried the slickness between them and he’d yanked out the cord, yanked the wire right out of the plug, and they’d sweated through to the mattress, the taste of the sweat in her armpits, the rivulets coursing from beneath her breasts, and the moans, the concentrated effort, all his energies focused on the perfect delicate movement, and afterward the sound of the flies knocking stupidly against the ceiling, none of it was lost to him, it all came back in the sagging stillness of the afternoon. Merry revels for an old man in his waning years? Not for Albert, for whom it was all distraction, grease on the lens when he was trying to train his eye on his punishment.
There was an element of mockery to it that enraged him—mockery of his intellectual weakness, his moral decrepitude. He couldn’t keep track of what day of the week it was, yet here was the girl he met in Berlin after the war, the light blue veins at the back of her knee, her leg draped so nonchalantly over his shoulder? That was thirty years ago. What was a body worth in those days? They would do it for a tin of beans, and what good was that? Slavery. A depraved, mechanical transaction that conjoined him to a catastrophe of a civilization, the utter debasement that had befallen the German people. A ragged, misbegotten country, deserving of all the malice the world had to throw at it. To fuck one of its daughters was to descend into a rotten, connubial malaise. How could there be such a thing as pleasure in a place like that? The girl had been lifeless as a rag doll, a receptacle to fill with the appropriate part of his own anatomy.
Sadistisch, sadistisch, she’d said. The infantry destroys. It’s those who come after, bearing accordion folders and documents, the shaved, pressed, and dressed, who conquer. Berlin, was it? Or Nuremberg? Why was he revisiting these things? What sadist was behind all this? Oh for god’s sake, don’t pretend it’s a punishment. What difference did it make who he thought about—he was nothing but an animal prowling old hunting grounds. No harm in it. They were pictures, not people. And then one day, in the doorway: Erica, as soft around the edges as a blurry photo, yet real, flesh and blood, a beating heart and a compassionate soul. God, how embarrassing, looking at her was like being caught peeping through a hole in the changing room wall, yet he kept catching himself doing just that. A little burst of shock and he’d turn his head, imagining himself to be disgusted. If nothing else, he had his iron will. Once that was gone, he was finished. He’d restrained his hands if not his eyes, and kept his comments to himself, and after she’d been with him a few weeks, the afternoon waters calmed. Sometimes he allowed her to sit in the room with him and read. She absorbed his loneliness, shuffling quietly through her copy of the Post, occasionally murmuring in dismay at a bus plunger or a smash-and-grab with casualties, and she made him feel that there was some life yet in the world. All those afternoons before her, his mind had gone to what was available in the archives, but now those memories had been sent back on their wheeled carts. He’d almost become fond of her.
More than fond. I know
