“Violet? She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Does she know that?”
Albert dodged her glance.
“It seems to me,” she said, “that we haven’t sufficiently prepared you here for the world of women.”
From the very beginning he hadn’t really thought of the sisters of Saint Helena as women. As teachers, tutors, yes, as parochial know-it-alls, oh certainly, but never as females — apart from a brief phase when, at the age of five, Albert had believed that the anatomical conspicuities specific to women were called “bad timing,” because he’d surprised Alfonsa while she was undressing in her room, and asked her, pointing, what that was.
Albert picked an apple, inspected it for wormholes, polished it on his pant leg, and took a bite. It puckered his mouth.
“They need more time,” said Alfonsa. “Another month at least.”
“In a month we won’t be here.”
“You could stay. What are you looking for elsewhere that isn’t here?”
Their eyes met for a moment.
“What in the world would keep me here?”
She smirked. “Shoelaces?”
“Sounds tempting.”
“Albert,” she said, stepped over to a crooked tree, plucked a rosy-cheeked apple, sniffed it briefly, and handed it to him. He took a cautious bite. You could taste the sun in it. “There were reasons not to tell you about her.”
Albert dropped the apple.
“You were three years old when you came to us. Not old enough to hear such things. And when you were old enough, I waited for the right moment to tell you. But it never arrived. Eventually I thought maybe it was better that way. There are certain things it’s better one never learns.”
“Then why precisely now?”
“Because we’ve been worried about you.” Typical of Alfonsa, not being able to say I. “When your call came, it confirmed our worries. We should never have let you go, especially not in this difficult situation with Fred. Only, you were so unbelievably stubborn. We didn’t see any other way to bring you back.”
“The ends justify the means,” said Albert.
“You could put it like that.” Alfonsa bent over, tasted Albert’s apple, and showed her teeth in a pleased grimace. “I’ve always had a way with the precocious ones.”
“I want to see her. For all I care, come along. But I want to get it over with.”
Alfonsa brought the apple to her mouth, paused, then bit even deeper. “Fred feeling better?” she asked with her mouth full.
Albert hated her chomping. “Yes.”
She looked at him. “Then what are we waiting for?”
As evening fell on the parking lot, Violet, Alfonsa, Fred, and Albert said good-bye to Klondi, who’d voluntarily given up her seat in the car. If they left right away, they could make it to the Zwirglstein by the next morning, including a rest stop during the night.
Klondi turned to Fred. “Take care of Albert, okay?”
“Albert is very young,” said Fred, knowingly.
“Albert is present,” said Albert, and mentioned yet again that it might be better if Fred stayed behind. They’d be gone for only twenty-four hours.
“But I want to come, too!”
“That’s not an especially convincing argument, Fred.”
“What isn’t an especially convincing argument?”
“You don’t have to come.”
“I do have to come!”
“Why?”
“Because I want to meet your mom!”
Albert looked accusingly at Alfonsa.
She shrugged. “He has a right to know what’s happening.”
Albert felt a tingling at the back of his neck, he knew that any second now his thoughts would take off, and then he’d have to think about things he found deeply unpleasant to have running loose in his head. So he said, “Fine. Let’s get going.”
And so after three days they left Saint Helena with Alfonsa and a new destination, and without Klondi.
Love Story
This woman scratches at the back of her unwashed head, which must be my mother’s head, no question about it, and asks: Who? And I repeat: Your son! And she repeats: Who? And I ask: Are you deaf? And she says: Very good! And I start again from the beginning: I’m your son. And she says: From where? And I say: That’s what I wanted to ask you. And she says: Not today. And I say: It’s me! And she says: Not that I remember. And I say: Can I come in? And she says: Sorry.
Or: This woman explains that the woman I’ve come to see was her sister, and that her sister is no longer with us.
Or: This woman grabs her shotgun as I introduce myself, and shoots me in the chest, and I think to myself: what the hell’s happening here? And then she shoots me in the head.
Or: This woman scolds me, saying, It’s about damned time, where’ve you been roving around all these years? She screams, Get inside this minute and wash your hands and go straight to your room, no supper for you, you’re grounded!
Or: This woman throws her arms around me and says she’s so sorry, she says it’s all her fault, but she was young, and now she’s older, she says, can’t we start again from the beginning, and I tell her I’m sorry, but I’m much too old to start again from the beginning.
Or: This woman has drool dripping from her mouth. She grins, finding just insanely ambrosial the fact that she’s the one who made me.
Albert sat in the passenger seat, reading his chess notebook. Violet steered with her left hand. Curve upon curve. Her right rested on Albert’s upper thigh. Which didn’t bother him. They weren’t far from the goal now, and no matter what he’d hoped to get from it, hoped to achieve, getting it over with would be a basically good thing, he told himself. The same went for a woman’s hand, like Violet’s, on his upper thigh: basically good.
Her fingers stirred almost imperceptibly. “It’s lovely to be with you,” she said.
Albert glanced over his shoulder. Alfonsa’s eyes were closed, but he didn’t believe she was sleeping. Ever since they’d hit the road, she’d been conspicuously reserved.
Fred, on the other hand, sat staring out the window, his eyes flicking left to right, again and again, as if he were reading an encyclopedia. Pushing the world, that’s what he called it. Fixing on something — a street sign, a tree, a license plate — holding it fast with his gaze, and shoving it aside with his eyes. Maybe he was right, thought Albert, maybe we all only believe we’re moving, when in fact we never really move at all. We simply push life past us.
“Thanks,” said Violet.
“For what?”
“You got me out of there. That internship at K&P was hell.” She told him about her days at the production company, confirming what he’d read in her eyes at the airstrip. “I don’t know what I want to do now, but there’s no way I’m ever going back there.”
“A few days ago you sounded completely different.”
“You, too.”
“What do you mean?”
Now she pinched his upper thigh. “You know exactly what I mean.”
There was too much expectation in her grin for Albert’s liking. On the other hand, a grin, too, was basically good. Why ask questions and risk breaking the mood?
The same thought occurred to him three and a half hours later, on the sagging mattress of a motel over whose front door the word Gasthof floated in black letters against a light-blue ground, as Violet sat on him, naked, rotating her hips. But there was one question he simply couldn’t suppress: about the pill he hoped she hadn’t forgotten to take. Violet just laughed, leaned over him, licked his upper lip. Which hardly reassured him. Forgotten pills were a by-no-means-insignificant part of their common past, as were small-hour journeys back and forth across the Bavarian uplands in search of the nearest twenty-four-hour pharmacy, and the patronizing commentaries of the smart-aleck pharmacists who’d clearly never made a single mistake in their whole lives, and finally, forty-eight hours in the company of an unbearable Violet, plagued by nausea and intestinal cramps, cursing, sweating, and smelling oddly of leeks.