She seems to be asleep now.
He slides his arm out from under her neck.
He feels very awake himself suddenly.
He slips out of the bed and feels his way to the door and through the sitting room, where there’s enough light to make things out, to the terrace.
He stands on the terrace smoking a cigarette and listening to the faint sound of the traffic from somewhere far below.
Thinking about death makes everything seem sad because it makes everything seem unimportant, at least for a moment.
Once, when she was telling him how she often didn’t know what to say to her husband when she went to visit him, she asked him what he would want her to say to him if he was in her husband’s position.
“I don’t know,” he said, honestly enough.
He found it hard to imagine himself in her husband’s position.
To actually imagine it.
What it would actually be like.
Would he want people to ignore the illness, and talk about other things?
Or would he want them to talk about the illness?
Or would it not make any difference what they said?
The way he imagines it, more than anything else he would perhaps feel very lonely—he would feel that he was facing this thing on his own, and that whatever anyone else said, or didn’t say, the fact would remain that they weren’t facing it, and he was.
The next morning they wake up later than usual and lie in bed talking. They talk about the situation with her husband. She seems more phlegmatic about it now.
“I’m sorry about last night,” she says.
“Why?”
“For being so…”
He waits.
“You know. Hysterical or whatever.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Obviously.”
He wonders whether to ask her what she meant when she said it was her fault. Partly just what was her fault?
He doesn’t.
Still naked he walks to the window and peels back the heavy curtain.
“What’s it like?” she asks.
“Sort of grayish.”
She yawns.
He pushes on the Nespresso machine in the cupboard.
The lights flash.
“What should we do today?” he asks.
“I feel very guilty,” she says.
“What about?” he asks, after a silence, still looking at the flashing lights on the Nespresso machine.
“What do you think?”
“Us doing this?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t seem to feel guilty about it before.”
“No,” she agrees.
“So?”
“I feel I owe him something more now,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Or I don’t know,” she says. “I feel I owe you something as well. It’s very difficult.”
“What do you owe me?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“You once said to me that you didn’t love him,” he says to her. “I don’t think that’s true. I think you do.”
“Yes,” she says. “In a way. You understand.”
“Of course.”
“You spend so many years with someone.”
“Yes.”
“They become part of your life.”
“Yes.”
“Part of who you are.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if it’s love,” she says.
“Does it matter?” he asks.
“Does what matter?”
“Does it matter what word you use?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
She’s in the bath.
He’s standing a few meters away, shaving at one of the sinks.
There’s the scraping of the razor, and sometimes the sound of her moving in the water.
She says that her husband’s family—his sister Mathilde for instance—all thought that she “only” married him for his money. What they didn’t seem to understand, she says, is how hard it is to say how much the money is or ever was a factor in the situation. While it seems undeniable to her that she may not have found her husband as attractive if he had been anything other than very wealthy, she nevertheless did find him attractive, and she did think that she was in love with him. It was not, in other words, that she found him unattractive and was only interested in the money. It was never as simple as that. It was that the money, insomuch as it was a factor, will have operated by making her find him actually more attractive as a person than she otherwise would have done, though to what exact degree of difference is obviously impossible to say, so that to even ask the question seems pointless, especially since those sorts of uncertainties, to do with what exactly it is that draws us to another person, in the end surely characterize every decision of that kind, every decision about who we spend our lives with.
There’s a spa in the hotel that they sometimes use.
There’s a nice pool.
Next to the pool there are indoor lounge chairs with views of the gray Munich skyline. It’s a strange feeling to lie there in swimming things with the cold March day just on the other side of the glass.
There are saunas.
“I can’t get used to these naked saunas here,” she says. “I mean, call me a prude but I find it a bit weird to sit there naked with total strangers.”
“You’re embarrassed?”
“What?”
“You’re embarrassed that they see you naked?”
“It’s not just that. I don’t want to have to look at them. I don’t want to have to look at their shriveled little dicks. I don’t want to have to look at their saggy tits.”
“Then shut your eyes.”
“Shut my eyes? That would make it even worse—to be sitting there naked surrounded by naked strangers with my eyes shut? No thank you. I’m surprised how many of the men wax,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you like it?”
“Would you ever do it?”
“I used to sometimes,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“When I worked out.”
“Yeah?”
“It was sort of part of the culture,” he says.
“Why?”
“Why?” He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“To make your dicks look bigger?” She’s smiling at him.
“Does it do that?”
“Yeah, a bit.”
“You’ve noticed that, have you?”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that,” she says.
Which leads to a conversation about the extent to which, in the sauna, they look.
He admits that he does as well. What he doesn’t tell her is that if he finds the sauna mildly arousing, it’s only minimally to do with the fact that there are other naked women there. Partly it’s that he finds it arousing to be naked himself in front of strangers. What most excites him, though, is to see her naked in front of other people. He’s not sure what that’s about, why that turns him on quite so much. He thinks maybe it’s something to do with the fact that she seems, naked in the sauna, in front of other people, to be somehow more naked than it’s possible for her to be now when it’s just the two of them, so that he often finds himself thinking about it later, sort of drawing on the memory of it for an extra lift of arousal when they’re actually having sex.
She speaks to her son, Thomas, on the phone.
“No, he’s still in the hospital,” she says.
István is lying on one of the sofas, looking at a Champions League match on the muted TV.
“No, it’s not good,” she says. Her voice, when she speaks to Thomas, is noticeably different from how it is at other times—softer, and at the same time more sure of itself. “I don’t know,” she says. “They’re going to start the chemo soon. The doctor says we just have to wait and see.”
When she has finished speaking to him she says, in her normal voice, that she needs a drink, and they go downstairs to the Jahreszeiten bar and have gin and tonics.
“He’s coming for a visit this weekend,” she says.
“Okay,” István says.
Thomas arrives on Friday evening. He’s taller than his mother now. He has a room next to hers in the hotel and while he’s there István sleeps in his own room a few floors down.