It’s a strange feeling, though not particularly an unpleasant one, to sleep alone for two nights in that much smaller room.
More unpleasant is the way that in front of her son Helen talks to him as if he’s just the driver. It’s not surprising that she should do that. What else would she do? What is surprising is how it makes him feel now. In London, where it went on all the time, he was used to it and it didn’t affect him. Now it does. She picks up on that. Late on Friday night she phones him in his room. She and Thomas had dinner together somewhere. “I know this is weird,” she says.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“This whole situation.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Me?”
She waits for him to say something.
“Sure,” he says. “You?”
“Yes, I’m okay,” she says. “I’ve just had a bath.”
“Okay,” he says.
“And now I’m lying on my bed, thinking of you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I’m naked,” she says.
“Okay.”
“And I’m imagining that you’re here with me.”
“Yeah?”
“Mm.”
“Okay.”
“Mm,” she says again.
He wonders if she’s actually doing what it sounds like she is.
He’s not sure what to do himself. This is the first time anything like this has happened.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Me?”
“Mm.”
“Uh.”
“Are you hard?”
“Yeah actually.”
“I wish I had it in my mouth.”
“That would be nice.”
“Mm.”
Although there’s just silence when she’s not speaking, something about the intensity of it is suggestive.
“What are you doing?” he asks, after a while.
“What am I doing?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m trying to come,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Aroused by the thought of her doing that, he starts to do the same.
Minutes pass without anything being said, though the phone, on loudspeaker, is next to where he’s sitting.
Maybe he makes an audible gasp.
“Did you come?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says, panting slightly. “You?”
“Not yet,” she says.
He sits there for another minute or two, wondering whether he should say anything to help her. Then, in a strangled voice, she says, “I’m coming.” There’s a note of panic to it, as if she’s about to be swept away by a flood or something. Then a small shout, and then silence again, although the silence has a different quality now.
The next morning he drives them to the hospital.
She sits in the back with Thomas and they sometimes talk during the hour-long journey. There are also long stretches when they don’t.
Thomas looks out the window at the distant mountains with an expression on his face that seems simultaneously worried and bored.
“I don’t want you to worry,” she says.
“I’m not worried,” he says.
“These are the best doctors in the world,” she tells him.
“I know,” he says, as if it had never occurred to him that they might not be.
“So tell me more about school,” she asks him, some time later.
“It’s okay,” he says.
It seems that he’s involved in some sort of school play and they talk about that for a while.
“So what’s your part?” she asks him.
“Horatio,” he says.
“That’s great,” she says.
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not an important part,” he says.
“Sure it is,” she says.
At the hospital they’re upstairs for less than half an hour.
István, looking at things on his phone in the lobby, is surprised to see them emerge from the elevator again so soon.
They drive back to Munich in silence, with Thomas wearing his Bose headphones now.
“What are you listening to?” his mother asks him.
He lifts one side of the headphones.
“What are you listening to?” she asks again.
“You wouldn’t know it,” he says.
She takes him shopping in the afternoon and the two of them have dinner together in the hotel restaurant, which she tells him has a Michelin star.
The next morning István drives them to the airport. Thomas’s flight is at about noon. On the way he asks his mother how much longer she’ll be staying in Munich.
“I don’t know, darling,” she says. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
István stands at a discreet distance while she hugs her son at security. She squeezes him for what feels like a very long time. She has tears in her eyes. Thomas has tears in his eyes as well.
“It will be okay,” she says to him.
He just nods.
They wait until he’s out of sight—it’s only a minute, he’s in the priority queue—and then walk back to the Audi.
For a long time neither of them speaks.
“He asked me why you were here,” Helen finally says, as they drive back into Munich, with her sitting next to him in the front now.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I needed you,” she says.
“And what did he say?”
“He said for what?”
“And what did you say?”
“I said to drive me to the hospital. And he said is that all? And I said yes.”
“He said is that all?”
“Yes.”
There’s a minute of silence. Then he says, “You didn’t spend long upstairs at the hospital yesterday.”
“No,” she says.
“Was it okay?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” she says again.
“Why not? What happened?”
“It was awful actually,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t talk much for the rest of the drive into Munich.
Later though, while they’re having lunch, she says, obviously still preoccupied with what happened, “Tommy isn’t the son that Karl wanted. I’m not saying he doesn’t love him. In some way I’m sure he does. He finds it hard to be proud of him though. And Tommy feels that, of course.”
“Sure.”
“They’re just so different,” she says. “Karl doesn’t understand him.”
“No.”
“He doesn’t understand Tommy’s sensitivity. He’s disappointed in him. Karl is, I mean.”
“Okay.”
After a while she makes an effort to talk about other things. Her son seems to be all that she’s able to think about though, and the whole afternoon she keeps coming back to him until István wishes that she would stop.
She says she’s worried that he isn’t happy at his new school, that he’s much more affected by his father’s illness than he lets on, that he’s shutting himself off from her. “We used to be so close,” she says.
Finally she seems exhausted by the subject herself and says she wants to drink gin and tonics in the Jahreszeiten bar.
In the morning he has a hangover, and memories of the sort of drunk sex that starts unusually vigorously but then just sort of stops.
“How do you feel?” she asks. She’s more used to this sort of thing than he is. Even so, she looks pale and fragile.
They had four or five gin and tonics and no supper.
“Okay,” he says.
He has a very long shower and then, wearing sunglasses even though it’s not sunny, they walk across the Hofgarten to the Luitpold.
They have cappuccinos.
After a while he feels slightly more normal.
“You okay?” he asks, taking the last of the cappuccino foam with a small spoon.
She understands what he means.
“Yes,” she says.
It’s raining now and they don’t have an umbrella so they just stay there.
He looks at the cakes under the curved glass and points to one, a pear tart. The man with the tongs puts it on a plate.
István eats about half of it and then pushes the plate toward her.
“How is it?” she asks.
“It’s delicious,” he says.
Outside the rain is falling even more heavily. The florist next door has covered her sidewalk display with a plastic sheet.