39
Anna stopped on the steps of Pine Run to say hello to Jean, Mrs. Gödel’s favorite nurse, who was juggling a cup of steaming coffee and a cigarette. “You look really great, Miss Roth! Did you do something to your hair?” Anna instinctively raised a hand to her head. To her utter surprise, the pink demon had done a nice job. The young woman could tell as soon as she’d rushed to a mirror after the session. Jean gave her an update on Adele’s state of health. The old lady was very agitated, and they couldn’t manage to bring down her blood pressure. Anna pursed her lips. Their escapade had exacted its price.
The nurse stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of her clog, then slipped the half-smoked butt into her pocket. “Gladys gave you a haircut, and you took Adele to the movies. You’re quite the adventuress!” She walked off laughing.
Adele had gone back to looking like a sulking little girl. She was bored stiff.
“You don’t want to watch TV?”
“It’s shit in a glass jar!”
“What if I read to you for a change?”
“Anything but that! I much prefer conversation. You are too fond of books and not enough of people. You remind me of my husband.”
Anna had been hearing this reproach all her life. As a child, she was always being made to get some air. She would hide in the closet so she could keep reading. Since her empty-handed return to Princeton, she had been devouring crime novels one after another, as though fictional mayhem could somehow make her own unhappiness more bearable. While others fed on cloying, sentimental novels, Anna, under the guilty tent of her duvet, wolfed down murders, rapes, whores, pimps, dealers, and blow jobs. She needed the alternate dimension from which these dark words issued. Once the book was closed, she washed her hands, drank a glass of wine, and felt a momentary relief, despite her soiled heart.
“I have the impression that reading helps me understand others better.”
“No one can go into another person’s head. You have to learn to live with solitude. None of your books will change that. A fuck is the one honest thing.”
Adele looked at her out of the corner of her eye. The young woman hadn’t flinched.
“Do you miss sex at this point?”
Mrs. Gödel smiled. That she had taken a step closer to the Nachlass crossed Anna’s mind, but she didn’t dwell on it. She surprised herself by her indifference.
“I miss the desire more than I miss the pleasure. I was quite ravenous in that department. Kurt stopped his attentions toward me too early. He neglected his body and by the same token he neglected mine.”
“How did you manage?”
“Was I an adulteress? No. I had a very strict upbringing. It never goes away. I suffered so much from the years when we lived in sin, as we used to say, that I swore I would be a model wife. And I was. Yet men were still attracted to me. I was good-looking before I became this … thing.”
She weighed her enormous bosoms in her hands with an air of disgust.
“I look like an ocean liner. It’s horrible to feel that you are imprisoned in a strange body. Inside, I am twenty years old. No, actually, I am your age. My age at the time I met Kurt.”
“How did you win his affections? I know you were attractive physically, but Mr. Gödel was not an ordinary man.”
Adele twisted her wedding ring around her swollen finger. It hurt Anna to see it. The old woman couldn’t bring herself to wear it around her neck. She preferred mild pain to symbolic betrayal.