My tongue seemed to swell to block my throat as I slipped off my chair to kneel before her, my fingers blindly searching for shards and fragments. The erotic archaeologist … I caught a gust of her perfume, a kind of lavender. She looked up. My eyes snapped up just in time.
“Hey, don’t bother, Dora’ll get it in the—”
I kissed her with undue violence, crushing my nose painfully on her cheek, simultaneously clutching her shoulders and hauling us both to our feet. I pressed my taut bulging groin against her thigh and pushed her back and down onto the sofa. She flung her head back.
“I love you, Doon,” I said. “I love — MNEEAAGHHH!”
The pain was infernal, not of this world. The hard apex of her knee mashed my testicles against the unyielding base of my pelvis. I felt as if I had been split from the perineum up to the top of my skull by an ice ax, or impaled, sitting, on a giant freezing horn. (Gentlemen, you surely know what I am talking about. Ladies, take my word for it, there is no more fiendish agony.) Everything went blue, black, purple, orange, white. I opened my eyes. An ultrasonic scream seemed to reverberate around the room as if it were a trapped demented presence. I was on the floor — balled up well and truly, you might say. Glass splinters sparkled before my eyes. My hands cupped the jangling fragments of my ruined groin.
I twisted my head round. Doon stood by the door, fully dressed (how much time had elapsed, for God’s sake?). Through the scream in my head I seemed to hear her say calmly, “I never want to see you again, asswipe.”
I felt the vomit — a prancing bolus — in my throat. I began to crawl to the bathroom. There was a knock on the door behind me, then Mavrocordato’s voice asking, “What is it?”
Doon said, “Nothing,” and the door closed. I am sure I heard laughter.
I never made it to the toilet bowl. I vomited over the linoleum — maroon fleur-de-lis in a pretty pattern — a yard short. I left it for Dora to clean up in the morning.
Julie was an enormous hit. An international success. Realismus Films made over a million dollars in Germany, France, Britain and America. Doon Bogan became for a year or two the most glamorous and celebrated actress in Europe. Karl-Heinz Kornfeld was acclaimed as the “quintessentially hoch modern leading man.” But more of that later. My own life entered a strange troubled phase just as my personal fortunes were at their zenith.
I was, I think, actually driven a little insane by my “falling out” with Doon — if that is not too absurd a euphemism. Even after such a brutal, unequivocal rejection I could not expunge or ignore my feelings for her. What can you do in such circumstances? If you are obsessed, you are obsessed. She telephoned me two days after the incident.
“Are you all right?”
“What? Yes. A slight limp, but otherwise … Look, Doon, I—”
“I shouldn’t have hit you so hard. But I was mad. And not just at you. I was kind of upset that day.”
“God, I’m so sorry. Terribly sorry. I should never—”
“You’re a fool, John James Todd. A great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool.”
She hung up. I had no idea what she meant. Or rather, I had one idea but it seemed to me she was implying something else.… In the event I grew none the wiser as I had to force my attention round to completing the film, which we did with little fuss and on time. Aram Lodokian paid my five-thousand-dollar bonus without demur. The film opened in the Kino-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm with a full symphony orchestra providing musical accompaniment on February 16, 1926, and the rest is history.
We moved from Rudolfplatz, west, to a new villa in Charlottenburg. The area was being developed: on every corner new houses were being built and the streets were planted with frail lime-tree saplings guarded by tight palisades of iron spikes. Mrs. Shorrold left us and Sonia acquired an English nurse (Lily Maidbow, a plain, efficient, almost speechless girl) to look after the boys. Our house was fresh smelling — of wax from the wooden floor, of paint, of leather and fabrics — it had a wide garden planted with birch and larch, and was surrounded by a white picket fence. I never liked it. I felt like one of the lime-tree saplings. I did not need such sturdy penning in. These were the accouterments of prosperous middle age, of bourgeois plentitude. I found the place oppressive and minatory — but, conceivably, that would have been true of any home I lived in then. I was not of a mind to settle down, eat big dinners at my dining room table, dandle my babes on my knee. Doon had knocked me off kilter; I was askew, like that first time I’d gone over the top, drunk. Everything about Sonia was stable, placid and fixed. I was living in a different geometry.
I spent long hours over the autumn and winter of 1925 editing Julie, writing and rewriting the captions, Sonia made no complaint about my protracted absence from the house. She kept herself busy and enjoyed the newfound Todd prosperity more than I did. Leo, I think, suspected that something was wrong, but with his ineffable tact did not ask me anything about it. He was settling down rapidly in Berlin and was enjoying a diverting love affair with Lola Templin-Tavel. When I had had enough of work and could not bear the thought of going home, I used to meet Karl-Heinz in a bar of Uhlandstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm. There was nothing louche or depraved about this place, although those were qualities its neighborhood rivals strove earnestly to reproduce. Our bar, the Dix, consisted of two rooms: one, smaller, with a zinc-topped counter and a few tables and chairs; and the other, larger, with two billiard tables. Its very plainness ensured it was never overbusy. Karl-Heinz and I would sit and drink in the small room and from time to time play a game of billiards. I grew to love that place, warm and blurry with cigar smoke, the air filled with the noise of subdued conversation, the rustle of newspapers (hung from the wall on sticks) and the solid reassuring click of the ivory billiard balls. It was anonymous, populated by transients. The owner and his large ginger-haired wife made no attempt to cultivate regulars. It suited me at that difficult time.
I told Karl-Heinz everything about Doon and he thoughtfully went through the motions of sympathizing with me. He was not surprised, he said. He had been waiting for something to turn my life upside down. How come? I asked him, but he would not expand. Later he told me he could never understand why I had married Sonia. When I told him the honest reason — for sex — he was even more baffled. I think he regarded me — as a representative heterosexual — as being something of a chronic naïf when it came to sexual matters.
But he listened patiently, a true friend, to my protracted moans. I am ashamed to reflect now on those one-sided encounters. I never asked him about himself, never wondered how he did when I finally left him, or when he left me. I was up to my neck in a mire of my own selfishness. I thought of my drowning Ulsterman (I thought a lot about the war, then) as he sank in the mud of the Salient: “I’m going doyn.” … No wonder I could not escape Doon: my day was spent watching her images shimmer by me on the editing machines. Karl-Heinz knew that all I required was a listener and he provided it, selflessly. At least we could break off and play billiards. (He was a terrible player, incapable of calculating the simplest angles. I always won.)
It was early in the New Year. The film was finished and we were waiting for its release when his patience finally broke. As usual we were sitting in the Bar Dix. Karl-Heinz was drinking beer with a schnapps chaser. I was drinking Moselle. I was a little drunk, typically brimful of self-pity, rhapsodizing about Doon’s beauty and how I longed for her. I paused. To my intense surprise Karl-Heinz took both my hands in his and stared fixedly at me. I looked into his dark eyes, hooded by his sharp circumflex brows. He squeezed my hands.