It is also the only city I know that gives up its best parts grudgingly, unhappily. Paris slaps you in the face with oceanic boulevards, golden croissants, and charm on every square inch of its surface. New York sneers — completely assured and indifferent. It knows that no matter how much dirt or crime or fear there is, it is still the center of everything. It can do what it wants because it knows you will always need it.
Most visitors like Vienna at first sight (including myself!) because of the Opera or the Ringstrasse or the Brueghels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but these things are only grand camouflage. The first summer I was there, I discovered that beneath the lovely gloss is a sad, suspicious city that reached its peak a hundred, two hundred years ago. It is now regarded by the world as a delightful oddity — a Miss Havisham in her wedding dress — and the Viennese know it.
Everything went right for me. I met a nice girl from the Tirol, and we had a fling that left us tired but unscarred. She was a tour guide for one of the companies in town and consequently knew every nook and cranny in the place: the Jugendstil swimming pool at the top of the Wienerwald, a cozy restaurant where they served the original Czech Budweiser beer, a walk through the First District that made you feel as if you were back in the fifteenth century. We had a rainy weekend in Venice and a sunny one in Salzburg. She took me to the airport at the end of August, and we promised to write. A few months later she did, telling me she was marrying a nice computer salesman from Charlottesville, Virginia, and if I was ever down their way. .
My father picked me up at the airport and, as soon as we were in the car, told me Mother had leukemia. What came to mind was a picture of the last time I had seen her: a white hospital room — white curtains, bedspread, chairs. In the middle of the bed hovering over that eternity of white was her small red head. Her hair had been chopped short, and she no longer made the quick, sharp movements of a hummingbird. Because they kept her sedated most of the time, it often took minutes before she fully recognized anyone.
«Mama? It's Joe. I'm here, Mama. Joe.»
«Joe? Joe. Joe! Joe and Ross! Where are my two boys?» She wasn't disappointed when we told her Ross wasn't there. She accepted it as she accepted each spoonful of colorless soup or creamed spinach from her plate.
I went directly to the hospital. The only obvious change was a pronounced thinness about her face. Taken together, her features and the wrong color of her skin reminded me of a very thin, very old letter written on gray paper in violet ink. She asked me where I had been; when I said Europe, she gazed for a time at the wall as if she was trying to figure out what Europe was. She was dead by Christmas.
After her funeral my father and I took a week off and flew down to the heat, colors, and freshness of the Virgin Islands. We sat on the beach, swam, and took long, panting walks up into the hills. Each night the beauty of the sunset made us feel sad, empty, and heroic. We agreed on that. We drank dark rum and talked until two or three in the morning. I told him I wanted to go back and live in Europe after I had graduated. Two more of my short stories had been published, and I wondered excitedly if I might have the makings of a real writer. I realize now he would have liked me to stay with him for a while, but he said he thought Europe was a good idea.
My last semester in college was full of a girl named Olivia Lofting. It was the first time I'd ever really fallen hard for someone, and there was a period when I needed Olivia as I needed air. She liked me because I had money and a certain prestige on campus, but she kept reminding me her heart belonged to a guy who had graduated the year before and was serving a hitch in the Army. I did what I could to lure her away, but she remained true to him despite the fact we'd been sleeping together since our third date.
May came, and so did Olivia's boyfriend, home on leave. I saw the two of them one afternoon at the Student Center. They were so obviously mad for each other and so obviously tired from making love that I went right to the bathroom and sat on a toilet for an hour with my face in my hands.
She called after he left, but I didn't have the strength to see her again. Oddly enough, my refusal sparked her interest, and for the few weeks left of the year, we had one endless conversation after another over the phone. The last time we talked she demanded we get together. I asked if she was a sadist, and with a delighted laugh she said she probably was. I had barely enough willpower to say no, but did I ever hate myself after I hung up and realized how unnecessarily empty my bed would be that night.
Although Vienna was always in the back of my mind, I flew to London and spent the summer trying on different cities — Munich, Copenhagen, Milan — before I realized there really was only one place for me.
Ironically, I arrived just as the German version of The Voice of Our Shadow was premiering at the Theatre an der Josefstдdt. Out of what I'm sure he thought was kindness, Phil Westberg told the Austrians I was there, and for a month or two I was the belle of the ball. Again, all I did was backpedal about my involvement in the original production, only this time auf deutsch.
Luckily the Viennese critics didn't like the play; after a month's run it packed its bag and went back to America. That ended my notoriety as well, and from then on I was blissfully anonymous. The one good thing that came from Shadow rearing its confusing head in Wien was that I met a lot of important people who, again assuming I'd been the moving force behind the play, began to give me writing assignments as soon as they heard I wanted to settle down there. The pay for these assignments was usually terrible, but I was making new contacts all the time. When the International Herald Tribune did a supplement on Austria, a friend snuck me in the back door, and they published a little article I'd done on the Bregenz Summer Festival.
About the time I started making money from my articles, my father remarried and I returned to America for the wedding. It was my first time back in two years, and I was bowled over by the speed and intensity of the States. So much stimulus! So many things to see and buy and do! I loved it for two weeks, but then hurried back to my Vienna, where things were just the way I liked them — quiet and settled and cozily dull.
I was twenty-four, and in some distant, mute part of my brain I had the notion it was time to try writing my world-beater, gargantuan novel. When I returned from America I started. . and started again and started again. . until I had worn out all my thin beginnings. That was all right, but too quickly I realized I had no middles or ends to work on instead. At that point I bowed out of the race for the Great American Novel.
I am convinced every writer would like to be either a poet or a novelist, but in my case the realization that I would never be another Hart Crane or Tolstoy wasn't too painful. It might have been a couple of years earlier, but I was being regularly published now, and there were even a few people around who knew who I was. Not many, but some.
After living a couple of years in Vienna, what I missed most was having a good close friend. For a while I thought I'd found one in a sleek, classy French woman who worked as a translator for the United Nations. We hit it off from the first and for a few weeks were inseparable. Then we went to bed, and the familiarity that had come so easily was pushed aside by the purple mysteries of sex. We were lovers for a time, but it was easy to see we were better as friends than as lovers. Unfortunately too, because there was no way back once we had turned the lights down low. She transferred to Geneva, and I went back to being prolific. . and lonely.