Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

I stayed outside a moment longer, arms crossed, bouncing slightly. I had the morning all to myself, it seemed. It would be hours before the city woke up. When I went back inside I put my headphones on and listened to some music Walter had recommended — Saint-Saëns. I lay in bed looking out the window, thinking of the day that was to come.

Walter had last night off work. He has worked every other night this week until five a.m. He is forty-two now, and he’s been waiting tables since he was nineteen. His new restaurant has two Hauben — a Haube is a kind of Austrian Michelin star — so he makes a lot in tips. Yesterday he slept until two, and we hung around the house until late afternoon; it was already dark when we arrived in the First District. I bought tickets for a concert at the Musikverein. Then, at his restaurant, we bought some nice wine for a dinner party his friend Wolfgang was throwing later that night. A few of his colleagues were drinking espressos and smoking cigarettes at the bar. The girls were wearing tight white button-down shirts and black trousers, and they had that air of high indifference one associates with waitstaff at a fancy restaurant. I wanted to introduce myself, but I was suddenly very ashamed at the state of my German, and hung back.

We had a few drinks in Loos Bar — a little place designed by Adolf Loos in 1908. It seats about ten people, and another ten can stand at the bar. When I was here in 2002, I drank there almost every night. Sometimes we would go for a midday pick-me-up, then back in for the evening, or start the evening there and pop back in at three or four for a nightcap. Last night, Walter drank two vodka gimlets and was tipsy. He’d had nothing to eat since waking up. I always know when he starts to get drunk, because he speaks English, or German with an American accent. He told me that to celebrate New Year’s Eve he gave a patron a blow job in the bathroom of his restaurant. He simply walked into the bathroom, saw a man having a piss in a stall, with the door open, and joined him. An hour later, the man left with his wife.

Walter has not had a homosexual boyfriend since 1992, when he lived for a few months in Texas. This sounds a little strange, but in Vienna there seem to be many straight men who experiment with other men — particularly macho Turkish men, says Walter. I believe he nurtures disenchantment in the same way that he takes care of the plants in his apartment, or the back garden in summer: he dusts them, mists them with a bottle, speaks to them, and maintains them in perfect condition.

He has started to dress conservatively in middle age — unripped jeans and ironed, long-sleeve button-down shirts. So when we are both dressed to go out, we look somewhat similar, except that he is a little shorter, and made of nothing but skin and bones: at five foot eleven, he weighs only sixty kilograms. He tends to skip breakfast — he is usually asleep — smokes cigarettes for lunch, works without food, and picks at ham and cheese when he gets home.

Walter is the only great-grandson of Octavian Augustus Fuchs — Herbert and Erika’s father — who does not look uncannily like Octavian: he looks like his mother, Heidi, and he is the only male descendant of Octavian who still has his hair. Of Octavian I know very little, only that he was a disciplinarian who, in his twenties, was a member of an exclusive club where the initiation rite was to be cut open with a sabre from the ear to the lip; then one stitched oneself up, so the scar would be coarse and jagged.

But even with the head of hair, Walter looks older than he is. This is the effect of twenty-five years of heavy drinking and cigarettes, and twenty years of drugs — daily use. I have seen pictures of him as a teenager, when he was angelic, but even then his eyes say he is going to live without happiness. No matter how many faces there are in a photograph, his eyes are the ones that attract your attention.

I had a coffee at a café near the entrance of the Hofburg. I sent Clare a text saying I was bored, which was unfair, considering I had left her on her own and gone in search of adventure, but she wrote back to say that I should find some pretty American students to play with. I liked the idea, except I caught a glimpse of myself in a window: alone, and with nothing to do again, I looked a bit sinister.

I left the café and booked a room for myself and Clare — she is coming for a few days shortly — and then had a drink in Santo Spirito, my favourite bar in the city. Santo Spirito is an old, out-of-the-way wine bar on the Kumpfgasse, not far from St Stephen’s Cathedral, that plays nothing but loud classical music. If you request Wagner, you are thrown out — this is what Walter told me, and the bartender confirmed it. It was empty because it had just opened for the evening, and I had a few glasses of wine while trying to improve my German with Wittgenstein. I considered the sad fact that Wittgenstein, a philosopher I struggle to understand in English, was my only companion in the city. I was too ashamed to send anyone a text telling them I had come all this way to feel sorry for myself, so I packed up, hopped into a nearby restaurant for a cheap schnitzel, and was home before nine. I opened a bottle of wine and made some spaghetti Bolognese for Walter, in the hope that pasta might fatten him up a little, and listened to some more of Walter’s music — Bruckner.

Today is Sunday, and Walter is drinking with colleagues at their Christmas party, which will go on all night. It snowed in sunshine all day, which was beautiful, since I had never seen anything like it, but I didn’t leave the apartment. Dieter and Heidi are away today, so for a few hours I played music so loud it could be heard up and down the street — I had cracked two windows to let in fresh air — and sat very still on the couch. I turned the music off briefly to watch ski jumping on television from Innsbruck. Now it is night.

After a very forgettable guided tour of the city — I wanted something different to do, and a refresher course on Viennese trivia — I decided to buy a book in German that was not Wittgenstein. I went into a bookshop near the Stephansdom and told a girl who worked there I was looking for a great book by any Austrian author, and she recommended Peter Handke. This is like giving an Austrian man, with bad English, a copy of Ulysses . So now I have a book I can barely make sense of, and I am reading it in Viennese cafés, having no idea whether I like it or not, since I have only bursts of understanding. I suppose I could read newspapers, or children’s books, if improving the language were really that important to me. But I don’t want to read newspapers, and I am too impatient for simple books. There was a time I could have made enough sense of Handke to translate him. I flip the pages anyway, so that I look like I’m making progress.

I had plans to take another tour, but by the time I got to town I had lost the desire. I only wanted to travel around in streetcars and walk the streets, and maybe get my head shaved — Walter says it is a good idea, and sympathetically adds that it would not look much different.

Café Diglas: a seat in a booth at the back. The Viennese are eating cakes. I have the best view in the place, staring down the long row of packed tables. White tabletops without tablecloths, luxurious red chairs, large and delicate chandeliers. There are two Viennese women in the booth next to me. They are speaking too fast for me to make sense of anything, so I observe their mouths, their tongues. I would like to lean over their table and be licked by them. I want to spend the afternoon rolling around in their breasts. I think about the shape of Clare now, six months pregnant, and I have a raging desire to pull my dick out and politely ask the women to feast on it. Cakes arrive, and they accept them routinely, without breaking the conversation, merely moving their arms out of the way so that the waiter may place the cakes gently on the table. And the women begin to eat between sentences. I request the bill and begin to pack up. The café has assumed a rapidity all of a sudden, and everyone seems to be departing. It is inexplicable, but I decide to be part of it.