Lauren Fox - Send for Me

They met in his shoe store. He told people he was a shoe salesman, and it was true, but it was also true that he owned the store. She came in one morning, early, full of purpose, strode over to Erich, the timid young clerk who had been working there for only three weeks. “Show me a selection of your most beautiful shoes,” she said, tapping on the counter. “Money is no object.”

Erich hiccupped and hurried back to the stockroom for Walter, who could charm the most demanding ladies.

She sat down on a high red chair and pretended it was a throne, a trick that had been working for her since childhood. In the end, after trying on shoes for over an hour, after Walter worked up a sweat trying to please her (a harbinger of things to come; he thrilled to it, even then), Johanna chose a pair of black and purple brocade T-straps with interwoven stripes and a Cuban heel, pricey and stylish and impractical. Walter wrapped the shoes as Johanna removed bills from her beaded purse, one by one: her father’s money, pilfered from his bureau. He would not miss it.

She walked around the small store one more time, slowly, lightly touching a few of the shoes on display, glancing back at Walter, who was watching her with an expectant look on his face. Their hour together had been intimate. There was no other word for a man’s strong hand taking the shape of a woman’s foot. Her initial embarrassment took her by surprise; twenty minutes later, she had conquered it.

—

She had stormed out of her house that morning, incensed. Her father had called her frivolous, her mother had demanded that she start taking her life seriously. They had clear ideas about her future, the cache of well-brought-up men from which she would be allowed to choose—from which, they insisted, it was time for her to choose. She didn’t care for any of them, the arrogant Heinrichs and smug Horsts. She was capable of making her own decisions.

She met the shoe salesman’s eye: a tradesman, a business owner. Walter Goldmann. Goldmann! Ha! She appraised his face in her frank way. How better to prove to her family that she would not be bullied than by bringing home a man like this? She laughed out loud. Walter heard bells ringing.

He had been seeing a lovely young woman named Rosa Grünbaum. They were strolling calmly, chastely toward marriage. He broke it off hours after meeting Johanna. She was a comet. He was blinded by her light.

But she was not just these things, not only fire and spite. She was generous, and thoughtful, and determined. She craved her family’s approval and tiptoed right up to the limits of it, then leapt.

They were married in a civil ceremony. Walter had no family, and Johanna’s didn’t come. He didn’t understand until too late that he was a specific ingredient in her messy concoction. By the time it made sense to him, he was so deeply in love with Johanna that he would have done anything for her, anything to get her family’s consent. Nothing he offered made a difference to them, of course.

—

He stared at her as she slept. She breathed like a kitten, little mewls and purrs. Her fine, light hair was a tangle on her pillow. She pinned it up at night, but it invariably slipped out of its clips; she raised her hand to her head every morning and cursed the mess of it. He adjusted his body, moved as close to her as he could without waking her.

It was such a privilege to lie with someone, to hold a person’s changing form in the drift and sweetness of sleep.

The early morning light was intensifying. Johanna snored softly and stirred. Her eyes blinked open, and Walter watched as she became herself.

“Why are you looking at me?” Her morning voice was a croak. She laughed and put her palm over his face, pretended to push him away. He kissed the soft middle of her hand, wrapped his arms around his wife, and existed, just briefly, without thoughts in this rare and perfect moment.

—

Two years in, Johanna realized she couldn’t live without her family’s acceptance, her father’s approval. That was the end of them. They had not yet had children. It was, in that way only, a clean break.

They had been man and wife. He knew her secrets and her details: that she was bitterly jealous of her little sister, Christine, that she hated pickles, that she loved jazz. He had run his thumb gently over the mole on her right shoulder. He knew the burnt-caramel smell of her.

After she left him, he didn’t want to know anything else. In Germany, for those few years he still lived there, and then after, he avoided asking questions of people who might have had a connection to Johanna or any information about her life: whom she’d married (she had surely remarried), whether she had children, how she lived out those particular years. Even Oskar, his closest friend in Feldenheim, who had known them as a couple, he forbade from mentioning her. In his adopted American city of German immigrants, where everybody knew someone from home, he deliberately avoided asking. He did this so that, now and then, he would be able to think of her with some fondness.

Years later, admiring his dark-haired daughter, the light of his life, in the city he wouldn’t have been able to find on a map back when he lived in Germany, he understood that even pain could bring joy. It wasn’t a trade-off, and it didn’t give him comfort; it was just something true.

Please write and answer all of my questions, and don’t be lax about writing, because this is all that we have left of you.

They stop coming to the bakery after about six months. It occurs to Annelise as she is sweeping up a flour spill that she hasn’t seen the couple in a while, and a quick electrical current buzzes through her; she realizes that she misses Walter’s face, his gentle manners, and equally that she does not miss Johanna’s haughty efficiency. And then she can’t recall the last time she’s seen them. Has it been weeks? Has it been months?

A few days later, as if drawn by her thoughts, the bells above the door jingle, and Walter slouches in. She glances up and doesn’t recognize him at first—he looks so much thinner, older. There are dark smudges under his brown eyes.

“How may I help you?” Annelise asks, and then, “Oh! Hello!” and then, with a tiny, unintentional grimace, “And where is your lovely wife today?”

There is no one else in the bakery. It’s almost closing time. The dusk still makes Annelise melancholy. Although she is well over Max, has finished mourning him for good, in fact barely even thinks about him, the truth is that it’s been three years and there has been no one since him, and so, for her, the lasting imprint of love is sadness.

Walter looks down, pretends to examine the sparse contents of the bakery case. It’s an unseasonably warm day in early May, and he takes a white handkerchief from his pocket and wipes a little trickle of perspiration from his forehead. “Ah…Johanna is gone,” he says after a pause, and with such sorrow that Annelise, without thinking, reaches across the counter and touches his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmurs. “She was so young. How…how did she…?”

Walter laughs. Annelise pulls away and plants her hands furiously on her hips, does her best to cool her boiling humiliation. Who is this man, laughing at his wife’s demise? Her sympathies shift, suddenly and completely, to poor, dead Johanna, brought irrevocably low by marriage to this monster.

“No, no, my wife is not dead,” he says, color rising in his cheeks now. “We’re…Johanna and I are, we’re divorced.” He lifts one shoulder, a little punctuation mark.

Annelise holds his gaze. There is, of course, a certain appeal to a broken man. “Well, I’m still sorry,” she says, “although I suppose not as sorry as I was when I thought she was dead.”