Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

At the doorstep her eyes darkened again. She leaned against the door and sighed, looking down at the roses. “Funny,” she said. “We’ve done the winter show every December for years, but I always feel this way afterward. Like there’s nothing to look forward to. Like everything’s finished.” She smiled. “Dramatic, isn’t it?”

He let out a long breath. “I’m sorry if-last night,” he began.

She stopped him with a shake of her head and told him there was nothing to apologize for.

“I shouldn’t have asked about your family,” he said. “If you’d wanted to talk about it, you would have.”

“Probably not,” she said. “It’s become such a habit with me, keeping everything secret.” She shook her head again, and he experienced the return of a memory from his early childhood-a night he’d spent hiding in the orchard while his brother Mátyás lay in bed, gravely ill with fever. A doctor had been called in, plasters applied, medicines dispensed, all to no effect; the fever rose and rose, and everyone seemed to believe Mátyás would die. Meanwhile, Andras hid in the branches of an apple tree with his terrible secret: He himself had passed the fever along, playing with Mátyás after their mother told him he must keep away at all costs. If Mátyás died, it would be his fault. He had never been so lonely in his life. Now he touched Klara’s shoulder and felt her shiver.

“You’re cold,” he said.

She shook her head. Then she took her key from her little purse and turned to unlock the door. But her hand began to tremble, and she turned back toward him and raised her face to him. He bent to her and brushed the corner of her mouth with his lips.

“Come in,” she said. “Just for a moment.”

His pulse thundering at his temples, Andras stepped in after her. He put a hand at her waist and drew her toward him. She looked up at him, her eyes wet, and then he lifted her against him and kissed her. He closed the door with one hand. Held her. Kissed her again. Took off his thin jacket, unbuttoned the glossy black buttons of her coat, pushed it from her shoulders. He stood in the entryway with her and kissed her and kissed her-first her mouth, then her neck at the margins of her dress, then the hollow between her breasts. He untied the black silk ribbon at her waist. The dress fell around her feet in a dark pool, and there she was before him in a rose-colored slip and stockings, the red-gold dahlia in her hair. He buried his hands in her dark curls and drew her to him. She kissed him again and slid her hands under his shirt. He heard himself saying her name; again he touched the bead-row of her spine, the curve of her hips. She lifted herself against him. It couldn’t be true; it was true.

They went upstairs to her bedroom. He would remember it as long as he lived: the way they moved awkwardly through the doorway, his persistent certainty that she would change her mind, his disbelief as she lifted the rose-colored slip over her head. The quick work she made of his embarrassing sock braces, his poorly darned socks, his underclothes worn to transparency. The shallow curves of her dancer’s body, the neat tuck of her navel, the shadow between her legs. The cool embrace of her bed, her own bed. The softness of her skin. Her breasts. His certainty that it would all be over in an embarrassing flash the instant she touched him with her hand; his wild concentration on anything else as she did it. The word baiser in his mind. The unbearable thrill of being able to touch her. The shock of the heat inside her. It could have all ended then-the city of Paris, the world, the universe-and he wouldn’t have cared, would have died happy, could have found no heaven broader or more drenched with light.

Afterward they lay on the bed and he stared at the ceiling, at its pattern of pressed flowers and leaves. She turned onto her side and put a hand on his chest. A velvety drowsiness pinned him to the bed, his head on her pillow. Her scent was in his hair, on his hands, everywhere.

“Klara,” he said. “Am I dead? Are you still here?”

“I’m still here,” she said. “You’re not dead.”

“What are we supposed to do now?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just lie here for a little while.”

“All right,” he said, and lay there.

After a few minutes she removed her hand from his chest and rolled away from him, then got out of bed and went off down the hall. A moment later he heard the thunder of running water and the low roar and hiss of a gas heater. When she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, she was wearing a dressing gown.

“Come have a bath,” she said.

She didn’t have to coax him. He followed her into the white-tiled bathroom, where water steamed into the porcelain tub. She let the dressing gown drop and climbed into the water as he stood watching, speechless. He could have stood there all night while she bathed. Her image burned itself into his retinas: the small, high breasts; the twin wings of her hips; the smooth plane of her belly. And now, in the electric light of the bathroom, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before: a crescent-shaped scar with faint stitch-marks, just above the neat dark triangle of her hair. He stepped forward to touch her. He ran his hand along her belly, down to the scar, and brushed it with his fingers.

“She was a difficult birth,” Klara said. “In the end, a cesarean. She was too much for me, even then.”

Andras had an unbidden vision of Klara as a fifteen-year-old, straining upward on a metal table. The image hit him like a train. His knees seemed to liquefy, and he had to brace himself against the wall.

“Come in with me,” she said, and gave him her hand. He climbed into the bathtub and sank down into the water. She took the cloth and washed him from head to toe; she poured shampoo into her hands and massaged it into his scalp. Then they made love again, slowly, in the bathtub, and she showed him how to touch her, and he concluded that his life was over, that he would never want to do anything else in this lifetime. Then he washed her as she had washed him, every inch of her, and then they staggered to bed.

Nothing in his life had prepared him to imagine that a series of days might be spent the way they spent the next ten days. Later, in the darkest moments of the years that followed, he would come back again and again to those days, reminding himself that if he died, and if death led him into formless silence instead of into some other brighter life, he would still have experienced those days with Klara Morgenstern.

The Brecht play had gone dark for the holidays; Elisabet would be in Chamonix until the second of January. The studio was closed; school was out until after the new year; Andras’s friends had gone home for the duration. Mrs. Apfel had gone to her daughter-in-law’s cottage in Aixen-Provence. Even the signs advertising meetings of anti-Jewish organizations had ceased to appear. At all hours of the day, the streets were filled with people out shopping or on their way to parties. Klara had been invited to half a dozen parties herself, but she cancelled all her engagements. Andras went to his cold attic for some articles of clothing and his sketchbooks, locked the door behind him, and decamped to the rue de Sévigné.

They went on an expedition for provisions: potatoes for potato pancakes, cold roast chicken, bread, cheese, wine, a cake packed with currants. At a music shop on rue Montmartre they bought records for five francs apiece, comic operettas and American jazz and ballets. With their arms full and their pockets empty, they returned to Klara’s apartment and set up house. Chanukah began that night. They made potato pancakes, filling the kitchen with the rich smell of hot oil, and they lit candles. They made love in the kitchen and in the bedroom and once, awkwardly, on the stairs. The next day they went skating at the other skating pond, the one at the Bois de Boulogne, where they were unlikely to see anyone they knew. The skaters at the park wore bright colors against the gray of the afternoon; there was a marked-off patch at the center of the ice where the more adroit among them executed spins. Andras and Klara skated until their lips were blue with cold. Every night they bathed together; every morning they woke and made love. Andras received an astonishing education in the ways a human being could experience pleasure. At night, when he woke and thought of Klara, it amazed him that he could turn over and curl himself around her. He surprised her with his knowledge of cookery, gained from watching his mother. He could make palacsinta, thin egg pancakes, with chocolate or jam or apple filling; he could make paprikás burgonya and spaetzle, and red cabbage with caraway seeds. They slept long and gloriously in the afternoons. They made love in the middle of the day on Klara’s white bed while freezing rain fell outside. They made love late at night in the dance studio, on rugs they’d dragged down from upstairs. One time, on the way home from a café, they made love against the wall in an alleyway.