Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Andras sat on the bench with the stack of letters beside him. That afternoon, two weeks earlier-what had he been doing? Had he been at work? At school? He couldn’t remember. Had she cancelled her classes, gone to meet Novak? Was she with him this very instant? He had the sudden desire to choke someone to death. Anyone would do: that brocaded matron beside the fountain with her bichon frisé; that sad-looking girl beneath the limes; the policeman on the corner whose moustache seemed grotesquely like Novak’s. He got to his feet, stuffed the letters into his bag, and walked back toward the river. It was dark now, a damp spring night. He stepped in front of cars that blared their horns at him, shouldered past men and women on the sidewalks, trudged through groups of clochards on the bridges. He didn’t know what time it was, and didn’t care. He was exhausted. He hadn’t eaten anything and wasn’t hungry. It was too late for him to show up at Forestier’s now, but he didn’t want to go home, either; there was a chance Klara might come to talk to him, and he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her. He didn’t want to confront her about Novak; he was ashamed at having read the letters, at having allowed Elisabet to do this to him. He turned away and walked off down the rue des Écoles to the place de la Sorbonne, where he sat at the edge of a fountain and listened to a one-legged accordionist playing the bitterest love songs he had ever heard. When he couldn’t stand another measure he fled to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he fell into a fretful sleep on an elm-shadowed bench.

He awoke some time later in a humid blue dawn, his neck in a spasm from the way he’d slept. He remembered that some disaster had crushed him the night before; he could feel it rushing toward his consciousness again. And there it was: Zoltán Novak, the letters. He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and blinked at the morning. Before him on the grass two tiny rabbits browsed the clover. The first light of day came through the delicate endive leaves of their ears; they were so close he could hear the snip and grind of their teeth. The park was otherwise silent, and he was alone with what he knew about Klara and could not unknow.

He was right: She’d been at his apartment the night before. In fact she’d been looking for him all over town. He traced her movements through a series of increasingly anxious notes, which he received in reverse order. First the one she’d tacked to his drawing table at the studio: A, where can you be? I’ve looked everywhere. Come see me as soon as you get this. K.; next the one she’d left in the care of the good Monsieur Forestier, who was more worried than angry when Andras came to work looking like he’d spent the previous night on a bench: A, When you didn’t come home I came here to look for you. Going to check at school. K.; and finally, at the end of what felt like the longest day he’d ever lived, the note she’d left for him at home, on the table downstairs: A, I’ve gone to look for you at Forestier’s. Your K. He climbed the five flights to his attic and opened the door. In the dark, there was the clatter of a chair falling over, and Klara’s light tread on the floor, and then she was beside him. He lit a lamp and shrugged off his jacket.

“Andras,” she said. “My God, what happened to you? Where have you been?”

“I don’t want to talk,” he said. “I’m going to bed.” He couldn’t look at her. Every time he did, he saw Novak’s hands on her, his mouth on her mouth. Your taste. Nausea came at him in a towering wave, and he went to his knees beside the bed. When she put a hand on his shoulder he shrugged it away.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Look at me.”

He couldn’t. He stripped off his shirt and trousers and crawled into bed, his face to the wall. He heard her moving through the room behind him.

“You can’t do this,” she said. “We’ve got to talk.”

“Go away,” he said.

“This is crazy. You’re acting like a child.”

“Leave me alone, Klara.”

“Not until you talk to me.”

He sat up in bed, his eyes going hot. He wouldn’t cry in front of her. Without a word, he got up and took the letters from his bag and threw them on the table.

“What are those?” she said.

“You tell me.”

She picked up one of the letters. “Where did you get these?”

“Your daughter was kind enough to deliver them. It was her way of thanking me for telling you about Paul.”

“What?”

“She thought I might want to know who else you were fucking.”

“Oh, God!” she cried. “Unbelievable. She did this?”

“‘Your taste is still in my mouth. My hands are full of you. Your scent is everywhere in my house.’” He peeled the letter off the pile and threw it at her. “Or this one: ‘But for you, my life would be darkness.’ Or this: ‘Thoughts of last night have sustained me through this terrible day. When will you come to me again?’ And this one, from two weeks ago: ‘… The Hotel St. Lazare, where I’ll be waiting.’”

“Andras, please-”

“Go to hell, Klara, go to hell! Get out of my house! I can’t look at you.”

“It’s all in the past,” she said. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I never loved him.”

“You were with him for eleven years! You slept with him three nights a week. You left two other lovers for him. You let him buy you an apartment and a studio. And you never loved him? If that’s true, is it supposed to make me feel better?”

“I told you,” she said, her voice flattened with pain. “I told you you didn’t want to know everything about me.”

He couldn’t stand to hear another word. He was exhausted and hungry and depleted, his mind a scorched pot whose contents had burned away to nothing. He almost didn’t care whether there was anything between Klara and Novak still, whether their most recent break was decisive or just one of many temporary breaks. The idea that she’d been with that man, Zoltán Novak, with his odious moustache-that he’d put his hands on her body, on her birthmarks and scars, the terrain that had seemed to belong to Andras alone, but which of course belonged only to Klara, to do with as she wished-he couldn’t stand it. And then there were the others-the dancer, the playwright-and before them there had undoubtedly been others still. They seemed to become real to him all at once, the legions of her former lovers, those men who had preceded him in his knowledge of her. They seemed to crowd the room. He could see them in their ridiculous ballet costumes and their expensive overcoats and their decorated military jackets, with their good haircuts and bad haircuts and dusty or glossy shoes, their proud or defeated-looking shoulders, their grace, their awkwardness, their variously shaped spectacles, their collective smell of leather and shaving soap and Macassar oil and plain masculine desire. Klara Morgenstern: That was what they had in common. Despite what Madame Gérard had told him, he had thought himself unique in her life, without precedent, but the truth was that he was a foot soldier in an army of lovers, and once he’d fallen there would be others to replace him, and others after that. It was too much. He pulled the quilt over his shoulder and put an arm across his eyes. She said his name again in her low familiar voice. He remained silent, and she said it again. He wouldn’t make a sound. After a while he heard her get up and put on her coat, and then he heard the door open and close. On the other side of the wall a pair of new neighbors began to make noisy love. The woman called out in a breathy contralto; the man grunted in basso. Andras ground his face into pillow, wild with grief, thinking of nothing, wishing to God he were dead.