Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“That’s nonsense,” Andras said. “The last Hungarian women’s swimming champion was thirty-three when she won her gold medal in Munich. My mother was thirty-five when Mátyás was born.”

“I feel as if I’ve lived such a long time already,” she said. “Those days when I wouldn’t have worn sandals for a million pengő-” She paused and smiled, but her eyes were sad and faraway. “So many years ago! Seventeen years!”

This wasn’t about him, he understood. It was about her own life, about how everything had changed when she’d become pregnant with her daughter. That was what had caused the veil to fall. When the waiter came she ordered absinthe for both of them, a drink she chose only when she was sad and wanted to be lifted away from the world.

But absinthe didn’t have the same effect on him; it tended to play dirty tricks on his mind. He told himself it might be different here at Nice, at this dreamlike hotel bar overlooking the beach, but it wasn’t long before the wormwood began to do its poisonous work. A gate swung open and paranoia elbowed through. If Klara was melancholy now, it wasn’t because she’d lost her life in ballet; it was because she’d lost Elisabet’s father. Her one great love. The single monumental secret she’d never told him. Her feelings for Andras were chaff by comparison. Even her eleven-year relationship with Novak hadn’t been able to break the spell. Madame Gérard knew it; Elisabet herself knew it; even Tibor had guessed it in the space of an hour, while Andras had failed to recognize it for months and months. How absurd of him to have spent the summer worrying about Novak when the real threat was this phantom, the only man who would ever have Klara’s heart. The fact that she could sit here in a sea-green dress and those sandals, calmly drinking absinthe, pretending she might someday be Andras’s wife, and then allow herself to be pulled back to wherever she’d been pulled-by him, no doubt, that nameless faceless man she’d loved-made him want to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she cried.

“God, Andras,” she said finally. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“What way?”

“You look as if you want to kill me.”

Her limpid gray eyes. The glitter of the starfish in her hair. Her child-sized hands on the table. He was more afraid of her, of what she could do to him, than anyone he’d known in his life. He pushed back his chair and went to the bar, where he bought a pack of Gauloises, and then walked down to the beach. There was some comfort in picking up shells at the water’s edge and skipping them into the surf. He sat down on the wooden slats of a deck chair and smoked three cigarettes, one after the other. He thought he might like to sleep on the beach that night, with the waves pounding the shore in the dark and the sound of the hotel band drifting down from the plein air ballroom. But soon his head began to clear and he realized he’d left Klara sitting alone at their table. The absinthe gate was closing. His paranoia retreated. He looked back over his shoulder, and there was the sea-green brushmark of Klara’s dress disappearing into the saffron light of the hotel.

He raced up the beach to catch her, but by the time he got there she was nowhere to be seen. In the lobby, the desk clerk denied having seen a woman in green walk past; the doormen had seen her leave, but one of them thought she’d headed away from town and another thought she’d headed toward it. The car was still parked where they’d left it, at the outside corner of a dusty lot. It was quite dark now. He thought she wouldn’t walk toward town, not in her current mood. He got into the car and drove at a crawl along the beach road. He hadn’t gotten far before his headlights illuminated a sea-green flash against the roadside. She was walking swiftly, her sandals raising clouds of dust. She’d wrapped her arms around herself; he could see the familiar sweet column of her vertebrae rising out of the deep-cut back of her dress. He brought the car to a stop and jumped out to catch up with her. She gave him a swift glance over her shoulder and kept walking.

“Klara,” he said. “Klárika.”

She stopped finally, her arms limp at her sides. From around a curve in the road came a sweep of headlights; they splashed across her body as a roadster tore past and shot off toward the center of town, its passengers shouting a song into the night. When it had gone, there was nothing but the thrum and pound of waves. For a long time neither of them spoke. She wouldn’t turn to face him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I left you sitting there.”

“Let’s just go home,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about this on the side of the road.”

“Don’t be angry.”

“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought up the past. It makes me miserable to think of it, and that must have been what made you get up and go down to the beach.”

“It was the absinthe,” he said. “It makes me crazy.”

“It wasn’t the absinthe,” she said.

“Klara, please.”

“I’m cold,” she said, and put her arms around herself. “I want to get back to the house.”

He drove them, feeling no satisfaction in his mastery of the road; when they got out of the car there was no celebration of his skill. Klara went into the yard and sat down in one of the wooden chairs they’d dragged outside. He sat down beside her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did a foolish thing, a selfish thing, leaving you there at the table.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. She’d retreated to some distant place of her own, too small to admit him. “It’s been little more than torture for you, hasn’t it?” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“All of it. Our connection. My half-truths. Everything I haven’t told you.”

“Don’t speak in those maddening generalizations,” he said. “What half-truths? Do you mean what happened with Novak? I thought we’d moved past that, Klara. What else do you want to tell me?”

She shook her head. Then she put her hand to her eyes and her shoulders began to shake.

“What’s happened to you?” he said. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t make this happen by walking down to the beach for a smoke.”

“No,” she said, looking up, her eyes lit with tears. “It’s just that I understood something while you were down there.”

“What is it?” he said. “If it has a name, tell me.”

“I ruin things,” she said. “I’m a ruiner. I take what’s good and make it bad. I take what’s bad and make it worse. I did it to my daughter and to Zoltán, and now I’ve done it to you. I saw how unhappy you looked before you left the table.”

“Ah, I see. It’s all your fault. You forced Elisabet to have the problems she’s had. You forced Novak to deceive his wife. You forced me to fall in love with you. The three of us had no part in it at all.”

“You don’t know the half of what I’ve done.”

“Then tell me! What is it? Tell me.”

She shook her head.

“And if you don’t?” he said. He got to his feet and took her by the arm, pulled her up beside him. “How are we supposed to go on? Will you keep me in ignorance? Will I learn the truth someday from your daughter?”

“No,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “Elisabet doesn’t know.”

“If we’re to be together, I have to know everything. You’ve got to decide, Klara. If you want this to continue, you’ll have to be honest with me.”

“You’re hurting my arm,” she said.

“Who was he? Just tell me his name.”

“Who?”

“That man you loved. Elisabet’s father.”

She yanked her arm away. In the moonlight he could see the fabric of her dress straining against her ribs and going smooth again. Her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t ever grab me like that,” she said, and began to sob. “I want to go home. Please, Andras. I’m sorry. I want to go home to Paris.” She put her arms around herself, shivering as though she’d caught a fever in the cool Mediterranean night. Her starfish pin glittered like a beautiful mistake, a festive scrap torn from an ocean-liner ball, blown across the sea and caught by chance in the dark waves of her hair.