Джоан Силбер - Improvement

“For justice,” Monika said. “And it looks bad for a museum to keep stolen goods.”

“Doesn’t look that bad to me,” Lynnette said.

As a student Monika had certainly thought that most European museums were full of ancient art looted by colonial powers from countries down on their luck in later centuries. Didn’t look bad to most people. But the objects she was researching now had been confiscated from Jewish collectors, Jewish families, Jewish art dealers; they had been offered in desperation, abandoned in flight, or stripped from homes of the transported; they had blood on them.

“If someone stole that nice leather jacket of yours,” Monika said, “wouldn’t you want it sent back?”

“I pity the fool,” Lynnette said, “tries to steal my jacket.”

Monika repeated this to her husband that night. He loved dialogue like that, and he had been acting a little bored by her conversation lately. She didn’t imitate Lynnette too closely—Monika had been in New York since college and was noticeably German only on words with th in them, but she would’ve sounded like a racist comic if she’d tried for Lynnette’s rhythms.

Her husband could imitate anyone. He was a visual artist, not an actor, but he had a goofy satiric accuracy. When they were first together, his style of joking put her into fits of helpless laughter. She hadn’t been raised in a stuffy way but still America had seemed much more lighthearted than the Berlin of her youth. She wrote to her mother, “Everyone is younger here.”

Now Julian, her husband, said, “Someone should steal her jacket to teach her a lesson.”

“What a mean thing to say. Why do you say that?”

“I just get tired of people thinking they’re above every kind of trouble. You can get like that, you know, with your job.”

He’d been doing this lately, getting hostile from nowhere. His gallery had dropped him seven months ago, which was naturally upsetting, but he’d had plenty of ups and downs before. And none of it was Monika’s fault. Au contraire , she was his helpmate; he had a teaching job at adjunct’s pay, and her salary was carrying them.

It occurred to her that he was probably not having an affair if he was being so openly irritable. She thought that men who were being sneaky were more likely to be blandly agreeable at home, even cheerful. But, then, he acted like someone looking for evidence against her, so he might be getting ready, tallying excuses.

These were just theories, but something not good was happening. In earlier days they had split up and gotten back together a few times, so she did know him. Some of the breakups had been fast and brief but the last one had come very close to severing them for good. He was still outraged at her for certain things.

Lately that outrage was mixed in with his rancor and grief at losing the gallery. Sometimes she thought very highly of him—his talent, his work habits, his stubbornness about not yielding to art-world trends—but now was not a time when she admired him.

And her job hadn’t turned her into a spoiled princess—what was he talking about? She’d grown up scrappy-poor with a nutty single mother; she took nothing for granted. Or almost nothing. He knew that.

“Don’t be mean,” she said to him. Lynnette would’ve come out with something snappier.

But he surprised her. “I don’t want to be,” he said. “I don’t.” He said it so nicely too.

The next time she saw Lynnette, three weeks later, things were much better with Julian. She heard herself bragging. “You know what he did? He built a desk for me in the corner of our bedroom. A built-in desk.” He was actually a decent carpenter but it was rare for him to bother with a practical project.

“I had a boyfriend used to build things,” Lynnette said. She meant the one before the last one—she liked to mention him. “Isaiah built me a shelf. I still have it in the kitchen; it’s very solid.”

Monika thought any idiot could build a shelf but she certainly wasn’t saying that. Even Lynnette had a heart, and Isaiah seemed to be the one who had broken it.

“And for Claude’s birthday one year he made a special cake stand, tall as me.”

Claude, her brother, was the only other person Lynnette spoke of with unbarbed love. He had told Lynnette that once he was making money (which he wasn’t yet), he’d set her up in her own brow bar. “I won’t need billions or anything,” Lynnette said. “Just the security deposit and a few month’s rent. It could happen.”

“I’ll follow you,” Monika said. “Of course.”

The salon where Lynnette now labored over people like Monika was a big place in the East Fifties where you could get hair removed from any part of you, in very private rooms, or makeup artfully applied for special occasions. It smelled of perfume and chemicals and melted wax and had clinical white tables and glass bowls with petals floating in them. What would Lynnette’s be like?

“Better music,” Lynnette said. Here they played soft rock very softly. “And I’d make it green, like a shade of chartreuse but not bright. The color green is relaxing.”

Monika had different ideas about color but she was impressed that Lynnette had thought this through; you’d never guess she was someone with a dream. At her age, what had Monika wanted? Only Julian. Sex, sex, sex, love, love, love. She’d lingered in the U.S. because of him. Everyone thought the reunified Berlin was so hip, and parts of it were—what was left of the ruins in the East with their squatters and clubs and graffiti. But would Julian ever have moved there? Not a chance. Berlin sort of gave him the creeps. He believed in New York.

“He has strong ideas,” her mother said, when she met him on her first visit. “So make him think you’re listening but don’t listen.”

Her mother was often full of cagey advice, though her own sorry love life wasn’t much of a credential. Monika thought of her as someone who was ineffectively bossy, laying down the law to a series of men who simply shrugged off her demands. Most of them had been fairly nice to Monika when she was little, and even her father (no one was sure if he was her father) brought her presents when he showed up every few years. Bruno (she certainly never called him Papa or Vati ) was an old boyfriend who’d reunited with her mother for a very brief fling, some thirty-one years ago. Alcohol had aged him ever since, gouging out his face and making slits of his eyes, but he wasn’t a bad guy. “Steffi, Steffi,” he liked to say to her mother, “at least we’re still alive.” A little maudlin, but he could carry it.

The other thing her mother had said about Julian right away was, “He likes himself.”

“That can be a good thing,” Monika said. “Not like us. Not like Germans.”

Whole libraries had been written on the ways Germans carried the shame of their history. It could be complicated to find out which grandparents had done what in the Nazi years, but didn’t every family have a perpetrator in it somewhere? A cousin. A lost enthusiast. An alternate self.

Americans felt surprisingly free to quiz Monika about exactly that, and indeed there was a great-uncle she’d heard the worst about. Julian had asked right away (he had his reasons), but then he didn’t like hearing it always brought up by other people. He’d go silent then. As if the past was best left unsaid.

Not that he was quiet by nature. He’d been trained, in his schooling, to fearlessly defend his art (installations that needed huge amounts of space) and had done well with women too by not bothering to hesitate. In the beginning she’d liked all that blurting confidence.

In his current season of blighted hope he didn’t talk so much. His tendency to forge ahead, to commandeer, took the form of doing things to their apartment, a nest of rambling rooms in Brooklyn (on a mixed block in Bushwick), which was much enhanced by his improvised solutions, his handy-dandy storage and stacks of wooden boxes. He was also doing a lot of sketching, getting some new ideas that seemed to please him vastly; she wasn’t a huge fan of his art, actually, though she said she was. And maybe she would get to be someday. He was the great love of her life, for all his crap. She did think that.