Джоан Силбер - Improvement

In the winter of a year and a half ago she had left him. He had brought it on himself (in her view) by weeks of disdain and sullen fights about money, and she had run off with a gallery owner who was too old and not remotely serious about her. He’d taken her to Saint Barts for a week; she’d never been to the Caribbean and the tropics in winter had truly dazzled her, but by the end she only wanted Julian. She had to work very hard to get him back—remorse, anguish, promises, all of it authentic—and this had taken till the spring. A terrible time. But once the pact was made, the reunion was joyous on both sides and sexy.

The gallery owner, whose name was Richard, had not taken this well. She had left too soon for his liking, and whenever they ran into each other he was barely civil to her and transparently rude to Julian. During that Caribbean week, she had voiced certain opinions to him about Julian that she now regretted. Julian, in his way, was forever convinced that grants had failed to go to him, invitations to group shows, sales to collectors, because Richard had put some sort of kibosh on him. And he might have been just a little bit right.

She would have done anything to remove Richard as an obstacle. She would have connived or bribed or slept with him again but she didn’t think that was how it worked at this point.

She asked Lynnette, “When you’ve done something stupid, do you try to make up for it eventually? Like if you mess something up?”

Lynnette said, “If you think I ever mess up people’s eyebrows, I do not. You wouldn’t suggest that, right?”

“No! Of course not. I’m thinking more about a friend I offended.”

“My brother went and bought me a new pair of sunglasses when he stepped on mine. That was good, wasn’t it?”

“Extremely.”

“He was afraid I’d kill him,” Lynnette said.

Julian, who was clearly trying to draw himself out of depression by being industrious around the house, had begun building an elaborate cupboard, and Monika respected this. He was suffering the indignities of rejection and he was trying not to just suffer. They had good evenings together now; they sat on the couch drinking beer and he explained at length the new installation he was designing, for a school if a school ever asked him, something with birches and barbed wire that didn’t sound so bad.

At seven in the morning, while she was stepping out of the shower and Julian was still asleep, her phone rang. What kind of jerk called at that hour? A man’s voice, speaking German—it was Bruno, of all people. He was fine, thank you, but her mother was not so good. She was in the hospital, a heart attack. “It wouldn’t be such a bad idea to come home,” he said. Monica wanted to speak to her—why was she talking to Bruno, that pickled blur of a person, and not her mother? Her mother was sleeping, he said, and still a bit weak for talking. “I think come now and not later,” he said.

“She’s not that old ,” Monika wailed to Julian.

Julian was hugging her, patting her back. “We’ll go right away,” he said.

He’d only been to Germany with her once, and he’d hated it, all the conversations that had to stop and change to English, all the art he thought was too cerebral or too stylized or too something. He had never really wanted to go. And her mother had given him a hard time. Her mother wouldn’t want him there.

“You have your classes to teach,” Monika said.

“Who gives a fuck?” he said.

She would send for him if it looked really bad, she said, but she didn’t think it was so bad. He was insulted—his face went cold—but he said, “Okay, it’s your call.” And he got up to make coffee for her, while she tried to phone airlines to get a special rate for family illness. She sounded businesslike in a crazy way and then her voice broke when she had to give her mother’s name.

For more than seven hours on the plane she thought about her mother. When she was little, Monika went with her mother every day to the dress store she managed and played quietly in the back. Her mother was very sharp with her if no one was there and was always perkier with people around. Once, when she was nine, her mother disappeared for two days and left her alone. Monika had known to knock on a neighbors’ door; they were a big family with older kids, she was fine. Nobody wanted a mother who unraveled like that, and in her teens Monika had run away twice with boys but never for long. Her best wasn’t good enough but her mother had done her best. On the phone, she still called Monika Mausi , little mouse. And she’d always had her moments of festive silliness—they danced in circles in the kitchen after a certain man called. The memory of that made Monika tearful on the plane.

Monika could tell that she was overpreparing for bad news, planning how to carry herself when she reached the hospital. In fact, when she walked into the room, her mother was awake, with her head propped up on the pillows, trying to explain something to a woman who turned out to be her friend, Elke.

“My God!” her mother squeaked, when she recognized Monika. “I must be dying, for you to come all this way.” She went into a toothy smile; she was reaching to hug her.

“You don’t look as bad as I thought you would,” Monika said.

“Your mother is getting much better,” Elke said.

It was a grand relief. Monika felt heady from the joy of it, the luck.

“Are they giving you drugs?” she asked. “Something good, I hope. Can they keep this from happening again?”

“I have to stop smoking,” her mother said. “I’ve stopped before. Done it a hundred times.”

“She has to take it easy,” Elke said. “Which is not her disposition.”

Her mother looked frowsy and defeated; she had been dyeing her hair a scratchy shade of ash blonde, which was growing out. She was round-shouldered and fleshy and somehow still thin.

“How long are you staying?” she said.

Bruno was nowhere in sight. He’d absented himself once he summoned the others. Elke stayed till after lunch, and another old friend, Christa, came after suppertime. In between conversations, her mother slept.

Monika sat by the bed, hearing the TV news the room’s other patient had turned on, and watching her mother’s sleeping face, sealed in its own realm. She’d spoken to the doctor, a woman no older than she was, who was very cheerful about how her mother had responded to treatment. She was out of the woods, as Americans liked to say. The doctor did not use that metaphor but Monika thought of those woods—the dark forest, the thicket of danger always in wait.

On the phone, she had to explain to Julian that German hospitals didn’t throw people out after a few days like American ones, and she had to stay to get her mother settled at home. “All my mother talks about is Bruno, as if he personally saved her by showing up eventually.”

“Give your mom my love,” he said.

Her mother had never been friendly to him. She had not forgiven Monika for moving to the U.S. and was always telling her how much cheaper and more socially advanced Berlin was, and the men had better manners. She was anti-American in politics, too, partly out of her grudge against the marriage.

“And don’t run off with any German guys,” Julian said. He’d heard the stories about her mother.

Monika had grown up in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin that should’ve been East on the map but was in the Western sector, shabby and Bohemian and also popular with Turkish families. When she was little, there were flea markets selling old clothes, squatters in wrecked buildings, and the streets smelled of smoke from the coal stoves everyone used for heat. The neighborhood had changed, but not entirely. Food sales had grown more lavish, but she saw plenty of familiar stores. She was peering over the gate of a school she’d once gone to when she almost tripped on a square of brass set in the pavement. It was a “stumble stone,” engraved with local history. Here lived Viktoria Kanafa year of birth 1895 murdered 1940 place unknown .