John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Hildegard.”

“Excuse me?”

“My mother, God rest her, was obsessed with her Bavarian heritage.” You smiled crookedly. “That’s just one of the things the Husband saved me from.”

“What else?”

“Hmm?”

“Tell me what else he saved you from. I’d like to know.”

“Do you really want an answer, Mr. Tompkins? Are you sure you want to hear my sordid tale?”

I was anything but sure, in fact, especially when I noticed your expression. “Just play down the romantic bits, if you don’t mind.”

You shook your head. “That won’t be hard at all.”

* * *

It took you the better part of an hour to perform the vivisection of your marriage, and I paid close attention, painful though it was, because it taught me just how wrong I’d been about you. Your glib, easy air fell away as you spoke, and without it you were awkward and unsure. You weren’t the coddled debutante that I’d imagined: you’d been a lonely, angry child, your girlhood shadowed by your parents’ failures. Haven had discovered you in a secondhand-record store — Rox in Your Head Vinyl in Middletown, Connecticut — on the day you’d finally given up on college. He was a boyish thirty-four at the time, already famous, already rich, getting ready to distance himself (in public, at least) from the cut-rate religion he’d founded. You were ready to distance yourself from everything.

Your father had been kicked out of Wesleyan’s German Department two years earlier for preaching (and/or practicing) die freie Liebe with his students; he now spent his time drinking lager and writing fascist screeds against the state of Israel, which your mother — devoted spouse, Germanophile, and quiet anti-Semite that she was — mailed to The Boston Globe in semiweekly packets. Your job kept the family in bagels and six-packs; occasionally your mother took in boarders. Haven came into your life, as you put it, “like a Martian abduction,” bearing offerings from faraway, exotic worlds. Your previous boyfriend had been a video store clerk and part-time pot dealer; your new boyfriend was the leader of a cult, with disciples in the NFL and Hollywood and the House of Representatives. Your parents hated him, which expedited things. You were married in a courthouse in Poughkeepsie.

From that relative high point, things went rapidly downhill, in such an effortless, frictionless, self-understood way that it barely seemed a topic for discussion. A full year into your marriage, you still had only the haziest sense of what the man you’d married liked and what he didn’t, let alone what he cared for or believed. He met your every word and gesture with a warm, attentive smile, and gave answers to your questions that evaporated when exposed to sunlight. You had no interest in the “church” he represented, and he seemed to have no interest in it either. He left for work each morning like any other husband, and in the evenings he talked sports and investments and music and cars — even fashion, when you introduced the subject — but never religion. He seemed to regard theology and science with the same blank-eyed indifference. In time you realized that he despised them.

You found your new life unusual — freakish, really — but you were still too dazed and grateful to ask questions. Haven cheerfully supported you in breaking with your parents. Your every worldly whim was gratified. Each night he came to you and told you what he wanted: in this regard, at least, his preferences were clear. He referred to the act as “synchrony” or “junction”: the only cult-speak he used in your company. He seemed less in search of pleasure than of information, or possibly — you sometimes thought — some form of proof. And he always left your bedroom disappointed.

A year went by, then two years, then — astonishingly, unaccountably — a decade. Your husband was never less than cordial. You’d had the idea to open a record shop of your own, maybe even a boutique reissue label, specializing in the sixties teen garage rock that you loved; but though he repeatedly promised to put up the “seed capital”—and though it was painfully clear he had money to burn — something always seemed to interfere. You participated in junction each night at 23:15 EST, his schedule permitting. He traveled much of the year, and was never reachable during the final hour of the day, though he returned your calls at midnight without fail. You had occasional affairs of your own, and once tried, semiseriously, to leave him; but you’d lost all sense of how to be alone. Your life was freakish — more than freakish: perverse — but you’d grown to accept it.

Then you met me at my cousin’s party.

You fell silent once you’d finished, staring bashfully down into your lap. A car alarm sounded nearby, invasive and shrill, but you barely reacted. You seemed to have forgotten where you were.

“Hildegard,” I said tentatively. “I have to admit, never in a million years—”

“I agree with you, Walter. A million at least.” You gave a tired smile and took my hand. “But you’re allowed to call me Mrs. Haven.”

For once I understood you perfectly. “I’d consider it an honor,” I said. “Hildegard doesn’t suit you.”

You sighed and shook your head. “It never did.”

“You’re more of an Irmgard, I’d say. Or a Brünnhilde.”

“That’s right, Walter. And you’re more of a Gandalf.”

“Mrs. Haven?”

“Yes, Walter?”

“I’d like you to stay here tonight.”

“I thought you might.” You brought my hand to your mouth and bit down lightly on the knuckle of my thumb. “That’s why I came with my pajamas on.”

* * *

If I stay hunched over this card table forever, Mrs. Haven — if the timestream doesn’t ever readmit me — I might one day find words to do justice to that stupefying night. For hours on end we were as deliberate as forensic scientists, committing the most obscure recesses of each other’s body to memory; the rest of the time we rolled around like chimpanzees. I tried to catalog the moles and scars and freckles on your body — to catalog them, not just count them, beginning with the heel of your right foot — but I never made it past the halfway point. And what a halfway point it was, Mrs. Haven. I could have lived out my duration there and died a happy man.

Did I wonder why you cared for me? I’ll admit it — I did wonder. You were the stuff of daydreams, after all, and I was a dropout with dubious posture. I was the opposite of the Husband in every respect; this ought to have reassured me, I suppose, but it tended to have the opposite effect. When all else failed, I fell back on the one thing I was certain of: I adored you, Mrs. Haven, and you liked to be adored. On that first night it seemed explanation enough.

In between sessions of monkey business we asked each other aimless, drowsy questions. I was ecstatically unaware of what the future held — our escape to Vienna, our doomed trip to Znojmo, and everything that would happen afterward — and I’d have told you everything, consequences be damned, if only you’d asked. But your mind was firmly on the present moment. You made love exactly as I’d imagined you would: clumsily at first, then earnestly, then angrily, then lost to the world altogether. I felt half-dead by morning, to tell you the truth. But my other half felt indestructible.

“That was very nice, Walter,” you whispered sometime around dawn. “I knew you were a man of many gifts.”

“I appreciate your confidence, Mrs. Haven.”

In the light from the street your hair glowed like an angel’s in some pre-Raphaelite painting of questionable taste, or even in something by Klimt. I felt painfully, unconscionably happy.