The Sensualist Read online

  Finally free, the woman, still grinning, put a finger to her lips, supplicating silence. Pointing to the dog and whispering, “Verboten, weißt du, “ she giggled, bent down and scooped the poor mutt up and stuffed him unceremoniously into her canvas shoulder bag. Helen, more confused than ever, was uncertain if it was forbidden to have a dog on the train or in the train washroom.

  The woman and her still-shivering bundle squeezed past Helen and through the doors to the adjoining car, leaving behind heavy wafts of bath and flea soap. Helen watched them go, wondering to herself why she didn’t find any of this amusing.

  She stepped into the washroom, locked the door, stood in front of the distorted mirror, and then took off her sweater and pulled her shirt up quickly to have a peek at her body. Shamefaced and perplexed, she traced the outline of the imaginary breasts she had felt so clearly in the compartment. Over and over, at times running the tips of her fingers along the surface of her skin, at times the edges of her fingernails, she etched an ever-darkening red line low along the bottom ridge of her ribs. The nerves of her fingers had never been so alive. Helen felt as though layers of damaged skin had been removed—not just from her hands but from her entire self—stripped to reveal a discomfort that should have remained contained. What did this Rosa mean, “It has begun.” What has begun? Why did she feel as though she already knew that whatever it was had begun, that the woman had merely been repeating her own words? She weighed the imaginary breasts in her hands, weighed the persistent fragments of the illusion. She’d go back, she’d ask, she’d find the answers.

  The train slowed down and then lurched to a standstill. Which stop would this be? It was reassuring to hear the normal commotion of a station—elbows hitting the bathroom door, luggage being dumped at the top of the stairs, passengers yelling and porters whistling. She dropped her shirt back down, tucked it in, and then quickly washed and dried her hands and face.

  Fighting against the boisterous mob plugging the corridor, Helen squeezed into her compartment, momentarily relieved but disconcerted to find that not only had the odd woman and her luggage departed, but that, better yet, no one had taken her place. Instead, along with the hairpins lying thick on the floor, there was a rather worn wooden box left lying on the seat. The note attached to it read “For your search.” After a quick, bewildered glance at the box, she flew to the window, unlatched its stiff lock, and struggled to slide it down low enough to lean out. Seeing no trace of the woman, letting the questions subside, she squinted to read the platform signs. “München,” she said aloud, the soft ch shushing along her palate—a pleasant tickle; “Munich,” she repeated, the hard ch grabbed at the back of her mouth, irritating her worsening sore throat. A city she had always meant to visit. Another time. Particles of snow drifted down through the gap between the platform roof and the train, and a cold draft sauntered into the compartment.

  Rosa had disappeared along with her wig, her bags, and her outrageousness, and moments later the conductors were blowing on their whistles and closing the doors to the cars. At the last minute the woman with the dog came running from somewhere at the end of the platform —unmistakable even from a distance—panting audibly, her inadequate summer shoes flapping against the concrete. Her heavy burden, still safely hidden in the cloth bag, was banging against her side, a hopeless antithesis to her sideways rolling trot. Helen imagined she could hear the pathetic dog yelping with each bump against its mistress’s body, but somehow knew that it would never consciously give itself away, that it knew its mistress too well, knew that the most jovial people could be the crudest. The conductor opened the door to the car adjacent to Helen’s and hoisted the woman up the stairs. The door shut again with a pneumatic poof and a bang and the train jerked ahead.

  CHAPTER 2

  FRAU KEHL

  Raising the window was only a token seal against the grinding wheels and gears. And the frozen air, so insolent and pernicious, had settled in for the duration. Helen chaffed her arms, cupped her hands over her ears, and then went to stand at the door, to watch the usual compliment of travelers lingering in the corridor, talking or leaning out the windows, smoking.

  She then carefully and silently slid the door shut, concerned that the action not be perceived as an insult to those in the corridor. She decided against raising the blinds now flapping limply against the windows. Back in her seat, she turned the box over and over, looking for the latch. It was heavy and sturdy, and its contents shifted with muffled tones. It was decorated on the top panel with an oval, glass-covered plaque, the surface of which was scratched and nicked, protecting paper printed with aged and complex diagrams of the human body. Its ornate frame was inset with large, round beads that looked like pearls. The lid of the box was ornately tooled, but the box itself was nondescript, of polished wood, maybe mahogany, and worn—the veneer was scarred and chipping away in places; worm-holes speckled its surface. Except for the rather perverse subject matter chosen for its decoration, it could, at one time, have been fitting for an ordinary jewelry collection.

  Helen tapped the box with her fingernail, musing over the coincidence between the artwork and her profession—a colleague couldn’t have chosen a better gift. She tried to open the box—the latch was not evident—by variously squeezing the sides and then the front of the lid, then by pressing the top down and releasing it quickly, and then by ramming the stiff note-card that had been left with the box in the crack between the lid and the bottom. Stubborn resistance. She balanced it on the edge of her knees and looked at it through the distance of her myopia. She tried pressing down on the plaque. She held it to her ears and rapped it with her knuckles, and then wedged her fingernail into the crack; the nail split. Mindlessly putting her finger in her mouth to chew off the hanging remnant, she picked up the note again. Nothing else was written on it except, “For your search.”

  She turned the card over and spat the nail end onto the floor. Just a thick piece of textured paper, neither white nor colored, neither new nor old; just a piece of paper. She turned it over again and looked at the handwriting. Old-fashioned style but inscribed with a ball-point pen. Writing like her grandmother’s. Nothing distinctive, just the copperplate taught in schools around the world when clear, legible script was paramount. Her grandmother could make a disposable pen write like a million dollars. She held the paper up to the light of the window and could make out the corner of a watermark, an animal. A greyhound? Some kind of rodent? Two of them. More precisely, an animal and a half, running inside a crest, the other half cut off by the edge of the paper. Contemplating these details helped to pass the time.

  Rosa’s questions about who she was and why she was here nagged like a vexing itch. It seemed like this was the first time in weeks that she’d had even a ghost of a break to think about the purpose of her trip to Vienna. And what caused this Rosa to assume that she was here to search? Would there be something in the box showing that Rosa guessed that she was here to collar a truant husband no less?

  Helen was a woman with a great capacity for disappointment; the bitter gall of fallen aspirations taunted her from waking to sleeping. Her husband, her marriage, and now this trip—all embarked upon with great enthusiasm and promise and all so quickly languishing in defeat and indifference, especially now that she was having such grave second thoughts about coming to confront him.

  Helen’s husband’s name was Martin Evans. He was a free-lance journalist who spent a good part of each year anywhere but home. She retaliated by abandoning the spaces empty from his absences, and wound her way along the academic speaking circuit, trotted out in front of drowsy students as an expert in medical art. Whether lecturing in classrooms harshly illuminated by fluorescent light, sensing instinctively the collective pressure of the hard plastic on her audience’s aching ischiums; or eulogizing in the gentle wombs of darkened lecture halls, being drawn to join the spectators, to drown in vast upholstery, to watch herself tease layers of skin, muscle, and bone off of numberless men and nameless women; she
had the impression that she was exposing more of herself than of the art. She was a freak in the art world and an intruder in the medical one, and as such seemed to invite probing, intimate questions.

  If only Martin took such personal interest. Well, at least they didn’t actively dislike each other—that would have taken too much effort.

  Helen had convinced herself that she would sacrifice elements of her career if he showed any signs of doing the same, but that sign never came. And now that he seemed to have dumped her, she felt obliged to at least try to find out why.

  During their long absences from each other, Helen would write him constantly as if by not doing so they would completely forget about each other’s existence. He would dispatch the occasional letter or postcard—from Jeddah, Beijing, Milan, Miami—wherever stories took him. He usually worked on feature articles rather than fast-breaking news items, so research on one story might take him several months and thousands of miles. His letters never communicated much—a sentence about the weather, a description of the latest airline outrage, a trite “wish you were here,”—and they were usually scribbled on complimentary stationery from second-class international hotels, the kinds of hotels that dragged exhausted maids down long corridors until well after dusk, that had the same dark wood-paneled bars piping in music that bordered on offensive, if only for its inoffensiveness. She pictured Martin sitting in these bars night after night, drinking too much, scribbling justifications, eavesdropping, meeting men in suits who had tips for this story or that or who just had their own sordid tales to sell. The work paid for the drinks, the airline tickets, and the hotel bills, but beyond that? She bought the house they never lived in, she owned the car that was rusting in the driveway. “Ah, resentment!” Helen half smiled to herself. Resentment held her hand, resentment stroked her hair, resentment shared her bed.

  Aside from the sparse mail, she would avidly read his articles when they appeared or when she stumbled across them. Here she found disappointment as well. What fascination did a poisoned well in a village in northern India hold that their marriage did not? What was worthwhile about a ten-year-old arrested for corruption in Moscow? What difference in the world did these stories make? Who the hell cared?

  But when she wrote to him she took care not to express her antipathy. She would agonize over the contents of his articles to show him that she read them carefully. She would also describe in detail what she was doing: her lectures, her travels, her day-to-day concerns. She tried to keep him up to date with the house and its constant need for attention and money. He would never refer to these letters, either in his own writing to her or when they were at home together. And because of his silence, she would say nothing as well—as if the letters never existed, as if she never wrote to him at all. The more she wrote the more it seemed a foolish thing to do, and so the more she wrote, as if to find vindication in the written words, vilification in the spaces between the lines.

  Helen thought back to her first awareness that he had cut and run, escaped, so to speak. His parents had phoned her to tell her that they had a message from him announcing that he would be home for Christmas. This “home” was back east—not exactly nearby but closer than he’d been for months. So she flew out, stayed with his parents—they were okay—and waited to surprise him. Christmas Day came and went, free time dragged heavily through the following week to New Year’s Eve with no sign of him. Not even a phone call or a card. A good part of the holiday was spent repeating phrases of regret and chagrin, his parents embarrassed for their son’s behavior and for the possibility that they might have misunderstood his message, Helen ashamed for not having the power to bring him back herself.

  She returned home on New Year’s Day, not surprised to find neither card nor message waiting. He had been in Vienna the last time she heard from him, so she wrote to him frequently over the next few weeks care of the poste restante, the American Express, the associated newspaper offices, and the hotels that he had stayed at in Vienna over the years. They had had a tacit agreement that she wasn’t to call him unless there was an emergency. Didn’t this constitute an emergency? What would other people do? She had no idea. “Why didn’t we just divorce?” she asked herself.

  Her reveries had interrupted her inventory of signs of illness, but the now unbearable discomfort in her throat demanded her undivided attention. Never before had a sore throat possessed so much surface area—from the steel wool lodged in her gullet, to the knives that poked with every swallow into her inner ears. Through these sensations the entire interior of her head seemed as tangible and knowable as the back of her hand. She contemplated going out to the restaurant car to at least get a bottle of water. Didn’t they send around men with carts? The desire for water suddenly became overwhelming.

  Just as she was about ready to heave herself up, the door slid open and the severely manicured face of a disapprovingly elderly woman poked itself into the compartment. She blinked furiously as though taken aback by Helen’s mere presence, scanned the racks and the other seats, and then barked a command at an unseen third party. Her head vanished and was replaced by a fussy but stylish young man who was burdened down with elegant, overstuffed luggage. As he shuffled in, holding two suitcases under each arm and pushing a fifth with his foot, Helen automatically slid the box out of sight. The hairpins, still littering the floor, skittered and snapped, knocked about by his feet and the bag. She watched him as he dropped the bags, first from his left arm onto the seat opposite and then from his right onto the floor. Then with a great deal of tortuous breathing and groaning he managed to hoist them, one by one, onto the racks, squeezing Helen’s small pack into even less space than it had occupied before. Each effort produced gusts of perfume that blasted her nostrils and seared her sinuses. Her eyes watered lamentably. He stood up straight, brushed off his sleeves with efficient, undulating fingers and squared his already square shoulders. And then, catching sight of the tarnished mirror on the wall opposite her, he bent down slightly to scrutinize himself, running his hand back over his hair which fell in a brown-blonde cascade beginning at his high forehead, ending in a blunt edge at the top of his collar. She noticed with a jolt that he wore cosmetics—mascara caked his eyelashes, heavy kohl framed his eyes, and outrageous spots of color perched high upon his cheek. As he rotated his head to inspect each and every aspect of his appearance, he observed her studying his reflection and smiled without turning around. She rearranged herself to face the window, but not before glancing towards the corridor and the woman waiting outside with knotted hands impatiently kneading the air. He followed Helen’s eyes to the corridor, and then with a hastily muttered “Pardon,” brushed off the seat previously occupied by Rosa, and gallantly motioned for the woman to enter and take her place. She marched in, crushing more of the pins. Brushing past the young man, causing him to lose his balance momentarily, she sat down in the seat opposite, making Helen rearrange herself again, to straighten up and tuck her feet in.

  “God,” thought Helen, “what’s the matter with the other seats? What’s the matter with the other compartments?” Clouds of perfume and cologne competed viciously in the cramped space, making Helen’s already watering eyes flood. The young man settled into the far corner, giving Helen the feeling that both were looking at her. And they both were. The woman sniffed lightly. Helen threw her a brief glance and then reached for her book. The young man played absently with the blind over the door. The blind shot up with a snap. He grinned to himself, left the blind up, then started tapping the window, alternating the sharp rap of a fingernail with the dull but reverberating thud of a fingertip. Click-thump-click-thumpthump-click. The toe of the polished boot of his right foot began to skip about as if anxious to join in. Hairpins danced in unison.

  The woman sniffed again, this time more heartily. Helen flipped through the pages, agitatedly searching for her place, but she was thinking about the woman—this ancient woman who was probably about seventyfive years old, around the right age to be the young man�
�s grandmother. Dressed very extravagantly, garnished with jewelry, and lots of it: a filigreed gold broach affixed to her coat, heavy pendulous earrings dripping from her elongated earlobes, necklaces draping around her crepey neck, bracelets stacked up the arms, numerous rings on the fingers of both hands, but…a finger was missing from her right hand! The gap was almost perfectly concealed by the glittering baubles. Helen gaped at the mutilated hand from under her lowered eyes then shifted away, sensing that the woman was aware of her gaze. Perhaps she was a bit older than seventy-five—the backs of her hands seemed very gnarled and blemished; her legs were tortured with varicose veins. Her jet-black hair was coiffured and sprayed into a helmet of waves around her forehead and swept back in such a way to show off her earrings, and pathetically, to show the skin at her hairline, stained by a clumsy dye job. Her clothing from her fur collar down screamed money: immaculate fit, luxurious fabrics, exacting finish, impeccable accessories. But for all of the ornamentation, it really was her face that struck Helen the most. She had the face of someone who had been honed and tuned and sculpted into a mockery of a rich woman. Her eyes and mouth were voracious: her eyes ferret-like—wary and assessing—her mouth working and reworking itself as if trying to decide what to devour next. Her nose was pinched into permanent disdain, and one could see that even liberal doses of the best perfumes would be insufficient to mask the sour odor of her greed. Her chin had the sharpened zeal of a tool worn into the habit of gouging. “Really, this is too much,” Helen thought, “but I’m not going to move.”