The Weight of the Heart

by Susana Aikin

  So when did I turn on him? What made me decide to strangle our precious bond? All I can say is that anything beyond the number two is a difficult love proposition. Choices need to be made to trim it down to something manageable, however imperfect. And love, even as it glorifies us and makes us shimmer with radiance, can also bring out the darkest parts of the self.

  * * *

  “Guess who’s back in town,” Father said one Sunday morning at the breakfast table. He sat drinking tea behind his newspaper. “Marcus Holsbeiter. He’s been posted back in Madrid by a new German firm that sells steel windmills and all that new environmental nonsense.”

  My heart punched at my rib cage with a zest I hadn’t felt in seven years. “Environmental nonsense? That’s the future!”

  “All right. You can tell him that. He’s proposing we market them together.” Then he added after a beat, “I’ve invited them to lunch.”

  “Them?”

  “Him, and his wife. Tuesday at Horcher, one thirty p.m.”

  My head reeled as I left the table. His wife! My newly found joy fell flat on its face. I spent the day in turmoil. I considered canceling the engagement. However, on Tuesday morning I got up determined to sail through the lunch. Despite everything, the prospect of seeing Marcus again filled me with a brutal thrill. I dressed up in a sexy plum-colored suit and expensive snakeskin pumps. I dabbed my lips with an aubergine-colored lipstick that went well with my short black hair.

  Horcher is one of those ridiculously priced, ancien régime style restaurants that, for some reason I had never understood, was considered the best dining establishment in Madrid. It was proud to have maintained until recently the tradition of dressing their personnel in elaborate red lackey uniforms and having them ceremoniously place special cushions under customers’ feet before serving the table, a practice I considered nauseating and always refused. But it was classical in the high business community to close important deals there, so I was one of their regular customers.

  I arrived fashionably late, and as I was being led to the table by the benevolent maître d’ with the long gray sideburns, I saw Marcus and Father stand up from their chairs to greet me. The moment I met Marcus’s eyes I felt my guts would fall out of my body. My heart thumped out of control up through my throat. I made a beeline for him with the intention of embracing him, but he just offered his hand and a cool cheek to kiss politely, as was the custom in Spain. Even as I pecked him, I felt that odor of his, that musk mixed with mud, envelop me like a cloud, invigorating me like an elixir that brings life back to a benumbed patient.

  “Hello, Anna.” His words hung in the air while I fought to harness my exhilaration. He looked healthy and strong, handsome as ever.

  “Hello, Anna,” a singsong voice echoed. Marcus stepped to the side and a blond woman with translucent skin, almost like an albino, offered a small beautiful hand that rested on mine like a fairy’s. We were introduced: Helga, Anna.

  “I am so glad to finally meet you,” she said. “You’re quite famous in German business circles.” She was dressed in drapes of ivory and soft pastels that gave her aura a dazzling white sheen, hard to pierce with the eyes.

  “Really?” I tried not to sound acid.

  “The most talented woman in the industry, they say.”

  We settled at the table and I studied the menu I already knew by heart. I was about to say something mean against businessmen and their nicknaming of female colleagues, but when I lifted my eyes and saw the expression on Helga’s face, so loving, so lacking in malice, my whole façade crumbled. I knew I would never be able to hate her.

  A casual business conversation was started on the subject of turbines and how they might be introduced in the market. We talked for a while about a possible collaboration while I studied Helga from the corner of my eye. Everything about her was pallid, her thin, shoulder-length blond hair, her very white skin and dreamy blue eyes, the pearly hue of her arms. Her beauty didn’t just come from her pretty features, but from a sense of frailty. She was delicate, refined. There was a vulnerability in the openness of her gaze, in the sweet curl of her lips, that made her immediately endearing.

  “Anna, you’re barely touching your food,” Father said, packing in his course of venison carpaccio with grain mustard and spicy figs. “Would you like to order something different?”

  I abandoned my fork over the mound of endives and cranberry salad. “I’m on a diet.”

  “With your great figure? I still haven’t been able to throw off the extra weight after the second baby.”

  The sound in the room ceased. I looked around dazed. I could see lips moving without emitting any noise. Mute figures of waiters came and went. A queasy feeling crept into my stomach and I thought I was going to retch. I lifted the serviette to my lips and excused myself.

  * * *

  That night I rang Julia’s doorbell at three a.m. She opened the door, annoyed, her red jumbled bed-hair spiked around her head.

  “Please. I need to spend the night here.”

  “You mean what’s left of the night.”

  We went straight to her bedroom, a messy mixture between a painter’s studio and a monk’s cell, and lay on her narrow bed together. My body was rigid; I couldn’t even cry as I told her about the lunch.

  “The strangest thing is how different we are. We have nothing in common. I don’t understand how he chose a woman so unlike me.”

  I guess the pain came from all the times I had searched for Marcus in other men, waiting to find the same tenderness in another lover’s glance, even the shapes of his arms, the lines of his hip bones running down another male belly. What a wasteland strewn with boyfriends and lovers I’d left behind in this useless quest.

  Julia hugged me. “I thought you were over him. It’s been so long.”

  “I don’t understand it either. It’s as if he’d never gone away.”

  “Can’t believe the bastard had the nerve to come settle back in Madrid as if nothing’d happened.” Julia yawned. “And call Father to make a deal. It’s fucking sick in the head. Like he returned to continue their little game, another carnival shooting-round to win the girl neither of them can have. Makes me want to barf.”

  “Julia, I don’t think I can travel with him to get this contract.”

  “Don’t you dare go anywhere with him!” And she dozed off.

  * * *

  The following week, Marcus and I set off to Düsseldorf to negotiate a contract with the German firm. We arrived at the plush offices of Nordemex at Friedrichtrasse in the center of Düsseldorf, and sat around a large glass rectangular table in tall black chairs. There were eight attendees, between company executives and board members, and only one other woman besides myself, sitting at the far end and taking notes on her computer. I was by far the youngest person in the room. I was introduced as co-owner of Maquinaria Británica en España. Cold eyes stared at me as I started a PowerPoint presentation of marketing specs of windmills and steel turbines for the Spanish market, as well as distribution strategies that our company could implement. I spoke in English and Marcus translated into German. The Q & A lasted a couple of hours, by the end of which I was exhausted, but happy to realize I hadn’t left one query unanswered. A boring but necessary lunch in an elegant restaurant down the street sealed the deal. They agreed to sign a marketing contract, granting all of my terms.

  Marcus took me to the hotel we were staying at overnight and then left, saying he had to visit family and we would meet again at six a.m. in the lobby before going to the airport. I went up to my room, took a bath, and lay on the large bed for a nap. When I woke up it was already dark. I went down to the bar and ordered a glass of red wine. I sat in the sleek leather chairs surrounded by subdued reddish lights. Gray-clad waiters milled around small groups of patrons engaged in hushed conversion.

  It was eleven p.m., well past bedtime for a sleepy German city like Düsseldorf, when I went up to room 207 and knocked on the door. It took a few seconds to open. Ma
rcus stood in loose tartan pajama pants and a white T-shirt, his iPad in his hand. Behind him floated the sweet, sad notes of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert.

  “Everything okay?”

  I stood in the somber corridor, looking in at his figure against the warm glow of bedside lamps. An old scene flashed in my mind like déjà vu. I, behind dark file cabinets, and he, in the yellow pool of streetlight with that tatty, beautiful paperback in his hands. Ten years had passed since that moment where our shadows mingled for the first time. Back then I had fancied him as the young, wild falcon I was going to tame. But now I no longer knew who the falcon was, and who the falconer. Where I stood at the threshold of his room in the dim corridor of a commonplace expensive hotel, I had nothing to offer, I no longer owned a shadow. I was just a beggar with empty hands defiled by vexation and long years of sorrow.

  Marcus shifted his weight. I looked at his bare, clean feet on the carpet. He searched my eyes, waiting for an answer. Blood pulsed thick in my veins, gushed down my belly, trickling down into my knees, my legs, into my feet swollen after hours of wearing stylish corporate pumps. I knew that if I stood here for a few more seconds he might say, Come in. He too was pounding. I could feel it in my gut. Even the sweet little ghosts of his children playing in corners behind him could not shake the momentum that was rolling toward the impending ridge.

  “I . . .”

  An elevator door dinged at the end of the corridor. Marcus and I stared as an old venerable couple stepped out and shuffled their way down the hall. We looked at each other again, but something had switched. A small sober voice whispered in my ear, asking if I knew what I hoped to gain by crossing this doorway, and what brutal piece of machinery I planned to cut my losses with when the moment of reckoning came. Its cool, tinkling sound, like the elevator ding, poured over me like a jug of water. Was I looking for a one-night stand, or was I conniving to become the mistress of a married man? The mistress of my man.

  And then I knew that if I stepped into the room, if I as much as looked into his eyes, embraced his body, felt the pulse of blood along his loins and arms, clambered up toward that soft, thick cloud from which we always listened to our billowing breath below . . . If I were to plunge into this right now, with me struggling to pace my desire, a famished demon, fast and reckless to reveal my flaked-out mind . . . To do all this, and he not be mine, I think I would go mad.

  I turned to leave. “All’s good. See you tomorrow.”

  “Sure.”

  Marcus took a while to close his door. Once in my room, I fell into my bed, crushed.

  * * *

  Next morning at the airport I sat across from Marcus in an uncomfortable plastic chair and stared at him. He looked so rested, a man contented with his lot in life. I’d hardly slept. I hadn’t touched any food since the corporate lunch. My eyes smarted from insomnia, the dryness of my lips extended into my throat and lungs.

  He lifted his gaze from his laptop and grinned. “Congrats again for yesterday’s meeting. Your pitch exceeded all expectations. Those guys are the toughest sell.”

  I jumped up. “Marcus, do you think I give a shit about any of this?” I threw my posh leather briefcase at him. People around us turned their heads and stared. I stomped off down the terminal hall toward the bathroom signs. There was a long line at the women’s room and I stood slurping my runny nose and tears into the back of my throat.

  “Are you all right, dear?” said an overweight, blond woman standing behind me.

  “Just my allergies,” I said in my atrocious German.

  “Aren’t they awful? I used to have them too.”

  I left her in mid-sentence as I dashed into the next empty stall. I stifled my sobbing while flushing the toilet a number of times. I leaned my head against the door’s cool metal surface as thick tears seared my cheeks. What had I been hoarding all these seven years besides this festering longing? What did I care about contracts or money, expensive clothes, ridiculous cars, or stupid business trips if I didn’t have Marcus? What was the meaning of gaining the whole world if I couldn’t sleep curled around his back, listening to his deep, soft breathing all night long? I would gladly take on a job cleaning public bathrooms, if I could just go back to a dingy little room with him at the end of each day.

  I arrived very late at the gate where Marcus had been patiently waiting with my briefcase, in case he needed to miss the plane too. We didn’t speak as he walked behind me down the jet bridge into the aircraft. Neither did he look into my eyes when we sat and fumbled with our safety belts, not that he would have recognized the deep red holes I hid behind the dark sunglasses. I made to sleep leaning against the small oval window the whole flight.

  When I reached the house, I took two sleeping pills before crashing on my bed, although it was only one in the afternoon.

  “Miss, Mr. Marcus on the phone,” Lolita, our new maid, said from the door.

  I squinted against the sunlight bursting in through the window. It must have been after ten a.m. the next day. I made to move, but my body wouldn’t respond. I had no muscle power. My limbs were dead.

  “Tell him I’ll call back later.” I buried my tear-pooled eyes in my pillow. “Please, draw down the blind before you leave.” I stayed in the same position for the rest of the day, motionless save for my eyes, which flooded rivers into the bed linen.

  In the late afternoon, Father returned home, and seeing me in this state called Doctor Martinez. He must have been the last doctor doing house calls in the whole of Madrid. After taking my pulse and pressing the stethoscope on my chest and back, the old, sallow-faced doctor sat in the armchair facing my bed and sighed.

  “Are your cycles regular?” he asked in a tired voice. I nodded yes.

  “Has there been an accident, a piece of bad news?”

  I opened my mouth to say no but my treacherous eyes burst once more into a torrent.

  He sat for a moment, opened his briefcase, took out a prescription pad and wrote a few fast words. Then he called Lolita, who was only a few feet away listening behind the door. “Take this to the pharmacy immediately.”

  He shot me a sad, benevolent look before leaving.

  Lolita returned promptly with a small box of pink pills and a glass of water, and gave me two to swallow. Before she turned to go, she gave me a coy look and said, “Miss, I didn’t want to say in front of the doctor, but I think you could have some heart problem. My brother had angina and he also lay in bed collapsed.”

  “Thank you, Lolita. I need to sleep now,” I said, turning toward the wall, and she stepped out quietly.

  The smart little bitch! How accurate her perception, or how astute her spying. Wasn’t this the final stage of my broken heart? Wasn’t that fist-like, muscle-clustered organ inside my rib cage disintegrating? Had it not become a slab of flabby meat coated in the nauseating, iridescent foil of decay? And why would I have a need for a heart anymore if it wasn’t to beat for Marcus? I reached over to the bedside table for the medication box and extracted the information pamphlet. The section on clinical pharmacology read: Exerts anxiolytic, sedative, muscle-relaxant, anticonvulsant and amnestic effects. Covers a variety of symptoms arising from conditions of spring depression and vital sadness. I read again, vital sadness. Yes, I wasn’t hallucinating, it actually said, tristeza vital. I threw the box of pink pills across the floor.

  * * *

  It took over three weeks for the medication to kick in and for me to sober up. Doctor Martinez returned a good number of times and I heard him speak with Father down in the hall about long-term exhaustion and a nervous breakdown. Father refused his suggestion to check me into a clinic.

  Julia visited and brought me chocolates, books, and a set of watercolors and paper. Marion, who had just returned from London, sat by the bed holding my hand, and said, in her beautiful, marble-tongued English, “Anna, just hold on, you’ll be just fine.” She sounded like Aunt Kay.

  But I didn’t want visitors, gifts, kind words, or phone calls. I just lay o
n the bed stunned, staring up at the ceiling for hours, observing how the pink pills rearranged the landscape of my storm, how day by day they pulled together the different fragments of my pained confusion, and arranged them carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously, like the fitted pieces on a Rubik’s Cube. And how hard they worked at blunting the raw, exposed stems of my nerve endings! Marcus, Helga, their beautiful babies, the cozy kitchen smelling of warm bread, the adorable pastel nursery, their snug family bed, all floated away into remote vignettes of silly, ingenuous fantasy. Finally, I was won over by the proficiency of these small pink industrious agents of benumbed, empty bliss.

  And behind their shield I started planning my revenge.

  * * *

  The evening I had decided to go back to work, I was still hanging out in bed when Father knocked on the door and came into the room.

  “How are you feeling, Anna?” He had been quiet all these weeks, checking in all the time to see if I needed anything. He walked to the window and stood there looking out into the sunset with hands clasped behind his back. A long swath of rusty orange tinged with crimson laced around the darkened, distant mountaintops. He turned and walked toward me, stopping at the bedside table. I watched his hands as they picked up the small pile of books by the lamp: The Diary of Alice James, A History of the Black Death in Europe, The Poems of John Donne. He put them down again and sat in the armchair facing the bed. We looked at each other for a moment. My eyes felt hot and drowsy, and his were drawn, shadowed with a strange anguish. He averted his glance.