Longing

by J. D. Landis

  Take me with you, she wanted to say, but could not. She hardly knew him, or at least had known him for so short a time, mere hours that love had tricked into seeming an eternity. She had never been able to imagine accompanying a man even to a hotel room, let alone this, through the door of death itself.

  “How can you talk of this so breezily?” she asked.

  “It’s a bigger wind than you might imagine, Frau Voigt.” He put his hand upon his frail chest, as if to indicate both the nucleus of its force and the site of the dying going on within him. “My doctor speaks only of illness, and Robert…Robert cannot speak of death at all. We avoid the subject entirely. We live together with it but do not touch it. He has had so much death in his life, as you know.”

  “And I have had so little.”

  “Now you have me,” he said.

  Her whole body became chilled. She feared he would see her trembling and mistake what was love for antipathy.

  “Now I have you,” she said.

  Robert and Ernestine lay upon the bed, his head upon her naked breast, her fingers in his hair, not moving, trapped there in its thickness, strangely unaffectionate.

  “Do you suppose this is her bed?” she asked.

  “I believe she sleeps with her husband.”

  “You have not been in this bed before?”

  “Never.”

  “Nor with her?”

  “Never.”

  And yet, this whole short time he had spent with Ernestine—playing with one another, touching, looking, laughing a bit, wishing for more sherry, each undressed to the waist but no more, aside from their shoes kicked off, each aroused but each unspent—Robert had found his thoughts wandering to Henriette, and to Ludwig with her, wishing he were there instead of here; nearer the sherry, of course, but nearer also to his friends, those he loved more than he loved this girl he was to marry, who was beautiful and kind and whose breasts were so incredibly ripe it seemed a crime against nature itself that they not occupy him fully rather than provide a mere resting place for his confusion and distress.

  Finally, he said, “We best join the others.”

  “Are you done with me?” she asked.

  “Done? How?” If only, he thought, she might release me now, let me go, banish me forever.

  “Done with me. Here.” She took his hand and placed it upon the middle of her body.

  “I could not force myself upon you.”

  “No force would be involved.”

  He shook his head. “It is too soon.”

  “Are those not meant to be my words?”

  “And are they not?”

  “They are not.”

  “It is too soon,” he said again. “I want to save you.”

  “For what?”

  “Not for. From.”

  “From what?”

  “From me.”

  “It is too late.”

  He sat up and took his watch from the pocket of his trousers as he turned to place his feet upon the floor. “Alas, you’re right—it is too late.”

  Ernestine was not at all sure how to present herself when she and Robert joined the others. She knew, from the evidence of her tangled hair and her wrinkled dress and her cheeks red from their contact with Robert’s and a certain tightness in her bosom, that it would be assumed he and she had done something they had not done. Wishing, indeed, they had done it, she felt it quite unfair that she provided merely the appearance of having done it. It did not matter whether the others would envy or disdain her for it. She merely wanted to do it. Or, in this sad case, to have done it. Not only to have looked as if she’d done it. One might as well have been arrested for stealing something one had been tempted to steal and was indeed about to steal when suddenly an announcement was made that the shop was closed for the day.

  She decided, therefore, that she would act as if they had done it.

  And so, after Robert had knocked gently on the door, they walked into the sitting room with her arm in his, her head on his shoulder, the front of her dress pulled even farther down, her hair shaken into even greater turmoil, and a look in her eyes, as near as she could get it, of having devoured or having been devoured. She also, in deciding whether to let her breath come in short spasms or huge gusts, chose the former, which had the advantage of causing her breasts almost to quiver beneath the flush of her neck and the pride of her chin.

  Assuming this attitude of the fallen woman, she felt risen. And if it were this easy, through such minor deception, to feel you were ascending to Heaven, she could only imagine what flight her heart would take when finally he made of her a true woman. And a true woman she needed to be: As it was, she was seducing him under false pretenses. She had been born out of a profane passion, and it was the very profanity of the act she wished not to escape but to duplicate.

  Yet, from the looks of it, it was Frau Voigt and Herr Schunke who had achieved some union that Ernestine felt would have escaped her and Robert even had they torn every scrap of clothes from one another and ground their sherry glasses to sand beneath their bleeding flesh.

  It was a union not of the body. Frau Voigt and Herr Schunke sat quite far apart, she on a strange kind of double-headed bench, he in a chair of monstrous proportions, at least in comparison with his frail bones, its arms as skinny as his own.

  Their clothes were in place. So was their hair. But there was between them some kind of concentration it was impossible to breach. How foolish Ernestine felt, having made herself look ravished. They scarcely saw her, and even had they gawked, they would not have cared. Somehow, these two had left the world. And they had left it together.

  Robert seemed not to notice. “Might you have more sherry?” he asked Frau Voigt.

  She unlocked her gaze from that of Herr Schunke and turned to Robert and looked at him as if she had forgotten he was in her home. She smiled at him in a way that convinced Ernestine she was not, and had never been, his lover. It was the kind of smile a grownup gives a child who has interrupted the most private of reveries: indulgent and dismissive at the same time.

  “I have more of everything,” Frau Voigt answered and pointed toward the elaborate decanter in which the sherry lay as still and dark as Ernestine’s heart.

  Leipzig

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1834

  I desperately wanted a woman to hold on to.

  Robert Schumann

  Clara was given a reprieve from her exile in Dresden through her commitment to play two charity concerts in Leipzig on September 11 and 12, the same program for each, she had decided, Chopin and Schumann, in particular Robert’s brand-new Toccata, which she was still learning. It was strangely sonata-like for so rebellious a composer, and she hoped the audience would appreciate the astounding hush in its final bars, huge chords attenuated into a kind of eerie repose, provided she could achieve cleanly and sedately the final octave-and-a-half in the left hand. But even shut away in her room on the third floor, she was unable to avoid the turmoil in the house, and was finding it very difficult to practice.

  The house was filled constantly with people, and not only the usual servants and students and New Journal of Music contributors and near-strangers who wanted to ennoble their own lives under the guise of providing some little favor for her own.

  Robert was here for Ernestine, and Ludwig Schunke was here for Robert, and perhaps also for Henriette Voigt, who, most peculiarly, was here for him as well as for Ernestine and Robert, for whose union she claimed responsibility and to whom she had apparently opened her own house.

  Worse, Baron von Fricken was here. And when he was not playing upon his flute for anyone who would listen some Variations he had written,* he seemed to be carrying on an endless dialogue with Clara’s father about possible compromises to Ernestine’s virtue. The baron kept asking Herr Wieck if his daughter was still “whole,” as he put it, and Herr Wieck kept assuring him she was, calling as his witnesses Ernestine and Robert themselves, who, belying their offended answer to this ridiculous question, gave every e
vidence that their intimacy knew no bounds.

  Ernestine, who upon her arrival in April had befriended Clara, now shunned her or, when she could not avoid talking to her, spoke of things so inane that Clara was tempted to inquire after Robert’s talents as a lover. She imagined herself telling Ernestine she had taken lovers of her own in Dresden and had found them to be not as all as skillful as she had found Robert, from what she could remember of their many happy unions. But what she really wanted to tell Ernestine (having no one else to tell) was how lonely she was in Dresden, fourteen years old and all alone in cold, old Dresden, to which she was condemned to return immediately after her final concert, and how she loved Robert more than Ernestine ever could, because she had loved him for what seemed her whole life and knew him better than Ernestine would if Ernestine were to spend her whole life trying to love him as much as Clara did.

  Clara tried to picture saying as much to Robert, but it was too difficult even to envision such a scene, out of fear not of her own words but of his. When he had finally written to her in Dresden, he had called Ernestine “the shining jewel whom it is impossible to overestimate,” which at the moment she read it brought to mind a precious stone of such proportions that it tore off the finger upon which it had been slipped. This image of mutilation caused her to think of Robert’s injured finger and his music lost to the world. Tears fell from her eyes upon his letter as she saw him taken from her by another woman and destroyed by his own hand.

  In person he seemed, except with her, perfectly content. He shadowed Ernestine and inquired constantly after her welfare, saying such things as, “How is my little Estrella?” which, whether it was his nickname for all of Ernestine or for a particular part of her body, Clara detested. And Ernestine, if Robert happened to be out, would stand by the window watching for him to appear in view, or as soon as he had left would rush to her room to change into yet another outfit, in which she would appear and only then address Clara, soliciting opinions about the bunch of her dress or the tilt of her shoe or the beribboning of her hair or the pronouncement of her bosom, all of which made Clara want to scream at this betrayal by someone she had been foolish enough to imagine might become her friend.

  Clara was in her room practicing Chopin’s E-flat Rondo when there was somewhere in the house beneath her a commotion so resonant that her playing was interrupted and her curiosity overwhelmed. She rushed from her room, nearly stepping upon her cats where they stretched out in the usual place and positions they occupied when she was at the piano. Then she ran down the stairs to the ground floor, all the while over the sound of her own breath hearing a kind of multivoiced fugue of accusation, recrimination, explanation, outrage, and woe.

  She came upon a large gathering just inside the front door, which was open to the street, on which there was a carriage with its door held wide by the coachman, who appeared nearly bug-eyed at the extravagant words that gushed from this otherwise decorous, even solemn house.

  “But I am a virgin!” Ernestine proclaimed, her head tilted back so it was impossible for Clara to tell to whom she was addressing this ridiculous falsehood.

  “All the more reason for me to take you home,” said her father, the baron.

  “Do you mean if she were not a virgin, you would allow her to remain?” asked Robert ingenuously.

  “Not a virgin!” Clara’s father uttered these words with an incredulousness so sudden and profound that Clara felt compromised in her own sad innocence.

  “If she were not a virgin, I would cut her off,” the baron pronounced.

  “Cut her off?” Robert shook his head as if to deny the very possibility, even as he wondered exactly what the baron meant: cut her off from her fortune, or, as he pictured it, dissever her from this very earth to have her float away forever.

  “Cut her off.” The baron chopped the air with his hand. “And, yes, I would leave her here, for I should certainly not allow her back into my home.”

  Ernestine reached out and grasped Robert’s sleeve. “You see, Robert, he will leave me here if—”

  “The only leaving,” Robert hurriedly interrupted her, “is your father’s leaving you no choice but to go with him.”

  Again tilting her head back, Ernestine cried out, “But I am not—”

  “A virgin.” Now it was Henriette Voigt who interrupted the poor girl’s apparent willingness to sacrifice her fortune for her love, addressing herself to the baron. “A virgin,” she repeated, “is the only sort of young woman I will allow into my home. And, as you know, Baron, your daughter and Herr Schumann have spent many happy and innocent hours chaperoned by none other than myself in my home, listening to me play the piano, the poor things, and educating themselves about art through a continuous viewing of my husband’s fine collection of paintings and objets.”

  “And in my believing this, you are not making of me myself an objet de risée?” the baron asked her.

  “Do you observe me laughing at you, kind sir?” Henriette asked him.

  “Not all laughter issues from the mouth,” observed the baron.

  “I see you are a philosopher as well as a father who cares for nothing so much as the good reputation of his daughter.” Henriette did not accompany such ambiguous flattery with her usual laughter, which had not been much in evidence, Clara had noticed, since she had begun to spend so much of her time with Robert’s friend Ludwig, whom even now she kept by her side through the clutching of his hand and the continual observation of his gaunt but comely face. It was like some kind of hopeless love, in the face of both death and marriage, and brought to Clara an admiration of Henriette she had not felt before, to say nothing of the fact that it left her no longer jealous of Henriette for the passion she had so clearly inspired in Robert.

  Ludwig Schunke had taken Henriette away. Now Baron von Fricken was taking Ernestine away. Clara didn’t care that the whole world might be emptied if that was what was necessary for her and Robert to be left standing together.

  “You have convinced me, Madame,” said the baron to Henriette, “that my daughter is whole.” He held out his arm to Ernestine. “Come, my child. Let us go home. You will be safe there. And those who love you will know where to find you.”

  The next moment, Ernestine was gone. Robert appeared lost. He stood in the open doorway watching the carriage disappear around the corner, holding his arms out before him, as if he had recently been carrying a huge bolt of fabric or a woman had been torn from his embrace.

  Clara edged closer to him. Ludwig put a hand on his shoulder. Henriette held Ludwig’s other arm with both her hands. Clara let her sleeve touch Robert’s. Now they were like two couples, two ordinary couples, two tragic couples, standing at an open door in the late-summer sun, pondering the approach of evening, each with its secrets, nothing need be said, their love forbidden and all the more intense for that.

  How nice it would be to walk out the door and stroll through town, deciding where to eat and what to drink. Or to stay at home, and talk, and she could sing to them the songs that Johann Miksch had taught her in Dresden, to which she now would not return, not ever, not with Ernestine away; for why else had her father exiled her if not to keep her from stealing Robert’s heart, unless it was to keep Robert from stealing hers (so little did her father know that it had long ago left her sole possession)?

  “Won’t you stay for supper?” Clara asked Henriette and Ludwig. “I shall make soup and meat if we have any and Robert’s favorite potatoes, with butter and pepper, and—”

  “I can eat nothing,” said Robert.

  “You may refuse to make love to a woman,” said Henriette. “But you must never refuse her cooking.”

  “Do you imagine Ernestine is a good cook?” asked Robert.

  “Oh, no,” said Clara.

  “Oh, yes,” said Henriette.

  “What about you?” Robert asked Ludwig.

  “You know very well I can’t cook,” said Ludwig.

  Henriette laughed.

  “That’s not w
hat I meant,” said Robert.

  “Of course it’s not.” Ludwig quite enjoyed his little joke and how it had restored the spirit of his ruthful lover. “But why do you inquire after her ability to cook? She is beautiful. She is rich. And if you marry her she will never cook a single meal for you as long as you live!”

  “Thank goodness,” said Robert.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Henriette, who in her matchmaking had learned that it was as important to recommend to men a woman’s ability to cook as it was to recommend to women a man’s ability to make love.

  “Because she’s a terrible cook,” answered Robert.

  “Did she cook for you?” Clara asked before she could stop herself.

  “Why did you ask if we thought she might be a good cook?” said Ludwig at the same time.

  “I was hoping for evidence to the contrary of my own experience,” Robert answered him.

  “She did cook for you!” Clara no longer cared if she showed her outrage.

  “Fish,” said Robert.

  Ludwig looked as if he might become even more ill.

  “Judge no woman by her fish,” said Henriette authoritatively.

  “I shall make fish for our supper,” said Clara, who had thus far limited her cooking for Robert to the soup she had promised him in the note with which she had accompanied the tie from Paris what seemed so many years ago when she had been a child.

  “Oh, but we cannot stay,” said Henriette. “Ludwig and I are having supper at my home.”

  “Where is your husband?” asked Clara.

  “Karl is away at the Vatican,” said Henriette. “But a word of advice, my dear child: A woman may dine alone with a man, and dessert will remain merely dessert.”

  “What could you possibly mean by that?” asked Clara, who knew the power innocence held over sophistication.

  Wisely, Henriette declined to answer. She said her good-byes and gathered Ludwig unto her, a frail man whose footsteps had grown abbreviated against the weakness in his breath and whose spirit had grown more generous within the foreshortened confines of his life. He went with her because she loved him, and he knew enough to know that this would feed the only hunger he had left. Yet he looked back longingly at Robert and Clara, like someone who wishes he could be in two places at once and would willingly die to effect such fission.