Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “Intact,” he pronounced. Then he made that same hand into a fist and brought it down with such force that the seal shattered.

  “Outtact,” he announced.

  He read the letter to himself as Wilhelm stood there, witnessing what appeared to be an instantaneous and nearly total transformation of Robert’s physical being. The weight was lifted. The red eyes turned blue again. Even his clothes seemed to rearrange themselves into an at least casual presentability.

  Robert reached out and pulled Wilhelm into his arms. Wilhelm realized that the letter, whatever its other magical powers, had not succeeded in providing Robert with either a shave or a bath.

  “We’re off to Dresden,” said Robert, which pleased Wilhelm, for Robert, as eager as he appeared to have Wilhelm live with him, had never taken him anywhere beyond the homes and taverns of Leipzig.

  But Wilhelm’s pleasure was short-lived. Once they reached Dresden, it was into Clara’s arms that Robert disappeared and Wilhelm realized he had been, as the term was used to indicate a decoy lover, a beard.

  It was not that Robert didn’t trust Clara. It was her father whom he doubted. Her letter—her wonderful, liberating, quite possibly life-saving letter—said that her father was leaving Dresden on business the next day. Her unspoken meaning was clear: Come to me.

  Wieck had taken her to Dresden the moment he became convinced that Robert would not marry Ernestine von Fricken. Once again, Dresden had become his place of her imprisonment. But this time her father was determined to guard her himself. And this is exactly what he had done, without a word passing between his daughter and Schumann, so that when he was called away on business, the lure of increased income overcame the diminishing fear that, should he not be there, Robert Schumann might magically appear and continue to distract his daughter from her music and from a better life than a dissolute lunatic like Schumann could ever provide.

  “Now I understand,” said Wilhelm as they rode together in the coach toward Dresden. “I had never seen you so distraught. Imagine, to find that your beloved, if that indeed is what she is, has been cruelly torn from—”

  “My mother died,” Robert interrupted his friend.

  “Your dear, sweet mother!” Wilhelm was instantly crestfallen. While he had never been invited to Zwickau to meet Frau Schumann, he was aware of Robert’s love for her and hers for him, as evidenced by the money she sent him so he could have his laundry done (not to mention the laundry she did for him when he visited her) and buy good beer. “When?”

  “Four days ago.”

  “Four days? Are you not—”

  “No.”

  “—going to the funeral?”

  “No. How could you even ask? Clearly, you don’t know me as well as Ludwig did. He would never even imagine I would go to my mother’s funeral.”

  “Your own mother…?”

  Robert put his hand on Wilhelm’s arm. “That’s all right. I wouldn’t go to your mother’s funeral either.”

  Nor, he had the kindness not to add, to your own.

  He and Wilhelm took a shared room in Dresden, where, before he had unpacked or bathed, Robert wrote a note to Clara and had the hotel deliver it to her at the home of the Reissigers, friends with whom she and her father were staying. He asked that the deliverer wait for a response.

  Since he did not trust that Wieck had indeed departed, he felt the need to write in code, should his note be intercepted:

  Dear Fräulein Wieck:

  A package has arrived for you at the Hotel David. As in the last days of Pompeii, it is ready to erupt. Please be so kind as to attend to its retrieval.

  Yours forever,

  Herr Einsamkeit*

  Too nervous to do anything else as he waited for a reply, Robert finally took a bath, keeping Wilhelm next to him so he might have someone to talk to in his nervousness, though usually he liked to bathe unaccompanied, because he preferred silence to talk and because he was always hearing music in his head; and what better place to hear it and try to remember it than the bath and thus to overcome his humiliating need to be at the piano while composing?

  Robert was still bathing when he heard a knocking on a door down the hall.

  “That must be the hotel boy with her response,” he said to Wilhelm. “Hurry. But if he’s gone and has slipped it under the door, be sure to bring it here immediately.”

  Wilhelm returned empty-handed, shaking his head. Robert looked at him forlornly. “I should have known—her father is still in Dresden. He must have intercepted my note. I should never have made reference to the Bulwer-Lytton. She told me he thought it was a most inappropriate gift. He even told her that it was evidence that I understood nothing whatsoever about her. He—”

  “It was the hotel girl,” interrupted Wilhelm.

  “What hotel girl?”

  “The girl who’s come to see you at your hotel.”

  “Girl?”

  “It’s Clara herself,” Wilhelm finally confessed, at once delighted over his little tease and saddened over his inevitable displacement.

  “Well, don’t let her stand out in the hallway,” said Robert, rising naked and still soap-streaked out of the dirty water. “Take her into the room. And then, if you don’t mind, gather your things and go down to the hotel desk to book yourself your own room.”

  “You are done with me?”

  Robert nodded gravely.

  “I have served my purpose?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Shall I seduce her for you, then?” said Wilhelm bitterly.

  “A towel, please,” answered Robert, stepping out of the bathtub.

  When Robert went to Clara, she was sitting at the desk in his room, a pen in her hand and paper before her.

  “I trust I did not take so long dressing that you are writing me a note of farewell that had I found it here would have broken my heart.”

  She did not turn around. She merely went on writing, her back to him, so that he could see her shoulders work against the fabric of her dress. He was reminded of when he had come upon her sharpening knives at her return from Paris nearly four years ago. But then, he remembered, he had felt she was like a stranger. And now, she seemed to belong exactly where she was.

  When she had finished her writing with the flourish of a signature, she turned to him, a great smile upon her pretty, joyous face, and said, “Here,” holding out to him the sheet of paper.

  Dear Herr Einsamkeit:

  In answer to your kind and welcome letter, I offer myself as antidote to your loneliness. Please be so kind as to accept this gift with your customary kindness and passion.

  Yours beyond forever,

  Fräulein Verloren und Verlobt*

  He did not yet dare take her in his arms. He had done so several times after their kiss on the stairway, but only for a moment, for another kiss or two, and never with the depth or meaning of their first kiss, as if they knew that no stolen kiss could be as passionate as the first.

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” she said.

  “Here? Dresden? My hotel? My room in my hotel? Or here on Earth?”

  “Speaking of your hotel,” she said, “I had to follow the boy who brought me Herr Einsamkeit’s message. I knew there was no Hotel David, but I knew that David was you and that I would find you wherever you would expect to have my response to your little letter. But I didn’t know what hotel that would be.”

  “Why didn’t you simply ask the boy where he worked? Or better yet, accompany him back?”

  “Because then he would know I was here with you. And I want no one to know I’m here with you.”

  “Wilhelm knows.”

  “Will he betray us?”

  “To your father, you mean?”

  “Papa does not want us to be together at all.”

  “He will.”

  “Betray us?”

  “No one will betray us. I meant your father will want us to be together.”

  “When?”

  “When he knows
how I feel about you.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Shall I show you?”

  She rose from the chair and came to stand near him. “It took me so long to learn to talk that I perhaps value words overmuch. So rather than—”

  “Are you saying you would prefer me to tell you than show you how I feel about you?”

  “For the moment, yes.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “So?” she prompted.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You might start by telling me that you adore me.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “There,” she said, so encouragingly as to give him the impression he had actually said it first.

  “And that you have always adored me.”

  “Always,” he emphasized.

  “And that you always will adore me.”

  “Forever.”

  “And that you like the way I look.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “And how do I look?”

  “How?”

  “Yes, how do I look to you?”

  “I think you are the most beautiful creature on earth.”

  “Creature?”

  “Woman. I think you are the most beautiful woman on earth.”

  He started toward her, and started to open his arms to her.

  She held up her hand. “I put the word into your mouth.”

  “But not into my eyes. My eyes have found you beautiful since the day I first saw you. I thought you were the most beautiful little girl I’d ever seen. And every time I’ve seen you since then, I’ve thought you the more beautiful, against the impossibility that you could be more beautiful. And you have never been more beautiful to me than now, tonight, here, with me. I feel we have never been alone together, not truly, and now that we’re alone together, and I can see you without the distractions of the world, I can see that you are, for me, the most beautiful woman on earth.”

  “The most beautiful woman on earth?” She was quite delighted. “No matter that it isn’t true, I shall carry those words to the grave.”

  “Please don’t mention the grave,” he said, with enough seriousness of tone, he would have thought, to cause her to stop laughing immediately. But this request only intensified her laughter.

  “It was merely a figure of speech,” she said. “I’m not about to go to my grave, and neither are you.”

  “But my mother is,” he found it necessary to relate.

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s died,” he said.

  Now, after all this, and on this note, she was finally up and in his arms.

  “I loved your mother.” She trembled against him.

  “And she loved you.”

  “I believe she did.”

  “And I love you.”

  “You love me?”

  “I do, Clara. Yes, I do.”

  She wiped her face hard against his shoulder, which he was surprised to find she reached, and then pulled back so she could gaze upon his face. “And does your love include desire?”

  “Yes.”

  “You desire me?”

  “Yes.”

  “With all your heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “And with all the rest of you as well?”

  “Where did you learn to speak like this?”

  “Thus far, only to myself.”

  Sometime, in the middle of the night, he truly wanted to sleep. But she would not let him. As he sought refuge from the winter air beneath the thin hotel sheet and the almost-as-thin hotel feather comforter, she sat beside him naked with her legs tucked up beneath her upon the thin hotel feather bed, a posture no longer modest as, he had discovered, neither was she.

  So delighted did she seem—with herself, with him, with what they had done and what she clearly wanted to do again—and so almost nervously, ecstatically alive, that, when her mouth was not upon his, she went on talking and talking and talking. There was no stopping her. She chattered away like someone who can subsist on the very words she relinquishes, feasting on her happiness and curiosity.

  “You smell good,” she said. “Did you bathe just for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “So you suspected we might end up like this?”

  “Like what?” he asked, to hear what she might say.

  “Doing what we have done.”

  “And what have we done?”

  “You don’t know?” she asked with feigned shock. “Have I made so little impression upon you that you’re unaware of what has recently passed between us?”

  “Did something pass between us? I was under the impression that we left too little space for anything to pass between us.”

  She bent to plant a kiss upon his cheek. He was, once again, amazed at the suppleness of her body, how she could not only sit upon her own legs but from that position also tilt and swivel, rotate and virtually pirouette, anchored to the earth, the bed, or to himself by her sweet, small backside, which had remained childish, while the rest of her had transformed, as if before his own blind eyes, into womanhood—breasts, mouth, chin, forehead, shoulders, waist.

  With her lips still upon his cheek, moving as she spoke, she said softly, “You bathed for me, but you did not shave. Tell me, Robert—did your previous lovers prefer you to shave?”

  “Previous lovers?” he said disingenuously.

  “Oh, I want to know about them all.” She rolled off him and once more sat upon her legs, but now so close to him that her shins pressed against his side and her hair, which she had let fall like some last piece of clothing when she had first undressed before him, sought out the fingers of his raised left hand. “I want to know about Agnes Carus. Did you make love to Agnes?”

  He shook his head.

  “Oh, I find that hard to believe. From the first moment I saw you two together, which was the first moment I saw you ever in my life, I was sure the two of you were making love. She was my idol, you know. And so it was quite natural that from that moment on, I, too, wanted to make love to you.”

  So shocked was Robert, he pulled down upon the hair that he had started to weave in his fingers. “But you were only—”

  She not only didn’t recoil from the pain but laughed. “A girl can want to make love even if she doesn’t know what it is. There may be a proper age for the doing of it, though I have no idea what that is, but no age can be dictated for the desiring of it. I desired to possess you. That’s all I know. As for what that might mean, I had no real idea of that until this very night. One may dream or look at pictures to the exclusion of all else in life, but there can be no preparation for the thing itself. There can be no rehearsal for the joy of this.” She slapped her hand down upon the feather bed. “That does not mean, of course, that one might not have had prior experience. In your case, I mean. In my own, I had not progressed beyond kisses, and aside from my kisses with you, not one kiss succeeded in unlocking any part of my body, least of all my heart. But if not with Agnes, then with whom? Where did you gain all your obvious experience, my fine man?”

  “Mostly in my head,” he answered, a bit distracted by her talk of kisses.

  “Mostly, but not wholly. Was it Henriette Voigt, then? What she could not have from poor Ludwig Schunke, did she get from you?”

  “No, not Henriette. Henriette is a faithful wife—if one does not count Ludwig, who would test the fidelity of any man or woman. But even Ludwig she did not…they did not…”

  Clara understood what Robert was attempting to hide from her sensibilities, whose delicacy she hoped would by now not be in question. “Did they not make love because he was too ill?”

  “His illness made her want him all the more. Dying, in our time, has come to seem more an adventure into the unknown than what it really is—delivery into the squalor of emptiness. He made Henriette feel all the more alive, and not merely in her brain. As for me, only once did I hold her in my arms, and so completely did she love Ludwig that it was more like holding him. I did, of cours
e, desire her. Who would not?”

  “Who indeed!”

  “Have I made you jealous?”

  “No longer.”

  “No longer? I would have thought—”

  “By possessing me, you have freed me. By taking me, you have given me to myself. By giving yourself to me, you have unburdened me. So speak not of jealousy. I could no longer suffer that imposter. But curiosity—oh, my God, I’m so curious I could die! What about Ernestine! Surely, you and Ernestine…”

  “No.”

  “No? I imagined it all?”

  “Imagined it? How?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly tell you, Robert. Modesty does not permit it.”

  He let his eyes travel upon her beside him, so pale and dear and wholly open and uncovered. “Modesty?”

  “It’s far easier, at least for me, I now find, to display my body than my mind.”

  “For me as well!” She seemed to have discovered something about him in revealing the same thing about herself, and to have revealed this discovery to him.

  She shook her head. “Robert, you wear your mind on your body as if it were your very clothing. I’ve always felt that everything you think and feel appears upon you instantly for everyone to see.”

  “Only for you. Everything I’ve thought and felt has been for you.”

  “Oh, really? What about Christel Schnabel then?”

  “Schnabel! Christel Schnabel!”

  “I suppose you’re going to deny her too, which is to say, deny that you did not deny giving yourself to her?”

  “No…yes…,” he sputtered.

  “Now there is a useful answer to a question,” she teased: “‘Yes…no…’”

  “That is her surname? Schnabel?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “if the Christel under discussion is the same Christel who was a pupil of my father and was seen on more than one occasion either going into or coming out of your rooms. And so fitting a surname, too, is it not? That is, if Fräulein Schnabel indeed frolicked with your Schnabel.”*

  “It is the same Christel,” he confessed. “I simply never knew her name.”

  “Well, under the circumstances, I can hardly expect that you might have called her Fräulein Schnabel, any more than you might, now that you have not denied yourself to me either, call me Fräulein Wieck. But what did you call her?”