The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  That was the other realization now so overwhelming me—and one that allowed me to sit on this bench in subzero temperatures, oblivious to the cold. Love. For all those days after first seeing Petra, I kept trying to temper the emotional wave that had blindsided me with the thought: it just can’t happen. I told myself a dozen reasons why things would not work out, why Petra would get cold feet and push me away. After she ran off into the night during our first dinner together, I felt an acute loss. With her vanishing came the realization that this just might never be, that a door had been slammed shut on something so tangible, so electric, so possible, so enormous.

  But now . . . now . . . this was actual, concrete. Again I found myself running the film of the last thirty-six hours over again in that screening room that occupies the back of my head: the immense passion, the profound intimacy, the sense of total complicity, and, of course, the knowledge that I had met the woman of my life. As I sat there, staring up at the wintry Berlin sky, I had a moment of dread when I wondered: say she panics today and does what I did with Ann, runs away from someone who just wants the best for her, for us?

  Trust her, trust it, I tried to tell myself. You are no longer alone in the world. You have someone who not only sees in you what you see in her—but who wants what it all represents as badly as you do.

  The cold finally got me moving again—and as I had already jogged up to the Tiergarten I now headed farther west toward the Krankenhaus. I had a small daypack on my back this morning, containing all of Alaistair’s mail as well as several newspapers and a few back issues of The New Yorker. When I reached his bedside and proffered assorted letters and the magazines, his first comment to me was:

  “What’s that old line about ‘shooting the messenger’? I mean, did you really have to bring me every fucking demand for money that assorted bloodsucking banks and companies are making upon me?”

  “Life, I’m afraid, does go on, and I sensed that when they spring you from here, you might not want to walk back into a room full of creditors.”

  “Did you bring my checkbook?”

  “It’s in the file with all the bills.”

  “You’re even more organized than I am. And I hate the fucking New Yorker magazine. All those patrician, anglophile New Englanders writing about fucking their neighbor’s wife in the nursery while snow falls on Boston and everyone downstairs is singing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful.’ Then there was that eighty-page dirge I was reading the other day about the origins of the Swiss Army knife. I know it makes a certain sort of East Coast American feel worldly and literate, but Jesus, the sclerosis that simply leaps off the page . . .”

  “So the withdrawal symptoms are behind you?”

  “You’re catching me on a good half hour. Still, the substitute, though dreary, is making the days slightly less intolerable. The doctors think I will be banged up here for at least another fortnight, until they’re certain I’m thoroughly detoxed, born-again, and all that. But let’s get off the all-encompassing subject of me and address the blinding glimpse of the obvious which I see before me.”

  “By which you mean?”

  “Oh my word, he has gone all coy on me. Coy and demure and bashful . . . and now, my word, he is blushing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to stop a thoroughly goofy smile from spreading across my face.

  “Her name, monsieur. Her name.”

  “Petra.”

  “Ah, eine Deutsche . . .”

  “That’s right.”

  “And it’s love, isn’t it?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “My son, you are as transparent as water. The moment you walked in here, I thought: Bastard . . . it’s happened to him. I’m not going to say anything more, except . . . and this is the voice of experience talking . . . guard it with your life. Because what you are feeling right now . . . it happens once or twice during a lifetime.”

  “Is that what you felt with Frederick?”

  “My word, you remember his name.”

  “Of course, I remember his name.”

  “Let’s not continue talking about him, otherwise I might jump ship and head out into the night in a few hours and score the first bag of smack I can find. My goal for the future is to live in that zone that is somewhere beyond the unbearable. Or to put it another way, this is a subject I wish to sidestep in the future. Because . . .”

  He fell silent for a moment, then turned away and looked out the nearby window, a shaft of winter light illuminating his face and highlighting a sadness that was tempered by an interesting incandescence—as if the discovery of all that had hit me brought back, for him, the same glow, the same sense of possibility and emotional immensity.

  “Get out of here now,” he then said. “What I need to do right now is embrace the mundane and dodge all that you’re feeling, as bloody envious as I am of it all.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  “But you will come by tomorrow, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Any news of Mehmet?”

  “He had another job today, so he couldn’t make it over. But outside of a final varnishing of your floorboards, your studio is essentially back to what it used to be. In fact it’s spanking new and improved.”

  “And when they finally end this incarceration, I plan to show the world just how fucking resilient I am. Everything destroyed by that talentless wanker I can redo in a matter of days.”

  “I’ve no doubt about that.”

  “One last thing I’m going to say to you before the powers-that-be tell you that visiting hours are over: enjoy your good fortune. You’ve been dealt four aces, my friend. Play them.”

  On my run back home, Alaistair’s words kept ricocheting around my head, the way that sage advice always lingers. That is, if you allow it to take up residence in your psyche and gain purchase. And when you begin to trust your heart for the first time in your life.

  I got back to the apartment and stripped the bed of its wildly contorted, soiled sheets. Then I remade it with fresh linens—and headed out to the Korean laundry two streets away and dumped off the dirty ones. From there I went to a butcher and bought an entire chicken, then stopped by the Turkish corner store for French beans and potatoes and two more bottles of that Pinot Grigio which we so easily drank yesterday. Back home I prepared the chicken and the potatoes, then scrubbed down all surfaces, putting out clean towels, making everything immaculate. As six p.m. approached, I began to obsessively glance at my watch every five minutes. Then I heard the key turn in the lock of the main door below. Bounding down the stairs, I got there just as Petra came in, the beret on her head wet with that evening’s sleet, a suitcase in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. But what I saw before all these secondary details was the huge beaming smile on her face, the electricity in her eyes, the way she quickly shifted the groceries to a chair, tossed her suitcase to one side of me, and threw herself into my arms. We kissed deeply, clutching each other so close, Petra then taking my head in her hands and pulling her lips off mine for a moment to look at me and say:

  “Thank God you’re here.”

  “Of course, I’m here.”

  “All day long, I was afraid you’d be taken away from me.”

  “And I had the same fear, the same dread. But now . . .”

  “Take me upstairs,” she whispered.

  Once there we fell onto the bed and taking off each other’s clothes, whispering “Ich liebe dich” over and over again, Petra again pulling me into her immediately, letting out a sharp moan, digging her fingers into my back, our lovemaking turning wild, without abandon.

  Some time later—I’d lost track of the minute, the hour, the day itself—Petra said:

  “I want us to be making love like this twenty years from now.”

  “I want us to make love like this when we decide to have a child together.”

  Petra looked at me with surprise.

  “Do you really mean that?” she
asked.

  “Have I jumped the gun?”

  “Hardly.”

  “It’s not like I’m suggesting we do this next week. It’s just . . .”

  I broke off, worried that I was entering delicate territory.

  “Go on,” she said, stroking my face.

  “If you love somebody, then you do want, eventually, a child with them. I can’t believe I’m saying such things because . . . well, I’ve never thought this before.”

  “And if I told you you’re the first man with whom I’ve ever wanted a child . . . well, I hope you won’t now be running off in fear to join the French Foreign Legion.”

  “I would never run away from you. On the contrary, I want everything possible for us. Everything.”

  “As do I, as do I. And you must know I would never stop you from moving around the world for your work, as long as you always come back to me.”

  “I’m not even thinking about travel right now.”

  “But it’s what you do, Thomas. I don’t want to change you. I just want to be a part of your life.”

  “And I want our life to be just that. Our life. And that could also mean us traveling together.”

  “But I’d be in your way.”

  “You will never, ever, be in my way.”

  “All those hours away from you today . . . it was almost intolerable. But I left work early and went back to my room and brought some clothes with me.”

  “Yes, I was very pleased when I saw the suitcase with you.”

  “But what’s so me is the fact that I kept thinking, all day, the moment you saw the suitcase you’d change your mind, think I was moving in far too quickly.”

  “And I kept thinking, all day as well, that you might get cold feet about us, and would run off again into the middle of the night.”

  We stayed in bed for another hour, lying side-by-side, never taking our eyes off each other, talking, talking.

  “You know that Rilke poem which begins: ‘Be ahead of all partings’?” she asked.

  “Rather ominous advice.”

  “But when you read it in the context of the poem—which is one of his sonnets to Orpheus—you see that it’s all about the need to accept the transient nature of everything.”

  “But this love is not transient.”

  “That is a wonderful sentiment, Thomas. But we are both mortal. Like it or not, eighty years from now neither of us will be here. We can’t sidestep the transience that simply is temporal life. But the thing about Rilke’s poem, he actually asks us to celebrate the impermanence with which we struggle. And for non-hereafter types like ourselves, there are these three lines that, when I first read them, struck me so forcibly.”

  “Can you remember them?”

  Not taking her eyes away from mine, our hands entwined, she recited, in a soft but wonderfully articulate voice, the following lines:

  “Be—and yet know the great void where all things begin,

  “The infinite source of your own most intense vibration

  “So that, in this only time around, you may give it your perfect assent.”

  “‘. . . in this only time around,’” I said, repeating the line. “That is so damn true.”

  “It’s why the poem has such heft—because it’s alive to the need to make the best of this thing called life.”

  “Which we will always do together.”

  “Always remind me of that, if I ever get overwhelmed by things.”

  Hunger finally got us out of bed. I put the chicken in the oven, then helped her unpack her groceries. I also showed Petra the space in the wardrobe that I’d cleared for her. She had brought just three changes of clothes—two skirts, a simple hippie-ish floral dress, her leather and tweed jackets. Seeing all these items hanging on the wardrobe rail—along with the two sweaters and underwear she stacked on a shelf—so pleased me, as did the sight of her toiletries in the bathroom. She was installing herself here now. Our story together was truly beginning.

  Over dinner that night, she said:

  “Now here is a question I have never asked a man in my life before: how on earth did you learn how to properly roast a chicken?”

  “That’s a skill just about every American boy is taught. My father—despite being a hard-drinking advertising executive—could actually cook rather well.”

  “And your mother?”

  “A total princess when it came to the kitchen. Her father—the Diamond District jeweler—could afford a housekeeper, which was just as well, as my grandmother did very little except play canasta, talk about how disappointing her life was, and tell my mother that she was worthless.”

  “Did your mother believe her?”

  “Absolutely, which was a big part of her tragedy. She was educated at the right schools. She was literate and by no means stupid. But she also married the wrong man as a small act of rebellion, then hated the fact that we were living in what was, for her, diminished status, though even telling you this makes me feel ridiculous, compared with the way you had to live in East Berlin.”

  “You know, Thomas, there’s no need to feel you have to downplay the sorrows of your childhood because they don’t match up to the perceived horrors of the GDR. I knew friends who had very wonderful childhoods there. I knew friends who had unhappy ones. Decency, cruelty, happiness, unhappiness . . . all those facets of the human emotional palette, they are rather borderless, aren’t they? The important thing is how your childhood ends up making you feel about yourself. Are you someone who comes away furious at the world or able to handle everything it throws at you? Do you believe you deserve to be happy, or do you quietly do everything in your power to upend all possibilities of contentment? And if yours was difficult, sad . . .”

  “I still believe in the possibility of happiness.”

  She slid her fingers through mine.

  “So do I, or, at least, I do since you walked into my life.”

  “Walked into my life. That’s lovely.”

  “And so accurate. It’s largely how life works, and, more specifically, how it changes. You’re going through your life—the day-to-day stuff, business as usual, all very routine. You’re trapped into thinking that this is how life is now. Then you walk into somebody’s office at work and there you are. I guess, the hardest thing for me was actually not knowing if you felt the same way about me.”

  “You mean, you knew immediately, too?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “But I am surprised. You were so reserved, so distant.”

  “That’s because I was so anxious, so nervous that it might not happen, or that I’d run away from it because I feared it not happening, which, of course, I did in that restaurant.”

  “But you came back. You chose happiness.”

  “And now,” she whispered, “let’s go back to the bedroom.”

  We could not get enough of each other. This was complete mutual intoxication, a physical totality that served to express the immense emotional totality of what we were both feeling. This is what they all talked about when using the phrase true love.

  We fell asleep early that night. When I woke the next morning all the dishes were washed, breakfast was laid out on the table, and Bill Evans was on the Victrola.

  “You didn’t have to do all this,” I said, wandering still half-asleep toward the table and kissing Petra good morning.

  “Yes I did, and I am stopping by my room today and bringing back some records. So tomorrow you’ll be waking up to Stop Making Sense.”

  We talked about the day ahead, and how she had to deal with a very long and dreary translation of an essay on Heinrich Böll: “A wonderful writer, but in the hands of the dry little English academic who wrote the piece, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum comes across as the seven stations of the cross.”

  “It’s an interesting choice of piece to discuss on Radio Liberty, given how it so thoroughly criticizes the Bundesrepublik, especially the intelligence services.”

  “I think that
was the point of commissioning the essay, showing how you in the West . . .”

  Suddenly she caught herself and flinched.

  “We in the West,” she said.

  “You don’t have to correct yourself. You’re in exile.”

  “Maybe one day I’ll feel part of this place.”

  “Or elsewhere.”

  “Would I like America? Would I fit in?”

  “Now, if I were from some small town in Indiana or Nebraska, I think the culture shock would be extreme. But you and Manhattan? It would be love at first sight.”

  “I adore your absolute certainty, Thomas.”

  “I am going to bring you to Manhattan.”

  “Can we leave today?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’d do that right now?”

  “Say the word and I’ll get on the phone and find two seats.”

  “Now I feel embarrassed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because even if I wanted to, I couldn’t just leave Berlin. My contract with Radio Liberty is, at least, for another year. The government department that deals with the integration of GDR citizens into the Bundesrepublik found me this job. Just as they also found me my room and gave me three thousand marks—a small fortune to me—to buy clothes, bed linens and towels, and generally ease my transition over here. To break the contract now . . . it would seem ungrateful, wouldn’t it?”

  “They’d get over it. But hey, my book means I need to be here for many months to come, and I can stay in Berlin as long as you need to stay. So if Manhattan has to wait . . .”

  “But not for too long,” she said, kissing me. Then starting to gather up the breakfast dishes she said, “After I deal with these, I’d best get off to work.”

  “You go do what you have to do. I’ll take care of these.”

  “A man who shops and cooks and does the dishes.”

  “That’s not so wildly unusual, is it?”

  “It’s just . . . my husband was rather ‘traditional’ in the domestic arena. He was a writer. He wrote plays that rarely got performed. One of them did get done a great deal in assorted theaters around the GDR. Another got him into considerable trouble. But that’s another story. And for all his talk of kameradschaft—comradeship—he was a very conservative man when it came to so-called sexual roles. I was his wife. He expected me to keep the apartment clean, and to cook and do the laundry. It didn’t matter that his plays were no longer getting staged anywhere, or that he was not even permitted to work . . .”