by Anna Winger
When the doorbell rang again Heike beat him to the front door and opened it. Hope stopped short on the doormat and leaned against the wall.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I’ll come back later.”
“Wer ist das?”
“Are you okay?” Walter asked Hope over Heike’s shoulder.
“I’m fine. Am I interrupting something?”
“Yes.” Heike switched into broken English. “Who are you?”
She pulled Hope into the foyer of Walter’s apartment.
“Why wears he a swimming costume? What’s going on?”
“Why don’t you tell her?”
“California,” Walter mumbled. “I’m going to California.”
“What?”
Heike paused to light a cigarette she’d pulled out of a small purse hanging from her wrist. A cloud of smoke enveloped Hope, who waved one hand quickly in front of her face.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d put that out,” she said.
Heike rolled her eyes.
“Americans.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah.”
“Seriously. I’m pregnant.”
Heike pulled hard on her cigarette before tapping its long ash onto the hardwood floor. Walter stared at Hope as if she had slapped him.
“I just took the test this morning,” she said. “I was coming up now to tell you.”
Heike pulled on her cigarette. “Why?”
“What?”
“This is Walter’s baby?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
He cleared his throat.
“Did you ever meet the American guy who moved in downstairs last summer? Hope is his wife.”
“American Dave? He has a wife?”
“I was in New York till October.”
“Funny,” said Heike. “I always think he’s with that Polish girl from the wrestling movie.”
“Who?”
“You know that girl on the posters. They always come in and out of the building together.”
Walter recalled acutely the sensation of Heike’s tongue buried in the crease behind his ear. She dropped her cigarette into a cup of cold tea sitting on a table by the door where it went out like an exhausted fuse. Hope’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, please,” said Heike.
“I just don’t understand what you mean.”
“Time for Action,” said Heike. “You know, Dave’s project. You’re his wife.”
“No.”
She checked the clock on her mobile phone impatiently.
“He explained to me once in the lobby. Just like what he is doing in Ecuador but better, because pornography is big business.”
“I thought it was a secret,” said Walter indignantly. “Why did he tell you?”
It felt strange to speak English to Heike. He wondered if Dave had been coming on to her. Bastard.
“I tell him I’m an actress. He ask some questions about makeup. So I ask questions too. He said the pornography is bigger industry than Hollywood because language is not important. Totally international. Of course I am interested.”
Heike shrugged.
“Instead of knitting sweaters, the Polish girls make the videos and sell all over the world,” she said. “Progress because they were prostitutes before. Sure beats selling blow jobs at the side of the road, he said. I remember because it sounds funny.”
Walter pictured Heike on the poster: arms in the air like a champion, her sly look following him from eyes pasted up on walls all over town.
“I don’t believe you,” said Hope.
“I make this up? Look. It’s not a bad idea. Very modern, actually. He is helping people.”
Hope glared at her.
“It’s a horrible idea.”
Walter reached out for Heike’s arm.
“Americans,” she said again, flinching him off. “You are so uptight.”
She turned to Walter and spoke in German.
“I’m leaving now. You know how to reach me.”
He lingered at the front door after she left, silently dividing up the female leads in Tom Cruise movies into two groups. There were only a few Heikes, he realized. The girlfriend in The Color of Money, the first fiancée in Jerry Maguire, random women in the Mission: Impossibles. Most of them were Hopes. Nicole Kidman always played Hopes; Renée Zellweger, the wives in The Firm and Cocktail; all Hopes. The brunette in the new film was definitely a Hope. Walter was almost surprised to find the real one still standing in his foyer, staring miserably at the floor. When he tried to read her mind, he caught only a fleeting image of the Polish girl with Dave in a headlock, his big body flaccid against the gym mat while the girl’s champion ass lorded triumphantly over his chest.
“You knew about this?”
“The girl? No.”
“I mean the project.”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I assumed Dave had told you.”
“Yeah. Well, he didn’t,” she sniffed loudly.
“Where is he now?”
“He left early this morning. I tried to call him earlier, to tell him about the baby, but I didn’t get through. I guess his phone’s out of range.”
She wiped one cheek with the back of her hand.
“What am I going to do?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Walter said.
The weather outside was cold but clear. Berlin’s distance from the Gulf Stream stripped it of Western Europe’s humidity, and its citizens suffered symptoms of the desert: rough skin, cracked fingernails, dry tonsils, chapped lips. Walter put one hand on Hope’s back, steering her north toward the university campus and the park beyond. Students streamed past them in both directions, shouting to one another, lit cigarettes hanging from their mouths.
“Why do they all wear black coats?” she asked. “It’s the same in New York. You’d think in cold climates everyone would wear bright colors to cheer themselves up.”
Walter looked down at his own black coat and around at the black-clad students’ bulky bodies, dreary silhouettes against the cityscape.
“People only wear yellow and turquoise in sunny places. Why is that?”
He took her arm, leading her past the train station toward the entrance to the zoo. A tour group was assembled in front of the large stone elephants at the gates. One of them came up with a digital camera.
“Can you take a picture of us?”
He had a British accent. Hope peeled away silently, as if resigned to perform a regular duty. The camera in hand she waved the group closer together.
“You ready?”
“Cheese!”
When she handed the camera back, they asked her where to get a bite to eat.
“Walk that way for about ten minutes,” she told them. “Then take a left at the light. On the opposite corner you’ll see a café with big windows and comfortable chairs. The menu is in English.”
Walter felt proud. Most people in Berlin would never take the time, even on a good day.
“Should we see the giraffes and zebras?” he asked her.
“Isn’t it too cold for them?”
“They take good care of them. They have lots of African animals here. Elephants and gorillas and everything. There’s a panda. The hyenas even had babies this spring.”
“In captivity?”
“Well, yes.”
“That’s so depressing.”
There was no one else in line to buy tickets and the guard at the front booth was clearly impatient to get back to his newspaper.
“There are all different kinds of parrots,” said Walter.
Hope looked through the gates as if the parrots were flying right there in front of them, a few steps away.
“They’re really colorful. None are black. One of them can repeat anything you say exactly, in any language. Once I heard him mimicking an Italian tourist.”
“We could train him to say bitch in Pol
ish,” she said, “or asshole. Do you know the word for asshole in Polish? He could repeat it for me till I remember it, then I could repeat it into Dave’s answering machine.”
Forget the zoo. Walter looked over her shoulder at what was once the center of West Berlin. The neighborhood had been a symbol of capitalist power in the 1960s and 1970s, but now the buildings were shabby, and many appeared to be empty. It was three in the afternoon and already getting dark.
“It’s getting cold. Let’s go to Café Keese.”
Hope sighed.
“You’ll like it,” he said. “You’ll see. They play music in the afternoon and people dance. It’s a real Berlin establishment, just around the corner. It’ll cheer you up.”
Inside the club the light was dim, punctuated by the reflection of colored spots off a disco ball. Walter hadn’t been inside in years but it was exactly as he had remembered it. Velvet-cushioned seats and small tables lined a round dance floor, each one equipped with its own old-fashioned telephone.
“Why the telephone?”
“So people can ask each other to dance.”
He waved to the waiter.
“I think the average age here is about seventy-two,” said Hope.
“It’s Monday afternoon. Germany has mandatory retirement at sixty-five. That’s a lot of old people with nothing to do. In the summer they go walking, in the winter they come here.”
Nat King Cole sang his heart out over the loudspeakers, working his way through an album of greatest hits. They watched the dancers move together slowly in pairs.
“The women are dancing with other women.”
“There aren’t enough men. We die off early.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? So many women, so little time.”
She ran her hands across her stomach. He leaned forward to make sure she could hear him.
“That isn’t my problem.”
The waiter brought them Cokes and pretzel sticks. Hope stared like they were the tools of an exotic tribe and she had no idea what to do with them. Walter ate a pretzel, grabbed his Coke and stood up.
“Where are you going?”
He walked a few paces to the left and sat down three tables away, picked up the phone and dialed her number. She let it ring twice before picking it up.
“Hello?”
The phone volume had been adjusted for people of a certain age. Even with the dance music, he could hear her clearly.
“Hello.”
They looked at each other through the flashing light.
“Dave told me that when you speak German on the phone, people think you’re Tom Cruise.”
“When I speak on the phone, my voice sounds more similar to the way it sounds recorded, in movies. That is, people recognize it then as the one they know for Tom Cruise.”
“Speak to me like that.”
“In German?”
Walter tried to recall some relevant dialogue.
“Was machst du hier allein?” he said. “What are you doing here alone?
He ran through some of the better pick-up lines from Cocktail. Once he got going, the German dialogue rolled off his tongue.
“It must be great to be someone else for a while,” she said. “I wish I could do that.”
“Be someone else?”
“Get away from yourself.”
Walter took a deep breath.
“Dann, komm mit mir nach Kalifornien.”
“Come with you?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Nach Kalifornien.”
“Kalifornien.”
She didn’t understand the translation. Walter cleared his throat and said it in English.
“California.”
She was leaning forward over the telephone.
“Wann?”
“Nächste Woche.”
“Next week.”
“After the premiere of my new movie.”
The disco ball sprayed blobs of color across the room. Red, yellow and green across her forehead. An eternity passed.
“Christmastime is nice in Los Angeles,” he offered.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yes.”
Before she could have a chance to take it back, Walter hung up the phone. Yes. None of the fireworks he had expected went off. Maybe she was just kidding, but when he stared at her across the room, she looked totally serious. She was playing with a pretzel, breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces, arranging the pieces into a pattern by the phone. It was an unlikely escape plan. The chances of meeting Tom Cruise were slim. The chances of Hope coming halfway across the world with him were possibly slimmer. But the image of the three of them together on the beach at the distant rim of continental America was so seductive, so palpably real in that moment, that despite all suggestions to the contrary, he believed it was going to happen. Sometimes, he thought, sometimes it was just a question of having a plan, however unlikely, for everything to fall into place. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted to feel her breasts pressed into his chest. He stood up and walked to her table.
“Should we dance?”
When they met at the edge of the dance floor, her body collapsed against his like a rag doll. They moved slowly in circles without speaking and did not stop dancing when the song changed. Walter held her in his arms but he could not feel the warmth of her body through her sweater or see her face, which was buried into his neck. When the band behind Nat King Cole kicked into high gear, he felt her crying; first the piano, then the strings, then the horn section, muffling her sobs. He just kept moving as her tears soaked into the collar of his shirt. Old women looked at them and smiled sweetly. From the outside, he thought, we look like a couple in love. It was a beginning. Hope was coming with him to California! He would take the role being offered him and run with it: a family man. Tom Cruise had children, didn’t he? Walter saw them all on a Malibu terrace overlooking the Pacific. The golden pink sunset, the sound of waves in the background, kids running around on the beach below. Let this be my midlife crisis, he thought, pulling Hope tightly into him and closing his eyes.
19
From January to June 1985, Walter ate scrambled eggs every Tuesday and Thursday morning at the diner with his grandfather. They had fallen into an easy routine. They sat at separate tables but shared the newspaper. They swapped stories like two strangers on neighboring bar stools night after night. His grandfather was friendly but his warmth had distance built into it, a chalk line drawn firmly through the playing field. He said he was a doctor, long retired, that he played a lot of tennis. He never mentioned his family, preferring to talk about sports and the weather. Walter was careful not to kick the conversation out-of-bounds.
“After World War II, I stayed in the service,” his grandfather told him early on. “We moved around a lot. Eventually we settled here and I went into private practice, but at the end, in the early sixties, I was stationed in Germany for two years.”
“Did you like it?”
“No, to be honest. Too cold in the winter.” He snorted one breath of laughter through his nose. “Didn’t much mix with locals.”
“Nobody?”
“The war was still a recent memory for us, Hans. We did our work on the base and kept a distance. Your family and friends sound very nice, but believe me, the people in the village we were in were nothing like you.”
He finished his eggs and pushed his plate away. He never ate bacon and so Walter didn’t either. He copied other things too, after a while: tucking in his shirt, pulling up his socks, rubbing one hand across his head, then still thick with hair, in exactly the way his grandfather rubbed his own bald pate.
“In fact, you don’t seem German to me at all,” said his grandfather. “I mean that as a compliment.”
After almost two years in the United States, Walter was used to this particular compliment. Casting directors, even other actors, often said it in an effort to be comforting. With the exception of Sharon,
almost everyone he’d gotten to know in California had said it at some point, as if to be German, even to seem German, would be shameful, which he accepted. Everyone of his generation in Germany had been trained to enter the conversation with head bowed, to apologize for the sins of their forefathers as a matter of course and principle. They knew never to wave a flag, or promote their own agendas too aggressively. In Hollywood, when he occasionally came across other Germans, he ignored them and they ignored him, too. No one wanted to call attention to themselves or to be seen as a group on foreign soil. By the time he started having breakfast with his grandfather on a regular basis, Walter hadn’t even spoken German aloud in more than a year. Still, he knew he retained a minimal accent in English, because people always asked where he came from.
He was used to receiving this particular compliment, but when his grandfather said it, he could not help but wonder if he meant it as some kind of bait. Actually, my mother was American, he might have replied. But he believed that the moment of recognition would come about naturally if they could just get close enough. He was careful not to say anything that might betray his true identity prematurely. We have time, he told himself. So he stayed in character as Hans, drawing freely from the scenarios cooked up by television writers for Schönes Wochenende’s faithful audience. Hans had been a character on the show for three seasons. A lifetime, thought Walter as he replaced his own biography with Hans’s fictitious one. Sixty-six episodes complete with a family, location names, background details, funny anecdotes, a first love, childhood friends, even pets; he never ran out of things to talk about. Since his grandfather hadn’t been back to Germany since the early sixties, the anachronistic world of Schönes Wochenende, contrived to tap into the German audience’s nostalgia for simpler times, rang true: milkmaids in lace-up dresses with their cleavage spilling out, red-nosed men drunk on Weissbier, hilly fields dotted picturesquely with bales of hay. His grandfather listened attentively, he seemed to enjoy it, so Walter ran with it. The more Hans stories that he told, the more he took them for his own; the more he believed them, the more he wanted to tell. Walter told his grandfather everything. At the time, the fact that none of it was true seemed insignificant.
