by Anna Winger
“Just hold your head up and ignore them. You know how people are. It’s a big deal today but it’ll be forgotten by tomorrow.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it.”
“What?”
Bodo sighed.
“Leute von Heute ran a profile of Heike today.”
Walter looked down at the place setting beneath him. To his left, Klara was translating the menu for Hope. He reached for a glass of water and brought it to his lips but didn’t drink. Out the corner of one eye he saw that a man waiting for a table by the entrance was reading the local paper, today’s issue with the profile inside it; the very issue sitting unread on Walter’s kitchen table at home.
“I see.”
“That’s not the worst of it.”
“How’d she look?”
“What do you think? It was a fluff piece.”
“Nice.”
“Look, nobody reads this shit—”
“Everybody reads it.”
“Well, nobody cares.”
“Of course they do—”
Walter looked over at Heike, who turned away. The other people at her table were laughing. Regulars all over the restaurant were watching him under heavy lids, over wine-glasses, holding their collective breath, waiting for him to make a scene. Wasn’t this why they read the tabloids in the first place? Why they ate at an industry restaurant instead of staying at home? Fight, fight, fight. Even Bodo and Klara, babysitting him so carefully. He imagined pulling the white tablecloth out from underneath the drinks at Heike’s table, the sound of glasses crashing to the floor, the smell of liquor, a stricken look on faces all over the restaurant. He could have silenced the room instantly by raising his voice. It was a strangely powerful realization. How would he begin? We live in a cynical, cynical world. Walter looked over again and this time Heike languidly returned his stare.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Hope, who put down her menu.
He moved quickly toward the door, leaving Klara and Bodo at the table. A tall man with a black cap was waving at Hope, trying to get her attention; he appeared to have only one ear. The eyes of fifty other curious diners were following them. As he reached the front of the restaurant, Heike called out Walter’s name, drawing on the first syllable so that it sounded worn out. He pretended not to hear her.
“Walter,” she called again, this time sharper, like a pout.
When still he didn’t stop, the man who had been reading the newspaper by the door blocked his path.
“She’s talking to you.”
Walter tried to shake him off without looking at him. He focused on the velvet curtain ahead, the sanctuary beyond it. Keep moving, he told himself. Make it to the sidewalk without turning around.
“Walter,” said Heike. “Stop.”
“She said stop.”
The man grasped Walter’s shoulder. He was maybe thirty, blond, red cheeks and a wide chest, nondescript; a tourist from Bremen or Hanover from the sound of his accent, clearly come to the capital, to The Wild West itself, looking for exactly this sort of brush with national celebrity. He was holding the newspaper in the hand that wasn’t on Walter’s shoulder. It was folded open in half, so that the profile of Heike was turned outward and Walter came face to face with the glamorous shot that took up the top right corner of the page. Three-quarter turn, glossy hair, come-hither smile.
“Let’s go,” he said again to Hope.
But the tourist from Bremen was still in his way. He glanced down at the side of the newspaper he was holding and back at Walter.
“What are you going to do about it, Santa Claus?”
He said Santa Claus as if it were a four-letter word. Walter could feel the heat from the eyes of the restaurant crowd, Klara, Bodo, Heike and her friends. Hope came up behind him.
“Please,” said Walter, so that only the man could hardly hear him.
“What was that?”
“Please.”
“Walter,” called Heike again.
“It’s Christmastime, Santa. Be nice to the lady.”
He wanted to rip the man’s hand from his shoulder and spit in his face, but in front of this rapt audience he would not give Heike the satisfaction.
“Santa?” The man grinned. “Isn’t that you?”
He turned the paper around so that the other side of the fold was now visible. Under the headline “People from Yesterday” were two pictures. A production still from Schönes Wochenende taken twenty years earlier and a paparazzi shot taken on the terrace of The Wild West in the summer. In the first one, Walter’s thick hair was gelled back and he was grinning like a playboy. In the second one, his bald spot shone like a light over the grimace on his face. He was wearing a loose red T-shirt that made his belly hang over his belt. The caption read: Santa Claus came early this year.
After the planes flew into the World Trade Center in September, Walter had spent all night transfixed in front of the television at the studio drinking coffee with his colleagues who comforted each other with stories of near-death experiences they had personally survived.
“I thought my world was coming to an end,” said one editor, describing the day he discovered that his first wife was having an affair. “But then I met my second wife.”
“I felt something cool at the back of my neck and in that split second everything changed,” said an actor, about being held up at gunpoint on a bus in Brazil. “But the real surprise came afterward, when the thieves got off the bus with my money and left me alive. It was almost as if it never happened.”
“This too will pass,” they told each other. “Life goes on.”
Only Walter had said nothing. They were wrong. Life might go on, but things would be different. These experiences, however distant, altered the course of your life. It might be imperceptible at first, but eventually their force gained momentum, until you had veered so far off in the wrong direction that you were undeniably lost. Standing by the front door at The Wild West in December of 2001, the man holding up the newspaper removed his hand from Walter’s shoulder, but it didn’t matter. The restaurant around him had already disappeared. Walter saw only the photographs in the paper, and in the distance traveled between them he counted backward, sixteen years, to that last day in California in June of 1985. His grandparents in their dark living room. Hot congestion on the 405. Tears streaming down his face.
“Walter.”
Hope said it this time, not Heike. She was next to him but he heard his name as if she were whispering it through plastic cups drawn taut with string.
“Walter.”
She wrapped her arm around his waist. Her small body was surprisingly strong, he thought, but she couldn’t stop the palm trees speeding past out the window on the freeway, the candy-colored houses gone by in a blur, the smell of fuel and sweat and the ocean. She couldn’t stop the tears streaming down his face because he was actually crying now, sobbing like a baby in the middle of the restaurant. Hope couldn’t stop him and she didn’t try. She propped him up gently, led him out through the velvet curtains and took him home.
22
By the spring of 1985, Walter had stopped going to auditions or reading Variety or sending out his show reel. He stayed at Sharon’s all the time, now that there was no reason to go back to Los Angeles. By March, they were no longer having sex; by April, he was sleeping on the couch. He moved through his daily Prince Charming shows in an automatic daze. Line here, flick of cape, line, worried expression, line, thrilled surprise, bend on knee, final line, kiss.
“You’re not yourself, Walter,” said Sharon.
“No,” he replied. “I’m not.”
The two mornings a week with his grandfather was the only thing that mattered. In between, when he wasn’t working, Walter drove aimlessly around Orange County. Sometimes he went all the way to the beach and looked out at the ocean and practiced Hans’s stories aloud until they came out like spontaneous memories. In the shower
he reviewed the chronology of Hans’s life so that he wouldn’t get anything backward during a performance (because that’s what it was, he realized, the best performance of his short career). He had played Hans already for three years on television, but this time he absorbed the character completely; he took the outline of himself, like a cartoon on the page of a comic book, and filled it in with Hans until the space inside was solid color. If the first time he’d played him for the teenage girls in the boondocks, for the cuddle pictures and the free drinks and the mob scenes in shopping malls, now he played him for the one bright face in the audience, standing out from the anonymous throng. And if he played him differently, better, it was not because he’d learned new techniques. In the intervening two years, he hadn’t taken any classes or done research. He had not acquired a method, a guru or a teacher; he was simply motivated. For the first time in his life, at twenty-three, Walter wanted something passionately: to reel his grandfather in, make him comfortable, make him laugh, make him come back again every Tuesday and Thursday. He wanted to make his grandfather love him and so he entertained him.
One morning late in May, a Tuesday, Walter arrived to find other people sitting at his grandfather’s regular table. In six months he had never been late. He looked around the restaurant at the breakfast crowd. The icy wind of the air conditioner traveled down his neck to his fingertips. Customers went in and out; the parking lot filled and emptied. His grandfather never showed up. Two days later, on Thursday, his table was simply empty. Walter ordered coffee by himself in hopes of conjuring the usual routine, but an hour later the coffee was cold and the table beside him remained empty. Over the weekend he didn’t sleep, he hardly ate, he sat on the steps in front of Sharon’s house and watched the yellow line up the middle of the street until it bent to the left and then to the right, until it zigzagged across the flat pavement baking beneath it and not a soul walked up the sidewalk. When on the following Tuesday morning his grandfather still didn’t show, Walter returned to his car and put his head down on the steering wheel in despair. Old men died, he thought, even the ones who played tennis. His grandfather was dead. Walter should have told him when he had the chance but he didn’t. Now he was gone and with him the possibility of reunion. Walter pressed his forehead into the vinyl. The most successful performance of my life, he thought, looking through the windshield at cars pulling in and out of the parking lot, unsure whether to laugh or cry. He turned the key in the ignition and pulled into midmorning traffic, blinking quickly into the sunshine. He could feel his kidneys throbbing softly in his back, the flow of his blood. REO Speedwagon played on the radio.
“Even as I wander I’m keeping you in sight,” he sang along.
When he came to the entrance to Springtime Estates, he paused.
“You’re a candle in the window on a cold, dark winter’s night.”
He crept through the community at twenty mph, its blue bungalows and evenly spaced young trees. When he hit the high notes, he closed his eyes.
“I’m getting closer than I ever thought I might.”
His grandfather’s car was sitting in the driveway of his house. Walter got out of the car and walked slowly toward the house.
“Hans.”
His grandfather greeted him at the door. He was wearing chinos and a button-down shirt, street clothes, not the usual tennis gear. He had a cast on his leg but otherwise appeared to be very much alive. Walter’s voice cracked.
“You’re okay?”
“I broke my ankle playing tennis.”
“That’s great.”
“Great?”
“I mean. I mean—”
His grandfather’s eyes narrowed.
“How did you find me here?”
“I asked the waitress.”
“She doesn’t know where I live.”
“She looked it up in the phone book for me.”
The screen door stood between them like a scrim in the theater, dividing the light: his grandfather in the cool darkness of the house and Walter in the sunshine on the doorstep.
“I was worried when you didn’t show up for a week. I thought—”
“You thought I was dead!”
“No. Yes.”
“Almost,” he said. “But not quite.”
Almost reluctantly, he pushed open the screen.
“Since you’re here you might as well come in.”
“Walter?”
Both men turned in response to the high voice that preceded a woman moving slowly toward him in a pale green housecoat. If his grandfather was old, his grandmother was ancient. Her white hair was pulled back tightly into a bun.
“Who’s this?”
“Hans,” said Walter’s grandfather, “this is my wife, Vera. Vera, this is Hans from the diner. I told you about him.”
She turned to Walter and looked him up and down.
“From Germany.”
Walter nodded.
“You came here to work at Disneyland.”
He nodded.
“What part?”
He smiled at her.
“What part, dear?”
“I play Prince Charming in the Cinderella panorama.”
“I meant which part of Germany.”
The same answer was true of Hans and himself, but still he had to think about it.
“Bavaria.”
“We lived in Bavaria,” she said. “When Walter was in the service. Did he tell you?”
“He did.”
“It was a long time ago. Before you were born, probably.”
“Probably.”
“We have pictures.”
“Really?” He took a step toward her. “I’d like to see them.”
His grandparents looked at each other. She clasped her hands together and released them.
“I feel homesick sometimes,” said Walter, as if to explain his interest.
“It does sound nice there,” said his grandfather to his wife. “A lot nicer than what we remember. He’s told me some great stories.”
He was nervous, thought Walter. He was speaking more quickly than usual, as if trying to convince his wife that what he said was true.
“Tell her about the horse, Hans. About the time you found it in the neighbors’ living room. Tell her about it.”
They were still standing in the dark foyer, where lamps were on despite the midday sun outside. There were thick curtains on the windows and wall-to-wall carpeting. Walter listened to the purr of a fan. His grandmother looked at him, seeming to consider the fabric of his T-shirt, the shape of its sleeves, the width of his neck.
“Let me see if I can find the album,” she said finally. “Come into the living room. I’ll get some lemonade.”
She was shaking almost imperceptibly when she served the drinks. Walter’s grandfather seemed to concentrate on a sliver of sunlight struggling to push in through the curtains, uncrossing and recrossing his legs. Walter’s palms were wet. He switched hands so the glass wouldn’t slip from his fingers while his grandmother searched through a cabinet at the back of the room. When she found a large leather photo album, she sat down next to him and balanced it between their laps. They touched; her skin felt like tissue paper against the muscular curve of his arm. She smelled like apricots and soap, he thought, a clean but thoroughly indoor smell. He could get used to it. She reached across him and opened the album’s cover.
Walter’s mother had been a teenager when the pictures were taken. She was wearing ice skates in one of them, standing in front of a house with her schoolbooks in another. In the background, the landscape of his childhood. The snow-capped peaks whose jagged outlines he could trace in his sleep; the ugly brown houses and grazing meadows behind them; the thick pine forests of the foothills.
“We were in the Alps,” said his grandmother. “Do you come from that area? I know there are flatter parts of Bavaria. It’s probably changed a great deal since we were there.”
“The mountains haven’t changed.”
“Of
course not.”
“They still look familiar.”
“The mountains were beautiful.”
She emphasized the verb, as if to say that nothing else was.
“You didn’t like it very much.”
“We are religious people,” she said, looking up at her husband. “To you it seems like ancient history, I’m sure, but we lived through the Second World War. It was very difficult for us.”
“Of course.”
“Germany was very difficult for us.”
“And for your daughter?”
“I’m sorry?”
Walter pointed to a picture on the page. His mother was smiling in a snowsuit. She was holding up a set of skis.
“This is your daughter?”
“Our only child. A miracle. We thought we couldn’t have any children at all and then she came to us late in life. I was forty-one years old. My husband was forty-four.”
Walter ran one finger over the yellowing photograph, his mother’s face still softened by lingering baby fat. She had been beautiful when he was a child, but thinner than the girl in these pictures, as he remembered her, sadder, wearier.
Now, he told himself. Say it now. It was a simple line; he had said it a million times before: I am Walter Baum. Walter could feel the shape of the words on his tongue, but his grandmother spoke first.
“She died the year this picture was taken,” she said.
“When?”
“1961.”
His mother had become pregnant in 1961. Walter was born in 1962. His mother died in 1971. She had been twenty-seven at the time.
“When?”
“1961.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid so. She was seventeen. Much too young.”
“1961.”
His grandmother told the lie with calm conviction, as if she believed it to be the indisputable truth, as if the past could be actually changed by describing it differently often enough.
“It was a long time ago.”
“Twenty-four years ago,” Walter whispered.
“That’s right.”
He pulled the photo album gently into his lap and stared into his mother’s smiling face.
“We say Kaddish for her every year.”
