But this vacation feels different. Gutenberg’s original printing press, the Chagall windows, blah-blah … He was impatient even about the thirteen Nobel Prize winners, most of them in physics, from Würzburg; didn’t look up any of them on his iPhone, which, she teases, is practically sutured to his fingers. He just drummed his fists against his thighs in Würzberg as the local guide proudly rambled on. Didn’t ask a question, her husband, who usually asks good questions, honest questions; he is not the type who speaks to impress his fellows, or to trip up the guide.
It is a fine second marriage. She has reliable taste in husbands. Although he lacks her first husband’s pizzazz, this husband is patient and distinguished. As chief scientist, age twenty-eight, in the Kennedy administration, he showed that Russian missile production was verifiable through satellite photography: international treaties became possible. Now he figures out how to conserve energy heating New York City apartments, and he teaches about the physics of climate change, and some of the time still lectures about leptons and gauge bosons and hadrons, words she finds fetching. He is busy, busy, busy.
Yet he can almost always be interrupted. The grandchildren call—“Google” him, as he puts it—when they are writing physics or chemistry papers. Her daughters want his take on things—he is a sensible, approachable stepfather; his many children call, students call, administrators call. And he is almost always even tempered, sweet; yells rarely, mostly at Windows, only very occasionally at her.
Oh, she had more in common with her first husband—not just medicine but also they read novels together; this husband doesn’t like to get lost even in a novel. And body type—her first husband had been a gymnast as a kid, and had remained wiry and lithe. And he made stick figures out of tongue depressors with balloon breasts, or deflated balloon dicks—that would get his child patients laughing, get her laughing. Although he could grow gloomy, now and then, dark … That husband would have fit comfortably into this cabin. She feels sad, a wash of nostalgia floods her, but he has been dead a long time, her first husband, and she is on good terms with him in her mind; she dreams of him still, maybe once a month—it is like a little visit.
But there is no doubt that she and this cheerful, equable husband are, now, on edge. As she stands uneasily straining to see out the cabin window, his snoring, which usually drives her crazy—besides keeping her awake, it indicates he is struggling to take in air—is oddly comforting. The dense, nasal sounds; the implication of well-fed-ness, for snoring is often a disease of the overweight, and he could stand to lose ten pounds; the human creaturely noisiness—he is alive! Alive! This bugling of his affords her a transient sense of calm as she looks out the black window. His trumpeting seems almost to assert the presence of nearby troops, “our” troops.
She closes the curtains. Gets into bed and feels for him, feels him—wild thin hedge of hair around his balding head; seamed, cross-stitched neck. He is sleeping on his side, facing away from her. He stays sleeping while she massages his back through the royal blue pajamas she bought him for the trip. She relishes the warmth given off by his flesh in the thick air-conditioning of the cabin, considers slipping her hand beneath the waistband of his pajama bottoms to grow his dick. (But he needs his sleep.)
After her first husband died, she feared she’d never see an erection again—oh, a cherished erection. And then she met him and fell wildly (and with trembling relief) in love. They’d been reckless before they married, teenager-ish, gone at it whenever either of their apartments didn’t have a kid in it: “Gotta free crib,” one would phone, giggly, mimicking their teenage children, to alert the other, who’d hotfoot it over. They’d found sweets they thought they’d never taste again, they were furtive children hiding from their children. She slunk around, fearing she was cuckolding her dead husband. In a dream he lay at the foot of their bed …
More than a decade ago …
After a while she says, “Put it on, dear. The CPAP machine. It’s bad for you to sleep without it.”
“Huh?”
She pummels his back gently with her small fists. “You are snorting and hawing and braying.”
“What’re you talking about?” His speech is sleep slurred. “I’m not even asleep.”
“Well, you’re awake snoring then. Put it on. Without that machine—I’ve told you this, goddamnit!—without that CPAP, you’re thirty percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Those little mammillary bodies on either side of the hypothalamus … they show withering on autopsy in people with sleep apnea, just like with alcoholics … memory, intellect, gone. Poof!” She slaps one hand against the other and brings them both up over her head, as if she were playing cymbals.
“Hah?” He rolls over to face her—he is semi-awake. Although he cannot see her, he fumbles for her hands—once he finds any part of her, nothing about her is ever far away—murmurs, “I’m an adult, not one of your kid patients, let me be …”
But he likes that she cares, looks after him, even if not always in the gentlest manner. And she seems proud of him, maybe even considers him a bit of a trophy husband, paunch and all: he grins in the dark. Kisses one of her hands, then the other, and feels the urge to lick deeply around the insides of her palms, round and round; but checks himself, he doesn’t know why, releases her. Turns away and reaches for the gray plastic box that encases the positive pressure machine, feels here and there over its smoothness until he detects the slight indentation of the on/off strip, depresses it hard: it lights up fluorescent green, and with a great whooshing sound, air begins to flow out of the tubing. He gets the black straps over his forehead and cheeks so that the clear plastic triangular mask attached to the hose fits snugly over his nose and mouth.
It is unpleasant going to sleep wearing all this paraphernalia; his nose is chronically congested, which makes breathing through the mask difficult. And he worries, absurdly, that he appears to be engaged in S&M practices. When he puts on the CPAP machine, he has to pull straps over his head to keep the mask in place; and then the mask sticks out, to say nothing of the long, thick tubing. Conjures up porn he’s seen on the Internet—men in masks, with leather straps …
He’s a little embarrassed about her divining or ferreting out of him whatever mildly perverse sexual appetites (curiosities, really) he didn’t know he had. And then she wants to enact everything with him, for him, satisfy him, although he supposes that is a good thing in a wife. And she has her own little kinky businesses she has always been upfront about—a hard twist on a nipple helps her come, or a bit of finger up her ass. Turns out he likes some pulling on his scrotum, or having her lick him in certain places, and sometimes he likes to bite her behind, nibble it. Not important, he can certainly do without these things.
Why do without them, she says.
His previous wives had adapted to his snoring. Well, he didn’t remember how the first one adapted, they never talked much, not clear why he married her—afraid of women? She looked like his mother? Ended in divorce, after three kids, twenty years.
The second one used earplugs and spent an occasional night on the living room couch, that was another twenty-year marriage. She actually snored a bit herself. Lightly. Which didn’t bother him, meant she was no insomniac. A more placid type than this wife; trained as a lawyer, but worked as an arbitrator, above the fray. And she was a brilliant cook, turned out a new dish most evenings without a recipe, scrumptious, especially her pasta sauces, he was skinny back then, she tended toward overweight—more than tended. But what nice big brown eyes! And a devoted mother to their children, although the younger, their son, fought with her about everything and nothing. And a good storyteller, his wife was, even if some of the stories turned out to be apocryphal, and she repeated herself. What wife doesn’t repeat herself? What husband?
Murdered. By a hit-and-run driver. Plowed down. Never found the bastard. Guy must have been blind-drunk because she was a big bright woman in a red suit crossing Riverside Drive on a summer morning, carrying her aluminum
briefcase plastered with photos of him and the children.
Truth is, he can’t remember much about her. He had loved her dearly but can’t recall the sex, the arguments (he liked to think they didn’t argue, but that can’t be), the texture of their life together.
His new wife had objected to his snoring and insisted he see a doctor. So his sleep apnea got diagnosed, which he supposes is a good thing, although he seems to have developed atherosclerosis high blood pressure lipids despite CPAP and echo stress tests, all the fancy expensive medical care she gets for him. Sometimes he thinks he has whatever he has—if he has anything, since he feels just fine, plays doubles tennis twice a week—because of all the medical care she gets for him.
She has a lot of zest herself, which he appreciates, but she is always trying to get to the bottom of things, which is pesty: wants to know why he can’t remember the texture of life between him and his dead wife. His dead beloved wife is dead, that’s why. But the current beloved wife believes it has a meaning. Or meanings. This wife feels the issue is psychological, thinks she has deep psychological insights—she points out that he cannot remember his mother either, and he supposedly adored his mother—and wants him to see a shrink. She saw one after her first husband died.
But he is almost always happy, it is his nature, the overexamined life is not for him. CPAP yes; psychiatrist, no. There is nothing wrong with his brain—his curriculum vitae is quite a few pages long. True, when he got to graduate school and heard lectures by the likes of Feynman, Schwinger, and Gell-Mann, he realized he wasn’t Nobel Prize material. Those guys, Feynman especially, came up with things he could hardly understand, let alone concoct—physici-gicians! Yet the way he’s used his brains, his good head—for disarmament, against climate change: he would do it again. Nutty idea, that he needs a psychiatrist. Reassured, he feels himself subside, sink back into an even, heavy sleep.
She lies listening. With her flashlight she checks her watch. Four thirty. She turns her head from side to side, hears the crackling. It is as if she has paper that crinkles in her neck, tissue paper. Doesn’t hurt, thank heavens, but it is odd hearing sounds emanating from her neck, as if it needs oil. She needs oil. Will she really get up at seven A.M. and go down to breakfast, eat too much smoked salmon and horseradish on small effete goyish bagels and then scramble to join up with her fellow tourists in the red group or the green group or the yellow group? (But not the blue group—the “gentle” group. She is old enough for that, but too fit, too trim, still 104 pounds, and springy as a little terrier.)
As he sleeps on, and the machine soughs, or more likely he is soughing—the mask probably doesn’t fit tightly enough and, she swears, lowing sounds occasionally escape him—she moves an arm up beside her head and raises and turns down her toes. Supinates and pronates. Feet and hands. Why is she so restless, so fidgety? And will she really join the others in a few short hours wearing in her ear the little headset the ship provides so that each passenger can hear her or his own local guide for the red group, the green, etc. They will ride in different buses with color-coded signs on the dashboard, ride up, up to the high castle with a bear’s head with yellow eyes mounted on a dark inner wall, the heavy wooden table and chairs in the dining room, the small gabled windows looking down, down on the brilliant blue Main or Rhine or the Moselle, the lush, ordered green fields beyond. As if peace and plenty had reigned here forever … Back in town, the guide will joke as they walk: “Men, hold on to your wallets, for sure your wife will want to buy this lovely dirndl or that crystal vase”—as if it is Mad Men time or medieval times, the men in charge of everything. Evidently Angela Merkel’s having assumed the chancellorship has not yet trickled down to these small medieval towns.
Nor has the murder of the European Jews. Or if it has, no one talks about it. During the week they’ve been here, only one guide, a balding fellow in leather lederhosen, has mentioned the word “Jew.” He walked his group of tourists through Bamberg, told them there used to exist hundreds of years ago “hop Jews,” Jews who grew and harvested hops, used in brewing beer to give a bitter flavor, and also as a mild sterilant. Unlike many Germans, he spoke an awkward English. Outside a pub/restaurant he gestured toward a six-pointed star on a sign over the door, and asked the group, “Any idea what means this?”
A short American man answered, perhaps hopefully, “Jews are welcome here?”
The guide shook his head, explained that the symbol originated in the Middle Ages, stood for fire and water, necessary to make beer. This pub has fire and water, and so the sign means, “Beer is ready now.” At the end of the tour, she asked what happened to the descendants of the hop Jews, the Jews of Bamberg, during the Second World War. The tour guide turned off his mike. And told her only one Jew survived the war. The town was cleansed of Jews, cleaned of Jews, cleared of them all. He gave her directions to the new synagogue, built in the last few years by Russian Jews who had recently immigrated, and to a monument to the murdered Jews, near the synagogue. She and her husband managed to find their way. Construction going on, with loud noises of drills and laying of pipes. The monument was covered, but to protect it, not to hide it, and the new synagogue was closed—it was the middle of a weekday—so they could not enter.
But this was encouraging.
Although, why did the guide turn off his mike when he talked about the fate of those Bamberg Jews?
Well, it is depressing. Who wants to talk about something depressing? And especially to a group of tourists on vacation.
But listing the percentage of the town destroyed by “bombing” is also depressing; yet that guide and, come to think of it, almost every guide, offered that number right up close to the beginning of her/his talk.
Perhaps he was ashamed of what his people had done and so didn’t want anyone to hear, to remember. Many Jews were, are also ashamed. “It looks as though we have no merit at all, otherwise so many troubles could not have befallen us.” She’d read that in the diary of a Jewish teenager who was deported from Brussels and murdered in Auschwitz.
Or is it that the guide believed the others wouldn’t be interested, that the Holocaust was a niche event, of concern only to a relative few—only to Jews themselves. And perhaps that is true: except for that short American man trying to decipher the sign outside the pub, no one has asked a question about the Jews.
Or maybe it is an out-of-date concern, unfashionable, shows her age, like wearing one of those fox pelts around your neck with feet attached and full face, teeth … One of her husband’s children, the youngest, said, when she mentioned her unease about the trip, “Oh, that’s ancient history, the murder of the Jews, Berlin is the swingingest city on the planet. Think about Bosnia and Herzegovina, Darfur. In the Congo civil war, both sides killed and ate the Pygmies.” Dreadful, she agreed. Told him they send money to Darfur, that there are more Jews in the Save Darfur movement than Sudanese. She did not want to argue with her stepson; he is, after all, her stepson; and his mother she heard had no luck arguing with him and she was a lawyer. She did not do the math to show that all the other genocides put together … No, she refused to enter the genocide contest, that is really yesterday’s news, refrained even from saying that the language of her grandparents is dead, murdered. Who cares about the death of a language? Of a culture. A branch of her grandmother’s family was murdered, too. She doesn’t even know their names. Dim memory of her grandmother knitting and crying in her parents’ home in New Jersey.
Or maybe there was some other reason he turned off the mike.
After each of the next few little daily tours, each with new local guides, where no mention was made—the talks were Jew-clean (although rubble share was quoted daily as if it were the Dow Jones Industrial Average)—she spoke. It cost her to speak: fullness in the throat and ears. It also would have cost her not to speak. At the end of each spiel, she asked the guide what had happened to the Yuden from this little town, Miltenberg or Spielsburg or Pestburg, in the Second World War. Always she was answered
off mike. But then, it must be said, she asked at the end of the spiel, after the end—she asked privately. She did not want to call too much attention to herself, single herself out as different. She did not want to sew a yellow star to her chest. One memorable response, a happy if breezy one by a plump guide in her sixties, was, “Oh, we warned them and they all escaped.” Miltenberg was the town. She was surprised. She was so, so pleased, she was almost tearful. If true, this should be known more widely, should be reported to Yad Vashem. While not Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the near-legendary town in southern France where the descendants of French Huguenots hid three to five thousand Jews and a few others—German deserters—in their homes throughout the war, still, little brave Miltenberg was worthy of mention. She double-checked with a knot of guides chatting in German and they all stopped speaking. Finally, one, a woman in her fifties, said, mournfully, in English, “I don’t know who told you that. Every Jew was killed. I am so ashamed.”
She herself felt dreadful, as if her people had been killed again just now right in front of her while she stood by doing nothing. And then she felt foolish for having been taken in. But after a while, she was appreciative: this other guide was ashamed. She liked her, did not like the limber guide in Nuremberg, an ex-dancer, also in her fifties, who said, “The Jews? I wasn’t born then. And my mother was a child. My father was sent to the eastern front, didn’t even know where he was going. Lost a leg there. He was only sixteen.” She had nodded vigorously at that dancer/guide, and smiled, and her husband had smiled and the guide smiled as they toured the vast Nuremberg parade grounds where hundreds of thousands of Nazis had smiled, beamed, as they listened, rapt, to Hitler.
Five A.M. She remains wide awake. His machine breathes obstreperously. Should she wake him and ask that he take off the mask for a minute? She wants to embrace him. She feels forlorn. In the dark, she clutches at her genitals through her nightgown.
Scary Old Sex Page 18
