Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  Alma’s throat constricted. In six months she would turn twenty-two. How much longer could she remain unwed before she became ridiculous—the dried-up spinster nobody wanted?

  “Of course, it’s your decision alone,” Mama said later, after Muhr had gone home. “But think long and hard before you refuse as good a man as Felix Muhr.”

  Alma attempted to wash away her confusion in a cascade of piano chords, playing “Liebestod,” the music she always turned to for comfort. She released her entire soul into the pathos of those notes. And she counted the hours to her next lesson. How deeply she had come to rely on Zemlinsky.

  Unfortunately, Zemlinsky had the habit of canceling their lessons at the last minute if he had important rehearsals. Nor was he reliably punctual. Three days after Muhr’s proposal, Zemlinsky arrived so late that Alma had given up on him and had washed her hair in preparation for that evening’s party at the Taussigs. Carl was immured in his studio, and Mama, Maria, and Cilli were out, leaving Alma to open the door in exasperation, her damp hair hanging loose and unbound while she waited for it to dry.

  “You’re more than two hours late,” she informed Zemlinsky. “At six, the Taussigs are sending their carriage for me. I should really turn you away.”

  Zemlinsky bridled, clearly not expecting that kind of reception. “My tram broke down!”

  “Your tram, Herr Zemlinsky, is always breaking down.” She folded her arms in front of her.

  Not wanting to answer the door in her dressing gown, Alma had hastily thrown on her one article of reform dress, a loose gown of linen with embroidered accents—a birthday present from Aunt Mie. The unfortunate garment reminded Alma of a pretentiously bourgeois attempt at a shepherd’s smock, and it didn’t flatter her in the least. She felt like an enormous billowing sail.

  “I’ll have you know that I walked all the way from the Ringstrasse,” Zemlinsky said, his voice rising along with the color in his face. “And now you want to turn me away? Do you really need three hours to dress for a party?”

  “What business is it of yours how long it takes me to get dressed?”

  Alma had to wait until Cilli and Mama were back just to get into her evening gown with all the tiny buttons up the back, and she also wanted Mama to help arrange her hair.

  “Fräulein Schindler, if you want to be my student, you either compose or you carry on as a socialite. One or the other. You can’t do both. I suggest you stick to what you do best and go to your parties.”

  Alma glared at him, angry enough to spit. How dare he turn up so late and then talk to her like that, as if he never went to parties or caroused in coffeehouses past midnight? A thousand ripostes rippled on her tongue. But she didn’t dignify his remark with a reply, choosing instead to lead him into the parlor in icy silence. Since he was here, she might as well have her lesson, or part of it, seeing as she couldn’t start dressing until the others were back.

  Flicking her damp, loose hair behind her shoulders, she sat at the piano and began to play her newly composed adagio. Not the Rilke song. It would have devastated her to hear him rip apart her Rilke, considering the foul temper he was in. Her eyes on her score, she played her adagio with as much verve as she could muster, not even glancing his way until she had finished.

  His eyes were as soft as velvet. “That’s one of your best pieces yet. It truly expresses your character.”

  “How so?” she asked tepidly.

  “Your unpredictability,” he said. “Your sudden changes in mood.”

  “My unpredictability?”

  Appearing to ignore her jibe, he sat beside her on the piano bench and began to play her score with such sensitivity that she could scarcely believe it was her own work she heard.

  “So mercurial and bewitching,” he said, when he had finished. “Just like you.”

  She closed her eyes and let his praise course through her. Then she swallowed hard. “Felix Muhr asked me to marry him,” she blurted, flushing with shame even though she had no reason to.

  Zemlinsky blinked, his face gone white. “I’d advise you to accept. Isn’t that what you want? What everyone expects of you?”

  Alma looked at him in disbelief, her eyes filling with the tears she could no longer hold back. “To give myself to a man I don’t love? Do you really think so little of me?”

  He looked so helpless then, his mouth quivering.

  As Alma moved to reach for another score, her long, loose hair spilled over the piano bench, one tress flicking like a flame across Zemlinsky’s thigh. When their eyes met, he began to shake. Before he could pull away, Alma seized his arms. His face washed red; he kissed her hands, then bent his brow to them. Gently, she rested her head on his, breathing in the scent of his silky brown hair, innocent of pomade. Let me die here. This is my heaven.

  They drew apart slowly and stared at each other. Clumsily, like two children, they kissed each other’s cheeks, and then held each other, his face buried in her hair, her fingers tracing the contours of his shoulder blades through his blue serge suit. Taking his face in her hands, she gazed at him with all the love burning inside her.

  “Alex,” she said.

  He kissed her lips and she kissed him back, no longer the naïve girl Klimt had thought he could lead astray. She was a woman kissing her lover with her full passion, kissing Alex so long and hard that her teeth hurt. He held her so close that she felt his heartbeat as her own.

  “Alma,” he said. “All winter long I was wrestling with my love for you. I tried so hard to stop loving you, but I couldn’t.”

  Her heart opened, light surging through her breast. O sweet ecstasy.

  “Now I shall write, compose—everything!—all for you,” he murmured, his mouth in her hair. “It’s such a joy that you’re an artist, too. We’ll always have that in common.”

  13

  “Alma, what a healthy color you have,” Aunt Mie remarked, as they cycled through Prater Park on a glorious May afternoon. “Fresh air and exercise give you such a glow.”

  Having left the Wurstelprater and its amusement park behind, Alma, Mama, and Aunt Mie glided through the wilder reaches, passing water meadows, groves, and the field where the Prater deer grazed. A young stag lifted his head to watch them go past.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Aunt Mie said to Mama, “I’d say your daughter was in love with her piano teacher.”

  Alma nearly lost her grip on the handlebars.

  To her relief, Mama only laughed. “Oh, tosh! Alma just takes her music lessons very seriously, don’t you, my dear?”

  “I’m making progress on my Rilke song cycle,” Alma said brightly, chattering away about the technical aspects of composition until Aunt Mie’s eyes glazed over and she changed the subject.

  Mama and Aunt Mie then began to discuss their new villas being built on the Hohe Warte. Both their families would be moving there in the autumn after they returned from their summer vacation in the mountains. Alma couldn’t express how grateful she was that the excitement of planning the move and decorating the new house seemed to occupy all Mama’s time and attention, thus making her oblivious to Alma’s love affair with Alex that was taking place right under her mother’s nose.

  Within earshot of Mama and Cilli, Alex was the model teacher, calling Alma Fräulein Schindler as if nothing had changed. But as soon as they were alone together, they tumbled down that deep well of longing. And so the spring of 1901 progressed. Their courtship unfolded in secret during their lessons and their attending matinee concerts. It wasn’t that Alma was ashamed of Alex—quite the contrary—but she knew that Mama and Carl would disapprove and tell her she could never marry a man like him, a poor Jew. She simply refused to allow their small-mindedness to interfere with her and Alex’s brand-new love.

  On May 15, Alma thought all her dreams had come true at once. Erica Conrat had invited her and Alex to watch the Court Opera’s performance of Tristan und Isolde from the Conrats’ balcony. However, Erica and her mother had come down with colds and c
ould not attend. Do invite your mother in our place, Frau Conrat had written in the note that accompanied the tickets.

  Alma did no such thing.

  And so it transpired, as if ordained by the gods of music, that Alma found herself alone with Alex in the Conrats’ private balcony while watching her most beloved opera, that wrenching tale of star-crossed lovers. Anna von Mildenburg and Erik Schmedes sang the arias that Alma knew by heart. Yet, as the music swelled around her, her eyes weren’t on the stage but on her lover.

  “Even when I’m with you, I long for you,” Alex whispered.

  In the darkened balcony, surrounded by the stormy ocean of sound, Alex knelt in front of her seat to lift her skirts and stroke her trembling knees in their silk stockings. Alma closed her eyes, her head flung against the velvet backrest, overwhelmed, for now he was kissing the insides of her thighs, the tender skin above her garters. Pulling Alex up to face her, Alma kissed him hard and gave him her tongue. She let him pull her gently down to the floor, out of sight, and let him stroke her all over.

  At the climax of the opera, Anna von Mildenburg sang the “Liebestod” aria more beautifully than Alma had ever heard it. Locked in Alex’s embrace, Alma surrendered to the absolute sublimity.

  Softly and gently

  how he smiles,

  how his eyes

  fondly open—

  do you see, friends?

  Do you not see

  how he shines

  ever brighter,

  star-haloed,

  rising higher—

  do you not see?

  To drown,

  to founder,

  unconscious—

  utmost bliss!

  As those sacred words enveloped her, Alex pressed his body against hers, and Alma felt his groin hardening against her thigh. She had the sensation of something holy. To burn with desire and yet feel so unsullied—surely that happened only once in a lifetime. A powerful, searing rite, something God-given. A drop of eternity.

  Dreamy and languid, Alma lay in bed the following morning, the taste of Alex’s kisses still on her tongue. May sunlight poured through the lace curtains to bathe her closed eyelids in liquid gold as she imagined him touching her every secret part. He opened me like a book. He is mine. I am his.

  When she finally dressed and padded to the kitchen, she found herself humming a passage of his Frühlingsbegräbnis.

  Cilli grumbled about Alma’s laziness, rising so late, but nonetheless deigned to brew her fresh coffee, grinding the roasted beans in the coffee mill. Alma savored the taste of sweet butter and Cilli’s homemade gooseberry jam on a poppy-seed roll still fresh and warm from the oven. When Mama marched into the kitchen with a letter—had the morning post already arrived?—Alma smiled at her like a simpleton.

  “Good morning, Mama,” she said, unable to disguise her happiness until she saw the outrage in her mother’s red-rimmed eyes.

  “Frau Conrat wrote to ask how I enjoyed the opera and she apologized for not being there.” Mama flung the letter down on the table. “So you and Herr Zemlinsky were unchaperoned! Frau Conrat sent a ticket for me and you didn’t say a word.”

  Alma tried to sit up straight, to speak to her mother as one grown woman to another. “Herr Zemlinsky and I go to concerts unchaperoned all the time. It’s part of my musical education.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself for giving you that liberty, you wretched girl! You were having an affair behind my back. And now you’ve brought shame on poor Frau Conrat as well. Frau Gottlieb saw you and Zemlinsky embracing like lovers in a cheap French novel.”

  Alma quailed at the thought of hideous Frau Gottlieb spying on them through her opera glasses.

  “But I love Alex!” She banged her fist on the table. This wasn’t like the fiasco with Klimt that Mama could try to sweep under the rug. “He loves me. We intend to marry.”

  “Never!” her mother cried. “I’ll never give you my consent.”

  “I’m twenty-one! I don’t need your consent. I’ll marry him even without your blessing.”

  But Alma’s bold words belied her powerlessness. Having no income of her own, she was wholly dependent on Mama and Carl.

  As though summoned by their raised voices, her stepfather entered the kitchen. “You can’t be serious, Alma.” He spoke with measured calm while Mama wept. “The boy doesn’t have more than two kreutzer to rub together. You, of all people, couldn’t bear to live on bread and water. Besides, he’s a Jew.”

  “The Conrats are Jewish!” Alma sprang up from the table, knocking over her chair. “You don’t mind if I sit in their box at the opera. Or is that because they’re rich and they buy your paintings?”

  Alma’s protests were in vain. Two days later, Mama took her off to the mountains without allowing her to see or speak to Alex before they left Vienna.

  “I’m doing this for your own good,” Mama said, on the train to Sankt Gilgen. “To keep the two of you from being alone together. This will give you both a chance to cool your heads.”

  Too angry to speak, Alma turned away from her mother and viewed the blooming meadows and orchards through the haze of her tears.

  “I do hope you’re not going to fume and rage at me all summer,” Mama said. “You know, I’ve tried to give you the best chances in life. There are girls your age working twelve-hour shifts in factories. Those girls couldn’t even dream about counterpoint lessons.”

  “But I should be left to make my own choice of husband,” Alma said, with vehemence. “You should leave me to choose, judge, and act. You married Papa and he was a poor artist.”

  Mama laughed caustically. “I married him because I had to. I was pregnant with you.”

  Alma flushed and looked around frantically to see if any of the strangers on the train had overheard. It was absolutely shocking to hear Mama speak of such vulgar affairs.

  “You don’t even understand what poverty is,” her mother said. “When I was a child, my entire family had to flee our home because my father’s brewery went under and we couldn’t pay the rent. My mother had just given birth to her twelfth child and she was raving with puerperal fever. We had to drag her out of her sickbed and carry her out of the house. When I was eleven, I had to work to support my family. First I was a ballet dancer—I made enough with walk-on roles to be the breadwinner.”

  Alma struggled to imagine her tall, stocky mother as a child ballerina, as nimble as a sprite.

  “Later, the ballet company folded,” Mama said, “and I worked as a nanny. I had to wash diapers until my hands were raw, and I slept in the cook’s room. Then I became a cashier in a bathhouse and finally an opera singer.

  “Even after I married, life was a constant struggle. Your father had so many debts. When the bailiffs were threatening to kick down our door, he would just lie on his stomach in bed and try to sleep through it. Carl would run from one usurer to the next and pawn everything he could lay his hands on. Without Carl, we would have starved.”

  It rattled Alma to hear her mother speak of Papa as a feckless sluggard. Carl had been Papa’s most faithful protégé, or so he claimed. But what if his involvement with her mother dated back to those desperate days when Papa was still alive and Alma just a baby? Mama, who so adamantly insisted upon her daughters’ purity, was herself far from stainless. Still, it sobered Alma to imagine her parents living in such squalor.

  “I have two wishes for you, Alma.” Mama adopted a gentler tone. “One: that you don’t marry for money without love. Two: that you don’t marry for love without money.”

  “So if Alex could establish himself, you would accept him,” Alma said, relieved to discover that Mama objected to him because he was poor, not because he was Jewish.

  Mama was silent for a moment, clearly flustered to be outfoxed. “We shall see, my dear. Time will tell.”

  I have two wishes for myself, Alma thought. First: that I won’t have to sacrifice my art for love. Second: that I won’t have to sacrifice love for my art. She wanted both
. To give herself completely to a man. To give herself completely to her music.

  14

  Alma stood at the gate of her family’s brand-new villa high above Vienna on the Hohe Warte. She directed her gaze not at the sweeping view of the city below but instead contemplated two flies copulating on the gatepost. How still and unperturbable they were, bathed in golden October light. Now and then a shiver ran through their wings. She gently blew at them, and they flew off lazily and continued their mating a little farther away.

  The breath of the world caressed Alma with her memories of Alex. She imagined the flow of his essence, his divine spark, into hers. Catching sight of her lover walking up the street, she cried out in joy. This was her first glimpse of him since that fateful night in May when they had shared such forbidden pleasures against the backdrop of Tristan und Isolde. Alma had planned today’s rendezvous with the utmost care. Mama, Maria, and Carl were out, and it was Cilli’s day off.

  “Alex!” she cried, flinging open the gate.

  Slightly short of breath from his steep walk up from the tram stop, Alex took her hands. “You live at the end of the universe, Alma Maria Schindler. The princess in her castle on top of the glass mountain.”

  They gazed at each other before sharing a kiss that broke the dark enchantment of their forced separation. But it wasn’t safe to kiss in open view. Kolo Moser next door might see them and report back to Carl.

  “Come inside,” she murmured, leading him by the hand.

  He stopped for a moment to regard the semidetached villa’s stark white exterior devoid of ornamental flourishes. “The epitome of modernity,” he observed.

  “It’s built to Carl’s taste, not mine,” Alma was quick to say. “It reminds me of a sanatorium.”

  Alma led him into the ostentatiously plain interior with its white walls and blue and white tiled floors. The color pattern was repeated throughout the ground floor rooms. The curtains were white while the woodwork, built-in cabinets, and upholstered furniture were blue. Blue and white Japanese vases occupied the blue windowsills. Even Mama’s new coffee service, on display in the glass-fronted cabinet, was blue, white, and pointedly modern with wedge-shaped handles.