THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, EVERY STUDENT ENROLLED IN THE Deutschkurs Intensiv turned out for class—Anna and Archie included. Archie had arrived on time and was, when Anna showed up fifteen minutes late, quietly filling in a worksheet with everyone else. The door’s hinges squealed when Anna entered and the entire class looked up to watch her cower into the room. Anna undertoned an I’m sorry and endeavored what she hoped was nonchalance as she took the only open seat available, the empty chair between Roland and Mary, the Canadian woman. But Anna was often as clumsy as she was passive, and as she rummaged through her book bag with one hand, she seemed to have forgotten that her other hand was wrapped around a flimsy paper cup of hot coffee. She spilled the entire cup—on herself, on the table, and on Mary.
Anna and Mary made simultaneous exclamations. Mary yelped Oh gosh! And Anna barked out a splenetic Mother of Christ! which, even to her own accustomed ears, sounded coarse. Roland pulled an agitated face. The coffee went down the front of Anna’s sweater; it caught Mary on the cuff and on the thigh. Her worksheet was ruined. Anna whispered a feeble apology and rose and left the room. Mary followed after her. Archie’s eyes remained locked on his paper.
In the bathroom, Anna blotted and dabbed and swiped at the stain on her sweater. Nothing helped. The cashmere was ruined. It was one of the nicest things she owned and Anna, fond of baubles and adornments, owned many nice things. A Christmas present from Bruno, she knew better than to have worn it to class. But she talked herself into it that morning by imagining the limp, silky pleasure she’d experience later in the afternoon when she would be talked so easily out of it, how Archie would tuck his hands beneath the sweater’s bottom banding, slide them up the sides of her waist, skate them across the inner side of her upraised arms, how he would lift it over her head and off her body, how he would then impel her to his bed and vandalize her for at least the next two hours.
ANNA LOVED AND DIDN’T love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted.
The longing for diversion was a recent development; her pining to be hungered for was decades old. But both rose from a lassitude born of small-scale grudges and trifling, trivial injuries, the last ten years of which she blamed on Bruno. From that rose boredom and from boredom particular habits were born. This she could not blame on Bruno. Like the ability to flash that sincere-seeming smile, Anna had taught it to herself by settling down, by settling on.
The affair with Archie was and wasn’t about sex. Anna was weak and she knew it. But she was still young enough to be pretty in certain lights and to the tastes of specific men.
“What do you think makes a person’s life successful?” Doktor Messerli asked.
“Do you mean accomplished?” They’d been talking of something unrelated to success.
Doktor Messerli closed her eyes as she searched for the right words. “The kind of success I mean comes from living a life that satisfies a woman in such a way that when, in her old age, she looks back upon her years in contemplation, she is able to announce with certainty, ‘I have led a conscious, useful life, whole and complete, and I filled it with as many worthy things as it could possibly hold.’ That’s what I mean. Do you understand? Is that something you want?”
“I don’t know.” Anna didn’t.
“I don’t know whether you want it either,” Doktor Messerli agreed.
MARY’S SHIRT WAS WEARABLE, but her jeans were soaked through to her thighs. She blotted herself with a pad of paper towels as she spoke.
“Missed you in class last week.” Anna listened for an accusation but there was none. Mary’s tone was sunny, though it perplexed Anna how someone she hardly knew would take even a passing notice of her absence. They’d only been in school a few days.
“I’m sorry I spilled coffee on you.”
Mary gestured never mind as she stepped toward the bathroom door to leave. “Say, Anna …” Anna looked up from her sweater to Mary reflected in the mirror. Mary’s face was round and she wore her curly sand-colored hair in a prudent bob. She was short and fleshy. Not fat, but large-breasted, generous of hip, maternal, and, despite her thickset frame, undeniably pretty. Anna looked from Mary’s reflection to her own and weighed the disparities. “My husband and I wondered if you and your husband and children wouldn’t like to come to the house for dinner sometime this week? You have boys? Are they hockey fans? Is your husband?” Anna paused long enough to defeat her. “Or,” Mary stammered, “next week. Or not, you know. Whatever you like.” There was apology in her voice. Anna had disappointed.
“Oh, no,” Anna hedged. “I’m distracted, is all.” She pointed to her sweater. “Of course … we’d love to come. I’m sure the boys … they’d love it.” She stuttered as she poured as much kindness into the words “of course” as they would hold. This woman wants a friend. Anna recognized that want. It made her wince. Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.
But in the bathroom and at that moment Anna felt trapped. Obligated to oblige. “I’ll have to check with Bruno. His schedule, I mean.”
Mary brightened. “That’s it, Bruno,” she said as she remembered a name she’d never been told. “Be sure and give me your email. We can make plans.”
“I don’t use email all that much.”