Anna scowled at him. “Don’t roll your eyes at her, she’s your mother.” Ursula couldn’t help but snore. She was an old woman.
“She’s not that old.” Anna granted Bruno this. Ursula would be sixty-seven on her next birthday. She’d been a young mother, just twenty-three at Bruno’s birth. By the time she was Anna’s age, her son was an insolent teen. Anna would be well into her fifties before all of the children were out of the house. The thought exhausted her. Mother has moods, too, Bruno had groused, but Anna only knew of one, that vinegar humor, her snappy disposition, the scowl into which she twisted her face when Anna did something she didn’t approve of, the silence she spat back when Anna said something she didn’t want to hear. Anna had given up trying to please her years ago.
“IS THERE A DIFFERENCE between destiny and fate?” Anna was jumpy, more unsettled than usual. Doktor Messerli asked if she understood the concept of synchronicity. “Not really.”
“Events don’t always obey rules of time and space. Sometimes the mere thought of a certain friend will cause her to telephone after months of no communication. Or perhaps a man wonders whether he should leave his wife and in the next instant he turns on the radio and hears a notice for apartments. No coincidence is chance. Synchronicity is the external manifestation of an inner reality.”
Anna quizzed her with her eyes.
HAD ANNA FORGONE A single stop that day, or had any of her exchanges in shops or on the street endured a short minute longer or a long half-minute less, then what happened wouldn’t have. Anna was close to giving up and going home. She was hungry. She was cold. The shopping was almost done. All she’d left to buy was Ursula’s gift. Ursula was a knitter; Anna planned to give her skeins of wool. She crossed the Limmat at the Rathausbrücke and made her way to the Hand-Art shop on Neumarkt.
THE BENZES WERE QUIET on the train to Mumpf, each locked in the closet of his or her own thoughts. Anna flipped through a German-language women’s magazine she’d bought from a kiosk at the Oerlikon train station. She scanned her monthly horoscope. Born October 22, Anna was a Libra and in less than a month she would be thirty-eight years old. Forest, danger, fire, trial. Most of the horoscope’s words she knew. She got the gist. It ended with a warning: Gib acht.
Be careful.
BEFORE DOKTOR MESSERLI SUGGESTED the German classes, she recommended that Anna begin a journal. “You needn’t bring it to analysis and I don’t ask you to share it with me if that isn’t your wish. Consider it a private, internal conversation. But be absolutely honest. To yourself, you must admit everything.” Anna liked this idea and she took Doktor Messerli’s advice and immediately after analysis that day she went to an upscale stationery story near the Doktor’s office and bought a flat-spine unruled journal with a green cloth cover. It was almost too pretty to write in.
She wrote the first entry on the train ride home. Admit it all, Anna. Do not hedge. Her sentences were scattered, disconnected: Everything I run from catches up to me. My prayers don’t have purchase. I carry them on my back. I cannot set them down. I have lost a year of sleep to insomnia. The utter sameness just drags on. I have a face like a key to a diary. There’s something it should open. I lack most kinds of stamina. I am beholden to my own peculiar irony: to survive I self-destruct. But the heart’s logic follows its own rules. I miss him simply because I do.
Anna read what she’d written and grimaced. She’d try this again, she was sure. Probably. Maybe. In the meantime, she took her pen and crossed out the entire page with an aggressive X.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT from this, Archie?” It was the Wednesday after the dinner party in Uster. Anna lay on her back in Archie’s bed with the blanket pulled all the way to her chin. It was time to go home but the room was cold and she was naked and getting out of bed would mean facing both those facts.
“What do you mean?”
Anna didn’t think it was a complicated question. “I mean this isn’t a relationship.”
“But we just had relations.” He winked.
Anna was undeterred. “What kind of man has an affair with a married woman?” It wasn’t an indictment. She wanted to know.
“Not relevant.” Anna blinked. She rebutted. He shook his head. “More people have affairs than don’t.”
Anna scowled. “That can’t be true.”
He spun her question on its axis. “What about a married woman? Why does she do it? What kind of woman’s she?”
“A lonely woman. A bored woman.” Anna spoke with authority.
Archie shook his head. “No, that’s not it.”
“How would you know?” Anna wondered whether Archie had done this before.
“Bored women join clubs and volunteer. Sad women have affairs.”
That’s the statement of a reductionist, Anna thought, but didn’t feel like arguing the point. “You think I’m sad?”