AND IT WAS SOMETIME around the start of October that Anna’s relationship with Mary began to deepen into a genuine, unmistakable friendship. It had happened with no fanfare, over cups of coffee in the Migros Klubschule Kantine. Anna had never had many close friends, even before the expatriation. But now in Mary, Anna had someone with whom she could enjoy a late lunch or see a film or sit in a park and talk about things that casual girlfriends might share with each other (they’d done none of these things, but that wasn’t the comfort; the peace came from knowing that they could). Anna was charmed by Mary’s sympathetic bent. She’d forgotten that people could be so genuinely kind.
But there are things that Mary will never know of me, Anna thought. We’ll never truly be close. Anna’s psychology demanded reserve. She held Mary at a short but distinct distance. But Mary didn’t seem to notice and remained her supportive, cheerful self even as Anna kept her own self separate. But Mary wasn’t mannerly all the time. One day after class, she dropped her purse outside Bahnhof Oerlikon and her wallet, her makeup, and every little thing she had stashed inside the bag spilled out onto the street. The powder in her compact broke and a snap-shut photo album she was never caught without landed in an oily puddle. Shit! Temperate Mary with her milquetoast demeanor cursed so loudly that a doorman at the Swiss?tel across the street looked over to see what had happened. No one is even-keeled at all times, Anna knew. Nevertheless, Anna couldn’t dare open up. There are burdens that even the best of friends shouldn’t share. In that way, Anna was lonelier than ever.
ANNA BROUGHT A DREAM to Doktor Messerli:
I descend a staircase into a maze of dark passages. It’s dank and foreboding. Each step forward sinks me deeper below the earth. I’m apprehensive. The farther I go, the more terrible I feel. I never reach the end of the labyrinth and I never find my way back out.
“Which is it,” Doktor Messerli asked.
“Which is what?”
“Is it a maze or a labyrinth? They aren’t the same thing. A maze has an entrance and an exit. It’s a puzzle to solve. In a labyrinth the way in is also the way out. A labyrinth leads you through itself.”
IT WAS A WEEK into October before Anna followed Archie home again. She hadn’t intended this. A tumbling series of obligations and impediments had wedged themselves between the pair. First it was Mary, who begged Anna to ride the train with her to üetliberg. Anna explained that in the foggy weather they wouldn’t be able to see much of anything and that standing in miserable drizzle 1,500 feet above the Limmat Valley is a good way to catch a bad cold. But Mary had her heart set so Anna gave in and went with her. The day after that Anna stayed with Charles, who was home with a fever. “I want you. Not Grosi,” he said. Anna would never have refused him. On Wednesday Charles felt well enough for school but in the middle of German class Anna started to feel woozy herself so she left after the first break (“Do you think it was because I made you go with me to üetliberg?” Mary fretted). Yet another day found Anna rushing home so Ursula could get to Schaffhausen in time to meet a friend who was visiting from America. And one day, it was Archie who couldn’t make their rendezvous; Glenn had a doctor’s appointment and needed Archie to mind the shop. They hadn’t cooled. They’d simply back-burnered each other.
But after German class on the second Tuesday of October Anna followed Archie to his flat and on the spring heels of a kiss in the doorframe that might have shattered glass, Archie carried Anna to his bed and the two of them made love like ravenous teenagers, the air on fire with a thick, erotic charge. She sucked him off. He licked her until she came. He pressed her to the bed and laid his body atop her like a blanket. Anna could barely breathe. That was okay. It was the price she paid for feeling safe, subsumed. A muscle in her soul was massaged, a particular crack in her wailing wall patched.
But the thing about cracks in walls is that they happen when foundations shift. The concrete slabs become abstract. From the first crack, others spider out. This? This is my fault, Anna thought when she felt the ground wobble beneath her. And she meant “fault” in every sense.
So two hours later, and against her best judgment, Anna stepped off a train onto platform 3 in Kloten, a town just on the other side of the woods north of Dietlikon, and crossed underneath the station to the Hotel Allegra, where Karl Tr?tzmüller waited for her. She’d received the SMS while Archie was in the bathroom. Come, Anna, it read and gave the address.
I’m cheating on the man I’m cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day.