IT WAS SATURDAY AND Anna and Bruno had been invited to Edith and Otto Hammer’s home in Erlenbach for a cocktail party. Bruno walked the children to Ursula’s house while Anna dressed. Her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t want to go, but the Hammers expected them and Bruno promised they wouldn’t be late coming home.
Anna made a habit of dressing well. She owned nice clothes and her fashion sense was irreproachable. She felt safest in her prettiest outfits, and if she couldn’t be glad all the time, at least she could feel—relatively, occasionally—impervious. She’d take it. She chose a slim-fitting black dress with cap sleeves and gold accents on the hemline. She wrapped a black wool shawl around her shoulders, piled her hair loosely atop her head, and fastened it with a rhinestone-studded claw clip. She considered herself first in the bathroom mirror, and then in the bedroom’s. Every looking glass treated her differently. In the bedroom she was thin but wan. In the bathroom she was healthy-hued but her arms seemed thicker and her face swollen. Neither face was hers and yet they both were. You are not my doppelg?nger, she said to each reflection. She took the sum of both and divided by two. She was presentable.
Bruno and Anna took the car. The radio was tuned to a hip-hop station. It amused Anna how much the Swiss loved black music. After school and on weekends when the weather was nice, a group of Dietlikon’s teenagers met in the church playground across the street from their house. They dressed in urban youth wear, their pants baggy, their sneakers white and wide-laced, and their baseball caps cocked hard to an idle side. They turned their radios as loud as the knobs would allow and thumped their heads against walls of air as they drank Red Bull and vodka, smoked cigarettes, and sang along to rap songs whose words they might not really understand the meaning of. Anna never talked to them. They scared her. Bruno left the radio tuned to its station and Anna tried to lose herself in the music’s pulse and throb.
WHEN ANNA THOUGHT OF Stephen anymore it was most always in passing, a transitory notion that traveled her mind from one side to its other, like a pedestrian crossing the street. Sometimes she thought of him while making love (it did not matter with whom). Sometimes it happened during her walks in the woods. Other times, it was when the train stopped at Wipkingen station or when the news reported on a forest fire or when she took the number 33 to Neumarkt or when she was combing Polly Jean’s hair. It happened on downtown trams when she smelled his soap or his cologne or heard a man speaking in the same register as he. Anna would whip around and scan every face but Stephen’s was never among them. This didn’t happen often. But it happened enough.
“WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between love and lust?”
“You tell me,” Doktor Messerli said to Anna.
“Lust’s incurable. Love isn’t.”
“Desire isn’t a disease, Anna.”
“Isn’t it?”
EDITH HAMMER RARELY THREW understated parties. This party, while not inconspicuous, was at the very least relatively small. Fewer than twenty guests moved through the rooms of the Hammers’ Gold Coast home. It was a party of no occasion. It was no one’s birthday, no couple’s anniversary, no celebration of any sort. The party came to pass simply because Edith wanted one. Otto always indulged her: Wife, your heart’s desire is my wish. But despite the sheen of contentment, the Hammers weren’t entirely happy. Otto’s temper flared hotter and more often than Bruno’s. Edith was frivolous with money and often cruel in her speech. Their daughters were delinquents and lived most of the year at a boarding school in Lausanne. And the Hammers drank too much.
But together they made a handsome, finespun couple, and Edith was one of Anna’s only two friends. Snippy and pitiless though Edith usually was, Anna had little recourse but to keep her.
When Anna and Bruno walked through the door, each was swept from the other’s company into the large living room, Anna by Edith and Bruno by Otto. It was a segregated room. The men crowded near the bar and the women by the kitchen. Switzerland is undeniably a modern country, but gender roles make occasional appearances. In some cantons women didn’t get the right to vote until the 1970s. Anna knew she’d been in Switzerland too long when this stopped appalling her.
Doktor Messerli had harped on it to the point that the conversation was formulaic: Did not Anna worry that she perpetuated the stereotype of the fragile, subjugated woman? That excepting her manner of dress and the language she used and the Handy in her purse there was little to distinguish her from a woman who lived fifty, seventy, one hundred years earlier? They didn’t drive cars or have bank accounts either. Didn’t she understand she could be anything she wanted to be? Didn’t she think she had a responsibility to be something?