I’m nothing but a series of poor choices executed poorly. It was an indictment to which she could not object.
But after class and as was now the general custom, she traveled with Archie back to his Niederdorf apartment. They small-talked their way through every tram stop. Inside, they didn’t even bother kissing. They made banal, quotidian love. It was the sexual equivalent of a shrugged shoulder.
I owe this man nothing of myself, Anna thought.
13
IT IS POSSIBLE TO LEAD SEVERAL LIVES AT ONCE.
In fact, it is impossible not to.
Sometimes these lives overlap and interact. It is busy work living them and it requires stamina a singular life doesn’t need.
Sometimes these lives live peaceably in the house of the body.
Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they grouse and bicker and storm upstairs and shout from windows and don’t take out the trash.
Some other times, these lives, these several lives, each indulge several lives of their own. And those lives, like rabbits or rodents, multiply, make children of themselves. And those child lives birth others.
This is when a woman ceases leading her own life. This is when the lives start leading her.
THE DAY BEFORE HER birthday, Anna woke to the Sunday morning surprise of two little boys standing over her. Charles held out a vase of semi-wilted flowers that must have been purchased the day before. Victor offered her a tray of toast and jam and coffee. Bruno stood behind them holding Polly Jean. “What’s this?” Anna sat up in bed. Charles spoke first. “It’s for your birthday, Mami.”
“Oh!”
Victor piped in, sure of himself. “Your birthday isn’t until tomorrow.”
Anna suppressed a scowl. Victor was always the room’s first pessimist. He held out the tray and Anna took it from him. “Thank you!” She waved her sons over for a kiss. “This is so thoughtful!” Charles grinned and kissed his mother before setting the flowers on the nightstand. Victor received his kiss passively and shuffled from foot to foot. Anna looked up to Bruno. He told her it was all their own idea and then he reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a little box.
“Here, Anna.” Anna took the box. It was a small square jeweler’s box, unwrapped. The tiny hinge creaked when Anna opened it. Inside, pressed into a padded slot, was a gold ring set with three stones—a garnet, a diamond, and a yellow topaz. They were her children’s birthstones. It was a mother’s ring. Anna slipped it onto the ring finger of her right hand. It was a snug, even fit. She looked up at Bruno and Polly and down to the faces of her sons and told them the truth in a metered, earnest voice.
“It is the nicest gift I’ve ever received.”
“You like it?” Bruno’s voice was flat, but not unkind.
“I love it.”
“Very good. Happy birthday. Enjoy your breakfast.” Bruno leaned down and gave his wife a modest kiss on the lips. Anna didn’t fight the tears that came.
ANNA HAD WRITTEN LETTERS to Stephen she’d never sent, all but one of which she composed during the immediate weeks after his departure. She hid them in her high school scrapbook (melancholy’s most appropriate storehouse), itself at the bottom of a box, which in turn rested underneath a stack of a half dozen other boxes in a deep corner of the attic where Bruno would never find them. Anna sometimes pulled the letters out and sat on the attic floor and spent moody hours rereading them. They were maudlin and overcomposed, and she remembered where she wrote every one. In Platzspitz: They used to call this Needle Park. Where the addicts got their drugs. I am addicted to you and I shake on the floor in your absence. And another, written from a bench facing the river Sihl, the muddy river that feeds into the Limmat: Brown like your eyes, brown like the hurt in my heart. Murky and silty and sad oh sad. The day was drizzly. A man in a green hat staggered past Anna to a tree fifty yards away and took a piss. Another letter opened like this: I write to you from the Lindenhof, the very place you searched out the day we met. And yet another letter began at Wipkingen station: Your station, Stephen. Do you remember? That letter took her weeks to write. She finished it on the bank of the Zürichsee at Seefeld, in the Riesbach harbor, by the large, abstract sculptures. Anna remembered each incident, each place, most every pen stroke, the clothes she wore, the weathers, how they turned, how they stalled, how they felt against her skin.
It had been at least five months since she’d read the letters. Maybe six. The last time she read them was the first time they embarrassed her.
ONE MORNING THE PREVIOUS week, Anna arrived at German class with a stomachache. She felt as if she’d eaten pebbles or swallowed hourglass sand. She took her notes silently and without flourish. Roland spoke of indefinite pronouns. Something. Someone. No one. Everybody. Whoever. All. Enough. And: Nothing.