The party’s chatter had picked up. People drank and ate and while the party retained a strained, dull ambiance, conversation loosened and people began to relax. Anna lagged back for a second, exhaled deeply, and then steeled in herself a will to interact. She bumped into Edith as she rounded the corner into the den.
“Everything all right, Anna?” She spoke disingenuously.
“Everything’s swell,” Anna said simply.
“You know”—Edith leaned in—“I’ve been surveying the livestock.” Anna made a face. “I’ll bet there’s at least one man we could hook you up with.”
“Edith. Really.” Anna reminded her she had a husband.
“Yes. I suppose you do.” Edith kept on. “What about that fellow Roland?” Anna threw her a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “All right, then. What about the Scotsman? Didn’t I just see him coming out of your bedroom?” There was a dance of light in Edith’s eyes.
“Enough, Edith.” Anna had flint in her voice.
“God, Anna. Lighten up. That Mary’s done her prudish number on you.”
“It’s not prudery,” Anna said. “It’s decorum.”
“Ha, ha!” Edith’s laugh was scattershot. “Trust me, Anna. I know the score.” Anna looked at her and decided that she probably did.
Edith returned Anna’s stare. “Mary, on the other hand …” She trailed off affectedly. Whatever she was going to say, she didn’t need to finish it.
“Be nice to her, Edith.”
“God, Anna. You bore me.”
“Edith, I have guests.”
Edith smirked. “Fine, whatever.” Edith brushed past Anna into the hall, pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and began to text Niklas, Anna assumed.
“WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN an obsession and a compulsion?”
As a child Anna had been prone to counting things. Rocks in her path. Telephone trills. Words in sentences. Sentences in paragraphs. Every action had to be ordered. Every thought both metered and meted out. It was painstaking. She was always on call. It was a fair enough compromise. The counting, sorting, and classifying helped Anna manage her panics. The psychiatrist decided that it, like Anna’s depression, was a phase. It was. It didn’t persist. She moved past the habit by picking up other habits.
“An obsession is a defense against feeling out of control. A compulsion is the failure of that defense.”
AT THE END OF a recent class, Anna asked Roland to translate some graffiti she’d seen scratched onto the back of a train seat. Graffiti in Swiss trains is rare. Anna had copied it onto the back of her German notebook. “ ‘Was fuer ae huere Schweinerei …’ What does that mean?”
Roland frowned, shuffled his papers, and started for the door. “It means something not very nice.” Anna stood there waiting for a response. Roland sighed and relented. “It means ‘what a fucking mess.’ ”
EVERYONE HAS A TELL. In poker, the underpinning rule for assessing them is this: a weak hand means strong action and a strong hand means weak. Does he shake? Does he glance too furtively at his stack of chips? Does he stare too intently at his cards? Does he throw down his bet like a chef drops a hot potato? Does he or does he not look other players in the eye?
Of course, there are other tells. Your son says Tell me a story, Mami, and you settle down next to him and begin: Es war einmal eine Prinzessin … There is show-and-tell, where for perhaps the first time in your life you publicize an inner aspect of yourself, not yet aware of exposure’s possible consequence. Once, in second grade, Anna brought her favorite doll to class. A bisque-head doll, her hands and feet were also made of porcelain and her hair was human, black and perfect. Anna named her Frieda and while she did not love her in the way that other girls loved their own baby dolls, rocking them and pretending to feed them and scolding them when they were naughty, Anna felt something lovelike. She was fascinated with the curves of Frieda’s face, the softness of her hair, and the lacy pink dress she wore. It was a detached, scientific interest, but a deeply enthralling one nonetheless. And when on the playground that day she dropped her by accident and a boy named Walter—also by accident—stepped on Frieda’s right hand and crushed it to irreparable bits, Anna felt the sort of loss that little girls do when their dolls break and she spent the rest of the day in tears. At home, Anna returned Frieda to her shelf and never played with or examined her again. She’d loved her more than she’d realized.
And then there is Wilhelm Tell, the Swiss national hero who, having refused to bow to the overlord, was forced to shoot an apple off his young son’s head. With a single bolt of his crossbow, he split the apple into perfect halves. If there was a moral to that story, Anna couldn’t say what it was.
HE NEVER TOLD HER he did not love her.
But he never told her he did.