Sleeping in Flame Page 3

She put a hand to her mouth. Oh! The moment before she spoke was ten years long. What the hell would I do if she said no? What would the night be like back in Vienna without her? She looked from Nicholas to me, to Nicholas again.

  "I think I want to do that."

  "Then do it. Let's go."

  Her coat was short and black and made of some kind of satiny material. I watched her pull it around her shoulders as we got ready to go. She turned and looked at me.

  "Is this crazy? Should I do it?"

  "I guess it's no crazier than anything else today, you know? Does Luc know you're friends with Nicholas?"

  "Oh yes, but he'd never expect me to go to Vienna on the spur of the moment like this. It's not my style; I'm not usually very spontaneous."

  'Then you're all set."

  She took a deep breath and nodded, more to herself than to me. "Yes, you're right. Thank you."

  Nicholas took her arm and started for the stairs. I followed, wondering what part God or fate or luck played in this script. There was still a fear around my heart that she would suddenly stop and say she couldn't possibly go. Maybe without thinking I walked behind them on purpose, to catch her if she began to fall back into uncertainty, or ran up hard against the wall of risk she was facing.

  A few weeks later I asked Maris what she was thinking that night as we walked out of the restaurant. She gave a strange answer.

  "I was thinking about a woman I know who entered contests. For years she clipped coupons and filled out forms, did all those things you do to enter contests. A real fan. Well, one day she won. Won first prize. It was a three-day trip across Colorado in a hot air balloon. Gourmet picnics, see the mountains from up high, the works. Nice, huh? The day she was to go up, she had to meet the balloon in a big field somewhere that bordered a national forest. When she arrived, there were all kinds of cameramen and TV reporters there to record the festivities. She loved that because she's kind of a ham. So now the prize was even better than she'd hoped. How many times does that happen in life? First, she'd won the contest, then she was going to be on the six o'clock news. Everything was wunderbar.

  "There were four people in the balloon, and once they were all on board, the thing took off. The television cameras were rolling, everyone was shouting good-bye and waving, the pilot had broken out a bottle of champagne. . . . Then the balloon caught on fire. Don't ask me how. The whole thing just went right up, swoosh! They were about two hundred feet in the air. No, that's too much, but they were very high, according to her. The balloon started disintegrating and dropping pieces of burning canvas on them.

  "My friend and two of the other people panicked and jumped right over the side. Those other two were killed as soon as they hit the ground, but by some miracle my friend hit a tree and was slowed or deflected. She didn't die, but she spent the next three years in a hospital and walks with two canes now."

  "God, what a story. But what does it have to do with the night we met?"

  "That night I was wondering if flying off to Vienna so spontaneously was going to be like my friend jumping from the balloon."

  "From the frying pan into the fire?"

  "No, because the fire was all around me. Luc had burned that day to the ground. I thought that even if I came down and hit like an egg in Vienna, it'd be better than going down in slow mad flames."

  We drove to the Munich airport in her old red car. It was as Nicholas had described – a mess. The ashtrays were packed, the back seat sported a big rip, books were scattered everywhere. I spent most of the trip trying to read the titles by passing streetlight. I wondered if she was a slob, but I was so happy about what was going on that I didn't care. Nicholas asked her to turn on the radio, but she said it had been broken the week before. He leaned over the backseat and winked at me.

  "Hey, Kleine, how come you never bought a nice car? You make enough money. This thing looks like something out of Mad Max."

  While shifting gears, she gave him a poke in the ribs. "That's not very nice. What am I supposed to do, be like you and buy a Porsche? An M.L.C.?"

  He looked at me again. "What's an M.L.C.?"

  "A Mid-Life Crisis car. Every man I know who drives one is either a twenty-year-old brat who got it from his daddy, or a forty-year-old who wants to have a last fling before admitting he's bald and looks silly with a gold Rolex and a teenage girlfriend."

  "I'm not bald. I don't have a teenage girlfriend."

  She looked at him, and although she was smiling, raised her eyebrows questioningly. "Maybe not, but you bought that car as soon as you turned forty. Don't forget, Nicholas, I was right there when you got it."

  There was a kind of sexy, teasing tone to their banter that made me seriously doubt what Nicholas had said earlier about their not being lovers. Before the ride was over, she had said a number of things to him he wouldn't have allowed others to say without becoming very angry or defensive.

  She drove the way she spoke: nervously, a little too fast, but clearly in control. I kept forgetting what she had already gone through that day. It was as if we three were out for a night on the town and not, in fact, helping her to flee a lunatic who had gone for her with a pair of scissors.

  "I'm going to call Uschi from the airport and see if you can stay with her."

  I quickly tried out three or four sentences in my head. "She can stay with me, Nicholas. It's no problem." "Hey, stay at my apartment, Maris. I'll bunk out on the couch if you don't mind sleeping with a cat." I tried several and then wisely decided to keep my trap shut.

  At the Munich airport she put the car in a long-term parking slot and we scampered through the fast-moving traffic to the main terminal. It was nine at night and there were few people in the building. While Maris bought her ticket, Nicholas went off to find a telephone. I stood far back from the ticket booth, not sure if she wanted me nearby. When she was done she came right over.

  "I haven't flown in so long. I've always hated to. It scares me right down to the bone. I usually take five Valium and sink into a dead stupor an hour before flight time. That's my way of handling it. No Valium this time."

  "You don't look like the kind who'd be afraid of flying."

  "Just watch my knees when we take off."

  "I know! We'll sit on either side of you in the plane so you can have stereo arms to squeeze if you need to."

  "You know what's so nice about this whole experience, Walker? That something so reassuring and . . . human could come out of so much bad. I thought when I went to meet Nicholas it would be for an hour and he'd make me feel a little better. Nothing more than that. But afterward I'd have to go back to being frightened and unsure of what to do next. But you've so wonderfully taken all of those decisions out of my hands. You just said 'We'll take care of you' and you have. I can't tell you how grateful I am. And you don't even know me!"

  I almost couldn't look at her. "I hope I will."

  It was raining when Nicholas pulled up in front of the Arrivals section in his white truck. Maris laughed loudly and clapped her hands.

  "It's the Good Humor man! Where's the Porsche, in the back?"

  I had forgotten there were only two bucket seats in the little truck, so Maris had to ride back to town on my lap. She kept asking if she was crushing me. It would have been fine with me if the trip had lasted a few days.

  Uschi Hellinger had worked with Nicholas for many years, doing all of the costuming for his films. She was probably his best female friend, and he often referred to her as his sister. I liked her for many reasons, especially because she was always dead-honest with me, but also generous and quirky. When I returned to town after my divorce, she was one of the kind ones who had kept a loving eye on me.

  She lived in an atelier in the Third District, and answered the door that night in a flannel nightgown as red as a fresh poppy. I didn't know her connection to Maris, but the two of them whooped happily when they saw each other and embraced hard. A glass table in a corner of the room had a big spread of food on it. None of us had eaten i
n a long time, so the next half hour was devoted to consuming everything on that table, while Uschi grilled us about what had happened in Munich.

  In the middle of Sachertorte, Maris began to cry. She was exhausted and the day had finally closed down on her. I have rarely seen a person in so much obvious pain. Hunched forward, hands spread over her face, there were so many tears that they actually dripped through her fingers onto the floor. Uschi got right up and put her arms around her, their heads together in what looked like prayer, or mourning.

  Nicholas looked at me and gestured with his head for us to go. We got up at the same time and went for the door. I turned there and looked back into the room. Uschi looked up, smiled briefly, and then turned her attention back to her friend.

  3.

  The next morning I woke to an almost total loss of memory of what had happened the day before. It was only when I was pulling on my pants that everything came back in such a Technicolor rush that I could only stand there and look blankly at the wall across the room.

  I don't know why this lapse occurred, but I had a hunch. Seven hours before my mind, like the rest of my body, had also dropped all of its "clothes" on the floor before crawling wearily into bed. Overtired by all the things the day had demanded it take in, or consider, reject, memorize . . . my brain had simply had enough and wanted some empty hours to itself. And like a heavy drinker the morning after, it rose to the call of the day only because it had to.

  Orlando broke through my remembrances of things past. Standing in his magenta cat box in the bathroom, he loudly announced that it was time for breakfast, since he had already finished his morning ablutions, etcetera.

  I walked barefoot into the kitchen and opened him a can of something tasty. One good thing about Orlando; he wasn't a picky eater. Avocadoes or raw liver were his favorites, but he made a happy meal of almost anything I put in his bowl. He always ate very slowly, pausing sometimes between bites to think about what he was eating. If you said something to him while he was chewing, his mouth would stop moving and, blind though he was, he would look in your direction and wait for you to finish before he went on.

  While preparing my own coffee and toast, I ran yesterday through my mind: backward, forward, and lots of stop-action. It reminded me of an athlete reviewing previous game movies in order to spot both his opponents' and his own weaknesses and slip-ups.

  When the phone rang, I was thinking about something Maris had said to me on the plane trip home. "Today has been the kind of day that tires you out the rest of your life."

  The phone had rung four times before I picked it up.

  "Walker, have you called her yet?"

  "No. Should I?"

  "Of course! Don't you know how lonely and frightened she is?"

  "Nicholas, it's nine in the morning! I don't think she's lonely and frightened yet. Listen, we talked about this, but I'm going to ask again: Is it really all right with you if I ask her out?"

  "Absolutely. I know what you're thinking, but we really never went very far. Don't be paranoid before you begin."

  Before I called I brushed my teeth.

  "Hello, Maris? This is Walker Easterling."

  "Hi! I just got back five minutes ago. I went out and bought everything I need to camp out here indefinitely: a toothbrush, soap, and mascara. I even went to a toy store and bought a couple of LEGO sets."

  "LEGO? What do you do with that?"

  "Didn't Nicholas tell you? That's what I work with. I do LEGO constructions. I build cities with them. LEGO, balsa wood, sometimes papier-mвchй. I'll show you sometime. I build my own cities for a living and people actually buy them."

  "Do you show in galleries?"

  "Oh yes. I had a big one in Bremen a while ago; sold almost everything. It made me so happy and lazy that I didn't do anything for two months. Then I realized I had run out of money and it was time to start working again. Unfortunately, that's when Luc started in on me."

  "Maris, do you have any free time today? Can I treat you to a coffee or lunch?"

  "I was going to ask you the same thing."

  "Really? Do you think we could do it now? I waited breakfast, hoping you'd say you were hungry."

  We met a half hour later on the Graben. One of Vienna's main walking streets, it is always a nice place to be, full of relaxed strollers, outdoor cafйs, chic stores. I arrived early and, on impulse, walked into the Godiva candy store and bought Maris two chocolate golf balls.

  As I was coming out, I saw her bustling down the street toward Saint Stephen's Church, our designated meeting place. I watched her for a moment. An idea struck me, and I moved fast to catch up. When I was about ten feet behind her I slowed, wanting to see other people's reactions to this tall woman in a red hat.

  I wasn't disappointed. Men watched admiringly, women gave two looks: the first of recognition, the second a quick up-and-down appraisal to see what she was wearing, or what she'd done with her makeup or clothes.

  I touched her elbow from behind. Instantly, she touched my hand with her own before turning to face me.

  "It must be Walker. Ha, it is you!"

  "You're pretty trusting. What if it hadn't been me?"

  "If it hadn't been you? It had to be you. Who else do I know on the Graben today?"

  "But how can you be so trusting after all that craziness in Munich you've been through?"

  "Because I want to keep trusting people. If I become scared and suspicious, then Luc really has won, even when I'm so far away from him. Where should we eat? Is the Cafй Diglas still alive?"

  To my surprise, she was thirty-five years old, much older than she looked. Her father was one of those trouble-shooting engineers who carts his family around the world with him while supervising the building of a university in Paraguay or an airport in Saudi Arabia. There were two children in the family: Maris, and her older brother Ingram, a disc jockey in Los Angeles.

  She had gone to international schools in six different countries before entering the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia at eighteen to study painting and sculpture.

  "But the school and I were like oil and water. From the beginning, I wanted to work with all kinds of crazy things like LEGO, and crayons, and those little rubber soldiers you buy in a plastic bag at the supermarket. You know the kind I mean? That's all I really wanted to do, but they didn't go for it at all. So I did the typical dumb-ass thing and quit after two years. I went to Hamburg instead because one of my greatest heroes lived there – Horst Janssen, the painter. I figured that if he lived there, then that would be my starting point. I went one summer and stayed. Took jobs in bars and restaurants, whatever I could find. I learned how to speak good German by taking orders and having to tell people how much their bills were.

  "I was working in a bar called Il Giardino, which was where all of the models and photographers in Hamburg hung out after work. Right in the middle of our busiest time, around eleven-thirty one night, a man came up and asked me to hold a bouquet of white roses. Actually, he didn't ask, he just sort of handed them to me and walked away. I had a giant tray of empty glasses in one hand and suddenly all these beautiful flowers in the other. I didn't know which to put down, so I stood in the middle of the floor and started laughing.

  "The man came back with a camera and started taking pictures of me. I hammed it up and posed like Betty Grable, or as best I could with all the glasses and flowers! When the guy was done, he handed me a card and told me to come to see him the next day. It was the photographer Ovo. You've heard of him, haven't you? Well, the most shocking thing was, I discovered the next day Ovo was a woman! When I got to the studio, there she was right in the middle of all her assistants and models, and it was so obvious she was a woman . . . I felt terrible for ever having thought otherwise!"

  Maris went on talking about her modeling career, about three months spent in Egypt, about living with a famous German opera singer. There were enough experiences and adventures for three separate lives. Her thirty-five years were so full and consumma
tely interesting that it struck me, more than once, that she might be lying. I had known great liars before and had enjoyed their tales. But if this were true about Maris York, then it was both heartbreaking and dangerous. Had her Luc attacked her the day before because she was a beautiful psychopath who couldn't distinguish between what was and what she wanted things to be? Even worse, had this Luc even attacked her in the first place?

  Proof came in a sexy way. While talking about life with her opera singer, she casually mentioned that he had asked her to prove her love for him in a bizarre way: He wanted her to be tattooed on the small of her back with a single musical note. She said she'd asked him which note, and then gone right out and done it.

  Nervously, I asked if I could see it. She smiled at me, but it wasn't a particularly friendly smile. "Are you a music lover, or do you just want proof?"

  "Maris, your life sounds like a nine-hundred-page Russian novel. It's all just too much. I mean –"

  Before I finished, she leaned forward and jerked her black sweater up and over her head. She was wearing a white T-shirt underneath, and this she rucked up just a little to show her back. And there it was – one bright purple musical note against the white smoothness of skin.

  A long silence followed between us for the first time that morning. I thought it was because she was angry at me for doubting what she had said. She began to put the sweater back on, at the same time saying, "You know, you saved my life yesterday."

  I didn't know what to answer.

  "It's quite true, Walker. The next time I saw him, he would have killed me."

  She knew Vienna because she had often come with her opera singer when he performed at the State Opera. On one of those visits she'd met Nicholas and Uschi. The three of them became close friends. After her affair with the singer died, Nicholas asked her to come back to Vienna to work as a set designer on one of his early television shows.

  "He has been my lifesaver more than once, as you can see. I wish there was some way I could repay him, but he gets very grumpy when you say thanks for anything he does. Years ago, I made a city for him and filled it with characters from his movies. He liked it a lot, but that's the only thing he's let me do in return for his kindness. What a strange man. He wants you to love him, and that's so easy, but when you show it, he doesn't know how to handle it; it's a hot potato for him. Do you know the German phrase, 'You can steal horses with him'? It means a person you can both make love with all night, passionately, then wake up with the next morning and be completely silly. And he never makes you embarrassed or self-conscious about anything you do."