The Love of a Bad Man Read online

  He isn’t jealous when he sees pictures of me in my swimsuit with the young men. He says it’s good to see me having fun, making the most of the long summer days. He says there’s nothing more virtuous in the world than young, healthy, German bodies having fun in the sunlight.

  They are German men, His men. I don’t forget this, even when they grab me by the wrists and ankles and swing me into the water, so I hit its surface with a hard, thrilling slap. My heart breaks as pleasure ripples through me — a murky bubbling and a pure mountain sky. They help me up and I know it’s all just innocent fun, know that their bodies belong to Him as much as mine does.

  In dreams, familiar things look unfamiliar. Places I know now seem too big, like I’m seeing them through the eyes of a child, while places I knew back then are too small to fit me. I wander through the empty studio, the rooms of the Grand Hotel, as if I’m the only person left on earth. I sit cramped at my school desk or on the floor of my parents’ apartment, among a clutter of cheap furniture and flowered wallpaper. No matter where I am, I can’t get comfortable.

  There’s one dream where I’m lying on the terrace of the Grand Hotel, looking at the view of the mountains. It’s winter and no one else is out, but I can feel Him standing right behind my chair. I long to turn around and look at him, but I have a feeling that it’s strictly forbidden, that I’ll see something terrible if I do.

  All sorts of people come to see Him at the Grand Hotel — not just politicians and military men, but royalty, film stars, musicians. Sometimes I’m allowed to dine with these guests in the big hall, posing as a secretary. Other times, I’m confined to my suite while his real secretaries get to stay at the table.

  I don’t understand what makes Him decide when to lock me away. In my suite, I throw clothes off their racks; I smoke and pace. I flop down on my chintz couch and feel so bored it aches.

  He has a separate suite, with a narrow iron bed and a neat little adjoining office. I don’t go into his rooms, but he comes into mine — usually close to dawn, when his face is grey and his eyelids drooping and pouched. I don’t look as he shuffles up to the bed in his billowy nightshirt, knowing he’s embarrassed of his unshelled body, the soft belly and narrow shoulders beneath his padded uniform. As soon as he gets under the sheets, however, I turn my gold toward him. I am the sun, breaking over the mountains.

  My whole family comes to visit me at the Grand Hotel, Papa included. We ride out of the gates on bicycles, wearing feathered hats with crisp shirts and slacks. My little black dogs chase after us, yapping as we roll down the grassy slopes. Everyone is happy and everyone is here as my guest, breathing luxury instead of the stale air of their tiny apartment back in town.

  Papa has changed his mind about His politics. He now has a uniform of his own, which he wears to lunch in the great dining hall. He wears it back in town, too, for the family portrait we sit for on his sixtieth birthday. It is September and there is a lot going on in the east that’s keeping Him busy, but everyone says it will be over soon.

  When He is away from the Grand Hotel, I have to be on my guard. Other women, officials’ wives, lie like snakes in the sun, coils glistening and chins held high. Other men, fat officials and lean younger officers, hedge me in hallways with their hot hands and breath. They don’t expect to succeed, but they linger over my body like they hope to leave a mark, then stride back into the open and joke about what a stupid little flirt I am.

  I don’t tell Him about all this when he calls; if he calls. He has enough to worry about without me coming to him with my petty troubles. Instead, I keep Gretl with me, long after the rest of my family has gone back to town. I invite my old school friends to visit with their children, and pretty blonde Marion, who used to be an opera singer. We sit apart from the other women, tanning ourselves and taking pictures of one another looking chic and sun-kissed. In our bathing suits, we practice yoga and gymnastics, feats of flexibility that make the men stare and their wives shoot daggers.

  When He is back, I make the Grand Hotel feel like a home. He appreciates my efforts: the cut flowers I bring in from the fields, the photo slides and home-video footage I show on the evenings he wants a break from work. ‘There’s me by the lake doing yoga. That’s called a wheel pose,’ I tell him. ‘And here’s us tanning our backs.’ The wives yawn and sneer, but He claps his hands. Beautiful, he says. It’s beautiful to be home.

  I haven’t tried to hurt myself again and haven’t thought about it either. There’s so much going on right now and I have so much to look forward to, once all His work is done. He says the end of his work is almost in sight, and Germany will soon triumph. The world will be a more beautiful place after we triumph, and He will finally be free to retire. He tells me we will have a big wedding then, and everyone will know I’m the only woman in his life.

  I know He worries about me hurting myself, not just on purpose, but also by accident. He worries about me not eating enough. He worries about me when I’m skiing and skating, doing high dives and swinging upside-down from my exercise bar. He worries about me getting cancer from bathing in the sun too long, and from the cigarettes I won’t give up. He worries about his enemies hurting me as a way of getting to him, keeping me hostage and interrogating me for information I don’t have.

  I worry about Him, too. He wasn’t young when we met, but now he is over fifty, with shaking hands and a sensitive tummy and a hunched, shuffling walk. There are lots of bad people who want to see him dead, and it’s taking a toll on him, even if he likes to joke about exploding podiums and bombed hotels. One summer, when he’s working in his Eastern headquarters, a bomb goes off in the conference room just feet from where he’s sitting. He escapes with a perforated eardrum and a shredded uniform, which he sends to me as a trophy.

  Soon after Dr Marx moves away, Ilse marries a lawyer, divorces, then marries another lawyer. Gretl gets married, too, a couple of years later, to a dashing general called Hermann. She is crazy for his broad shoulders and luscious lips, which she tries out within weeks of him arriving at the Grand Hotel. Neither of them know anything about true love. All the same, they look good dancing together at the wedding, hand in hand and cheek to cheek.

  I dance with Hermann, too, almost as close and almost as much. If it weren’t for me, Gretl would never have found a husband like him, or been able to afford a wedding like this. We feast high up in the mountains, in the eyrie above the Grand Hotel. An accordion man and two violinists serenade us with gypsy songs.

  Though He foots the bill and makes an appearance at the ceremony, he doesn’t stay for the celebrations and he certainly doesn’t dance. There is still work to be done.

  I think of us dancing on that mountaintop, like heroes in Valhalla, when we are hiding in the concrete world underground. Only a year has passed, but so much has crumbled, so much is closing in around us. While He sleeps, as still and grey as a corpse, I get everyone to come out of the shelter with me, to the empty rooms upstairs. There is champagne and a gramophone, a song about happiness and blood-red roses playing over and over. I dance until I am cold with sweat, until the room is heaving with bodies, and enlightenment is almost within reach.

  When He comes back from the explosion in his Eastern headquarters, he is whispery and half-deaf, thinner than I’ve ever seen him. Everyone at the Grand Hotel compliments him on his heroic survival. They look away tactfully when food drops from his trembling fork, and when I lean in to dab at his face after he’s finished eating.

  I would like to make love to Him, to take the years off his body by giving him mine, but he says this is no longer possible. Instead, he sleeps beside me, stomach squeaking and groaning. The air is thick, and his body gives off a smell like something dying.

  In spring, I see things that could be dreams. A train platform in the capital, lumped with people waiting to flee south. A view of pale sky through a cracked ceiling in the chancellery building. A shattering of glass in the wintry court
yard, where the secretaries have been doing target practice. A big metal door and a concrete staircase leading fifty feet underground.

  Places that were once safe aren’t safe anymore. People that He once trusted are turning into traitors. But our dreams for the future are still dreams, shimmering like gas on the air.

  Clothes are spilling out of my wardrobe at the Grand Hotel, a jumble of colours and textures. I fill my valise with silk and satin, tulle and taffeta, polka dots and florals to brighten up the grey underworld where I am heading. He says he doesn’t want me coming to the capital in these dangerous times, but I don’t listen. I won’t let Him be alone among enemies.

  I leave the rest of my clothes for my sisters: Gretl, big with Hermann’s baby; Ilse, ramrod thin, staying on at the Grand Hotel after I leave. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ she asks me. I tell her yes, I know.

  It ends on a couch. In an office fifty feet underground, with the last of His officials standing guard outside the door. I sit to his right, leaning against his arm and telling him he’s made me the happiest woman in the world. My feet are drawn up under my full skirt, which is black with appliquéd red roses. A ring glints on my fourth finger, a cyanide capsule in my closed fist.

  He says it will be quick and painless. A coldness in my mouth. A smell of bitter almonds after I clamp down. A smooth, pretty face for when I enter the next world. I know He doesn’t believe in a life after this one, but maybe my belief is enough for the both of us. I lift my face to brush his old lips one last time before this world ends.

  There is enlightenment and there is ignorance, so bright and pure that it’s almost a virtue. They will say that I knew nothing, Ilse and Papa and everyone else — that I didn’t really know Him and that’s how I could follow him underground. In a way, they will be right.

  We are on a couch together and my eyes are closed before his. We are on a couch together, and then He is standing up while I dress, smiling at my lowered golden head. He is telling me I’m good, but what thrills me is the thought that I’m not. If I look up at his face now, maybe I’ll see something terrible.

  Martha

  There’s a tradition here at Sing Sing that the strongest go to the chair last. Strongest how, nobody says, but I’d like to believe it’s not only my weight they’re talking about. I’d like to believe there’s some kind of strength that’s been with me always, waiting to be found, like oil at the bottom of an ocean. Strength that wasn’t Ray’s, though he might’ve brought it out with his loving.

  If I’m honest though, my weight probably has more to do with it. People love what they can measure, and I’ve got a good forty pounds on Ray.

  Most folks think us large women are sexless, old before our time. That just isn’t true. Even before Ray, I tried to get it regular, every week if I could. I guess it must have done something to me, having my brother sneak into my room so many nights as a kid; got me used to it early.

  I had my share of young men when I was an Army nurse in California. Yankees. Rednecks. Dagos. Sambos. They were all the same, where it mattered; their pimples and peach fuzz, their small dicks they used like weapons. I knew love had no more to do with it than with what happened after Ma turned the lights out, and that I was meant to keep quiet in the same way. But that didn’t keep me from laying down in the dark for every serviceman who stood in line.

  Ernie was one of the few guys who went to the effort of buying me daiquiris beforehand, and he was kind of cute with his squinty black eyes and brows that met in the middle. The days lined up, too, so it made sense to say it was his. He tried denying it. When that didn’t work, he jumped off the pier and tried to drown himself. I sat by his bed after they pumped his stomach, watching the rhythms of his chest and stroking his brow, and he looked so lovely I believed he could only have loving words for me when he came to.

  Instead, Ernie woke with his face seasick-green and looked at me with the eyes of a drowning man.

  ‘Oh God,’ he moaned. ‘I wish I was dead.’

  Well, I gave Ernie his wish when I moved back to Florida. There’s more respectability in being a 200-pound widow than a 200-pound bachelorette and my prospects were better with a ring on my finger — even if it wasn’t bought by a man, but out of the settlement his folks gave me to leave him be. I told the neighbours Ernie had been killed in the Pacific and for weeks had them doing my cleaning and bringing over Key lime pies. The local paper even paid me for a story about my tragedy, which called Ernie a ‘national hero’ and me his ‘brave young widow’.

  I never heard from Ernie again. I like to think that he really did die soon after, that all those young men did: blasted out of the clouds, eaten by tiger sharks, taken prisoner by the Japs. Somehow, it only seems fair.

  Willa Dean was a cute, dark-eyed baby, but sometimes her crying was too much for me. I could almost see where Ma was coming from with her spankings, though I had always told myself I’d do better than that. Most times when it got too much, I’d leave Willa with my across-the-road neighbour Birdie, or if Birdie couldn’t take her I’d crush a sleeping pill into her banana puree. That would usually give me a few hours of my own.

  With the war over, I picked up a few ex-navy types in the bars of Pensacola, but most of the men were older, like Al. He worked as a bus driver and had a gut and plenty of grey hair, which I figured would make him more likely to stick around than the others, when I started throwing up my morning eggs. To his credit, he did, long enough to give our Anthony a proper name. Sadly, once the christening was over with, so were we.

  Al said it was my moods that made him up and leave. It’s true, I’ve had rages so black they’ve left me blinking up at the ceiling lights. If you ask me though, Al would’ve left anyway, moods or none.

  It was harder being lonesome, knowing what it was to have a man around the house. I was always finding things Al left behind — his belt, his razor, his driving cap — and couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them, knowing all I would’ve been left with were my bonbon wrappers, and my big bras hung over the radiator. Sometimes I thought about using Al’s belt or razor on myself. Other thoughts, too: drowning myself in the bay, putting my head in the oven, sleeping pills. The last way always seemed like the kindest, for me and for the babies. Of course, I would have to take the babies with me; I couldn’t die in peace with them crying over me.

  What always stopped me was the thought of my own body, lying huge and mottled, waiting to be found. After nursing school, I had worked for a time as a mortician’s assistant, so I knew what dying did to a person — the bloating and the rictus and the discolouration. Somehow, it was easier to live with the shame of my body as it was, fat folds and dimples and all, than to die with it.

  I’ve tried all kinds of reducing diets in the past: the Joan Crawford, the grapefruit-and-egg, the Lucky Strike, where you trade sweets for cigarettes. It didn’t matter what it was, I always wound up with a flat emptiness inside my belly, a tightness in my jaw that wouldn’t go away until I put something in my mouth — and by ‘something’, I don’t mean grapefruit or a Lucky. The few occasions when I did grit my teeth and push through the hunger pains, I ended up blacking out, only coming to when the kids were crying and my pantry eaten bare.

  Folks at the hospital used to joke about how I looked, too. ‘Avalanche Martha’, they’d call me, on account of my white uniform and the way I rushed through those narrow halls. But I got things done and everyone knew it.

  Probably if I was a skinny, pretty thing they wouldn’t have made me superintendent of the children’s ward at twenty-seven. But, like I said, folks don’t think of fat women as being women. Not in the same way as all the pretty little nurses under my charge.

  Sure, I was sharp with them sometimes: Shirley and Doris and Thelma and all those other foolish flirts who’d only gone into nursing in hope of catching a doctor. Sometimes I enjoyed reprimanding them on the shortness of their hems and the sheerness o
f their stockings. Sometimes I got a kick out of making them stay back changing bedpans when they had dates to meet. Sometimes I yelled just to see them jump like Jiminy Cricket.

  But that didn’t give them the right to play the cruel trick on me that they did.

  St. Valentine’s Day crept up on me that year from behind, like a prowler in an alleyway. I was coming back from my dinner break when I saw it, sitting in the middle of my desk. It had been torn from the pages of a magazine — the kind full of diet tips and advertisements for beauty products — and circled in bright red. No one walking by could have missed it.

  Are you lonely and shy?

  Then join Mother Dinene’s Family Club for Lonely Hearts!

  None of the girls were in sight, and yet I could hear them all laughing, the shrillest sound in the world. I can’t say what precisely happened next, but suddenly the ceiling lights were brighter than I remembered and my girls too shook up to even shed a tear. Dr Geyer, our resident paediatrician, clapped his hand on my shoulder then and said it might be best for my nerves if I took the rest of the week off.

  The last thing I planned was to actually write in to the lonely-hearts club. I hadn’t even known I’d kept that scrap of paper, but it kept showing up in the corner of my eye. One night, after putting the kids to bed, I found it peering up at me from the dining table where I was sitting with my pack of Luckys. My eyes watered from the smoke. I stubbed out my cigarette on the magazine page. Then I picked up a pen.

  I knew if anyone at the hospital got wind of me advertising for dates, I’d get the can. But I also knew I was nearing thirty, and the bars in Pensacola seemed smaller every week, and my body was crying out for something other than sitting at home alone. I was so dog-tired of being lonesome, I was just about ready to chew my own leg off.

  Ray’s first letter came that spring, a warm Spanish breeze from grey Manhattan. This is my first letter for the lonely-hearts club. Lies. I live alone in my own apartment, much too large for a lonely bachelor. Lies. Why did I choose to write to you? Because you are a nurse, so I know you have a full heart and a great capacity for love and comfort. Truth, maybe. Ray always had a plum way of mixing his lies up with something like truth.