The Golden Hour. Beatriz Williams

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      The thing about Gerhard, he was so stiff and formal in public and to strangers and even to his own family, his two sisters, one married and one maiden. Inside the privacy of marriage, however, he was a pussycat. Not, not a pussycat. More like a spaniel, deeply emotional, almost abject, wholly bound to the late Romantic ideal of a singular, mystical, all-powerful love between husband and wife. Also as a Romantic, he worshiped nature. He loved to go walking with Elfriede, away from the schloss and its gardens, maybe rowing on the lake. He didn’t say much during these expeditions, but tears often welled in his eyes as he gazed at her, especially once she became pregnant and her belly began to swell beneath her dress. He hated to leave her side, even to work in his study for a few hours, as duty demanded. Yet when he traveled to Berlin or to Vienna—to pay his respects to his Kaiser, to see to his business interests, to buy art for his collections—and Elfriede asked to go with him, he always refused.

      No, he said. His angel Elfriede must not be polluted by the dirt of the city. He liked to think of her here, in the country, breathing the pure air that was so healthful for their growing child. Besides, he would say, kissing her tenderly, she wouldn’t like Berlin, it was chock-full of merchants and artists and Jews. The worst, decadent aspects of Vienna transported into a kind of German Chicago, whatever that was.

      Back to bed. Yes, the wedding night was a tearful disaster, but Gerhard was remorseful. The next evening he took greater care, and—a man of discipline—didn’t allow himself the pleasure of penetration until he had coaxed Elfriede’s first orgasm from between her legs, sometime past midnight. Following this victory, he became determined that they should experience climax at a simultaneous instant, in order to achieve the sublime, transcendental union of which he dreamed. In fact, so determined that Elfriede, touched but not inexhaustible, learned it was sometimes easier to simply pretend that she was about to reach the desired peak, so that Gerhard could join her there, or rather imagine he’d joined her.

      Then she could go to sleep, stunned by the weight of his body.

      STILL, SHE CAN’T DISCUSS THESE things with Wilfred. Something sacred should remain of that time, she thinks. Anyway, once she’s recovered from her breakdown, once Herr Doktor Hermann determines she’s completed her course of treatment, she must return to her husband and family. And can she face Gerhard again if she’s disclosed these intimate secrets to another man? Another man than Herr Doktor Hermann, of course, who is a professional. (Although she hasn’t described her conjugal experiences to Herr Doktor Hermann, either, despite how often he insists that her successful treatment depends on such revelations. That’s the bind, in fact—she can’t return to her husband until she’s completed her treatment, and she can’t return to her husband if she’s completed her treatment.)

      “FAIR PLAY, I SUPPOSE,” SAYS Wilfred. “We’ll leave that aside. But what would you do, if not marriage?”

      “I don’t know. I can’t think about it. It would be like wishing he were dead.”

      “All right. We can speak in the abstract, if you like. If not marriage, then what?”

      Elfriede draws her knees up to her chin. “I might travel.”

      “Travel where?”

      “Everywhere. I want to see the ocean, first. I used to dream of traveling on a liner across the sea, and ending up in some exotic place, like America.”

      Wilfred laughs. “America’s not as exotic as you think. Maybe the western part.”

      “Have you been there?”

      “I went to Boston with my father, one summer. It was hot and dirty and businesslike, and the people were surprisingly prim. They draw from Puritan stock, I believe. Then we went to Cape Cod for a couple of weeks, which was rather nicer. It sticks out right into the ocean, you see, curling like a scorpion’s tail, and we swam in the surf every morning at sunrise.”

      “Heaven,” says Elfriede.

      Wilfred struggles upward to sit beside her. “Not quite.”

      “Why not?”

      “This is more like heaven, if you ask me.”

      A breeze comes upon them, stirring Elfriede’s clothes. Stirring his. The sky is clear above the greens and grays of the mountaintops, except for a single, small cloud that sticks to the highest peak. The air smells of warmth, of sunbaked grass, and occasionally of Wilfred when his scent steals close enough.

      “I don’t understand …” she begins softly.

      “Understand what?”

      “Why you should move me like this, when he loved me so much. So terribly.”

      “It’s strange, isn’t it? This.”

      She leans her head on his shoulder. “What are we to do?”

      “Nothing.” He touches her hair. Then he says it again, in English. Nothing.

      Nothing, she repeats.

      “No-thing. Th-th-th. Put your tongue beneath your upper teeth.”

      “No-thing,” Elfriede says again, paying particular attention to this English th, her Waterloo these past few weeks. In order to pass the anxious time while Wilfred lay in bed with his relapse—a friendly orderly passed the notes between them—she began to teach herself English with the books from the sanatorium’s extensive library. She hoped to astound him when he recovered. Good morning, she said to him, when they met at last on the wall of the infirmary garden, the exact spot where they had spoken their first words to each other. (This by design, of course, in a note passed that morning from the orderly’s pocket.) I hope you are vell. She remembers how he turned—she’d come up to him from the meadow behind—and how the sight of his face, pale but radiant, made her dizzy. How his smile, growing slowly across his face to expose his teeth, illuminated the universe. Well, he said. W-w-w. Well.

      W-w-well, she repeated.

       I am well, thank you. Are you well, my love?

       I am wery vell.

      Now it’s a joke between them, how wery vell they both are during these slow, beautiful hours together. How wery vell the sun shines upon them, how wery vell the air smells, the ground feels, the skin glows. How wery vell she’s progressing in her English lessons.

      Nothing, Elfriede says again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. We are doing nothing. How is zat?

      “I’m being discharged,” Wilfred says in German.

      BUT ISN’T THIS WHY THEY’VE fallen in love, so suddenly and so utterly? Because of course Wilfred must go home when he’s better, because of course Elfriede and Wilfred must part. It’s so easy and so safe to fall in love when the universe is against you. Now, they haven’t quite said those words to each other—I love you, we’ve fallen in love—but Elfriede has no doubt they echo inside Wilfred’s head, in the same way they echo in hers.

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