Chapter 16 Bad Paintings over Bullet Holes #4
“Come in!” Jimmy called to them. When the door opened, Jolanda made herself appear taller by standing on the threshold.
Claude hung back, taking refuge behind Jolanda’s hip—the hip with the holstered bicycle pump.
As usual, the heel of Jolanda’s right hand rested on the pistol grip of the pump handle—as if every situation might require a quick draw, and the bicycle pump was her Colt . 45.
“Your roommates, I presume,” Fr?ulein Eissler said to Jimmy.
She took off her cashmere cardigan and put it on his bed; she was wearing a matching short-sleeved sweater under the cardigan.
The tucked-in sweater was a light-gray color, accentuating her dark hair and dark eyes.
Her small breasts were very noticeable in the sweater, as were her small but shapely hips in her fitted slacks.
“Annelies,” she said, coming forward and shaking Jolanda’s hand, as Jolanda mumbled her own name.
“Claude!” Claude blurted out, bumping against Jolanda’s jutting hip.
Claude reached for the small, pretty hand with the silver thumb ring.
When Fr?ulein Eissler said something in French to him, Claude’s reply made him sound as if French were his second (and much neglected) language.
Jolanda, holding tight to the pistol grip of her bicycle pump, whacked her elbow against the doorjamb.
“Ouch,” Annelies said. She smiled at Jolanda and Claude, who had now retreated into the odors of frying sausage that were overwhelming the narrow hall.
Annelies and Jimmy tried sitting beside each other on the love seat.
She’d put her cardigan back on, but she left it unbuttoned.
That was when she asked young James if Jolanda was a “potential girlfriend.” Was it a young writer’s inclination to tell the whole story?
Telling Annelies that Jolanda was a lesbian would have been sufficient, but Jimmy opened the whole can of worms. The “potential girlfriend” might be Mieke, who wanted to try it with a guy.
Fr?ulein Eissler was repelled by the thought of Jolanda holding Mieke’s head.
“There’s a more natural way to get a girlfriend pregnant, Jimmy,” Annelies told him. “Finding a girlfriend who’ll give you her baby is the unnatural part,” Fr?ulein Eissler added.
“I guess you know what my mom and Esther want,” Jimmy said.
“Don’t look at me! I’m not a potential girlfriend, Jimmy Winslow,” Fr?ulein Eissler told him.
Then she moved on; the girlfriend subject was this quickly passed over.
“Every week, there will be four days in a row when you don’t see me,” Annelies announced.
She told James to write down, in English, every sentence he wished he could say “in perfect German.” (Jimmy was already writing down these instructions.) “Eventually, you won’t have to write down everything,” she said, sighing.
“Werden wir nur sprechen?” (“Will we only speak?” he’d asked her.) Jimmy doubted he would ever say anything in perfect German.
“Das Bett,” she said, pointing to the bed. “When you’re not writing things down, when we’re only speaking, the bed will be more comfortable than this misnamed love seat,” Annelies said. “Let me hear you say, ‘more comfortable’—bequemer,” Fr?ulein Eissler said.
“Bequemer,” James said, trying not to look at (or think about) the bed. He stared under the glass-topped table at Fr?ulein Eissler’s feet in his white athletic socks. “Bequemer,” Jimmy repeated, because Annelies was shaking her head.
“Again. Noch einmal,” she said.
“Bequemer,” Jimmy said again.
“Noch einmal und noch einmal,” Annelies intoned.
He kept saying the word, until he got it right.
“Repetition is the key to language. Aren’t you a Ringer—you’re a wrestler, right?
” she asked him. “Isn’t there repetition in wrestling?
Isn’t anything you get good at repetitive?
Like sex, I suppose,” Annelies said, offhandedly, as if James Winslow knew anything about sex—having not had sex, not once.
“Bequemer,” Jimmy repeated, as if he were having sex with her and it would never stop.
“Das reicht,” she said, softly. (“That’s enough.”) She was distracted. “Siegfried’s mother—I’ve seen her before. I just can’t remember where I saw her,” Fr?ulein Eissler said, sighing again.
“You mean Irmgard?” Jimmy asked.
“The one who is not dressed, whatever her name is,” Annelies said; she was impatient with distractions and already moving on, in her authoritative way.
“I don’t know what I think of this perfume—it’s new, and it’s in conflict with the cooking smells.
Do you like it?” she asked, pointing to the side of her throat as she turned her face away from him—entreating him (and showing him precisely where) to sniff her neck.
It was intoxicating to inhale her. It took more self-control than young James thought he had, but he somehow managed to restrain himself.
He didn’t kiss her throat. No doubt the look on Jimmy’s face, after he’d breathed her in, gave him away.
“Don’t fall in love with me, Jimmy—there’s no future in it,” Annelies said. James Winslow knew her warning had come too late. (Fr?ulein Eissler must have known this, too—she just looked away.)
Jimmy was reminded of Irmgard’s unreadable utterance, her weird word order and the rest. He would never forget what Siegfried’s unmarried mother said, or how she’d said it: “In winter, the living room colder is—better on one sofa movie to watch.” It wasn’t yet winter, but the living room was already colder, and he’d not been invited to watch another movie with Irmgard—not on separate sofas or the same sofa.
As for what Irmgard meant, she’d promised Jimmy nothing beyond sharing a sofa.
Irmgard’s expressions revealed her anger and her depression.
In the other expressions Jimmy saw on the tired face of Siegfried’s unmarried mother, he could not discern the difference between baleful and indifferent.
It was a little after 6 P.M. on her first tutorial visit when Fr?ulein Eissler left.
She’d pointed out to Jimmy that Jolanda and Claude had interrupted them.
Otherwise, she said she would have left “on time.” James Winslow was as unaccustomed to his attraction to Fr?ulein Eissler as he was to her exactness.
In their two hours together, he’d noticed those moments when Annelies had glanced at her wristwatch.
When she checked the time, Jimmy looked at her breasts in her tucked-in sweater.
Meanwhile, Irmgard and Frau Holzinger had thoroughly examined Fr?ulein Eissler’s boots on the doormat at the entrance. Jimmy’s landlady said it was ungewohnlich (“unusual”) that his tutor didn’t wear socks in her knee-high winter boots.
This didn’t seem strange to Irmgard, because the German tutor’s boots were lined—as Irmgard told her mother and Jimmy.
“Trotzdem ungewohnlich,” Frau Holzinger said. (“Still unusual.”)
“The lining like flannel or fleece felt,” Irmgard further explained to Jimmy, in her out-of-order English. She’d felt the insides of Fr?ulein Eissler’s boots? Jimmy was thinking, when Irmgard added, “The Jew her toes paints.”
“Annelies paints her toenails,” Jimmy corrected her.
“Wer ist Annelies?” Frau Holzinger asked. (“Who is Annelies?” the Frau had asked.) She’d not heard Fr?ulein Eissler’s first name before.
“Die Jüdin—the Jew,” Irmgard answered her mother. “Your tutor a Jew is, you know,” Irmgard told Jimmy.
“Ich wei?,” he said, as he was always saying to Siegfried’s mother.
The next night, Jimmy went out with Jolanda and Claude to their local Kaffeehaus.
They had their own name for that café, calling it the “Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik,” though it had another name—since forgotten.
Yes, the café played Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” repeatedly, but they played other music no less obsessively.
There was a fanatically limited but eclectic list.
At the café, Jimmy was trying to explain why Siegfried’s before-bedtime bath disturbed him—that Irmgard took a bath with Siegfried was the issue. “How much longer will it be appropriate for a five-year-old’s mother to take a bath with him?” he asked Claude and Jolanda.
“It’s not appropriate now,” Claude said, shivering at the mere thought of Irmgard naked in a bathtub.
“Fuck what’s ‘appropriate’—it’s a whale with a herring situation,” Jolanda said. “That little boy could drown in a tub with her—the cow!”
“And the cow wraps herself in all the towels afterward, while poor Siegfried is dripping in the hall!” Claude said, his teeth chattering.
They were listening to a Johann Strauss II waltz. “Vienna Blood Waltz” wasn’t everyone’s favorite. The TV at the bar was on a news channel with the sound off, as always. (For the patrons of the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik, what was happening in the news was a matter of guesswork.)
As for Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” the foreign students thought the usual English translations were a little misleading.
“A Little Night Music” or “A Little Serenade,” they’d heard people say in English, but Jimmy and Claude liked what Jolanda called it.
“A Little Frivolous,” Jolanda had labeled the only Mozart the café ever played.
The three foreign students certainly didn’t feel serenaded by the music they played (again and again) at the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik.
“Your Jewish German tutor,” Jolanda said, enunciating each syllable—as slowly but succinctly as a death knell.
“Fr?ulein Eissler is about a decade older than we are, but she dresses like a middle-aged woman. She must buy her clothes in a thrift shop—an expensive thrift shop, in a neighborhood where well-off divorcées move to die,” Jolanda told Jimmy and Claude.
“Annelies is beautiful!” Claude exclaimed; he was still shivering.
“Your Annelies, Jimmy, is the kind of woman who’s always having her period—if you know what I mean,” Jolanda said.