Chapter 22 In the Future #3
“You hear the rain, don’t you?” Jolanda asked Jimmy. They listened to the patter of rain on the balcony window; it sounded a little like fingernails tapping on wood, James Winslow was thinking. They started talking about anything and everything, in no particular order.
“Sometimes I wish I was romantically involved with Fr?ulein Eissler,” Jimmy admitted to Jolanda.
“I can identify with that, but I’m being faithful to Mieke now,” Jolanda said.
The rain was pelting down; there was no mistaking it for fingernails.
Because Jimmy and Jolanda were talking, they didn’t hear Irmgard come home.
The flashes of lightning were coming closer.
When Irmgard turned on the light in the hall, Jimmy saw her unmistakable shape in the frosted-glass panel on his bedroom door.
He and Jolanda watched Irmgard undress and wrap herself in a towel.
“I can hear two of you, Jimmy,” Irmgard said. “Is she old enough?” Irmgard asked.
“She’s old enough! I’m with Jolanda!” Jimmy called.
“I want to see her,” Irmgard told him, opening his bedroom door.
Like most tall people, Jolanda had a way of making herself look taller when she wanted to. In her tent-size bath towel, Irmgard filled Jimmy’s bedroom doorway. “Yes, Jolanda is of age, but Claude must be sleeping with someone—I heard their voices, too,” Irmgard said.
“Claude is sleeping with a friend of my mom’s. Her name is Chantal—she’s older than Claude. Chantal has a Geschenk for Siegfried—a gift from my mother,” Jimmy told Irmgard. He didn’t know how much more he could have blurted out, in three deep breaths, and Chantal was already in the hall.
“I’m Chantal,” she said, offering to shake Irmgard’s hand. From the way that went, Jimmy would have guessed that Irmgard didn’t have a lot of experience shaking hands. “It’s a very active gift to transport from the U.S.—I needed Fr?ulein Eissler’s help to arrange it here,” Chantal told Irmgard.
“Annelies is good at arranging things,” Jolanda ventured to say.
“Fr?ulein Eissler is an arranger, all right,” was all Irmgard said.
Claude must have been holding back Hard Rain.
There was a clap of thunder—no more distant rumbles, Jimmy was thinking.
He got out of bed; he didn’t want to be in the bed when Claude let Hard Rain go.
Jolanda had gotten out of bed, too. She and Jimmy thought Hard Rain wouldn’t jump on an empty bed, but who knew what Hard Rain would do?
“I’m not crazy about baths in thunderstorms,” Irmgard said, edging her way into the hall. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll try to get in and out of the bathtub before the storm,” she told Jimmy and Jolanda.
Claude took the next resounding thunderclap as his cue. “Wait, wait!” Claude cried from his room. “No one has been killed by lightning in a bathtub—not when a dog was watching,” Claude said.
“Not when Siegfried’s dog is watching—this dog watches over you,” Chantal said to Irmgard.
“I’m sorry, but I told my mom that Siegfried wanted a female German shepherd. I should have known what this might prompt my mom to do,” Jimmy told Irmgard.
“Your mother got Siegfried a dog?” Irmgard asked. She was standing on the threshold to the bathroom.
“You can always give her back if you don’t want Siegfried to have a dog,” Jolanda said, shrugging.
“Her name is Hard Rain!” Claude cried. This caused a commotion in Claude’s bedroom, where Hard Rain had heard her name.
“For Christ’s sake, Claude—let her out!” Jolanda cried. “Her name, Hard Rain, is from the Bob Dylan song,” Jolanda explained to Irmgard.
“Hard Rain,” Irmgard said, interrupting Jolanda. Irmgard then started singing it—the where-have-you-been bit, and the blue-eyed-son business.
Irmgard was kneeling in the open doorway to the bathroom. It’s not easy to kneel in a bath towel, but Irmgard managed to do it. She must have known that dogs prefer meeting you when you’re down at their level.
There was a new person in the hall, and Hard Rain couldn’t wait to sniff her.
The new person’s clothes were in a pile on the floor in the hall.
When Hard Rain sniffed the clothes, she sneezed, banging her big nose on the floor.
The new person’s face was close enough to lick, so Hard Rain licked her.
“Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?” Irmgard was singing.
When Irmgard took Hard Rain into the bathroom, even after she closed the door, Chantal and the roommates could still hear her singing.
The Gewitter was a serious one, but no one was worried now.
There are five verses to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and the chorus is repeated five times.
It’s a long song to sing in a bathtub, but Irmgard kept singing it.
Chantal and Claude and Jolanda and Jimmy cuddled together on his bed, listening to her sing.
The roommates knew Irmgard would be singing a different song if Hard Rain were shitting her brains out in the bathtub.
If you can sing to a dog, you will make a friend.
It was the spring of Jimmy’s junior year abroad, 1964.
The roommates didn’t have many more nights in Vienna together.
Later, when they passed through the Holzinger living room, they saw who was watching movies with Irmgard—on the same sofa.
In the semidarkness—in the flickering light from the TV screen, in the constant staccato of dubbed German—the roommates knew it wasn’t Irmgard who thumped her tail on the sofa.
That first night, following her bath, Irmgard didn’t linger with them.
She was almost shy when she thanked Chantal and the roommates.
In the morning, when Jolanda and Jimmy woke up, Siegfried was staring at them.
He’d been told there was a Geschenk for him—from Yimmys Mutter!
It was a weekend morning; Siegfried was still in his pajamas.
Jimmy made the boy get in bed with Jolanda.
Then Jimmy went to wake up Claude and Chantal, and to bring Siegfried his gift.
Jimmy knew Hard Rain would be happy to jump into bed with a little person and a tall one.
“That went well,” Jolanda told Jimmy later, “but Siegfried peed in his pajamas.” Hard Rain had been as excited by Siegfried as he’d been by her. (Hard Rain had also peed in Jimmy’s bed, but just a little.)
When they weren’t fucking, Claude and Chantal spoke French all night. Jolanda was smoking up a storm at Jimmy’s balcony window.
When Jolanda wasn’t smoking, she slept with Jimmy and Hard Rain in Jimmy’s bedroom.
When Jolanda was smoking, she focused better on when Mieke was coming to Vienna.
Thinking about Mieke made it hard for Jimmy to study for his philosophy exam at the Institute for European Studies.
The exam was mostly on Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein.
That spring, the IES students were driving themselves crazy by repeating Proposition 7 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” Jimmy kept saying to himself.
(“What we cannot speak of, we must leave to silence.”) Just hearing this made Jolanda smoke more.
Just thinking about when Mieke was coming made Jimmy and Jolanda crazy.
When Chantal went home to New Hampshire, Claude went crazy for a few days.
Claude and Chantal were a love story; Chantal was moving to Paris soon, and Claude was insanely happy.
Claude was just missing Chantal like crazy.
This made Jolanda smoke more, too. An insanely happy Claude or a crazy Claude gave Jolanda fits.
“Jesus Mary Joseph, Claude—Hard Rain should sleep with you,” Jolanda told him. “Hard Rain won’t let you hump your pillow.”
Even with Jolanda’s smoking, it seemed right that Jolanda and Jimmy slept together—just the two of them—now that Mieke was coming.
Now that Hard Rain was Siegfried’s dog, the five-year-old’s sudden affection for the roommates changed how Jimmy and Jolanda felt about the boy.
He’d stopped mutilating his toy soldiers.
Hard Rain might choke on the soldiers’ body parts, Irmgard had told him.
When Siegfried hugged them, Jimmy and Jolanda could imagine how their shared child might hug them.
Claude was so besotted with Chantal, he was oblivious to Siegfried’s hugs.
When Jimmy and Jolanda looked at Siegfried, the blond, blue-eyed boy didn’t look like he belonged to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Irmgard.
Who would Jimmy and Mieke’s child look like?
Jolanda was wondering. Jolanda was no less obsessed with what she called Mieke’s “fertility window,” and everything to do with Mieke’s ovulation.
In Jolanda’s estimation, Mieke had a “fairly regular” or a “fairly reliable” cycle.
The ovulation and cycle words caused Claude to have muscle spasms.
“For fuck’s sake, Claude, you’re getting married—you should know that women have some sense of when they’re ovulating,” Jolanda told him.
“You get symptoms like premenstrual syndrome—like cramps or bloating or breast tenderness—but you know it’s way too early to get your period,” Jolanda went on, while Claude kept convulsing.
What Wittgenstein wrote could apply to ovulation and women’s periods, Jimmy thought to himself.
It might have been funny if Jimmy actually said, What we cannot speak of, we must leave to silence, but Jimmy knew better than to say it.
Ovulation and women’s periods were scary to Claude, and Jolanda was taking seriously everything to do with Mieke’s “fertility window,” as she kept calling it.
Mieke had counted the days since the start of her last period.
Fourteen days later, when she was expecting her period in a couple of weeks, Mieke would be in Vienna.
“You and Mieke will do it for three days, Jimmy. These will be days twelve, thirteen, and fourteen of Mieke’s cycle.
” Even the math gave Claude muscle contractions.