I first set eyes upon my wife, I knew—I could see it for myself already, at that instant. She had changed my life forever.” Vilmos reached for Clara’s hand and clasped it. “And now, after seven years, perhaps you wonder how I feel?” He addressed himself to Esther. “Yes? You want to know? Well, I will tell you.” He removed his hand from Clara’s and slapped it to his chest. “I feel just the same!”
Esther stared at him. Vilmos and Clara! She couldn’t tell if he was serious. She couldn’t tell if Clara took him seriously either. But why shouldn’t he be serious? Why shouldn’t he feel what he said he felt?
A strange thought came to her. Perhaps the trouble between friends was not a lack of understanding—perhaps it was not a question of one person fooling himself about how well he knew someone else, or of fooling oneself about how well one was known, so much as it was the inability to be anybody else. For what if Leah and Kathleen had considered the idea that for the first time in her life Esther might have a secret from them? They could not have guessed the truth—how could they have?—when she had done something, felt something, neither of them would have done or could have felt. What had happened between her and Bartha was, for them (she knew—she didn’t have to hear it from them, she had heard enough from them before anything happened), unimaginable.
She had had the right idea, then, she thought. No one could know anyone, not really. There was always the chance that someone you thought you understood completely would do something that you could not understand—something that you could not picture yourself doing. And what of finding yourself doing something unimaginable, something that you surely hadn’t ever pictured yourself doing?
She chased this thought away as if somebody else had asked the question of her, interrupting her. Please, let me be, I’m talking about something else now. Why, just think of Vilmos—whom she’d never even thought she knew so well, whom she never would have said she “understood.” And yet how he had surprised her! And even though she had just heard him, with her own ears, declare how he felt about his wife, didn’t she still doubt that what he’d said was true? But why should Vilmos not be in love with his wife? Because she found her so unlovable? Yes, that was why. And this just proved her point, she thought. She could not even pretend she understood him.
She had begun to cry—she felt tears sliding down her cheeks. “Too much wine, Esther,” Bartha said. She set her wineglass down, too hard, too quickly. Bartha had to reach for it and right it before it could break or any wine spilled out. “Just wait a bit,” he said. “When the food comes you may want then to drink a little more. For now, I think perhaps you’ve had enough.” She nodded yes, and looked away. The tears were still slipping down. She couldn’t understand why she was crying.
She felt Bartha’s hand on her neck, under the thick, loose knot of hair that she’d twisted and pinned into place for this occasion—it was the way her mother always wore her own long hair on special days, and she had thought it would make her look festive as well as more like a wife (she wasn’t certain it had worked—she hadn’t been able to find a hand mirror this morning so that she could check the back of her head in the bathroom mirror).
Bartha stroked her neck. He touched the nest of hair, tentatively, and then he stroked her neck again. He didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything this morning when she’d emerged from the bathroom and spun around for him, although he must have noticed that her hair was different, since she always wore it loose—she never even put it in a ponytail, or braided it. With two fingers now he stroked her hair beneath the bun, where it pulled upward from her neck; with his whole hand he stroked the sides, above and underneath her ears. She remembered how he had stroked her hair and neck after he had made love to her for the first time. She had been crying then—she had not been able to stop crying for a long time. He had guessed that she was crying because she was sorry, that she was ashamed of what she had done, and when she swore she was not—”I don’t care,” she told him, “I don’t care about that, about shame”—he asked if he had “hurt” her, if that was what was wrong, and when she shook her head, he gave up, he stopped asking. He stroked her hair and waited silently for her to finish.
She wished he would be silent now, but he had started murmuring, “All right? Yes? Better?” She didn’t answer him. She was thinking of that afternoon when he had first made love to her. She could remember everything about it, still—every little thing: the way he had leaned over in the middle of a lesson—they were sitting alongside each other on the piano bench—and kissed her, holding her head in both of his hands as carefully as if it were one of the fragile things he kept around the studio perched dangerously on the cluttered tabletops, the thin colored glass bowls and the crystal vases she had never seen with flowers in them. The kiss lasted a long time, just like kisses in the movies, and she remembered telling herself that this was exactly what she had imagined kissing would be like. When finally she noticed that his lips were not quite closed, she opened her own mouth, just a little, just like his, and as she did she told herself, Now everything changes—and all the while that he was kissing her (for after that first kiss, he kissed her again, and then again) and stroking her arms, and after a time standing up and drawing her up too, and taking her hand and leading her to the green velvet sofa (which she learned only later—the next time—converted to a bed), she kept thinking, Now I am no longer myself, I am someone else—I am becoming someone else. And while he undressed her, then undressed himself, she thought, Soon—soon I will no longer be myself. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t even nervous. She assumed that she would feel some pain but she was not afraid of that—it seemed so small a toll for a new self, a whole new life—but she did not, or she did not especially, feel any pain; she was only uncomfortable, and only for a little while; and then it was over. She lay in his arms and waited, but she felt no different—she felt nothing much at all. It was then that she began to cry.
She wasn’t crying now, not anymore, but Bartha was still murmuring, still petting her. He had one hand on Alexander and one hand on her. On his wife. Wife, she thought. Wife! Wife and husband. Marriage. Magic words—and here she sat again (again? still!) waiting for a transformation. Always waiting, she reflected. Always disappointed. Always thinking, That’s all? But how can that be? When she first began her love affair with Bartha; when she found out she was pregnant; when she told her parents—and her father for the first time slapped her, and said things she couldn’t bear to think of even now, and ended by saying that he never wanted to see her again, then burst into tears, which surprised and pained her far more than the slap had; when she left home for good that same night after everyone had gone to sleep, taking just one small suitcase, leaving most of what was hers behind—she had imagined, each time, that she was poised on the brink of some momentous change. And each time there had been momentous change—but not within her. Always, she felt that whatever happened hadn’t worked, that her experience of what had happened—her experience of the experience—was smaller than it was supposed to be. Even during her first months in Omaha, lonely and restless (fidgety, her mother would have said), even when she felt the baby’s own first restless movements (and caught herself thinking fidgety) inside her—even during childbirth, even when she first saw Alexander—what she felt was never what it seemed to her she should have felt. It was insufficient. It was never as momentous as she had imagined it would be, never momentous enough.
And you’d think, she told herself, that by now she would be used to this. She should be used to disappointment. Yet here she was again. Still. She’d convinced herself that this time, this great change, would be sufficient finally to change her. She had tricked herself—had tricked herself again—for, married or not married, she was still herself, the same person she had been this morning. She would always be the person she had been this morning—the same person she’d been yesterday, last month, last year.
Always, she thought. Now and ever after. Forever.
How was it
