thoughtsor vaguely expressed ideas like native speakers could. I’d noticed this at the bars and parties Holly and I went to when our nights ended in conversation about the Wall or the Green Party or Ronald Reagan, and I found myself as dazzled by the clarity of their expressions as I was hesitant to accept the absolutism of their declarations.
I went to the record company four days a week and spent most of the three hours I billed them for daily talking with my students’ secretaries. The executives were hardly ever around. I read magazines and newspapers and sipped from my bottle of Spezi until one of them waved me into his office to walk him through some phrasal verbs until something more interesting came up. The one who needed the most help was a Parisian named Marcel, and as outsiders we enjoyed pointing out to each other the peculiarities of the Germanic character.
Rolf, the man who had hired me, was forty-seven years old and liked to gaze out his office window and watch the parking lot below as he talked to me, in English, about his life. He was married and had two children, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with prostitutes as often as he could. He told me this without compunction, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t share my prostitute story, which was nothing I was proud of. When I thought back on that night, I felt uncomfortable and awkward that I’d stupidly let myself get pulled into a situation where I felt obligated, even pressured, to play along. Rolf, though, was proud of the number of hookershe’d had sex with. He traveled once or twice a month and came home with stories of call girls crawling all over him at the Regency or the Groucho Club or some anonymous Marriott. He was a short man with silver hair and spoke explicitly about the sexual acts he’d performed on his most recent trip, whether to Hamburg, New York or Amsterdam. He didn’t recount these stories with any sense of titillation or sexual energy as far as I could tell, more like a frat boy bragging about the number of goldfish he’d managed to swallow live.
When I wasn’t sitting with one of my three execs or chatting up the secretaries, I claimed a cafeteria table by the windows on the second floor and took a stumbling swing at learning a bit of German. Most of the people I worked with spoke English well enough that I didn’t have to extend myself, but the staff here was different. They had very little English, so to this day my best German is located in the practical nouns and verbs used in a cafeteria. When not engaged in halting conversations, I’d sit there and watch the attendant in a small glass-and-aluminum station at the far end of the parking lot or read or sketch something, all the while thinking that trying to learn a new language was like climbing up a mountain into a rock slide.
The parking attendant was a Turkish fellow named Gorkhan, whose German seemed to be very good. He’d been in the country for sixteen years, raising and lowering the red-and-white barrier that blocked traffic access to all but paid employees and registered visitors. A man trapped in a glass box all day long these dayswill spend his shift talking on a cell phone, but not then. Gorkhan was an island. He referred to his outpost as Checkpoint Charlie.
One night I woke up and saw Holly standing at our bedroom window holding a piece of paper in her hand, a letter, I thought. In the morning I found it under her pillow. It was the Ezra Pound poem Miles had taped up on the living room wall back in Montreal. That’s when I began to understand she could never leave that place—not with my presence constantly reminding her of what we’d both lost. I was the problem. With me at her side she could never break the pattern of her grieving. Whenever she looked at me, she remembered our friend and the life they’d had together. I think I knew what I needed to do well before admitting it to myself. What it meant horrified
I went to the record company four days a week and spent most of the three hours I billed them for daily talking with my students’ secretaries. The executives were hardly ever around. I read magazines and newspapers and sipped from my bottle of Spezi until one of them waved me into his office to walk him through some phrasal verbs until something more interesting came up. The one who needed the most help was a Parisian named Marcel, and as outsiders we enjoyed pointing out to each other the peculiarities of the Germanic character.
Rolf, the man who had hired me, was forty-seven years old and liked to gaze out his office window and watch the parking lot below as he talked to me, in English, about his life. He was married and had two children, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with prostitutes as often as he could. He told me this without compunction, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t share my prostitute story, which was nothing I was proud of. When I thought back on that night, I felt uncomfortable and awkward that I’d stupidly let myself get pulled into a situation where I felt obligated, even pressured, to play along. Rolf, though, was proud of the number of hookershe’d had sex with. He traveled once or twice a month and came home with stories of call girls crawling all over him at the Regency or the Groucho Club or some anonymous Marriott. He was a short man with silver hair and spoke explicitly about the sexual acts he’d performed on his most recent trip, whether to Hamburg, New York or Amsterdam. He didn’t recount these stories with any sense of titillation or sexual energy as far as I could tell, more like a frat boy bragging about the number of goldfish he’d managed to swallow live.
When I wasn’t sitting with one of my three execs or chatting up the secretaries, I claimed a cafeteria table by the windows on the second floor and took a stumbling swing at learning a bit of German. Most of the people I worked with spoke English well enough that I didn’t have to extend myself, but the staff here was different. They had very little English, so to this day my best German is located in the practical nouns and verbs used in a cafeteria. When not engaged in halting conversations, I’d sit there and watch the attendant in a small glass-and-aluminum station at the far end of the parking lot or read or sketch something, all the while thinking that trying to learn a new language was like climbing up a mountain into a rock slide.
The parking attendant was a Turkish fellow named Gorkhan, whose German seemed to be very good. He’d been in the country for sixteen years, raising and lowering the red-and-white barrier that blocked traffic access to all but paid employees and registered visitors. A man trapped in a glass box all day long these dayswill spend his shift talking on a cell phone, but not then. Gorkhan was an island. He referred to his outpost as Checkpoint Charlie.
One night I woke up and saw Holly standing at our bedroom window holding a piece of paper in her hand, a letter, I thought. In the morning I found it under her pillow. It was the Ezra Pound poem Miles had taped up on the living room wall back in Montreal. That’s when I began to understand she could never leave that place—not with my presence constantly reminding her of what we’d both lost. I was the problem. With me at her side she could never break the pattern of her grieving. Whenever she looked at me, she remembered our friend and the life they’d had together. I think I knew what I needed to do well before admitting it to myself. What it meant horrified
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