Longing (38 page)

“Woman. I think you are the most beautiful woman on earth.”

He started toward her, and started to open his arms to her.

She held up her hand. “I put the word into your mouth.”

“But not into my eyes. My eyes have found you beautiful since the day I first saw you. I thought you were the most beautiful little girl I'd ever seen. And every time I've seen you since then, I've thought you the more beautiful, against the impossibility that you could be more beautiful. And you have never been more beautiful to me than now, tonight, here, with me. I feel we have never been alone together, not truly, and now that we're alone together, and I can see you without the distractions of the world, I can see that you are, for me, the most beautiful woman on earth.”

“The most beautiful woman on earth?” She was quite delighted. “No matter that it isn't true, I shall carry those words to the grave.”

“Please don't mention the grave,” he said, with enough seriousness of tone, he would have thought, to cause her to stop laughing immediately. But this request only intensified her laughter.

“It was merely a figure of speech,” she said. “I'm not about to go to my grave, and neither are you.”

“But my mother is,” he found it necessary to relate.

“Your mother?”

“She's died,” he said.

Now, after all this, and on this note, she was finally up and in his arms.

“I loved your mother.” She trembled against him.

“And she loved you.”

“I believe she did.”

“And I love you.”

“You love me?”

“I do, Clara. Yes, I do.”

She wiped her face hard against his shoulder, which he was surprised to find she reached, and then pulled back so she could gaze upon his face. “And does your love include desire?”

“Yes.”

“You desire me?”

“Yes.”

“With all your heart?”

“Yes.”

“And with all the rest of you as well?”

“Where did you learn to speak like this?”

“Thus far, only to myself.”

Sometime, in the middle of the night, he truly wanted to sleep. But she would not let him. As he sought refuge from the winter air beneath the thin hotel sheet and the almost-as-thin hotel feather comforter, she sat beside him naked with her legs tucked up beneath her upon the thin hotel feather bed, a posture no longer modest as, he had discovered, neither was she.

So delighted did she seem—with herself, with him, with what they had done and what she clearly wanted to do again—and so almost nervously, ecstatically alive, that, when her mouth was not upon his, she went on talking and talking and talking. There was no stopping her. She chattered away like someone who can subsist on the very words she relinquishes, feasting on her happiness and curiosity.

“You smell good,” she said. “Did you bathe just for me?”

“Of course.”

“So you suspected we might end up like this?”

“Like what?” he asked, to hear what she might say.

“Doing what we have done.”

“And what have we done?”

“You don't know?” she asked with feigned shock. “Have I made so little impression upon you that you're unaware of what has recently passed between us?”

“Did something pass between us? I was under the impression that we left too little space for anything to pass between us.”

She bent to plant a kiss upon his cheek. He was, once again, amazed at the suppleness of her body, how she could not only sit upon her own legs but from that position also tilt and swivel, rotate and virtually pirouette, anchored to the earth, the bed, or to himself by her sweet, small backside, which had remained childish, while the rest of her had transformed, as if before his own blind eyes, into womanhood—breasts, mouth, chin, forehead, shoulders, waist.

With her lips still upon his cheek, moving as she spoke, she said softly, “You bathed for me, but you did not shave. Tell me, Robert—did your previous lovers prefer you to shave?”

“Previous lovers?” he said disingenuously.

“Oh, I want to know about them all.” She rolled off him and once more sat upon her legs, but now so close to him that her shins pressed against his side and her hair, which she had let fall like some last piece of clothing when she had first undressed before him, sought out the fingers of his raised left hand. “I want to know about Agnes Carus. Did you make love to Agnes?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, I find that hard to believe. From the first moment I saw you two together, which was the first moment I saw you ever in my life, I was sure the two of you were making love. She was my idol, you know. And so it was quite natural that from that moment on, I, too, wanted to make love to you.”

So shocked was Robert, he pulled down upon the hair that he had started to weave in his fingers. “But you were only—”

She not only didn't recoil from the pain but laughed. “A girl can want to make love even if she doesn't know what it is. There may be a proper age for the doing of it, though I have no idea what that is, but no age can be dictated for the desiring of it. I desired to possess you. That's all I know. As for what that might mean, I had no real idea of that until this very night. One may dream or look at pictures to the exclusion of all else in life, but there can be no preparation for the thing itself. There can be no rehearsal for the joy of
this
.” She slapped her hand down upon the feather bed. “That does not mean, of course, that one might not have had prior experience. In your case, I mean. In my own, I had not progressed beyond kisses, and aside from my kisses with you, not one kiss succeeded in unlocking any part of my body, least of all my heart. But if not with Agnes, then with whom? Where did you gain all your obvious experience, my fine man?”

“Mostly in my head,” he answered, a bit distracted by her talk of kisses.

“Mostly, but not wholly. Was it Henriette Voigt, then? What she could not have from poor Ludwig Schunke, did she get from you?”

“No, not Henriette. Henriette is a faithful wife—if one does not count Ludwig, who would test the fidelity of any man or woman. But even Ludwig she did not…they did not…”

Clara understood what Robert was attempting to hide from her sensibilities, whose delicacy she hoped would by now not be in question. “Did they not make love because he was too ill?”

“His illness made her want him all the more. Dying, in our time, has come to seem more an adventure into the unknown than what it really is—delivery into the squalor of emptiness. He made Henriette feel all the more alive, and not merely in her brain. As for me, only once did I hold her in my arms, and so completely did she love Ludwig that it was more like holding him. I did, of course, desire her. Who would not?”

“Who indeed!”

“Have I made you jealous?”

“No longer.”

“No longer? I would have thought—”

“By possessing me, you have freed me. By taking me, you have given me to myself. By giving yourself to me, you have unburdened me. So speak not of jealousy. I could no longer suffer that imposter. But curiosity—oh, my God, I'm so curious I could die! What about Ernestine! Surely, you and Ernestine…”

“No.”

“No? I imagined it all?”

“Imagined it? How?”

“Oh, I couldn't possibly tell you, Robert. Modesty does not permit it.”

He let his eyes travel upon her beside him, so pale and dear and wholly open and uncovered. “Modesty?”

“It's far easier, at least for me, I now find, to display my body than my mind.”

“For me as well!” She seemed to have discovered something about him in revealing the same thing about herself, and to have revealed this discovery to him.

She shook her head. “Robert, you wear your mind on your body as if it were your very clothing. I've always felt that everything you think and feel appears upon you instantly for everyone to see.”

“Only for you. Everything I've thought and felt has been for you.”

“Oh, really? What about Christel Schnabel then?”

“Schnabel! Christel Schnabel!”

“I suppose you're going to deny her too, which is to say, deny that you did not deny giving yourself to her?”

“No…yes…,” he sputtered.

“Now there is a useful answer to a question,” she teased: “‘Yes…no…'”

“That is her surname? Schnabel?”

“Yes,” she answered, “if the Christel under discussion is the same Christel who was a pupil of my father and was seen on more than one occasion either going into or coming out of your rooms. And so fitting a surname, too, is it not? That is, if Fräulein Schnabel indeed frolicked with your
Schnabel
.”
*

“It is the same Christel,” he confessed. “I simply never knew her name.”

“Well, under the circumstances, I can hardly expect that you might have called her Fräulein Schnabel, any more than you might, now that you have not denied yourself to me either, call me Fräulein Wieck. But what did you call her?”

“I called her Christel,” he said, to spare Clara the pain of learning that he had called her Charitas. He remembered how bitterly Clara had reacted to his having given Ernestine a nickname, and Ernestine had been his fiancée, not merely a girl with whom he had shared an intimacy so shallow (if, at the same time, profound) that he had not until now learned her surname.

“So who was Charitas?” asked Clara immediately. “Yet another of your conquests?”

“I had no other conquests,” he answered, to try to evade his lie with what was, he realized, the truth. “How did you learn of her?”

“My father told me.”

Robert was shocked. “How did he know?”

“Papa has made it his business to learn of anything he might use to keep me from loving you, and then of telling me of it. But there's nothing he could tell me, or you could tell me, that would succeed in that. So is it true: Christel and Charitas were your only other women?'

“She was,” he said.

She nodded at his tacit confession. “And the rest?”

“Only whores.”

“Whores?”

“Whores.”

“Many whores?”

“Oh, yes, many whores.”

“How many whores?”

“I have no idea. One doesn't count whores, after all. One may count lovers, and children, and one certainly counts beats to a measure, but not whores. I mean, a man—a vulgar man, it is true—might boast, ‘I have had twelve mistresses.' But I have never heard any man, no matter how vulgar, say, ‘I have had a hundred whores, and tonight I'm going to have my hundred-and-first.'”

“A hundred! You have had a hundred whores?”

“Come to me,” he said, opening his arms.

She looked at him skeptically before leaning forward, kneeling into him until her head and hair settled on his shoulder.

“I have no idea how many,” he said. “I was usually drunk and had no memory in the morning of what I'd done the night before. For all I know, I had no whores. All I meant to say was that whatever and whoever I had before you, it was nothing and no one. As it feels to me now, you are my life, you have always been my life, and you will always be my life.”

She let her body go, and slid beneath the thin hotel sheet and comforter, and there she held him as together they fell asleep and left forever the world that had known them as children.

*
Mr. Lonely

*
Miss Lost and Betrothed

*
A
Schnabel can
be both bill or beak and spout or nozzle, so it is not clear whether Clara was punning on Christel's surname in reference to a kiss upon the lips or, more likely, given her mood, the taking of a gambol with the male member.

Part Three

Distant Beloved

Dresden

FEBRUARY 15, 1836

I love you unspeakably
.

Robert Schumann

“Give me his letters. Give me all his letters.”

How strange, she thought, that in the middle of her father's latest tirade against Robert, and against what he imagined she and Robert had done in his absence (she nearly smiled at remembering what they had done), he should ask for Robert's letters. Unknown to her father, a letter had arrived this very day. It had been written in the coach station at Zwickau, where Robert had gone to pay respects at his mother's grave. As the snow and sleet came down, and Robert was trapped by the closed roads while he waited for the Leipzig express, he was, in his impatient misery, given the opportunity to write of his love for her. She recalled that night and how she had stood at the little window in this same room on the third floor of the Reissigers' house and watched the snow swirl aloft like dancers' arms and listened to the frozen rain tap out a message she imagined was from him. It would not be the first time they had communicated through the air.

But what joy it had been to receive this palpable evidence of their connection and to learn he was indeed writing to her at the very hour she had been at her window looking for his image in the darkness and listening for the sound of his fingers on her skin.

She hid this new letter beneath her even as she refused to take from the desk between them those other letters from Robert, which her father knew were all the letters and little notes Robert had ever sent or slipped to her. She traveled with them always, to have his disembodied voice with her, addressing her from childhood until now, his first letter since he had embodied her wholly, and she him, in such a way as she had never imagined in all her imaginings.

As her father continued to hold out his hand for the letters, he said, “He's not right for you. You may think he's right for you. Corruption is a magnet that attracts the corruptible. You're like your mother in that—drawn to the flesh. But you have art far beyond what she had, and I had thought—mistakenly, I learn—that it would keep you from such wantonness. You disgrace me with your deception and behavior. But most of all, you disgrace yourself. He is not right for you. He drinks too much. He suffers from illnesses and an imagination of illness that's worse than illness itself. He has, by his own hand, crippled his hand and thereby taken from himself his one best chance to earn a living. Is this the act of a sane human being? Or does he suppose he can live on the income from those dissonant, nerve-wracked pieces he composes, that no one in the world but you and I appreciate or understand? His mind is as weak as his will is irresolute. He will betray you with other women with no more thought than a man eating fowl after fish. Or have you forgotten you're not the sole student of mine whose virtue he's transgressed? Tell me—have you?”