Wrecked (22 page)

“Where were you for so long?” That’s a snippy tone for him.

“What do you mean? At the pediatrician and then Frau Drescher’s.”

“With Liza? Why didn’t you bring her here before therapy?”

Uh-oh, misunderstanding. He was waiting for us. In my rush I forgot to tell him. Now I know why he’s acting funny. He was worried. Death always stalks us, even while we’re hanging the washing. It’s true.

“I’m sorry. That’s right. You thought I was going to bring Liza home before therapy. I left her at Stefan’s—he was able to take her earlier than I thought. I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

“I wanted to go out, take care of a few things. I was waiting around like an idiot. I tried to call you many times.”

Crap. Reproach. Mood in the shitter. I was hoping to surprise him with happy news.

“My phone was on silent. I was in therapy. Did you think something had happened to us?”

“Yeah, no.”

“Well nothing happened to us. My sieve of a brain just forgot to tell you about the change in plans, okay? Forgive me. Okay?”

I hug him and kiss him on the big scar on his cheek—my favorite spot on his body, where the cancerous skin was cut out before we met each other. That spot shows how strong he is.
Not even cancer can mess with him. Or an accident. Or me. He’s a seawall able to stand up to the harshest surf.

“I have a surprise for you. The doctor gave us pills that kill the worms as soon as you take the first one. Mine are already gone, and if you take a pill yours will be, too.”

“I don’t have worms. How many times do I have to say it?”

I have to laugh. “Yeah, fine, then take one as a precaution instead, and then we can plan our visit to the brothel and go tomorrow morning if they’re open. What do you think? Liza will be with Stefan for the next two days and we can have a nice child-free time.”

“Do you really want to? I always have the feeling that you’re pleased whenever it gets canceled.”

“Yes, that’s true. I have to get through it, for you. But you know that I get into it, too, when I’m lying there with my legs spread and she’s licking me. I mean, there’s no alternative, really, it’s a simple mechanical fact. Should we do it? It’ll be a way to put yesterday’s stupid worm night behind us.”

Still holding me with one arm, he reaches down with the other—without even noticing it himself—and scratches his ass. I’ve got to give him one of these pills. I would love to feel as comfortable in my own skin as he does. He does lots of things he doesn’t notice because he’s not as mercilessly self-aware as I am. It must be nice.

He smiles with anticipation about our outing.

“Come on. I’ll just finish up and we’ll go get lunch.”

I sit on the couch and try to breathe calmly. According to Frau Drescher, I need to practice this now and then. Otherwise I
just hectically do things to flee the accident, myself, and my nonexistent grief. It’s going to come sometime. And for that I have to learn to deal with downtime.

I hear Georg shuffling around downstairs and it gives me a guilty conscience because I’m not helping despite the fact that most of the laundry is mine. I breathe and close my eyes. The first thing that enters my head is a mosaic of images from the accident. My paranoia about being followed, related to the papers. The fear that they could get a photo of me and my husband screwing a prostitute. It comes from the way they hounded us back then when my brothers died. After the television team broke into my mother’s hospital room we had to assume that, like it or not, the same pigs would disrupt the funeral as well. They had tried to get pictures of the dead children from all kinds of sources. Luckily everyone held tight. We had to pay for the security guards who sealed off the cemetery and patrolled inside and out to keep any photos from being taken. All to protect us from those pigs. That you have to deal with that on top of everything else leaves you maniacal with rage for the rest of your life. They created a lifelong enemy. When someone is murdered in a crime show, the cops always ask, “Did he have any enemies?” In the case of the heads of the newspaper publishing companies, their wives will have to say, “Yes, Elizabeth Kiehl.” How they even have wives is a mystery to me. Shouldn’t all women stand together and refuse to let the men who pull the strings at those papers have sex? Then they’d change their ways pretty quickly out of emergency horniness, no matter how much money they were making from their evil stories.

The bodies, or rather the urns, weren’t released until long after the accident. The urns of the three dead children sat in a
little concrete room in the cemetery the day before the funeral. You could say good-bye there. But good-bye to what? I went with my favorite aunt.

I looked at her mischievously and asked, “Should I pick one up?”

“Sure, why not?”

She’s cool. You can’t shock her with anything. My favorite aunt. I first lifted up the urn of my oldest brother, Harry. I shook it with both hands. Then the second. Then the third. They were each a different weight. The urn of the twenty-four-year-old was the heaviest, the nine-year-old less heavy, and the six-year-old the lightest of all. How could that be if there wasn’t anything left of them? My aunt and I came to a chilling epiphany: if there was nothing left of them in the burned-out car, what were they supposed to have burned in the crematorium? If there was anything in these urns that had to do with the accident, it was charred padding from the backseat upholstery. What else could it be? They had the backseat dropped off and chipped what they could off of it. They were told how old the victims were by the police, looked at a table to see how much ash someone of a given age would render, and then dumped who knows what into the urns. Wood ash, ashes of other people who were overweight and didn’t completely fit into their own urns.

What exactly was in those urns? One day, when I’m feeling very strong, I’ll find out. I’ll drive to the facility where my bodiless brothers were supposed to have been cremated. And I’ll collar an employee there until I get the truth. It won’t work right now. I can’t do it yet. I’m not in the right state. I can’t handle it.

I can only vaguely remember the day of the funeral. It was eight weeks after the accident. Maybe a certain level of
realization had crept in, the shock that was a long time coming. Mother had arranged everything from her hospital bed. I remember that far too many people came to fit into the minichapel at the cemetery where we were sitting. The entire schools of each of the dead boys. Including the teachers. The parents of school friends. Neighbors. Sports teams they played on. All the fathers, all the grandparents. Friends of all the dead. Friends of all the survivors. Far too many people for a funeral and way too many for one head to deal with.

I didn’t know most of them. And of course all of them were absurdly wearing black. What’s the fucking point? In the front of the chapel hung huge photos of my three brothers. I didn’t think the shot of my oldest brother captured him well. I have no idea who said what. Everything went by as if I were in a daze. Funerals are almost all the same. How can you distinguish them? Except for the photos at the front. I don’t remember anything from the chapel except the photos. And outside the only thing I know is that we had to walk ridiculously slowly behind the fake urns. Very slowly, the way they always make you at a funeral. And I can remember that I kept having to keep whispering to myself, “Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh, Elizabeth.” The pressure to put on a stupid mourner’s face (something else you don’t learn to do in school) was so extreme that I had the feeling things could easily slip into a completely opposite expression.

I felt watched. Everyone looked for the craziness in our eyes. Yes, but you won’t find it—it comes only later! I can remember one thought as clear as day:
What’s keeping the three boys? We’re putting on this big production and they’re late! Such cheek. Typical of them
. I looked for them everywhere. And that
has continued to this day. But I still look for them the way they looked eight years ago. I can’t picture them any older.

I pushed Mother in her wheelchair. She had a release from the hospital—discharged at her own risk, as they so nicely put it. She was pumped full of who knows what to numb the pain in her back, in her feet, in her heart, in her head. I pushed her in front of me and all I could think the whole time was how I wanted to get away, how this was her show, no question about it. All the fathers whispered to me beforehand, “Hopefully she won’t want to sit beside the grave afterward and shake everyone’s hand.”

I couldn’t imagine beforehand how many people three dead boys would attract, but when I saw them all, an entire cemetery full, I also desperately hoped she wouldn’t want to shake everyone’s hand. But as a result of the medication she was unfortunately like someone who’d been bitten by a tarantula. All the close relatives left as soon as the pointless vessels had been put into the holes in the ground. Obligations met. Then began the freestyle portion of the program. My no longer recognizable mother and I—her wheelchair slave—stood for hours at the open wounds in the earth and let all those who wanted to shove their way past us. “Sincere condolences.” Next, please. “Sincere condolences.” Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Blah, blah, blah. At some point I became convinced that people were getting back in line because it was all so funny, again and again. The line of supposed mourners wouldn’t stop. What a fuck-up. I’m never going to another funeral.

The entire cemetery and all its paths broad and narrow were filled with children. It seemed fitting. Grave full of children. Cemetery full of children.

Eventually it was quitting time for us grief workers and we were allowed to go back to the peaceful hospital in an ambulance.

I breathe deeply, feeling pressure on my chest. I have to get rid of these agonizing thoughts. How can I do that most effectively? Displace them with thoughts of sex, the usual mind trick. At least it works.

Good. Now I’ve told him that tomorrow we’ll go to the brothel. But he still doesn’t believe that I like the idea. I can’t really understand myself sexually. He and I sometimes have to really force me to do things. For the last few years I’ve really had to have my arm twisted to have sex in general and sexual adventures with third parties in particular. My therapist says lots of women do that. She calls it “suppressing a tear.” Meaning the woman can’t just go and have sex; instead, beforehand, there has to be a little fight so that the man has to jump through some hoops. For instance, he has to overcome the woman’s reluctance by begging or by seduction or whatever—who knows?—and then open up the oyster little by little. That’s exactly the way I am. If I know sex is unavoidable, I pick a fight to try to create a delay or even a cancelation. Or I confess to him that I don’t feel like it. But when he won’t leave it alone and pushes the right buttons, which are all in my crotch, then I get into it regardless of whether I wanted to before or not. At that point I want everything. But at first I’m always fighting it. Must be pretty stressful for my husband. He’d like to be seduced by me sometime. But that won’t work. I set the roadblocks.

I do the same thing before every one of our brothel outings. I fight it. And as soon as I’m there, I say to hell with my mother and find myself in the middle of an orgy, happy as a clam. Can
you call three people an orgy? When we first started going to brothels I had a big problem with jealousy. There were images that got burned into my brain and were hard to get rid of. They kept causing fits of jealousy in my head. Images of my husband kissing a strange woman very long and deep. Yeah, well, since
Pretty Woman
I always thought they didn’t kiss; they only fucked. Yeah right! They kiss all right, and how. Forever. And images of my husband spending an eternity licking another woman. Try dealing with that at first! But eventually you get used to it and realize that there’s no risk whatsoever—or, perhaps let’s say, little risk. But really none whatsoever. We’ve already been with eighteen women. I’ve written down all of their names. And written notes about how it was with each. So I won’t forget. Grace, Amanda, Dina, Lumi, Lotus, Vanessa, Vivienne, Olga, Tina, Michelle, Melissa, Samara, Nesrin, Mira, Samantha, Jule, Ira, Diamond. When we picked Vivienne out on the Internet and went to her place, she accidentally introduced herself as Vicky. She laughed and quickly said, “I mean Vivienne.” They all use false names, obviously.

At the beginning, with the first few women, I drank way too much because I was so anxious. I could barely remember anything afterward. And sometimes, embarrassingly enough, especially given how expensive it is to go as a pair, I had fits of jealousy during the act itself and we had to break it off in the middle. That was very embarrassing for my husband—it takes a while for the erection to subside, and then to get dressed, and then you’re standing in front of the brothel in bright daylight in a bad mood. I’m sure he had imagined it differently. But so had I.

It was worth it for me to keep at it, though. We kept trying. Me for the sake of my husband, as a gift, a show of love.
Few people still believe in God or go to church anymore, thank goodness, but for some crazy reason we still believe—or hope, at least—that monogamy can work. For the first few years I was so worried that I might lose my husband that I built a horrid prison around him. I constantly accused him of cheating with every woman under the sun. Friends of ours, coworkers of his, strangers on the street, anyone. It was as if I was suffering from some kind of delusion, trying to convince him that he didn’t like me and wanted to constantly go out, fuck other people, fall in love with someone else. My therapist says I fight my own desire to cheat by taking it out on my husband. I’m fighting something in him that actually exists only in me. She’s said that for years. Rationally, I can follow her argument, but it doesn’t sink in emotionally. That is the challenge of therapy. When you talk about things constantly, they eventually take hold in your gut, too. And then you feel liberated. A switch has been thrown. It’s as if the therapist has removed a big tumor. You are freed—the problem is recognized not only rationally but also emotionally. And soon after, it’s gone. That’s why I love my therapist more than anything and forever. She liberates me and my husband from huge problems that could screw up our life.