Lisey's Story(69)
"If Andy hears anything - Deputy Clutterbuck, I mean, he's running things until Sheriff Ridgewick gets back from his honeymoon - I'm sure he'll let you know right away. All you have to do in the meantime is take a few sensible precautions. Doors locked when you're inside, right? Especially after dark."
"Right."
"And keep that phone handy."
"I will."
He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled when she gave it right back. "I'll just go on and get that kitty now. Bet you'll be glad to see the last of it."
"Yes," Lisey said, but what she really wanted to be rid of, at least for the time being, was Deputy Alston. So she could go out to the barn and check under the bed. The one that had spent the last twenty years or so sitting in a whitewashed chicken-pen. The one they had bought ( mein gott) in Germany. In Germany where
8
everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Lisey doesn't remember where she heard this phrase and of course it doesn't matter, but it occurs to her with increasing frequency during their nine months in Bremen: Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Everything that can, does.
The house on the Bergenstrasse Ring Road is drafty in the fall, cold in the winter, and leaky when the damp and hungover excuse for a spring finally comes. Both showers are balky. The downstairs toilet is a chuckling horror. The landlord makes promises, then stops taking Scott's calls. Finally Scott hires a firm of German lawyers at a paralyzing expense - mostly, he tells Lisey, because he cannot stand to let the sonofabitching landlord get away with it, cannot stand to let him win. The sonofabitching landlord, who sometimes winks at Lisey in a knowing way when Scott isn't looking (she has never dared to tell Scott, who has no sense of humor when it comes to the sonofabitching landlord), does not win. Under threat of legal action, he makes some repairs: the roof stops leaking and the downstairs toilet stops its horrible midnight laughter. He actually replaces the furnace. A blue-eyed miracle. Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott the American Communist boiling-potter, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him Goinzee on!
Goinzee on, mein Führer, bitte, bitte! That year Scott is drinking, Scott is joking, and Scott is siccing lawyers on sonofabitching landlords, but Scott isn't writing. Not writing because he's always drunk or always drunk because he's not writing? Lisey doesn't know. It's sixenze of one, half a dozenze of the other. By May, when his teaching gig finally, mercifully ends, she no longer cares. By May she only wants to be someplace where conversation in the supermarket or the shops along the high street doesn't sound to her like the manimals in that movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. She knows that's not fair, but she also knows she hasn't been able to make a single friend in Bremen, not even among the faculty wives who speak English, and her husband is gone too much at the University. She spends too much time in the drafty house, wrapped in a shawl but still usually cold, almost always lonely and miserable, watching television programs she doesn't understand and listening to trucks rumble around the rotary up the hill. The big ones, the Peugeots, make the floors shake. The fact that Scott is also miserable, that his classes are going badly and his lectures are near-disasters, doesn't help at all. Why in God's name would it? Whoever said misery loves company was full of shite. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, however... that guy was onto something. When Scott is at home, he's in her eye a great deal more than she's used to, because he's not crawling off to the grim little room that's been designated his study to write stories. He tries to write them at first, but by December his efforts have become sporadic and by February he's given up entirely. The man who can write in a Motel 6 with eight lanes of traffic pounding by outside and a frat party going on upstairs has come utterly and completely unstrappinzee. But he doesn't brood about it, not that she can see.
Instead of writing he spends long, hilarious, and ultimately exhausting weekends with his wife. Often she drinks with him and gets drunk with him, because other than f**k him it's all she can think of to do. There are blue hungover Mondays when Lisey is actually glad to see him going out the door, although when ten PM comes and he's still not back, she's always perched by the living room window that looks out on the Ring Road, waiting anxiously for the leased Audi he drives, wondering where he is and who he's drinking with. How much he's drinking. There are Saturdays when he persuades her to play strenuous games of hide and seek with him in the big drafty house; he says it will keep them warm, at least, and he's right about that. Or they will chase each other, racing up and down stairs or pounding along the halls in their ridiculous lederhosen, laughing like a pair of dopey (not to mention horny) kids, yelling out their German buzzwords: Achtung! and Jawohl! and Ich habe Kopfschmerzen! and - most frequently - Mein Gott! More often than not these silly games end in sex. With booze or without it (but usually with), Scott always wants sex that winter and spring, and she believes that before they vacate the drafty house on the Bergenstrasse, they have done it in all the rooms, most of the bathrooms (including the one with the hideous laughing toilet), and even some of the closets. All that sex is one of the reasons that she never (well, almost never) worries that he's having an affair, in spite of the long hours he's gone, in spite of the hard drinking, in spite of the fact that he's not doing what he was made to do, which is to write stories. But of course she's not doing what she was made to do, either, and there are times when that knowledge catches up to her. She can't say he lied to her, or even misdirected her; no, she can never say that. He only told her once, but that one time he was perfectly straight about it: there could be no kids. If she felt she had to have children - and he knew she came from a big family - then they couldn't get married. It would break his heart, but if that was how she felt, that was the way it would have to be. He had told her that under the yum-yum tree, where they'd sat enclosed in the strange October snow. She only permits herself to remember that conversation during the lonely weekday afternoons in Bremen, when the sky always seems to be white and the hour none and the trucks rumble endlessly and the bed shakes beneath her. The bed that he bought and will later insist on having shipped back to America. Often she lies there with her arm over her eyes, thinking that this was a really terrible idea in spite of their laughing weekends and their passionate (sometimes febrile) lovemaking. They have done things in that lovemaking that she wouldn't have credited even six months ago, and Lisey knows these variations have little to do with love; they're about boredom, homesickness, booze, and the blues. His drinking, always heavy, has now begun to scare her. She sees the inevitable crash coming if he doesn't pull back. And the emptiness of her womb has begun to depress her. They made a deal, yeah, sure, but under the yum-yum tree she didn't fully understand that the years pass and time has weight. He may begin to write again when they get back to America, but what will she do? He never lied to me, she thinks as she lies on the Bremen bed with her arm over her eyes, but she sees a time - and not all that distant - when this fact will no longer satisfy, and the prospect frightens her. Sometimes she wishes she had never sat under that smucking willow with Scott Landon.