Pre-Poland

It was his apartment but she unlocked the door, leading them inside. While she began to undress he went to the oven, turning the knob to the highest heat and pulling the door open, hoping to warm the little room. He sat down and watched her pull off each layer, staying in his coat and scarf, too trashed to do anything but watch. She stripped off the absurd black wool pants they had bought her yesterday, now only in ripped black tights and a thin lace camisole. He knew she came from money and so her vagabond presence, the neediness of it all, every tear in her clothes, baffled him anew. The Europe winter had bleached her; he had the sense that her skin should be olive but it was an unenthusiastic yellow, a dried lemon, covering her small wrists and bloated stomach. She was a caricature of baroque neglect. Her nails were little black discs she painted every night, with jagged red strips of skin surrounding them like detail on pottery. She would sit with fingers in her mouth and write at the table, unconscious of the blood from the finger in her mouth blossoming through her lips. Avoiding his eyes, she went to the stove and put apple juice in a pot, a makeshift offering of cider she felt made up for her presence. The air was laden with the purposeful attempt to move casually, to dredge up the sensual, to crowd out the sentimental. She filled the two little 1970s tea cups, thin German bone, and brought them to the table where he sat, all heavy glass and dirty smoky breaths.

She spoke more quietly in the apartment, he noticed. Her words creaked with the weight of ornamentation. An impressive woman, he imagined, the sort with an endoskeleton of disappointment. Men do not love the impressive. They tinker with it until the Cartier of a woman resembles a shabby steampunk watch. She was otherwise regal, he was sure. There were glimpses of this quick bitter bite, ringing her spirit like a rind, but only when they weren’t in this little room. Lifting the teacup to his face, he stared at her, hunched over, examining the train ticket. She stared at the thick white slip and only saw red, the crimson walls of the East Berlin nightclub. A silly German man named Johann had pulled her aside in the smoking room, telling her about his trip to Los Angeles. He had seen the Hollywood sign, he had thrown up at magic mountain. Pulling away from Johann eventually, she went back to their group of friends. He was standing there, waiting for her.

He said, “Did you have a nice conversation?”

She smirked, “Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, darling.”

His face contorted into something like injury. They finished their smokes and he led her inside, twirling her in a playful spin. She pulled away and walked ahead, an unnatural construction of cruelty, adrenalizing venom. It didn’t last. Turning around, she grabbed his waist and pulled him against a crimson wall. The following moments were heat. Mouth in the deep grooves of her collarbones, tiny bone hands twisting his black curls, a grating jean zipper. Skinny austere German boys walked by and stared and she laughed at them. He was busy in her hair as she stuck her tongue out at an anorexic industrial girl wandering by. These moments were the shriek of a raped tea kettle. He pulled away and they went back on the dance floor. His pulls on the flask of bourbon came harder after that. At the end of the night, while they waited for the U-Bahn, he jumped onto the tracks and began to walk back and forth. He called at them, “There are enormous rats down here. The government shoves real Berlin between the tracks.”

Now they sat at the table, hit with the smell of burning apples. He rolled her a cigarette and lit it, wanting to see her little hand erect and pinching the long rolled paper between her middle and ring fingers.

He asked, “What would you like to listen to?”

Smoke dribbled from her mouth, her answer made cotton by the thick air.

“Mountain Man.”

Their frames withered with each minute, the deflation of tired roses. She carelessly placed the burning cigarette on the wooden table and climbed into his lap, one leg on each side of his body, facing him. Pulling off her camisole, with a gaze of heavy water, she did the same to his coat, the roughly cut fabric acting as a scarf, the buttons of his cardigan, all of it. All of it.

She said, “I want our chests to be touching.”

A black nail traced it all, the stubble, the rough Neanderthal bones propping the eyes of lazy almonds, pouting witty lips.

She said, “Come with me. Come with me.” Imploring.

“Where?”

“You know. Poland. You know.”

He shook his head no. Wet eyes of lazy almonds. Wet rivulets tracking through black stubble.

“It’s not right to make love right now. It can wait til morning.”

“Okay. Okay.”

He took her to the train station. It was some hours past noon and the city already moved toward darkening. She regretted asking if he was coming, because in that moment she realized there would never be any way to know if he would have of his own accord. This difference seemed to matter. He rolled her a cigarette while she ran around the tracks, asking different personnel in broken German about the train schedule. She strode back him eventually, rage trembling beneath her pale face, tightly wound and yellowing like an old corset. The wet air, hard in the cold, treaded through her hair; the black strands always seemed to crash around her head like cymbals. Tugging on her knots, she lit the cigarette and smoked hurriedly, leaning over the tracks and looking for the train. He waited until she calmed down and told her, knowing she couldn’t read German, that the sign read a 45 minute delay.

She said, “You can leave.” She began to roll the overstuffed backpack between her boots, staring at him insistently.

He looked at his watch, then stepped forward and placed his chin onto her right collarbone. He sang her lullabies and Tom Waits, told her about visiting Munich. And the train came and she got on, and he went down the escalators. And she watched until he disappeared, and turned to find her seat as the train began to move. And he had run up the escalators stairs, backwards, and jumped onto the moving train and kissed her and jumped off and she slumped down in the train hallway arms splayed and withered as angry German mothers strode by with their fat ankles and swinging floral bags hitting her face, a corset completely undone.