It wasn’t in the least what I wanted. I said hastily, “I’m with Steve, you see. ... I mean . . .”
“Ach, we know very well what you mean!” Mitzi’s voice came near to drowning out the orchestra. “But a girl shouldn’t be too possessive about her men.”
I had never cared much for Mitzi Flamm, and now I was disliking her more with every passing second. But she had been a part of my life with Max. I ought to be welcoming this chance to cultivate her.
Steve must have sensed the split in my mind, and perhaps even thought that as our twosome had been getting rather tense I’d be glad to break it up. Without consulting the other two men he turned around abruptly and summoned the waiter.
“Bitte, Herr Ober.”
The headwaiter himself hurried forward, and after a moment’s consultation with Steve we were being bowed across to a larger table close to the orchestra. On the way over, Mitzi gave my arm a significant squeeze.
“What a gorgeous man you’ve got! I adore it when they’re masterful.”
After a bit of shuffling we got ourselves settled. I had Steve on my right and Erik Limmer on my left. Across the table Mitzi’s smooth blond head was buried in the menu while she debated whether to choose
Backendl
or
Holsteiner Schnitzel.
Suddenly she looked up at me and creased her face into an expression of sympathy. “What a filthy shame about Max! I meant to write and tell you how upset I was.”
“Thank you, Mitzi,” I murmured.
She spun around on the Frenchman to explain. “They’d only been married a few months, and he got killed by some bloody truck. Imagine!”
“Mais c’est terrible!”
He looked across at me—a young widow—with a new interest.
“They were still in that lovely romantic haze— you know, real wedded bliss! And old Max going around like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. It was a proper giggle. . . .”
I’d have shut Mitzi up myself, but Steve got in first. “You had better give the waiter your order,” he said brusquely, “or our food will be arriving long before yours.” His bottled-up anger, I sensed, was not only directed at Mitzi—but at me, too.
Somehow I survived that meal. I reminded myself that talking to this awful woman was a part of my work. The contact I was looking for could turn out to be anyone, Richard had said. So it might even be Mitzi Flamm, despite her apparent lack of interest in anything but men and sex.
She talked of nothing else. Every remark was angled, and her eyes were busy making points. Even the table waiter wasn’t left out. While he served soup, her fingers absently brushed up his thigh, and I saw her grin when the poor young man nearly dropped the ladle.
Steve said little during the meal, eating in an abstracted way, as if the rest of us didn’t exist. I had a fight to keep conversation going on a level that would just get by as polite.
We were finishing our coffee when Mitzi announced that she had a sudden urge to dance. “Why don’t we get out of this crappy joint and go somewhere hip?” She said “hip” in English, like
heap.
“It was a lousy idea, coming here. . . .”
“So why did you?” asked Steve, abruptly emerging from silence.
It took Mitzi a second to recover and hand him a bright smile. “It was Erik’s idea, honey. He swore the food was good.”
Erik burped complacently. He had eaten an enormous meal. “And so it
is—nicht?”
“Lover boy, the food may be okay, but that music!” She sprang to her feet. “Come on, Jessica, darling. We’ll go and sort ourselves out, you and me, and decide where we want them to take us.”
“Sorry,” I said, staying put in my chair. “I’ve had a tiring day. I want to get to bed early tonight.”
Mitzi flipped a wide-eyed glance at Steve. “And no one’s going to blame you for that, honey! But come along to the powder room anyway for a bit of. girl talk.”
Unhappily, I put work before inclination and went with her, feeling Steve’s angry stare drilling a hole between my shoulderblades.
As Mitzi and I sat refixing our faces, her eyes met mine in the mirror.
“Fancy you turning up in Vienna! What was it brought you back?”
Again I pitched into my recitation, wondering how often I’d need to repeat it during the next few days. When I’d finished, Mitzi gave me a quizzical look and sighed.
“Poor old Max! It was rotten luck for you. I bet you miss him!”
“Well, of course I do.”
She tutted sympathetically. “I know exactly what it’s like. Sometimes I think I’ll have to get myself married again. I mean, this gay-divorcee lark is all very well, and I’m not saying Jurg wasn’t generous with the settlement, but a woman needs a background. . . .”
“I don’t imagine you’d have any trouble finding a husband,” I said rather waspishly.
She chose to take it as a compliment. “How perfectly sweet of you
?
darling! As a matter of fact, there was a time when I seriously considered old Max.”
I gripped the sides of the padded stool to stop my sudden trembling. Mitzi was wanting to upset me; she must be. With an outward coating of easy calm, I said, “I didn’t realize you’d been . . . fond of Max.”
“But of course, darling ... he was that sort of man.” She was making a big thing of doing her lips, so the words came out in little spurts. “Max sure knew ... he sure knew how to get a woman going, didn’t he?”
She was telling me nothing I hadn’t known already, I argued. Naturally a virile man like Max, who was thirty-four years old, had been around. And if I’d never questioned him about his sex life before we’d met, it wasn’t a case of burying my head in the sand. It just didn’t matter.
But somehow it mattered now, if Mitzi Flamm had been part of his scene. A quick lay, that’s what men called her sort. I felt a heavy ache in my chest, and it was my heart begging off from this picture of Max.
Mitzi was making it all up, I told myself doggedly. If she had wanted Max for herself—and that was understandable—she must have been madly jealous when he married me. And now that Max was dead, she saw her chance to get her own back.
“I must say,” she went on with a light laugh, slipping the lipstick back into her gilt evening bag, “we were all knocked flat when he produced you out of the blue. No offense, darling, but he didn’t really seem the type to marry—especially not a mere teen-ager.”
She was just being vicious, my mind hammered away—that was all. As we went back to join the men, I caught an unguarded expression of triumph on her face, a gleam of spite fulfilled.
Steve spoke scarcely a word during the ten minutes it took us to break away from Mitzi Flamm and her boyfriends. And even when we were alone, walking to the car through brightly lit streets, he stayed moodily silent.
The Mercedes was parked in the center of a small square. Steve held the door for me, then went around and got in himself. But he made no move to drive off.
“Did you mean what you said about having an early night, or would you like to go somewhere else? Someplace we can talk without half the riffraff of Vienna barging in.”
“Well, it was your fault,” I flared at him. “It was you who got us all put together at the same table.”
“I just fixed it the way you seemed to want it. You were all over that cow of a woman and her two hopefuls. God knows why! You didn’t need to be so damn friendly.”
Not really having a leg to stand on, I attacked him. “If you’d left it to me, I’d have gotten rid of them. But with you rushing in like that, what could I do about it?”
Absentmindedly, Steve reached forward to switch on the ignition. He looked surprised when the engine fired, and immediately switched it off again.
“Those bloody men! They were giving you the eye like mad, too. I thought you’d have had more pride….”
This was a new Steve from the dependable rock I’d known. Before, he’d been calm and reassuringly competent; now he was over-touchy, ready to fly off the handle. Why, I wondered miserably, did people have to change?
Steve’s thoughts were apparently running on the same lines. He said unhappily, “You seem so different, Jessica—so hard! You always used to be a gentle sort of person. There was a quality of ... of innocence about you, whatever you were doing. But that’s gone now.”
We were silent for a while, sitting there together in his car with bright flashing neon signs mocking our saddened mood. Traffic buzzed endlessly by, and laughing pedestrians thronged the pavements. Was it possible that in the spring days of this same year I had been so happy here in Vienna!
“Things have changed,” I said bitterly. “You can hardly expect me to be the same.”
Steve shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “You’ve got to start picking yourself up again. You’ve got to look ahead, not just backward. It’s tough for you, I know, but it’s life.”
“I’m trying, aren’t I?” I shot out angrily. And then I knew it wasn’t true, I wasn’t really facing up to the future at all. I was here to square an account that could never be squared for me.
I said, with a falter in my voice, “You can’t expect me to just forget. It’s hardly a couple of months since ...”
“Who’s asking you to
forget?”
“I loved Max. I loved him more than . . . more than I’d ever dreamed possible.”
“Yes,” said Steve soberly. “I know you did.”
He started the car again, and this time drove off. I had so much on my mind that I didn’t even consider where we were heading. In fact, it wasn’t until Steve pulled up some minutes later in a cobbled side street that I noticed our surroundings at all.
“Where are we?”
“Out near the Westbahnhof.” He pointed across the road. “There’s a little pub there. It’ll be quiet.”
We went down three steps to the
beisl.
As the door swung to behind us, a smiling elderly waiter beckoned us over to a bench seat in the corner. I hardly took in the details, just the atmosphere. It certainly was a quiet place. Stolid, solid citizens sat around in twos and threes or singly, drinking their beer, having their little snacks, studying the evening paper, or weightily debating the news.
Without consulting me, Steve ordered lager beer for us both. The cold, clean sharpness on my tongue seemed to drive away the sour taste of our quarrel. Perhaps it worked the same way for Steve, for when he spoke, it was peaceably.
“Have you any special plans while you’re here in Vienna?”
“No, not really. I just want to look around and meet old friends.”
“Friends, did you say?”
“Now, Steve! Please”
“I’m sorry.” He smiled rather thinly. “That’s the second time this evening I’ve had to apologize to you.”
We sat in silence for a while, sipping our beer and staring out across the tavern, soft-lit and hazy with tobacco smoke. Then he said slowly, carefully, “But you’ve got to admit that some of those ‘friends’ aren’t exactly the best company for you.”
“There’s no real harm in them.”
“Maybe not—when you were married. It’s different now.”
I laughed, a short, sharp sound that had no ring of conviction in it. “I can take care of myself.”
“Can you, Jessica? Are you sure about that?”
I wasn’t sure at all. This job I was doing seemed like treading a dangerous marsh. I was uncomfortably aware that at any instant I could step off safe ground and be sunk in up to my neck—or even go right under. But Steve couldn’t know about any of that. He was merely showing his dislike of some of the crowd Max and I had mixed with. And in that respect, I reckoned I was in no danger—I was quite able to take care of myself.
I’d been a long time without answering, and I could feel Steve’s eyes watching me. I gave a little scoffing laugh.
“You know, Steve, you make my friends sound an awfully rackety lot.”
“They were Max’s friends, really.”
“And so they were mine, too,” I came back sharply.
In the prickly silence that followed, I felt an urge growing to question Steve about Mitzi Flamm, and I fought against it. But in the end the need to know was too strong.
“Did Max know Mitzi Flamm well? I mean, before ... ?”
“Why? Has she been hinting that he did?”
I tried to make light of it. “Oh, something she said gave me the idea they were older friends than I’d thought.”
Steve picked up his glass tankard and drank from it. I got impatient and prodded him. “Well... ?”
“Mitzi was unimportant.”
It answered my question. But I couldn’t leave it at that. I stared into the clear-glowing amber beer and asked slowly: “How long did it last?”
He frowned. Not the usual deep furrows, but rather a little niggle of distaste. “There are some things it’s best not to delve into. I don’t mean just you. Any wife....”
“Look, Steve,” I said urgently, “I wasn’t such a little innocent as to imagine Max had never slept with a girl before he met me. That would have been stupid.”
There was a tiny pause, hardly noticeable, before Steve flipped out: “Then why ask about it now?”
“I suppose it’s because I hate to think of him and, well... a type like Mitzi Flamm.”
“She’s a prize bitch, all right. But you’ve got to admit she’s very sexy. With men these things are only physical, Jessica. They mean so little, really.”
“My mind tells me that,” I said unsteadily. “But it’s hard to accept, all the same.”
And it
was
hard to accept, however fiercely I clung to the avowals of that final letter from Max.
“Remember always that I loved you very deeply. You are the only woman who ever mattered to me.”
Those tender words should have given me the reassurance I needed now, but without Max’s living presence to endorse them, my confidence was at a low ebb.
I sighed. “Perhaps no woman ever fully understands that casual sex can mean so little to a man.”
Sitting side by side on the leather-covered bench, it had been easy to avoid meeting each other’s eyes. Steve was staring straight ahead, but after a while he turned and looked at me squarely.
“Take a chap like me, then. I’m twenty-eight, Jessica. I’ve been sent all over the place by the firm— Stockholm, Brussels, six months in Detroit; and now Vienna. I’m a normal male—or so I like to think! Even the Mitzi Flamms of this world . . . well, I’m not indifferent to them—and there are plenty of Mitzis around. But as for feeling any other emotion about them . . .”